Humans Gaze at the Heavens and Dream
“What the hell? That’s terrifying.”
Wasn’t the Heavenly Demon supposed to be the other side?
This was more Heavenly Demon than the Heavenly Demon.
“Well… in a sense, he was the Heavenly Demon of the Orthodox Faction itself. Can you imagine the terror Namgung Hwe’s enemies must have felt in those days?”
An overwhelming power that could neither be resisted nor understood…
This was cosmic horror, pure and simple.
“At any rate. After that, the Demonic Cult was completely destroyed.”
Not merely in the physical sense—it was annihilated in ideology as well.
The Demonic Cult had originally been a philosophical movement that dreamed of Yeokcheon—going against Heaven.
The “Heaven” they spoke of was the natural order itself.
The most fundamental order of all: that which flows from above to below.
As water runs from high ground to low. As divine punishment falls from the sky to the earth.
That order meant civilization itself.
The noble stood above; the turbid waters of the low settled at the bottom. Thus the Son of Heaven descended from the sky, while the common folk clung to the soil and grew. From this came order, law, and civilization.
And beneath Heaven, the greatest civilization of that order was the Central Plains.
So for them, invading the Central Plains was itself an act of Yeokcheon.
Filthy lower waters daring to surge upward toward the sky—a rebellion of weeds, a challenge to Heaven.
And if they succeeded in conquering the Central Plains, floor and sky would at last reverse, and Yeokcheon would be achieved.
But that ideology could never be fulfilled again.
Heaven had come down, as the natural order dictated—from above to below.
It had sent divine punishment to the earth and swept everything away.
Like a primordial flood that drowned the unclean.
Those who had insulted Heaven received their punishment at last.
As a man who slighted Zeus was struck by lightning. As the arrogant builders of Babel were cursed.
And so the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult was forced to prove that its philosophy had been wrong.
So long as Namgung Hwe lived, Yeokcheon could never come to pass.
In the end, the old Demonic Cult collapsed.
This time there was no gathering of strength, no preparation for the next war.
The survivors scattered in every direction and hid. Most of them lived out their days as ordinary people—melting into the Central Plains, or lying low in remote corners as quiet as the dead. Some fled to the western lands.
They promised themselves a distant future.
And so the ages turned.
Centuries later.
The Middle Ages ended. The Age of Exploration opened. World wars began and ended. A cold war rose and fell. Then came the era of space development.
Across that long current of history, Namgung Hwe became a god.
Once merely the Heavenly Sovereign within the Martial Alliance, Namgung Hwe grew into a still greater giant as the ages passed and the world expanded to match him.
In the Age of Exploration he was the two-legged dragon of the nation of Xing. In the era of world war he was the East’s final shield and a living asymmetric weapon. And after the wars, when East and West began to reconcile in the age of space development, he became at last the patron of all civilization—a living divinity worshipped by East and West alike.
And the Demonic Cult…
The Demonic Cult never rose again.
The descendants of those who had once hidden among ordinary people truly became ordinary people. To them, the Demonic Cult was nothing more than an ancestral tale from the distant past. They were fully absorbed into the Central Plains, their very identity as Demonic Cultists erased.
Those who had gone west held on to that identity a little longer. Some among them even founded secret societies that melted into the shadows of the Western nations. Those long-lived societies seemed for a time to achieve something—contributing to the birth of Nazism, among other things—but even that withered and crumbled as the years wore on.
“The old Demonic Cult is history now—history that has passed beyond. Even time was not on their side.”
“Hmm… so the current Demonic Cult is basically an organization founded as a successor after the complete extinction of the old one?”
“Exactly so. Both revere the concept of Yeokcheon—climbing against Heaven. But where the old Demonic Cult’s Heaven was the Central Plains, the Heaven of the present Demonic Cult has become something else.”
An unchanging Heaven. A man who was the Central Plains itself.
Namgung Hwe had become the Heaven the Demonic Cult sought to surpass.
“Ah. I think I get it. So the Demonic Cult is the faction that doesn’t believe in the God of Martial Arts? Belief makes you Orthodox; disbelief makes you Demonic?”
“No. On the contrary—the Demonic Cult is the most fanatically devoted worshippers of the God of Martial Arts in this entire galaxy.”
“Huh? But you said they go against Heaven?”
“Haha. A true paradox, is it not?”
Come to think of it, among the people of that cult-like order on Jami Star, there had been fervent Martial-God zealots who shouted “Long live the God of Martial Arts!” every other day.
Even this tteokbokki shop, whose owner was a Demonic Cultist, had a portrait of the God of Martial Arts painted on the pillar over there. And a flashy, expensive-looking one at that.
“They defy the God of Martial Arts and worship him at the same time?”
“Precisely.”
“How is that even possible?”
“Allow me to explain. We return once more to the age of Terra—around the time the world had passed through the era of world war and entered the cold war and the age of space development.”
It was a world in which the old Demonic Cult had become dead history and Namgung Hwe a living divinity.
In that age when the Demonic Cult had become a historical joke…
There were still those who carried on its will.
There were still fools who dreamed of Yeokcheon.
The Demonic Cult had been dismantled, and there was no talent left who could even be called a Heavenly Demon. They no longer dared to call themselves the Demonic Cult.
Too weak even to style themselves a grand religious order, they named themselves simply the Heaven-Defiers.
The Heaven-Defiers did not envision an invasion of the Central Plains. They were too weak for that. They were neither prepared nor qualified. They merely gathered strength.
And the Heaven they meant to defy was no longer the Central Plains.
The last remaining Heaven in this world. Namgung Hwe himself was the Heaven they had to climb against.
And Namgung Hwe was the God of Martial Arts. He had to be killed by martial arts. Only then would it mean anything.
So they pursued the martial path.
In a world where nearly every martial art passed through Namgung Hwe’s hands, and only techniques touched by a god’s fingers were recognized as mainstream, they sought to defeat Namgung Hwe with martial arts that were not his.
It was an insane, impossible act.
To challenge the God of Martial Arts with martial arts. An idea that could never succeed.
And yet, with stubborn folly, they tried to achieve it.
Foolishly. So foolishly.
Their goal lay in the realm of the absurd.
Countless people quit along the way.
Those who feared Namgung Hwe.
Those who wished to go along with the current of the age.
And above all… those who judged, objectively, that Yeokcheon was impossible.
All of them were rational people.
Rational and normal—and so they left.
Only the freaks remained.
Stubborn souls who wanted to challenge the impossible anyway.
Abnormally diligent people who could not stop the work handed down from their ancestors.
Idiots who could not abandon a dream.
People who simply wanted to see their loved ones achieve one.
They were weak, and weak, and so terribly weak.
“You’re saying they meant to surpass the man who reinvented martial arts… through martial arts?”
“Truly reckless, is it not?”
“Beyond reckless… isn’t that close to madness?”
“Indeed it is.”
“It’s astonishing they kept it up out of sheer faith.”
“Is that all? Those who shared their cause began to grow as well.”
It was a remarkable thing.
People started gathering around this band of fools.
Those who came were, of course, fools of a similar kind.
Those who wanted martial arts that were not Namgung Hwe’s.
Unbelievers who refused to put their faith in the God of Martial Arts.
Solitary martial artists who wished to prove their own path.
They did not gladly accept the existence of Namgung Hwe, the living god.
They did not wish to become great by walking the path of a god. They wanted to become great by their own power.
They did not want to lean on a god for everything, pray to a god, and wait for a god to bestow his inventions.
However meager and imperfect it might be, they wanted to build it themselves.
It was an exceedingly foolish thing to do.
Namgung Hwe had already grasped the truths of the universe and, on that foundation, paved humanity’s road.
Simply analyzing and following the research he left behind was enough to reach great heights.
It was the largest, fastest highway in the world.
All one had to do was walk it.
But these single-minded obsessives refused.
And people of that kind gathered in one place.
In an age of gods, when even the Western world that had once opposed Namgung Hwe no longer treated him as an enemy…
Those who sought to surpass a god were carrying on the flame.
So the Heaven-Defiers grew, little by little.
From a feeble beginning, dreaming of an impossible grandeur.
Advancing step by step, as an infant learns to walk.
And so the ages turned again.
Humanity at last left the cradle of Terra and entered the early stages of the Great Galactic Age of Expansion.
Namgung Hwe became more than the God of Martial Arts—he became the god of humanity itself.
The Heaven-Defiers were still weak. Still weak—but at least they had escaped powerlessness and finally become a force worthy of the name.
They researched and researched again, seeking to challenge the God of Martial Arts with something that was not his.
The conclusion was still impossibility. They could not even touch the tip of his toe; they could barely look up at him.
And yet, little by little, they were building something.
Many left. Those who saw there was no hope left.
And many new ones came. Fools who came to challenge a hopeless cause.
The Heaven-Defiers’ identity as the old Demonic Cult had been greatly diluted.
People left and entered in endless cycles, until they had drifted far from the original.
They felt no thirst for revenge over the Demonic Cult’s destruction. That was too long ago, and no longer truly connected to them.
The Heaven-Defiers had changed.
What drove them now was no longer vengeance, but competitive pride.
The brighter the god’s name shone, the greater that feeling grew.
While everyone else bowed their heads in worship, they looked the god straight in the eye and meant to claw their way up to the heavens.
In the age when Namgung Hwe, a living god, was leading humanity’s golden age…
These unbelievers dared to want to touch a god’s achievements with human strength alone.
And at last, a figure worthy of pride rose from among them.
The leader who guided the Heaven-Defiers.
The one who, with martial arts that were not Namgung Hwe’s, succeeded in joining the ranks of humanity’s greatest masters.
Eleonor Sky.
Founder of the Heavenly Demon Divine Art, and the woman who would one day be called the First Heavenly Demon.