A Hamburger Is a Snack
A month had slipped by since I returned home.
Back when I still walked the Murim, there was a saying that the scholars who liked to boast they'd "swallowed a bit of ink" would repeat like a tic if they went even a single day without meeting someone: after three days apart, look at a gentleman with new eyes. The old idiom meant that a mere three days was enough for a scholar to change into someone strikingly, visibly improved.
A month is roughly thirty days. Ten times that span.
And who might Bonjwa be? The absolute master. The finest under heaven. The only one since Cheon-goe and Cheonma to push all the way to the very brink of conquering the Transcendent Realm... The one and only Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin!
If three days could make a mere scholar unrecognizable, what of the finest martial artist under heaven? Ever since the Blood Demon Art reached its absolute peak, I could pick up a superior-grade art or two in the blink of an eye and perfect one in less than half a moment — a truly great martial artist! Set beside some common scholar, I was a full moon before a firefly, a blue mountain rising beyond the pines.
And I, in the space of one short month—
"Oppa. I keep telling you, the fridge is always stocked with side dishes, so you have to eat properly."
"I-I am eating properly..."
"And don't go blowing your allowance on whatever delivery you want again, like last time. Understood?"
"Y-yeah, uh, mmhmm..."
"I'm trusting you. Anyway, I need to head out now... Oh, and I'll be back before dinner, I promise. So if I'm a little late and you order delivery again without asking... hmm?"
"I-I know. I know better now, so..."
"Aigoo. Good boy. Such a good boy."
—I had transformed into a parasite who got babied like the little sibling by his own little sister.
Pat, pat. Grinning brightly, Se-ah stroked the crown of my head in gentle little passes. The awkwardness from the day we'd reunited had vanished completely; the problem was that it had vanished in a rather different direction. After a while she stroked my head like someone lost in thought, then came back to herself with a flicker of guilt — she seemed to have only just realized how she'd been treating her own brother.
"...Tch."
So this body's a wreck, fine, but I'm still your brother, you know...!
Catching my expression, Se-ah jolted, blurted out "Sorry, Oppa!" and scrambled out the door.
From brother, to parasite — or more precisely, to little sister. Having pulled off a metamorphosis that would have startled even Gregor Samsa, I murmured as I watched her retreating back.
"...I'm the one who's sorry, Se-ah."
The truth was, I'd already blown my allowance on a hamburger delivery moments ago... I'd nearly died of suspense wondering whether it would land before you left the house...
"Phew. Close one..."
And then I thought. The order had merely been switched, that was all — a hamburger was, is, and always shall be a snack. To humanity, one hamburger was never a meal, only a snack.
Some pedant might quibble over how a set menu could count as "one hamburger," but the fries and cola were, strictly speaking, mere accessories. Bundle the whole thing together and the unit still came out to exactly one hamburger.
In other words: eat the hamburger first as a snack, then have the lunch Se-ah had lovingly prepared afterward. In very modest portions! ...Like a snack!
Only the sequence of snack and meal had been swapped — which meant, by any reasonable accounting, that I had not defied a single word Se-ah said!
Behold, everyone. —Behold the completion of a world where no one gets hurt.
"Heh."
Flushed with triumph, I toasted myself and sorted through the things I needed to do before the hamburger arrived. The moment I recalled the task sitting at the very top of that list, the gloom came flooding back, as it always did.
"Ugh, I really don't want to do this..."
It had been a month to the day since my return. Convinced that this frail body would only be a burden to Se-ah, I had thrown myself into preparing to reclaim my martial arts.
First-Generation Hunter — was that the term? In ten years, Se-ah had made it big, big enough to live in a house some ten times the size of the cramped place our family used to huddle together in. Compared to the old days, money and everything else came easy now; she could certainly afford to look after one extra person like me.
But honestly — even if I couldn't live up to an older brother's full dignity, I refused to sink into being a parasite! So I had resolved to reclaim my martial arts as fast as possible, shake off the seal binding this cursed body, and stand tall as a brother again, and yet—
"Nnngh... haaah, hah, hah."
The horse stance — mabo, the rider's seat. One of the very first postures a student of the martial arts ever learns, a training stance for forging the lower body, the single most important asset in any martial discipline. In the martial arts, the eyes matter most, the legs come next, and the hands come last. The horse stance builds the foundation beneath every movement technique and tempers the grit needed for endless training. In modern terms, picture a squat you are never allowed to stand up from.
And my horse stance lasted seven seconds.
"Haaeeek!"
This goddamn body! How could seven seconds of horse stance leave me whimpering like a puppy in the sweltering heat of early summer, legs buckling clean out from under me?! And this was Bonjwa — Bonjwa, bearer of unbreakable will, no less! My mind hadn't surrendered to anything; the body simply quit first, all on its own, and toppled over!
Not seven minutes. Seven seconds. Though it had been three when I first tried, so technically that was more than double, wasn't it?
"Heh heh..."
...This was no time to be celebrating a gain that pathetic! Stop leaking that dopey little laugh just because you got happy for a second!
"Damn it! What kind of worthless body even is this!"
Still sprawled where I'd fallen, I rolled across the floor and thumped my forehead against it, again and again. Training superior martial arts had honestly been easier — it had been hardship, sure, but at least it never drove me to despair over sheer impossibility like this!
And it wasn't just the puny legs that couldn't hold a lousy horse stance. There were these spindly forearms that couldn't even manage a proper workout with one-kilogram pink dumbbells, and soft, squishy flesh without a fistful of muscle to its name! The joke of it was that the body was scrawny overall while the flesh stayed marshmallow-soft — and why, why was this belly of all things so impossibly squishy?!
"Haaah..."
I slumped, sighing. From a body that could cleave cliffs and part rivers to one whose grand ambition was a ten-second horse stance — nothing remained but despair.
But the truly despairing part wasn't this external conditioning. The external arts were improving, technically. A month's progress amounted to three seconds becoming seven — a teardrop the size of an ant's — but progress nonetheless. At least there was hope that things could get better, no?
"First of all... the Blood Demon Art is out."
The Blood Demon Art. The supreme demonic art of past and present, the very bedrock of the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin. Since the Heavenly Demon Divine Art was suspected, in truth, never to have been a demonic art at all, the Blood Demon Art could fairly claim the title of greatest in all history.
But demonic arts, of all things, were forbidden. Rich words coming from a Blood Demon, perhaps — but this was one door I could not walk through a second time.
"...Nngh!"
Because the demonic path was nothing more than an ages-long trap laid down by the pioneer who had gone ahead of us all: the Heavenly Demon. Those who walked it were fated to meet a miserable end, and the only way to shatter that fate was the Transcendent Realm. I had believed exactly that, which was why I made transcendence my goal and attempted it even with the entire Murim arrayed against me. And the result was precisely what you see before you. A truly miserable end, this one.
The meaning of that "miserable end" had shifted somewhat, granted. For me, it felt about the same.
Besides, honestly, it hardly mattered that I couldn't practice demonic arts. Bonjwa's mind — the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin's mind — was nothing less than a walking library of every martial art under heaven. The venerable orthodox divine arts of the righteous sects, the crooked side-arts of the unorthodox clans, the vicious demonic arts of the demonic path — nothing was missing. Some I had "read" straight out of people with the Blood Demon Art; some I collected by annihilating their sects outright; some I beat out of self-styled masters and took. So I had picked a suitable internal cultivation art from the collection and tried to train it.
"Seriously, what kind of body even is this! At the very least give me an ordinary girl's body—!! Hic, khh, hck-hck!"
Sniffle, sniffle. The instant anger surged, this body burst into tears, same as always — and my voice cracked on top of it, which only made me angrier.
On the first day I attempted to accumulate qi, I understood something: this body and my mind were like a forced union, their balance fatally, catastrophically misaligned.
Anyone who reads martial arts fiction knows the scenes — the cultivator circulating qi while a guardian stands watch, because the slightest disturbance mid-circulation is deadly. Those scenes exist because when the balance of body, mind, and qi collapses, the practitioner suffers internal injury, or worse, falls into qi deviation. Barring a congenital defect in body or mind — severed meridians, say — no one's balance is ever so broken that internal cultivation becomes impossible.
And my current state was exactly like those severed meridians. No — in truth, it was worse. Because the balance between body and mind simply did not exist at all! Worse still, this body could seize up at any moment, so even circulating qi frightened me...!
For this body to survive its very first qi accumulation, I would need to ward off qi deviation with the luck of a top-tier pull in one of Se-ah's gacha games. And for the record, it was pulling off an ordinary accumulation — not avoiding the deviation — that came with gacha-level odds. Naturally, there would be only the one attempt. Fail, and it meant death or a half-paralyzed body.
I was steadily retraining the external arts, but honestly, I was on the verge of giving up on ever reclaiming my martial arts at all...
"...Sniff."
Beep-beep-beep.
"Ooooooh!"
In that moment of despair, the smartwatch Se-ah had given me chimed with a notification. I sprinted for the front door and... did not open it. Instead I pressed my head against it and listened to the sounds outside. The elevator doors sliding shut. The instant I confirmed that sound, I flung the door open, snatched the brown paper bag sitting on the mat, and slipped back inside.
It had arrived — the hamburger set...!
As lord of Blood Heaven Castle, I had tasted every delicacy the Central Plains had to offer and every rare dish from the lands beyond the frontier. But that was all ancient civilization. How could anything rival fast food, the masterpiece of modern civilization? Unwrap the paper, and there it was: a thick beef patty, a glistening buttery bun, lettuce dripping with cool moisture! Ahh! Now this was the martial world! Let the taverns make haste and swap their noodles and bamboo-leaf wine for hamburgers and cola!
"Slurp."
This body was hypersensitive to stimulation and far too honest with the fleeting emotions it was supposed to suppress. The drool escaping before I could stop it was, in any case, entirely this body's fault. I swallowed quickly, then took a great, hearty bite — one worthy of the hero whose earth-shaking feats had once resounded across the world.
"Nomnomnom."
...Hearty, at any rate.
Beep-beep-beep!
Hm? A delivery confirmation text...? I checked the smartwatch—
"Eep!"
The finest under heaven. The Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin. This month's allowance: confiscated.
...And this was my daily life, these days.