Interlude: Dokgo Ryeon, the Heavenly Demon
Dokgo Ryeon’s life had been nothing but a string of nightmarish horrors.
Once, she had known the sort of happiness other people could only envy, living under her father’s roof as one of the pillars of the Four Demon Alliance.
Then, one day, she saw her father’s head tumble across the plaza.
Treason.
Drunk on power, he had tried to borrow the Blood Cult’s strength and conquer the Central Plains.
It was not the sort of thing her father, a man who valued freedom and romance above all else, would ever have done.
But no matter how desperately she cried out that there had been some terrible mistake, a severed head never grew back.
It had to have been the work of some treacherous pack that had long since envied her father.
Yet before beasts who had abandoned all righteousness for profit and gain, there was nothing a helpless widow and a child could do.
The martial world was never a peaceful place for a young widow trying to survive with her little daughter.
Once the pillar that had held the household upright collapsed, mother and daughter were flung into the street in an instant.
Her mother struggled to keep them fed, even if it meant selling her body.
The gutter-trash crawling through the back alleys did not leave her beautiful mother—once the mistress of a noble household—alone.
Night after night, Dokgo Ryeon could not sleep, listening to her mother’s muffled groans on the other side of the wall and the vile laughter of those filth-coated scum.
Maybe I’ll end up like that too.
That was the one fate she wanted to avoid.
She thought herself selfish for it, but fear made a mockery of reason.
All the young Dokgo Ryeon could do was curl beneath a piece of ragged cloth and tremble.
A place where hunger and fear, and human filth uglier than beasts, roiled together.
In such a place, her mother was too beautiful to remain untouched.
Day after day, new trash arrived to kill the old and seize whatever they wanted.
Whenever filthy hands reached toward young Dokgo Ryeon—who had not even begun menstruating yet—her mother would desperately smile and flatter them, drawing their eyes away.
Watching her mother sacrifice herself for her, Dokgo Ryeon was tormented by a suffocating guilt.
If I weren’t here, Mother could live a better life.
If her mother were still young and beautiful, then even if she had to go into a pleasure house, her life would at least be better than this.
But every morning, her mother would press a hard rice pancake into her hands—the price she had paid with her body—and whisper to her in a worn, exhausted voice, “Live, child. You must survive somehow.”
Her mother’s breath, as she held her little daughter close and whispered those words, became an indelible brand seared into the girl’s heart.
The day her mother, who had shielded her daughter all this time, was brutally butchered and left as a cold corpse by some jealous scumbag, Dokgo Ryeon barely managed to hold back the vomit rising in her throat before rushing out of the alley and running blindly toward the nearest martial hall.
She wanted strength.
That was all she had learned in those filthy back alleys.
If she had strength, her father and mother would never have met such miserable ends, carved apart in such appalling shapes.
If she had strength, she could slaughter anything that stood in her way and seize whatever she wanted.
But by then, both she and her mother were already infamous in the area.
Neither the righteous sects nor the demonic ones would ever take in the daughter of a criminal falsely accused of colluding with the Blood Cult.
They treated the little girl prostrating herself on the ground and screaming in despair like an annoying insect, trying to placate her just enough to send her away.
But Dokgo Ryeon had already gone mad.
With shrieks like a vengeful spirit, she lunged at them with feral desperation—and in the end, she was beaten senseless and dumped back onto the street.
The violence was far too cruel for a body that was little more than skin stretched over bones from lack of food.
Someone picked up her pitiful body, left sprawled in the street with only the faintest breath still clinging to it.
And that was how Dokgo Ryeon disappeared from the back alleys for good.
**
The Central Plains had already rotted from the roots up.
It was common for those with power and influence to buy and sell people for entertainment.
The man who had picked up Dokgo Ryeon was one of the traffickers who served them.
They threw scraps of food at the children they dragged out of the alleyways—just enough to keep them alive—then tried to train them with whips.
Had she grown up properly, taking after her mother, Dokgo Ryeon would have been a woman of breathtaking beauty.
But the body worn down by years of starvation had no value as merchandise, and thanks to that, she escaped becoming a plaything for the powerful.
It was a tiny ray of hope found amid a life of garbage.
Even while she was being abused for being too weak to work properly, her eyes still burned with poison.
Rage against this Central Plains that had framed her father and murdered her mother for the sake of their own greed wrapped itself around her very existence.
No matter how much she starved, those eyes never lost their light, and no matter how many lashes she took, she kept baring her teeth and biting the overseers’ hands whenever they tried to touch her.
One day, after she bit off a manager’s finger for reaching for her tiny body, she was beaten until the flesh on her whole body split open, then locked in a shed.
That was when she heard sharp human screams outside.
The world before her blurred with wounds, and then went dark the moment the door flew open.
The masked man who entered picked up the bloodied Dokgo Ryeon without a word and carried her somewhere.
**
When Dokgo Ryeon, who had lost consciousness, opened her eyes,
she found herself deep in the mountains, mixed in among many other children.
The masked men surrounding them declared that they were members of the Mythic Demon Cult.
“From this day forward, you will become weapons.”
The Mythic Demon Cult.
One of the groups reviled as enemies of the martial world alongside the Blood Cult.
They had been kidnapping orphans and training them to become disposable weapons—blades meant to be thrown away after one use.
Dokgo Ryeon was destined to become one of their test subjects as well.
But she did not despair.
On the contrary, this was the one thing she needed most.
Strength.
Only strength.
A world ruled by strength alone.
The poison in her eyes was not something children her age could endure.
As meals were cut off and brutal training piled on, and one child after another collapsed around her, she chewed on insects and sand and somehow kept herself standing with ferocious stubbornness.
When they handed out knives and ordered the children to stab the person beside them, she drove the blade into the head of the child next to her without hesitation.
When they shoved her into a room full of insects and poison and ordered her to survive, she became the last one standing by biting into the nape of the boy who had been her friend just yesterday.
That savage will to survive.
That hatred overflowing in her eyes.
It caught the Heavenly Demon’s attention.
Dokgo Ryeon, the last one standing, became the Heavenly Demon’s disciple.
Fortunately, she was descended from a man who had once led the righteous faction.
She possessed talent worthy of the vengeance and venom burning in her heart.
For a long time she trained beneath her master, coughing up blood as she honed her martial art, and before she knew it, she had surpassed the old man.
As one of the Cult’s Protectors, she faced the experts of the Martial Alliance countless times, until at last she realized that in the rivers and lakes of the martial world, no one could beat her one-on-one.
And yet the fire of revenge still burned.
After becoming a Great Protector, she argued again and again that they should strike the Martial Alliance, but the other Protectors opposed her, citing the balance of the world.
Since when has the Mythic Demon Cult cared about the world?
Dokgo Ryeon found that laughable.
Even the Heavenly Demon himself had agreed with them, living a decadent life with a woman tucked beside him.
There was no longer any reason for Dokgo Ryeon to serve a Heavenly Demon who had grown so lazy.
One night,
she silently approached her master’s back as he drank.
From the moment she entered the room, she had intentionally made no effort to hide her killing intent.
In fact, she let it pour out of her entire body.
This was Dokgo Ryeon’s final test—and her warning.
But the old Heavenly Demon did not turn around.
The cold edge of a blade sank into his back.
The sword pierced straight through the old Heavenly Demon’s heart, and the sharp smell of blood instantly filled the room.
Only then did the old Heavenly Demon slowly turn his head to look at her.
Unlike what she had expected, his eyes held no resentment and no question.
They merely gleamed with interest, as though he had foreseen this all along.
As his breath faltered, he read the hatred still blazing in Dokgo Ryeon’s eyes.
And as if he did not even feel the agony of having his heart pierced, he burst out laughing, left her with one final sentence, and died.
“Yes. Burn as fiercely as you like.”
It was not that he had failed to respond because he had grown too lazy.
He had been waiting.
Waiting for the true Heavenly Demon to descend in place of his own weakened self, who could no longer set his heart ablaze.
In all the long years she had spent beneath him, Dokgo Ryeon had never once thought he was worthy of leading the Mythic Demon Cult.
And yet, that final moment was carved so deeply into her memory that it never faded.
And so she became the new Heavenly Demon.
The moment she ascended, she drew her sword and personally purged the Protectors who opposed her, then declared war on the Four Demon Alliance.
When she led her forces herself to cut down her enemies, the Martial Alliance stood in her way.
Since they were not her enemies, she gave them a polite warning.
“I have no interest in you. Stand aside quietly.”
But there was no way they would obey.
“Do not be deceived by the treacherous words of a demonic dog!”
And thus began the long war between righteousness and evil.
Revenge had been far too easy.
The Four Demon Alliance had become something entirely different from the organization it had been when her father was still alive—an empty shell that had lost both romance and freedom.
They were nothing more than pigs content to wallow in the positions they had won through politics rather than martial prowess, no longer capable of any progress.
All the many families that had falsely accused her father fell beneath her sword.
But the Martial Alliance still had true heroes among them, and when they banded together to resist, the war dragged on.
Dokgo Ryeon had been extraordinary, yes.
But the Mythic Demon Cult itself had grown weak under the influence of the previous Heavenly Demon’s laziness, so the balance of power rested solely on her shoulders.
No matter how absolute an expert she was, she could not face the entire Martial Alliance alone.
In the end, for the sake of those who followed her in the Mythic Demon Cult, she accepted the Martial Alliance Lord’s proposal that there was no need to kill everyone who was innocent.
Revenge was over.
The war stopped.
But in the memories of the people, the image of the Heavenly Demon who rode forth with crimson hair streaming like blood and butchered the demonic sects remained an unerasable symbol of terror.
**
In the Mythic Demon Cult’s headquarters, the Ten Thousand Mountains,
Dokgo Ryeon stood before the sword grave where the previous Heavenly Demon was buried and silently looked down at the tomb.
Having lost the goal of revenge, she had nothing left.
Strength.
Only that was a reason to live.
The force that had allowed her to survive those hellish years.
But the moment she crossed swords with the Martial Alliance Lord, praised as one of the Three Great Peaks of the martial world, Dokgo Ryeon realized it.
There was no longer anyone in these rivers and lakes who could stand against her.
Even if she accumulated still more power, there would be no opponent left to test it against.
And with that emptiness came a strange stillness, and she stopped.
She longed for greater power.
But she did not know how to reach it.
The peak was a lonely place.
For several years, she drifted through meaningless days until one day, something absurd washed up before her.
A single crude, ridiculous book.
On the cover, written in a stylish and grand hand, were the words:
Heavenly Demon Divine Art
The martial art that had raised her to the throne of the Mythic Demon Cult, a sacred wonder passed down only from Heavenly Demon to Heavenly Demon through the generations.
Who in the world would be brazen enough to cram that earth-shaking martial art into some ragged old booklet like this?
Who would dare lay out, in such insolent detail, a martial art that even she, as the Heavenly Demon herself, had never fully mastered?
But her anger did not last long.
During the war against the Martial Alliance, she had seen countless scoundrels pretending to be her.
Trash had always been like that.
Given a little borrowed prestige, they imagined it made them powerful too, and acted arrogant as if by sheer association they had become something more.
This book was probably the same.
Her expression, as she opened it with indifference, changed to shock the instant her eyes landed on the first line.
Heavenly Demon Divine Art. Because it possesses immense power, one who becomes intoxicated by that power and grows arrogant shall never attain greatness.
It was like a blow to the back of the head—especially to her, who had grown arrogant at having no rivals left in the martial world and had even become lazy in her training.
Her gaze, as if enchanted, moved on to the next line.
What is the Heavenly Demon Divine Art?
It is an arrogant martial art that calls its vast power "demonic" and dares to name itself a divine art, claiming to reach the heavens.
It felt as though her heart had dropped straight through the floor.
Each line struck at her mind.
What did it matter that there were no rivals on earth, when the Heavenly Demon Divine Art had always aimed for the heavens?
This was a martial art so outrageously audacious it sought to stand above everything beneath the sky and pierce even the barrier of heaven itself.
It was only natural that someone who had been satisfied with becoming nothing more than the king of the ground, and had grown lazy in her training, would be unable to move on to a new realm.
The thirst for strength she had forgotten flared up again.
Realization made a martial artist stronger.
She read on with complete seriousness.
Inside were astonishing insights and a kind of mad, reckless arrogance.
This book was real.
She did not know who had written it, but this was the carriage that would carry her into a new world.
Her whole body itched so badly she could no longer bear it.
If she missed this moment, this feeling, she might never get another chance.
Dokgo Ryeon gathered the elders and Protectors of the Mythic Demon Cult together and announced that she would enter closed-door cultivation.
In her eyes, which had spent the last several decades growing dull and empty, a new resolve had ignited.
No one dared stop her, and no one even questioned it.
All she carried as she entered the cave was a single worn book.
And so the Heavenly Demon, once called the greatest martial artist in the world, vanished from it.
---