A Flower Grafted to Steel
To look down with arrogant eyes upon those prostrate against the earth. To receive the envious, admiring gazes of those forced to crawl upon it. Cheon Yujin thought: this feeling... just how long had it been since he had last savored it?
Back then, it had simply been a matter of course. Killing and being killed was the natural order of things, and precisely because of that, the vicious fiends of Blood Heaven Castle obeyed the law of the strong to the letter, while the hypocrites of the orthodox sects, for all their lofty talk of chivalry and justice, bent at the waist the instant they faced an overwhelming gap in power. Just like those days when he had brought black and white alike to their knees.
As the Blood Demon once had, Cheon Yujin gazed down with a smile of pure, mad arrogance at the hunters crawling on the ground. The process seemed a little different this time, but no matter. In the end, they were crawling because of him — and in the end, what could they do but gaze up at Bonjwa as he gazed down on them!
Ever since his return, in this frail body, all he had been able to do was scramble on all fours under the pretense of dodging his enemies. Cheon Yujin barely held back the single tear of emotion and rapture threatening to spill from the corner of his eye.
Ah. Applaud me.
"From this moment on, Bonjwa shall stand in the heavens—"
Cheon Yujin, who had in fact come within a hair's breadth of standing in the heavens, tried to declare it with all his grandeur — and then his eyes met those of the hunters staring at him in shock and awe. Their eyes were bulging wide, mouths working soundlessly around something.
"...?"
Urgent mouth-shapes. And fingers pointing upward.
"Hey! Hey! Look up—!!!"
They wanted him to look up?
Come to think of it, hadn't everything around him been oddly dark for a while now? Sensing the wrongness, Cheon Yujin turned his gaze skyward without thinking.
A shadow hung over his head. An iron fist, falling.
"Hugyaaaaagh!!!"
BOOOM!
With a colossal roar, shards of the shattered floor sprayed outward like a hail of darts. He had been so carried away that he hadn't even registered the attack closing in, and so Cheon Yujin was left to whip his body toward the floor and roll, tumbling head over heels.
Shashashashak!
Pressed flat against the ground, he had to dodge the flying shards like — quite literally — a donkey scrambling on all fours!
"Shiii...!!!"
The hunters had already been crawling on the ground, and Cheon Yujin, smaller than any of them, found his view of the world dropping lower still in an instant. His face burned crimson.
"Can't Bonjwa be happy too, just once?! It's been ages since I got to be the Blood Demon...!!!"
Without even noticing that this damned body was spitting out childlike pronunciation and speech yet again, Cheon Yujin stamped his feet against the floor and flailed his arms, pouring rage into every wild swing.
The metal golem rose from the dust cloud, crimson eyes blazing. Ground iron trickled in thin streams from its massive metal frame, but overall it was perfectly intact.
A martial art that rode the flow. An ascending art that did not cut the current, but surrendered itself to the raging stream and rode it as naturally as breathing. They called it Four Ounces Deflects A Thousand Pounds — governing a thousand pounds of weight with a mere four ounces of force — but in the end, it had only ever collapsed an opponent's center of gravity through the yielding knack of aiki.
Had the opponent been a living creature of flesh and bone, it would have escaped serious injury, yet crushed beneath its own weight it would still have writhed in agony too severe to move properly. It was only because the golem wore a human shape that its center of gravity could be broken at all — and human shape was all it was. For a mass of metal, merely toppling it meant nothing.
"Bonjwa is mad now."
Ever since returning home, it seemed that every time he tried to be even a little happy, nothing ever went right. And in all the hundreds of games of online Go he had played since, he had not won once. Anyway, it wasn't that his Go was trash — it was this body's fault, and the world's. Rage and pent-up resentment heated the blood in his veins to a boil, and that heat became the power of the Forged Blood Art.
"Here I cooome...!"
The crimson afterimage of his eyes shot forward, carving a vivid trail through the air, and Cheon Yujin channeled the Forged Blood Art's energy into his soles and kicked off into a sprint. Since becoming this body, he had always been made to run backward. Today, his feet pointed not behind him but straight ahead.
The gate's rampage — the Superposition Phenomenon. Just as when he had subdued Kang Mujin. No, space did not split open this time, and no crimson star engraved upon the night sky and its black sea blazed brilliantly. It didn't matter if his spirit could not transcend this flesh and touch the stars of heaven. Most of his concentration had already been allocated to moving this cursed body even slightly more comfortably, and his body, lighter than usual thanks to the equalization of its physical abilities, left him just enough slack to spare.
He was not the Blood Demon who had once held the whole murim in his palm and played with it like a playground. But still—
'Today... I feel light!'
And it was not only his body that felt light. His mind, so long bound and fettered, felt the same.
And so, the warrior so firmly chained within Cheon Yujin's frail body awoke.
Warriors tested their martial arts against one another, and at the end of every contest they coveted, more greedily than any clean and honorable result, one and the same thing. They say we are born empty-handed and leave empty-handed, that this is the essence of human life — and yet, having been born at all, everyone reaches for it as if by instinct: the thirst for victory. And no one honored that thirst more faithfully than the breed of men called warriors. A path drew itself, natural and clear, across Cheon Yujin's mind.
'A head-on fight is still beyond what this body and the Forged Blood Art can manage.' Even if he could collapse the golem's center of gravity with the principles of Four Ounces Deflects A Thousand Pounds, these frail fists could never land the finishing blow — and an inexhaustible hunk of mineral held an overwhelming advantage.
'In that case—' It didn't have to be a head-on fight. That was all.
Ducking the falling iron fist, Cheon Yujin slipped nimbly out between the golem's legs.
"He's... drawing them off for us?!"
"He can barely fight in his condition, and he's going this far...!"
For the hunters, merely crawling this far had already pushed them to their limit. Leaving their cries behind him, Cheon Yujin dashed off again. It seemed he had picked up some strange misunderstanding along the way, but with things this desperate, he couldn't have cared less.
The metal golem chased him down, footsteps thudding heavy and slow. True to a giant soldier that moved not on instinct but on artificial patterns woven by magitech engineering, its crimson eyes glowed with a cold, mineral light, locked solely onto Cheon Yujin — the only one still moving at full capacity. As expected, it prioritized the greatest threat above all else.
"...Just as I thought."
It was exactly as he had predicted, and the corners of Cheon Yujin's mouth curved into a thin smile. The meaning of the word dungeon. And the nature of the golems that guarded such places. Naturally, the golem watching over this place had never been the only one of its kind — and where Cheon Yujin was running, another massive shadow rose to meet him.
Vreeeeng—
With an unpleasant mechanical whine, crimson light poured from the eye sockets of the golem that had appeared dead ahead. A passage that ran one way only. Pincered from front and back, Cheon Yujin faced the two golems — and stood perfectly still, extending both hands before him. The hands that had been clenched into fists slowly unfurled.
KWAAAH!
The air tore apart as an iron fist bearing a thousand pounds — no, far more — came crashing down toward him. Add gravity to weight, and acceleration follows; a mineral body that never had to fear torn muscle, aided by magic, gained a still more crushing heft. Truly a cannon forged of metal.
Thump... thump... thump...
The power of the Forged Blood Art, which had been pounding furiously, slowly weakened its pulse. Watching the fist close in like a single shell, the girl's crimson eyes spat forth a deep blood-red light.
Tak—
A palm met the tip of the fist. A bare hand, gripping nothing at all. The flowing art, Four Ounces Deflects A Thousand Pounds. Master a mere four ounces of force, and not only a thousand pounds of weight—
"—but even a flower can be held."
For even the heaviest thing in the world could be remade into a single, infinitely light flower. It was one unbroken flow. Cheon Yujin's palm, still touching the golem's fist, slowly traced a semicircle — endlessly slow, endlessly dull, beside the iron arm that had gained crushing weight and violent acceleration from gravity. The arc drawn by his palm soon rode through the muscles and vessels of his arm, and both of Cheon Yujin's arms undulated violently, muscle and bone together, like a mollusk's — visibly so, even from the outside.
Another semicircle was traced through the empty air. The arc that had begun at his palm traveled down arm and body in turn, engraving one vivid circle upon the world.
"Hoooooh..."
A hot breath streamed from his nose. A single flower bloomed. Graft the flowering branch onto another tree, and buds would blossom again, as naturally as anything.
"...This is—"
Shifting Flowers Grafting Trees.
An ascending art that only a master who had reached the very extreme of the flowing arts could perform. With the Forged Blood Art at its center, the flow of semicircles spread through the air as densely as ripples across the surface of water. Cheon Yujin's hand drew its curve backward—
KWAAAAANG!
—and the golem's iron arm, following his hand as naturally as if it were its own will, punched clean through its fellow unit's body at full force. Shards flew as the imprint of a fist was carved vividly into the metal. Thud! BOOM! The rear golem that had taken the blow toppled over, leaving the afterimage of its crimson eyes hanging in the air.
A metal golem — if his own frail fists could not deal a proper strike to a body of metal, then he would simply crush it with a fist of the same metal and the same weight. In the rain of pouring shards, crimson eyes rippling a blood-red deeper than the golem's own glow curved into a thin, smiling arc.