The Supreme Great White Shark, Baek Sang-ah (1)
Among sharks, the greatest was the great white shark.
And among great white sharks, Baek Sang-ah was the greatest of them all.
The reason he was special was simple.
“Kraaaaw.”
Unlike the other sharks, who had neither swim bladders nor vocal cords and could not cry out at all, he could let loose a magnificent roar.
And as for his looks, they were equally exceptional. His white belly was round and glossy, and his tail was pleasantly plump. His teeth were sharp, his bridge was sleek, and he swam faster than any other male great white shark.
As for size, there was no need to even mention it. He was nothing like an ordinary great white shark; he was big enough to stand on equal footing with most whales.
He was, quite simply, the king of the sea.
So of course the female sharks could not possibly leave a male great white shark like Baek Sang-ah alone.
Female sharks courted the great white shark who drifted through the sea day after day for the sake of mating alone, baring their teeth and trying to bite his tail fin and dorsal fin.
That was the great white shark’s way of courting.
But he merely swished his tail and shook the females off.
Baek Sang-ah was not a shark who would be won over by a mere female shark.
Why are they trying to bite me? That hurts.
The strangest thing about Baek Sang-ah was that he had once been human in a previous life.
Specifically, a human from twenty-first-century South Korea.
Of course, even if he had once been human, that did not mean he was dissatisfied with shark life.
On the contrary, he liked shark society better than human society.
There was no need to travel in groups, and all he had to do all day was swim fast.
If he was hungry, he could hunt fish and eat. If he wanted to rest, he could sleep for a while.
I never imagined it would feel this good not having to work or waste my emotions on human relationships.
More than anything, what satisfied him most was his lifespan.
When he had lived as a human, he had suddenly developed a brain disease and died, but now things were different.
Baek Sang-ah was ten years old in shark years.
By the standards of other adults, he was young, yet he was growing unusually fast compared to the rest of his kind.
Besides, great white sharks usually lived sixty to seventy years, so he still had at least fifty years left.
At this rate, life—no, shark life—is going to be smooth sailing.
But shark life was not always so convenient as one wished.
Just as storms and waves sometimes swept across a tranquil sea, a huge turning point came to Baek Sang-ah’s shark life as well.
It happened one day.
That day too, Baek Sang-ah was gliding endlessly through the sea, just as he always did, in order to breathe.
He swam so fast that he often lost control of himself and shot up above the surface like a dolphin.
And then it happened.
Right in front of Baek Sang-ah’s nose, as he leapt from the sea, he saw a cloud.
But no matter how high he jumped, there was no way he could ever reach a cloud, was there?
I don’t think I jumped up; I think the cloud came down.
Just as Baek Sang-ah was feeling perplexed and making a “Kraaaaw?” sound, his snout pierced through the cloud.
At the same moment, something tapped against the tip of his nose.
Something hard yet soft, something still carrying a trace of warmth.
After brushing past it in midair, Baek Sang-ah fell straight back into the sea.
With a heavy splash, a huge spray of water burst upward.
But Baek Sang-ah did not stop there.
To find out what had collided with him, he bent his body and looked back up at the sky.
Is it coming closer?
What came into view was a cloud drifting ever nearer to the surface.
If there was anything unusual about that cloud, it was that it held a vermilion glow.
Baek Sang-ah swam away for a moment to put some distance between himself and the cloud.
Then he charged at it at full speed.
At last, the moment Baek Sang-ah leapt out of the sea again and passed straight through the cloud—
he saw a vermilion bead glowing with a radiant light.
[No, this is! Could it be Malrangjiche?]
And not only that—it was a bead that could speak.
What that mysterious vermilion bead did not know was the nature of sharks.
Sharks had the habit of biting first when they encountered something unfamiliar, or when they felt curious about something.
Even if Baek Sang-ah still retained the memories of his human life, he was, in the end, still a great white shark.
Why is it talking about Malrangjiche so suddenly…?
Glup—
In the end, swallowing the vermilion bead he had never seen before was only natural.
The bead vanished into his belly in an instant.
The light was so intense that Baek Sang-ah’s white underbelly glittered brilliantly.
You ignorant little brute! This body is the avatar sent by the Great Immortal to observe the lower realm—how dare you swallow me!
It all happened in the blink of an eye.
An unfamiliar voice rang out from inside Baek Sang-ah’s round white belly, but he had no room to answer it.
The moment he swallowed the vermilion bead, his stomach felt as though it had been burned with fire.
Unable to bear the pain, Baek Sang-ah thrashed wildly, crying, “Kraaang!”
He made such a commotion that the surface itself was splashed red with vermilion spray.
Even so, the pain did not go away, and he dashed through the sea in whatever direction he could.
In shark society, where there were no doctors and no hands, it was not easy to erase pain.
I’m going to die, I’m going to die! Spit me out right now!
Like a tiny boat caught in a typhoon, Baek Sang-ah ran without any destination at all, until at some point he could no longer move forward.
It was as though someone had seized his body and held him in place.
“Kwoeek.”
Shortly afterward, his soft white belly floated up to the surface of the water.
He had lost consciousness and rolled over.
……
……
……
Within a black void.
A space with neither above nor below, a place without the flow of waves.
Baek Sang-ah drifted there.
“Kraaa… no. I, I can talk?”
Only after a long while did he open his eyes.
Or rather, he felt as though he had opened them.
What is going on?
There was nothing to see.
And yet the thought came to him on its own that he was seeing something now.
A river of vermilion light, a world where sky and sea had turned upside down without any boundary.
At the center of it all, a silhouette floated.
A presence he could not fully perceive, yet unmistakably felt.
Something not quite a sound, and not quite silence either.
“A-am I dead again? Because I swallowed that weird bead? No, wait, I was only trying to bite it…”
[Mortal, what are you?]
When Baek Sang-ah spoke again, the vermilion river trembled violently.
“A, a judge of the dead?”
[Did I not say so, foolish one? I am the avatar of the Great Immortal, a separate manifestation sent down to this land to observe the lower realm. You may call me Muyeonja.]
Great Immortal.
An immortal who had reached the pinnacle of the Dao, shed lifespan and flesh and all manner of worldly constraints, and ascended beyond them.
The vermilion bead before Baek Sang-ah was nothing other than an avatar sent to the lower realm by such an immortal, merely for amusement.
Yet the vermilion bead found itself suddenly unable to continue speaking.
“Th-then… what is that?”
It was not because Baek Sang-ah was not rattled in the least.
Nor was it because he was perfectly fine even after swallowing a being that carried the aura of a Great Immortal.
[You are the one asking questions. Speak. What, exactly, are you?]
The reason Muyeonja was truly bewildered was that, in Baek Sang-ah, he sensed traces of emptiness—something even an immortal had never encountered.
Cultivators trained to defy the lifespan granted by heaven, to transcend death through enlightenment.
That was an act of moving away from death.
Thus, an immortal like a Great Immortal was infinitely distant from death.
There was no reason for such a being to experience death, nor to come near it.
[Why do I sense the aura of death from a trivial mortal like you?]
Being far from death was common to all cultivators.
Except for the dead, all of them were the same.
And yet this peculiar shark carried the aura of death.
It was only natural that Muyeonja, the avatar of an immortal, would feel a strange interest stir within him.
Baek Sang-ah, who had quietly listened all this time, opened his mouth to answer the question.
“B-because I died, o-once.”
[What did you say?]
He said it as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.
[You experienced death? You, this mortal creature?]
The vermilion river roiled violently.
[This is no deception, no delusion. It is an unmistakable trace. The principle of emptiness… has seeped into this existence.]
If Baek Sang-ah had still been human, he would not have said that he had already died once.
In the countless works he had seen in his human life, tales of reincarnation and the like had always been things people were silent about.
But Baek Sang-ah was a great white shark.
The greatest of great white sharks, at that.
There was no reason to hide something so ordinary.
[Tell me more. Tell me more in detail.]
“I was originally human, but my head hurt, it h-hurt, so I died.”
[Your head hurts even now? You’re stuttering.]
“N-no, it doesn’t hurt now. It’s been a w-while, so I-I’m having trouble talking.”
Of course, being a shark also meant his explanation was a mess. He no longer had the intellect needed to think too deeply.
“I died, and then I became a shark.”
[How could such a thing possibly happen?]
It made no sense.
To Muyeonja’s senses, Baek Sang-ah did not possess the spiritual energy a cultivator ought to have.
He could not even detect the trace of a spiritual root within the body.
In other words, he was utterly rootless.
And yet this ordinary being had died once, then come back to life?
[You are completely beyond reason. This is what one would truly call defying heaven.]
And the principle of emptiness, which only those who have approached death can awaken to, was residing in nothing more than a stammering shark?
Even if the Great Immortal himself were brought here, he would not understand it.
[Could it be that the Great Immortal foresaw this in advance, and created me so that I might observe the lower realm?]
Muyeonja let out a low murmur.
If the Great Immortal, who knew all principles, had sent him, then he wanted to know the reason why.
[If this too is his intention, what am I to do? Must I eliminate what goes against the natural order, or…]
“E-eliminate? I, I don’t want to die.”
When Baek Sang-ah spoke cautiously, Muyeonja stopped thinking and answered.
[Yes. I do not yet know the Great Immortal’s will, so I cannot act rashly. I can only dare to ask him directly.]
At that very moment, a vermilion current poured like a waterfall between the unbounded sky and earth, and Baek Sang-ah began to writhe in pain.
[I shall have no choice but to take you directly to the Great Immortal.]
The vermilion waterfall was the Great Immortal’s spiritual energy.
The force a cultivator gains through the pursuit of the Dao—sometimes mistaken by martial artists as inner power.
[But the Great Immortal’s vision reaches the ends of heaven. If you are to stand before him, then your consciousness must also reach its limit.]
That wave-like spiritual energy completely wrapped itself around Baek Sang-ah’s formless body.
[Though it is but a speck compared to what the Great Immortal possesses, for a mortal like you it will become a key, allowing you to feel things you have never seen or sensed before.]
Baek Sang-ah screamed instinctively.
It was not pain in the flesh, but the sensation that consciousness itself was twisting.
Memories buried in the void rose up to the surface, and unfamiliar sensations piled on top of one another.
The surface, the waves, the deep sea, and…
[Using the knowledge the Great Immortal has arranged for me, I shall personally impart instruction to you.]
The moment those words ended,
the vermilion river surged upward toward the sky.
The stream, rushing like a wave, wrapped around Baek Sang-ah’s consciousness and dragged it aloft.
At last, when Baek Sang-ah came to himself again and woke beyond the realm of consciousness,
he saw the vermilion light rising from his own body to the heavens, forming a colossal pillar of radiance.
“K-kraaaang?”
At the same time, things that should never have been visible became visible.
Sunlight skimming across the ripples.
Minute currents flowing through strands of seaweed.
The trails of fish swimming in the distance.
Behind all of it, interconnected lines shimmered into view.
The world was flowing along those lines as though it were a woven tapestry.
Everything was tangled together, all extending from a single point.
[Rejoice. You have entered the path of cultivation.]