Day 5: Severing the Cycle
The villains locked away in Tartaros were in an uproar.
Word had already spread that Cheon Seo-ah had been imprisoned there for performing Heart Devouring—and further, that her ability might be identical to that of the infamous Heart Devourer himself.
Their reactions split cleanly into two camps.
One held that no matter how vicious they themselves might be, some taboos still ought never to be crossed. The other insisted that a villain was free to do whatever he pleased; whether Cheon Seo-ah had eaten hearts or not was none of their concern.
Among them, a tiny minority even found themselves developing a strange fondness for her.
Meanwhile, the warden who had personally consigned Cheon Seo-ah to Tartaros’s most hellish solitary cell…
“I’ve checked, but… I still don’t know for certain.”
He was on both knees, head bowed low, addressing someone.
No one who saw him then would ever have believed this was the absolute sovereign who ruled Tartaros. They would have doubted their own eyes.
And the presence great enough to make even such a warden prostrate himself spoke:
Is that so. Still, the possibility isn’t zero—keep watching for now. And…
“I will continue to report diligently.”
Good.
With that, the voice cut off cleanly.
Even so, the warden remained on his knees, head still lowered.
“Everything… for the Heavenly Maiden.”
He whispered the words like a prayer, quiet and devout.
“It’s built rather sturdily, isn’t it?”
Cheon Seo-ah tapped the walls and door of her solitary cell, testing them with light knocks.
Tartaros itself was already formidable, yet this particular cell had been constructed to an even higher standard—sturdy enough, at least, to hold a cultivator up through Foundation Establishment for a while.
Of course, to anyone who had stepped beyond that realm, Tartaros was thinner than paper.
More to the point…
“Why did they all look at me as though I were pitiable?”
She dropped unceremoniously onto the floor and tilted her head, genuine bafflement written across her face. The pitying expressions of the guards who had escorted her here still refused to leave her mind.
How many tens of thousands of years had it been since anyone had looked at her with pity?
No—tens of thousands of years wasn’t even close. Truthfully, Cheon Seo-ah had never once received anyone’s pity before.
From the countless cultivators of the cultivation world she had only ever received resentment and rage. Even fellow practitioners of Demonic Cultivation Arts, even her own sect, had only ever feared her.
Even back when she had just stepped into the Golden Core realm and been captured by a Nascent Soul cultivator dispatched by a sect she had wronged, there had not been a single shred of camaraderie—certainly no pity. All she had seen in their eyes was mockery, envy, and jealousy.
“Pity, huh… That’s rather novel. Not that I have any reason to receive it.”
Ziiip—
She finished speaking and flicked her fingers. Space itself tore open at the gesture. Beyond the rent, the view fractured into dozens of separate scenes—glimpses of Tartaros’s interior, of the world’s major cities, each window showing a different place.
“Come to think of it…”
She murmured, and with every additional wave of her hand the landscapes beyond the tears spun and changed. Dozens of views became hundreds, then thousands, until at last she found what she wanted.
“Good. I’m not too late.”
A genuine sigh of relief left her as she peered through the single remaining window. The dozens of scenes had fused into one: a young man walking down a deserted alley. Utterly ordinary looks—the kind of face you could pass a hundred times without remembering.
That young man was the “self” who had lived on Earth before Cheon Seo-ah became Cheon Seo-ah.
“Honestly… the whole reason I came to Earth was to settle this.”
Having reached the Ancestral Dao Stage, Cheon Seo-ah had long since become something that transcended every law, every rule, every thread of causality. If a god existed—and if that god were truly omniscient and omnipotent—then she had already surpassed even such a god.
No: she had slipped free of laws, rules, and causality long before she reached the Ancestral Dao Stage.
Perhaps that was why, while roaming the cultivation world, she had encountered countless versions of “herself.”
Some were the version of her who had just fallen into the cultivation world and was still panicking. Some had only just begun training in Demonic Cultivation Arts after awakening to their talent. Some, blessed with natural aptitude, physique, spiritual roots, and fortuitous encounters, had already climbed a fair way up the realms.
And Cheon Seo-ah had killed every last one of them without exception.
Yet “herself” continued to appear in the cultivation world on a fixed cycle.
“It was about once every three hundred years, wasn’t it?”
For all she knew, a new version of her might be appearing in the cultivation world even now. That was why she had crossed over to Earth carrying more than simple homesickness—she wanted to sever this tiresome cycle once and for all. If she could resolve the incident that stood at the origin of everything, no more versions of herself would keep tumbling into the cultivation world to annoy her.
“Let’s see… the incident should be starting soon.”
She watched through the tear in space.
The Earth of the present, however, was almost unrecognizable compared to the Earth she had once known. She knew perfectly well the reason: long ago she had traveled through countless eras and places of this planet, casually lending a hand to nine miserable people. Anyone else might have assumed that the very cycle she wished to break had already been broken by those changes.
But—
“That’s not how it works.”
When the world changes, the incidents that unfold within it simply take on new shapes to match. Precisely because she understood that, she had sought out her Earth self even after the planet had been transformed.
“Ah. It’s beginning.”
Her eyes lit up.
Beyond the tear, not far from the “self” strolling down the empty alley, a single villain was sprinting hard. He was badly wounded—clearly being pursued by heroes.
“I see. Once ability users appeared and the whole hero-and-villain concept settled in, incidents started playing out like this instead.”
She smiled faintly.
Every previous “self” she had hunted down and killed had crossed over after dying in a traffic accident or a random murder. This time, though, it was an ability-user incident. Compared to the Earth she remembered, the changed version wasn’t bad at all. In fact, it was rather interesting.
Still—
“Interesting is interesting, but what needs doing still needs doing.”
Her Earth self finally noticed the wounded villain racing toward him and froze with a startled gasp. The villain’s eyes lit up the moment he spotted the ordinary young man—clearly intending to use him as a shield or distraction against the pursuing heroes.
Her guess proved correct. The injured villain charged without hesitation, flames wreathing both hands as he closed the distance, ready to engulf her Earth self. One touch of that fire and this particular Earth version of her would die and cross into the cultivation world.
Which was why—
“Excuse me for a moment.”
Cheon Seo-ah leaned her upper body out through the tear in space.
Her Earth self nearly jumped out of his skin at the sudden appearance of a girl half-emerging from midair. The flame-wreathed villain fared no better.
“You’ll be coming with me. ‘I’ can handle dying just fine, but ‘I’ over there isn’t used to it yet.”
“What kind of nonsense are you—”
A spatial ability hero?
That was the villain’s snap judgment. The instant he tried to detonate the flames in both hands, the scenery around him warped violently.
Where am I?
He had been racing down an alley. He hadn’t even blinked. Now he was sealed inside a cramped solitary cell.
His face twisted with fury.
“You little bitch—this was your doing!”
Flames roared up. Directly in front of him, the girl who had been leaning out of empty air was now sitting calmly, smiling.
“Where the hell did you drag me?!”
“Tartaros.”
The villain flinched hard at the casual answer.
Tartaros. In Greek and Roman myth it was a god’s name, and also the nightmarish abyss lying even deeper than Hades’s underworld. In the modern world the word meant something else entirely: the prison that held only the most vicious, the lowest, the absolute worst villains—a hell on earth. That was the weight the name carried now.
Startled though he was, the villain quickly mastered himself.
“Don’t give me that crap—!”
He refused to believe it. Moments ago he had been in a deserted alley in Seoul, capital of Korea. Tartaros stood on a massive uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific. Even a spatial ability couldn’t jump from Seoul to the middle of the ocean in an instant—not unless the user were at least Class 2. Cheon Seo-ah looked, at best, like a Class 9. And every ability of every villain locked in Tartaros was suppressed, which made it even less likely this place was the real thing.
A kilometer or two away at most!
Kill this “hero” right now and run.
“Mm, I’m sorry, but I’m not a hero. I’m not a villain either. Just an innocent victim who got thrown in prison by mistake.”
…!
She had read his thoughts?
“That’s easy enough.”
A chill raced down the villain’s spine as she continued answering the thoughts he hadn’t spoken. So the girl possessed both spatial movement and mind reading?
Even so, nothing changed. Holding two rare abilities at once was impressive, but neither was a combat ability. His plan remained the same: roast her whole and escape.
He gathered the condensed flames in both hands, ready to unleash them—
“The incident has vanished. The cycle bound to ‘me’ has been severed. And the guards who heard you shouting are on their way.”
No more reason to stall.
Cheon Seo-ah smiled brightly.
She had deliberately left the villain alive until now for a simple reason: if she killed him too quickly, some new incident might simply latch onto her Earth self in his place. So she had waited patiently, confirming that every last thread of the original event had fully unraveled, before she moved.
“Eating your heart wouldn’t help me much anyway. I suppose I’ll just kill you.”
Crunch—
At her casual gesture, space compressed around the villain. His body, caught between the collapsing dimensions, was instantly crushed into something resembling dried meat jerky. At the same moment—
Whoosh—!
Black flames erupted greedily from the tips of the compressed corpse’s feet and swallowed the remains whole. When the last of the black fire finally died away—
“Hm.”
A guard peered in through the small window set in the iron door, saw only Cheon Seo-ah sitting quietly by herself, decided he must have misheard, and walked away.