What Is Lust, and What Is a Demon?
What is lust, and what is a demon?
Death was not far off, and the strangest thoughts kept drifting in.
Forty years had passed since he came to Murim. Geum Suhyun — the man who bore the epithet Flying Heaven Lust Demon — found himself turning over the life he had lived.
They had been days thick with trouble and thicker still with incident. Branded a lust demon, branded a public enemy of the martial world — those grand, damning titles had not granted him a single peaceful day.
Geum Suhyun. No — his real name was Kim Suhyun, and he was, in all honesty, thoroughly aggrieved.
In all his years, he had never once done anything worthy of being called a lust demon. Granted, the number of women with whom he had shared a bed was… not small. But he could say this without a flicker of doubt: he had never forced a woman in his life. If anything, they had been the ones clinging to him.
How hollow. If this was how it was going to end, I should have set it all down a little more easily…
There was not much of his life left. The sword of the Sword Saint, Namgung Seong, had shattered his dantian. The blade of the First Blade under Heaven, Paeng Mukgi, had taken his arms and legs.
What was a mere lust demon, that every so-called supreme expert under heaven would join forces to put him down?
Was it because he had forced the Jegal Clan to seal its gates? That had been unavoidable. A wastrel son of the Jegal Clan had seized a fisherman's daughter and kept her as a sex slave.
Or was it because he had shared a bed with the daughter of the Murim Alliance Leader? That, too, had been unavoidable. She had sworn she would take her own life if they were not bound together — and what kind of man could walk away from that?
Suhyun turned over this reason and that for how he had fallen into this state. It was a pointless exercise. Whatever the cause, he was a dead man walking.
Even so, he had no regrets. A mere lust demon, and yet he would take the Sword Saint and the First Blade under Heaven with him as companions on the road. Could there be a more extravagant death than that?
Ah… I want a cola.
"Nn…?"
Suhyun opened his eyes on a bed. A ceiling that was strangely, stubbornly familiar. Modern blankets. Modern wallpaper.
Is this my life flashing before my eyes…?
What kind of dying reel was this vivid? And this was supposed to be a memory sliding past — yet he could move his body. Suhyun sat up.
"…"
For a phantom spun out of memory, it felt unnervingly real. Exactly like reality. He pinched his cheek.
It hurt.
"Don't tell me… I came back? To the real world?"
He could not believe it. He had searched so desperately for a way home — searched and searched until he gave the search up entirely. And only by dying did he return.
Suhyun took a slow look around. No matter how many times he checked, this was unmistakably reality. None of the Central Plains' ornate furnishings, no golden bedding. A plain, practical bed. A blanket printed with cartoon characters. And above all, a pane of glass that even an imperial palace would have struggled to come by.
The reality he had wanted so badly to return to. No — Earth.
"So it was a place you could only come back to by dying…"
Suhyun muttered it with a hollow little laugh. The method he had hunted so feverishly had been death. Of course he had never found it.
"Heh heh…"
The emptiness pulled a laugh out of him on its own. But Suhyun was a master who had reached the peak — essence, energy, and spirit all fully honed. He let the regret, the attachment, the sighs and the what-ifs slide off him in a single breath.
It's as good as a life newly given.
An extra life he had never expected. Suhyun resolved to treat this second chance as something precious.
"Hrm. This body is in a sorry state."
Having adapted to reality with startling speed, he took stock of himself first. Not a scrap of muscle — a body gone soft. The inner energy that had once run on and on like the Yangtze was gone without a trace.
"This, too, will be a pleasure, I suppose."
Decades of effort had vanished like sea foam. Suhyun only smiled and shook it off. This was a life granted in surplus. To want his old labors back on top of that would be greed. Strength could be trained again.
Mm. Faint — very faint — but it isn't gone entirely.
He folded into a lotus seat at once and tried circulating his energy. The qi that existed in nature — draw it in according to the mind method, store it in the dantian, and that was inner energy. Compared to the world of Murim, what he could feel here was pitifully thin, but it was not nothing, and that was enough. If the quantity was lacking, he could go where there was more of it. Failing that, he could simply train harder.
"Ugh… Apparently the old me didn't exercise at all."
He had only sat in lotus for a moment, and already his thighs and groin were screaming. At this rate, he would need to build an external foundation before he even thought about inner energy work.
That was when the door to the room he had been sleeping in banged wide open.
"Hey! You bastard! Still knocked out!? You gonna get out here or what?!"
"Oh…"
A face that lingered, if only faintly, in his memory. The name, though, would not come.
Right… this was some kind of dorm, wasn't it? Probably?
The memories from before he crossed into Murim still sat in the back of his mind, hazy but intact. Suhyun had been an orphan, and the moment he finished high school he had been fighting just to stay alive — taking whatever work he could get, obsessed with putting money aside. That was how he had ended up at L Massage Parlor, a place that hired orphans and threw in room and board besides.
A few years earlier, massage licenses had been opened to the general public, and businessmen had poured into the trade. Supply — the businesses themselves — had swelled, and the product they needed to sell — masseurs — had run short. To recruit on a large scale, L Massage Parlor had built a system: gather people, feed them, house them, and put them through to a massage license. Suhyun had been one of the ones hooked by room, board, and a professional qualification.
The Suhyun of the past had spent a year grinding through the bottom-rung work at L Massage Parlor and had, in the end, earned that license. The Suhyun of the present did not remember it with any precision.
"Gwanghyun! I remember now. It was Gwanghyun."
"Wh-what?"
A moment's thought, and Choi Gwanghyun's name surfaced. Suhyun's senses had always been exceptional — to pull up a name he had buried forty years ago.
"A pleasure to see you again."
Suhyun started to cup his fist in a martial salute by reflex, then stopped. He lifted a hand instead, the greeting awkward on him.
"Y-you little shit…!? Have you lost your mind!? You think because you scraped together one license you get to talk to me as an equal!?"
"Hm?"
The greeting had been correct, had it not? Gwanghyun's face twisted as his temper flared.
"What is the meaning of this?"
"Ha… You haven't come to your senses yet. I have been slacking on keeping you in line lately!"
"Tut. Why are you doing this. You'll only get hurt."
Gwanghyun cracked his neck left and right and came on in a way that was meant to be threatening. He looked every inch the neighborhood thug. Had Gwanghyun always been this sort of person? It had been so long that the memory would not sit still.
"Ha, haha. Get hurt? Who? Me? Grit your teeth."
Gwanghyun's fist came for Suhyun's head. There was weight behind it — a blow thrown in earnest. To the eyes of an absolute master, though, it was painfully slow. There was no martial principle in it at all, just a telegraphed swing, and there was no reason to stand there and take it.
Suhyun shifted half a step and let the fist go by. Then he tapped the back of the man whose weight was already committed forward, and Gwanghyun's body lurched into a wild, helpless surge.
"Uh!? Uhhh! Waaaaagh!"
The man who had been throwing a punch went down in an ugly sprawl. Unfortunately, the fall only stoked his temper. Face flushed brick-red, he huffed and started to push himself up.
Now what.
Suhyun did remember, at least, that you were not supposed to use violence in the modern world. That did not mean he was obliged to stand there like an idiot and let himself be beaten. Absolutely not.
I'll have to hit him in a way that doesn't show.
"You son of a— huh?"
This time Gwanghyun came in with a boxing stance, determined not to be caught off guard. He only realized something had gone wrong when a hot, rising sensation climbed out of his abdomen. His body jackknifed. He flung out a hand, frantic.
"W-wait!"
"Don't bother speaking. I know your kind all too well. Had you never drawn the blade, I might have let it pass. But once it is drawn, you stamp it down until the man never dares raise it again."
"Wh-what blade did I even—! GYAAAAAAH!"
That day, Choi Gwanghyun — who had only ever thought of Suhyun as his gofer — got the living daylights beaten out of him. The strange part was that there was not a mark on his body. He could not even file a complaint.
"Nnngh…"
"Tut. Your hips are dropping."
"Urgh!"
A complete reversal. Gwanghyun, head planted on the floor, made a long-suffering noise. Suhyun had no intention of going easy. His eye was an absolute master's — he could tell at a glance whether a body had reached its limit. No amount of pitiful acting from Gwanghyun was going to land.
"I-I'm sorryyy… I was wrong…"
"Is that so? And what, precisely, did you do wrong?"
"Everything. All of it. All the rotten things I did to you. I'm sorry. Forgive me…"
"What rotten things did you do?"
Suhyun was asking because he genuinely did not know. To Gwanghyun, the question could not possibly have sounded that way.
"Making only you do the laundry, only you do the cleaning… sending you on errands… stuff like that… I won't do it anymore… I really can't take any more…"
Even through the groaning, Gwanghyun did not break the face-down, ass-up pose. His body had already learned that if he collapsed, he got hit again.
"You worked me quite hard, I see."
"…S-sorry…"
"Want to be forgiven?"
"Of course!"
"Then get up and buy me a cola. Do that, and I will forgive you."
"A cola? I-I'll get it right now!"
A moment ago he had been groaning like a dying man. Now Gwanghyun shot to his feet and bolted out of the dorm as if launched from a bow. Suhyun watched him go and snorted.
He was no petty man, nursing a grudge over something forty years gone. He had put Gwanghyun through it for one reason only: once the hierarchy was set in stone, everyone would be more comfortable.
"Here!"
"Good. With this, you are forgiven."
Gwanghyun came pounding back and held the cola out in both hands. Suhyun took it with fingers that actually trembled.
Cola. After forty years. Pizza, hamburgers, chicken — those he had been able to approximate, more or less. Cola, never. In Murim, how he had craved this.
Pssssht—!
The can cracked open with a bright, clean hiss that seemed to go straight through his ears. Suhyun drained it in a single pull.
"Khh! Now that's the stuff!"
The electric fizz of carbonation thrilled across his tongue and down his throat — a taste Murim could never have offered. With the cola in him, it finally, truly sank in that he had come back to the modern world.
"Is it… good?"
"Yes. The cola is excellent."
"Ha, haha… That's a relief… Then should we head to work…? We're running a little late…"
Gwanghyun said it while watching Suhyun's face. Staff who lived in the L Massage Parlor dorm were required to come in earlier than the commuting employees and help with the parlor's work. It was in the contract.
"Work, is it…"
Suhyun knew this was the parlor's dorm. He knew, too, that he had wanted to work as a masseur. A Murim master, giving massages? In Murim, he would never even have considered it. But this was not Murim. This was modern Earth. And he had not yet decided what he wanted to do with himself here.
In that case, doing the work his self of forty years ago had wanted to do was not such a bad idea. Besides, on modern Earth, gold spoke louder than steel. To make money, you had to work.
"If it is time to work, then we work. Lead the way."
"Yeah. But, Suhyun."
"What is it?"
"That way of talking… you're not gonna do that at the parlor too, right? The managers'll lose it…"
"Ah. Right."
He had been so disoriented he had forgotten. People on Earth did not talk like that.
"Yeah. Talking like this should be fine, right?"
"Uh… and you're using formal speech with me…"
"What?"
"N-never mind. Let's just go."