Somehow, I Became the Blood Demon
"The Central Plains now belong to Lord Blood Demon!"
One of my subordinates shouted it at the top of his lungs, his voice thick with emotion. Around him, I could see tears welling up in the others' eyes.
These insane war-crazed bastards.
So even these lunatics, who had drenched the kangho in blood, knew how to cry. To be fair, I suppose my own emotions were running a little high as well—after all, we had finally gathered every last ingredient for the Ten Thousand Blood Dimension-Opening Formation, the formation that would open the gate to another world.
Thirty years. A full thirty years I've been slogging through this godforsaken place.
I had been eighteen when I first fell into the kangho. A high schooler, living off my older sister's goodwill under her roof. I'd been on my way home from school when I blacked out, and when I came to, I was in a world I'd only ever read about in novels.
For a twenty-first-century Korean teenager, Moorim was nothing short of an insane world. A place overflowing with lunatics who drew swords at the slightest provocation and slipped poison into strangers' food. The only reason I'd survived that world at all was that the previous Blood Demon had taken notice of me.
"Your clothes are strange too. What an odd fellow you are."
Then again, the Blood Sect had always been like that. It was less a sect of Moorim than a place that merely resembled one—a strange hybrid, something between a martial sect and something else entirely. Where the Demonic Cultists were a pack of fanatical zealots, the Blood Sect was, how should I put it, a thick stew of that zealotry mixed with every kind of bizarre occult knowledge. Within the sect, there were researchers studying jiangshi, a division trying to summon ghosts through talismans, formation masters, and even people dabbling in something suspiciously close to alchemy.
Of course, since we still had to survive among sword-wielding maniacs, learning every underhanded martial technique in existence was simply part of the basics. That was probably why the previous Blood Demon had taken an interest in me in the first place.
"Hoho. You say you're not from this world, but from the far future? What a fascinating story."
As I said, I was only eighteen at the time. Faced with an old lunatic who'd snap a man's neck if things went sour, it wasn't exactly strange that I wrung out tears and snot alike as I poured out my sorry tale like a confession. And honestly? It turned out to be a pretty decent choice. Gal Junghyeok, the previous Blood Demon known as the Blood Jade Demonic Lord, heard my story—and spared my neck.
Not only that. He dragged me along at his side and, whenever boredom struck, peppered me with questions about the future.
"I see. Gravity, was it? So you're telling me an invisible force is pulling everything in the world toward everything else?"
"That's right. The Earth pulls on the Moon, the Sun pulls on the Earth..."
Any modern Korean high schooler would know that much as common knowledge. But Gal Junghyeok received even this ordinary fact in an entirely different way.
"Hmm."
When the old man went silent, it meant one of two things: he was thinking deeply, or he was angry. Fortunately, that day it was the former.
"That is... rather similar to the principle behind my qi arts."
"Qi is also invisible to the eye. Yet it dwells within all things in creation. By your logic, wouldn't gravity simply be another form of qi?"
From a twenty-first-century high schooler's perspective, the word "qi" conjured up nothing but suspicious signs for traditional medicine clinics—but alas, this was Moorim. And standing before me was none other than the Blood Demon himself, a murderous old madman who would pluck a man's head clean off if the mood struck him.
"I—I suppose you could look at it that way, yes."
"Hoho. You've given me an interesting bit of knowledge, so I shall grant you a gift in return."
You see, Gal Junghyeok was the sort of man who, like someone with an obsessive-compulsive aversion to debt, repaid whatever he received in full measure. I couldn't understand it myself, but according to him, Moorim operated on the principle of grace and grudge—eun-won—and every exchange between people had to be settled cleanly, one way or another.
At any rate, the strange relationship between Gal Junghyeok and me persisted for quite a long while after that.
"Everything, if you break it down and break it down again, eventually comes to tiny particles?"
"Yes. Stone, water—people too."
"...People as well?"
"Yes. Our world calls them atoms."
When I gave him one piece of knowledge—
"This is the principle of the Blood Body Dissolution Art, known to only a select few even within the main sect. Once you reach the realm of mastery, even a blade will simply pass through your body."
"...That's actually possible?"
"You said it yourself, didn't you? That in the end, stone, water, and people alike are nothing but collections of tiny particles."
—Gal Junghyeok would casually toss me martial techniques and cultivation methods as though it were nothing. For me, of course, it was a thoroughly joyless exchange.
Ah, damn it. I still haven't finished absorbing the last thing he gave me.
Every time I slacked off on learning what he'd taught me, Gal Junghyeok would fly into a rage, snarling that I was spitting in the face of the main sect. Which is to say, even well into my twenties, I was being forced to study the ways of Moorim against my will.
That old man really was a genius, though.
It was some time after that before I truly came to understand the previous Blood Demon's genius. Greatness only becomes visible once you know enough to recognize it, and acquiring that knowledge took a little more time.
"Nothing can come from nothing?"
"Correct. Energy is neither created nor destroyed—it merely changes form, apparently."
"You brat. Then how do you explain internal energy? Doesn't power that didn't exist before come into being through cultivation?"
"Ah—I've actually thought about that. I suspect it's energy already stored in the body being converted."
"Converted? Conversion, you say."
The old man didn't dismiss even the words I'd tossed out half-thoughtlessly. The word conversion hooked him, and he shut himself in his chambers for a long stretch, buried in research. The martial technique he created during that period was a cultivation method that more than doubled the circulation efficiency of internal energy.
The man is genuinely insane, I'm telling you.
Didn't someone once say that a genius and a madman are separated by a single line? That was Gal Junghyeok, the previous Blood Demon, the Blood Jade Demonic Lord. I threw him a seed, and he went and bore fruit all on his own. And then, to top it off, he handed that fruit to me without holding anything back.
"My disciple. Is your dream to return to your original world?"
The tragedy, of course, was that even a genius could not easily outrun the lifespan heaven had decreed. Gal Junghyeok—no, my master—had pushed his body all the way to the point of returning to youth from age, but the wall beyond that he could not cross. I was forty at the time. More than twenty years had passed since I'd fallen into Moorim—meaning I had now spent longer inside the Blood Sect than I had living in twenty-first-century Korea.
Besides, what Gal Junghyeok had given me was hardly lacking. I, who had been as good as a lone orphan in the kangho, had somehow become the disciple of a man called Gal Junghyeok—and the young lord of the Blood Sect itself.
"If I could go, yes."
And yet, even so, I wanted to return to my original world. Because my family was there. My older sister, who had looked after me like a parent since I was a child; my brother-in-law, who had slipped me pocket money behind her back; and my young nephew and niece. I wanted to see all of them again.
"Because of your family?"
"Something like that."
Mostly true, though not the whole truth. In a Moorim without my master Gal Junghyeok, I no longer had any reason left to stay.
"I see. I have no family of my own, but meeting you has let me grasp a little of what that feeling must be like. Even if I die and open my eyes in some other world, I suspect I will not be able to forget you."
I clenched my teeth at those words from the Blood Jade Demonic Lord. Ours was a close bond in its own way, but we were hardly the type to exchange tender sentiments with each other.
"They say people change when death approaches—why are you being so unlike yourself?"
"Heheh. True enough. Even I find myself with goosebumps. In any case, that is why this master of yours has prepared one final gift for you."
Even then, I assumed Gal Junghyeok had simply been struck by some grand inspiration before death and invented yet another martial technique.
"...Your disciple currently has no shortage of opponents who can match him, you realize?"
"Then as now, you are a truly loathsome creature when it comes to study."
"The only perverts who enjoy that sort of thing are you and the rest of the Blood Sect."
"Heheh. Are you not a Blood Sect man yourself, then? Regardless—take this."
Gal Junghyeok gave my words a cursory wave of his hand and drew a single book from thin air, offering it to me. I examined the volume with the expression of a student receiving yet another homework assignment—but it was not a martial manual.
"Do you recognize it?"
"...Is this real? You're saying this can actually open a dimensional gate?"
"Who knows. I've never tried it."
I bit down hard on my lower lip at his shamelessly irresponsible answer. And seeing my reaction, he burst out laughing and said, still grinning:
"Well now, something tells me this master of yours has become a strange creature indeed. I cannot say for certain that it will carve a path to the place you desire—but that's the way of it."
The Ten Thousand Blood Dimension-Opening Formation. The formation manual left behind by the previous Blood Demon, the Blood Jade Demonic Lord—it was the first spark of the Blood Calamity, the catastrophe in which the Orthodox and Unorthodox factions, the Demonic Cult and the Blood Sect collided, and the kangho ran red with blood.
"So if they'd just handed the things over when I asked to borrow them, everyone would have been happy."
I muttered with a bitter face, looking over the pile of items gathered in my chamber. It sounds like a joke, but I had never had the slightest intention of staining the kangho with blood. The Blood Sect had scores to settle with the kangho after everything they'd suffered at its hands over the years, so maybe their vindictiveness wasn't pure fabrication—but I was different. I was from Earth. Having been scooped up by Gal Junghyeok not long after falling into Moorim, the extent of my experience with actual kangho martial artists amounted to a handful of third-rate black-society thugs.
The problem was the Ten Thousand Blood Dimension-Opening Formation my master had left behind. A formation that opened a path between dimensions—and to deploy it, all manner of materials were required. The Blood Sect possessed more rare treasures than any power in the world, so most of the odd components had been easy to come by. The trouble was the items that had to be placed at the formation's eight cardinal points: the Dharma Treasured Mirror, the Taehyeon Sword of the Great Void, the Jade Mountain Violet-Mother Ring, the Holy Fire Token, the Ghost-Faced Yaksha Tablet, and more. Every last one of them was a treasure that the great sects of the kangho cherished as the sacred relics of their mountain fortresses.
Being a civilized man, I approached each sect and asked politely to borrow their treasures, offering to pay a reasonable sum. Once the formation activated and I vanished, the treasures would be returned afterward—and even if that somehow didn't pan out, well, I'd already be gone to Earth, so it wouldn't be my problem.
But in my giddiness at the prospect of finally going home, I had overlooked one crucial fact: that the people of Moorim were lunatics who drew their swords over absolutely nothing.
And so I became the first person in Moorim's history to unite the Righteous, the Unorthodox, and the Demonic factions against a single enemy. The Nine Great Sects and Five Great Families, the Unorthodox Alliance, and then even the Demonic Cult—all of them declared war on the Blood Sect.
There was just one problem.
Our master was a genius—far too much of a genius.
The time Gal Junghyeok, the previous Blood Demon and Blood Jade Demonic Lord, had spent at my side was exactly twenty years. In that span alone, the martial techniques he personally created numbered in the dozens, and the existing techniques he refined into far more efficient forms numbered in the hundreds. Which meant that those who had learned the Blood Sect's arts had witnessed an utterly absurd leap in martial progress over those twenty years. Like the Miracle on the Han River.
The allied armies of the Righteous, Unorthodox, and Demonic factions being swept aside by our sect's masters—no, by our rank-and-file sect members, not even the masters—happened a mere seven days after the war had begun.