Blood Heaven Demon Radiance
A thin, pale sunlight at the edge of dawn. The daybreak that had risen was already passing. A bird chirped, and in the morning that followed, dazzling sun took the place of the shadows that had lain over the world.
Warmth and light tickled the eyes of a woman with passionate crimson hair.
"...Mm..."
She opened drowsy eyes and showed the world a pair of vivid scarlet irises, stirring her clouded mind awake only to meet a ceiling she did not know.
At some point she had been laid out flat, and the fact puzzled her. Slowly she sat up and looked around, and then she understood. This was not her study. It was someone else's bedchamber.
A single stick of incense was burning there. The moment she recognized it, the woman murmured without meaning to.
"Cheap Night Incense..."
True to its name, it was called the cheapest of the cheap—an incense said to help one sleep, and in truth nearly useless. She stared at it and felt the question rise.
"Why is that..."
She had no memory of lighting incense before she slept. There had been a time she drifted off amid every costly fragrance money could buy, but once they proved useless she had never used them again. No matter what medicinal ingredients she tried, whenever her consciousness receded she became a blood fiend and killed, and the more blood she took, the worse that backlash grew. So why? More than that—how?
The thought had barely formed when a voice reached her.
"You're up?"
"Get ready and come out to the yard. From today on, you'll have to work hard at learning martial arts."
Watching Hwa Baek say it as if it were nothing and walk out, she understood. This was his room. The very room she herself had prepared for him.
She washed the oil from her hair, bathed a face and body worn thin, and changed out of her wrinkled clothes. Last of all she put on the light makeup that had always been habit, then stepped out into a morning courtyard where a soft wind was blowing.
"You're out."
Hwa Baek was waiting for her there with several martial manuals in hand. Without preamble he held a hand out to her. She did not know what it meant, but she followed his lead and offered her own.
That was when the hand he had kept hidden shot out like an arrow, shaped into a knife-hand.
"...!!"
A threat lanced through her and she jerked backward, but her body was already toppling. Hwa Baek's foot had hooked her leg. Even so, Yeon Ihwa turned on the strength of a solid waist and lower body and struck him as she spun. The blow carried both rotational force and internal energy, yet he flicked it aside as if it weighed nothing. Before that overwhelming difference in strength, not only her hand but her entire body was flung away, empty and helpless.
Balance utterly gone, Yeon Ihwa squeezed her eyes shut and braced to be driven into the ground. Then something caught her—an incomprehensible force. It was Hwa Baek's hand. Braced at her waist, it drew her in.
Face met face, close enough that the slightest movement would have set the tips of their noses together. Hwa Baek gazed into her red eyes for a moment, then spoke.
"As I thought. You're not that far gone."
He had put killing intent into the attack, and still the Blood Red Eyes had not bloomed in Yeon Ihwa's gaze. That was proof the Blood Bloom had not taken hold—and proof she had not yet become a blood fiend in full.
If her condition were truly severe, an attack of this level would have triggered Blood Bloom with ease.
The heroine treated by the divine physician had been a constant nuisance, bursting into Blood Bloom the instant her life was threatened. Her realm back then had sat between the Peak Realm and the Transcendent Peak Realm. Set beside that, Yeon Ihwa's realm could be taken as something around the Peak Realm.
"...For now, would you please let go?"
At her words he took his hand from her waist. He seemed to turn something over, then asked her outright.
"What's your realm?"
Yeon Ihwa hesitated before she answered.
"First-Rate... I am First-Rate."
"First-Rate?"
Hwa Baek's question hung in the air as if the answer made no sense. He had only watched for a moment, but her movement was not of a First-Rate standard. Her skill stood plainly ahead of even the shadow guards she commanded. More than that, in the original story she had been one of that world's higher-ranked masters—a Transcendent Peak expert who wielded Gang.
"Is that true?"
When he asked, her expression changed. Something about it sat wrong with her. It did not look like a lie, yet her whole body said there was a catch, and then she opened her mouth and was honest.
"...Right now, I have my middle dantian sealed. So that my realm will not rise."
Yeon Ihwa was what people commonly called a martial prodigy. For a woman she had been born rather tall, with a sturdy frame, and she was quick-minded, so martial arts came to her fast. Thanks to that she had endured the training life of the Blood Heaven Cult—but the very gift that had carried her through childhood had, by now, become nothing short of a curse.
The higher her realm climbed, the more the Crimson Blood Demon Art dominated her mind. Unwilling to lose her human heart, she had tried to improve the art and correct it. The attempt had only made things worse. The more she tempered her body, the more she honed her control over her internal energy and the further she increased her internal power, the more the Crimson Blood Demon Art nibbled her mind away, bit by bit.
In any case, because she had never set martial arts aside in her search for a cure to the Blood Bloom, the completeness of her body and the depth of her insight were not merely enough to reach for the Peak Realm. They overflowed it. And by the nature of the Crimson Blood Demon Art, a demonic art, she would never lack for internal energy. Even so, she had not ascended to the Peak Realm. She was certain that if she opened her middle dantian and arrived there, the Blood Bloom would grow severe beyond any comparison to what it was now.
"...I see."
Understanding her, Hwa Baek nodded. Then he said it.
"You did well."
He picked up the two manuals he had set down for a moment and held them out to her. On them, names like these were written.
⚔ Taiji Fist ⚔
⚔ Heart-Tending Art ⚔
The first was a manual one could obtain easily anywhere in the murim, closer to calisthenics than to a martial art. The second he knew to be as cheap as the Three Calamities Heart Art or the Six Harmonies Art, though he had never trained in it himself.
"Practice each of these for an hour a day, and when night comes, burn the Cheap Night Incense and sleep. Do that, and at least you won't become a blood fiend."
By the original's account, the heroine who had come within a breath of fully blooming into Blood Bloom had eased the symptoms through several methods. Cheap Night Incense was one of them. The Taiji Fist and the Heart-Tending Art were among them as well.
The Taiji Fist was calisthenics, yes, but for governing the mind it held an effect more outstanding than any martial art under heaven. So tremendous was that effect that the original stated it outright: master the Taiji Fist to its extreme, and one could learn any art at all without the slightest fear of qi deviation. Within the world of Disciple of the Greatest Under Heaven, that was the standing the Taiji Fist held.
And the Heart-Tending Art. True to a name that meant tending the heart, it held an effect similar to the Taiji Fist and yet subtly different—the settling of internal energy. Righteous qi, selfish qi, demonic qi, it made no difference. Merely circulate the Heart-Tending Art, and internal energy of any nature could be laid to rest. Of course, that came with the condition that one's attainment had to be high.
The original's heroine, who had nearly become a blood fiend, had been in a far worse state than Yeon Ihwa was now. With only these three remedies—Cheap Night Incense, the Taiji Fist, and the Heart-Tending Art—resolving Yeon Ihwa's Blood Bloom would be a simple matter. But there was something more important. Hwa Baek had not yet cured her Blood Bloom at the root.
"I'll be away for a week. There's somewhere I need to go."
From this moment on, he meant to head there and settle it.
Disciple of the Greatest Under Heaven was a paint-by-numbers harem novel, but the author's skill had made it genuinely popular. For formulaic harem fare, it had kept a steady place inside the weekly top ten, and after it finished it was popular enough to hang on the site's front banner as promotion. If it hadn't been, it never would have caught my eye.
Anyway. Cliché or not, Disciple of the Greatest Under Heaven ran past five hundred chapters, and the protagonist had stumbled through about as many fortuitous encounters as there were installments. One of those encounters was Serpent Sound Valley, in Sichuan.
I stared at the cliff that bore the name—a drop with no visible end.
Shaaaaa—
Darkness without a bottom. From inside that dark, something like a serpent's scream went on without end. I knew what threat waited in there, so I had no choice but to say it.
"It lives up to the name Serpent Sound Valley..."
Finding the valley had been easy. Its infamy was such that you could ask anyone who lived in Sichuan where Serpent Sound Valley was, and they would tell you without trouble. There was one more rumor about the place: that a dragon lived at the bottom of this cliff. A rumor is only a rumor, one might think—but cliché or otherwise, this one was obviously true.
And it isn't an ordinary dragon, either.
The Blood Dragon. A dragon made of blood, grown fat on countless spirit beasts and human beings. As the name suggested, the Blood Dragon was tied to the Blood Heaven Cult—a spirit beast left behind by the cult's founder, an imugi that had evolved and shed its old form across several hundred years. It was a dragon, yet it had never ascended, and its strength could not compare to a true dragon. Even so, the Blood Dragon existed on an entirely different plane from some mere imugi.
Even the protagonist, who by the middle of the story had reached the very extreme of the Harmonized Realm, had only barely managed to kill it, using the surrounding terrain with a miraculous string of coincidences piled on top. The protagonist who slew the Blood Dragon obtained every treasure the Blood Heaven Cult's founder had left behind. Most of those treasures existed for the cult's sake, so he burned them. Hwa Baek had no intention of burning anything. He meant to take them all.
He had no room to spare a thought for the original story's plot. Right now, his own life mattered more. Without a moment's hesitation, Hwa Baek threw himself from the cliff.