The Sword Emperor
"Look, I'm only doing this so I can survive. What part of that don't you understand?"
I said it with a smile, looking down at Oh Pilsang.
At my words, his face, which had been scanning the aftermath around us, went white all over again. Not a single one of his men had survived—which meant the odds of him walking out of here alive were just as nonexistent.
"But you know what's funny? What makes you so sure I won't survive?"
"Th-the other guilds will come after you. You're a returnee, so you wouldn't know, but the relationships between guilds aren't something to take lightly. None of them will let this slide. It's not too late even now—join hands with me. Those bastards can all be bought off with money anyway, and I can smooth everything over, every last bit of—gaaagh!"
Even now, with a boot on his neck, all Oh Pilsang could talk about was the other guilds.
Which meant that in today's South Korea, killing people wasn't a problem at all.
Well, I suppose that's why they ran around acting like animals in the first place.
A world where strength let you do anything. It might have been far too dangerous a place for my young nieces and nephew to live in, but for me? Not so much. If anything, this kind of world was the one I found far more familiar and comfortable.
I pressed my foot down firmly on Oh Pilsang's knee, the man still clinging stubbornly to his own miserable life. I could feel his bones crumpling and giving way, soft as a collapsing cake.
"It seems you've misunderstood something. There's exactly one reason I'm keeping you alive."
At my words, Oh Pilsang looked up at me, his face contorted with pain. Right now, that was the only path he had to staying breathing.
Watching him, I asked slowly, deliberately.
"Choi Taemin. Explain properly what happened to my brother-in-law."
I'd already heard the broad strokes through Seo Yeon, but that was only fragmentary secondhand information. She'd been just fourteen when her father was said to have died, and everything she knew had come from someone else's mouth. Which meant I needed to confirm the precise details from Oh Pilsang himself.
"...Choi Taemin. Ha. A-and if I tell you? What's in it for me—AAAAH!"
He was still trying to negotiate with me, so I grabbed his ear and tore it clean off. The agony of it sent Oh Pilsang screaming and rolling across the floor.
"You keep getting the wrong idea. I'm not here to make deals with you."
I tossed his filthy ear aside carelessly and looked down at him. He clutched the bleeding stump where his ear used to be, glaring up at me—and in his eyes, I could read it plain as day. The thought that if he was going to die anyway, he'd rather give me nothing.
"Oh, you're going to hold out? Fine. Give it a try. Go ahead."
I said it to his face, then turned my head and looked toward somewhere down the hall.
The moment he saw where I was looking, all the color drained from Oh Pilsang's face.
"N-no. Don't."
As I walked toward the room, Oh Pilsang crawled across the floor after me, gasping the words. Naturally. He could feel Oh Sejun's presence inside that room.
"You'll talk. You'll tell me everything, won't you?"
I grinned, baring my teeth, as Oh Pilsang clutched at my trousers and babbled his surrender.
"There we go. Should've done that from the start."
Come to think of it, I mused, I wasn't fundamentally any different from the Blood Sect bastards I'd known.
But the story that spilled out of his mouth was something I genuinely hadn't imagined.
"...Choi Taemin might still be alive."
Beijing, China.
The conference room on the top floor of the Hunter Management Bureau.
Namgoong Hwi, the Sword Emperor, gazed out the window and sipped his tea at his leisure. The city had changed a great deal since the gates appeared, but from this height, none of it was visible.
Namgoong Hwi found that very satisfying.
"Team Leader Wei Jinsheng."
The moment he set down his teacup and spoke, everyone in the room turned tense eyes toward Wei Jinsheng.
"Why was the returnee released?"
"Detainment was not possible."
Namgoong Hwi pressed him with all the authority of his title, but the man across from him answered with perfect composure.
Namgoong Hwi didn't like that one bit.
"Not possible? Against a single man?"
"All five A-Rank Hunters on the scene at the time were subdued. We committed additional forces and got the same result. According to the report, they somehow managed to persuade the target and bring him to the Bureau—whereupon our own hunters were subdued in turn. Beyond that point, there was no way to predict the damage if we provoked him further."
Namgoong Hwi's eyebrow twitched as he listened. This was precisely why he'd never cared for Wei Jinsheng. Every hunter in the Chinese Hunter Management Bureau, every high-ranking power broker, scrambled to curry his favor—everyone except this man, who walked around with his chin held stubbornly high.
"Ha. So I'm hearing that China's Awakened couldn't stop one lone man. My pride is wounded, truly."
"Regrettably, it's the truth. Though that was largely because our main combat forces were all out on gate raids."
The corner of Namgoong Hwi's mouth twitched. Depending on how you parsed it, that sounded suspiciously like this happened because you weren't here, Sword Emperor.
Of course, that didn't mean he intended to overlook the perennial thorn in his side. There would be no better opportunity than now to cast the slippery bastard out.
"I'm well aware of that. But I hear you went so far as to provide him a private jet? How do you explain that?"
"I judged that building a good relationship would yield greater benefit than attempting detention."
Namgoong Hwi's face screwed up as he listened to Wei Jinsheng's steady defense.
"Wei Jinsheng."
"Yes."
"Your mother was Korean, wasn't she?"
A heavy silence fell over the conference room. The Awakened who had long found Wei Jinsheng irksome went rigid—and so did the flatterers who spent their days stroking Namgoong Hwi's ego.
That Wei Jinsheng's mother had been Korean was fairly well known, but no one had ever dared raise it as an issue before. And with good reason: the only way a man his age had risen to Emergency Response Team Leader was by racking up achievements no one could dispute.
"When the returnee said he wanted to go to Korea, I hear you personally arranged his accommodations. You even dispatched Bureau staff to accompany him to Korea. And you exchanged communications with the Korean government as well, did you not?"
"It was a measure to track the returnee's movements. Nothing more."
"Haha. Tracking? He must have looked tremendously impressive to your eyes."
At Namgoong Hwi's words, Wei Jinsheng simply closed his mouth, his face cold and unchanging.
"If that's how you saw him, perhaps. But I don't believe your arrangements were merely for tracking purposes. How should I put it? They feel... intentional. As though there were some design behind them."
"I belong to the Chinese Hunter Management Bureau."
Namgoong Hwi smiled thinly at him. However sharp the man's brain supposedly was, this was what it looked like when someone lacked seasoning.
"I know. Does anyone in this room not know it? Frankly, saying it now, of all moments, only makes it sound stranger."
"My mother being Korean has never once influenced my official duties. That is all I meant."
"Well, that's simply your one-sided claim, isn't it. And my dear man—when someone denies everything that categorically, it only makes them look more suspicious."
The Sword Emperor flipped through the report laid out before him as he spoke. It detailed, at length, the official reasons Wei Jinsheng had released the man presumed to be Korean—but Namgoong Hwi had given it only the most cursory glance. He'd convened this meeting the moment he heard that Wei Jinsheng had let a Korean returnee walk free, with every intention of driving him out.
The truth was, Namgoong Hwi couldn't have cared less whether Wei Jinsheng released the returnee or not.
"The returnee was from Moorim, was he not?"
Moorim. Even Namgoong Hwi himself, hailed as the Sword Emperor, would never have learned the secret arts of the Namgoong Clan had he not carried the name, had a dozen coincidences not aligned in his favor. He couldn't imagine that this Korean returnee from Moorim possessed any special ability worth noting.
At best, he scraped up some third-rate martial techniques or picked up a trick or two from unorthodox sect rabble. If he was lucky, something from the Changbai region.
To be fair, the man had crossed over through a unique gate unlike any ordinary returnee—hardly a typical case. But Namgoong Hwi, already rated the strongest in all of China, dismissed it as a trivial detail.
"So—did you identify his sect?"
Namgoong Hwi asked with an expression devoid of expectation. A returnee's sect was the single most valuable piece of information about anyone from Moorim. If even that had eluded them, ousting Wei Jinsheng would only get easier.
"He identified himself as Blood Sect."
"Wh-what?"
Namgoong Hwi blurted it out with a stupid, slack-jawed expression, completely forgetting that everyone around him was watching. He recovered his composure a beat too late, but the furious red flush creeping across his face remained.
But even Namgoong Hwi couldn't help it. Anyone from Moorim would have reacted exactly the same way to those two words.
One of those lunatics?
Until that incident, the Blood Sect had not been a particularly famous name. The orthodox, unorthodox, and demonic sects had held each other in careful balance, and the sects beyond the pale had dwelt far from the Central Plains. The Blood Sect was just one more such group existing somewhere in that vast expanse—nobody gave them a second thought.
But the letter sent by the Blood Sect's new Cult Master had ignited the fury of the greatest figures of all three factions. Setting aside lifetimes of accumulated grudges and debts, they reached an unprecedented accord: destroy the Blood Sect together, all at once.
The problem was what happened next. Those united masters of the orthodox, unorthodox, and demonic paths were swept away like autumn leaves before the Blood Sect.
And Namgoong Hwi himself—revered in China as the Sword Emperor, granted the highest honors the nation could bestow—had perished on the very first day of that historic war.
At the hands of a man named Kang Samsik, belonging to some minor Blood Sect detachment—a man so insignificant it was almost embarrassing to call him a master.
"Is something the matter, Sword Emperor?"
"...It's nothing."
Forced to maintain the most composed face he could muster, Namgoong Hwi could do nothing else. He could hardly announce that he'd been slaughtered on his way back to Earth by a mere ordinary follower of the Blood Sect—a man who wasn't even a proper master.
The problem was that Wei Jinsheng's instincts were far from ordinary. The way the man was already studying him with that odd, unreadable expression made Namgoong Hwi intensely uncomfortable.
"In any case, I've judged that this matter cannot simply be allowed to pass."
The emergency session ultimately unfolded exactly as the Sword Emperor willed it. Wei Jinsheng offered no further excuses, and everyone else in the room was too busy appeasing Namgoong Hwi to object.
Everyone acknowledged Wei Jinsheng's competence. But in the end, he could never be a true son of China.
"Ruling. Emergency Response Team Leader Wei Jinsheng. You will bear responsibility for this incident and surrender all posts. You will stand by until further instructions are issued."
At the verdict, Wei Jinsheng rose from his seat without a word. He knew perfectly well that protest would change nothing.
"Ah—one more thing. That Korean. What was his name again?"
Still gnawed by unease at the words Blood Sect, Namgoong Hwi posed the question to Wei Jinsheng, who was rising and bowing his head. Strangely enough, the report contained neither the phrase Blood Sect nor the returnee's name.
"He gave his name as Lee Jaeseong."
Lee Jaeseong...? Why does that sound familiar? Lee Jaeseong...? No. It couldn't be. That Lee Jaeseong?
The Sword Emperor's mouth fell open. The only Lee Jaeseong he knew by name was that deranged new Cult Master of the Blood Sect—the Blood Heaven Emperor, Lee Jaeseong.
"No, no, it can't be. There's no... no way."
But Namgoong Hwi quickly shook his head, muttering to himself. In his understanding of the world, it was simply impossible for a nameless Earthling—a Korean, no less—to become the Cult Master of the Blood Sect.