Chapter 1
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Translator: MJK
Chapter: 1.1
Chapter Title: Tiger Father, Dog Son; Dog Father, Tiger Son
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-Prologue-
The world I was dragged into...
...was hell.
Monsters that brought catastrophe just by moving...
Demons that bewitched every living, breathing thing.
The Demon King who destroyed stars.
Only after the annihilation of the evil god that birthed them all could I finally escape that hell.
But by then, I was already broken beyond repair.
Both body and mind unstable, I simply counted the days until my death.
One day, amid endless fits of madness surging day and night—screaming until I blacked out, only to wake and repeat—I returned.
As if it were a dream.
Back to that ordinary moment in my life before being dragged to... that hell.
Chapter 1. Tiger Father, Dog Son; Dog Father, Tiger Son.
I opened my eyes to a familiar ceiling.
...And it wasn't just the ceiling that felt familiar.
The entire room surrounding me was familiar.
It reminded me of something I'd seen somewhere before—no, something I'd missed so dearly.
Then I realized it was nostalgia.
'A hallucination?'
I'd seen countless hallucinations soaked in madness, so that was my first thought.
But I soon shook my head.
My mind was too clear for it to be a mere hallucination—clearer than it had been in ages.
Then a woman entered.
She saw me and hurried over, gazing at me with eyes full of worry.
"My son. Why does your complexion look so poor?"
"!!!"
Ah... right, Mother. This was Mother's face.
It wasn't just her face.
She was even smaller and more delicate than I'd remembered.
Facing her like that, I couldn't hold back the tears.
Because I missed her so much. And because I was so sorry.
"My son. Are you hurting somewhere?"
Startled, she fussed over me, gently wiping my tears with her sleeve. An Hoe flinched at every touch of her warm voice and gentle hands.
Then he threw himself into his mother's arms as she anxiously examined him.
Like sunlight on a spring day after a long winter... her embrace, so dearly missed, was overwhelmingly warm.
That irresistible warmth reminded him of so much he'd thought lost long ago.
It was the humanity he'd forfeited while killing and being killed by monsters and demons.
-My father was a tiger father who begot a dog son.-
Father was nothing like Grandfather, the hero of the Honam War known as the Fierce Tiger Seven Swords.
Far from a hero, people often said a dog had been born under a tiger.
He was truly petty, cowardly, and foolish.
And that was hardly the end of it.
He loved drink and gambling, so he was the very picture of a wastrel.
The problem was that this father was Grandfather's only bloodline.
Due to the family tradition of cherishing heirs, he was a precious late-born son.
"Maybe that's why Father turned out like me."
With no alternatives, the wastrel had to inherit the clan.
But as Father grew older and more dissolute, Grandfather couldn't bear to let him take over. So he sought another path.
"All we can do is hope for the next generation..."
Grandfather was nearing seventy then, so it wasn't an easy decision. But seeing his wastrel son, he must have thought it the right one.
Still, given the scarcity of heirs, he arranged four wives for Father. Astonishingly, Father sired twelve children among those mothers.
"...You were good at something after all."
"Hahaha! Any real man can manage that much, right?"
Grandfather was exasperated at his oblivious, booming laughter, but at least it had worked out.
Five of the twelve were sons. He just needed to pick the most outstanding one to inherit.
And that turned out harder than Grandfather expected.
For a dog father had astonishingly begotten tiger sons.
Every one of them showed exceptional talent. Thanks to my brothers, I was eliminated from the succession war early on.
-Not because my talent was lacking, but due to my birth background.-
For one, unlike my other three mothers, the family of the mother who bore me was poor.
Even so, Grandfather took her in because it was a lineage that had produced great scholars. He hoped it would compensate for Father's shortcomings.
Anyone who knows how much maternal family support matters in a succession war would see I was at a massive disadvantage.
-And that wasn't the only drawback.-
Mother was the last wife taken, so I was much younger than my brothers.
The eldest, the main lineage grandson, was fully thirteen years older. Even the seventh brother was seven years ahead.
By the time I was born, I'd already been knocked out of the running.
Unlike the obtuse Father, Mother was wise.
"The blood of the great tiger doesn't stray far, it seems."
She knew early that my talent matched my brothers'. And the moment she did, she steered me out of the succession war.
And very openly, at that.
Mother formally received my inheritance from Grandfather in advance, then left the Jang Family Clan.
Afterward, she entered commerce.
-Even now, Mother's decision feels shocking.-
Though the family was declining, she was still from a deep-rooted scholarly house.
Merchants, at the bottom of the scholar-farmer-artisan-merchant hierarchy, were deeply despised. It was a blush-worthy choice.
But Mother didn't hesitate.
She knew merchants might be lowly, but great merchants were different.
People cursed them behind their backs but bowed before them. Some were even revered as lords.
-Mother knew this and chose the merchant path.-
Of course, it wasn't easy.
For all the scorn, that world was ruthless.
Yet in less than ten years, she grew it into a mid-tier merchant house—a natural outcome, really.
She'd leveraged the Jang Family Clan, one of the Honam Five Great Clans, as her backing.
Backing makes all the difference, and hers overflowed.
-But the real reason Mother started the business was different.-
To distance me from the succession seat.
Indeed, once she took up the despised trade, my position in the clan shrank further.
Eight years after she left...
At age twelve, I followed her out of the house.
I didn't understand her thinking then, but looking back now, it was the right call.
The succession competition was heating up fiercely by then.
If you had no shot, better to escape before getting entangled.
"Mother!"
Reuniting with her after so long, I was overjoyed for days. But the joy didn't last.
"...It's cramped."
The merchant house Mother had nurtured for a decade was far too small and humble.
Objectively, though, it wasn't.
It was flashier and more solid than most mid-tier houses.
But compared to the Jang Family Clan, the An family merchant house she'd built from nothing seemed pitiful.
Despair bowed my head, and a deep gloom twisted in my heart, hard to shake.
-Time passed indifferently, and I reached the age of aspiration at fifteen.-
That was when Mother called for me.
"You called for me?"
"...Come in."
That day, Mother seemed different in many ways.
Tense, or perhaps fearful.
Seeing her like that, I hesitated without knowing why.
I had a premonition I'd hear something I didn't want to—something I'd tried to ignore.
My intuition was spot on.
"The reason I called you here is..."
After much hesitation, Mother's words were none other than this:
She hoped I would inherit the An family name from her side, not the Jang castle.
Hearing that, my mind went blank with shock, then rage boiled over.
'If only I were truly foolish and inferior...'
I might have accepted it meekly.
But my only shortfall compared to my brothers was my birth background.
Or at least, that's what I thought then. That's why I resented Mother so much for saddling me with it.
I finally exploded.
"How... how can you tell me to live as a dog under a tiger?!"
Did she not expect such a vehement reaction?
Mother stared blankly at me, shocked—or perhaps resigned.
That look only fueled my sadness and anger. I vented several more times, then stormed out aimlessly.
Leaving her alone in heavy silence.
-...I shouldn't have left like that.-
I regret it deeply.
Who could have known?
That her forlorn figure, as if she'd committed high treason, would be the last I saw of her.
The saddest part was how she faded amid the escalating war.
Soon, I couldn't even recall her face. Later, her voice and that faint lingering scent vanished too.
It tormented me more than the brutal war against the western Demon King.
"If I'd known we'd part like that, I never would have said those words..."
Had I known our last moments would haunt me so, I would have smiled and accepted the wishes of the mother who'd tried to protect me with her small frame.
The guilt I'd thought time would erase instead burrowed deeper, gnawing away.
Until, neither dead nor alive, lost to madness and the flow of time...
I encountered a miracle.
-Crunch, crunch...!
An Hoe bit deeply into the apple with his eyes closed, his face lighting up with profound emotion.
The apple's rich, tart sweetness assaulted his tongue intensely.
Some might think it trivial, but it wasn't odd to him.
Long before his regression, he'd lost his senses of smell and taste.
An aftereffect of the eastern Demon King's curse. Food had felt like chewing sand.
It was more horrific than imagined.
It surely played a major role in eroding his humanity.
After seventy years—or perhaps more—they returned.
"No. Calling it a return is wrong. I never lost them in the first place."
Muttering to himself, An Hoe could hardly believe what was happening.
How could he?
Back to his naive twelve-year-old self, just after leaving the clan with Mother.
Not just back to his world, but time itself had regressed.
Pondering the source of this unbelievable miracle, he soon hit on a plausible theory.
"Did the Supreme God keep his promise after all?"
In destroying the final evil god, the Supreme God had lost most of his power and severed ties with the world.
This brought new chaos, but it was manageable.
The empire's emperor and his hero subordinates could handle that much.
While I was out of it, the Supreme God reconnected and, true to an ancient promise, granted my wish.
"...I never expected it from that backstabbing world. But the Supreme God is different. Keeping his word like this!"
He chuckled softly, then stifled it at a passing thought.
"Regression doesn't mean I'll get dragged back, right?"
-...Gulp.
Afterward, he swallowed hard repeatedly in silence.
It was a hypothesis he desperately didn't want to imagine.
But since it wasn't impossible, his anxiety grew.
-Scratch, scratch.-
Before long, he was clawing at his body madly.
Like bugs crawling over him, he scratched furiously—not a normal sight.
How much time passed?
His appearance was a wreck.
He'd scratched until his nails nearly split, shredding his clothes.
Thank goodness his last shred of reason kept it over his clothes.
On bare skin, his child's flesh would have been mangled.
"F...fuck."
Spitting curses he'd learned from Park Si-young, the 3rd Hierarchy hero and friend dragged from Earth's Korea like a dog, An Hoe exuded a murderous aura unbelievable from a human boy.
"If... if that happens, I swear on my mother's name—I'll make the evil gods irrelevant."
No exaggeration.
Though from the 3rd Hierarchy, he'd risen to 1st Hierarchy hero.
He'd slain the eastern Demon King—so freakish among them he was called the Psycho Demon King by heroes.
And he was one of seventeen heroes qualified for the final battle with the last evil god.
With his caliber and foreknowledge of the future, if he rampaged, he could unleash havoc rivaling the Great Demon Kings dubbed evil god incarnations—if not more.
Even after, he cursed for a while before snapping out of it at some point.