Foreign Substance Detected
"So... you're not pulling some kind of prank, right? You're seriously telling me my big brother just became an awakener?"
Se-ah pushed back, prodding her deeply furrowed brow with the tip of one finger. Her face radiated pure, unfiltered disbelief. The corner of her lips even twitched, poised to break into a bright, relieved smile the moment I said Just kidding.
How could a little sister make that kind of face at her own big brother!
I, Bonjwa, the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin, felt so wronged I could have vomited blood. I had deliberately demonstrated my progress in the Forged Blood Art as proof. I had shown her, in exhaustive detail, supernatural phenomena no ordinary person could possibly fake. I had already given up on her ever believing that I was once the Blood Demon, the finest under heaven. I had even compromised with myself, settling for the lie that I hadn't recovered my martial arts but had merely awakened. And after all that—after ALL of that—what exactly about the Forged Blood Art, the peerless, supreme, invincible divine technique Bonjwa himself had created, was insufficient to dispel her doubt...!
"Um... big brother? Let's get our story straight for a second. First, try putting yourself in my shoes, okay?"
"...?"
"Say you were sleeping in for the first time in ages, and I come sprinting up to you out of nowhere, yelling that I've become an awakener."
At her prompting, I pictured the scene for a moment.
"And then the awakening ability you demonstrate turns out to be... uhhh... what, exactly? You and everything around you get warm? You're a human hot pack...?"
"Wh-wha—...!!!"
Bonjwa nearly fainted on the spot from his little sister's inhuman, inhumane, immoral, righteous-sect verbal atrocity. A—a—a human hot pack. A human hot pack...!
The heat his body generated while running the Forged Blood Art came purely from overflowing yang energy. Call it a supplementary process that simply accompanied the circulation of qi—nothing more! Never! The purpose of the Forged Blood Art was never to produce a warming effect so one could save on winter heating bills...! And it was summer right now, which stripped the ability of even its reason to exist...!
And yet. Imagining Se-ah's position exactly as she had described it, even Bonjwa, the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin, found himself with nothing to say. He could circulate qi, but emitting it outside the body still eluded him—such were the limits of the Entry Realm. Which meant the only thing he could show her right now was blood qi making his own body warm. ...I can't argue with that, can I?
"G-grrrgh...!!!"
They say that when a man has no rebuttal, the curses come first. This doomed body, eagerly siding with the emotions surging through it, began stomping its feet and huffing in outrage. It was mortifying. If our positions had been reversed, I would have been smirking exactly like that too, the corners of my mouth twitching up and up. Se-ah, winning her argument with dirty facts, was without question the most despicable righteous-sect scum alive...!
As tears began to gather at the corners of this body's eyes, Se-ah flailed her arms in a panic and spoke up.
"Okay, okay! I'm sorry. I get it—so I'll accept that my brother's an awakener. Hot-Pack Awakening—no, wait. A Martial Arts Awakener. Right?"
"N-not a hot paaack...!"
"I said I'm sorry. Well then. You say you're a Martial Arts Awakener, but honestly, I don't know the first thing about martial arts, so... is there anything else you can show me?"
You should at least show some evidence, Se-ah added.
Something to show, is it? At her demand, I crossed my arms with all the swagger I could muster. Se-ah, staring head-on at the grin I was wearing, clenched her fists and shuddered for some reason, but no matter.
Warm yang energy radiating through the body was, again, merely a side effect of the Forged Blood Art. The true power of its Entry Realm lay in what every internal qi art did best—using blood qi to supercharge the body's physical capabilities...!
"Hah. Fix both eyes upon this, Cheon Se-ah, and witness the might of the true martial arts that Bonjwa has reclaimed!"
"What is with that way of talking..."
I ignored my sister's insolent, dumbfounded muttering. Bonjwa, the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin, roused his slow-beating heart. The Forged Blood Art's blood qi surged along his vessels and out into every minor channel of his body, and superhuman strength bloomed at his fingertips as though overflowing.
Bonjwa strode boldly toward an old nemesis—one he had found far harder to overcome than holding the horse stance for a single minute. That nemesis. The pink dumbbell...!
"Hoo, hoo, hoo."
He gripped the pink dumbbell and pumped it up and down with vigor, a single fluid rhythm. With no resistance, no weight to speak of, the arm that cradled superhuman strength defied gravity itself. At a spectacle unthinkable until yesterday, even Se-ah could not close her gaping mouth...!
"Uh... hm."
Thud!
Mouth still hanging open, Se-ah went and fetched something, setting it down in front of me. Bonjwa's expression froze at the sight of that silver-gleaming something—a brand-new dumbbell set. And printed on each end of it, a number. 3KG...!
Its very color had changed in an instant—this dumbbell's bearing was villainy incarnate. But then, Bonjwa had been the Lord of Blood Heaven Castle, commander of monsters far more dreadful than this. Bonjwa, the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin, seized the handle without a flicker of hesitation...!
"Hngh... up! Hngh... up! Huuh, hngh, heaagh, hee... agh!!!"
"Anyone watching would think you were doing a super-heavy deadlift..."
Blood flooded his face like it might explode, burning scarlet. Had someone ground a thousand-pound boulder down onto my palms? Even while suspecting that Se-ah—the craven righteous-sect cur—had tampered with the weight, Bonjwa saw it through to the bitter end. The age when he couldn't even properly hoist a pink dumbbell was over. Toward Se-ah, who was staring at him blankly, Bonjwa puffed out his chest prouder than it had ever been.
"Did you see it, Cheon Se-ah? Superhuman strength, enhanced a full threefold...!"
Blood-wind majesty. Ah, Ma-noe, how I missed him—the faithful strategist who used to weep streams of grateful tears and fling himself prostrate toward all four cardinal directions every single time Bonjwa displayed such grandeur.
Then Se-ah, for some reason, wiped at her eyes and spoke.
"Pathetic...!"
Wh-what. What did she just say? Trapped in this accursed girl's body though he was, he was still her big brother...!
"Grrrgh...!"
"N-no, that slipped out. I mean... well... yeah. Proportionally, that's three times stronger... martial arts awakening... I-I guess it checks out."
She was trembling badly, but acknowledgment had been won. Acknowledged, regardless.
"Haa... So what you're telling me, big brother, is that you want to register as an awakener?"
"Yeah...!"
"Seeing you go this far, no lecture of mine was ever going to stop you."
Nod. His head whipped up and down, and Se-ah's sigh deepened another notch.
"Fine... honestly, I'd rather talk you out of it. But whatever—registering as an awakener and becoming a hunter are two separate things."
"Does that mean...!"
There was a distinctly negative undertone about the hunter part, but that was a problem for after the registration was cleared. Once he was registered, her psychological wall was bound to crumble a little.
"Okay, then we're going right now. I'll be with you, so nothing bad can happen."
"...R-right now?"
Could awakener registration really be dispatched in the space of a lightning flash? I had drawn up grand plans but never actually researched the process, and for a moment I was thrown into disarray. In every novel, registration meant sitting an exam, hunting illusory monsters, demonstrating your power before a panel...! Wasn't there supposed to be a convoluted application process first, then an appointed date, something along those lines?
"Where exactly are we going...?"
Se-ah smiled.
"The public health center."
"...Huh?"
And so we came to the public health center. Not some special government facility—the ordinary neighborhood kind. It wasn't a busy hour, and amid the sparse trickle of visitors, Se-ah and I waited with the number tickets we'd pulled from the machine.
And then I had to ruffle the hair hidden inside my hood and wail.
"This is... not what I imagined... at all...!" Who on earth registers as an awakener at a public health center, clutching a number ticket!
"──Gal!!! This isn't... this isn't how hunter stories goooo...!!!"
"Big brother..."
It felt precisely like watching martial artists locked in a life-or-death duel at an inn, only for government troops to come crashing in and drag everyone off in chains on property-destruction charges...!
Se-ah, looking vaguely embarrassed, folded her number ticket for no particular reason. "Awakener registration is just a check to confirm you can use mana. Of course it's nothing special."
"Then why a health center...?"
"The government manages awakeners. Guilds handle hunter autonomy and administration. Honestly, it's a bit of a look-the-other-way arrangement, but... there was a lot of ugliness back in the day. Legal trouble. Public safety."
A bitter smile. Come to think of it, Se-ah was a first-generation hunter with a full ten years of service. It felt as though I had brushed against a fragment of that severed decade I knew nothing about, and it left me a little uneasy.
Ding-dong.
"Your turn, big brother. I'll be right here, so go on."
"O-okay...!"
A short while later, a civil official guided me into a room like a vast solitary cell. Inside stood a strange machine, shaped much like the one I'd seen in Rachel's laboratory, fitted with a crystal orb that practically shouted place your hand here. The examiner from the registration office—a bespectacled man with an official's badge on a lanyard—pointed at the orb.
"Just rest your hand there and move your mana, and you're done. Then you only need to sign. Simple, right?"
"Um, w-well..."
"And don't worry if your awakening power is faint. This machine can detect even the weakest trace of mana."
I stilled the Forged Blood Art's energy and approached the crystal orb. Mercifully, the machine appeared to read the flow through circulation alone—no external emission required. He had already brought the Forged Blood Art's Entry Realm to complete mastery. He would dispatch this absurdly simple procedure in a single stroke and, from this very day, set out toward the hunter's path as a registered awakener...!
Beeeeep!
"...Huh?"
"Foreign substance detected."
No. Hold on.
Beeeeep!
"Foreign substance detected."
A long silence descended on the room. The examiner removed his glasses, polished them with a handkerchief, and sighed.
"Haa... This happens all the time, honestly. Minors who've swallowed some counterfeit mana-boosting drug—the kind that can scrape past a registration scan—turning up like this."
"N-no, that's not—I mean, huh?"
The machine kept shrieking its obnoxious warning beeps. And then a thought from not long ago surfaced. In this world, devoid of murim and populated only by Martial Arts Awakeners, surely no human being could tell internal qi apart from mana. The distinction between internal qi and mana. Yes—no person could. But where people failed, a machine had been built that could...!
"W-w-w-w-wait a second...!"
Humanity had, without ever noticing, fallen under the rule of a machine civilization far more capable than any living organism...!
Desperately, I set the Forged Blood Art churning through my veins. Mana. If I could just mimic the properties of mana and manipulate it somehow...!
And the result.
Seated in the waiting room, waiting for Cheon Yujin, Cheon Se-ah was thinking. Her brother's human-hot-pack... ability. No matter how she turned it over, there had been almost no mana flow when he'd used it. As a first-generation hunter and one of the very first awakeners, Cheon Se-ah was exquisitely sensitive to mana, and she was certain of one thing: whatever that was, it had never been an awakening ability to begin with.
Something terrible had evidently happened to him, but her brother was a Returnee all the same. Whether it was truly martial arts or what have you she couldn't say, but the odds were high that he'd come back from the other world with some faint, peculiar technique of his own. Of course, Returnees like that couldn't pass awakener registration unless their gift was mana-related—and Cheon Se-ah knew of another route. She had deliberately kept it to herself, fully aware of how the scan would end. Only by letting him fail would her brother give up, before he did something reckless like last time.
Her thoughts had barely settled when the click of the door made her turn her head.
"Oh, you're done alrea—pffht...!"
Cheon Se-ah barely caught the laugh with her own hand. Out came Cheon Yujin—both feet hovering in midair, carried out dangling by the arms, gripped tight by officials on either side.
"Young lady. Don't let this happen again. Understood?"
"..."
Plop. The officials deposited the dangling Cheon Yujin onto a chair and walked away. At the sight of the flushed girl staring vacantly into the air with hollow eyes, Cheon Se-ah fought down the laughter with everything she had. Because this was exactly like...
"Uweh, eh, hueeeh..."
...a cat robbed of its treat—no, worse, a cat in the very first moments after its beloved collar bell had been taken away. It was, beyond any argument, too pitiable a sight, so Cheon Se-ah cleared her throat and chose her words.
"Hey... big brother. You want to register as an awakener and become a hunter, right?"
"..."
"Awakener registration and hunter qualification are separate things. Plenty of hunters aren't awakened at all. So... seeing as it's come to this, how about you give the hunter exam a try?"
"...I-I'll try it!"
Watching the light flicker back to life in her brother's eyes, Cheon Se-ah smiled warmly. Better to make him quit quickly, before he attempted something even stranger and more dangerous. Looking at him now, she couldn't detect a single shred of a chance that he'd pass. And above all, the hunter exam itself carried no risk whatsoever—she could simply permit it, half-heartedly, as a show.
'Well, fine. A guild entry exam might be another story, but the hunter license test is basically no different from any written exam.'
But Cheon Se-ah had not yet realized. Her brother, Cheon Yujin—the man who fell into another world while out on military leave, who barely clawed his way home only to find himself turned into a girl, who went to sightsee at a Gate and got swallowed up by a terrorist attack out of nowhere—was, in the fullest sense of the word, the textbook specimen of the unlucky, the jinxed, the cursed by fate itself.