Day 1
“Ah….”
Cheon Seo-ah let out a quiet sigh.
Charging into Earth with such bold confidence had been fine enough—but somewhere along the way, she must have made a mistake setting the time.
What stood before her eyes was unmistakably Earth. It simply wasn’t the Earth she had wanted.
How could it be? Seas of scorching lava rolled across the ground, and poisonous gas gathered into clouds that drifted through the sky. No matter how you looked at it, this was nothing like the modern Earth she had been aiming for.
If she had to put a name to the world in front of her…
“I suppose you’d have to call it primitive Earth.”
Either way, the fact that she had arrived far too early was beyond dispute.
“This time, I really mustn’t mess it up.”
Kiiing—.
A vast surge of demonic qi erupted from Cheon Seo-ah’s fingertips, enough to swallow the planet whole, then coiled back in and condensed into a single small bead.
The bead drifted upward, left her fingers, and floated forward.
After it had traveled a short distance, a sudden crack split the space where it hung—and the fabric of reality collapsed with a roar.
Beyond the shattered space waited only an endlessly churning, bottomless abyss. Without the slightest hesitation, Cheon Seo-ah threw herself through the hole.
Kiiing—.
A strange sound rang out as space tore open, and Cheon Seo-ah stepped through from the other side.
“Mmm. Looks like I arrived properly this time.”
She glanced left and right, surveying her surroundings, then nodded with a satisfied little smile.
That said, she had no idea exactly where on Earth she had landed.
She hadn’t particularly wanted to know in the first place.
Before her rebirth in the cultivation world, Cheon Seo-ah had been a young man from a country called the Republic of Korea, somewhere on this very planet. But that didn’t mean she felt any lingering homesickness for Korea.
The years she had spent there amounted to a little over twenty. Against that, the time she had lived in the cultivation world stretched past a full three hundred thousand years. To the person she was now, Earth held no real meaning at all.
Even so, the reason she had bothered to come back was simple.
Because I felt like it.
Cheon Seo-ah was a cultivator who had climbed all the way to the Ancestral Dao Stage through Demonic Cultivation Arts. As a result, she had a strong tendency to do whatever her heart desired in the moment.
“The spiritual energy is awfully murky, though.”
With the ambient qi this foul, even a cultivator of exceptional talent would find it nearly impossible to achieve anything worthwhile. The only real exception would be Demonic Cultivation Arts, which advanced by thoroughly unorthodox means.
And so, while Cheon Seo-ah was taking in the long-unseen scenery of Earth, a distant uproar of screams and curses suddenly broke out. A moment later, a man brushed past her side—and right behind him came dozens of riders thundering in on horseback.
“C-Captain! There’s someone ahead—!”
“Just trample them and keep going! It’s too late to turn the horses now!”
At the cry of the man riding at the front, the middle-aged man they called captain barked his reply.
Cheon Seo-ah’s appearance was that of a girl in her mid-teens at most. And they were ready to let a child like that be crushed under the hooves of warhorses.
Well now.
“For the sake of their own advantage, they’d casually kill even a child like me. If they’d been born in the cultivation world, that mindset would have made them perfect cultivators.”
Heeheeheeing—!
The moment Cheon Seo-ah said it with a bright little smile, the horses that had been charging like mad all shrieked at once and reared up on their forelegs.
Dozens of mounts screamed and pawed the air, then began thrashing as if something had terrified them out of their minds. The men astride them tumbled off in a panic.
“Damn it! What the hell is going on all of a sudden?!”
The captain of Pursuit Squad One scrambled to his feet and roared.
Several of his tribesmen hadn’t survived the fall. Even those who’d been lucky enough to keep their lives were rolling on the ground, moaning, with an arm or a leg shattered. The only one still more or less intact was the captain himself—and he glared at Cheon Seo-ah with a face twisted in fury.
“Girl! Was this your doing?!”
“I didn’t do anything, though?”
“I am the captain of Pursuit Squad One of the Great Blue Wind Tribe! What tribe do you even belong to, that you dare interfere with the business of the Great Blue Wind Tribe?!”
“Hmm… at the moment, I belong to Daematcheon. And I already told you—I didn’t do anything.”
As the captain of Pursuit Squad One declared his affiliation with the Great Blue Wind Tribe, Cheon Seo-ah named her own without the slightest hesitation.
Daematcheon.
It was a heaven she had created anew because her particular nature made it impossible for her to remain in Daeracheon—and it was also a heaven meant for cultivators who had reached higher stages through Demonic Cultivation Arts.
Of course, for the time being only Cheon Seo-ah belonged to Daematcheon, and the odds were high that only she ever would. But still.
The captain of Pursuit Squad One, hearing the name Daematcheon for the first time in his life, wore a brief look of confusion.
The Great Blue Wind Tribe, to which he belonged, was a great tribe in the truest sense of the word—one that held the entire region in its grip. And he himself stood at the very peak of that great tribe.
So how was it possible that he had never once heard this name?
That treacherous little witch was clearly toying with him. The instant the thought took hold, his expression twisted into something monstrous, and a violent wind began to howl around him.
“You—! Do you dare mock me, captain of Pursuit Squad One of the Great Blue Wind Tribe?!”
“Oh my! You even know the word ‘mock’? I’d love to be impressed—but the only reason you and I can understand each other at all is the divine ability I’ve mastered, so… in practice, you probably aren’t capable of that kind of fluent vocabulary.”
“What have you been babbling about this whole time?! I’ll kill you!”
Kwaaaa!
The spear in the captain’s hand thrust straight at Cheon Seo-ah. At the same time, the violent wind swirling around him coiled tightly around the shaft.
Watching the captain of Pursuit Squad One wield the wind as he lunged, Cheon Seo-ah regarded him with a look of genuine curiosity.
“Earth is full of ordinary people, yet you can command the wind? Does that mean this isn’t Earth after all? I may have misjudged the era, but I shouldn’t have gotten the location wrong…”
“Shut your mouth!”
Jjeoeong—!
The instant the captain’s spear struck Cheon Seo-ah’s chest, a crushing shockwave blasted outward in every direction.
And at the same moment—
“Keuheok—!”
The captain of Pursuit Squad One coughed up a mouthful of blood and was hurled backward. The spear in his grip shattered into worthless scrap.
“Wh-what—!”
Forcing his trembling body upright, the captain stared at Cheon Seo-ah with eyes that refused to believe what they were seeing.
His power! The power of the wind granted to him by the heavens themselves—how could it not work?!
Just what was that girl?!
Facing a man whose mind seemed as badly shaken as his body, Cheon Seo-ah spoke carefully.
“Well… to leave even a single scratch on my body, you’d need to be an immortal who has entered the Ancestral Dao Stage. Of course, even if such an immortal attacked me, I wouldn’t just stand there and take it without thinking.”
Ancestral Dao Stage? Immortal?
What on earth was this girl talking about?!
As Cheon Seo-ah continued to spit out nothing but incomprehensible words, the captain’s eyes slowly filled with terror.
Meanwhile, as the two of them stood locked in that not-quite standoff, the man who had brushed past Cheon Seo-ah and fled into the distance came back.
“I offer my thanks to the exalted one.”
“There’s no reason for you to thank me. I didn’t do anything.”
As the man bowed his head, Cheon Seo-ah answered him. She wasn’t wrong, either.
The horses going berserk. The riders dying or suffering grievous injuries when they fell. The irreversible wounds that had just been dealt to the captain of Pursuit Squad One.
Cheon Seo-ah had not intervened in any of it.
In the captain’s case especially, the man had simply worked himself into a frenzy and attacked her on his own.
To strike at her with a cultivation base that barely reached the third star of Qi Condensation… The captain of Pursuit Squad One’s inability to even gauge the gap between them had been so wretched she could hardly stand to watch.
That aside.
“You’re a ‘pitiful’ person, aren’t you.”
For an instant, a gloomy darkness welled up in Cheon Seo-ah’s eyes and vanished again.
She had only given him a single glance, yet she had already read every reason why this man was being hunted—and why those people were pursuing him with such fury.
Taken together, by Cheon Seo-ah’s standards, the man before her could only be called “pitiful.”
His own power was so meager that the woman he loved had been stolen from him. His parents and siblings had died in hideous ways. And now even his own life hung by a thread.
If Cheon Seo-ah hadn’t appeared here—if the captain of Pursuit Squad One hadn’t attacked her—this man would have been seized, his arms and legs torn off, and left writhing on the ground toward a terrible death.
Whether he understood that himself or not, the man bowed his head to her once more in greeting. And that was when she spoke again.
“Mmm. I can’t very well leave a pitiful person like you as you are. So I’d like to give you a small gift—would that be all right?”
“How could I refuse? I can only be grateful for an exalted one’s grace, vast as the sea.”
A faint smile touched Cheon Seo-ah’s lips at his answer. From her robes, she drew out a single volume.
It had been bound in human skin, and the writing within had been set down in human blood. There was no shortage of grounds for calling it something thoroughly abominable.
“This is a method called the Ninefold Nine Demon True Scripture. It’s a technique that lets you borrow the power of the nine demons who dwell in the nine heavens.”
…!
At Cheon Seo-ah’s explanation, the man’s eyes went wide.
Borrow the power of demons?! Could it be that the woman before him was a servant of demons?!
But even if she were, that did nothing to change the fact that she was the benefactor who had saved his life.
Cheon Seo-ah, for her part, paid no mind to whether he was shocked or not and simply continued.
“That said, you must be careful when you borrow a demon’s power through the Ninefold Nine Demon True Scripture. They are extremely greedy and selfish beings. If a fitting price isn’t paid, they will do whatever it takes to extract that price from you.”
“Once again, I give thanks for the exalted one’s grace.”
Accepting the Ninefold Nine Demon True Scripture she held out, the man bowed his head once more in gratitude.
Come to think of it—what did it matter if she was a servant of demons? And what did it matter if the “small favor” she offered was some sinister thing that let him borrow a demon’s power?
He had already lost everything to those people. Perhaps using a demon’s power to avenge his beloved, his family, and his brothers was only proper.
“Good, good. Then I’ll be on my way—enjoy your revenge to the fullest. From where I stand, you’re more than qualified for it.”
With those words, Cheon Seo-ah shot high into the sky and vanished in an instant.
Appearing like the wind, and vanishing like the wind.
The man decided that Cheon Seo-ah must have been a heavenly maiden descended from the sky, one who could not ignore his sorrow. Then he turned to look at the fallen remnants of the Great Blue Wind Tribe.
“W-wait! Let’s settle this with words! Honestly speaking, I never laid a finger on a single thing of yours, did I?!”
“Shut your mouth!”
Kwajik!
At the desperate cry of the captain of Pursuit Squad One of the Great Blue Wind Tribe, the man crushed the captain’s head under a merciless stomp.
At the same time, he opened the Ninefold Nine Demon True Scripture the heavenly maiden—Cheon Seo-ah—had given him. The bizarre contents of the book poured into his mind and branded themselves there with perfect clarity.
“So this is how you borrow the power of demons.”
A sinister smile spread across his face as he looked over the people who had been hunting him. Crimson, murderous light was already streaming from his eyes in thick, endless threads.