Blood Demon Star
It had started on a certain day.
Kang Mu-jin first began to sense that something was wrong on the day he completed the Seven Plum Blossom Sword.
The Mount Hua Sect's sole-transmitted martial art. Master the Seven Plum Blossom Sword, and seven plum blossoms would bloom with every swing of the blade, their fragrance drifting along the steel in a subtle, lingering trail. The Realm of Sword Fragrance—a plane of the sword that awaited, naturally and inevitably, at the very peak of Mount Hua's sword arts.
So he had believed it waited.
He took pride in having bloomed all seven flowers to perfection. This was not arrogance; it was a judgment he could make precisely because other Martial Arts Awakeners of Mount Hua techniques existed in the world. Among the Mount Hua Awakeners in the country, most could not produce even a single blossom, let alone seven. The Realm of Sword Fragrance was not some ultimate state that existed only in fantasy. To be sure, it was a plane most ordinary practitioners could never dream of reaching—but for a student of Mount Hua's sole-transmitted sword arts who had attained the level of a master, it was simply the next step that had to be taken.
And yet, even with the flowers in bloom, his sword carried no fragrance.
...It must be my own failing.
Not a trace of plum blossom scent—only the fishy tang of blood that greeted him each time he cut down an enemy. At first, he assumed his belief that he had completed the Seven Plum Blossom Sword was nothing more than a delusion born of arrogance, the pride of a young man hailed as a genius before his time.
So he tried harder.
Whenever a dungeon opened, he was the first to throw himself in and carve down monsters. When they attacked, he stood at the front; when they retreated, he fought from the rear. Rest, hobbies—such things did not exist for him. When there was no hunter work, he swung his sword in the training hall and nothing else. Rest was sword training. Hobbies were sword training. The name of the young genius Kang Mu-jin became firmly known, but that, too, was merely a small reputation that grew out of the process.
No matter how he swung his sword. No matter how many monsters he cut down. The thirst would not stop. The hours spent feeling that thirst were more agonizing than the brutal training itself, and the days grew so relentless that the guild master of Sungmuryeon Guild, unable to watch any longer, took to managing his schedule personally.
In those days of solitary devotion to the sword, Kang Mu-jin came to a realization.
Martial Arts Awakeners. Unlike true Murim warriors, Awakeners had no internal qi. Mana—or awakening power. Was it that the flowers refused to give their fragrance to those who wielded strength handed to them for free by some unknown benefactor?
In that darkness with no visible exit, Kang Mu-jin had to find a way through somehow.
Martial arts.
A leap of logic. Martial arts began when human beings first crossed weapons against one another. Therefore, monsters would not do. Only warriors measuring their martial skill against one another, correcting and complementing each other, could leap to higher realms.
And so Kang Mu-jin went searching for opponents—those with whom he could cross swords and test his arts against theirs.
And then he understood.
In this world, there were no warriors. There were only hunters. To Awakeners and hunters alike, martial arts were nothing more than a means of putting food on the table—a weapon for carving up monsters. Unlike Kang Mu-jin, not one of them wanted a sparring match where their weaknesses might be exposed, and a duel to the death was out of the question entirely. Every Awakener he approached treated the quietly visiting Kang Mu-jin as an eccentric and drove him away.
Days of despair. An insurmountable wall—just as the old man of Mount Hua had, he spent those days in despair before a sheer cliff that reached the heavens.
...Right.
Kang Mu-jin knew it too. That he was merely an anachronistic freak, and that they were the normal ones. That he was the mad one, and they were the sane ones. That they were hunters, while he was not.
Through exceptional talent and relentless effort, Kang Mu-jin was steadily growing stronger. Perhaps if he had simply kept cutting down monsters and training, he might have found his answer one day. But he was impatient. Because the more he witnessed the old man of Mount Hua's endless questions in his recurring dreams, the more unbearable his thirst became.
A concept that should only have existed in Murim. A disease that gnawed at a warrior's heart. Not knowing the concept of the Heart Demon—that was Kang Mu-jin's misfortune.
One day, someone of unknown identity came to find him. That someone whispered: We will support the Bomb Demons. All you need to do is help disguise them as Sungmuryeon hunters. And if you do, you will obtain the moment you have craved for so long.
Kang Mu-jin was mad—but he was a madman who remained coldly lucid. Under normal circumstances, he would have scoffed at the absurd proposal, seized the messenger, and dug out whoever stood behind them.
...But the thirst was overwhelming.
Yes. That day, truly, could only be described as a day the demon had taken hold.
When Kang Mu-jin opened his eyes, a snowfield stretched before him, dyed pure white all the way to the horizon.
"...!"
Snow piled up past his ankles. Each time the blowing snow struck his protective coat, a faint chill pierced through its insulation. Only a tiny handful of Awakeners had ever reached the realm of Cold and Heat Immunity, impervious to extremes of temperature. Kang Mu-jin raised the mana within his body and slowly drove out the cold.
"Is this... a dungeon?"
It was a snowfield—but a snowfield laced with bizarre scenery. In the far distance, a massive building stood embedded upside down in the ground. Medieval castle walls ringed the snowfield, their interiors hollowed empty, while tree-like things sprouted up, marked with strange patterns he had never seen in his life. Objects and environments from every era, every civilization, every world, all mashed together into one contradictory landscape.
"The Superposition Phenomenon...!"
This was no dungeon. Strictly speaking, it was not even a gate. For humanity, hungry for resources, it was the worst possible phenomenon an Indefinite Gate could produce. When a mirror shatters, its fragments reflect every space at once. Perhaps it was because of that rampage—a rift that failed to become a gate, overlaying the visages of countless other worlds into a single phantasm. He had not entered a gate. A tangible phantasm had burst forth from the rift and swallowed reality whole. It was a temporary phenomenon, nothing more than a space that would naturally disperse after a short time.
"The guild master is going to lose his mind."
The master of Sungmuryeon would already have more than enough trouble thanks to his atrocity—and now the Indefinite Gate they had strained to win in the first bid had been consumed by a Superposition Phenomenon that would vanish before long. A faint, hollow smile touched Kang Mu-jin's lips.
"...Jin! Yu-jin! Please... stay with me! Ah, what do I do..."
A desperate voice. The Superposition Phenomenon had only overlaid reality's space—no one present had been transported to different coordinates. And so, naturally, Namgung Ye-rin was right there beside him. And beneath her, a girl whose face had drained ghost-white.
Namgung Ye-rin's blue-tinged lips trembled as she covered the girl with the protective coat she had stripped off, trying desperately to preserve what warmth remained. How fragile could a body be? The red eyes were hollow, and the breathing he could sense through his qi perception was fading by the moment.
...Was it a coincidence?
The girl's sudden intervention. And the Indefinite Gate's rampage. He had assumed, naturally, that the cause lay with the girl—and yet that very girl was dying in the blizzard. So Kang Mu-jin set the question aside. He chose to focus on the thirst that consumed him now.
"Take your stance, Namgung Ye-rin. The fight is not over."
Namgung Ye-rin's expression twisted—the coat she had given up for the girl was the only protection her own body had left.
"You... you insane bastard! She's dying right now!"
"All the more reason to take your stance. There is only one way you can save that child."
Kang Mu-jin leveled his sword, gleaming a vivid blue against the snowfield.
"Defeat me."
Furious sparks flew from Namgung Ye-rin's eyes. Rage became the engine of her strength, driving her body upright—but in that instant, the wound across her abdomen sprayed hot blood into her eyes. Namgung Ye-rin's legs buckled, and she sank into the snow.
"You lunatic... Why... why... would you go this far..."
"...Why?"
Why did he go this far? His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His throat was parched. Thirst. An eternal thirst that left no room in his mind for anything else. The source of his awakened martial art lay in his dreams. It came from a failure who repeated meaningless questions endlessly before a cliff.
"...I must know."
What that failure had wanted to see. The thing beyond—formless, beyond imagination, its very existence impossible to predict.
"...I must show them."
To that failure. Even though Kang Mu-jin had ascended to a supreme realm he could never be certain he would reach, he could not overcome defeat. To the old warrior lost in despair. To the old master lost in despair.
"This is what martial arts truly are! This is what the pinnacle of martial arts truly is—!!!"
A longing that took madness for its kindling and blazed like a signal fire. Kang Mu-jin could not have known—but that longing, lacquered in desperation and madness, had surely reached the heavens.
Kuuuuuu—
The snowfield trembled, and a violent blizzard surged in like a wave. Crack. At the sound of something splitting, Kang Mu-jin found himself looking up at the sky.
"What the—the sky...!"
The sky was cracking. The Superposition Phenomenon was like a shattered mirror—it could shift from moment to moment, reflecting fragments of different worlds. But this was different. Something was different.
Craaack— crcrcrcrack!
The snowfield's sky, shrouded in blizzard, split open. What lay revealed was a night sky where countless starlights flowed like a river. And blooming across it in blood-red light, a single massive constellation. A blood-drenched phoenix, wings spread, soaring beyond the heavens themselves.
The Blood Phoenix.
Stars he had never seen. A constellation he had never seen. Kang Mu-jin had never known anything about astronomy to begin with. But the moment he saw that blooming starlight, tears of blood welled up and streamed clearly down both his eyes, and the star's name struck deep into his mind as if whispered there.
"The Blood... the Blood Demon Star...!"
The star, called by its name, blazed crimson. And in that moment, his spirit transcended his flesh.
"You there. Why do you gaze at the sky?"
A chill ran down his spine. The voice came not from the sky but from the ground, and it froze him to the marrow. Kang Mu-jin's trembling gaze sank slowly downward.
Blood-red eyes, curved in a thin smile. And within them—the Sea of Blood. In those pupils, Kang Mu-jin saw a vision of himself drowning to the neck in a raging sea of blood, thrashing desperately.
This was—this was nothing more than the skin of a young girl, worn like a disguise—
"Is not the pinnacle you sought right here?"