Immortal Ascension (2)
The dimensional rift screamed.
Through the gaping crack, white immortal light poured down like a waterfall.
From within it, a man emerged.
Dressed in Daoist robes.
"Hahahaha! I was soaring up at the Great Perfection of Core Formation when I spotted a gap, so I came through — and what a worthless place this is!"
He had been ascending to the higher realm when a new world appeared through a dimensional fissure, and curiosity had drawn him across.
"Excellent! I shall become master of this land and rule all livi— gah!"
He stopped mid-sentence the moment Kang Hanul stepped in front of him.
"Wh-who are you, sir?"
"Barely Core Formation Great Perfection, is it."
In the Demon Realm, Hanul had crossed blades with beings from countless dimensions. Through those endless conflicts he had learned to read the ranks of other worlds. The cultivator before him sat at roughly Core Formation Great Perfection — an extraordinary height by ordinary standards, but nothing of consequence to Hanul.
He must have reached the soaring stage and swaggered through the gate full of confidence…
In Hanul's eyes?
Nothing but a lost moth that had flown into the wrong flame.
"Where does a mongrel like you think it's crawling in from."
Hanul's finger traced a horizontal line through empty air.
Abyss Slash
Tsupapapapat!
A black line that ignored space itself punched straight through the man's waist. He tried to deploy immortal arts and draw out a magical treasure to resist, but the gulf between them was simply too vast. Before Hanul he was a newborn infant — kindergarten level at best, if one were being generous.
"Khuhuhuhk… khuhk… cough!"
Kwachachachak—
His upper and lower halves sheared apart and crashed to the ground. The confident light in the man's eyes went dull in an instant.
"H-how…"
He never finished the sentence. Without Hanul, he could have carved out a throne for himself in almost any world he entered. Instead, a Core Formation Great Perfection cultivator was bisected and snuffed out like nothing.
"Trash disposed of… but the trash widened the hole on its way through."
Hanul clicked his tongue as he studied the dimensional rift the Immortal Realm cultivator had come through. The situation had worsened. The tear was already ragged as a scrap of cloth, and the unrepaired crack yawned hideously over the skies of Beijing.
Hanul stretched a hand toward the torn void. Black demonic energy wove itself into threads and began stitching the tattered dimensional seam.
Pachit— pachit—
But he knew this was only a stopgap. His own demonic energy actively harmed the dimensional fabric.
And then there was the fundamental problem.
The dimensional viscosity itself had thinned. It was like an ozone layer grown dangerously sparse. The protective membrane still existed — but ultraviolet radiation was pouring through unfiltered. Energies from beyond Earth's dimension were beginning to flood into the atmosphere far more easily than before.
As a result, the Chinese Hunters on the ground were already reacting to the Immortal Realm's energy, their bodies stirring in agitation. The mana inside them resonated with the immortal force and began to boil.
"What is this feeling?"
"H-hey, power's surging through me!"
"I think I can break past human limits!"
"Is this that Second Awakening people only talk about?!"
They were wrong.
White scales began sprouting across their skin. Their pupils slit vertically. Grotesque bone spurs erupted from their backs. Bodies that could not withstand the Immortal Realm's high-density energy were transforming into demonic beasts and abominations.
Hanul looked down on the scene. It was exactly as he had once told Sarah Cameron. Accepting something non-human to surpass one's limits — what Hunters called a Second Awakening beyond the first. But that path was never smooth. For those unprepared?
Not glory. A curse.
A shortcut to becoming a mindless monster.
Earth's dimensional barrier was thinner than I expected. If I'd known, I would have been more careful.
As Hanul murmured to himself, something else registered on his senses — a grotesque current systematically siphoning the Immortal Realm energy that was seeping through the weakened barrier. It felt as though someone had been waiting for this exact moment, quietly unfolding a secret ritual.
Hanul issued orders to the three Leviathans.
Kurururung—
With a thunderous roar, the three vessels swung their bows in separate directions. Maintaining a triangular formation, they swept across the vast land. Using the ships themselves as colossal transmission towers, a wide-range detection spell unfurled. A mana net spread like a spider's web, reading even the faintest vibrations beyond the northeastern mountain ranges.
"Found it."
The point where Immortal Realm energy was being absorbed. Without hesitation, Hanul drove the Leviathans toward it.
A remote mountain range in China's northeast, not far away. Deep underground, hidden beneath dense forest.
Hanul gestured. The Leviathans overhead deployed a cloaking formula and melted into empty air. Hanul himself blended into the ambient mana and vanished without a trace.
The deepest chamber underground.
A plaza dominated by a massive altar. Figures in white Daoist robes and grotesque masks had gathered there.
"That senile old fool Zhao Jinping really laid the groundwork for us."
"The Immortal Ascension Project, of all things. It's so easy to rattle humans blinded by greed."
So these people were behind what the Chinese did.
The language filtering out from behind the masks was not Chinese.
"Preparations in the home country finished?"
"Of course."
Japanese. A few mixed-in Korean phrases suggested some were Zainichi. But they could not have been directly controlling China — the nation was simply too large a beast for that.
No. They had merely leaked clues at the right moments and dangled the Immortal Realm's sweet power as bait to lead things along.
"Opening a gate to the Immortal Realm in the home country is too dangerous."
"And China is too far. We're drawing energy here for now, but…"
"Somewhere like Korea would be just right."
The voices rising from the underground altar grew greedier still.
"We need to tear the rift wider. More Immortal Realm energy has to flood in before our own ranks can rise."
"Using the Koreans as a refining furnace would make it perfect, hahaha!"
"Either way, the dimensional barrier crumbling is a windfall. We absolutely cannot let this chance slip!"
Hanul watched them with cold eyes. It was true that his own existence had strained the dimensional barrier. But these people were exploiting that crack to drive the entire planet toward irreversible ruin.
Hanul dropped his concealment and revealed himself.
"Wh-who are you?!"
"Intruder! Seize him!"
The white-robed figures swept their hands as one. Crimson-black clusters of ritual light poured toward Hanul. Dozens of flying swords carved through the air. Immortal martial techniques.
Hanul did not so much as blink. From beneath his feet, black shadows exploded outward.
Shadow Bind
The next spell followed.
Thorns
Shadow spikes lanced out in every direction, batting aside the flying swords and punching through the limbs of those who had cast them. The altar was instantly soaked in black blood. Bound by shadow, the victims could not even scream. Hanul lightly closed his fist. The shadow spikes swept the altar from end to end.
Tsupapapapapat—
Pupupupuk!
Bodies crumbled to dust and evaporated.
"Uheok!"
Hanul deliberately left one man alive at the far edge. Binding only the man's legs in shadow, he approached.
Abyss Spectrum
Hanul's pupils flared with an eerie light.
The trajectory of the techniques the man had used. The path he had walked. The intentions he had harbored. Streams of past information poured into Hanul's mind.
A returnee from the Immortal Realm. Rank no higher than Qi Condensation.
But only for a moment. Deep in the man's memories, a high-level Immortal Realm seal activated — a barrier driven into the soul itself to prevent information leaks.
"K-keoeok…!"
The backlash flipped the man's eyes back in his head. He foamed at the mouth and collapsed.
"A seal this strong on a Core Formation nobody. Interesting. Proper interrogation is in order."
Hanul snatched the fallen man by the scruff of the neck, leapt into the air, and landed on a waiting Leviathan overhead. The warship's engines roared in welcome of its master's return. The bow swung east — toward Korea.
The television screen showed Beijing as it was now — a miraculous exodus of tens of millions pouring out of the city as if entranced.
And the hellscape that followed.
The Demon Thousand-Armed Guanyin, which had sat in silent meditation, finally opened its eyes. It began trampling the emptied downtown, indiscriminately hunting Chinese Hunters who had turned into demonic beasts. With the dimensional barrier blurred, gates erupted without restraint across the city. In a matter of hours, Beijing had become the epicenter of an apocalypse.
The place watching all of this on television was the Minister of the Dungeon Management Department's office. Minister Kang Eunha's eyes were trembling.
"…What on earth is going on."
Beside her, Hatchery leisurely sipped her tea and spoke up.
"As expected of Master-yong!"
"…Hatchery. Don't tell me — Uncle did that?"
Hatchery shrugged as if it were obvious.
"Probably~? There's only one person in the world who can cause a mess on this scale."
"Minister, Special Director Kang Hanul has arrived."
Speak of the tiger and he appears. Min Sehui's announcement.
"Send him in."
"Yes, ma'am."
The door opened. Hanul strode in, black coat billowing. Eunha pointed a trembling hand at the wall-mounted television. On the screen, Beijing was a burning demonic landscape.
"Uncle! That… did you really do that? If you cause an accident this big, how are we supposed to clean it up?!"
"There were no civilian casualties. I personally evacuated them and kept them safe."
"Even so, the city looks like that…"
Hanul sank onto the sofa with a sigh.
"My presence probably thinned the barrier's viscosity. Thanks to that, the Immortal Ascension Project those bastards were preparing forced open a rift leading to the Immortal Realm."
"Th-the Immortal Realm-yong?!"
The instant the words "Immortal Realm" left Hanul's mouth, Hatchery's eyes blazed. Hanul casually waved a hand and suppressed her rising aura.
"Settle down. Hatchery has an extremely bad history with the Immortal Realm."
"Ah! Sorry-yong!"
Hanul shifted his gaze back to Eunha and continued.
"In other words, this would have blown up eventually even without me. The Chinese were preparing something called Immortal Ascension, and there were others behind the scenes steering them into it."
"Behind the scenes? Who on earth…"
Hanul opened a spatial gate. A man's body, reduced to rags, dropped onto the floor with a thud — a Korean man, unconscious and foaming at the mouth. Hatchery's eyes glittered with cruel curiosity.
"You know what to do."
"I can feel an Immortal Realm seal on him. Touch the soul and he'll explode, but if I manually read the electrical signals in his brain one by one, I can dig the information out-yong!"
Hatchery's mouth curled into a grotesque little smile as she seized the man by the scruff.
"Move now."
"Yes~!"
Hatchery snapped her fingers. A blue spatial-transfer magic circle bloomed across the floor. Hoisting the man like a sack of cargo, she vanished into the circle.
Her destination: a goat farm on the outskirts of Gyeonggi Province — Hatchery's private torture chamber and workshop, fully equipped with massive steel facilities.
"Heheh, anyone connected to the Immortal Realm has to get ground up completely-yong!"
In the darkness where the clash of steel mixed with the bleating of goats, Hatchery's cheerful humming began to ring out.