Return
An immortal, as everyone knows, is what you become by cultivating the Dao, refining yourself, or piling up merit. So when people hear the word, they usually picture a paragon of virtue.
In certain worlds, though, it means something else entirely.
They cultivate, same as the immortals everyone thinks they know. The things that come out the other side of that cultivation, however, could not be further from the immortals of Earth.
What they accumulate is not virtue. It is power, and nothing else. Their strength swells to grotesque proportions in step with their practice, while their morals are not cultivated in the slightest. Beings like that have no hesitation at all about using what they've gained.
Someone has a little money, so you kill them. You're in a bad mood, so you kill them. You need an elixir, so you kill them. The dead from that sort of thing numbered a thousand a day at the very least. A world run on the law of the jungle—that was the Cultivation Realm.
Unfortunately, I was dropped into that vicious neighborhood without a word of warning. One day, out of nowhere.
If there was any comfort in the misfortune, it was that adapting wasn't all that hard. Two reasons, mostly.
First, I had read my fair share of xianxia. A very well-timed vaccination. Had I never once touched the genre, I would probably have been cooked down into an elixir and become some fucker's precious Dao power.
Second, I had the talent to become an immortal. Talent, and nothing more. Having the capital to start a business doesn't mean you succeed at it, does it? Likewise, the talent to become an immortal does not mean you become one.
Getting there took an agonizingly long road. Seven or eight out of ten never even broke the first great realm, dying of old age or swept off by heavenly tribulation. Even so, crowds of people set out on the path, hungering after eternal life and power enough to startle heaven and shake the earth.
Those people were called cultivators. Ignorant bumpkins out in the countryside lumped cultivators in with immortals and used the same word for both, but between a cultivator and a true immortal there yawned a hopeless gulf. To the overwhelming majority, an immortal was something that lived past a far shore they would never reach.
I was lucky enough to become a cultivator myself, but I never believed I would actually make immortal. I only ground away, desperate to live as long as I could. Live like that for more than ten thousand years, and you do become one. People took to calling me Dokseon.
It wasn't that I liked poison and so decided to deal in it. Things simply led me into cultivating the poison arts, and once I had them, I put them to use. That must have left an impression even on cultivators of singular disposition, because I was hounded by every kind of slander and sabotage—right up until it all vanished the moment I became Dokseon.
And I do mean vanished. Physically.
After that, I lived at my ease. Reach the level of an immortal, and even cultivators who regard people as little more than elixir ingredients come to prefer peace. At least where other immortals are concerned. An immortal gets an undying life, and nobody wants to ride down to the Yellow Springs in the middle of trying to pill a peer. Far better, if it came to eating anyone, to devour the lesser cultivators.
The most pastoral days I'd known since falling into the Cultivation Realm stretched on from there. Ten thousand years, and I still missed Earth, but putting up a modest little theme park to pass the time was enough to quiet the homesickness. I was just about to settle my heart for good and take the Cultivation Realm as another home when my theme park was erased.
The one who did it was Shangdi.
The Heavenly Immortal among Heavenly Immortals, called Shangdi far more often than by any true name. Whatever had stuck in his craw, he wiped out the park I had built and left not a trace. I had reached the realm of Heavenly Immortal myself by then, but I could not dare stand against him. Heavenly Immortals both, and still an overwhelming gap. Fight him ten times, lose ten times.
I should never have opposed him. Any other Heavenly Immortal would certainly have seen it that way. You don't so much as set a foot where you might die. One who had grasped the ultimate truth of self-preservation would have done exactly that.
But forgetting a kindness while repaying a grudge is a cultivator's duty. If someone makes your life a fucking misery, you make theirs a fucking misery right back.
I drew on ten thousand years of experience, laid a plan, and carried it out. It worked. With the poison arts I had honed across those years, I left Shangdi poisoned, and with the thieving I had practiced across those same years, I cleaned out his treasury.
I couldn't kill him, of course. I had never imagined I could. I only meant to screw him over, and while I was at it, to knock out another goal I had long since struck from my mind.
I spent the treasures looted from his vault without holding a single one back. The treasures I had gathered myself went in just as readily. All of it for a return to Earth.
That had been the aim from the start. The theme park was gone, and I couldn't build it again, so I had not the slightest lingering attachment to the Cultivation Realm. I dreamed of nothing but going home, and the arithmetic was simple: loot Shangdi's treasury and throw every last thing I had into the working, and it could be done.
So I did it.
I threw everything in, and just as expected, I made it back to Earth. I lost the treasures, yes—and the power and the body I had built up along with them. Even so, I was moved to be standing once more in the homeland I had never forgotten.
A sleepless city blazing with light against the dark. Signs in familiar Hangul. People in modern clothes drifting through the streets.
I couldn't afford to stand there soaking in a sight I had never managed to forget. Do that, and I'd be ascending straight to the underworld. I burned through most of what power I had left, found a suitable body, and possessed it.
And then...
"Fuck?"
Of all the bodies in the world, the one I had taken belonged to a drug-addicted prostitute. Worse, I was in an operating room. They weren't cutting to save me. They were a breath away from harvesting the organs.
"Fuuuck."
"How much has this one brought in so far?"
"A little under two hundred million won."
The world runs on money, and gangsters are no exception. Money was what kept the lackeys in line, and money was what you needed to grease the right people. There were plenty of places to spend it and only so many places it came from—extortion, nightlife, gambling dens, and the rest. Of those limited streams, nothing ranked higher than drugs.
Drugs were a fine product that made the customers bring the money in themselves, and with drugs you could raise a fine cash cow. The prostitute on the operating table was exactly that.
"Already two hundred million? Ha. Fuck. Why'd this bitch die so fast? Huh? You know how many people are looking for her, and she goes and drops dead on us? You worthless pieces of shit!"
True to the cow in cash cow, she had gone and given out in the middle of letting a customer suckle.
"How the hell were you managing her?"
Dumping every last responsibility on one's subordinates is, as a rule, a superior's rightful exercise of authority. Park Yong-sik, owner of the cash cow, was not a man to forgo his rights.
"How were you handling her that a bitch who hasn't even been on the job three months is already dead? You satisfied milking two hundred million out of her? Huh? Is two hundred million enough for you people? You ought to be sucking her dry with your eye on a billion at the minimum!"
"It doesn't seem like the drugs killed her, sir. Looks like she died from the sex."
"What? Fucked herself to death?"
"Yes. That's what Dr. Kim said."
Park Yong-sik narrowed his eyes at the body sprawled any which way across the operating table, the thing that had been his cash cow. The sex had been so fierce that her heavy makeup had run under sweat and spit. Meeting those clouded pupils, he clicked his tongue.
"Ha, fine. Fuck it. She's dead anyway, so hurry up, gut her, and get rid of the body. And send me every photo you were told to take of this bitch. You're shooting them now, and don't forget the ones after the organs come out. This matters, so you take them and you send them. Understood?"
"Yes, sir!"
"And find girls to replace her, fast. Bring me ones with good faces and big tits. Got it?"
"Yes, sir!"
The moment Park Yong-sik left the operating room, the smaller of the two remaining lackeys pulled out his phone and started photographing the prostitute on the table.
"Why are we even taking these?"
"Hell if I know, you little shit. When the higher-ups say do it, you do it. More to the point, Dr. Kim—that bastard left to get ready ages ago. Why isn't he back?"
"Uh, uh? B-boss."
"What, punk? Why? You getting hard looking at a dead bitch, or— fuck, wh-what is this?"
While the two of them floundered, the prostitute who had been lying still on the table twitched, then slowly pushed her upper body upright. Light returned to eyes that had been glazed only a moment before.
"Hoo. Haa."
The woman who had just come back looked down at a body dressed in nothing but a negligee, every lush curve laid bare, and muttered.
"Fuck?"
"How... she was definitely dead..."
At the voice beside her, she turned to the lackeys. Whether she couldn't place the men this face had met so often, she scowled, then pressed a hand to her forehead and sighed.
"Fuuuck."
She scratched irritably at her head, then glared at them.
"Hey. Mind checking whether I've got the situation straight? Memory's a little fuzzy."
"Ch-check? Y-yes, yes. W-we can do that."
On any other day those lackeys would have looked down on a prostitute. They couldn't do it with the one in front of them now, and not simply because she had died and come back. She was different. Far too different.
Even that lush figure, the kind they once would have made fodder for dirty talk, couldn't hold their eyes. Even makeup smeared to a ridiculous degree couldn't raise a laugh. A tiger is still a tiger no matter how absurd the costume, and the woman before them was a beast of prey, nothing like the naive prostitute she had been—the sort that could chew a couple of lackeys up without effort.
They felt it on instinct, and so they behaved like docile sheep. They didn't want to be eaten.
"First off, I'm a prostitute. A bitch who sold pussy out of your shop. And a junkie who took every won she made selling it and handed the lot over to you for drugs. That right? Am I right?"
"Ah, th-that is... yes, yes. You were a valued customer of ours."
"Valued customer, says the fucking dealer. My ass. Anyway, I was mid-screw, I died, and I ended up here. And from the look of it, you meant to harvest a dead bitch's organs while you were at it. Right?"
"Well, since you've come back to life, I expect we'll be leaving the organs where they are."
"This is a real motherfucking situation."