Falling from the Cliff
I was a thriving troubleshooter.
Missing persons, debt collection, catching cheaters—you name it. I had a knack for scratching other people’s itches, made good money at it, and even came to think of the work as my true calling.
Then one day a kitchen knife punched straight into my gut.
It happened while I was gathering proof of an affair. The reason he stabbed me was pathetic: my evidence had been too thin and he’d lost in court. That was exactly why I should have been pickier about crime-of-passion jobs, but the fat paycheck had been too tempting to refuse.
And so my life seemed ready to end right there. In the fading haze of consciousness I calmly accepted death—until, out of nowhere, a pain like my insides being ripped apart crashed through me.
Pain belonged to the living. Had I not died after all? Would I open my eyes to a hospital ceiling?
Clinging to that hope, I snapped my eyes open.
What greeted me was nothing like what I’d expected.
“……Impossible. I unleashed my qi—how are you still alive?”
Rain hammered my shoulders. Thunderbolts cracked without pause, charging the air with menace. In the middle of it all stood a woman gripping a blood-smeared longsword, staring at me with eyes wide in shock.
“What the fuck is this…….”
My head was pure chaos.
I stood on a high mountain peak. Behind me a sheer cliff dropped away, and far below I could hear a river roaring. My abdomen was slashed open; bright-red blood welled up and spilled out.
“Heaven and earth, why have you sent this trial upon me…….”
Her voice was thick with grief. Everything about her screamed that there was a story here. And up close she was ridiculously beautiful—black-pearl eyes, delicate features, a high ponytail, and a pale, elegant neck.
“I’m sorry, Cheongjin. Even in death, do not forgive this sister of yours.”
And that beauty was calling me by a name that meant nothing to me.
This body belonged to the all-purpose troubleshooter Dan Wonjun. Who the hell was this Cheongjin guy?
In that instant someone else’s memories flooded in like a tidal wave.
“Ugh!”
The Moyong Clan where I had been born and raised, the malevolent star that ate away at my sanity, the inescapable fate written in the heavens—everything slammed into place. Who I was, who she was, and why this little ritual was happening all became clear.
This was the jianghu of the Murim, a world where superhumans split boulders and parted seas with a single sword. And this body belonged to Moyong Cheongjin, the youngest young master of the Moyong Clan.
“Cheonghye…… Sister Cheonghye?”
The woman in front of me was my own blood sister, Moyong Cheonghye.
“To stop the blood calamity that would sweep the Central Plains, and for the Moyong Clan to survive, this is the only way.”
Why would my own sister say something so cold? That answer arrived just as quickly.
Heavenly Killing Star.
The root of disaster that would annihilate the entire family—that was what they called me inside the Moyong Clan. When human evil reached its peak, Heaven sent down the Heavenly Killing Star to punish it. A hundred years ago the previous bearer had turned the Central Plains into a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood with indiscriminate slaughter.
Step.
As if shaking off the last shred of hesitation, Moyong Cheonghye strode forward with a grim face. The raised blade now carried a clear, killing intent—this time she meant to finish it.
“W-wait! Sister! Stop!”
I knew all too well the power of the Heaven and Earth Wave Flash Sword that bloomed from her fingertips. Even with bones and talent born for killing, a body was still just meat in front of sword-qi that could slice iron like tofu.
Clatter.
And I had forgotten—I was already standing with my back to the cliff after being driven here in a panic. The moment my foot found the edge, loose stones skittered and tumbled, promising a long fall. Nowhere left to retreat. Since standing still meant another stabbing, I started talking for my life.
“Hey, Sister Cheonghye……? I’m completely sane now, okay? So put that scary thing down and let’s talk…… yeah?”
The merged memories made Moyong Cheongjin’s speech pattern slip out on its own.
“……You never get tired of this, do you?”
Her reaction was nothing like I’d hoped. Moyong Cheonghye bit her red lips hard, as if I’d only made her angrier.
“Viper-tongued, treacherous killing star! You think to mock me again by borrowing my brother’s mouth?”
Backfire.
Apparently the thing occupying this body had already imitated little brother Moyong Cheongjin more than once.
“For fuck’s sake, I’m not the killing star! This time I really snapped out of it! Look at me, Sister—I’m Cheongjin!”
I was ready to lose my mind. Whatever stunts the previous occupant had pulled, no amount of pleading moved her. In her eyes I was already a blood-thirsty murderer, a vile Heavenly Killing Star wagging a silver tongue just to slip the noose.
“You will mock me to the end……! But no more. Vanish from this world, Heavenly Killing Star!”
The declaration landed like a death sentence. A razor-sharp aura began to gather along the blade—true sword qi, something only a master with profound internal power could produce.
Ssssss—
The secret sword art of the Moyong Clan, said to split even lightning at its peak.
Moyong Cheonghye settled into the stance of the family’s ultimate technique.
“Ah, hell.”
The iron resolve in her eyes told me walking away in one piece was no longer on the table.
Clatter-clatter.
Another half-step back sent more stones tumbling down the slope. Behind me waited only the bottomless drop and a torrent thrashing like a wild horse. Jump and I might not even leave bone fragments. Stay and the sword qi would shred me just the same.
“What kind of choices are these?”
It felt like a life born only to suffer. Dead this way or that—if I was going to die by a blade again, I’d rather choose my own exit.
Yet when I actually looked down the cliff, a bitter injustice rose up. I’d been an orphan back on Earth; was I going to be abandoned by family in this world too? What the hell had I done in my past life?
“So even in my sister’s eyes…… I was nothing but a monster.”
That single line, tangled with resentment and disappointment, froze Moyong Cheonghye mid-motion. Before the Heavenly Killing Star had been revealed, she had treated me like a little brother she would never let the wind touch.
“Shit—”
I squeezed my eyes shut and hurled myself into the abyss.
Endless freefall swallowed me.
“Fuuuuck—!”
In the Central Plains there had long stood five deep-rooted great houses that had wielded unbroken prestige and influence for centuries. One of them was the Moyong Clan of Liaoning, overlords of the northern martial world.
“Did you send the child off without pain?”
In a quiet manor where white magnolia blossoms bloomed in profusion, Moyong Cheon, lord of the Moyong Clan, ground ink on his inkstone and asked the question, trying to settle his turbulent heart.
“…….”
No answer came. Moyong Cheonghye simply stood there, face blank and distant.
Her expression was always cold. With a lightning-fast sword that had cut down demonic leaders across Hebei, she had earned the sobriquet Cold Flower Jade Maiden from the gossips. Yet with her own family she was soft to a fault—especially with the youngest brother who had always clung to her. Worry colored Moyong Cheon’s gaze.
“……Because of my inexperience, I caused him pain.”
At last Moyong Cheonghye forced the words out, fists clenched so tight they might shatter. Even a peerless expert who could fell an ancient tree with one stroke could falter before emotion. That fleeting hesitation had kept her from taking his head cleanly; her brother had writhed in agony, then thrown himself from the cliff. Searchers had been sent, but the raging current had swallowed even the corpse.
“Did it…… did it truly have to be this way?”
After finishing her report she kept her head bowed and asked in a voice thick with grief. Moyong Cheon’s brush paused.
“It had to be this way.”
Leave a rotten branch too long and the rot reaches the roots. As the man responsible for countless retainers and blood kin, he had been forced to decide. The previous Heavenly Killing Star had, within a decade of awakening, achieved miraculous heights, then annihilated his own house first and dyed the jianghu in blood. A demon mad for slaughter. No one who carried the Moyong name could be allowed to unleash such a calamity. Besides, other factions had already begun to sense the star’s appearance. If the Moyong Clan had not cut off its own painful finger, they would have moved instead.
“But Father…… at the very end…… he truly seemed to have regained his senses.”
Whatever she had seen on that cliff made her forget even the formal address of Clan Lord and plead that something had been different.
“One chance in a thousand, one in ten thousand…… what if Cheongjin had come back and I simply failed to recognize him and swung the sword…….”
Her voice trembled with self-reproach. Had asking this child to finish it been a mistake?
Moyong Cheon clicked his tongue softly.
“Do you mean to be deceived by the killing star again? Even if he briefly awoke like a last flare of the dying lamp, he would soon have been swept away by murderous intent once more.”
It would have been only a moment. How could a human mind bear the weight of Heaven? The parting would only have been more painful.
His brush resumed its path across the paper. Failing to recover the body was regrettable, yet surviving a fall from that height was impossible even for Peak Realm expert Cheonghye—let alone with a wound like that in the belly.
“Heaven is truly heartless.”
Why that child, of all people?
Every art and medicine they had tried had only made the madness stronger by the day. A fate written by Heaven could not be defied, no matter how one thrashed.
The letter he had written by hand was finished—a notice that among the stars lighting the dark night sky, one malevolently shining star had fallen.
How had it come to this?
When I came to, I was being tossed about by a violent current. The irresistible violence of nature dragged me along the river like a stupid waterweed. I learned the preciousness of air the hard way, and I learned what it felt like to have my body smashed against rocks.
My life hung by a thread that refused to snap. Downstream, where the current finally eased, I crawled up the riverbank like a zombie.
Squelch, squelch.
The smell of wet earth filled my nose. Having solid ground under me was more comfort than I ever expected.
“Haaah.”
My whole body was wrecked. The second I relaxed at the thought of being alive, pain crashed in so hard I couldn’t even open my mouth for several seconds.
In the martial arts novels the protagonist who falls off a cliff always finds some once-in-a-lifetime opportunity waiting. This body had no starter pack—just fractures, bruises, and contusions everywhere.
“Fuck…… this……!”
I had no idea what was going on, felt wronged, and hurt so much I just screamed. Pain was proof of life. On the muddy bank a boy flopped around like a freshly caught mackerel.
Then a sudden question.
……How the hell am I still alive?
The height should have been unsurvivable. The river had poured into my mouth every time I tried to breathe, and the rocks had pulverized me—yet I still had breath.
I carefully retraced those desperate moments of survival and realized that while it hadn’t been a grand opportunity, something strange had definitely happened.
Every time my breath had been about to stop, an unknown energy had surged up and yanked me back.
Ssssss—
Speak of the tiger and it appears. While I lay there half-dead, the familiar crimson mist once again slipped out of my body.
It went to work on my rag-doll body—crack, snap—setting bones and sealing wounds in moments.
“…….”
Then it prodded my forehead, as if searching for a crack to squeeze through, as if trying to reclaim control of this body. When that failed, it tilted its head and slid back inside.
I had thought it was a near-death hallucination. Apparently not.
“……Fuck, what is that now?”
Something strange lived inside me. Something thoroughly ominous and spine-chilling.
Could that be the power of the Heavenly Killing Star my sister had spoken of?
“Haaah.”
I had no idea what was going on. My mind was a tangled ball of yarn. I flopped onto the damp earth.
Unaware of my turmoil, the dark clouds parted and the sky turned clear and bright.
“Heavenly Killing Star, Central Plains Murim…….”
I muttered in a dazed voice.
According to the familiar-yet-foreign memories, this was probably the region called Hebei within the Central Plains. Hard to be sure after being swept along faster than a migrating bird, though.
“……And what exactly am I right now?”
Maybe it was an existential question about the nature of a human being. The memories of Moyong Cheongjin of the Central Plains Murim and Dan Wonjun of modern Earth were tangled together. Mix red and yellow and you get orange; maybe I had become some middle blend of the two.
“Ha. I know life can throw you curveballs, but…….”
This was a bit much. Opening my eyes in a hellish Murim of pure survival of the fittest, where blood kin stabbed each other the moment things went sideways.
I let out a hollow laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all.
Grrrrooowl.
And my stomach, utterly uninterested in its owner’s existential crisis, started screaming for food. The price of forcibly repairing the body, maybe. My belly was plastered flat against my spine.
“Ugh.”
Earth or Central Plains, the sensation of starving was exactly the same. The lively writhing of my organs yanked me out of my thoughts and forced me to face reality.
Right. Brooding for a hundred days about why this happened wouldn’t produce a proper answer. All that remained was to accept the present situation and find a way to survive.
Quick adaptation to reality and the tenacity of a tardigrade were among my few strengths, weren’t they?
Grrrrooowl—!
So for now, focus only on staying alive.
I had nothing to eat, and the family I had been born into was hunting me. By now they were probably tearing through every valley looking for my corpse. My first family after crossing into the Murim turned out to be a pack of psychopaths who didn’t blink at kin-slaying; for a second my heart almost broke.
But maybe because I had already cheated death several times, instead of despair a stubborn fire rose up. Some philosopher once said that whatever does not kill me only makes me stronger.
“Just watch. I’ll survive somehow.”
I snatched a passing grasshopper and muttered those words.
What mattered was a heart that refused to break.
This body had already been stabbed twice and had survived both a cliff and a raging current.
Crunch.
From now on, ordinary misfortune would not be enough to shatter my mind.