Returned, but the Coordinates Were Off
'Honestly, there was a time I thought I was doomed to rot there forever.'
It pained me to think it of my master, Gal Junghyeok, but I hadn't been free of doubt—not once, not ever.
And who could blame me? The formation he'd devised in his twilight years, the Myeolhyeol Dimensional Gate Formation, was an unrivaled supreme array—but its very ingredients were absurd on their face.
The notion that the Shaolin's Dharma Cinjing or the Demonic Cult's Holy Fire Token could simply be used as the core materials of anything was laughable beyond words.
"You rascal. Do you think tearing open a dimension is a trivial matter? Of course you'd need treasures without equal. Yes—using the terms you taught me, an equivalent exchange? Well, think of it that way."
I naturally raised my objections, and that was the answer my master gave me.
Of course, that didn't wash my doubts away as cleanly as all that.
After all, the Blood Sect was treated in Murim as something even lower than a demonic cult, and Blood Sect disciples were marked for death the moment their identities came to light, condemned as enemies of the orthodox world. It was simply the natural order of things.
"This isn't some scheme to deceive me so you can unify the martial world, is it?"
"Heheh. You think such a thing comes easy? In essence it's similar to a wormhole. You people never managed to build one of those, did you? And if it truly troubles you so, well—I did come up with one other method."
"What method?"
I pressed him at once for the alternative.
"In my estimation, if you were to die, there's a fair chance you'd return to your original world. You know the old tale of Zhuangzi's butterfly dream, do you not? But it's hardly a certainty, and I can't very well ask my disciple to go and die to find out. And even if you did somehow return to your world, this old master would have no way of knowing. Yes—in the terms you've taught me, you'd be in a state rather like Schrödinger's cat."
"...And if that's not it?"
"That's precisely why I built the formation, isn't it? Heheh."
I couldn't find a single word to say for a long while after that.
Truthfully, as Gal Junghyeok's vitality waned, my own condition had not been good either.
At the thought that the only person in all of Murim I could open my heart to might vanish, I had been wracked by a crushing depression.
That was why I had doubted my master.
All that talk of unifying the martial world had been half a joke.
My master had never cared a fingernail's width for such things, after all.
I'd suspected he'd told that lie only to leave his lonely disciple something to occupy his mind.
"In any case, those treasures are scattered across the vast Central Plains. If someone were fool enough to hand them over, that would be one thing, but this old man suspects no such luck. So my dear disciple will simply have to work hard."
My master's prediction was half right and half wrong.
The other sects of Murim, far from surrendering their treasures, flew into a rage and declared the Blood Sect an enemy of the martial world outright—but his foolish disciple did not, in fact, suffer much for it.
Thanks to the martial arts my master had created or refined, no other sect dared stand against the Blood Sect.
In truth, even my master hadn't imagined his own techniques would reach that level. He found joy in making things, you see—harming people with them had never interested him in the slightest.
And so the first clash between the Blood Sect and the alliance of the orthodox and demonic paths ended, anticlimactically, almost before it began.
The problem was that from that very moment, the long-dormant fury of the Blood Sect's people began to detonate.
'Enmity and gratitude. That's a word more terrifying than anything alive.'
At first I tried my best to mediate, but it was never going to be that simple.
So many of them were afflicted with tempers barely held in check, and there were countless men whose parents or siblings had been cut down screaming at another's hand.
'When they're screaming for family blood, what hand could possibly stay it?'
The conflict deepened by the day, and the orthodox-demonic alliance—which had shown a loose restraint at first, declining to attack one another—began to bind itself ever tighter together.
If they hadn't, they would all have died like dogs, never once getting to flex their strength properly.
"Thanks to that, it took a full ten years."
Murim was, truly, a horrific place.
Those loutish bastards drew steel at the slightest provocation as a matter of course, and hypocrisy ran through their veins like a passive skill.
"So you resort to vile and crooked arts after all, you treacherous dogs of the Blood Sect!"
Lose in a contest of martial skill? The opponent had obviously used sinister, heretical sorcery.
"GRAAAH! I will never hand over the treasure Master Josa left us to the likes of you! I would sooner destroy it with these hands!"
It was hardly once or twice that someone, cornered into a losing position, had tried to smash their own sect's sacred treasure—a so-called heirloom of the mountain—rather than let it be taken.
"Still... well. In the end, somehow or other, I gathered them all."
I swept my gaze across the objects piled to the walls of the room and felt the corner of my mouth curl upward.
The Dharma Cinjing. The Taehyeon Celestial Sword. The Holy Fire Token. The Jade Mountain Twin Rings. The Demon-Face Yaksha Medallion.
Every last one had been a treasure whose acquisition had been anything but smooth.
All those months of grinding hardship flashed before my eyes—but it ended today.
Tonight, at the hour of the Rat, was the most auspicious time to unfurl the formation.
'Here I go. Back home.'
I quietly closed my eyes and steadied my breathing.
My sister's face. My brother-in-law's. My nephews and nieces.
Thirty years should have worn those memories thin, but because I had thought of home every single day, the past rose before me with unbearable clarity.
'Please, just be alive. Any of you.'
I couldn't know whether as much time had passed on Earth as had passed here, or whether I'd arrive mere moments after I'd vanished.
Even so, I wanted to see my family's faces again, whatever it cost.
"Oh, right. I should pack a few gifts to bring along."
I took out a cloth bundle and began sorting through the items stacked in a corner of my room, picking out the ones to take.
Gold and jewels, naturally, along with a few of the sect treasures I'd stumbled into while collecting materials for the formation—sacred relics of other sects, if I was honest about it.
Gold and jewels would hold their value well enough on Earth. As for the rest...
'I'll get antique prices for them at least. Worst case, they make decent gifts for the kids.'
Humming a little tune, I packed up my things.
'See, Master? I always believed in you!'
And so, at the hour of the Rat that very night, I unfurled the formation exactly as the texts my master left behind described—and I felt an electric rush of elation.
The moment each sect's treasure settled into its appointed position, the relics began to glow with a light all their own.
I could feel the very air of the room growing heavy.
The formation wrought by the peerless genius, the Blood Jade Demonic Lord Gal Junghyeok, was coming to life.
'It's working. It's really working!'
Only then did I admit it to myself—that I had never fully trusted my master. It stung a little. It was funny, too.
As the light climbed to its peak, an oval black portal—the sort you'd expect to see in some video game—began to form right before my eyes.
I slung the pack I'd prepared in advance over my shoulder.
"Take care, all of you. Thanks for the good times. And now—the show's over."
My departure would wipe a few of the so-called followers who'd trailed in my wake off the map, but there was no cause for worry.
No force capable of resisting the Blood Sect remained in the Central Plains anyway, and those followers were, every last one of them, monsters in their own right.
And with that, I took a slow, deliberate step into the portal my master had made.
'Huh?'
The scenery around me shattered like glass—and then began to reassemble itself.
"The gate is expanding."
"Did you sound the emergency alert? What's the field response?"
Beijing, China, was in a state of absolute chaos.
A gate had materialized in the heart of the city center—without a single warning sign, without so much as a tremor of precursory energy.
It was precisely ten years to the year since gates had first begun appearing on Earth.
The world had been thrown into massive turmoil by the sudden emergence of the gates, but human adaptability proved, as ever, remarkable.
People gifted with superhuman abilities had begun to appear alongside the gates.
The public came to call them hunters, and as those hunters began to conquer the gates, human civilization transformed once again.
"Five A-Rank hunters from the vicinity, plus four B-Rank, arriving within three minutes."
"The gate's rank?"
"That's the thing—it's unknown. Even the measuring devices can't get a reading."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean? Are you telling me the instruments are broken?"
The problem lay in the fact that the rank of this suddenly-appeared gate could not be confirmed.
On the off chance it was a domestic hardware issue, they'd tried imported measuring equipment as well—the result was the same.
"Isn't this a first?"
"Never once reported. Not a single time, ever."
That was why the Chinese Hunter Management Bureau—an organization proud of possessing a fighting force ranked among the very top in the world—was wound tight with tension.
"Just to be safe, have additional personnel standing by."
"We already have eight teams on standby around the perimeter."
Even with more than sufficient reserve forces marshaled, the complexion of Wei Jinsheng, team leader of the Chinese Hunter Management Bureau's emergency response team, remained grim.
Higher-ranked gates had been appearing at regular intervals for years now, but never once in all that time had there been a case where even the rank itself could not be measured.
What was more, gates simply did not open this way.
Energy condensation was always observed before a gate formed, and even after formation, it was standard for a doorway to open from this side first.
In other words, under normal circumstances, the nation's own hunters would enter the gate and clear it—and only when that raid failed did the catastrophe known as a Gate Break occur.
But the gate that had appeared in Beijing without warning refused entry altogether.
It merely drank in the surrounding energy, swelling steadily larger.
"Team Leader—it's opening."
At his teammate's report, Wei Jinsheng fixed his eyes on the gate, his face taut with tension.
He couldn't begin to guess what manner of monster might come bursting through.
Yet as he stared at the footage streaming in live, an utterly deflated voice slipped out of Wei Jinsheng's mouth.
"...That's— that's a person, isn't it?"
"That's what I see too."
His teammate answered exactly so.
Against every expectation—every fear—what emerged from the gate was not a monster. It was a human being.
Specifically, a man in period-drama garb with a cloth bundle slung over his shoulder.
The man glanced around at the hunters on standby, then promptly wrinkled his brow and spoke.
"What is this place?"
The words out of the man's mouth were not Chinese. They were Korean.
I stared at the scene unfolding before my eyes, straining to get my bearings.
Judging by the shop signs plastered with hanja, it seemed safe to say I'd landed somewhere around the twenty-first century.
'China? Huh. That old man didn't bother setting the coordinates after all.'
The thought struck me suddenly.
My master had said he'd open a door back to my original world—he'd never once said anything about twenty-first-century Korea.
But even granting that this was China, something was very, very wrong.
I furrowed my brow at the humans surrounding me.
I could see blades in their hands.
No—more than just blades, in fact. Spearmen, obviously, but also men carrying nothing at all whose hands nonetheless shimmered with faint glimmering energy, and others wearing strange armor of a make I'd never seen.
And to top it all off, the eyes fixed on me were anything but friendly.
'What the hell is with these bastards?'
Guns I could understand, but a pack of lunatics brandishing bladed weapons through a twenty-first-century city was flatly bizarre.
They felt closer to the people of Murim than to anyone from the era I'd grown up in.
"It's the one who came out of the gate. Subdue him."
I heard someone shout in Chinese.
I'd rolled through Murim for thirty years, and yet, strangely, I couldn't understand a word of it.
Come to think of it, communication had been effortless from the moment I'd crossed over into Murim, so perhaps it made sense that the effect would carry over the moment I returned.
Still, I could roughly grasp what they were getting at from the look of things.
"Look, I'm just trying to go home."
I said it quickly—but they came charging at me all the same.
And the one in the lead swung his sword straight at my head.
'These lunatics? Straight for the blade here too?'
Call me a pacifist all you liked—I was hardly going to dodge a fight that walked up and slapped me across the face.
Half a step back, and in the same breath I seized the wrist of the man who'd swung at me and drove my qi straight into him.
"GYAAAAAAH!"
The scream tore out at that very instant.
The others froze at the shriek—only to grit their teeth and come rushing at me moments later.
I had the distinct feeling that something had gone wrong. Very, very wrong.
"Damn it all. A thousand years, and these bastards haven't changed a bit."