All Immortals Return to Origin
I couldn't decide which fictional world to enter.
Martial arts worlds are tempting…
If I could pick up internal cultivation methods, lightness techniques, sword arts, blade arts, assassination techniques—all of it—I'd get a lot stronger than I am now.
Magic wasn't a bad option either…
But I can't picture myself actually learning and casting magic.
The idea of some idiot who'd never studied a day in his life picking up spellcraft was hard to swallow, and the image of me waving a staff around muttering incantations just made me laugh. In the end, I settled on a martial arts world.
The problem was that martial arts worlds had peak experts, Transformation Realm masters, and Profound Realm monsters popping up left and right. You never knew when you might die.
I don't even know what happens if I die inside a fictional work yet.
The worry was real, but if I wanted to get strong fast, I had to take some risks.
I opened the 【Browse】 window, and dozens of titles unfurled across the screen.
Fictional works stretched on without end. Martial arts, fantasy, modern, sci-fi, games, romance fantasy, erotica—the genres were all over the place, and the sheer volume was staggering.
Just checking them one by one was giving me a headache.
I wish I could filter for martial arts only.
The moment the thought formed, the window responded. Everything except the martial arts titles faded into a blur.
"Much better."
From there I skimmed through the martial arts novels I'd already read, trying to decide which one to enter.
Anything I hadn't read was out. Anything with almost no heroines was out. Anything with vague opportunities or mediocre weapons got cut too.
After filtering out works with thin settings or incomplete information, only a handful remained.
This one's just a gay romance dressed up as pure love…
I cut that one.
And this one's way too brutal.
Another had such a broken world balance that the odds of dying early were ridiculous.
Then I looked at the last remaining title and blinked.
Wait… this is a xianxia novel.
【All Immortals Return to Origin】
It wasn't pure xianxia. It was a novel that took the Chinese immortal-cultivation craze, dumped in a spoonful of Korean-style martial arts, and ran with it.
Still a little iffy…
Its bones were pure cultivation, which gave it a completely different feel from regular martial arts stories.
Where martial arts worlds prized righteousness and chivalry and forging your own justice, this place was different. Everything got ground down for a single goal: cultivation. It was the kind of world where people would sell off their own lovers if it made them stronger.
But nowhere else has this many opportunities or ways to get strong.
Martial arts, internal cultivation methods, magic treasures—if you got lucky, there was no end to the things you could bring back to reality. Short-term power-ups came in every flavor, and the place was overflowing with beautiful women.
Or if things get too dangerous, I can just snag a nearby opportunity and bail back to reality.
I hesitated a moment longer, then made the call.
"…I'll go in and decide from there."
Enter 【All Immortals Return to Origin】?
I took a deep breath and selected 【Yes】.
When I opened my eyes, it was the middle of a pitch-black night.
Where the hell am I?
I looked around. High walls, torches hanging sparsely along the top, and the faint chirping of insects drifting in from far away—that was all.
The moment I tried to take a step forward—
Smack!
Someone cracked me hard across the back of the head. I scowled and turned around.
"Hey, you little shit. Who said you could space out on watch?"
A young man in crimson martial robes stood there. Mid-twenties, maybe. Sharp eyes, thin lips twisted into a sneer—the kind of face that screamed nasty personality at a glance.
"Who the hell are you?"
"'You'? Did you just call me you?"
He was breathing hard, genuinely pissed, and I saw him raise his hand again.
He was clearly about to throw a punch. And sure enough, he swung. The attack looked so slow I figured I could catch it easy, but—
Thud!
"…Ah."
His hand twisted like a snake, slipped past mine, and slammed into my skull.
…What? I just got hit by some random night-watch grunt?
Getting smacked by a sentry was so absurd I almost laughed, but the guy was already grinding his teeth and lifting his hand again.
This time I barely managed to dodge.
"Oh-ho? You dodged that?"
A kick came up from below without warning.
I leaned my waist back, trying to slip it—but his leg stretched like a whip and cracked me square in the jaw.
"Ghk…"
"Listen up, newbie. Do better. If you want to be a disciple of our Red Blood Sect, you got that?"
The words Red Blood Sect made my eyes go wide.
"Wait—did you just say Red Blood Sect?"
"Oh, this bastard. You've been talking down to me this whole time?"
He looked genuinely furious. This time I felt killing intent rolling off him, so I dropped my attitude immediately.
"I'm sorry! I dozed off for a second and my head's not right!"
A fist appeared in front of my face and stopped cold. A fraction later and it would've been buried in my nose.
"You're only getting a pass because you've been here one day. Pull that shit tomorrow and you're actually dead. Got it?"
"Yes, sir!"
He snorted and went back to his post.
I stood there and clicked my tongue to myself.
Red Blood Sect… those fucking lunatics.
In All Immortals Return to Origin—or more precisely, in the Mansang Realm that made up this world—dozens of large and small factions were constantly at each other's throats. At the very top, the Emperor and the Heavenly Demon kept each other in check, while the powers beneath them carved up everything else.
Among them, the Red Blood Sect was a name people actually knew. And not in a good way.
Strength through blood. That was both the creed and the iron law of the Red Blood Sect.
Training, breakthroughs—everything ran on blood as a medium. Your own blood, someone else's, it didn't matter. Their combat power ranked among the best of peer factions because of it, but their reputation for savage, extreme cultivation methods was just as infamous.
Even the outer disciples here were at least Qi Condensation 6-star, right?
Cultivation in the Mansang Realm was divided into nine stages total.
Qi Condensation, Foundation Establishment, Golden Core, Nascent Soul, Spirit Transformation, Void Refinement, Body Integration, Great Ascension, and Immortal Ascension.
Each stage broke down further into early, mid, and late phases, and crossing from one stage into the next was called a breakthrough.
Qi Condensation was the starting point—the stage where you first sensed the spiritual energy flowing through heaven and earth and began drawing it into your body. In martial arts terms, it sat somewhere between third-rate and first-rate. The numbers looked low, but anyone who could use spiritual energy was a fundamentally different creature from a normal person who couldn't.
No wonder I'd gotten my ass kicked. Even as an E-rank hunter with Body Enhancement Lv.2, without a scrap of spiritual energy I was still garbage.
And the real problem is that I'm here because I'm trying to become a disciple of this place…
The Red Blood Sect took anyone. Disciples died in daily brawls so often that recruitment never stopped—but the way they accepted new blood was notoriously vicious.
First they dumped every dirty chore they didn't want to do on the applicants. Only after that did the real entrance exam begin.
The test itself was simple.
They shoved everyone who wanted to become a disciple into the Poison Cave. Only the final ten survivors earned the right to become outer disciples of the Red Blood Sect.
The catch… the odds of dying were extremely high.
Still… places where you can get this strong this fast are rare.
The Red Blood Sect was cruel, but once you became a disciple, they didn't skimp on support. In particular, the disciple who killed the most people in the Poison Cave received a Blood Affinity Pill as a reward.
I might die without even passing the exam—but for someone with nothing, this place was as perfect a starting point as I was going to get.
A bell rang in the distance, signaling the shift change.
"Newbie, shift's over. Let's go."
"Yes."
I followed him.
The inside of the Red Blood Sect was bigger than I'd expected. Beyond the high walls, training grounds and buildings stood in orderly rows.
Pretty large scale.
Even in the middle of the night, disciples were still training. Some swung swords; others sat on the ground with their eyes closed, meditating.
I kept trailing after the man until he suddenly stopped, and I just stood there staring blankly.
"What are you doing."
"Huh?"
"You're seriously clueless. This is the outer disciples' building. The dump you're staying in is over that way, dumbass."
He pointed toward a far more shabby, dilapidated building in the distance.
"Sorry. I'll head there right away."
I turned with a slight bow and ran for the newcomers' building, then shoved open the first door I found.
Creeeak—
Ten cots were crammed into a narrow room, half of them already occupied. Most of the people had their eyes closed, but a few shot me wary glances.
I found an empty cot, sat down, and sank into thought about what to do next.
The most important thing is building up spiritual energy.
Spiritual energy.
It was the source of every power in a cultivation world—the equivalent of internal energy in martial arts, or mana in fantasy.
Drawing the spiritual energy that naturally flowed through heaven and earth into your body and condensing it in your dantian. That was the beginning of cultivation, and the foundation of every martial art, every spell, every breakthrough.
If I passed the exam, the Red Blood Sect would hand down a basic cultivation method. But I couldn't just sit around waiting until then.
I need to prepare something before the test…
I still had Body Enhancement Lv.2 from my rewards.
I'd gotten wrecked by that outer disciple on watch earlier, but against the other newcomers taking the same exam, it was a different story.
Most of the new blood won't have learned any cultivation methods yet.
People in this world especially tended to focus on accumulating spiritual energy over tempering the body.
If I play this right, I might even snag that Blood Affinity Pill.
I closed my eyes.
Time flew. In the days that followed, I had to grind through the Red Blood Sect's grunt work like a madman.
My job was washing, drying, and folding the martial robes, underclothes, and training gear worn by the disciples.
Hundreds of garments soaked in sweat and blood-pus piled up every single day like a mountain. The outer disciples' underwear in particular… was straight-up hell.
The stench of blood mixed with nauseating body fluids hit so hard that at first I nearly vomited.
The sheer volume was infuriating, but thanks to an Awakened body and Body Enhancement Lv.2, it wasn't physically hard at all.
If anything, I was grateful for the assignment.
Some guy from my room got stuck cleaning out the latrines, didn't he?
Just thinking about it made my nose wrinkle. Laundry was the high road.
And there were upsides, too.
The Red Blood Sect had plenty of female disciples.
There were three among the inner disciples, and a considerable number among the outer disciples as well.
Most of them were strikingly beautiful, their bodies honed by training into lean, springy frames.
Heh heh.
I lifted a pair of undergarments belonging to some female disciple whose face and name I didn't even know, and grinned.
The silk underwear was stained with sweat, but a faint trace of her scent still clung to the lining and tickled my nose.
When I ran my fingers over the soft fabric, it almost felt like a lingering warmth was still there.
No idea whose these are, but they're pretty high-end.
Judging by the material and the subtle perfume, they weren't an outer disciple's. Probably belonged to an inner disciple.
I was happily admiring them when—
Thwack!
"Ow…!"
Something cracked me hard across the back of the head. I spun around on reflex.
Standing there was the man I'd shared night watch with on my first night—Wi Ho.
"You little shit. Ogling underwear again? You keep that up and they'll chop your limbs off, you know that?"
I'd heard the same line plenty of times. And I already knew why Wi Ho bothered coming all the way out to the laundry grounds just to scare me.
I slipped him a set of undergarments I'd set aside earlier—the best-condition pair. Wi Ho stuffed them into his sleeve in a hurry and cleared his throat.
"Ahem… You know the drill?"
"Don't worry, sir. When you're done with them, I'll dispose of them properly."
"Kid. First day you were a total idiot, but you've gotten pretty sharp."
Wi Ho grinned, satisfied, and clapped me on the shoulder.
"Then I'll be counting on you tomorrow, Master Wi Ho."
"Yeah. Before you head into the Poison Cave tomorrow, I'll hook you up with a sword."
With that, Wi Ho left the laundry grounds.