The Blood Demon Enrolls
Bonjwa. The Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin.
An absolute being who had struck terror into righteous and demonic sects alike, one who at his height could have held the entirety of Murim in the palm of his hand.
Had he set his goal not on the Transcendence Realm but on the unification of Murim, then the Nine Great Sects and One Union, the Seven Killings Palace, no power anywhere could have dared defy Bonjwa's path of conquest in the end.
And yet that very Bonjwa.
Bonjwa Cheon Yujin, the greatest under heaven, Lord of Blood Heaven Castle, Cult Master of the Blood Cult, starting today...!
had been reduced to a mere high school girl...!
"Huk... huuuk..."
A ribbon and skirt stirring in the breeze. A bag slung carelessly over one shoulder. The very picture of a high school girl.
Standing here was not the peerless martial artist under heaven, the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin, but just one high school girl who could have been found anywhere...!
This was, this was a humiliation too... too inhuman for words...!!!
He had already crossed the most humiliating threshold imaginable, wearing a girl's uniform in front of his own younger sister, more times than he could count, and the sense that he had grown somewhat used to it had been nothing but an illusion.
Since waking in this girl's body, he had believed he had already endured every humiliation it could possibly dish out. Never could he have imagined that beneath the floor he had taken for rock bottom, there was a basement waiting all along!
He might have managed to adapt to an ordinary skirt. But this skirt, of all things, was none other than a school uniform skirt, a garment that in the natural order of things he should never have had occasion to wear, and somehow that made the shame burn all the deeper.
The shame was severe, yes.
"Mmm..."
But in truth, that was not all. Riding in the car Se-ah was driving, he stole a glance at the window, and there, faint but unmistakable, was the reflection of a girl in the bloom of youth.
This girl's body resembled his little sister Se-ah, whom he had doted on so dearly in childhood, far too closely, and so every time his uniformed reflection caught the glass, false shell of Bonjwa though it was, he did feel, just a little, that it was... rather cute...
"Oppa, how does it feel?"
"F-fee-feeeeling...?! U-uh, ugh, uuugh! Wh-wh-wh-what feeling...?!"
"Uh, uhh?"
How does it feel, she says...!
Could it be that his little sister's awakening ability was actually mind reading?! You wretch, Cheon Se-ah! How did she know to fire off such an inhuman, inhumane, immoral question at precisely this moment...!!!
"G-Gaaaal!!!"
And so, from the back seat, thrashing as though the seatbelt might snap, he unleashed the Lion's Roar with the full force of the Forged Blood Art behind it.
Jolt.
The instant Se-ah's shoulders flinched, the car lurched hard.
"Geez, you scared me...! I almost crashed right at the entrance... If I weren't an awakened one, that would've been an accident. A real accident."
"Ah, aah... S-sorryyy..."
Lately Se-ah had apologized to him every single day; he had never imagined the moment would come when the apology would flow back the other way. His face, already flushed crimson with shame, grew hotter still, and he could feel it happening in real time.
Ever since he had been made to wear a uniform with a short skirt, the embarrassment and humiliation seemed, for some reason, to arrive along a slightly different axis than before, and it was bewildering...!
Then Se-ah spoke, the shock and disbelief not yet faded from her voice.
"Seriously, why are you screaming your head off? I asked how it feels. We've arrived, so I meant how does the school feel..."
"Th-the school, of course! Yes, Bonjwa assumed that was what you meant...!"
"...Oppa."
Se-ah twisted her upper body around from the driver's seat, fixing him with a flat, unimpressed stare.
"Ah, aah..."
Guilty as he was, he could not bring himself to meet those eyes and quickly turned his gaze out the window.
Passing through the enormous main gate and into the school grounds, they found it was apparently class time; students were almost nowhere to be seen, and the quiet, sparsely populated campus spread out before them at a glance.
"Ahh... Se-ah. Isn't this place... a bit too big for a high school...?"
"Right? They didn't stick 'Academy' in the name for nothing. It's about the size of a decent university."
"The size was one thing, but..."
how to put it, the exterior alone was on another plane entirely.
Thinking back to his own high school days, before he had fallen into Murim, he remembered buildings so old that ivy climbed their walls, most of them thrown up carelessly from characterless red brick.
Here in the age of Gates, however, most of the buildings were raised from some freshly mined substance, a material he could not begin to identify.
Vmmm...
Perhaps because the Gates had spurred magic engineering to new heights, there were even buildings crowned with glowing crystals atop soaring spires, structures that, no matter how he looked at them, had no business standing in the modern world!
His clothes were a perfectly ordinary modern school uniform, yet the buildings looked like something out of a fantasy academy. It was absurd.
"Oppa! Don't be so nervous. If anyone gives you a hard time, I'll just send them flying straight through a Gate and..."
"N-no! I wasn't... nervous...!"
He had not been nervous; the campus's appearance had simply robbed him of words. He had come home in the summer, and autumn was already closing in, but his hometown had changed so much that settling back in was still no easy task.
"Oppa, it's about time for you to go in on your own... If anyone really does pick on you, you have to call me and tell me, okay?"
"Bullying...?"
Pfft.
The sheer absurdity of it wrung a hollow laugh out of him before he could help it.
"There's no way I'd get... bullied... Do you have any idea how many years I've lived?"
Perhaps her guilt had grown excessive of late, because Se-ah's worrying sickness seemed to have worsened. Granted, his current appearance hardly inspired confidence, but no matter what, Bonjwa had not fallen so low as to suffer wicked treatment at the hands of brats barely seventeen years old!
He laughed as though the very idea were absurd and waved the concern away.
A short while later.
"This is Cheon Yujin, a transfer student joining you all starting today. Yujin, why don't you start us off with a self-introduction?"
With the students watching and his name written on the blackboard, the homeroom teacher who had met him at the staff office and led him to the classroom made this utterly merciless demand.
"...B-Bonjwa..."
"Hm?"
"N-no, I mean, I am..."
This damned body...!
He had reached the Blood Flame Realm, the first tier of the Forged Blood Art, and his cultivation had long since matured. The Forged Blood Art was, at its core, a martial art that tempered and commanded the heart and the blood, and since he could regulate his own heartbeat at will, he had assumed he would never again suffer humiliation in this particular arena. He had simply forgotten that this girl's body was, like a newborn's, endlessly vulnerable to every new stimulus.
"She's shaking like crazy."
"How many transfer students is that this year alone? Real awakenings really can happen anytime, huh."
"You're a transfer student too, dumbass. Didn't they say there was one more? Why's she all on her own?"
"Whoa, she's so tiny... Adorable."
"Is she really the same age as us...?"
At the murmuring from boys and girls alike, his shoulders hunched further beneath his jacket. Wearing a girl's uniform in front of his own sister Se-ah had been humiliation enough, but to have to do this in front of a whole crowd of onlookers...
Entirely against Bonjwa's will, his whole body trembled so violently that he could barely string the words together...!
"I-I'm... Cheon Yujin... N-nice to... meet you..."
Reining in the flesh that threatened to run wild with nothing short of superhuman willpower, he barely managed to bring the sentence to a close. It felt as though forming the Heart Sword, a feat said to be possible only when the mind becomes one with the blade, would have been easier.
"...Well done! Everyone, a round of applause!"
Clap clap clap!
A veritable ovation. Amid all the cheering, Bonjwa simply kept his eyes lowered, brimming with tears of humiliation, gripping the hem of that damned uniform skirt in both hands as he trembled, and swore that the homeroom teacher's name would be written on his kill list. Without fail.
"Now, Yujin, why don't you go take the open seat? Let's see... next to Yurin, it looks like. Yurin, could you scoot over and make a little room?"
"Got it, teach."
To keep the humiliations this body was bound to suffer to an absolute minimum, he walked with his eyes fixed on the classroom floor, and the moment he hopped up onto the chair the teacher had indicated and sat down...
A chill.
"...!!!"
A cold current swept up his spine, like a mouse pinned beneath the stare of a beast sighting its prey.
What was that?
That presence, like killing intent and yet not quite, like coming face to face with one's natural predator...!
"Hey. Nice to meet you?"
The lilt at the end of the sentence rose in a peculiar way. It was the voice that had answered the homeroom teacher earlier, a slightly low girl's voice from right beside him, and it made his spine jolt. The instant he flinched, lifted his head, and looked at the girl in the next seat...
Bonjwa shuddered as though a dreadful premonition sweeping through his entire body had electrified every nerve...!
"Ah, aaah..."
Long hair dyed so bright a yellow it was nearly platinum blonde, the faintly black roots giving it away. Long, crossed legs and a tall frame; thank goodness she was seated, because with this tiny body of his, he would have had to crane his neck a long way up just to meet her eyes.
But above all, the silver piercings on her ears, and a face made to match them. The corners of her eyes tilted slightly upward, evoking a sleek, agile cat. It was a feline face...!
"Hey, I said nice to meet you?"
"H-Hiiik..."
Ding ding ding.
The instincts of this frail body were sounding an urgent alarm. The absolute masters of Murim who had once stood against Bonjwa, the likes of Hangma-sinseung or the Cheon Gang Sword Demon, could not so much as compare. A true rival... and a natural predator... was right there before his eyes...!
"...Pfft. You're cute as hell. Hey, relax. I'm not gonna eat you."
"E-eat me...?"
"We're seatmates, so let's at least say hi. Cheon Yujin, right? I'm Namgung Yurin."
"...!!!"
Every piece of the puzzle clicked into place. The impression was somewhat milder than this girl's, but the face of a ponytailed woman with an equally fierce bearing superimposed itself over the one before him, and Bonjwa's fists trembled with inhuman fury.
You wretches, the Namgung Clan...!!!
The hunting dog they had labored to dispatch had bowed before Bonjwa's majesty, so now they had sent a hunting cat as well?!
Assassins of the despicable orthodox sects.
Namgung Yurin giggled, her sharply upturned eyes crinkling into a laughing smile.
"Let's get along from here on, yeah?"
"S-squeak..."
He thought.
If he called Se-ah right now... would she pick up...?