The Sword Demon Won't Leave
Two months had passed since I possessed Baek Muheun, young clan head of the Ghost Sword Baek Clan—a house under the Demonic Cult that raised Sword Demons.
Hah. Young clan head. Yeah. Young clan head. Money to spare, a solid background, and a decent web of strings tied to the political types. If I had to transmigrate into someone, a rich house like this was the one to pick. Even so, I couldn't bring myself to smile about it.
I'd become first mate on a sinking ship.
"Haa..."
It wasn't simply that the Ghost Sword Baek Clan, the body I now wore, was going to collapse. The entire Demonic Cult, Baek Clan included, was fated to fall in three years.
The reason was simple. The cult's current leader, the Heavenly Demon, was catastrophically bad at politics. Personal martial might was the only thing she had to offer. Every other stat scraped the bottom. What good was being good at nothing but fighting? One person had limits in the end.
In the original story, the Heavenly Demon was beaten to death by a mob of orthodox masters. And while they were beating her to death, not a single person came to help. Everyone either watched from a safe distance or had already been picked off one by one and killed, so she fought alone at the end and died alone. Tsk. Put that way, it really was a shame. Martial arts or anything else—numbers win. People don't gather for no reason. They gather because a crowd is strong.
But filling out those numbers took politics, and was the current Heavenly Demon capable of that? Ah, flower-brained Heavenly Demon...
You fall, and the cult goes down with you! You bitch! And Baek Muheun, next clan head of the Ghost Sword Baek Clan—the man I possessed—goes down right after you! You can't do politics, you can't hold your people together, and that's why it all collapses! This is a world where the Demonic Cult lives high and proud, and because you obsess over martial arts every damn day and never look after your own, they all go looking for a way to survive and leave! By the end, any sense of belonging unravels faster than a Jenga tower!
Of all the places to possess someone... not anywhere else, but the Demonic Cult... life, I swear...
Still. Knowing this place was going to fall was some comfort, at least. If you knew the ending, you could find a way, couldn't you? I hadn't spent two months quietly reading the room for nothing after taking over this body. Information. I needed to learn what I could actually do at this point in time. Almost nothing was known about Baek Muheun in this period.
And at last, I reached a conclusion. My one and only way to live. The only way I could be happy in this world. And that was...!
Liquidate the clan and run!
I'd turned it over for two months, and no matter how I looked at it, I couldn't think of a way to stop the cult's collapse. What was the point of thrashing around when the person above me was an idiot? You don't fight a battle you can't win. So running was the best plan.
On top of that, this body I'd possessed—Baek Muheun, young clan head of the Ghost Sword Baek Clan—had stats that, if this were a game, were miserably low.
Martial arts? Never learned them. Too lazy.
Reputation? None. They didn't call him a scoundrel for nothing.
A special ability? He had one, but it wasn't enough to save a cult that looked fine on the outside while the inside was already falling apart...
For the incompetent, running is the only answer! Before the cult's fall arrived, I'd liquidate every asset I could get my hands on and flee! Then vanish. After that, simple. Show up somewhere as a sudden rich man with the fortune in hand and live like a king. Heh heh. Beautiful wives—ten, at a conservative count, ought to be enough. I was confident I could feed every one of them.
This Baek Muheun had nothing but money. The messes he'd caused had already tilted the clan's fortunes hard, and even so, there were still plenty of places cash could come from. Knowing the original story, I wasn't particularly worried about money.
But.
Money wasn't the problem. The problem was grudges.
Baek Muheun. That piece of trash. He'd bought bad blood all over the place. Enemies, you could call them. Arrogant to the bone and garbage through and through, so of course he had a lot of them. An absurd number!
Born a scoundrel and close to useless, he even had enemies inside the clan. If he hadn't been the only legitimate son, there were plenty of retainers who would have raised both hands to oppose him becoming young clan head at all.
So what happened if someone like me hauled off everything worth money overnight? Right. Fuck. You die, I die. Every interested party would swarm in to beat me to a pulp. Leaving empty-handed wouldn't be any better. Even if I actually pulled off a clean escape and vanished somewhere no one could find...
The Sword Demons would come first.
In five years, they'd come to kill me.
"Haaaaaah!!"
The Ghost Sword Baek Clan was a house under the Demonic Cult that raised Sword Demons. So what was a Sword Demon? A swordsman trained by a special method. The end product of taking children and drilling nothing but how to swing a sword into their heads, all in the pursuit of making a living sword.
And those Sword Demons—this human called Baek Muheun had openly treated them as less than people. Whenever he got the chance, he kicked them and spat on them. If they annoyed him, he drove a foot into their gut and slapped their faces. At drinking parties he used them to wipe his feet, grabbed them by the hair, and slammed them into walls. That viciousness hadn't lasted a day or two. It had gone on since he was a child...
Every Sword Demon of the Ghost Sword Baek Clan was on bad terms with Baek Muheun. That was a fair way to put it.
And five years from now, when the Demonic Cult collapsed, a sacred relic tied to control over the Sword Demons—the Soul-Lock Stele—would shatter, and the Sword Demons would regain their freedom.
Which meant that in five years, the Sword Demons who hated me would be turned loose in droves...
Ah!
What good was making a fortune and disappearing?! They'd scour heaven and earth, ready to tear me to shreds!
In the original, too, Baek Muheun died at the hands of the Sword Demons. The description was something else—smashed so thoroughly you couldn't find a single intact limb. It said he'd bolted the moment the Orthodox-Demonic War was lost, fleeing far away, and a horde of Sword Demons had doggedly chased him down anyway.
So. Liquidating assets, running away—none of that came first. I had to settle the bad blood, with everyone I'd made an enemy of, Sword Demons included. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to sleep easy even after I ran.
So how do you apologize...?
Right. Money really was the best, wasn't it.
There was nothing in the world money couldn't solve. Obviously. And Baek Muheun was the young clan head of a house that was a corpse without its money. In a year he'd even rise to clan head, a seat from which he could burn through the entire clan's funds.
Therefore! Settle grudges with money! Honeyed words and cash, and anyone would forgive you! No matter how filthy the things you'd done, hand over a lump of gold and they'd laugh, Well now. These things happen. Haha.
And for the Sword Demons, the ones I'd wronged the worst, there was one more gift I could give. People branded with the Soul-Lock Seal, bound to serve the clan for life. I had the authority to give them freedom.
They were going to be freed in five years anyway, so before that I'd make a grand show of it—sorry for everything up till now—and dump both money and freedom on them all at once...!
You could call it retirement! For people who'd been handled like objects for the Ghost Sword Baek Clan their whole lives, wasn't that a dream come true? That much ought to wipe the bad blood clean. Even if they still didn't like it, they'd sigh, well, fine... and let it go. They'd even forget the times he'd spat straight onto their masks...
...They wouldn't, would they? Figures. But that wasn't me. I mean it. That really wasn't me.
Still, if I treated them well and retired them properly, they wouldn't chase me down to kill me, right? I sincerely hoped so...
For the first retirement, I decided to start with my escort Sword Demon. Every Sword Demon hid face and body, so I didn't know what they looked like, but this was the one who had stayed at my side for the two months since I possessed this body. The one who had silently endured every last one of Baek Muheun's tantrums, then, the moment freedom came, chased him hundreds of miles and drove a blade into his throat.
I faced my masked escort, Hongryeon.
Gender... I couldn't tell. A thick veil with a character written across it hid everything underneath. The clothes were bulky and loose, so there was no reading the lines of the body. Even the voice came out in a strange, altered pitch, cold as an actual ghost.
And yet this one had guarded my side in silence ever since I took over, two months ago. Awkward at first. Later, somehow, reassuring.
Aigoo. Baek Muheun, you son of a bitch. A person has limits. Beating, thrashing, spitting on, and slapping a steady person like this day in and day out, just because you were annoyed? You deserve to die. But I don't. I don't want to die.
"Hongryeon. This is your retirement pay."
I held out a chest packed with silver and set the mood.
Go on. Fly. Get far away from here...
Just please don't put a poison needle in me.
"Dealing with the scoundrel of the Ghost Sword Baek Clan must have been hard on you. I don't have much authority yet, so I can't erase your Soul-Lock Seal... but the day I take the seat of clan head, I'll strike your name from the register completely. From today, you're free. Go as far as you like. You've worked hard."
I figured the least they'd do was nod. The freedom they'd longed for. Money, beyond even freedom. And an apology on top. With that trio in place, bolting was the natural move, wasn't it? At the very least, a normal person would quietly tuck the chest of silver under an arm.
But.
They didn't.
"I am fine."
Hongryeon's glove seemed to brush the chest—then drew smoothly back.
"...I will continue to serve. My lord."
Hongryeon wasn't leaving.
Not even after I'd handed over the retirement pay.