The Blood Demon Dances
The Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin.
This was different from when the Indefinite Gate had run rampant. Back then, the Superposition Phenomenon had shattered space itself, and an inexplicable transcendence of the mind had been born, connected to Blood Heaven Castle. Now, unlike that time, the Blood Demon's mind remained firmly bound within the prison of this frail body.
There was no night sky unfurled across the void, nor any crimson star symbolizing transcendence blazing brilliantly overhead. But it didn't matter that the star of transcendence was absent. It didn't matter that the Blood Demon Art was absent. It didn't matter that his strength was wanting. What proved the Blood Demon was none of those trivial accessories — it was the time Cheon Yujin had spent struggling. Just as every human being once had an infancy, even the Absolute had known moments of utter insignificance.
An ordinary young soldier on leave to see his family had dropped without warning into the heart of Murim. He had started as a beggar barbarian in a back alley of Hangzhou in the Central Plains — a petty thief, a fist-gang thug. Dragged against his will onto battlefields where blood was washed away with blood, he had met the bonds that would shape his life, until at last he became the Lord of Blood Heaven Castle, whose terror and infamy shook the entire murim. That will — the will that had struggled on, spilling hot blood every step of the way — was the proof of the Blood Demon.
And then.
The first disciple, standing on legs that shook uncontrollably before a vast army of monsters, with certain death staring him in the face.
"─You were waiting for Bonjwa, weren't you?"
And so.
The Blood Demon laughed. He roared, sneered, cackled like a madman, and — as always — his blood-red, shimmering countenance curved into a slender smile.
The greatest under heaven: the Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin. Even if it was no formal oath sworn before the gods of heaven and earth, to keep without fail the words one had uttered even once, with one's own will behind them — that was the honor of a martial artist.
Letius, War Chief of the Ratmen. He had not fled like a sewer rat; he had kept his honor as a Blood Cultist. And if a cultist exists upon the earth, then a Cult Master must exist in the heavens — such is the law.
The Blood Cult. It was nothing more than a karma that had begun half as a joke. But in this moment — just as in the distant past, when he had resolved to shoulder the curse of the Blood Demon Art in another's stead — the Blood Demon resolved to become, wholly and completely, the Cult Master of the Blood Cult and its incarnate god.
"……"
Pa-at! The Blood Demon kicked off and sprang into the air.
It was not the peerless lightness skill of the Traceless Snow-Treading he had used against Kang Mujin. He did not tear through the empty sky, nor did he close the ground at a terrifying pace like the fabled earth-shrinking stride. It was the Gentleman's Step, unleashed standing on two legs rather than running on four.
His strength had not returned. From the string of overtaxed battles, the bones and muscles of his entire body creaked, and the internal energy of the Forged Blood Art was drying up. His mind was the Blood Demon's, but his body was not — and this frail shell was shrieking that it wanted to rest, this very instant. It was, quite literally, the worst possible condition. It had been teetering at the very brink of its limit for a long while now.
But.
"Warmed up to perfection, I'd say. Wouldn't you agree?"
"Jjijk, jjiijk…!"
Letius was struck dumb. At some point she had drawn up beside him — a crimson-faced girl grinning through black hair blown loose and streaming in the wind. At the sight of that girl beaming wide, baring snow-white teeth, Letius's vision swam.
Just as Cheon Yujin could not understand the tongue of the Ratmen, so Letius could not grasp the meaning of the Blood Demon's words. Kin or not — even were she a human who merely wore the face of kin — it made no difference. A frail body, no different from a Ratman's. And yet she was not even one of their kind.
When a young Ratman warrior stood at death's door, Letius — a War Chief, of all things — had fled to the rear. The girl had swept right past him and hurled herself headlong into that very death. Against the Tyrant of the Forest, that incarnate of overwhelming terror before whom no Ratman alive could help but feel the fear of dying!
From that moment on.
The crimson-faced girl had become a turning point capable of changing the fate of their entire race. To the warrior Letius, she was the king destiny had delivered — and a god.
"Are you afraid?"
The Blood Demon's finger pointed. Letius had taken a step forward, yet his two legs had not stopped trembling since before. He could not understand the words, but what they meant was unmistakable — and the shame welling up inside him nearly wrung tears from his eyes.
Tap. The girl's hand came to rest against his chest.
"It's hot."
His heart. His boiling blood. The ember that had caught fire within it.
"Can you feel it too — the ember clinging to this heart?"
Confidence without a shred of fear is nothing more than reckless bravado.
"So remember this."
But if, even with fear beside you, you can still take one more step forward—
"That is courage."
From the Blood Demon's fingertip, a thread of heat pulsed crimson and flowed into Letius's chest.
"Jjijk, jjiijk…."
Leaving Letius staring after him with dazed eyes, the Blood Demon swept his black cloak about and strode forward. The great horde of monsters was closing in by the moment — an absurd spectacle of pursuer and pursued chasing one another in circles, and a lethal one. The instant that advance crashed into them, the Ratman band and the fallen hunters would be flattened like rat droppings. If it could not be stopped here, Ratmen and hunters alike would be slaughtered to the last.
But the Blood Demon, as he stood now, had nothing left with which to halt that pandemonium on the march.
And yet.
"─Bonjwa is the Blood Demon."
If he lacked the strength to stop it, then he need only turn it.
Tap, tap-tap. The Blood Demon's feet began to spring lightly off the ground. It was not the lightness art of making the body weightless to dart about swiftly, but a footwork like a dance — no, not like a dance. It was dance itself. His arms stirred slowly; his toes flicked out; and the deep-crimson energy blooming from every inch of him left afterimages in its wake, tracing arcs like the tail of a star.
"Yes. Watch this."
Once, there had been a demoness called Sura Hyeolma. Before the true Blood Demon's advent, she had been the Lord of Blood Heaven Castle of the previous generation. She had been no martial artist but a dancer by nature, forced down a path she never chose; born to the duty of her bloodline, which demanded she shoulder the Blood Demon's curse, she had refused the succession of the Blood Demon Art and sealed it away — a pitiable woman who lived in nothing but dread of the day that seal might break.
That woman, beneath a darkened sky, within a galaxy of shooting stars streaming down like rain, sang her grieving fate and folded tomorrow's hope into her dance.
Its name:
Lament of the Starfall River
The river of starlight streamed down like rain, and the girl danced as though in lamentation.
"Kik, kiiik?"
"Grrrrk!"
Thud, thud-thud. A body light as a feather bounded upward, toes stamping down upon the heads of monsters. She sprang off the skull of a charging goblin to run through midair, stepped from an orc rider's shoulder and plucked the weapon from his grip. The crimson trajectory curved, curved again, swayed with liquid grace — and though darkness had yet to fall upon the sky, the Blood Demon made himself a scarlet shooting star and painted a swath of the Milky Way across the vault of heaven.
"Kuwaaaah…?"
That brilliantly blazing comet could not possibly go unnoticed. Amid the pulsing red starlight, the girl's crimson face gleamed vividly.
"KUWAAAAAAAH─!!!"
The giant bear's eyes rolled as it spotted the detested culprit who had slapped its forehead and knocked it senseless.
Control of the flow. He bewitched them with bright starlight, coaxing the goblins and orc riders along their course, while the monsters that had lost their reason and threatened to scatter were steered so that the giant bear at the very rear would press in behind them, forcing them naturally to fall in line.
"Now, then — are you watching?"
It was martial arts. And it was dance.
And so the Blood Demon became a dazzling North Star, guiding the direction of the horde.
But that alone was not enough. At best, he had steered their course and bought a moment's reprieve from the collision. The instant the Blood Demon's stamina and inner energy ran dry, that body would be trampled beneath the monsters' feet and ground into meat all the same.
Watching that life burn from closer than anyone else could, Letius knew. He knew that his king, his god, would soon reach his limit and meet a terrible end.
"Jjijk, jjik-jjik…!"
Sacrificing so much. Burning so fiercely. How could one tiny ember be so utterly powerless? However brightly it had begun to blaze in his chest, that single faint flame was weak beyond bearing.
And yet.
"Jjik, jjik-jjik."
"Jjik-jjik-jjik…!"
"Jjik-jjik, jjik-jjik, jjik-jjik-jjik…!"
An ember is an ember because it spreads. The faint ember Letius had kindled in his chest caught and spread in a shape he himself had never foreseen. The Ratmen who had fled had, at some point, returned — and without yielding an inch, they stood arrayed around Letius. He reached out to the chest of the kin beside him.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Hearts pulsed, and the embers burning in their blood leapt from one to the next.
To the Blood Demon's dance, the Ratmen stamped their feet. Not the rollicking dance that had once beaten out the fanfare of victory, but one heavier than that, and hotter.
Thud! Thud! Thud! Dust bloomed into the air. Following the Blood Demon dancing in the heavens, the Ratmen danced upon the earth, and with every roll of their feet the sound merged, little by little, with the pounding of their hearts.
The Ratmen's dance was nothing more than an imitation of the Blood Demon's. It was utterly primitive, crude, and clumsy beyond measure — and yet it was already, in its own right, a martial art.
At some point — around when the sound of beating hearts and the sound of stamping feet had overlapped so completely that neither could be told from the other — no, when there was no longer any need to tell them apart—
They had no idea what it meant. But their king, their god, had named himself so — and so, just as with the name of Letius, after the old naming customs of the Ratmen, they came to call him by another name. Stamping their feet, they bawled that name toward the heavens, loud enough to reach them.
Thud, thud-thud!
Answer our call!
Thud, thud-thud!
It began with Letius. The ember of the heart passed sideways, and sideways again, and sideways still, swelling as it went — and when it came back around to Letius at last, it was no longer an ember but a single towering blaze. The blazing Blood Flame.
"Jjijk, jjiiiik…!"
The Ratmen's black fur had, before anyone noticed, been dyed red as blood.
Letius ran. From the earth, toward the heavens — on two legs, not four.
"──Ahahahah! You came. You actually came. So in the end, you've come all this way too!"
Kicking his feet amid the starlight, the Blood Demon burst into wild, soaring laughter. How could he not laugh? A single sewer rat from the very bottom of the world — unsatisfied even with the ground itself, it had leapt all the way up to this place!
"Jjijk, jjiijk…!"
Letius had to endure pain as though his whole body would burn away along with the blaze he had gathered in his blood. But he did not stop. The flame he had kept alive by passing it on and on, he passed on one final time — to the Blood Demon.
With a roar of flame. Into the Forged Blood Art, the art of tempering blood — an art that had done no more than gather heat — the blaze was poured, and the residual blood-energy blazing like fire across the Blood Demon's body erupted along his black cloak. Behind the mask shaped like a Ratman's skull, his crimson face smoldered. The black cloak had been swallowed whole by flames of blood, streaming out like a single enormous wing.
Stamping down on the heads of the charging orcs, the Blood Demon rose to his full height.
"…Yes. This."
Thus he had named it. The entry-realm Forged Blood Art, with the blood and the will of the Ratmen gathered into it, had advanced a stage at last.
Pa-at! Kicking off, tracing an arc of blood and flame, the Blood Demon drove onward through the empty air. The one steering the flow of this colossal free-for-all was, in the end, the giant bear — the mightiest force on the field. Without the bear's pursuit, the orcs and goblins would naturally scatter. And so the place toward which the girl soared was directly in front of that very bear.
"KWAAAAAAAH──!!!"
The bear's bloodshot eyes flared, and a charge bearing the crushing weight of its entire body came surging in, sharp forepaws leading.
The Forged Blood Art had reached the Blood Flame Realm. No longer merely circulating within — it had attained the realm from which qi could be released outward.
One fist. The forehead he had already, in the previous exchange, pried open ever so slightly with the penetrating force of his external strike — the tip of his white-hot fist met it.
"K-Kuwaaah…?"
FWHOOOOOSH─!!! Into that interior, the flame of blood — pumped like a forge's bellows by the Ratmen and tempered by the Blood Demon — poured in like a tidal wave!
The outside was quiet. The inside was anything but. Beneath the hide, the twin currents of power churned without end, waves crashing over a collapsed dam. It could not even manage a scream. Spreading out from the forehead, the searing heat soaked through it from head to toe and swallowed its entire body.
KWOOOONG! With one dull, colossal boom, the Tyrant of the Forest — its exterior untouched, its insides charred jet-black — crumpled to the ground.