Greatest Under Heaven, Third-Rate Brother
Everything was chaos.
Such were the feelings of Cheon Yujin, who had just been forced into the deeply humiliating posture of a "princess carry" at the hands of Namgung Yerin.
That his flesh had been remade into a girl's body — one that twitched and reacted to every little stimulus like an infant's — fine. He could, in theory, set that aside.
When he had first heard the name Namgung Yerin, his working assumption wasn't that he'd crossed dimensions at all — only time. As far as his memory went, the homeland he'd left behind was an ordinary civilized world with nothing resembling special abilities, and yet Namgung Yerin had just moved in a way that plainly transcended the human.
The movements had been eminently practical — though for all that, it was a touch strange that they bore not the slightest trace of footwork or movement arts—
Modern clothing. The surname Namgung. And a superhuman body in motion.
Stacked together, it was a set of circumstances that permitted exactly one misunderstanding: the genre had simply jumped from murim to modern-day murim.
And so Cheon Yujin thought.
The Namgung clan — head of the Eight Great Families, a power rivaling the Nine Sects and One Union. A traditional house so storied and renowned throughout the gangho that men called it the Sword King Family.
So it truly was that Namgung clan. To have passed through the rift, vaulted clean over time itself, and carried its legacy unbroken all this way — only to end up the one to take him captive in the end.
With the righteous sects' running dog — a daughter of the Namgung, no less — standing right before him, how could the Blood Demon possibly hold his tongue?!
Worse still, this was a righteous-sect rat who had witnessed every last one of the most humiliating moments of his existence — one who absolutely had to be killed and silenced!
Cheon Yujin had lost his power…… so instead, he simply threw everything he had into a bellow laden with the full majesty of the greatest under heaven.
"The aid of the vile Namgung clan is—!"
"Ah, not that Namgung claaan—!"
"……Eep!"
Her berserk button slammed, Namgung Yerin had screamed on pure reflex — and now could feel nothing but crushing guilt.
Something had been whispered in a voice no bigger than an ant's antennae, and she could have sworn she'd caught the words "Namgung clan" somewhere in it. That was what had set her off.
And now the sight before her — the tiny girl's hands trembling as they clutched the protective coat draped over her bare little body, fat teardrops spilling one after another from a pair of reddened eyes — was nothing short of a guilt amplifier.
"I-I'm sorry. Unnie raised her voice at you…. I'm sorry! Are you okay? Don't cry — really, really, I'm sorry…!"
"U-unnie…?"
"Yes — this unnie swears it was a mistake! It only looked like she was scolding you. This unnie will absolutely take you outside with her, so no crying, okay? Just bear with it a little longer. Yes?"
"U-unnie…."
Having never had a younger sibling of her own, Namgung Yerin had no real experience soothing a small child, so she simply plunged into apology after apology.
And in the flurry of it, she lost her one chance to hear, properly, what the girl had actually been trying to say. Well — "Namgung clan" must simply have been a mishearing. That was all.
If the girl's eyes, as she murmured "Unnie…. Unnie, she says…? Unnie…?", seemed to be hollowing out more and more by the second — that was surely just Yerin's imagination.
At any rate, the girl before her was, at a glance, nothing more than a small child — one who didn't even look old enough for high school.
And yet….
It was still only cautious conjecture, but she felt she had some idea of what might have been done to this little girl inside the dungeon.
True, this being an undiscovered dungeon, nothing could be sworn to with certainty. But the circumstances themselves were clear beyond dispute.
A dungeon with the look and the air of an experimental hospital ward. A girl covered head to toe in the marks of abuse, who burst into terrified tears the instant a voice was raised even slightly.
'So this really was a dungeon tied to some kind of sinister experiments…?'
Unless she was a newborn infant, crying at the least raised voice could only be the work of trauma.
Which was why — half out of fear that there might be another child somewhere — Yerin had hurriedly called the guild to request reinforcements for the search team.
And had dropped a pointed hint, besides, that the dungeon's interior would need a meticulous investigation.
'I'll have to give the full report once we're out, but… whatever else it is, this place is suspicious. No — it might not even be a dungeon at all.'
Gnashing her teeth inwardly at the grim, grisly images surfacing in her mind, Namgung Yerin made her vow.
This was an era that had long since grown accustomed to gates tearing open and to hunters — awakened humans — hunting down the monsters that poured out of them. An era of superhumans who had stepped clean past the limits of mankind.
And an era like that, inevitably, had made common currency of crimes that vaulted every bound of human morality.
So she would dig up every last secret of this deeply suspicious dungeon!
…Such was the resolve Namgung Yerin swore, gazing down at the pitiful little girl who kept murmuring something to herself with those hollow, empty eyes.
"I'm sorry — a wh-what? A Returnee?"
After we came out of the 'dungeon'.
Thankfully, the fond imagining that perhaps I hadn't crossed dimensions at all — that this was nothing more than the murim world's far future — had, thankfully, stayed an imagining, and died there.
Above all, it was a heartfelt relief that this was not the world where legends beginning with "At that time, behold the Blood Demon — this…." still made the rounds.
But that sense of relief lasted only a moment before bewilderment crashed in.
My homeland — the Korea I had ached for my whole life — had gone strange.
No. In this case, perhaps it was more accurate to say the Earth itself had gone strange, not merely Korea.
They say ten years can remake mountains and rivers; this felt less like remade scenery and more like the entire country had been flipped upside down and shaken out.
For starters, there was the fact that while I lived out my years in the murim world, a mere ten had passed on Earth.
There was also the small matter of 'gates,' 'dungeons,' and 'hunters' — things I had only ever seen in web novels from the dim past — strutting about reality in broad daylight.
Granted, one could argue that a man who had crossed dimensions twice was hardly qualified to call anything else strange, but still.
'A gate….'
Ten years ago, the first 'gate' had yawned open in midair — across the nation, and then the whole world — and monsters had spilled out.
And, as if in answer, ordinary humans had awakened extraordinary powers and risen to fight back as 'hunters.' A story so absurd it bordered on farce.
And out of that story, I finally managed to settle a question I had carried for a very long time.
'So what I saw back then really was a gate.'
The colossal door I'd glimpsed in the instant before I was flung into the murim world — the one I had written off as a hallucination.
That had been a gate.
It didn't tie off every loose end, but it was, at the very least, something I could broadly make my peace with.
And I was grateful to learn that this place was not some other world wearing a familiar face.
Which meant that, at the very least, I would get to see my precious little sisters again — the ones fate had forced me to leave behind.
"We'll be in contact shortly, and they'll come here to meet you in person, so wait quietly like a good girl. All right?"
"Handling me as one handles a child — the sheer audacity! Do you have any idea who I, Bonjwa, am…!"
"I'm sorry? What was that? My apologies, but your voice is so very small — would you repeat that for me, just once more?"
Bonjwa. The Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin.
The iron-blooded devil who, as the greatest under heaven and lord of Blood Heaven Castle, never left breathing a wretch too dim to grasp his station and too insolent to grovel.
But you had best count your blessings, fool.
Today — today alone — I shall graciously stand down.
You would do well to celebrate: today marks the second birthday of your life!
"……Sniff."
Wrestling frantic control over a body that kept trying to cower in fear all on its own, I hopped up onto a nearby chair.
It couldn't even manage a proper voice. It was enough to drive a man out of his mind.
Exactly like an infant babbling because it cannot yet speak, this accursed body could not so much as attempt a word without dissolving into babbling.
Which was how, mere minutes ago, I came to be put through the wringer yet again.
After being all but abducted out of the dungeon by one hunter by the name of Namgung Yerin, the questioning of circumstances had begun — and this godforsaken body of mine, time and time again… I don't mean it simply shed tears; it went so far as to try and bawl like an actual baby.
My mind went so white that, in truth, I can barely recall what I even said in my own defense.
Even back in my earliest days in the murim world, when they took me for a savage, I never once endured humiliation on this scale!
Just how, in heaven's name, had the miracle of transcendence been applied, that I should end up saddled with a body this ludicrous?
"Haaa……."
Even by my own accounting the explanation had been a shambles — but apparently it had gotten through, one way or another.
For some reason the look on Namgung Yerin's face as she listened had turned distinctly odd, but that was of no concern to me whatsoever.
What arrived not long after the questioning wrapped up was the man whose today had just become the second birthday of his life.
A government-affiliated agent assigned to Returnee affairs, was it?
My own head had still been blank at the time, so I couldn't say for certain, but….
Apparently, among 'Returnees' like me there had been someone who caused a major incident, and ever since, an agent was duty-bound to appear for anything Returnee-related, however trivial the case.
As I sat quietly reordering my thoughts, I noticed a faint chill in the air.
Could it be that machine at work — the air conditioner, a contraption I had never once laid eyes on in the murim world?
Curling up inside the coat Yerin had draped over me, perched atop the needlessly tall chair, I felt a cozy warmth gather around me.
"Hehe…."
I had thought, just for a heartbeat, hm, that feels rather nice — and this damned body immediately went and bubbled up a ridiculous giggle.
"…Hngh!"
A stifled sound came suddenly from beside me, and before I knew it I had turned to look.
There sat Namgung Yerin — who, having stripped off her coat for my sake, now wore a snug suit of light armor spun from some material I couldn't begin to place.
"So this is… a Returnee…?"
Whether it had slipped out unconsciously or not, her expression had already flipped to flustered, one hand rising to cover her mouth.
And what radiated from her face — a single teardrop pearled at the corner of one eye — was….
Pity.
"────Gal!!!"
Is a warrior defined by the inner power stored in his dantian? By the martial arts etched into his flesh? Does weakness unmake a warrior?
No — it does not!
Even robbed of his arts, a warrior remains a warrior.
I — the Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin.
Shall endure humiliation no longer!
"This Bonjwa is—"
Though the flesh had been swapped out from under me, the experience and the majesty I had hoarded were not things that simply evaporated.
Coat flaring like a war banner, rising up atop the chair, I thundered at the whelp before me with eyes blazing with unhinged, towering arrogance.
"—the foremost of all the demonic sects."
The Namgung brat's eyes went wide; her jaw hung slack.
Yes. Look upon me.
"—the greatest under heaven."
This, right here, is the man who brought the grand alliance of the righteous and demonic paths — murim's twin pillars — crashing down.
The man who could have unified the gangho beneath his fist whenever the mood so much as struck him.
Having declared it all with supreme pomposity, Bonjwa — the Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin — wheeled around in a magnificent turn and—
Their eyes met.
"………."
A door, standing open — since when, exactly?
She had matured far beyond the figure burned so vividly into my memory — but there was no mistaking her. Not in a thousand years.
My precious little sister, Cheon Se-ah.
For her, a reunion ten years in the making. For me, one longer still.
And there, at what should have been that soul-stirring moment of reunion — the expression that surfaced on Se-ah's face.
I took a quiet moment to take stock of myself.
The coat, slipped off at some point and now sailing grandly through the air. And the naked body beneath it, presented to the room in all its glory.
……Mm.
"But as a big brother, you're third-raaaate!"
It was summer.