Second Stage: Air Purifier
Hunter. Kim Jinhu, the Iron Blood Sword.
He had crossed countless lines between life and death, hauling despair, resentment, and pain on his back the whole way, fighting without pause for nothing more than survival.
"Please, just stop...."
Despair.
He had barely hooked his fingers over the edge of the cliff, and now something was stomping that hand loose and kicking him down past the abyss itself. A despair like that pressed down on his heart.
"Why do you make such a face?"
A cold sneer. A girl imperious and glacial, her cloak of azure demonic qi billowing, twin horns worn like a sovereign's crown.
In her brainwashed, hollowly glowing blue eyes, a faint trace of something else flickered.
"Jinhu, my friend. Kim Jinhu, my comrade. You, too, have come to welcome me, so why do you wear such a face? I welcome you. Truly, I welcome you."
Jjinhu, Jjinhu—that short-tongued, lisping call.
The girl who used to fumble his name and whine at him to hand over the Hell Sword Demon Saber was gone. What stood in this place now was only—
"Behold. Come, behold. Look upon me, witness me, prostrate yourselves, and despair. I am the First Among Demons, the sovereign enthroned upon the heavenly seat of the Black Forest."
Fwooooooosh—!!!
The azure demonic qi thickened further, and the enhanced bicorns stretched their necks and wailed out long hymns of worship, as if this had been her true nature all along.
In her wickedly gleaming blue eyes, an abyssal darkness rippled, and that long, drawn-out sneer was erasing every trace of the girl who had always tried so hard to keep her face blank and composed....
"Please, stop...."
As if she meant to leave not even that trace behind.
Adrift in a despair like a rowboat caught in a riptide it could never escape, Kim Jinhu barely managed to force out a single line.
"You're going to kick your blanket and cry about this later, I'm telling you... so please, stop...!!!"
Well. That was that.
Kim Jinhu writhed in despair, recalling the drawings and worldbuilding notes he used to scribble in his sketchbooks back in middle school.
"………?"
Bukgung Seol tilted her head.
"A blanket...? Why would I kick a blanket?"
"Khhk...!!!"
Watching her fail to understand in the slightest, Kim Jinhu had no way of holding back his tears.
Especially with what was right behind him: Cheon Se-ah, standing dumbfounded with a hand clapped over her mouth, trying to smother her gasp of disbelief. What Kim Jinhu's perception caught was her hands and arms prickling head to toe with goosebumps.
And then—
"Bukgung Seol, that girl...! She can actually fight. Even Bonjwa finds her a tough one...!!!"
"Jeez, you're allowed to lose at stuff like that!"
"S-Se-ah... why are you yelling like that...?"
The crimson-faced girl who went sheepish the instant she heard Cheon Se-ah's scolding... well... she seemed to have gotten a bit younger, so he'd let that one slide.
At any rate, with strangers' eyes on them too, Kim Jinhu—who was merely standing there watching—felt twice as much like dying...!
Seeing Kim Jinhu clutch his head, Bukgung Seol's brows bent ever so slightly, but as a strange ripple of mana spread out from the bicorns' twin horns, her blue eyes sank back into their hollow haze.
"You speak words I cannot understand. If you will not submit, there is only death."
Speaking with utterly empty eyes, Bukgung Seol took a step forward.
Crack.
"Kuuooogh...!!!"
When she snapped off one of the horns of the bicorn right beside her and closed her fist around it, a harrowing scream tore through the air.
Tsssssss—
The azure demonic qi condensed to a single point, stretching long as it spewed an ominous current, and soon hardened into the shape of a sword. The bicorn's broken horn.
Just as unicorn horn served as material for gear capable of striking down wraiths and spectral monsters, the bicorn's horn—limited in application, but a high-priced material used for hunter equipment or as a medium for spellcraft.
As their easy swaying under the pure power of Cheon Yujin's Forged Blood Art, and their instant corruption at a mere touch of demonic qi, had shown, a unicorn's receptivity was extraordinary. Their horns were used as equipment material precisely because the mana conductivity built upon that receptivity was so superb.
Which meant—
Unlike all the times she had been forced to wrap mana around a bamboo sword and hammer sword qi into shape, the Cheongang Demonic Qi condensed through the bicorn's horn was, in itself, no different from a peerless famous blade that could cut through anything...!
"No, wait—"
Kim Jinhu tried to stop her, but
"Are you insane! Keep your head in the game, you idiot!"
the mana barrier Cheon Se-ah threw up slammed across Kim Jinhu's front, and
Krrrshhhhh!
black mana orbs spewed from the bicorns' mouths crashed against the barrier, raising a deafening roar and a storm of backblast.
And through that backblast, the twin-horned girl came charging, driving her bicorn like a warhorse, and brought her sword down.
From her swordplay poured a single stream of sword wave.
Unlike before, when a lack of decisive power had kept her to the flexible sword, this was nothing but a single strike of utter simplicity, chopping straight down from high guard to low!
But the demonic qi draped around her like a curtain resonated and deepened, and the moment it condensed onto the Cheongang Demonic Qi's descending blow, it violently oppressed the air and mana around the blade—terrain began to be swallowed whole, as if gravity itself had multiplied dozens of times over!
An endlessly heavy single strike. The subtlety of the Heavy Sword meant something different, but this was truly enough to press down on gravity itself.
"Ah, shit."
Just as the bicorns had been strengthened by receiving the amplified demonic qi of Bukgung Seol's art, infection also meant circulation—so she and the bicorns circulated each other's demonic qi, dispersing the pressure bearing down on their bodies as well.
And so—
"Why the hell is she so strong, damn it...!!!"
Part of it was Kim Jinhu himself, weakened by being stuck with a bamboo sword of all things, but Bukgung Seol was stronger than usual. Far weaker than the Cheongang Geom-ma, the Greatest Sword Under Heaven, in his prime—but in this moment alone, she could show a realm beyond even a peak master's sword realm.
Kweeeeeeung!
With a sharp roar, Kim Jinhu, unfolding the Iron Blood Sword Art at full power, and Bukgung Seol collided. An exchange of strike for strike.
"......!!"
Kim Jinhu was stunned.
In overall combat power, in raw contests of strength, he was overwhelmingly the stronger. And yet—
'From the moment I picked her up... I knew she was no ordinary kid...!'
He was the stronger. But not in the sword. The instant their blades met, he understood: the raging torrent of swordplay the girl unfolded, the realm engraved in that blade, hung far, far beyond the ridge of the martial path Kim Jinhu had been gazing up at...!
And so—
"We're... we're fucked."
Cheon Se-ah was holding back the bicorns that had begun casting spells with her barrier arts, and unlike ordinary bicorns, each of the enhanced ones was putting out combat power on par with a named-rank monster. With her intervention hard to count on, and judging by the combat power Bukgung Seol was showing right now—
Given time, he could surely subdue her. But as things stood, he had no confidence whatsoever in taking her down without a single scratch.
"Somebody, do something...!!!"
Even knowing it was pointless, Kim Jinhu shouted through gritted teeth—and at that moment, with a faint smile, Cheon Yujin took a step forward.
A sphere of darkness came flying through the air. The attack spell the bicorn had loosed was not ordinary mana but a condensed mass of demonic qi—and for Bonjwa, the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin, it was not Bukgung Seol's ridiculous state but the situation unfolding right in front of him that was enough to drive him up the wall.
"Neigh! Neigh!"
"Neiiiigh!"
His little sister Se-ah's barrier arts had certainly blocked the attacks, but the backblast had scattered remnants of demonic qi—and the unicorns, from nothing more than a brush with those mere leftovers, began to convulse and corrupt. Just how extraordinary was their receptivity? Bukgung Seol's demonic qi was fairly concentrated, sure, but to think they would try to fall into bicorns on the spot just from taking a hit...!
Just as black ink soaks more readily into a pristine white page, the mana inside a unicorn that touched demonic qi immediately turned to the same nature as that qi.
"Grrrgh...!"
Bonjwa thrust both hands out toward the unicorn about to fly into a frenzy. The already-fallen bicorns were beyond saving, but at this point, an emergency measure—swiftly drawing the demonic qi out before their internal mana turned—might just be possible...!
No. It was possible. Hadn't it already worked when demonic qi tried to invade through Bonjwa's own palm, and the purification succeeded?
He laid his hands on the unicorn's body.
Thump. Thump. Thump!
Using the blood-filled vessels as his channel, he exerted the Absorption Art at full power—unlike his usual idle drinking of the ambient air's energy.
Carelessly absorbing demonic qi could mean accidentally mastering a demonic art, or sliding into qi deviation. But the Forged Blood Art that Bonjwa himself had created—even if the white page did soak up black water easily, it had been forged and tempered in the will of transcendence, and it surpassed principle and logic. It was a cultivation art devoted solely to pure refinement, able to filter even jet black into colorless clarity. Black water was nothing: drop it not on a page but into the great ocean, and it simply mingled with the water and vanished.
"Neigh? Neiiigh?"
The demonic qi invading the unicorn was swept into the Forged Blood Art's current and filtered away, and every sign of corruption vanished completely. The single-horned white horse gazed up at Bonjwa with wide, innocent eyes.
"Phew...!"
Bonjwa smiled in satisfaction, wiping the cold sweat that had beaded on the horn that had been glowing annoyingly since earlier—and just as he reached to drain the next unicorn's mana—
"......Wait."
A thunderbolt of an idea tore through his mind.
Infection also meant circulation. Then didn't circulation also mean infection? The Forged Blood Art, circulating without end, filtering all mana and energy into purity and refining it. Demonic qi that devoured unicorns. The Forged Blood Art that devoured demonic qi. Which meant this food chain pointed to one thing—
"Bonjwa... can infect too?"
Well, "infect" felt a little off somehow, but in any case—rather than merely purifying demonic qi, he might be able to dye it in the Forged Blood Art's color instead!
"......Heh."
If so—then the first tier, the Blood Flame Realm, would fall short.
And so, at the end of that sudden flash of inspiration, Bonjwa found the path for the Forged Blood Art to advance to a new second tier. The art, already at its extreme, smashed through its own wall and flung the door wide open on nothing more than a shift in perspective. In this moment, the Forged Blood Art advanced one stage further.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
With the pulse of his heart, Bonjwa flung wide every meridian and extraordinary vessel in his body, and every channel of the Forged Blood Art, toward heaven and earth.
Qi Absorption.
Simply by walking, running, passing through, it would greedily seek out and drink in every wisp of energy present, purify what it absorbed within the body, then discharge the crisply filtered energy of the Forged Blood Art indiscriminately into the air—so that the bicorns could drink it in. This was the realm of the Forged Blood Art's second tier.
Just as he was about to give it a name—
"Hold on, though...."
When he turned the principle over carefully in his mind—
wasn't this... an awful lot... like an air purifier...?