Introduction
What? Mount Hua is ruined?
What kind of bullshit is that?!
If something’s fallen to ruin, the natural thing is to save it.
“Ruined? Not while I’m here! Who the hell decided that?”
Plum blossoms fade eventually, no matter when.
But after the bitter winter passes and spring returns, they bloom again in riotous profusion across the mountains.
“Though if Mount Hua doesn’t get back on its feet soon, I’m gonna die first! If you’re going to ruin something, at least ruin it properly, you idiots!”
And so begins the arduous struggle of Chung Myung, the Plum Blossom Sword Saint, to revive the utterly bankrupt Mount Hua Sect.
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Prologue
"Th—"
His teeth clenched so hard it felt as if they might snap.
How much force had gone into the fist he’d balled that even his fingernails had dug into his palm, drawing dark, sluggish blood?
He could no longer control the convulsions wracking his body.
An anger so intense it seemed to bleach his mind white washed over him.
Red.
Everything was red.
All he could see had been stained a blood-dark crimson.
This mountain peak, green with life until just a day ago, had been covered in human blood in the space of a single day, its color changed beyond recognition.
Death.
That was all that remained here now.
What had all this blood been spilled for?
Chung Myung raised a hand and seized the sword blade lodged in his shoulder. With one violent tug, the broken blade of his plum blossom sword came free.
His own body was far from whole.
His left arm had been torn away, leaving only the sleeve of his robe fluttering in the wind, and one of his legs had been nearly severed, useless now. But worse than that was the enormous hole punched clean through his stomach, a wound as large as a child’s head.
And yet Chung Myung felt no pain.
Compared to the psychic agony of being torn apart inside, the body’s suffering was nothing.
“...Senior Brother Sect Leader.”
His eyes landed on the ruin that had once been Mount Hua Sect Leader Chung Mun.
What had he been so aggrieved about?
What grievance had been so great that even in death he could not close his eyes?
It wasn’t only the Sect Leader.
“Junior brother...”
The sight of Chung Gong, dead with his waist split clean in two, stabbed into his eyes like a blade.
“Junior brothers.”
They were all dead.
The senior brothers who had climbed this mountain together, vowing to protect the jianghu and spread Mount Hua’s name across the world, had all gone to a place from which they would never return.
So had all the junior disciples who had followed them up this mountain.
Chung Myung gritted his teeth.
It was a noble sacrifice. An awe-inspiring death, one overflowing with righteousness and chivalry.
But who could possibly praise this death?
Who would dare!
Chung Myung slowly turned his head.
With a hatred so immense it seemed to swallow everything else, he glared at the culprit behind all of it.
The devil sent down from heaven.
The leader of the evil cult that had soaked the world in blood, the Demonic Sect.
The one the world called Heavenly Demon.
Even in this horrific hellscape, the Heavenly Demon looked utterly calm. Sitting in meditation amid a sea of blood and corpses, he stirred in Chung Myung an emotion even he found strange.
No, calm wasn’t the right word for him now.
What sort of calm could there be for a man with more than a dozen swords embedded in his body and two spears piercing his stomach?
Everyone had given their lives to make that monster look like this.
The Nine Great Sects and more than twenty other schools, the final death squad made up only of the elite among elites. Their clash with the Heavenly Demon had ended in mutual destruction.
Would they be satisfied?
Could those who had died here truly close their eyes satisfied with this result?
Impossible.
Even if they had been satisfied, even if they had felt it was enough, Chung Myung could not. The only thing he could do was master the raging hatred and fury that seemed ready to burn through his entire body.
Then, at that moment, the Heavenly Demon opened his eyes.
Those transparent, empty eyes turned to face Chung Myung.
And then his mouth slowly opened.
“...Mount Hua.”
The first words out of his mouth were those two characters: Mount Hua.
Mount Hua.
Those two words, branded into Chung Myung’s chest like a searing mark, spilled from the mouth of that demon.
“A pity. Disciple of Mount Hua. If you could have lived through this, you would have enjoyed the glory of having killed me for the rest of your life.”
“...Shut your damn mouth.”
“You may be proud. Though you had the help of many, your sword did reach me in the end. In the name of the Heavenly Demon, I acknowledge that your sword—Mount Hua’s sword—is the strongest under heaven.”
“I said shut up!”
Even hearing the name Mount Hua from that cursed mouth made him sick with hatred.
“A pity.”
The Heavenly Demon was dying.
No matter how extraordinary his martial prowess, no matter how he stood as the greatest demon in history whose power touched the heavens, there was no surviving after having one’s dantian pierced and all the organs of the body carved apart.
Flicker of dying light.
What Chung Myung saw now was nothing more than the final spasms before life was severed.
And yet why did the sight of a dying man seem so composed?
To Chung Myung, the Heavenly Demon had always been an unfathomable existence, something impossible to understand no matter how he strained his mind.
“If I had been given just one more day, I would have become truly worthy of the name Heavenly Demon. But perhaps this too is the fate granted to me.”
Chung Myung gripped the blade he had torn from his shoulder with all his strength. The sharpened edge bit into his palm, but that meant nothing.
One step.
Then another.
Limping, Chung Myung approached the Heavenly Demon, moving toward the end of that long, horrible war.
Even as Chung Myung came closer, the Heavenly Demon’s eyes remained clear and colorless.
“Remember this, disciple of Mount Hua. This is not the end. The demons will return. And when they do, the world will truly become the domain of the demonic path. A demonic world that no one can stop...”
Whoosh!
The whistle of a blade cleaving the air rang across the quiet mountain summit.
Thud.
The severed head of the Heavenly Demon rolled to the ground. Chung Myung crushed the head beneath his boot, the eyes still gazing up at him with that same transparent emptiness.
“Th—”
The war was over.
The world would remember this war as the victory of the death squad. But Chung Myung knew better. There was no victory here. No one, not a single soul, had won.
At last, the strength left his legs, and Chung Myung sank to the ground. The inevitable death that had claimed everyone else was coming for him too.
He lifted his head and looked up at the sky.
Even after so much blood had been spilled, even after so many had died, the heavens remained as indifferent and blue as ever.
What will become of Mount Hua now?
Everyone who had climbed the Great Mountain to kill the Heavenly Demon was dead. And even if any survived, they too would be groaning under the weight of this near-total devastation.
But no sect had suffered a blow as devastating as Mount Hua’s.
“Senior Brother Sect Leader... I told you.”
That they should not give everything to righteousness. Didn’t he say that?
Every single disciple of the Cheong generation from Mount Hua had buried their bones here.
And the Baek generation who had followed them had died as well.
What remained were only children who could not yet be counted as fighting strength.
And then...
Only regret. Nothing but regret.
Had it meant anything?
Did the blood Mount Hua shed here mean anything at all?
“I don’t know, Senior Brother Sect Leader...”
Chung Myung’s body slowly tipped over onto its side.
In his blurred vision came the white robes soaked in red blood, and the five-petaled plum blossoms embroidered upon them.
Only the death of warriors.
A lonely end, with no one there to witness it. The death of Mount Hua, sacrificing life as if it were a blade of grass, with a single plum blossom sword that had been held all one’s life serving as its gravestone.
“...Still better than me.”
At least there was someone who would weep for them.
And Chung Myung was weeping for them now.
His dimming gaze followed the figure of the Sect Leader.
I’m sorry, Senior Brother Sect Leader.
If only he had devoted himself more to martial arts, could he have saved even one of them?
If he hadn’t spent his life ignoring the words of his master and senior brothers, wandering beyond the sect like an idiot.
If he had truly inherited the sword of Mount Hua instead of bearing the useless and hollow title of Plum Blossom Sword Saint, would the ending have been different?
Useless.
All of it was useless.
What remained was only regret.
And concern for the sect he was leaving behind.
Plum blossoms fade eventually.
And after the bitter winter comes, they bloom again.
Mount Hua...
Chung Myung’s consciousness drifted farther and farther away.
Thirteenth disciple of the Great Mount Hua Sect.
The Third Generation Sword Master of the world.
Chung Myung, the Plum Blossom Sword Saint.
He cut down the head of the greatest demon in all of history, the Heavenly Demon, who had thrown the world into chaos, and then entered his final rest atop the Hundred Thousand Great Mountains.
That was the handful of words the world would leave behind for him.
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