2. That Damned School
……The late nineteenth century, when every conceivable breed of demon and monster, eccentric and immortal — East and West alike — crawled out of the woodwork.
Museon, the Martial Immortal, announced himself to the world by slaying the Heavenly Demon of Zhongyuan in a single stroke, declaring himself not merely the greatest under heaven, but the greatest in all recorded history.
Then he conjured a landmass twice the size of Seoul and lifted it into the sky.
Permanently, at that.
The world reeled at the miracle. Nations trembled in fear that he might drop the thing onto their own territory, and even those who dared not fathom the depths of his power were left in utter confusion before this incomprehensible being.
But the panic was short-lived.
Before long, the immortal opened a school on the sky island he had named Seondo — the Isle of the Immortal.
Mages, martial artists, anomalists — everyone in the world was baffled. What on earth was the man thinking?
Regardless of the world's opinion, Seondo was a school on which the entirety of the sky island's resources had been lavished. And that historic, flawless institution finally began recruiting its first students.
……And so time flowed on, and a hundred years passed since Seondo first opened its gates.
An entire generational cycle had turned over in every faction of the world. Magic and martial arts alike — every industry had been filled to the brim with Seondo graduates.
So outstanding were they that the royal families and great houses of every nation strained at the leash to send their children to the academy. Even the Heavenly Demon Cult, which had burned with vengeance for generations, sent scions of its direct bloodline to study there — proof positive that Seondo had become a truly prestigious institution.
And through it all, the raison d'être of the world's undisputed foremost academy never changed. Not once.
The strongest.
"───It is COMBAT!!"
Andrej Dragonov, Ancient Dragon and Vice Principal of the academy, bellowed the words as he stamped his foot.
KWAAAAAAM! Every student in the auditorium felt their organs rattle as the shockwave of his qi slammed into them.
This was all in the middle of the entrance ceremony presentation.
"Fight well, and every problem in existence can be solved! If a problem goes unsolved, it is because you are simply too WEAK! Pathetic! But fear not! For the next three years, I shall beat that most universal of solutions into your skulls!"
The Vice Principal Dragon pressed on without pause. His crushing qi washed over the gymnasium again and again, and his speech showed no sign of ending.
"You, the 101st class! I hear you are promising enough to be called the Golden Cohort! But do not grow arrogant! Your goal, upon graduation, is to surpass ME! Strive! And strive again! The education system for that very purpose is already in place! The medical staff is more than sufficient — they will keep you alive even when you beg to die, so kill and be killed to your hearts' content! That is all!"
When the welcoming address finally ended, the cadets, barely recovering their composure, clapped half-heartedly.
Yet even that applause carried considerable force, and thunderous cracks echoed through every corner of the auditorium.
Clapclapclapclap─!
"……Bleeeurgh!"
And thus the proud son of the Republic of Korea — now reduced to a comparatively frail weakling — thought to himself as he coughed up blood.
'……Son of a bitch, I'm dying! I'm actually dying! Huurghgh!!'
I had returned to the school from hell.
After that came the welcome address from the freshman representative, the escorting of visiting dignitaries from around the world, briefings on tomorrow's classes — one thing after another.
But my insides were wrecked and my ears were ringing, so I let most of it wash over me. I couldn't have listened if I'd wanted to — partly because none of it made sense, and mostly because I genuinely thought I was about to die.
"……How did I ever put up with this before?"
Had I collapsed right there at the Vice Principal Dragon's stamping foot?
Honestly, I'd nearly fainted today too. I barely held on, but between you and me, I desperately wanted to just keel over.
The only reason I forced myself through it was that I refused to hear what I'd heard in my past life — 'Aw, did you hear? The kid couldn't even survive the welcome speech and passed out. What a shame.'
Decades of hard-earned seniority demanded better than that. My pride wouldn't allow it.
"Ugh, I feel like death."
Still, there was nothing to be done about my battered state, so I dragged my modestly packed suitcase along and limped onward.
The campus I was seeing for the first time in ages was obscenely, offensively vast.
Groping through faded memories, I wandered for a solid thirty minutes before finally reaching the dormitory.
*Beep* — Combat Department, Rank 298: Choi Gangjun
"Wow."
I opened the door and stepped inside to be greeted by a super-luxury penthouse spanning roughly 1,550 square feet.
A private dormitory, prepared for me and me alone. I'd known about it long in advance, and it still blew me away.
This school poured support into its students on an absurd, almost criminal scale.
If my entrance scores had been higher, I'd probably have scored a higher-tier penthouse, or a longer list of perks and amenities.
Not that my current lodgings were anything less than lavish. Three bedrooms for one occupant — downright wasteful, really.
"Maybe I'll use two of them as guest rooms."
Not that I could imagine ever inviting anyone over. It hadn't happened last time, after all. I hadn't had any friends.
"Man, I really lived like an idiot."
Remembering my past life, I smiled bitterly and headed into the largest room to unpack, just as before. The bed, the desk, the wardrobe — everything was already furnished, so I simply filled the closet with clothes for the holidays, and that was that. Unpacking complete.
Huh. That was simple.
Feeling an inexplicable sense of liberation in the neatly arranged room, I threw myself onto the bed.
Whumph─… The dormitory bed, after so long, was nothing short of heavenly. The cushioning was divine.
Luxuries like this had been hard to come by on the battlefield, and I'd rarely had the leisure to rest properly anyway.
"……Finally, a little piece of heaven."
Surrendering myself to the most cloud-soft bed in the world, I at last began to sort through my thoughts.
Why had I survived? More precisely — how had I traveled back through time?
Regression.
I hadn't merely died and come back to life. I'd returned decades into the past.
I'd experienced my share of strange wonders in my day, but this was on an entirely different level. No matter how many mighty beings populated this world, it was a miracle so staggering that no one would even begin to guess how it could be possible.
They say even a dog rolling in muck prefers life over death, and sure, being alive was good — but it was bewildering.
Yes. It was good, all things considered.
"……So does the reason even matter?"
The thought occurred to me: as long as this wasn't some illusion, who cared what the reason was?
Whoever had brought me back to life, and whatever price they'd extracted for it — it was still, obviously, a hell of a lot better than being dead.
And judging by how vividly I still recalled the sensation of brushing against the threshold of death when the Vice Principal Dragon's qi had struck me, this hardly seemed like a hallucination.
Yes. My instincts were telling me.
This was real.
With that certainty settled, my muddled mind cleared considerably. The situation offered no clues whatsoever — the kind of mystery that might never yield a single thread to pull on, no matter how long I searched.
And I'd always been the type to invest in things that produced definite results, rather than waste time spinning my wheels.
"Right, I can think this part over slowly, later."
And so I resolved to worry less about how I'd come back, and more about how I was going to live from here on.
'……One thing's for certain — I'm back at the Academy.'
Seondo, the Isle of the Immortal — that damned prestigious institution that had enrolled me under the pretense of giving me a proper education, only to expel me six months in.
The school founded by the greatest immortal in all of history stood, as of the twenty-first century, as the world's foremost academy. It would remain so even ten years from now, when the Great War — the Third Orthodox-Demon War — broke out.
Graduate, and you wouldn't just live in a super-luxury penthouse; you'd be treated like royalty anywhere on the planet. That was the caliber of this place.
With my past-life experience under my belt, I was confident I could live better than before even without graduating — but why suffer through the long way around when the express lane to the elite was right there?
There was no reason whatsoever to decline.
Plenty of heavyweights numbered among Seondo's faculty and student body, and top-ranked students were awarded rare elixirs as scholarships. For building strength ahead of the coming Great War, it was the perfect proving ground.
……The only problem was that graduation — that miserable, godforsaken graduation — was obscenely difficult to achieve.
The so-called world's foremost academy, Seondo. Its Combat Department, assembled by that damned school from the finest talents across the entire globe.
An elite collective of three hundred students, each seventeen years old and standing at the Peak Realm or knocking on its very door.
For the next three years, starting tomorrow, I would have to live a life of killing and being killed alongside the greatest monsters the world had to offer.
Worse still, this insane school — gilded with the plaque of "World's Foremost Academy" — had made us fight on day one. This was the Combat Department, after all; lessons were to be learned through actual combat, or so they said.
Truer words were never spoken. Unfortunately, for the current me, it was a bit of a problem.
"I'm terrifyingly weak right now."
I was a career rookie with plenty of hard knocks behind me, sure — but could I really survive in this arena?
I was in such hopeless shape that those weak-willed thoughts crept in on their own.
And no wonder. The me of this era knew nothing about how to train properly and had no experience to speak of. A clueless earthworm who had cultivated blindly, without a proper master or even a decent training manual.
My level had been scraped together just barely enough to clear the entrance requirements. If this body slammed headlong into kids who'd been raised on rare elixirs since childhood, the outcome was obvious.
"……Well, nothing I can do about it now."
The mess dumped by your past self is yours to clean up, present self. That's just how it works.
And if I lost tomorrow, or got expelled within the first semester, I knew exactly how miserable I'd feel about it.
Expulsion was bad enough on its own — but twice in a row, counting my past life? My pride flatly refused.
'Expelled? Like hell. Not happening. Ever.'
And with that, I sprang up from my seat.
It pained me to leave the bed, but wasting an entire day on moping was a luxury I couldn't afford.
"Was the Training Building this way?"
If I wanted to survive, there was only one answer: training.