The Weight of Life
“Fair enough.”
Hyun Si-woon let out a long breath.
No one had ever claimed that a Peak-realm martial artist was the final trial on the path to the archive. He had come prepared for something worse.
Even so! Ha-wol snapped inside his mind. You just finished one of them, and they throw ten at you right after? What a twisted bookworm!
Actually, this works out.
The goal of this regression had never been to clear the Spiral Library. He had only come for real combat experience.
The heights Si-woon fixed his eyes on were far higher than this—Peak, Transcendent Peak, the Flower Realm, the Profound Realm… and whatever lay beyond them. The mountain he had to climb was impossibly tall.
To get there, I need a proper training ground.
To him, those wraiths were nothing more than fine materials for growth—exceptionally high-quality ones.
“Let’s begin.”
The Formless Sword slid free with a soft hiss. The spirits around him were still present.
He kicked off the ground and drove into the wraiths’ flank.
So began a one-against-many battle.
Steel screamed as his blade knocked aside one wraith’s sword—only for strikes to come crashing in from three other directions at once. He wrenched Moon Spirit Footwork into motion and twisted his body, but he still had to allow one of them through.
A deep gash carved into his shoulder.
One-on-one and one-against-many were different from the ground up. When that “many” stood at a higher realm than him, the difference became absolute. Si-woon clenched his teeth and threw everything he had learned—every martial art, every spirit—into the collision.
The result:
First Form — Flash
Fire
A crimson comet punched through one wraith’s throat—and in the same instant, the sensation of his entire body being carved to pieces followed.
Still… I got one.
The agony was monstrous, yet strangely it did not feel bad. He had measured the height of the wall he had to climb, and he had shattered one piece of it. That was enough.
His vision went black.
Special Ability Regression has activated.
This is your twenty-ninth regression.
Twenty-nine already.
When he opened his eyes, he was exactly where he expected to be—right after clearing the seventh floor.
“Hyung-nim!”
“Oh, Si-woon’s awake!”
Everything had rolled back three years, to that day.
Si-woon closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. The sensation of his body being diced apart still clung to him with vivid clarity. Yet this regression was different from the ones before. Instead of humiliation or rage, a strange fullness settled through him.
This time I killed a Peak expert.
And the next trial? Ten of them. He would have to train until he could carve through those things with ease. That meant he truly needed to step into the ranks of the Full Moon.
“Si-woon, why aren’t you answering? Are you hurt somewhere?”
Baek Do-hee’s worried voice finally pulled him back to the present. He gave a faint smile and shook his head.
“No. You all did well.”
The look he turned on his party members ran deep. In the previous regression he had left them to their own devices solely for his own growth. Yet without a single complaint they had quietly grown in their places and become legends of the Korean server. They had never once asked about the whereabouts of the Despair Stones. For three long years they had held their ground without a single personality clash or fracture, offering him nothing but solid trust.
I was lucky.
He realized it afresh—finding the right people was an enormous fortune of its own.
I’m sorry. And thank you.
Something hot rose from the depths of his chest. Thinking of them tangled his thoughts all over again.
Is throwing away a life the right answer?
What was the difference between discarding a life and discarding these people?
Everything that followed unfolded like a set sequence. The Atla raid progressed more perfectly and more swiftly than in the last regression. Si-woon no longer hesitated; he put Baek Do-hee’s abilities to aggressive use from the very start, and the time needed to clear each region shrank dramatically. His sword, already carrying sword energy, dismantled the shell in moments even without the spirits’ help.
In the end he once again obtained eighty Despair Stones.
Yoo Jin-hyeok, exactly as before, offered the Whisper of the Spiral and asked to serve under him. Si-woon accepted the book, promised a next time, and parted ways.
Everything had gone according to plan. All that remained was to begin the brutal training once more. That should have been enough…
You brat.
Ha-wol’s voice reached him, carrying a deep concern he rarely heard from her.
Grinding an entire life into dust may not be the only answer.
“What do you mean?”
I acknowledge your vicious obsession and passion. But that may not be the only method.
Si-woon’s brow tightened. This was the first time Ha-wol had ever tried to stop him from training.
There is no need to bury yourself so completely in one particular realm. The path of martial arts is not the same as sitting at a desk poring over scriptures. The insights you gain while simply living also become part of your martial arts. Sometimes taking a single step back and looking at the world brings greater achievement than forcing open a blocked meridian. Why not focus on the Tower of Despair for a while? With your companions, I mean.
“And put the Spiral Library… on hold?”
That place may be important as well. What matters more is that you stop treating your own life lightly.
“……?!”
It felt as though someone had struck him across the skull. Ha-wol had spoken the very fear he himself had carried in the earliest days.
A life is fierce and desperate precisely because it is given only once. Within that desperation, human potential explodes past its limits.
Her gaze pierced him, sharp as a blade.
But look at you. You accept death far too easily and treat life as nothing more than a tool for growth. It may look efficient in the short term, yet over the long run it will become a poison that gnaws at your soul.
The words flew like daggers and buried themselves in his heart—sharper than the wraiths’ swords.
That attitude of discarding life will eventually seep into your every action. In a moment of true crisis you may form the habit of giving up too easily instead of taking one last step forward. The higher your martial realm climbs, the more important the heart becomes—not technique. An unshakable heart. The will to live. Martial arts without that are nothing but a castle built on sand. If you truly wish to look upon the Flower Realm and the Profound Realm, you must reclaim the weight of your life starting now.
Ha-wol thought quietly to herself that if things continued this way, Si-woon’s spirit would break. One who had lost the value of life could never stand at the peak of martial arts. That was the truth of the world as seen by one who stood in the realm of Moon Shadow.
“…….”
Si-woon could say nothing. She had struck the exact center of the mark. He had treated his regression ability as something natural and convenient for far too long. The pain of death had even become familiar.
“I understand.”
After a long silence he answered in a low voice. The decision was made. He slipped the Whisper of the Spiral into his inventory.
I’ll seal this away for now.
There was no need to rush. To see the truth of the tower he would have to walk the climbing path anyway.
“So take it step by step, is that it?”
Yes. Not merely climbing the tower—live your life. A pebble by the roadside, a passing breath of wind, the silly jokes you trade with your companions… every last one of them will become the fertilizer that builds your martial arts.
The next morning, clear sunlight washed over the training ground.
Si-woon sat leaning against the shade of a tree, watching a small girl swing her sword.
“Hyaat! Hyaaah!”
Yoon Seo-a.
In the previous regression she had reached the Transcendent Peak realm of Rigid Energy and been called the Sword Emperor. Now she was simply a cute disciple sweating at the threshold of the Heart Lake stage, still a third-rate martial artist.
While polishing Moon Point she sensed her master’s presence and came trotting over.
“Master! You’re here?”
“You’re already hard at it this early.”
“Of course! Thanks to the chance Master gave me I can move this healthily—I have to work even harder!”
“How’s practice going?”
“Mmm…”
She hesitated a moment, and a question clouded her clear eyes.
“Moon Point feels a little strange. I clearly stab the scarecrow’s vital points dead-on, but the force keeps scattering. The energy condensed at the tip of the sword doesn’t just burst—it feels like it’s splitting into several branches.”
Huh.
Look at that. Even the dimension of her concerns was already different. An ordinary martial artist at her stage would still be worrying about missing the target; she was already sensing the change in energy after the thrust. Her thinking simply ran on a different circuit from ordinary people.
A laugh rose in him.
Let’s see.
Si-woon called up the memory of his disciple’s sword from the last regression. The answer was right there. Whenever Seo-a gained an insight she had always come running to him, chattering nonstop about it.
“That’s because you’re already looking at the next stage of Moon Point without realizing it.”
“The next stage?”
“The essence of Moon Point is aiming at a point. But that point doesn’t have to be only one.”
He picked up a few small pebbles nearby and flicked them into the air.
“Imagine every one of those stones is a vital point. Could you pierce them all at once with a single trajectory?”
“What? How would that even be possible? I only have one sword.”
“You have one sword, but the points that sword draws can be many. Don’t try to force the scattering energy back together. Instead, pour your will into each of those branching streams. Imagine that just as you have five fingers, your sword energy can become five, or ten.”
Si-woon was not explaining something he himself had realized. Seo-a had told him this in a past regression. The principle reached past the extreme of Moon Point—Flash—and touched the very principle of Full Shadow, the third cut of Moon Spirit Swordsmanship. It was a realm far too distant for a Heart Lake martial artist.
But Yoon Seo-a was different.
“Huh? Oohhh?”
Her eyes sparkled. It was the feeling of something that had been clogged suddenly opening, as if she had found a lighthouse in the fog.
“Ah…! It wasn’t splitting on its own—I was the one dividing it! Master, you’re amazing! How did you even think of that? It feels like you looked straight into my mind!”
She gripped the wooden sword again. Having grasped something, she soon sank into a trance of solitary practice.
A strange emotion washed over Si-woon.
Maybe Seo-a’s true master isn’t me… but the future her.
That wasn’t bad either. Watching her rejoice as though a single small piece of advice had given her the entire world made something warm settle in his chest.
Ha-wol had been right. Reclaiming the weight of life—perhaps it lived inside moments as ordinary as this.
“Everyone, gather up.”
Si-woon called the rest of the party members who had been training hard.
“From now on, if there’s any part of your martial arts that’s stuck, or anything you’ve been curious about, speak up.”
Yes.
This regression…
Climbing together with them would be better after all.