The Sword Demon's First Steps
Murim.
The Seven Killings One Palace — the pride of the Sapa, the Unorthodox Faction.
Just as the Orthodox faction had its world-renowned Nine Sects One School, so the Sapa had its great standard-bearer: the Seven Killings One Palace.
The fiends of its seven Killing Gates had stalked the kangho, heaping up mountains of the dead — and from the summit of those very mountains, the palace of the One Palace flew its banner in solitary majesty. The First Demon Palace was, in truth, the eternal overlord of the Black Path's Sapa and the great lodestar of every practitioner of the demonic arts.
Its Palace Lord: Cheongang Geom-ma, the Sword Demon.
A sovereign born with the vessel of a hegemon already standing in the heavens of the Black Path, bearing the fated mandate to scourge the earth and bind the whole Sapa beneath one blade. In his youth his name had resounded as the greatest genius among all the successors in First Demon Palace history, and from the day he brought the demonic arts to perfection, no rival could be found for him anywhere in Murim.
Once, the gossips of the kangho had babbled thus:
So absolute had the Sword Demon's demonic blade become that only one man alive — the leader of the Orthodox Murim Alliance, Shaolin's Abbot Hangma-sinseung — could even hope to trade a single move with him!
And more: the day Cheongang Geom-ma unified the Sapa, all of Murim would be left shuddering in dread, waiting only for the descent of the Great War between Orthodox and Unorthodox!
And so — that protagonist of boundless infamy and terrible renown, Cheongang Geom-ma himself—
"Urrrgghh... hhek!"
THUD!
Absorbed in practicing his toddling steps, he had slipped and cracked his forehead square against the floor.
Resentment! Hatred!
The instant his head struck, shooting stars rained down, bleaching the world before his eyes white; a horrific agony, like an axe buried clean in his skull, came crashing in — and on top of it all, a tongue that refused to obey him wrung out the strangest sounds.
Cheongang Geom-ma.
His eyes brimmed over, tears heavy with the depth of his indignation, and all he could do was burn — burn with hatred for the Blood Demon.
Cradling the lump now rising from his forehead in both hands, Geomma turned his head to the side.
A huge full-length mirror.
A mirror of such flawless clarity, and large enough to hold his whole body with room to spare, was not a thing one came across every day. But what mattered was not the mirror — it was the figure reflected in it.
"..."
In the mirror:
the half-gray hair of his prime had, for reasons unknown, bleached into a head of brilliant white; the eyes that had always gleamed an eerie blue from the North Sea blood running in him — eyes that had once earned him the epithet "Blue-Eyed Demon" — now shone cooler and clearer than ever. And staring back, lips trembling on the edge of blubbering, stood a young girl who looked, at the outside, mid-teens. Possibly younger.
Quivering.
Where had every last muscle forged through decades of single-minded discipline gone?! Just who was this wretched child, this unweaned brat of a girl, standing in the mirror?!
Geomma howled. In the slurred babble of a child who had barely learned to talk.
"Kiww... kiww yuu... KIWW... Bwood... Bwood... Dem...!!!"
He had passed through the Ghost Gate — and when Geomma opened his eyes, the place before him was, quite literally, another world. But it was neither the underworld nor the realm of ghosts he had heard tell of so often in old tales, nor even the fabled Peach Blossom Paradise said to lie at the end of Ghost Gate legend.
Great masses of iron rolled past along the roads. Buildings taller and vaster than any emperor's palace stood shoulder to shoulder to the horizon. It was a world teeming with creatures bizarre and wondrous beyond reckoning, where there existed people who wielded not only martial arts but Taoist craft and sorcery besides.
But Geomma understood.
That Ghost Gate had been a vile trap, laid by the despicable Blood Demon...!
He had not judged it a trap merely from waking up in a girl's body, ignorant of what sorcery the Blood Demon had actually worked.
Right after he passed through the Ghost Gate, a benefactor had dug him free of the collapsed wreckage — and the déjà vu Geomma had felt at the swordwork that benefactor displayed while shearing the debris apart was no delusion at all.
'The Iron Blood Sword Art...!'
Geomma's teeth ground together before he knew it.
The sword art displayed by Kim Jinhu — the man he had taken for his savior — was, to his horror, the art of the closest of the Blood Demon's closest confidants. The Left Protector of Blood Heaven Castle, the Castle Lord's personal shield: Cheol-myeon-mu-jeong. It was that man's sole-transmission martial art...!
And yet not once had any intelligence reached him that the Left Protector had ever taken a disciple. Worse still, the Iron Blood Sword Art Kim Jinhu had shown was already the work of a seasoned master. Had a disciple truly reached such a level at so young an age, the whole kangho would long since have been ringing with the feat.
In all the world, the only ones who knew the Iron Blood Sword Art — its creator Cheol-myeon-mu-jeong aside —
were that wicked, despicable Blood Demon...!
There was only one answer Geomma, who knew nothing of the concept of 'Martial Awakening', could possibly draw.
The Ghost Gate itself had been the trap — and this other world was already a land the Blood Demon's claws had reached, a playground lying beneath the Blood Demon's rule...!
Grrk.
What a villainous, inhuman sorcery this was! Not even the grace of a warrior's death — instead, turning him into a little girl, to toy with him to the very end!
He should have known from the moment the Blood Demon had shown off that sorcery of pulling his own thumbs off and sticking them back on whenever he pleased...!
"Haah... haah... haah..."
Gasping for breath, Geomma braced a hand against the wall and pushed himself upright once more.
The moment he had recognized the Iron Blood Sword Art, only a single strategy had remained to him — stranded in an alien world with no information and no common sense to lean on.
Darkness beneath the lamp.
Kim Jinhu of the Iron Blood Sword Art was without doubt entangled with the Blood Demon. If he hid in the shadow under that very lamp, then someday — someday — he was certain to lay hands on a clue to the Blood Demon himself...!
He had resolved, in preparation for that day, to unpick the sorcery's binding spell and reclaim the strength of his prime. But—
"Haah... haah... hhek!"
CRASH!
The moment he hit the floor again, the body wrung tears out of him all on its own.
"Huuuhhk..."
Face turned to the ceiling, sketching the Blood Demon's insufferable face against it, Geomma wailed.
Just what! What manner of sorcery could possibly twist a man's body into THIS...!
At first he had taken it for nothing more than a body as feeble as a 'newborn's'. But no. There was an abyss beneath even that. Some impossible secret was surely buried in this flesh.
Geomma, who had once stood at the very summit of the world as a supreme grandmaster, was for all intents the greatest living expert when it came to governing a body. And yet this body—!
Only by mustering technique of the caliber that had once guided a flying sword by qi alone, or drawn the Heart Sword from the breast, could he barely coax an arm into motion. Only by calling up lightfoot artistry of the caliber of Treading Snow Without a Trace could he barely get his legs beneath him...!
And that was not all.
The instant his vigilance lapsed, the body's instincts would drag his very mind down with it into that deep abyss before he knew it.
One month.
Geomma — genius among geniuses, monster of talent, ranked among the very finest Murim had ever produced — had thrown himself into it with the same grueling devotion he had once given to mastering a peerless divine art. And the sum total of his achievement was a wobbly, collapsing toddle and a mouthful of mangled baby-talk. That was all.
And so Geomma was certain.
Even if the Martial God of the highest heaven descended into this world, making this demented body move like an ordinary human being within a single month would be flatly impossible!
Beep-beep. An electronic chime sounded at the door.
"Jinhuuu...!"
To Geomma, 'Jinhu' and 'food' had long since become one and the same word, differing only in pronunciation.
The instant the door opened, Pavlov's Geomma launched himself at dinner.
Something was off.
However unaccustomed Bonjwa still was to the modern age, it was not as though I lacked all perception. From the eyeline of this tiny body, nothing came into view but the back of the person ahead of me — which was why I hadn't felt it until now.
But as the march drew toward its end, the wrongness that had been boiling up inside me could no longer be ignored.
"Applicants. The Gate will activate shortly, so please step back and stand by."
The applicants stood at readiness, tense and immaculately ordered. The examinees I'd seen waiting back at the staging area had, granted, included some armed in protective coats or armor — but most had been in everyday clothes, and everyday clothes had made up the larger share.
Now, all around me, protective coats and armor formed the overwhelming majority. Plain clothes still appeared now and then, but even those people had at least thrown a light suit of combat gear over top.
And being ferried through a Gate, of all things.
Since when did a hunter license examination involve a Gate?!
You registered as an Awakener at the public health center. You sat the written exam to become a hunter. You faced the panel for your interview. You took the aptitude assessment — and that was supposed to be it. Not this: being marched through a Gate to risk our hides in live dungeon training, fight conjured monsters, or cross blades with guild members disguised as raiders...!
Just how in the world was any of THAT a hunter license examination?!
"...?"
Er. Hm.
Wait — wasn't the latter actually more like an exam for becoming a hunter than the former...?
"There is no need to be so nervous. This Gate leads to a dungeon our Iron Blood Guild manages and controls with the strictest rigor, so nothing untoward is going to happen."
As the proctor from the Iron Blood Guild tossed out the pleasantry, a faint ripple of laughter spread among the applicants. I nodded along, quite satisfied.
He was even asserting there were no safety concerns — and with that, conviction finally settled in. It was the health center's Awakener registration that had been the strange one. This was how it was supposed to be done...!
"The Gate will be activating soon. Applicants — are you aware that each guild has its own preferred type of hunter?"
During the wait, at the proctor's sudden remark, one applicant shot his hand up as though he had been waiting for exactly this.
"Do you mean, by any chance, the type of awakening ability?"
"Haha, that would be the Sungmuryeon Guild — the ones who recruit none but Martial Arts Awakeners. The type I have in mind lies somewhere else entirely."
Come to think of it, it was the Iron Blood Guild hosting this hunter license exam in the first place. Were they scouting, well in advance, for the people they'd want drooling at the prospect of joining as rookie guild members later...? Hosting the exam anyway, so why not court the guild a little while they were at it — a strategy?
Though I had been doing my desperate utmost to ignore the wrongness gnawing at me, it remained.
Something really was off...!
"There is but one thing we of Iron Blood ask of a hunter."
The proctor went on, calm and measured.
"The battlefield is always in flux. Disadvantaged, you wring another path out of the situation; favored, you squeeze your strengths for everything they are worth."
The Gate — webbed with cables of every description — flared with light and split open into a widening fissure.
"Adaptability."
The moment the fissure shuddered, mana welled up across the floor where the applicants stood huddled together, threading itself into a single formation.
"The more perceptive among you will already have sensed that something is amiss. How is it, then, that not a single one of your proctors is a Martial Arts Awakener, or a physical-enhancement ability user?"
The mana formation activated, and the fissure's light swallowed the hall in a single breath.
"The first test. The gimmick of this dungeon is 'the levelling of physical ability.'"
The scenery changed between one blink and the next, and we were carried into the dungeon's interior.
And—
"Some of you will find your bodies strengthened. Some of you, weakened. But what matters is not the gap in physical ability — it is the will that refuses to break... hhek."
"...Eh?"
With a groan like a frog struck by a stone, the proctor folded to the ground.
A bolt from the blue.
Hold on — the proctor had been all the way at the front; there should have been no way to see him directly at all. The instant that wrongness pricked me — how, exactly, was I watching him fall—
"......?"
What.
Somehow, my body felt lighter. If everything until now had felt like being wound head to toe in iron chains and cannonballs and sunk into the deepest trench of the sea, then now my body felt so light it was as though someone had at least hauled me up out of those depths toward open water...!
"Ugh... uuuugh..."
Then a moan drifted up from somewhere below me, and I turned my gaze downward.
I saw it.
A scene of utter, screaming pandemonium.
"U-ugh...! My legs — my legs won't move...!!! MY LEGS!"
"They said... Iron Blood's... difficulty... was 'Inferno'... but... this is... un...believable... khhek!"
"The gravity — the gravity's crushing...!!! Isn't this literally just a gravity chamber?!"
"Waaah... WAAAAAAAHHH!"
"Um, hello...?! Is anyone there...?! I can't lift my head...!!!"
Applicants sprawled across the floor, wriggling like worms. The proctors too. It was chaos — pure, uncut chaos, the word made flesh.
The only soul left standing was one — exactly one: Bonjwa, the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin.
"Ahhh..."
What. What even is this situation?