The Monster Raised by the Murim Alliance
'I survived my whole life by feeding on other people’s pain, and in the end, I met the most miserable death as payment.'
"Cough!"
Blood mixed with scraps of viscera soaked into the stone floor.
The torture chamber, buried deep beneath the Murim Alliance, wore its usual sickening chill. My limbs were bound with iron chains, and a thick metal collar had been locked around my neck.
"Heh... cough."
Why go this far after already severing the tendons in my wrists and ankles?
I wasn’t even thinking about running away.
A laugh slipped out of me for no reason at all.
It stopped soon enough, swallowed by the pain of having my innards seared with fire.
Thud— thud—
Footsteps echoed out of the darkness.
An all-too-familiar presence.
Creak—
The rusted iron door opened, and a middle-aged man with the refined air of a scholar stepped inside.
"Well? Tell me, what does it feel like to sit in the chair yourself after making so many others sit in it?"
I forced my head up to look at him and asked through clenched teeth, enduring the pain.
"Why... are you doing this?"
It was a question packed with too many meanings.
The corners of the man’s mouth curled faintly.
"Does the reason matter?"
"You saved me when I was on the brink of death. You brought me here. You made me who I am now. And now you..."
"Did I? It’s been so long, I’m afraid I can’t quite remember."
The man—Zhuge Gun, chief strategist of the Murim Alliance—settled into a chair and packed an herb pipe with practiced ease before touching it to a flame.
When the sharp, distinctive scent drifted into my nose with the thin stream of smoke, the pain eased just a little.
"Didn’t I tell you I was capable? That I was indispensable to the Alliance?"
"I did say that."
Past tense.
I’d been prepared for this, but my instincts were still telling me that something was very wrong.
"No, no, let’s be precise. ‘Capable’ isn’t quite right. ‘Unusual’ would be closer."
"What’s the difference?"
"A great deal. Strictly speaking, Number Twenty-Eight, your martial talent was nothing special. Not when compared to the other shadows of your generation."
I had no answer for that, and with the pain worsening by the second, I couldn’t have spoken anyway.
As if it were of no concern to him, Zhuge Gun continued speaking in a flat, almost conversational tone.
It was as though he were talking to himself.
"Graduating from Black Shadow Pavilion, the cradle of the Alliance’s shadows, is no easy feat."
He wasn’t wrong.
Of the hundred children who had entered with me, only five remained at the end.
And the rest?
Half had died during training. The other half had either taken their own lives or been murdered by their fellow trainees.
That was how inhuman and brutal the training at Black Shadow Pavilion had been—too much for any child to bear.
"And yet you survived. Always slipping beyond my calculations and predictions."
Setting aside the pipe as if discarding a burnt-out grudge, Zhuge Gun looked at me with quiet interest.
"How did a child who should have been thrown away manage to survive? I became curious. That’s when I started watching you."
"Cough... For the chief strategist of the Murim Alliance to... take an interest in some lowly interrogator... should I call it an honor?"
"You were that unusual. And as I watched you over time, I began to see something."
Zhuge Gun rose from his seat and slowly circled around me.
I was already dizzy enough; his pacing only made the world spin harder.
"During the poison-fog training, most of the trainees rushed to the right-hand ravine, but you moved left without hesitation. Half the ones who went right were bitten to death by venom insects. And that wasn’t all. During the leap training, you alone stepped onto the rock just an inch to the side, as if you’d known in advance the ground would collapse."
He stopped and crouched down until our eyes were level.
"Was all of that really just coincidence?"
I swallowed the blood surging up my throat and glared at him.
"Luck or whatever else, I passed every trial fairly and squarely, and I’ve lived with pride as a shadow of the Alliance. If you told me to bark like a dog, I barked. If you told me to gouge someone’s eyes out, I did it without hesitation. And now this is how you treat me after I’ve spent my whole life crawling under you like a dog? Hah... hah... Is that really acceptable...?"
Even as I spoke, anger suddenly surged up inside me.
After surviving death’s edge and graduating from Black Shadow Pavilion, my first assignment had been to the Pursuit Squad.
The work was simple. You tracked someone down and killed them—nothing more, nothing less.
But after only five years, I was suddenly reassigned to the Surveillance and Intelligence Bureau.
It had been an extremely rare case. So rare, in fact, that everyone had tilted their heads at it.
Still, I had moved without complaint. It was an order from the lofty Alliance.
The Bureau’s work wasn’t hard either. All I had to do was gather useful information from our side.
But the level of danger was dozens of times higher than it had been in the Pursuit Squad.
That was only natural, considering I was infiltrating the enemy’s territory.
"I was just indulging some innocent curiosity—wondering if you might somehow survive even there. I was truly shocked. To think you endured for ten years without dying."
"Then why keep me as an informant? Why send me back here?"
The order from the Alliance, given after ten long years, had been to replace the vacant interrogator.
Countless nights, I had sat people down in that chair and subjected them to cold, mechanical torture.
The shrieks I’d heard so often they had become like cries from a haunted valley echoed briefly through my ears.
When I glared at him, Zhuge Gun let out a faint chuckle.
"Your talent seemed better suited to this place."
"What does that mean...?"
"You really think I wouldn’t know? Number Twenty-Eight, the way you extracted information."
"..........."
"Even now, I can hardly believe it. To think you’d use torture to get information out of people. And in the middle of enemy territory, no less. Should I call that bold, or just reckless?"
In my defense, I hadn’t exactly had a choice.
I’d been tossed from a pursuit member into an informant overnight—what was I supposed to know?
With performance pressure bearing down on me like a millstone, I had no other options.
Even so, I had some confidence.
With the Point-striking Martial Scripture I had painstakingly learned, I could make a target suffer hellish pain without leaving a trace.
"In the end, didn’t you bloom properly because of me? You even earned that absurdly excessive nickname, Hyeolmunsa, despite being nothing more than an interrogator."
"And now I’m being discarded after use."
"Don’t take it so hard. When the times change, people have to change with them, don’t they?"
"Why would the times suddenly change?"
"We’ve signed a truce with the Evil Alliance. And they’ve requested your head."
The Evil Alliance was the heterodox coalition that had been at war with the Murim Alliance for fifty years.
"You should’ve behaved yourself. Honestly, I can hardly blame them for demanding your head even at a loss to themselves. Tsk, tsk."
His tongue-click nearly made me laugh.
He’d been frothing at the mouth, urging them to turn me into less than a man, and now he was acting as if he had no part in it.
"Still, I have to admit, it’s impressive. I hear even peak masters spill everything in front of you—tears, snot, and all. What exactly is your secret? I’m curious."
When I only kept glaring at him in silence, Zhuge Gun lifted one shoulder.
"In any case, you’ve worked hard. Your stubborn, dogged luck ends here, I’m afraid. Though I suppose there is one comfort: no family will be left grieving when you disappear."
At his mocking words, I slowly closed my eyes.
A poor but warm home.
On rainy days, my mother would always make steaming hot tangbyeong.
And after returning from the fields, my father would shake the dirt from his hands and pat my head.
It had taken no more than a blink for that peaceful life to shatter.
Masked monsters had come to the village and slaughtered the townspeople without mercy, and my father and mother had not escaped their blades.
Hiding inside a chest used for storing grain, I had witnessed every last scene with my own eyes.
When the world collapsed like that, Murim warriors appeared, killed the monsters, and saved me.
They fed the starving child I was, gave me a new name, and gave me a reason to live.
Though my life had grown farther and farther from that of an ordinary human, I had thought it was fine.
It was work done for the Alliance that had saved me from hell.
The same was true now. Even if I was being cast aside after use, I could still accept death humbly if it was for the Alliance.
Wasn’t that the perfect end for a dog who had inflicted unbearable pain on countless others?
Still, I found myself wanting to sit down and share a warm bowl of tangbyeong with the parents whose faces I could barely even remember now.
It was a meaningless fantasy, but still.
Clang—
When I lifted my head, a blade flashed in front of me, cold and razor-sharp.
"Before you die, want me to tell you something interesting?"
Zhuge Gun, who had been seated and toying with the edge of his sword, smiled with his eyes narrowed in elegant amusement.
"Those monsters who attacked your village that day... why do you think they were there?"
"Because the Evil Alliance was clearly carrying out indiscriminate slaughter..."
"No matter how vicious they are, they don’t start bloodbaths without a reason. There has to be something worth taking."
"What... are you trying to say?"
A bad, icy premonition brushed past me.
"Around that time, a piece of information reached our side. Something had been discovered that appeared to be the treasure map of Thousand-Hand Thief."
Thousand-Hand Thief had been a legendary bandit from a previous generation, said to be a man who could steal anything in the world.
"At first, I never imagined it could be real. If I had known, I would have sent my personal guard immediately, not a search unit directly under the Alliance Lord."
"What are you saying...?"
I tried to stay calm, but I couldn’t hide the tremor in my voice.
"Haha, what can you do? Treasure always brings blood in its wake."
His bright laughter echoed through the basement, but I heard nothing anymore.
"It’s my little gift to a man who devoted himself to the Alliance all these years. It would be such a shame to die without knowing a thing, wouldn’t it?"
So this was it... From start to finish, I’d only ever been used.
Once I understood that, blood spilled down my face like tears.
What was strange was that the blood didn’t feel hot.
It felt cold.
Rage boiled up inside me, impossible to contain, but soon enough a hollow emptiness rolled in and washed it away.
I had joined the Alliance to avenge my parents, only to end up serving their murderer.
There had never been a farce more ridiculous than this.
"Now, go on. I’ll make good use of your head."
Zhuge Gun’s voice was chillingly calm.
As always, it was the tone of a man who had already finished his calculations.
He came closer.
The blade was raised, and the cold aura crept nearer to the nape of my neck.
In that fleeting instant where life and death parted ways, I smiled.
Just a little—so little no one would notice.
One finger, the only one that hadn’t been broken, moved by a hair’s breadth.
Whoosh—
A needle thinner than a strand of hair sank into Zhuge Gun’s forehead.
Startled, he stumbled back and touched the spot with his hand.
Then, realizing it was nothing more than a needle with no real killing power, he twisted his lips into a sneer.
"What is this pathetic..."
And then his expression froze like stone. His pupils shook violently.
His face turned red and blue as though someone had painted it.
"W-what is this?"
Now panicked, Zhuge Gun began to stammer.
Seeing that man, who had always acted so lofty, babbling like an idiot was deeply satisfying.
"Ghk."
Before he could finish speaking, his body collapsed.
Then his bones melted, his flesh went soft, and he dissolved into a handful of bloody water that spread across the damp stone floor.
"Cough... You were the one who told me, weren’t you? That a martial artist should always have an ace up his sleeve..."
I spat out another mouthful of vivid red blood.
This was bad. Clear proof that my time was nearly up.
Still, I had no regrets. I’d managed to take one companion with me on the way out.
"Haah..."
Using the last of my strength, I let my gaze sweep over the room.
The underground torture chamber, tucked away in the deepest, most secret part of the Murim Alliance.
Walls bleached of color by absorbed blood, and a drainage channel blackened with crusted gore.
'S-stop!!! Stop it!! Please!!'
'Just kill me!! Kill me already!!! You devil!!!'
Desperate screams, sorrowful pleas.
Even knowing they were hallucinations, I didn’t bother to shake them off.
I had no right to.
Among those dragged here had been innocent, decent people with no crimes at all.
But I had still been made to inflict the same pain on them until the answer we wanted came out.
That had been the order of the Alliance, and like an idiot, I had believed that obeying it was justice.
So I didn’t feel wronged by this ending.
"Hah... hah..."
My breath thinned, and my vision blurred.
The edges of the basement began to spread like ink in water.
Hell would be fine. I would accept any punishment gladly.
I had never been the sort of man who deserved salvation.
Every day I had lived like a worm proved it.
Sound faded little by little, and the world itself gradually turned black.
Then the blurred faces of my father and mother began to sharpen.
Their smiles were so warm. Without meaning to, I found myself smiling back.
And then the world became completely black.
***
"Hey! Holy shit, I think we’re screwed—this bastard isn’t breathing."
And when I came to again...
"What are you talking about, you idiot? He’s got his eyes open just fine."
...a pair of boys who looked barely old enough to shave were looking down at me.