The Original and the Copy
How had it come to this?
Everything had been fine — surely it had. Surely this was the kind of thing they could have laughed off at the end of the day, called a run of bad luck, and left behind.
They had only gone on a school field trip. She had followed at his heels out of worry... an accident had happened thanks to her brother's ill-starred constitution, and they had cleaned it up. That should have been the whole of it.
As one of the strongest of the 1st-generation hunters, she had known despair with no exit in sight, and she had lost comrades more than once. But she could say this with certainty: never since the day she had awakened had Cheon Se-ah felt so utterly powerless.
She had believed her own strength was enough. She had believed that no matter what catastrophe struck, so long as she was standing on that ground, she could handle all of it.
But she had failed to stop her brother Cheon Yujin from stepping forward. And it had come back as the worst result imaginable.
The sudden aberration that had seized her brother's body. No — could she truly call it sudden? Perhaps the very act of calling it "sudden" was her own way of shirking responsibility.
Floundering in the endless mire of self-blame, she kept seeing her brother as he always was after some incident dragged him past his limits — the nosebleeds, the hospital stays. Had the omens not been there all along? Had she not simply looked away from them?
For the entire drive to Rachel's hospital — her brother's personal physician — Cheon Se-ah, her mind gone blank, had done nothing but replay this self-flagellation, over and over.
And now—
"........."
Cheon Yujin lay on the bed in the private room. Cheon Se-ah chewed at her trembling lip and gazed at him in silence.
According to Rachel's findings, none of his outward symptoms called for any immediate measures — no respirator, no IV drip, nothing of the sort. The blood that had dyed him scarlet from head to toe had all been wiped away... so to the naked eye, nothing appeared to be wrong at all.
The crimson-eyed girl simply slept in stillness, both hands folded over her chest. She didn't look like a hospital patient in the least. She could have passed for a student who'd wandered into the school nurse's office for a nap because she was feeling a little off.
But that was impossible.
This was the brother who, in his clash with the Bicorn, had worked a miracle straight out of a novel's saintess. And through all of it, Cheon Yujin had never taken a single wound — her barrier arts had shielded him from start to finish. There had been no way for him to be hurt.
"If only it had been an injury..."
That would have been its own horror — but at least not the worst of it. Just the second-worst. With Rachel's power as a healing-type awakener, nearly any trauma could be erased in moments.
But there had been no trauma of any kind. Cheon Yujin had bled from every inch of him — and that symptom, unmistakably, came not from without but from within...
"Oppa..."
Gazing at that face — as white as the hospital ceiling above — Cheon Se-ah slowly laid her palm against his cheek.
Beep... beep... The steady pulse of the vitals monitor confirmed, beyond any doubt, that her brother was alive.
"He's... warm."
Warmth flowed from his cheek into her fingertips. Cheon Yujin slept on, so very peacefully. And he had been unable to reclaim consciousness for a full week now.
The memory was still vivid — her brother's thick blood spilling, clinging, filthy, over her hands. That sensation, that scalding heat. Without even this warmth... he looked as though he might draw his last breath at any moment.
She knew it meant nothing. Even so... she could not help but cling, with everything in her, to this one tangible proof that her brother still lived.
Just then, the door slid open, and Rachel walked in, her face clouded.
"Se-ah... the results came back."
"Unnie. What did they say?"
Holding out the chart, Rachel said, "I ran them again... but as I expected — right now, Cheon Yujin is 'normal.'"
"Again...?"
Cheon Se-ah's head sank. A heartbeat later she snapped it back up, as if seized by a fit, and cried out:
"That's... that's impossible, Unnie! Fine! Say he's normal. Then why, why on earth, has he been unconscious for a week?!"
Right. That was what had let everyone keep underestimating his condition all this time. The nosebleeds, the hospitalizations, incident after incident — and yet no matter how many tests they ran, the only conclusion that ever emerged was that Cheon Yujin's body was, impossibly, the picture of health.
And the physician running those tests was the finest healing-type awakener in the nation, a doctor of the first rank. If even Rachel could produce nothing better than this, then Se-ah could only sink that much deeper into despair.
"His body itself is perfectly sound. The reason he can't wake is... an 'overload.'"
"What...?"
"An instinct to shield the mind from the body's overload. By that instinct... he has, for a time, set his self adrift from his own body."
Rachel's theory was not entirely wrong.
In truth, Cheon Yujin's body, having reached the Pure Blood Realm of the Forged Blood Art, had entered a temporary state of overload in order to force through its drastic 'transformation.' Just as warriors who attain the legendary realm of complete rebirth lose consciousness in the throes of shedding their old selves, Cheon Yujin, too, was simply walking that road.
But to Rachel Lee, it had looked like something else entirely — a process pointing in a wholly different direction.
"Se-ah... I haven't been able to say this until now, but this time, at last... there's something I must confess. Something you need to hear. It involves Cheon Yujin, too."
Rachel had made her decision.
The anguish and resolve in Rachel's expression — a look Se-ah, who had known her for years, had never once seen — sent anxiety roaring up through her, as though she stood teetering at the edge of a cliff.
"U-Unnie... no. Please don't. Don't frighten me like this..."
"...Hear me. Hear the confession of my sin."
And so Rachel laid everything bare — the wrongs she had committed in days gone by, together with every conjecture she had been quietly building about Cheon Yujin's condition.
Homunculus.
Hearing all of it, Cheon Se-ah could not accept Rachel's words.
"Unnie, don't say such absurd things."
"Cheon Se-ah. I know it's hard to accept. But Cheon Yujin's condition—"
"No. I'm not denying your confession to run from reality."
She meant it literally. She could not accept Rachel's words — could not, as in they did not hold. It was not that she couldn't accept reality.
That the unnie she'd counted as a dearest friend and comrade for so long was confessing to such sins was staggering enough. But separate from that, Se-ah's reason — which had been careering without end — finally cooled, clear and cold.
"By your reasoning... my brother bears no returnee mana patterns, his body has become what it is, similar symptoms have occurred... you believe the common threads run deep."
"Which means..."
"Which means I've decided to call it what it is — baseless conjecture. Because... if your theory were true, then the brother lying here would be walking around with copied memories. Which would mean an original exists somewhere else. Isn't that right?"
"...Ah."
It was something Rachel, too, drowning too long in her own anguish, had let slip past her.
"My brother went missing more than ten years ago. There is no way he was kidnapped somewhere back then and cloned a decade later. And if he returned as a returnee, then he'd have to have been seized all over again and put through human experimentation... Even for a long shot, that's far too long a shot, don't you think?"
"That's... true, but—"
"You've overthought this, Unnie — past the point of reason. Your claim is like meeting someone with a cold and trembling in terror that they carry the Black Plague, because both share a single symptom: a cough."
Cheon Se-ah sank into the chair beside the bed. She laid her hand on Cheon Yujin's cheek and felt that quiet warmth.
"So... unless something like an original of my brother appears, just as you claim... I won't believe it."
Slowly, the corners of her mouth drew up.
"Because I believe it, with everything in me — that the Oppa before my eyes is my Oppa... the most precious Oppa I, Cheon Se-ah, have."
Her smile held a warmth like the heat resting in her palm.
A basement room.
Two shadows, their eyes filled with an eerie blue glow, gazed at the glinting tip of a syringe — and at the ominous mass writhing within it. Before that needle sat a man who had once been the hope of Sungmuryeon Guild, and was now nothing more than a criminal. The man they had once called the Martial Maniac.
"Everything returns to its rightful path in the end... I always knew I would pay for my sins someday. I just never imagined I would pay like this."
Kang Mu-jin, bound fast from head to toe, smiled bitterly.
"Hey. Is there really a need to tie me up this tight? You know as well as I do... I've already lost my martial arts. Binding me does nothing but hurt. It's meaningless."
The Kang Mu-jin who had once wielded sword arts dreadful enough to make Mount Hua itself shudder no longer existed.
Even now, the moment he closed his eyes, it rose before him. Beneath a red star burning in the heavens. A crimson-eyed girl, soaked in blood, sneering down at him.
The instant that single punch had sunk into the core of his body, everything the martial arts awakener Kang Mu-jin had been had shattered — and he had reverted to an ordinary man.
"Right. It's meaningless."
Then one of the shadows spoke.
"But Kang Mu-jin — you are the only case on record of a martial arts awakener reverting to an ordinary human. You have fallen into a meaningless existence. And that is precisely what gives you meaning to us."
"Haha... what nonsense is this?"
"This is the Demon Art."
The syringe where an ominous energy squirmed. An energy that recalled the hunters gone berserk during the Indefinite Gate terror attack. Kang Mu-jin's face went rigid.
"So?"
"Until now, the Demon Art has been administered only to the unawakened... to artificial life. Whether an awakener who has lost his martial arts can re-awaken through the Demon Art — as of today, that question is answered."
"So that's why you dragged me out of my prison term by force... only to spend me as a lab rat. What a letdown."
The syringe drifted closer, unhurried.
"I find myself curious what manner of Demon Art will awaken."
The needle's tip found his vein. Kang Mu-jin smiled a hollow, empty smile... and thought once more of that day — the one he could never forget.
Ah... you, O great Martial Ultimate.
Even if you stole my martial arts from me, even if you made me pay the price of my sins...
still... without fail...
I had wanted to show you the answer I myself had found...
"Kgh!"
The needle bored cruelly into the vein, and demonic energy writhing like an abyss flooded his body in an instant.
And then—
Thud... thud... thud...!
"AAAAAAAAGH!!!"
His heart wailed in agony. Black veins rose across his skin as a convulsion vast beyond all resistance came crashing in.
Screaming, his consciousness dimming bit by bit under the pain, his vision soaking over into a blur — his mind leapt into a strange and twisted elsewhere.
Th... this is...
A dream.
An awakening dream...!
He had prayed the experiment would fail — if only so those bastards would be the ones left eating shit. But true to his wretched luck, the experiment, it seemed, had succeeded.
And so, within the dream of awakening, Kang Mu-jin drifted, dreamlike, through the whole of one warrior's life...
.........?
Red. Red. Red. A space drowned in scarlet, edge to edge. The brackish reek of iron. A sea of blood — a Blood Sea.
Waves of blood surged over him, flooding his throat, sealing his mouth, seeping into him as if to smother him in silence.
.........!!!
Kang Mu-jin understood. In this sea of blood... his own self was dissolving, melting away...
And then — 'It' opened its eyes.
"Re-awakening of the Demon Art... a success, then."
A skin-crawling aura radiated from Kang Mu-jin's body. One of the shadows exclaimed in awe, eyes fixed on the tightly bound form.
Bound like that, even re-awakened by the Demon Art, he would never dare resist. ...Or so he believed.
".........What—!"
He had not looked away. Not once. And yet where their captive had been bound, Kang Mu-jin's body was simply gone. And now, right beside him — 'It' stood, lips split into a thin gash, blood-red eyes locked onto his.
"Stop that crea—!"
WHAM!
A hand had already seized the first shadow by the nape. The second shadow rushed forward, trying to loose a palm-force brimming with demonic qi — but a hand that had drifted in like a phantom was already closed around his throat.
".........!"
"Kehk... kghh... grrkk..."
The shadow in the left hand crumpled to the floor in a heartbeat, drained of every drop of blood, nothing left but a withered husk. The shadow in the right hand died on the spot, blood pouring from his eyes, his nose, his mouth... from every hole his body possessed.
Then — a soft slurp. Having tasted the spilled blood with a long, outstretched tongue, 'It' stretched, like a sleeper rising from dreams.
Not enough. This was not enough. With this, it could never arrive. A puddle of blood this meager would never presume to knock upon the gates of the heavens. It needed thousands. Tens of thousands. Millions — no... hundreds of millions, and then more beyond them! It would devour this world entire, drink it dry of blood, swallow it down — and reach transcendence!
'It' was an amalgam of resentment. 'It' was an amalgam of curses. 'It' was a being forged in the crucible of the blood and tears of demonic practitioners who, across a thousand long years, had knocked without end upon the gates of the heavens.
.........
'It' tried to say something — and understood, then, that it did not yet possess a self. It had no self because it had failed to steal one.
That man! Not even an inheritor of the bloodline. The fool who had taken up the bloodline's duty in place of that frail, spineless wench who had abandoned her own succession to 'It'! A man with no gift for battle, whose talent for the martial arts was middling at best, who had fixated on nothing but surviving, cockroach-like! Of every successor in history, the one saddled with the most pathetic talent and destiny — and yet the only one ever to subjugate 'It' through nothing more than a single-minded will to return to his family!
Without a self, 'It' thought on instinct alone: if an ego was required to reach its purpose, then it would borrow the ego of the strongest of them all.
And so 'It' looked down into the blood soaking the floor, and made of it a mirror.
Crack. Crick-crack-crack! To that uncanny noise, the man's skeleton twisted and warped.
Crimson eyes fixed upon the mirror of blood, 'It' opened its mouth, slow and halting.
"Bonjwa is... the Blood Demon... the Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin."
Crack. Crick-crack. Twisting its neck aslant, it — the Blood Demon Art — smiled, thin and cold.