002
002
Every person has a turning point in their life.
"How dare someone of lowborn blood call me elder brother!"
For me, Baek Seong-gi, the first turning point came at age seven, when the one I thought was my brother nearly beat me to death.
Just the day before, we had taught each other calligraphy and laughed together. The one I now had to call a bastard beat me mercilessly with a wooden sword.
No one in the clan came to my rescue, and the clan head—the man I thought was my father—merely locked me in the warehouse and didn't even apply a single salve.
"Uncle Sam-bong, why do I have to be beaten?"
"It's because you're not a child of this clan."
A servant who did menial labor revealed the truth to the seven-year-old me.
I was the son of my mother's secret affair with a guard warrior, conceived behind the back of the clan head, her husband.
My father never considered me his own child, and my mother, who should have protected me, had long since died of illness.
Over a dozen years.
I learned how to survive before I even came of age. I said nothing. I made no sound.
Even when the boy I'd once called my half-brother used me as a training dummy to practice his sword forms, I endured the pain in silence. That was the only way I might earn a meal the next day.
"If you want to live, abandon your surname and leave the clan."
One day, someone who saw me said those words.
So I cast off the surname 'Baek.' With only the awkward name Seong-gi, at the age of twenty I became a disciple of a martial house.
"Your bone structure is too damaged for first-rate, and you're far too old for second-rate. Third-rate is your limit."
The master who taught me clearly defined my limits. He deliberately spelled them out to steer me toward a path other than that of a martial artist, but I ground my shattered bones down again and again and barely managed to surpass third-rate.
"What? At that age and you still haven't reached Three Stars?"
"I hit that at ten and this guy still can't do it!"
But the gap in skill between me and those who had walked the martial path since childhood was painfully clear.
To their eyes, I was nothing more than a low-grade warrior. A sparrow cannot follow the stride of a phoenix.
I had to take ten steps to match a single step of theirs. A sword art that took me ten days to learn, they grasped in less than a single watch. Even when my mind understood, my body could not keep up.
"His Five Stars are outstanding, but his sinews and bones are already twisted."
"His lower dantian is already ruined for accumulating internal energy."
"Is there truly any meaning in continuing to walk the martial path?"
My master kept urging me to give up the life of a martial artist.
"Seong-gi. How about abandoning martial arts and taking up farming? If you just train the external arts, even the sect leader—Seong-gi!!"
I left my master. Later, I would come to understand his deep intentions, but at the time, I felt so betrayed by the thought that even my master was abandoning me that I wished I were dead.
That was when the Great Righteous-Demonic War broke out.
With the Demonic Cult's aggression, a war erupted that entangled the Orthodox Faction, the Unorthodox Faction, and even the Blood Cult—the entire martial world.
My master had been trying to spare me a pointless death in the Murim's strife, but I, with my character as twisted as a bent spine, could not grasp the depth of his concern.
"Bursting Blood! It is a mind method of the Demonic Cult! You can wield first-rate power in exchange for your lifespan!"
I threw myself into the Demonic Cult. By selling off some of the intelligence on the Orthodox Faction I had been a part of, I was able to become a Demonic Cult underling.
Underling though I was, thanks to the power bought with my lifespan, I rose from first-rate into the ranks of peak experts. The more my body was destroyed, the more power I could exert, and I earned a notorious name for myself killing countless members of the Orthodox Faction.
Chu Ma-gwi—the Ugly Demon (醜魔鬼).
A demon who abandoned humanity and grew unsightly to the extreme.
By the time I staked my life and slew my hundredth master, I had already fallen as low as a human being could fall. Only after killing my own master did I come to my senses, and having exhausted my use as a Demonic Cult expendable, I was imprisoned by the Murim Alliance.
"You certainly are unsightly. You'll make fine material for a Jiangshi."
Just as my body was rotting away, so too was the Murim Alliance rotten to its core.
The Blood Cult secured my body through a traitor within the Alliance and turned me into a Jiangshi. Trapped inside that Jiangshi, I killed and killed countless masters under the Blood Cult Young Leader's control.
And then my usefulness ran out.
"Young Cult Leader! Flee!"
"Tch, Blood Jiangshi! Go block those bitches with your body!"
Only when my body was smashed apart as a Blood Jiangshi and nothing remained but my neck and torso did I regain my full senses. I had lived as the Blood Cult's puppet—a Blood Jiangshi—for twenty long years. Only then could I greet a proper death.
"It was a long battle. May you be reborn in paradise."
At the verge of death, a woman as beautiful as a flower cut my throat with her sword. With eyes full of tender, mournful grace, she beheaded me in a single stroke.
I was destined for hell, and she wished me paradise. What an absurd contradiction. And so I died.
Died.
I should have died.
"......?"
The moment I opened my eyes, I found myself back in the Baek Family warehouse—the same place where I'd once been beaten nearly to death and had awakened from unconsciousness.
I had returned to the past.
* * *
"Clan Head. His wounds have been treated. However, they were so deep that he will no longer be able to learn martial arts."
"That doesn't matter."
Baek Su-gwang, head of the Hyeoncheon Baek Clan and the Sage Sword (賢劍), could not hide his displeasure at the steward's report. If the steward knew the Baek Clan's uncomfortable truth, he might understand Baek Su-gwang, but the clan's shame could not be spread widely.
"Steward. Don't you think that brat Seong-gi doesn't resemble me at all?"
"I believe Young Master Seong-gi takes after the late lady of the house. As the days pass, I see her image more and more in him."
"...Right. Yes."
Baek Seong-gi. The boy who had turned only seven this year revealed more of his mother's face with each passing day.
The woman once called the greatest beauty of Anhui had cast off the clan's prestige to become Baek Su-gwang's wife, but what she later committed behind his back had curdled Baek Su-gwang's blood.
"What is Bo-jun doing right now?"
"He is in self-confinement in his room."
The Baek Family had two successors.
Baek Bo-jun and Baek Seong-gi. With each passing day, Baek Bo-jun resembled Baek Su-gwang more, and with each passing day, Baek Seong-gi resembled Baek Su-gwang's late wife more.
In Baek Bo-jun, you could catch glimpses of both husband and wife. But in Baek Seong-gi, only one person's image remained.
In the boy's early years, Baek Su-gwang had laughed off his lack of resemblance to his own rugged face. But once he realized there was no reason the boy should resemble him at all, he could no longer tolerate Baek Seong-gi's existence.
—Ah, Father! My brother is trying to kill me! Wh-why are you looking at me like that?!
"......."
For years, he had raised him believing the boy was his own child.
But if he had raised another man's child, where should that rage be directed?
Even digging up a grave and severing the corpse's neck would not quell such fury. And yet a stranger's child who so closely resembled the object of that fury called him Father.
"......."
Baek Su-gwang covered his face with his hand.
"Is this what love and hate truly is...?"
"Clan Head! S-something terrible has happened!"
A servant burst through the door and rushed inside. Drenched in cold sweat and pale as death, the servant cried out.
"Young Master Seong-gi has disappeared!"
"......!!"
* * *
'Looks like coming back to the past is really happening, huh?'
Late at night.
I sat atop the fortress wall, looking down at the clan estate while soothing my aching body. The wounds from that bastard who called himself my brother had begun to heal, but there was no remedy for the bruises on a seven-year-old child's body.
"Fucking hell, this hurts like shit."
Not words suited for a child's voice, but the pain was too much. Twenty years had passed since I became a Blood Jiangshi and lost all sensation of pain, yet now the bruises from a wooden sword swung at random hurt worse than the agony of dying.
"That dogshit household. The father was garbage, so the son is garbage too."
I committed filial impiety without a hint of shame. There was no other way I could endure this unfairness I was feeling for the first time in ages.
"A family with a dog's lineage, and yet...."
It was true that my dead mother, whose name I don't even want to speak, provided the cause. But Baek Su-gwang wasn't exactly a good man either. And that legitimate son Baek Bo-jun wasn't even my mother's child in truth, but my mother's younger sister's—
Young Master Seong-gi—!!
Where are you!!
"Ah."
Clan retainers began rushing out one by one to search for me.
Some retainers in the distance didn't bother hiding their annoyance as they went through the motions of searching. They were clearly among those who knew the truth, bit by bit.
'If I get caught, I'll get beaten half to death. Better run.'
I couldn't afford to be beaten into the ground until the day I finally fled the clan. A seven-year-old child was far too young to muster the courage to leave home, but for someone who had already escaped this house once, steeling my resolve was a piece of cake.
'The problem is internal energy.'
Internal energy is what gives a child's body stamina comparable to a robust youth. But what power could a child possess when, though born to a martial clan, he hadn't even properly received a single mind method?
'A life started over, and it's already going sideways.'
In the life I could call a previous existence, my bones and sinews were twisted. In this life, it seems my qi meridians will be twisted instead.
'Still beats getting beaten to death.'
I turned my body. Government guards patrolled nearby with torches in hand, and from their expressions, they were growing rather irritated with the clan retainers roaming about searching for me.
If I'm caught, I die. Their eyes, thick with annoyance, were filled with killing intent toward me.
In other words, the moment the government soldiers got hold of me, I'd be dragged straight back to the clan. I had no interest in that future. I steadied my breathing and looked beyond the fortress wall.
Shaaah—
A river vast as the sea flowed gently. Beneath the sheer fortress wall, no one would care much about one child falling.
"...Bursting Blood."
I forcibly roused the pitiful scrap of internal qi accumulated in this child's body. I steadied my breath again and again as I hammered at the closed blood meridians.
—If only your bones and sinews hadn't been ruined, you'd have at least reached first-rate.
"I can't repeat the same life."
Throw myself into the river, my only escape route, and gamble?
Or surrender quietly to the clan and have my bones and sinews smashed so thoroughly that even the possibility of first-rate is cut off?
"Shit. If I died once, am I gonna die twice?"
Thump.
I threw myself from the top of the fortress wall. My face reflected on the dark river below was, perhaps because it hadn't been ruined yet, rather decent-looking.
'So this is what I looked like before my face was destroyed.'
Splash!
Just before hitting the water, I barely managed to curl my body into a ball and plunged into the river.
* * *
"Eh? What's that?"
Sam-gu, a man with a thick, bushy beard who made his living gathering medicinal herbs in the mountains, cried out in shock at something floating down the river.
"Good grief, another body coming down!"
The small form floating with only its back above water seemed at first like an animal. But as time passed, Sam-gu realized it was a child.
"What a wretched age we live in. How could... tsk, tsk."
There was a reason people warned against leaving children by the water. Sam-gu pressed his palms together and prayed at the sight of what looked unmistakably like a drowned child drifting downstream.
"In your next life, may you—what the hell, he's alive?!"
"Puha!"
The boy lifted his head and expelled a breath. Then he plunged his head back beneath the surface. As if holding his breath for a long stretch and only briefly inhaling, the boy was 'enduring'—keeping himself from drowning.
"Hold on just a moment!"
Sam-gu pulled a rope from the pouch where he stored his herbs. It wasn't a very long rope, but it was just barely long enough to reach where the boy was drifting.
Fwoosh.
As Sam-gu hurled the rope from a distance, the boy's movements, which had been drifting motionless with only his back showing, suddenly changed.
Splash, splash!
The boy swam over like a seal, each movement desperate with the will to live. Sam-gu winced as the current stirred by the boy's strokes kept pushing the rope away.
"Grab hold!"
Snatch! The boy stretched out his arm and seized the rope. Sam-gu hastily pulled on the rope and dragged the boy onto dry land.
"Are you all right?! Kid, get a hold of yourself!!"
"...Where is this?"
Oh? The boy's unchildlike speech unsettled Sam-gu.
His clothes clearly did not suggest the scion of a prestigious clan, yet there was a strange, unrecognizable aura about him—one that seemed to press down on others.
"Th-this is...."
"Thank you for saving me, good sir. I nearly died for want of internal energy. Whew."
"...Internal energy? D-don't tell me?!"
Sam-gu shrieked and stumbled backward in shock at the boy calmly rising to his feet.
"A transcendent master who has returned to youth?!"
"......Ha."
The boy pointed at himself with a dumbfounded face. An old, worn book titled Reborn Sword Emperor Volume 2 lay near Sam-gu.
"You've immersed yourself a little too deeply in marketplace tales...."
For a moment, the boy grinned and scratched his head.
"You've seen an embarrassing side of me, so I have no choice. I'll have to silence you for good."
"N-no, no! I saw nothing!!"
"......Hmm. Is that so? In that case, I have a request for you."
The boy's eyes as he pressed firmly on Sam-gu's shoulder were unmistakably not those of a child his age. They were filled with the intent to use Sam-gu—the malice of a human being worn down by the harsh currents of the world.
"Let me impose on you until this body of mine reaches adulthood."
Faced with a martial artist's tyranny, Sam-gu found himself unable to say a word.
"In return, I'll teach you martial arts."
"Y-yes!"
A secluded riverbank.
In the moonlit water, the reflection of a middle-aged man performing the Nine Bows Ceremony before a seven-year-old boy shimmered, then vanished into the ripples.