One Month Before Awakening
"I'm heading out!"
I said it with all the energy I could muster and stepped out of the house.
The moment I was outside, I set a timer and started running.
Drawing in oxygen with a familiar breathing technique, I paced my breath and kept moving.
It had already been a week since I returned to the past.
'This isn't a dream.'
Collecting information had brought me to a single conclusion.
"I regressed."
Not reincarnation, not possession. Regression.
'What is this, a fantasy novel?'
At this point in time, I was a student who had given up on becoming an awakened one and was preparing for my college entrance retake.
'And then I awakened, threw the retake away, and left. Right.'
Looking back now, it was the recklessness of youth. I couldn't understand what I'd been thinking back then, a weakling who had never seen a monster and had never learned a single martial art, dreaming of becoming an awakened one.
After regressing, I had dropped out of the academy immediately and started building my body through running.
Of course, my parents still believed I was attending my retake academy.
'Walking into a gate with a body like this would be idiocy.'
I had set three goals for myself.
Protect my family.
Become stronger than anyone.
Defeat Ohman.
I had no intention of repeating the regrets I'd felt before dying in this life as well.
'One month until awakening.'
I had regressed one month before I awakened.
'I don't know why I regressed, but I have to give it everything I have.'
I pushed off the ground again.
How many minutes had I run? Sweat had started streaming down my entire body. My breath was slowly slipping away from me.
'Was my stamina always this pathetic?'
Tongue-clacking at a level of fitness worse than I'd imagined, I was already at my limit without even reaching five kilometers.
'My heart's about to burst. Even my vision's blurring.'
In the end, I collapsed to the ground.
Just then, the phone in my pocket rang.
"Hello?"
"Jina, black bean noodles? Or spicy seafood noodles?"
My mother whispered the devil's temptation into my ear.
I wanted to shout jajangmyeon on the spot, but for someone who needed to build his body in a hurry, that food was nothing short of poison.
"I'm fine. I'll just have chicken breast."
"Really?"
She knew I'd been working out lately to get in shape, so she accepted it without much fuss.
"Jina, is something worrying you?"
"No, nothing like that. I just want to get in shape, that's all."
"Are you sure?"
"That's what I'm telling you."
After awakening, I'd been able to manage my body through stats, but it was still better to lay a foundation through training.
Black bean noodles kept circling through my mind. I shook the thought away and started running again.
'The moment I awaken, I'm eating everything I've been craving!'
Forced to give up the noodles, I howled inside and kept my legs moving. Every exhale felt like I might collapse at any second.
I gritted my teeth. When your stamina hits its limit, every stray thought in the world creeps in. But I couldn't quit.
'If I give up here, I can't reach my goals.'
Brainwashing myself, I forced my creaking body onward. Changing a weak body was hard work, before regression or after.
'Time for the next training.'
Just then, I found a spot perfectly suited to training while I ran.
'This really is the best.'
What I was about to do now was footwork training. Since I hadn't awakened yet, I couldn't use the full technique, but reproducing its form should be possible.
Probably.
The footwork I created had five basic forms in total.
Speed (Sok), Illusion (Hwan), Destruction (Pa), Shadow (Am), and Anomaly (I).
Speed for velocity. Illusion for phantoms. Destruction for breaking. Shadow for darkness. Anomaly for skills.
These five forms became the foundation of all footwork. Just as martial arts without fundamentals are nothing but empty shells, the basics of footwork were paramount.
'Starting with Speed.'
I closed my eyes and focused every nerve into my legs, recalling as vividly as I could how my feet had once moved. In footwork, every single step mattered. One wrong placement and there was no telling where you'd fly off to.
One minute after pouring every nerve into my legs, I stepped into the footwork.
Basic footwork. Speed.
"Ugh!"
A single step was enough to throw off my balance and send me crashing to the ground. Because I was forcing myself through motions that had once been natural, my muscles and bones ached.
'It hurts like hell.'
Thankfully, no one was watching. If anyone had seen me like this, they'd have laughed themselves sick at the physical comedy.
'Better finish this while no one's around.'
Part of me wanted to abandon the training altogether, but I had to do it either way, so I decided to get it over with quickly.
Basic footwork. Illusion.
The moment I stepped, my body seemed to scatter in every direction at once. I had fallen victim to my own Illusion.
'Is it because I haven't awakened yet?'
This had never happened before my regression. When I stopped the footwork, motion sickness came flooding in.
"Uuurp!"
Only after spitting up something that shimmered rainbow-colored did the nausea finally pass.
'So this one's Destruction?'
Speed brought muscle pain, Illusion brought motion sickness. I had no idea what Destruction would bring. But I couldn't just skip it.
'The fundamentals come first.'
Brainwashing myself once more, I stepped into the next form.
Basic footwork. Destruction.
The instant I stepped, the ground beneath my foot caved in. With my foot buried in the dirt, I toppled forward.
'I knew this would happen.'
Sighing, I wrenched my foot free of the soil, shook the dirt out of my shoe, and immediately moved into the next form.
Basic footwork. Shadow.
The moment I stepped, my presence thinned to almost nothing. The sound that had accompanied every step until now vanished entirely.
'Shadow works just fine.'
Since Shadow only erased one's presence, nothing strange happened, unlike the others. Well, if I had to nitpick, it was cold. As if I were standing naked in the dead of winter.
'I'll have to be careful with these forms from now on.'
If anyone saw me like this, I'd want to die of embarrassment. As for Anomaly, it required skills, so it was unusable for the time being.
'Then again, this is fascinating.'
Unstable since I hadn't awakened, but a feeling remarkably close to my awakened days still lingered inside my body. Had it really been a simple return to the past?
'Then should I try that training too?'
It was possible that some of my old power had remained with me.
'Footwork ends here.'
With the footwork training done, I moved straight into the next exercise. This one was an attempt made under the assumption that a fragment of my old power remained. If it succeeded, I would reclaim the most important power I had wielded after awakening.
Sitting cross-legged, I began the familiar breathing.
"Hoo..."
Inhale slowly, exhale slowly. But I twisted the process slightly.
As soon as I began, my breath kept catching and stuttering. Since this was a method of drawing energy in artificially, it was only natural that it felt awkward at first.
After about five minutes of breathing, blue particles began to appear around me.
'It worked.'
My guess had been more or less right. There were risks involved, but it had succeeded.
The blue particles before my eyes were a crucial element in using footwork. If footwork were a car, they were the fuel.
Then one of the blue particles drifted toward me.
'Here it comes!'
I tensed and swallowed hard. The moment the particle touched the area near my heart:
"Gahk!"
Black blood spilled from my mouth.
'Ah, now that I think about it, this hurt like crazy back then too.'
In the past as well, acquiring this power had come with tremendous agony. The only difference was that back then I was already awakened, whereas now I was pre-awakening. In other words, as an ordinary civilian, both the durability of my body and my mental fortitude were far lower.
Crackle-creak-crunch!
With a violent noise, a pain as though my whole body were being twisted apart swept over me. I wanted to scream on the spot, but somehow I held it in.
'I have to endure this!'
Precisely because I wasn't awakened, my very life hung in the balance. Pain that would have been unbearable even in my past life pressed down on me twice over.
"Haa, hah. Hoo, hah."
Enduring the agony, I kept my breathing going. If I could accept just a few more particles, Complete Metamorphosis would be within reach.
'Please, let this work.'
If I failed to control this power here, my body would twist itself apart and I would die. Several particles floating in the air touched my body.
"Ugh!"
The pain swelled another degree, and a groan escaped me unbidden.
'It's fine. What matters starts now.'
A pain as though every bone and organ in my body were being wrung apart came crashing down. I bit my lip and held on.
Crackle-creak-crunch!
Before, it had merely felt like I was being twisted. This time, my body actually was.
'Anything but losing consciousness.'
If I passed out here, I would die as I was. I poured every nerve I had into resisting the pain.
Pop!
A leg flew off. It was the removal of useless parts for the sake of Complete Metamorphosis.
And moments later, the leg regrew. From then on, my arms and legs kept replacing themselves over and over.
'Hm?'
By the time I could no longer tell how much time had passed, the pain had stopped entirely.
"Is the Complete Metamorphosis finished?"
I looked around and found the sun long gone, darkness pressing in from every side. In its place, flesh of every description lay scattered around me, blood included. Matter like that would vanish within a day, never mind a single night.
"Did I actually get it?"
The moment I moved to confirm whether I'd truly gained the power, my phone rang shrilly. Only then did I check it.
It was already past three in the morning, and the missed call log was enormous.
'I'm dead!'
I carefully dialed one of the missed numbers.
"Son?"
My mother's voice was thick with murderous intent.
"Get home. Now."
She said that and hung up.
I wanted to sprint straight home, but my situation was a disaster. My clothes were torn to shreds, and my body was coated head to toe in the impurities that had poured out of me. The one mercy was the hour; with dawn approaching, no one was out on the streets.
'Screw it! I'll run home as fast as I can!'
For this one moment, my mother frightened me far more than the Demon Sovereign Ohman ever had.