Day Two
Day Two
“Which era shall I visit today?”
Having risen past the sky itself until she reached outer space, Cheon Seo-ah looked down at the Earth spread beneath her feet and spoke.
Originally, she had meant to go to “modern Earth”—the time period immediately before she had fallen into the Xianxia world.
Her mind had changed, however, the moment she dropped into primordial Earth.
Having already witnessed the planet at the very instant of its birth, she found herself wanting to experience Earth’s many ages.
A goal that flipped as easily as turning over a hand.
Had other cultivators seen her like this, they would have coughed blood and reeled in shock.
Space-time immortal arts were not something one used lightly.
To wield them so casually, and for no reason beyond “I feel like taking a lighthearted trip”…
Then again, when the one tossing out such a reason and casually employing space-time immortal arts was Cheon Seo-ah, the story was different.
Even back in her cultivator days she had done as she pleased and piled up countless grudges, had she not?
The reason she became the public enemy of every cultivator in the cultivation world had never been merely that she practiced Demonic Cultivation Arts.
“Mmm, I’ve decided.”
After a brief spell of thought, Cheon Seo-ah’s expression brightened a little as she concentrated demonic qi at her fingertip.
A surge of demonic qi so immense it seemed ready to dye even the cosmos black erupted, then gathered at her fingertip into a small bead.
She flicked the bead. The slowly advancing sphere vanished without a trace—and in the place where it had been, a hole appeared, swirling with an abyss.
Without the slightest hesitation, Cheon Seo-ah stepped through that hole.
“There was a pitiful person here, too.”
A dense jungle.
Before a man covered in terrible wounds, gasping ragged breaths, Cheon Seo-ah appeared.
The man, who had been slowly walking toward death, lifted his clouded eyes to look up at the girl gazing down at him.
“How pitiful.”
She said it again to the man before her: “pitiful.”
Like the man who had been hunted by the people of the Blue Wind Great Tribe earlier, the one now lying before her eyes was also a desperately pitiful soul.
He had been chieftain of a tribe called the Guruguru.
Betrayed by a subordinate who coveted his seat, he had lost his entire family; he himself had been left with catastrophic wounds and was now drifting toward death.
“Pitiful one. Do you wish for revenge, by any chance?”
Revenge…?
The instant the word “revenge” left Cheon Seo-ah’s lips, the man’s eyes trembled.
Revenge.
Of course he wanted it.
Against the subordinate who had dared betray him, slaughtered his family, and tried to kill him as well—and against the tribe he had once ruled, the ones who had sided with that subordinate.
But how was he supposed to take revenge?
He had lost everything. His wounds were so severe that no matter what method he tried, the only ending waiting for him was death.
“If you lack the strength, I can help you. If the wounds are the problem, I can help with those as well. How about it?”
…!
When Cheon Seo-ah spoke again, the man’s pupils shook even more violently.
“All you need to do is blink your eyes. So I’ll ask one last time. Do you wish for revenge?”
Blink.
Blink blink.
Blink blink blink blink blink!
At her repeated question, the man began blinking as if he had gone mad.
Even he himself had no idea where such strength had suddenly come from.
“Very well. For someone like you, I’ll give you this.”
Smiling sweetly at the man who had accepted her offer, Cheon Seo-ah produced a single book.
It was something written in human blood upon the hide of a beast.
“This is called the Blood Wolf True Body Art. It should suit you perfectly.”
The Blood Wolf True Body Art.
It was a Demonic Cultivation Art in no way inferior to the Ninefold Demonic True Scripture she had handed the previous man.
One of the body-refining arts that tempered one’s own flesh; if brought to great completion, one could become a man-beast blood wolf.
The man looked up at the Blood Wolf True Body Art she offered.
He could guess that it would grant him the power to take his revenge.
But at present, not a single part of his body was whole.
Both legs had been completely crushed.
Both arms had been severed; not even a trace remained.
Dozens of arrows were lodged in his back, and a deep gash across his belly had spilled his guts.
In truth, the man’s condition was so critical that simply being alive was a miracle.
Yet Cheon Seo-ah, wearing an expression of pure innocence, tilted her head and said,
“You’re not going to take it?”
She had gone out of her way to offer help out of goodwill.
He had said he would accept her help. So why wasn’t he taking the Blood Wolf True Body Art?
Ah! Could it be.
“Does it not suit your taste? But the Blood Wolf True Body Art is a Demonic Cultivation Art perfectly matched to the aptitude you possess, you know? If you try to learn anything else, you won’t even reach a proper stage, let alone great completion.”
That wasn’t it.
That was not it at all.
The reason the man had not taken the Blood Wolf True Body Art she offered was that he had no hands or arms with which to receive it.
Just as he struggled to open his mouth—
“Come, come, so don’t feel burdened and just take it. And please make sure you achieve your revenge.”
Before the man could utter a single word, Cheon Seo-ah set the Blood Wolf True Body Art down upon his “hand” and vanished.
She disappeared from before his eyes in an instant.
Startled, the man jerked upright—
And in that moment, he realized.
“My wounds…?”
The horrific wounds carved into his body had completely vanished.
The legs that had been crushed now planted firmly against the earth and supported him.
The arms that had been severed had grown back whole, and his hands were tightly gripping the mysterious thing the unidentified girl had given him—the so-called Blood Wolf True Body Art.
Beyond that, the deep gash that had spilled his entrails, the dozens of arrows that had been lodged in his back—everything had disappeared without a trace.
For a moment the man wondered whether he might be dreaming.
But none of this was a dream.
The blood that had poured from his wounds still soaked the earth, thick with the stench of iron.
In his hand was that mysterious something called the Blood Wolf True Body Art.
“Ah…!”
A low gasp escaped him.
“I offer my gratitude to Rakuru.”
Suddenly the man dropped to his knees where Cheon Seo-ah had stood and bowed his head low.
The Rakuru he spoke of was the name of a god passed down in his tribe—and throughout the jungle where the tribe made its home.
Not an ordinary god, however.
In the distant past, Rakuru had been a being who fought countless other gods for dominion over the world.
Defeated in that war, Rakuru had become an evil god and, according to legend, was sealed somewhere in this very jungle.
Of course, it was nothing more than legend and myth.
Yet the man regarded the girl who had given him a chance at revenge as the incarnation of Rakuru.
“Hwaaaah. I’m tired.”
Cheon Seo-ah stretched out a long yawn, smacked her lips, and muttered.
Until now she had wandered through Earth’s many eras.
And she had given a little help to pitiful people.
The total number of “pitiful” people who had received her aid came to nine.
The Demonic Cultivation Arts she had pressed into their hands also totaled nine.
Including the earlier Ninefold Demonic True Scripture and the Blood Wolf True Body Art, there had been the Heart-Devouring Soul-Seizing Great Power Art, the Sea-Sundering Flood Dragon Sword Scripture, the Bloodsucking Art, the Three Eyes Three Calamities Art, the Six Faces Nine Mouths Art, and the Mara Great Hand Seal.
And last of all, in the era she currently occupied—in the land that would one day become Korea, but had not yet—
to a man she met in a place suffering under Japanese colonial rule, she had handed the Seven Desires Demon God Art together with the Seven Desires Sword.
Perhaps because she had crossed too many eras and places in far too short a time, however,
Cheon Seo-ah once again felt the oncoming fatigue and limp exhaustion.
“Hwaaaah—.”
She yawned long and smacked her lips again.
This fatigue and limpness did not come from the space-time immortal arts she had used whenever the whim struck.
She was simply, literally, so tired she wanted to sleep like a madwoman.
To begin with, for Cheon Seo-ah—who had long since surpassed the Daluo Stage and reached the Ancestral Dao Stage—space-time immortal arts were as natural as breathing.
The tiredness she felt now was merely a kind of side effect from having spent far too long lounging around shut up in Daematcheon, only to suddenly roam through far too many places after such a long time.
“Mmm, and anyway, once a few decades pass it’ll be the time period right before I fell into the cultivation world, so…”
Still yawning continuously, she took a single step—
and before she knew it, Cheon Seo-ah had arrived in the middle of a vast ocean.
An endless open sea, nothing but unbroken horizon in every direction.
“Mm, this place looks good.”
After surveying her surroundings, she nodded with a satisfied expression.
Not bad at all.
And so Cheon Seo-ah descended to the seafloor of the deep and began to set a formation.
“Yin-Yang Five Elements Heaven-Reversing Formation—complete!”
Parting the deep-sea water with a light gesture, Cheon Seo-ah showed a bright, sunny smile.
Even constructed in simplified form, the Yin-Yang Five Elements Heaven-Reversing Formation would easily last a hundred years.
Of course.
“I don’t need to sleep for a whole hundred years… Ah! I should set the alarm properly.”
Belatedly remembering the importance of an alarm, she gestured again. With a thud, a colossal bell dropped down beside her.
“With this, the preparations are fini… shed…”
Hwaaam!
Yawning once more as she muttered, Cheon Seo-ah suddenly toppled over and closed her eyes.
The soft sound of her breathing and the gentle rise and fall of her chest made it clear she had fallen into a deep sleep.
The year 1999.
The prophet born in the sixteenth century, Nostradamus, had spoken.
In the year 1999, when the seventh month rose,
the heavens would open and the Great King of Terror would descend, and humanity would be destroyed.
Of course, the great majority of prophecies—especially those concerning the end of the world—had never once hit their mark properly.
And Nostradamus’s prophecy was no exception.
Even so, Earth’s humanity did undergo one great upheaval.
Supernatural ability users—who until then had existed only in ghost stories, urban legends, or the realm of pure delusion—revealed themselves to the world.
They had not, however, appeared completely out of nowhere, as if they had simply dropped from the sky.
From ancient times until now, they had been operating in the shadows of society all along.
People simply could not understand why those ability users had suddenly chosen to reveal themselves—and on the very day of humanity’s destruction that Nostradamus had mentioned, no less.
They could only guess that there must have been some reason for them to unveil an existence they had hidden for thousands of years.
And so the ability users who appeared in 1999 blended into society with remarkable naturalness.