Death Blood Demon Art
Death Blood Demon Art
In a state of no-self.
Even in my previous life, when I had pursued magic, I had never once fallen into such a profound, silent immersion. It took hold of my body completely. The dark red orb within my dantian spun along my blood vessels and drew in the surrounding death qi like a magnet, while my dantian devoured that energy with manic hunger, as though someone had flung water across a desert.
How long had I gone on like that? By the time simply circulating energy felt as natural as breathing, my consciousness snapped back to reality with a faint jolt.
When I slowly opened my eyes, the world before me was entirely different from before.
“What the hell? Where did everybody go?”
The training ground, which had been buzzing with noise, was now eerily empty. More than half of it had cleared out, either because the gifted trainees had already finished their circulation or because the failures, unable to properly manage their internal cultivation, had injured themselves internally.
In that dazed confusion, a shadow fell across me.
I looked up to find the chief instructor staring down at me.
“Four shichen.”
His voice was unusually grave.
“When others succeeded in a few minor circulations and strutted off, you fell into no-self. To sink into such a state during your very first breath-regulating cultivation... your talent is impressive.”
He knew I hadn’t simply been slow; I had been training at a density several times greater than the others.
“Have you been standing here this whole time?”
“No-self is not an experience that comes easily. Besides, if someone were to disturb you during breath-regulating cultivation, you could suffer internal injuries.”
Which meant the chief instructor had stood guard beside me for four shichen.
I had decided I would kill him someday, and yet here he was protecting me. It left me with a rather complicated feeling.
“The elder has been waiting. Come with me.”
I followed the chief instructor to the front of the platform, where the elder was leaning back in his chair, staring fixedly at me.
“Oh? You’ve grown rather a lot.”
The elder narrowed his eyes and extended his staff, tapping me lightly on the chest.
The moment it touched me, a chill current slipped along the tip and penetrated my body.
He’s probing my energy!
In an instant, I shoved the death qi deep into my dantian and covered it with the aura of the Blood Pill.
But I had only just finished my breath-regulating cultivation, and I hadn’t fully sorted out my energy yet.
The faint residue of death qi I hadn’t managed to process brushed against the elder’s force.
“...!”
The elder’s brow twitched. Cold sweat poured down my spine.
At the elder’s level, he would certainly have noticed that alien energy. I wondered what sort of reaction he’d have.
“Hmm... strange.”
The elder murmured softly.
“Death qi clings to your body. It’s too murky to be yin qi, and too still to be demonic qi.
Were you born with a body that can contain death qi?”
Thankfully, the elder had not realized I was actively wielding death qi.
He seemed to have simply judged me to be constitutionally unusual.
“Heh-heh-heh, interesting. Now I’m curious how you’ll grow.
Very well. Since you’ve shown me such an amusing sight by falling into no-self, I’ll give you a gift.”
The elder tossed a worn book from within his robes.
“Heh-heh, this is a manual called Death Blood Demon Art, an internal cultivation method left behind by a believer whose body could accumulate death qi just like yours.”
The book he had thrown me was stained with the dark red traces of blood.
The chief instructor, who had been watching from the side, had a flicker of unrest in his eyes.
He opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something, then lowered his head, perhaps after sensing the elder’s chilling aura.
“Heh-heh, survive, and we’ll meet again.”
The elder left. Had that been the gift all along?
As soon as he was gone, the chief instructor spoke with a serious expression.
“Death Blood Demon Art is a martial art founded centuries ago by the third Blood Demon, who mastered death qi.
It is also a martial art no one has ever managed to cultivate since every disciple who attempted it was instead devoured by death qi and died.”
He was the sort of man who couldn’t care less whether children died or not.
So what was the meaning of those words now?
“A sect’s loss is the death of talent. Be careful as you learn it.”
Well, the chief instructor was a Blood Cult man through and through. Of course he wouldn’t be pleased to see talented members of the Blood Cult die.
“I won’t die.”
After bowing to the chief instructor, I returned to my place.
When I got back, Jin Sohee hurried over and clutched at my sleeve.
“...Don’t learn that. I heard the assistants whispering. No one who’s tried it has ever survived.”
I gently pried her hand away and turned the pages.
“Don’t worry. You know I’m different.”
As I flipped through the book and read the words written by that third Blood Demon, I found myself nodding repeatedly.
This third Blood Demon guy... he’s a genius.
He understood that death qi was an energy stronger than any other.
And so he had laid careful traps to prevent others from recklessly reaching for that absolute power.
Nowhere in the formula for Death Blood Demon Art was there any method for easing the side effect of life force growing murky and slowly rotting away.
In the end, anyone who learned this secret manual would continue to decay and die as they cultivated more and more death qi. No wonder no one had ever succeeded.
So this bastard suppressed it and dulled the backlash, huh.
That was the difference. The third Blood Demon had reduced the side effects by suppressing death qi, but in the end, he still died.
But that wasn’t the answer. A necromancer is one who rules death. To truly wield death qi, one had to accept it in full and dominate it.
Still, in a world with no complete knowledge, to have achieved this much... he deserves to be called a genius.
I turned to the next page of the manual. From there on, it contained the applications of death qi that the third Blood Demon had researched over a lifetime.
They were crude ideas, the sort one might expect from an ancient necromancer from a primitive age, but mixed in were some remarkably ingenious concepts that made me slap my knee and laugh.
He uses blood infused with death qi to flood his veins and explosively increase physical ability?
It was an idea a necromancer would never have imagined. Necromancer battles were usually fought through soldiers, with the caster supporting from the rear.
By contrast, this third Blood Demon had designed everything on the assumption that he would personally throw himself into the fight.
If a necromancer was a one-man legion, then the third Blood Demon was more like a walking calamity.
“Interesting. Really interesting.”
A faint smile spread across my lips. If I fused the knowledge from my previous life with this grotesque martial art, I might even surpass the days when I had been the King of the Dead.
I immediately sat down cross-legged and began circulating the formula of Death Blood Demon Art.
Wooooong—!
Before, I had simply stored death qi within my body, but Death Blood Demon Art was different.
Because it infused death qi into flowing blood, that energy spread throughout the entire body.
And once I operated Blood Meridian Circulation, my power would increase even without actively absorbing death qi.
This is insane.
I no longer had to rely on the necromancer’s old method of only being able to use power after absorbing death qi. Even if there were no death qi nearby, I could still grow stronger.
That meant I had no real limits anymore.
.
.
.
Night deepened.
I had lost track of time entirely, focusing only on growing stronger.
As I mastered Death Blood Demon Art, my skin grew even paler than before, while my eyes shone a deeper, more vivid red.
It was a satisfying time.
Within my dantian, a vast sea of death qi lay sleeping, far beyond anything I had possessed before.
“Are you all right...?”
Jin Sohee, who had been watching me from the corner, asked quietly.
“More than all right.”
“Then are you leaving now?”
By then, there were only a few children left in the training ground. Everyone else had already learned Blood Meridian Circulation and gone.
Something about leaving this place supposedly marked the moment one truly became a member of the Blood Cult, or so they said, but I still had work left to do here.
“I’m going to do more breath-regulating cultivation before I leave.”
Once I left the training ground, I might be moved somewhere else. If that happened, I’d have to abandon the death qi in this place behind.
What a waste.
Death qi was the source of power. If I absorbed all the death qi in this land, I’d be strong enough to test myself against the chief instructor.
More than that, thanks to the formula of Death Blood Demon Art, I could absorb death qi even more efficiently, so I should drain as much as possible before I left.
And so I once again devoted myself to breath-regulating cultivation and to absorbing the death qi of this land.
.
.
.
How much time passed?
By the time the thick candles in the training ground had nearly burned down to stubs, I opened my eyes at the sound of someone’s presence.
“Chief Instructor?”
When I looked up, the chief instructor was standing in the middle of the empty training ground with his arms folded.
“Congratulations on surviving. Still, it’s time for you to leave.”
His voice echoed through the silent hall.
I got to my feet and loosened my body a little. My joints cracked all over with a series of crisp pops.
Because I had absorbed death qi to the very limit, my body felt as light as a feather, while my dantian felt heavier than I could describe.
“Looks like everyone’s gone.”
“The little leech who kept sticking to you was sent ahead through the assistants.”
If he’d been sent ahead, then there was obviously a reason he’d kept only me behind.
The chief instructor was fiddling with the hilt of his sword.
Ah. So that was it.
I could safely define the swordmasters of my previous life as lunatics.
Maybe there was some instinct in them that, once they grew stronger, compelled them to test that strength. They always came at me, only to confirm I was weaker than them before leaving this world behind.
And now there was another man before me who was roughly equal to a swordmaster.
Wherever you went in this world, swordsmen were all the same.
“Aren’t you curious how far that bizarre power of yours can reach?”
A cool fighting spirit gleamed in his eyes. It was curiosity about the martial art known only to the third Blood Demon, along with a desire to test the talent of a genius.
I stood still and looked back at him.
A test, huh...
Not a bad offer. Now that I had mastered Death Blood Demon Art and added the knowledge from my previous life on top of it, I was curious myself how much of my strength would actually work against a master of this world.
A man of the chief instructor’s caliber would not kill me, and even if I fought with everything I had, I wouldn’t die either, so he was the safest punching bag I could ask for.
On top of that, it was a chance to observe the Blood Cult’s martial arts directly from a master.
A chance to learn how the swordmasters of my previous life differed from the martial artists of this world, and to discover the true source of their destructive power.
“You won’t kill me, will you?”
“Of course not.”
“That’s good enough for me.”
A swordsman worthy of being compared to the swordmasters of this world.
How much would my power actually work against him, I wondered?