The Blood Demon and the Sword Demon
A girl came scurrying in behind the homeroom teacher and stopped in front of the blackboard. Apparently there had been some mix-up at the front office—one that sent her wandering into the elementary division—and that was why she was late.
Come to think of it, hadn't even Bonjwa—shrunken into this paltry, hopelessly immature body—been properly escorted in? And if that mix-up had come down to nothing more than a face that read a few years too young, then Bonjwa, too, might well have suffered the humiliation of being dragged off to the elementary division.
Which was why I could only stand there, staring at the girl, struck dumb by the sheer absurdity of it.
It had been a long time. A very long time indeed… since anyone who wasn't some tot of ten at best had stood there with eyes level to mine. Granted, she looked for all the world like she belonged in the elementary division rather than the high school one, no matter how you looked at her—but more than anything—
"Huh… she's not wearing a uniform?"
Well. That was the thing. Hearing that mutter from Namgung Yurin—chin propped in her hand beside me, gazing at the girl with vacant eyes—even Bonjwa, who would never, ever compromise with the vile Namgung clan, found himself nodding along.
A thick, solid-colored hoodie that, for no reason I could name, kept stirring a nagging sense of déjà vu. An outfit that pursued nothing beyond the pure functionality of moving comfortably. In short: a picture-perfect set of loungewear. That build—and, unlike Bonjwa, neatly turned out in uniform—not even a uniform on top of it—
"…Pfft-kk, pfft-kk."
The snickers poured out of their own accord, and with them came one and only one impression: why on earth was there an elementary schooler in here?! How could a girl who looked like some pocket-sized pet possibly be seventeen! Even Se-ah, my featherbrained middle-school dropout of a sister, had been less grown-up at that age than she is now—but by seventeen, her height was already just about what it is today!
So I stood there snickering for a good long while at the tiny girl. And then a gaze landed on me.
"……?"
"Oh… no, it's nothing. Yeah—go on, keep laughing."
For a reason I could not have fathomed to save my life, Namgung Yurin beside me was nodding along, gazing down at me with eyes as warm as if she understood everything….
"It seems her uniform will take some time to prepare due to her personal circumstances—but she'll be studying alongside you all as a classmate of the same age, so make sure you get along with her, okay?"
Perhaps conscious of the students buzzing over her missing uniform and her small, babyish face, the homeroom teacher tossed the words out lightly, half in jest, to break the tension—then, swoosh, swoosh, the girl's name slid across the electronic whiteboard.
"Now then—our second transfer student to join our class today… Bukgung Seol. Seol-ah, if you're comfortable with it, may we ask you to introduce yourself to the friends you'll be spending your days with?"
Tap. One step. The girl edged slightly forward—and when the teacher finished speaking, the atmosphere did not settle; if anything, the murmur running through the class turned more flustered.
"B-Bukgung…? Huh… do we even have surnames like that in this country? Honestly, I've never seen one outside a murim novel."
"Well, I mean. There's a Namgung already, so a Bukgung's not that much of a stretch, is it…?"
"Iii…s that so? Now that you say it, I guess…?"
Bukgung Seol. White hair laced with a pristine water-blue, like snowflakes drifting down in deep winter. Unlike the strengthless white of the aged, it was a long mane that kept the sleek resilience of pure silver, half-veiling the eyes it spilled past. Blue eyes, clean as a lake flashing back the sunlight raining down from overhead.
"Is she even Korean…?"
"Her features do look kinda… foreign, though, man. You think she's mixed?"
It wasn't that her hair and eye color made her look non-Korean. Ever since awakeners had appeared in the world, it had become commonplace for an awakening ability to rewrite the body—hair, pupils, and the like. Right beside me, the eyes of pure-blooded Korean Namgung Yurin ran close to gold, like a cat's pupils catching fire in the dark, and not one student thought it odd that Bonjwa's eyes were the color of blood. It was only that the girl's features carried an impression unmistakably apart from the average East Asian face.
"…………."
For all her outward air of artless, untouched girlhood, she stood wrapped in deep silence—and those blue eyes rolled cold and clear as ice, gazing down upon the room like a sovereign surveying cowed subjects.
"Ahh…."
"Urk!"
She looked years too young for her age, but the instant students met that gaze, a hush draped over the class, laced with short groans, as though everyone had been flattened by something immense.
"……What in blazes!"
Thump. Thump. Thump.
My heart slammed wildly, and the Forged Blood Art, rising of its own accord, reflexively began to circulate scorching blood and shield my heart meridian.
'This is……!!!'
Face gone rigid, Bonjwa fixed the girl with a knife-edged glare. Green as these students still were, every one of them was an awakener who could wield mana in their own fashion. A girl's cold bearing alone should never have been enough to shrink them back and grind them under like this. Without intent of any kind—merely by letting her presence pour out—it bore down on and smothered the minds of others: the grotesque depth of her power.
"…Gulp."
For some reason, the golden-haired girl in the next seat looked less overwhelmed than anything else—if anything, the little sound she made was less a gasp than the swallow of someone drooling. Desperately shutting out that bizarre noise, Bonjwa analyzed the aura the girl emitted with absolute, unblinking focus.
Its nature was unmistakably different from the mana awakeners handled. It was an alien energy—something any human being, the moment it touched them, could not help but recoil from, revolted and ill at ease straight down to the instinct. This was what the world called demonic qi. And to refine one's dantian with demonic qi in place of internal energy—that was how it earned the name its first creator, the Heavenly Demon, had bestowed amid peals of mad laughter.
'—A demonic art…!!!'
And like the Explosion Demon Art that had whipped those Martial Arts Awakeners into frenzy last time, this was no cheap third-rate demonic art either. Given that the Forged Blood Art's most basic circulation alone had sufficed to shield my heart meridian, the depth of her training did not feel especially profound. And precisely because her cultivation was not so deep—demonic qi tempered this heavy, this utterly refined, could only have been forged by a supreme demonic art of ascension, nothing lesser…!
'How does another demonic art even….'
First the Explosion Demon Art that had surfaced before. Perhaps—unknown to the world at large—demonic-art awakeners too had been living in hiding all along. The very instant that suspicion formed, I looked up without meaning to and met the girl's limpid blue eyes—and a strange déjà vu, of a face seen somewhere before, set my instincts howling.
"……!!!"
And then a conjecture too absurd to be believed slashed through my skull.
Bukgung Seol. The surname Bukgung. Blue eyes that marked the colored-eye tribes of the western wilds. The appearance—all too convenient—of a demonic art of ascension. And that face. That face above all…!
Truly, it made no sense. And yet: one of the two supreme grandmasters who had stood against Bonjwa to the very last, back when I still walked the murim. Cheongang Geom-ma—the Sword Demon of the Heavenly Dipper. A warrior whose blood married the Central Plains to the Northern Sea, and who thus bore, unique among murim folk, the mixed-blood features and blue eyes of two peoples. The Cheongang line, the house bearing the name Bukgung, had passed down the First Demon Palace, foremost sect of the Unorthodox faction, generation after generation. The surname matched, true—though Cheongang Geom-ma's own given name was nothing anyone would mistake for a girl's—but the looks of this girl called Bukgung Seol resembled him so exactly that one could only think: had the Sword Demon ever had a daughter, would she not have looked precisely like this?!
Just as the face I wore now mirrored my little sister Se-ah's, from back when she was still small…!!!
"It couldn't be…."
Most of the murim who had witnessed the heaven-and-earth-shaking arts of Bonjwa, the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin, sank without fail into despair and terror. But Cheongang Geom-ma alone had been the one warrior who never released his obsession to win, even while despairing. I had sneered at the joined assault he chose at the very end—yet inwardly, in truth, I honored the Sword Demon's tenacity and his pride. And then, all at once, I remembered that I had never confirmed whether the rift Bonjwa had crossed still stood, or had simply vanished. Looking down at this frail girl's body I now wore, a sickening what if seized my mind. With this much aligned, guesswork was no longer guesswork—and the intuition of a warrior who had reached the realm of ascension had long since left mere hunches behind.
And then Bukgung Seol, who had been gazing down the room with frost-chill eyes, said in a voice of ice:
"I am Bukgung Seol."
'It can't be. Cheongang……!'
"Jjinhu told me to come eat here from now on."
"……?"
'It can't—be. Cheon… gang……?'
"Homeroom teacher? Is this acceptable?"
"Ah, um… y-yes…."
The girl turned and strolled away, serene as you please—and then, clatter, she pitched forward flat on her face like a first-rate klutz.
"Kkeheuuuk…!!!"
The girl raised her head. Her blue eyes brimmed, glass-clear and trembling, and what streamed from her nose was bright scarlet blood.
"Hh… hheuu… hheueuukk…."
She fought with everything she had to hold the tears back—but in the end they fell, fat and steady, exactly like a toddler's. And watching her, Bonjwa, the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin, reached a conclusion.
"Hm! My delusions… did run rather too far, it seems."
As if she could possibly be Cheongang… Geom-ma! To think this world truly held a coincidence beyond believing—no. That lofty, solitary pride that would never relinquish its infinite obsession or its hunger to stand above all warriors: that was Bonjwa's own acknowledged head of the Unorthodox faction, Cheongang Geom-ma, and surely he…! He was a great warrior who would sooner have chosen a clean, dignified death by his own hand than ever come to such a pathetic end…!
Once, she had been lord of the First Demon Palace, hailed as the foremost master of the Unorthodox faction—Cheongang Geom-ma. Bukgung Seol: the name Kim Jinhu had coined for her now, on the grounds that her hair had gone white as winter snow. Going by that name, the Sword Demon thought:
She was angry at being robbed of one more of Kim Jinhu's meals. Twice as angry at being hauled off to some playground where snot-nosed brats played. And beyond that—even granting that this was Kim Jinhu, the one man she herself had acknowledged—daring to put a skirt, a girl's garment, on the Lord of the First Demon Palace? That was beyond forgiveness…!
And so—because Kim Jinhu had begged so piteously, one breath from pounding his head into the floor—she had finally nodded, on the sole condition that she would wear no uniform attached to a girl's skirt, and had thus come to this world's hall of learning, where young whelps were schooled.
"………!!!"
Eyes red as blood. A déjà vu that clawed up her spine with such a chill that, without meaning to, she had let her demonic qi spill. In her desperation she had thrown obsession over it like a cloak to hide the fear surging up—and dredged up the past.
True, she had roared across the murim, like a vow carved in bone, that she would seize the Blood Demon and kill him. But in truth she had known she could never stand against his heaven-defying arts, nor against the Blood Demon Art—an incarnation of terror itself. Had she not been born of the Cheongang line, which shouldered the karmic debt of the defeated, she would long since have knelt beneath the Blood Demon. No one felt that truth more keenly, or owned it more readily, than Cheongang Geom-ma—and so those blood-red eyes, met face to face, could only drown Bukgung Seol in shock and confusion…!
And that was not all. The name written on the uniform's name tag. Bukgung Seol was still clumsy at it, but she had moved beyond mere speech and could now read and write a fair amount of Hangul—and though the pronunciation sat a little strangely against her native tongue, the name was unmistakable.
There, emblazoned across the crimson-eyed girl's name tag, stood the Blood Demon's true name.
In the very instant that sight struck her senseless—clatter.
"Kkeheuuuk…!!!"
Well. That happened. Clutching her torrentially bleeding nose, Bukgung Seol stared at the crimson-eyed girl and swallowed.
'Could it be……!'
Could it be—that the rift which had sealed her into this cursed body, the very rift that had trapped her in a doomed shell and cast her down into this bizarre world no denizen of the murim could so much as imagine, had not in truth been some vile snare the Blood Demon had laid with malice aforethought? Then perhaps the Blood Demon himself, too…!
"………?"
The moment that thought took shape, the crimson-eyed girl came into vivid focus. If she had been merely an ordinary little girl, perhaps it would have meant nothing—but there she was, bundled up together under the outer jacket of a woman with startlingly yellow hair like it was a blanket, held snug in that woman's arms, parading a humiliation no warrior could conceive of even in nightmare.
"……"
Cheongang Geom-ma—Bukgung Seol—reached a conclusion.
'Hm! The world truly does hold… every manner of marvelous coincidence!'
The one whose every single stroke of his arts shook heaven and earth, who had reached the very brink of transcendence and plunged the whole of the murim into chaos single-handedly. The very greatest under heaven whom the Sword Demon himself had acknowledged—the Blood Demon, surely he…! He was a great warrior who would sooner have chosen a clean, dignified death by his own hand than ever come to such a pathetic end…!
"…Pfft."
"…Heh."
And so the Blood Demon and the Sword Demon looked upon one another, and laughed.