Knocking on Heaven's Gate
There is no ultimate in the demonic arts, and none may ever reach its summit.
For those who cultivated the demonic arts, only two ends existed: death at an enemy's hand, or death by one's own when the demonic nature within had grown too heavy to bear.
There was a single exception — the founder of the demonic arts. The very sky of the Demonic Path, who first spread those arts across the Nine Provinces and Eight Sovereignties of the rivers and lakes: the Paramount Demon of Heaven and Earth. The Heavenly Demon, Cheonma.
Only the founder had ever surpassed the limits of the demonic arts and set foot in the Transcendent Realm. With that so, how could any who came after ever dare lay hands on the Heavenly Demon's throne?
Countless practitioners hurled themselves at that unreachable peak like moths into flame — some burning with yearning for the ultimate of the martial way, others thrashing in sheer desperation not to die with their minds eaten hollow. Yet not one of them ever so much as caught the hem of the Heavenly Demon's robe. They died in despair without end.
Such was the fate no walker of the demonic path could escape: a miserable death. So bitter was this tragedy that ending one's own life before old age sent the demonic nature rampaging was counted the gentler way to go.
And so, as the history of the rivers and lakes rolled onward, mighty as the Yangtze's current, cultivators beyond counting foundered in blood and tears.
Thus the blood and tears of every demon who never reached the summit, and the dying wish to overcome the limits of the demonic arts, gathered together and condensed into one more demonic art — the Blood Demon Art.
And here stood its inheritor of this age:
Demonic Path, the Hundred Thousand Great Mountains.
Lord of Blood Heaven Castle.
The Greatest Under Heaven.
The Blood Demon — Cheon Yujin.
A bitter wind swept across the wasteland.
Feet planted on nothing but empty air, the long sleeves of his black dragon robe rippling, the Blood Demon gazed down with proud, aloof eyes. The wasteland had become a tomb for the entire martial world: masterless weapons studded the earth, and warriors beyond counting lay heaped like hills, their warmth draining away into the cold.
And so the Blood Demon laughed.
"Behold. Where now are the Nine Dragons, whose martial skill and righteous spirit were said to pierce the heavens? Where are the Seven Demons, whose vicious craft was said to shock all under heaven?"
Nine Dragons and Seven Demons. Of all the supreme masters who had thundered across the rivers and lakes, orthodox and unorthodox alike, who was left standing? A body losing its warmth is no different, whether it belonged to a supreme master or a third-rate fighter.
Across the wasteland over which the Blood Demon gazed in dominion, only two warriors yet remained standing, both feet planted firmly on the ground.
"Come to think of it, the gossips of the murim were forever debating who was the invincible master of the age — and they always bundled the two of you together with Bonjwa."
An old monk in a worn, unadorned kasaya. Gaunt though he seemed — a body of little more than bone — he had not yielded a single step.
Orthodox faction, the Murim Alliance.
Abbot of the Shaolin Temple.
The Demon-Subduing Divine Monk — Hangma-sinseung.
Half-white hair and a heavy beard streamed like a lion's mane. His towering frame — easily twice the size of the old monk — carried the majesty of monstrous strength, the bearing of a man who had walked the road of the hegemon.
Unorthodox faction, the Seven Kills One Palace.
Palace Lord of the First Demon Palace.
The Sword Demon of the Heavenly Gang — Cheongang Geom-ma.
These were the two supreme masters whose names were always the first spoken whenever the greatest under heaven came up for debate.
"Tell me — do you not find it utterly laughable?"
Yet the Blood Demon only allowed a faint sneer to touch his lips as he swept his gaze over the monk and the sword demon, still standing unbowed.
"You huddled together like alley thugs — yet has Bonjwa not stood alone, supreme above heaven and beneath it?"
Alone. He had brought with him not one of the fiendish killers of Blood Heaven Castle in the Hundred Thousand Great Mountains. He had come utterly, entirely alone.
Hollow despair clouded the Divine Monk's wrinkled face; humiliation and disgrace twisted the Sword Demon's features. Not one of Blood Heaven Castle's elites — each whispered to be a demon fallen upon the mortal world — stood upon this field.
The Blood Demon had come alone, while behind the monk and the sword demon had stretched the combined armies of the Murim Alliance and the Seven Kills One Palace. And that host had been annihilated in the span of mere moments. If that was not a warrior's shame, what in the world was?
"Amitabha. Though joining forces and trading turns brings no honor to a warrior, the mountain of wicked karma you have built—"
"How tiresome, listening to this."
One step. The Demon-Subduing Divine Monk — who in his youth had already brought more than half of Shaolin's Seventy-Two Arts to perfection and never once known defeat through all his campaigns to sweep away demons — spewed blood and was blasted backward through the air.
Two steps. Cheongang Geom-ma — hailed as the foremost of the unorthodox path until the Blood Demon revealed his might, the man who had raised the banner of unifying the dark way under one rule and whom all had conceded truly could do it. The demonic sword of that ambitious soul, hegemon turned failure, snapped hollow and went rolling across the dirt.
Three steps.
Silent, the Blood Demon looked around at what remained. He had done nothing but walk. Yet the Blood Demon alone stood unbroken beneath the sky — this was the incomprehensible itself! The monk and the sword demon could not even fathom what had struck them, or whether those strides had truly been martial forms at all; their bodies, pinned to the earth, could do nothing but tremble.
"Why... why...?"
Dead blood burst from the Sword Demon's mouth. Even as it dyed his lips and chin crimson, he pressed on, eyes brimming with terror and outrage.
"How can the gap be this vast?! How — why, WHY...!"
What streamed down Cheongang Geom-ma's face were tears of blood. He had given his every day to the demonic arts; his talent was genius itself, and from youth to this gray age he had never met his match. And yet — why? Why?!
Thud! With a strange boom, the Sword Demon's body was driven into a pit of dust yet again.
"Let it be understood: sparing even your lives, if nothing else, was courtesy toward the heads of your Alliance."
"All of this... for a reason so meager as that...?"
"Of course, that is not all. Someone must be left alive to carry word of what I am about to show you across the rivers and lakes — would you not say?"
Cold eyes, a low voice. Looking upon the Blood Demon as he spoke, the Divine Monk's face froze in anguish.
"Lord of Blood Heaven Castle! What new wickedness do you mean to pile upon your karma now...?!"
"Your blood, and the blood of the two great alliances of the murim — it shall be my fuel."
The Blood Demon let the words hang, then lifted his gaze to the sky above the wasteland, bloody light swirling in his eyes — the sky where dusk was slowly settling, and where the darkness of night would soon descend.
Though they had failed to land a single hand or foot upon the Blood Demon and had been crushed in wretched fashion, the two supreme masters — who had rarely found a rival in all the rivers and lakes — grasped the meaning of those words at once. And so fear and disbelief hammered upon the monk's mind and the demon's mind once more.
The Blood Demon raised his right hand to his chest, and a wind began to blow — not the wasteland's bitter wind, but a wind hot as blood.
Ssssssss—
Drawn by the Blood Demon Art's art of blood command, the blood of the fallen warriors rode that wind and gathered into his right hand.
Thud! Thud! Thud! The blood, still warm with the heat of the living, pulsed like a heart under the pressure of that formless power.
"It cannot be..."
Cheongang Geom-ma cried out as if keening, his soul fled from him.
"Blood Demon! Do you now covet even the throne of the Heavenly Demon...?!"
A realm where the spirit transcends the flesh. A realm beyond birth, age, sickness, and death. A realm where one casts off the limits of humanity and ascends to the seat of the gods. Some called it the Realm of Life and Death, some named it the Transcendent Realm, some revered it as the Realm of Myth — the uttermost extreme of the martial way.
It defied every single definition for one reason alone: across the whole storied history of the murim, only two had ever broken through to the ultimate. Cheon-goe, the Anomaly of Heaven — and Cheonma, the Heavenly Demon.
"As Cheon-goe and Cheonma did before me, so too shall Bonjwa open that gate of heaven and carve his star among theirs."
Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud! The pooling blood pulsed without end — and it was becoming the distillation of murim history itself. Every martial art the warriors of the two great alliances had bled and sweated to master, all of it gathered here to strike the Blood Demon down; the memories of that training, etched into their spilled blood, were being carved one by one, vivid and clear, into the Blood Demon's mind.
"The sky...!"
The Divine Monk, staring entranced at the Blood Demon, tore loose a cry of shock. At the old monk's voice — rent as though split apart — the Sword Demon too looked up at the heavens and sucked in a ragged, empty breath.
The sky, still dyed deep with sunset, was being invaded inch by inch by blackest dark. As though time itself flowed faster over this one wasteland, the world's current was accelerating — night was falling!
Kuuooooo—
The night sky had gone utterly dark. And across it, a river of starlight bloomed into vivid clarity. The Heaven Demon Star and the Heaven Anomaly Star flickered in answer, as if hailing the birth of a new transcendent.
"Behold."
Countless martial arts adrift in his mind rode a long, stately current — fraying, splitting, interweaving — and merged into a single road. The instant he traced that one path of battle through his mind...
"This is the completion of the Blood Demon Art."
Like the great Peng that spans ten thousand li on a single beat of its wings — the crimson sphere hovering above his hand reshaped itself into the form of a phoenix and began to beat its magnificent wings into the night sky.
The Blood Demon Art, complete at last — wings of crimson blood unfurled against the night sky.
When this blood-red phoenix carved its star into the firmament, his spirit would transcend his flesh and — like the Heavenly Demon before him — he would cast off the limits of the demonic arts. At long last, the yearnings and the bitter karma of every demon who had died in despair would be fulfilled!
Trickle.
A fishy taste lingered in his mouth; something hot ran down his chin.
"...What... is this...?"
And that was only the beginning.
Veins of dark blue surfaced across his entire body, swollen so taut they seemed ready to burst through the skin — and when they ruptured, the black dragon robe was dyed red for the first time in its existence, not with an enemy's blood, but his own. The blood-qi that was the wellspring of the Blood Demon Art was boiling over, spilling out faster than he could ever contain.
The end no walker of the demonic path had ever escaped: the rampage of the demonic nature. His spirit was transcending his flesh — yet the flesh, it was plain, would die before the process could be completed.
Then, like a bolt of lightning, a realization tore through the Blood Demon's mind.
There is no ultimate in the demonic arts, and none may ever reach its summit.
For those who cultivated the demonic arts, only two ends existed: death at an enemy's hand, or death by one's own when the demonic nature grew too heavy to bear. One exception — a single one.
The Heavenly Demon Divine Art.
"...My sincerest of tributes to you, Senior Cheonma."
The founder of the demonic arts. But could anyone truly swear that the founder had cultivated a demonic art himself? Why was the Heavenly Demon's legacy a divine art, and not a demonic one? Why, across this long, long history of the murim, had there been only a single exception? Because the art Cheonma had created and cultivated was the Heavenly Demon Divine Art — it had simply never been a demonic art at all.
And the moment he understood why the Heavenly Demon had invented the demonic arts and scattered them across the world, he could only laugh, hollow, applauding all the same. To think the reason countless cultivators had died weeping tears of blood was nothing more than the Heavenly Demon kicking away the ladder behind him!
"...If only..."
If only he had spent his strength searching for a way back home instead.
Memories of days gone by flicker through the Blood Demon's mind like a lantern's shadows — of the time before he fell into this murim where martial arts and inner energy truly existed, when he was an ordinary young man of the modern world named Cheon Yujin.
There had been nothing he would not do for his two young siblings; loved as their big brother through and through, those had been the happiest days of his life. He had enlisted in the army and worried over them daily, and every leave, they came before any friend.
That day was no different. Out on leave, hurrying to see his siblings as fast as his feet would carry him. Then, for no reason he could name, the world had gone black — and when he opened his eyes, it was to this very murim. The last thing he had seen, surely a hallucination, was something like a colossal gate floating in empty air.
Yes — shaped just like the gate standing open before him now...
"...!"
Was it a miracle — heaven answering the wish of a man who had taken even a single step into the transcendent realm? Or was there some other cause, one he himself could never fathom? No matter. It was no hallucination. A gate of unmistakable substance stood right before his eyes!
Whipping onward a body that was fading by the moment, the Blood Demon moved toward the gate that had torn open in the air like a crack in the world.
A body that will die soon regardless.
If he died, at least he would die in his homeland. And perhaps — just perhaps — some slender chance of survival might wait on the other side of the gate.
Before long he felt the crack beginning to swallow his body whole, and as his consciousness slowly dimmed, the Blood Demon suddenly remembered.
Come to think of it, if he went back he would be a deserter — or be dragged straight back into the army. Even the Greatest Under Heaven, it seemed, had things he could never, ever accept.
...The army, though. The army I still hate.
But he never learned. He never knew that with his final thought, the stars of the heavens blazed out all at once.