The Second Otherworld
"……."
He closed the book he had been reading, The Sword King of Another World Possesses the Young Master’s Body.
He couldn’t say a word.
The novel was just too maddening.
At first, he’d thought it was some shōnen-style story about a boy slowly growing stronger.
He’d figured something worthwhile would happen eventually.
But in the end, nothing like that ever came to pass.
"Did I read this wrong?"
■
"Magnificent! You strange knight…."
"Shut up…."
"You may be proud. You’ve brought me down."
Even after losing one arm and her heart, she still wasn’t dead.
What a monster…
"Hah… huff…."
There wasn’t a shred of inner power left in him.
But then, the same was true for his opponent.
He was the king of demons who would shatter the heavens, yet there was no way he could avoid the death closing in on him.
"What a waste…. What a shame. Patcheon Yusingong was so close to completion…."
With that final dying breath, the Heavenly Demon fell still.
All around them lay countless corpses, their end impossible to discern.
After staggering through a horrific sacrifice, he had finally managed to bring the Heavenly Demon to mutual destruction on Mount Taesan.
Of course, the price had been losing everything below the waist.
Still, he’d taken the Heavenly Demon down, hadn’t he…?
Sojin, you’ve worked hard all this time. You really never change, do you?
He could feel the Sword King leaving his body.
That must mean his own death was drawing near.
His vision gradually bled red.
The world around him was silent; no one remained.
Soaked in blood, he savored his victory alone.
Still… I’ve carried out the justice I believed in.
All strength drained from his body, and his focus began to blur.
Murim would be peaceful now.
Like sprouts breaking through the earth in spring, a new era would come.
He would be the foundation of that age.
With that thought muttered in his heart, he closed his eyes.
Toward eternal rest.
Cheon Sojin had finally defeated the Heavenly Demon and brought peace to Murim.
His noble will would live forever in the darkness.
Done.
At last, the series has reached its conclusion. To the reader who stayed with my novel until the very end, I offer my deepest thanks…
■
I closed the window again.
"……."
It was a story I’d felt nostalgic for, so I’d read it all the way through, but this still wasn’t it.
It had been fine when the incompetent protagonist finally gained a stroke of destiny in the form of the Sword King’s soul after all that hardship.
What drove me crazy was everything that came after.
It was understandable that he’d been consumed by some strange sense of justice.
A protagonist overflowing with righteous indignation? That was who he’d always been, and it was within the realm of comprehension.
But why forgive the traitors? Why deliberately take a beating despite being strong? Why hand the woman over?
And I still had no idea why he insisted on operating in secret while hiding his identity.
If the writer’s idea of a chivalrous hero was someone who gave and gave for no reason, then maybe that made sense.
Because of that infuriatingly patient plot,
I was probably the only one who had actually read the final chapter.
The moment I slowly placed my hand on the keyboard and tried to write something,
"……."
I had plenty to say, but I didn’t bother typing it into the comments.
I already knew from experience how that would go.
Just thinking about it was horrifying.
I glanced at the clock and saw it was already five o’clock.
"It’s already this late? I’m going to be late."
I had plans with a friend today.
They said they had something important to tell me, and if I was late, I had no idea how annoyed they’d get.
Right as I hurriedly changed clothes and straightened myself in front of the mirror,
Wheeeeeeeng—!
With a strange sound, brilliant white light flashed from the monitor and began dragging my body toward it with overwhelming force.
An impossible amount of brightness was pouring out of a screen that absolutely should not have been able to emit anything like this.
A bizarre sense of unease crawled over my body!
"W-what, is this…? No way. Not again? This time it’s the monitor?"
I wasn’t about to be taken in by another impossible phenomenon.
I immediately crouched down and plastered myself to the floor, and just as I expected, the pulling force stopped.
"I’m not falling for it twice."
If I’d kept standing, that could have been dangerous, but thanks to my quick grasp of the situation, I’d escaped the crisis.
All I had to do now was crawl out of the house like this.
As I kept holding on for a while longer, the light slowly began to fade.
Thank God. Let it go find someone else.
Whoosh—!
Then,
The monitor floated up into the air and came flying straight at me as I lay pressed to the floor!
The monitor was floating on its own?
"How does that even make sense?! This is reality!"
In an instant, blinding light filled the room.
"Why me again, you bastards!"
Those were my last words before an eerie silence swallowed the room.
*
The brilliant flash did not last long.
As the light faded, an unfamiliar ceiling was the first thing to greet me.
No way.
I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them again.
And the fact that it wasn’t even the ceiling of a building, but the ceiling of a cave, made it all the more horrifying.
"……."
This was a nightmare.
Just a completely fucked-up dream.
Don’t mess with me. This isn’t funny.
But no matter how long I repeated that in my head and waited, nothing changed.
Before long, I realized I was lying on some suspicious altar and shook my head from side to side as I forced my body upright.
Why?
As if denying the act itself, my whole body screamed in protest with a creak and a shudder.
Pain spread violently through me; to put it kindly, I was a wreck, and to put it bluntly, I was barely more than a corpse.
The small cuts, the blood seeping out from here and there,
the unknown internal injuries and the way my body seemed to have shattered from the inside made one thing clear to me.
This wasn’t my body.
The pain prickling in every corner of me told me this was not a dream.
"Is this fucking real…."
My body trembled.
How many people in the world would be happy to be dragged here against their will?
If they’d at least given me one or two cheat abilities and dragged me here, maybe I would’ve been glad.
But there was nothing like that.
Survive by any means necessary.
Again?
You probably already guessed it, but
I’d already had the experience of writing one bad review and ending up in a martial arts world.
"……."
This time I hadn’t even done anything…?
My anger surged to the top of my head, but I forced myself to breathe and calm down.
After trembling for a long time, I reached for the cigarette I’d tucked into my chest pocket—only to find, as expected, that it wasn’t there.
That was because I wasn’t wearing a shirt at all, but martial clothing.
"F-fucking hell!!!!!!!"
I couldn’t suppress the emotions surging up and ripped off the upper garment.
Why the hell was it me again!
But the fury didn’t last long.
"Ugh! Hhk! Cough!"
When the coughing fit ended, I spat out a handful of blood onto the floor.
Dark red, sticky blood.
"Hah, haa… I’m going to die at this rate…."
Once I dragged in a few ragged breaths and steadied myself, the panic receded almost instantly.
Because whether something was fucked up or not, if I wanted to survive, I needed to keep my head on straight.
I had no idea whether I could make it back out alive this time either, but figuring out where I was came first.
When I looked into a puddle of water gathered on the cave floor, a familiar man stared back at me from the surface.
A straight nose, a finely sculpted face, and a beauty so striking it was hard to believe he was a man.
"This guy is…."
Cheon Sojin.
No, at this point in the story, was he still supposed to be called Jin Sojin?
Either way, Cheon Sojin was the name I knew best.
He looked exactly like the illustrations.
I’d had a vague feeling this might happen, but I never thought it would really come to this.
I’d been sucked into the novel.
And of all people, I’d become the protagonist of The Sword King of Another World Possesses the Young Master’s Body.
"……."
Rolling forward, getting beaten down, looked down on, losing everyone I knew…
With nothing but disaster waiting for me ahead,
was that now my fate?
"Fuck… what kind of insane bullshit is this!! Gaaahhhh!!"
I wasn’t usually the type to swear, but the curses came out naturally.
It felt like the time back in my first year of service when I’d gotten beaten with rifle butts together with the rest of my unit and been forced to do naked drills in the shower room.
Calm down. Anger is poison.
Beside the altar hung the long robe he had been wearing, and on it was a blood-written message.
The contents were, as expected, things I already knew.
It described everything he had experienced up to now, and included a request for whoever received it—though he didn’t know who that would be—to take good care of things.
It was a testament to Cheon Sojin’s regret.
"Hoo."
I wanted a cigarette, but of course there still wasn’t one.
Before anger could rise again, a deep sigh welled up from inside me first.
That was because the altar was a forbidden ritual array called Talhwon Gyeong, a technique used to force a powerful soul to possess one’s body.
It wasn’t enough simply to know the ritual; it also required a very special treasure called Cheonok.
As if to confirm my guess, right beneath the altar I saw a Cheonok reduced to powder.
Then,
What if…?
A flash of thought struck me.
The protagonist had had an incredible helper, after all.
Clinging to that sliver of hope, I called out to him in a low voice.
"Sword King."
The cave remained quiet, his voice echoing back alone.
Nothing happened.
"Sword King?"
"Sword King-nim."
"The world’s greatest swordsman, Sword King-nim!!"
No matter how many times I called, nothing changed.
No, thinking about it, that made sense.
I was the one who had possessed Cheon Sojin.
"……."
What made my skin crawl was that even Cheon Sojin himself wasn’t there anymore.
It was as if both of us had died…
As though we had never existed in the first place, I couldn’t feel anything at all.
If this had been a game, wouldn’t this have been the most hopeless pile of trash imaginable?
My head throbbed, but when I saw the blood trickling down, there was no more time to linger.
Somehow, my mind felt hazy too.
In that state, I sat cross-legged and slowly tried to regulate my breathing and circulate my energy.
I had no idea what the Jin family’s Jingi Doilbeop breathing formula was, so
the martial art I had to use was naturally the Ilwol Eumyang Singong.
It was the strongest technique I had learned in my previous life in Murim.
"……."
Only,
…it had a few flaws too.
Ilwol Eumyang Singong, huh….
I didn’t like it, but if I wanted to survive, I had no choice.
And I had experience now, so maybe this would be different from before.
I slowly tried to raise my inner force and circulate it through my body, but
"Cough…."
With this pathetic body, even one small cycle of circulation was hard to complete.
At my age, is this all the internal energy I’ve got?
It was because the body hadn’t even accumulated the most basic amount of internal force.
If I can’t even do this much, I might as well ram my face into a plate and die.
Wooooong—
I had no choice but to use Simjae Gong, my basic heart technique, and barely finish the breathing exercise.
"Hoo…."
I stood up and moved my arms and legs, settling into my stance.
My body still screamed in protest, but it wasn’t bad enough to keep me from moving.
How am I supposed to survive from here on out?
No matter how handsome the face was, in the end Murim worshipped only one thing: the strong.
Strength was everything.
After all, the reason he had fallen off that cliff in the first place was none other than that.
You bastards… this is all because of you. I’m going to collect with interest and get back every last bit, multiplied.
I already knew who was behind this.
"Ha…."
I let out a long sigh and walked toward the mouth of the cave.
It was a sheer cliff where not even sunlight reached and there wasn’t a single foothold to stand on.
I could see the ground far below the cliff, but in my current condition, falling straight down would be suicide.
I didn’t even have enough inner qi to protect my body, let alone anything like it.
It was a true dilemma.
So how had the protagonist escaped from here?
"Looks like there’s only one answer after all…."
Beside the altar was what looked like a woman’s hand.
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