Who Is Namgung Hwe
The Heavenly Venerable lifted more than a hundred steel swords into the air with object-manipulation arts, then, through the technique of flying sword control, set each blade dancing in a different form of swordsmanship.
The hereditary sword styles of the great Orthodox families, the transmitted arts of the Nine Great Sects, the secret schools of the Unorthodox, and the Yeokcheon sword methods of the Demonic Sect each traced their own arcs until the Hundred and Eight Arhat Formation was complete—and then the blades fell as a Myriad Flower Rain.
Un-rang let out a long sigh.
So the day had come at last.
The day he would have to speak of the Demonic Sect.
“Teach us well~~~ And don’t you dare leave anything out~~~?”
Beside him, the Succubus Boss smiled with her eyes and piled on the pressure.
At this rate, he wouldn’t even be allowed to teach them a distorted version.
With no customers in the shop anyway, the Boss simply parked herself in the next seat, beaming, ready to hang on Un-rang’s every word.
In the end, Un-rang cleared his throat and began.
“Ahem… First of all… to understand the Demonic Sect, one must first understand the Martial God, Namgung Hwe.”
Gong Ryun looked puzzled.
“I already know that much. Wasn’t he the strongest person in human history?”
“True—but he was never merely the strongest.”
“And he was important to human history, too.”
“Calling him ‘important’ doesn’t begin to cover it.”
“The most important person, then?”
“Indeed. But it doesn’t end there either.”
“If ‘most important person’ isn’t enough, then what is he?”
Beyond the most important person—
the person without whom humanity itself could never have existed.
“Namgung Hwe is humanity. He is humanity’s identity.”
His history was the history of humankind; his achievements were the achievements of humankind.
“To call him the strongest is not enough to explain him.”
Namgung Hwe was the pinnacle of martial arts. The overwhelming greatest of all ages.
Even the second-strongest human in history could not reach the tip of Namgung Hwe’s toe.
Gather every martial artist from every era across the entire galaxy and have them all attack him at once, and they still would not defeat Namgung Hwe alone.
“To say he is historically important is also insufficient.”
Human civilization is divided into before Namgung Hwe and after him. A single individual became the baseline of history.
From the moment he began advancing technology as civilization’s patron, humanity entered the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Space Development, and then the Age of Galactic Expansion.
It overwhelmed every other alien civilization in the galaxy and became the greatest intelligence to rule the stars.
“Namgung Hwe is the completed form of humanity.”
In some distant eternal future, when human civilization has advanced far enough to rival the authority of the gods—if humans were to evolve into their most ideal shape, that form would look like him.
“He is a genius who will never appear again, not across all history past or yet to come.”
No matter how far humanity advances, no matter how many geniuses it produces, none will ever match the genius he possessed.
“In truth, he is closer to a god born in human flesh.”
Arrogant for a human, humble for a god.
Born human, ascended as a god.
In every sense, the most perfect being that ever was.
“…Uh… isn’t that… a little much? I get that he’s a great ancestor, but… isn’t the worship going a bit overboard?”
“On the contrary. Even speaking this much fails to contain Namgung Hwe’s greatness. That is simply the kind of man the Martial God was.”
“Is that so? People always say the Martial God is incredible, but they never really spell out his deeds in everyday conversation, so I never knew the details.”
“Why would anyone bother repeating what everyone already knows? You can learn it all from a textbook.”
“Ah.”
“Honestly, it would have helped if Gong Ryun had at least read a book on the Martial God’s life.”
“I’d rather work or watch a romance drama in that time.”
“Well, if you take an interest later, read at your leisure. The Martial God’s greatness won’t run off just because you don’t open a book today. For now, let me give you a taste and tell you a little about Namgung Hwe.”
And so Un-rang began a more detailed account of Namgung Hwe.
“The Martial God reached the Nature Realm at the age of twelve.”
“Ah. You mean the anecdote where he reached Nature Realm the very day he started learning martial arts?”
“Exactly. It may not hit as hard in this era, but back then—in Terra’s Middle Ages—it was utterly absurd.”
Nowadays there were realms higher than Nature, and even Nature itself, while not common, was something one might occasionally encounter.
The past was different.
In Terra’s ancient and medieval ages, Harmony Realm was enough to rank among the Ten Great Masters under heaven, and Profound Realm made you the undisputed greatest under heaven without question.
No higher realm existed.
More precisely, it existed only in theory. It was the stuff of legend—something a once-in-a-millennium genius like Bodhidharma was said to have reached long, long ago.
“If Gong Ryun hopped a time machine back to old Terra, you could probably become the greatest under heaven without much trouble.”
Today, Harmony Realm was the lowest recognized rank—but in the past there had been stages beneath it.
Commoner – Third-rate – Second-rate – First-rate – Peak – Transcendent Peak – Harmony Realm – Profound Realm.
Anyone called a master was usually around Peak, and Transcendent Peak meant a powerhouse with nothing left to fear in the world.
Into that weak world, Namgung Hwe was born.
Ordinarily, a martial artist trained along the road laid down by the ancestors. They studied the teachings left by founding sages—Bodhidharma, Zhang Sanfeng, the Moon Maiden—and the arts invented by each era’s geniuses, walking the paths those predecessors had cleared.
Namgung Hwe was different.
There was no one left who could teach him.
In the year he turned twelve, having decided to learn martial arts, he sat alone in the backyard of his home and began to meditate.
And just before the sun set that same day, he grasped the principles of the cosmos and ascended to the extreme of martial arts.
Alone, in a single afternoon, he attained a level that surpassed every teaching of the ancient sages.
From that moment on, he had no master.
All that remained was to pioneer the path alone.
“After Namgung Hwe appeared, the history of martial arts was thrown into upheaval.”
Until then, martial arts had been nothing more than efficient ways of swinging a blade.
Techniques for killing people more effectively—nothing else.
Internal energy existed as a concept, true, but even that was, in the end, only a craft for strengthening the body so one could cut harder.
No matter how strong a martial artist grew, they could not cleave a mountain.
They could not defeat an army.
And if they let their guard down against something strange like a thunder-bolt bomb, even a master died without a fight.
“But Namgung Hwe’s martial path was different. He interpreted martial arts in an entirely new direction.”
To him, martial arts were never merely efficient motion of the body.
The martial way he defined was the recreation of cosmic truth through flesh.
“In his youth, the Martial God learned every martial art of every school that existed, then remade them all. Every martial art that had ever existed on Terra passed through Namgung Hwe’s hands. Re-created by the hands of a god, those arts were no longer mere ways of moving the body.”
Every style that passed through Namgung Hwe began to carry the principles of the world.
The Mount Hua Sect’s arts were no longer flashy blade-work meant to dazzle the eye under the name of illusion-sword. Remade, Mount Hua’s sword filled heaven and earth with petals of internal energy and truly warped the five senses and the synesthetic field across a vast range—something closer to sorcery than technique.
The Wudang Sect’s Taiji Sword twisted the waters of the Yangtze itself, and Shaolin’s Geumgangbulgoe—the Diamond Body—began to endure the bombardment of thunder-bolt bombs.
The Zhuge Clan’s mechanical formations evolved into ultra-precise logic-circuit machinery, and the Sichuan Tang Clan at last understood what true poison arts could be.
Across the long history of the Central Plains, countless people had created and refined martial arts.
Those innumerable styles converged into a single point called Namgung Hwe.
And then they spread outward again.
For the merciful and omnipotent Martial God returned the evolved arts to each school—
like Prometheus sharing fire with humankind.
The martial artists of the Central Plains received that spark.
And they began to feed the flame themselves.
They researched martial arts on their own and drove them forward.
Thus began the Great Age of Martial Arts.
“Many things followed after that.”
Martial artists whose bodies had been strengthened by internal energy contracted with the imperial court and carved a colossal canal straight across the Central Plains.
When horse-riding nomads poured down from the north, martial artists rose as one and stopped them.
From the Western Regions came a merchant fleet fond of thunder-bolt bombs, roaming every sea and causing no end of trouble.
“That last affair was something of a preview of the later clash between the Western and Eastern worlds.”
In any case, as the ages turned, humanity grew steadily stronger.
With the martial path opened to all, the average achievement of individual martial artists rose.
The great masters began cutting mountains and parting clouds.
Western science and Eastern martial arts competed without end and elevated each other.
Rising scientific power strengthened martial arts, and new martial arts opened fresh horizons for science—a virtuous cycle that never stopped.
Now everyone on Terra knew martial arts and trained in them.
Martial arts were no longer the pastime of immortals; they entered the domain of science and technology and became the subject of systematic study.
Humans tore open mystery and dragged myth down into the realm of folklore.
Humanity was no longer the wretched grass beneath the sky, but the master of the world and the seeker of truth.
“But the greater humanity became, the more clearly people understood one fact: no matter how strong or magnificent they grew, there remained a single being they could never approach.”
No matter what humanity achieved—
no matter how many geniuses the world produced—
Namgung Hwe remained far above.
For he, too, had not sat idle across those long ages. He had striven and advanced himself.
Alone he broke through realms no human could even approach, and he established new stages.
He kept inventing new martial arts without end.
From an impossibly distant domain that geniuses, however hard they tried, could neither reach nor dare imagine, he looked down upon the world. He drove the geniuses of each century to despair.
And still he never monopolized enlightenment.
He made the methods of climbing higher available to all.
Advice to those who sought advice. Solutions to those stopped by a wall.
He spread martial arts to those who knew none,
and guided despairing geniuses so they could go further still.
He sponsored science and martial arts alike, and distributed the knowledge he had awakened.
“A question always followed Namgung Hwe. ‘If you keep revealing knowledge like this, what will you do when someone eventually surpasses you?’”
His answer never changed.
It was less the arrogance of an absolute being than the warm gaze of a parent.
Always lofty and high.
Impossible to reach, no matter how one stretched.
An unchanging sky.
“Yes. Namgung Hwe was the sky.”
In the past, the sky had symbolized the highest of all things—the end of the world, the most austere of concepts.
But as humans advanced civilization, the sky shed its mystery.
Through science, people learned that above the sky lay outer space. The sky was no longer an infinitely stretching firmament. The blue vault was nothing more than a thin atmosphere clinging to a planet.
As myth was demoted to folklore, the sky ceased to be the dwelling of the Jade Emperor. Olympus tumbled into the Mediterranean, and Thor, god of thunder, was no longer the guardian of sailors.
Even the Son of Heaven—whose imperial mandate was said to descend from the sky—was washed away into history’s far shore by the tide of democracy. Humans no longer sought the sky’s permission; they chose their own leaders.
And at last humanity lofted satellites above the sky, and then people themselves—
and the sky was no longer a place beyond reach. Neither the world’s end, nor sacred unknown.
Yet one thing alone never changed.
Namgung Hwe alone still stood at that height.
Still. Forever. Immeasurably above.
As if that place were the end of the martial path.
As if it were the destination humanity must reach.
Like a lofty lighthouse lighting the way,
he waited for us.
And so, in a world where the sky had lost its meaning, people acknowledged that only one sky remained.
“The final wall humanity cannot cross. And therefore the direction humanity must go. The completed form of humankind.”
People naturally began to revere him as a god.
As the ages passed, those who did not think of him as a god vanished.
The Martial God. The eternal greatest of all ages. The unchanging sky.
He is humanity.
And there were always those who followed the Martial God at his side.
“Those who revere Namgung Hwe as the founding master of the martial path, and who seek to walk the road he laid out. Those who support him and take as their core value the ideology he always championed—‘Righteousness.’ We call this age-old traditional force the Orthodox Faction.”