Prologue: The Valley of No Return
Rain fell.
At first it was only a drizzle. A drop or two soaked the man's hair and ran down the blood-caked hem of his clothes. Then, without warning, the sky opened.
The rain roared as if it meant to swallow the world. Beneath that sound, Bulgwigok—the Valley of No Return—lay silent. No groans. No screams. Only the downpour itself stirred the valley's hush.
"Hah."
The sword in his hand was broken in half. Blood ran down what remained of the blade, over the hilt, and stained the back of his hand a deep red. Whether it was his or someone else's, he could no longer tell.
The man turned his head slowly. The first thing that caught his eye was an old monk whose neck had been snapped.
"Why did you do it, Abbot?"
Abbot Hyegwang, abbot of Shaolin. A high monk who had spent a lifetime cultivating the One Hundred and Eight Arhat Arts until he attained Diamond Invulnerability—a monster who could grind boulders to powder with his bare hands and turn aside even sword qi with his flesh. And yet his chest had been caved in, and by the Great Vajra Palm no less: Shaolin's own supreme technique.
"I asked you why. Daoist."
Beside the monk lay a dead Daoist, missing one arm. Daoist Cheongheo, the Sword Venerable of Wudang, praised as the man who wielded the most perfect Taiji Wisdom Sword in all the Central Plains. A blade was buried in the center of his chest. He, too, had died without being able to stop the Taiji Wisdom Sword.
"If you'd just left me alone."
His gaze shifted. A man lay there with his torso severed from his legs. Hyeokryeon Pae, Lord of the Evil Dao Alliance. Thirteen years ago he had, alone, brought the Eighteen Water Bandit Strongholds of the Yangtze to heel and unified the Black Path and the Green Forest—the hegemon of the Evil Path. What had cut him in two was the Blood Heaven Saber Technique, the very art that had made him Number One of the Evil Path. To the end, Hyeokryeon Pae never understood why the man's Blood Heaven Saber Technique was more perfect than his own.
Ten paces from him, a charred corpse knelt in the mud.
"None of this would have happened."
Jin Mugeuk, the Heavenly Demon. Ruler of the Hundred Thousand Mountains. For decades he had reigned as the very sky of the Demonic Path, claiming to be the highest beneath the heavens. Even he had burned to death in his own Heavenly Demon Divine Art.
The man lifted his gaze and looked around.
Corpses filled Bulgwigok. Grandmasters of the Nine Sects and One Gang. Family heads of the Five Great Clans. Elders of the Martial Alliance. Hegemons of the Black Path and chieftains of the Green Forest. Even the elders of the Demonic Cult who had come down from the Hundred Thousand Mountains. Speak any of their names, and every martial artist in the world would have known them.
One hundred and twenty-seven in all. Not one of them was alive.
He knew every name. He had met some of them in person; he had shared drinks with others. There were those who had once fought at his back, trusting him with their lives. Some had received his kindness. Some had followed him for months, begging him to teach them martial arts.
Today, every last one of them had gathered here to kill him.
The Righteous Path, the Evil Path, and the Demonic Cult. For hundreds of years they had been desperate to slaughter one another. Today, they had joined hands like the best of friends—to kill a single man.
A question rose in him, unbidden.
"Hah. Just what, exactly..."
He thought it over. He had never wanted to conquer the world. He hadn't wanted to lead the Martial Alliance. He hadn't wanted to be Lord of the Evil Dao Alliance, or the Heavenly Demon. He hadn't even harbored some grand ambition to change the world. He had learned martial arts simply to survive in this place and find a way home.
When he needed a Righteous Path inner method, he learned Righteous Path martial arts. When an Evil Path technique proved useful, he studied an Evil Path secret art. When demonic power was required, he obtained the Demonic Cult's manuals as well. That was all.
And yet, at some point, people began to fear him. They were horrified to see demonic arts unleashed with orthodox inner energy. They found it ominous that he used saber techniques with a sword. When martial arts that were never meant to coexist became one inside his body, the world stopped seeing him as human.
"Was I that frightening to you?"
A monster beyond all measure. A calamity that would shatter the order of the martial world. A being that must not be left for posterity. Those were the justifications they put forward. The truth was simpler.
They were afraid. The Righteous Path. The Evil Path. The Demonic Cult. Afraid that the secret arts they had guarded like their own lives were gathering in a single man. Afraid that they could not know how strong he might become, having mastered them all.
And so one hundred and twenty-seven of them had swarmed into Bulgwigok, and this massacre was the result.
"...Fuck."
The curse slipped out on its own. How had it come to this? When he had first fallen into this world, surviving had been the only goal. Get through today. Find food for tomorrow. Someday, find a way home.
"That was all it was."
He had killed people to survive. He had learned martial arts so he wouldn't die. One art wasn't enough, so he learned two. Two weren't enough to stay alive, so he stole ten. He lived like that, without a moment to think, and became a master of the Peak realm. Even then the ones who wanted him dead never stopped coming, so he grew stronger still.
In the end, he became the Number One Under Heaven.
And then the entire world came to kill him.
"I just..."
He lifted his head. Rain poured without pause from a sky buried in dark cloud.
Too much time had passed. His mother's face was already a blur. He could barely remember what his father's voice had sounded like. Would his little sister even remember him as her older brother?
No.
More than that—was she even still alive?
Sixty years. That was how long he had spent in Murim. Even if he went home, there might be no one left waiting for him.
Even so, he wanted to go back. A life of eating, of sleeping, of opening his eyes in the morning. A world where he could live through the day without killing anyone. He wanted to live one ordinary day like that again.
A dull tap.
He discarded the sword. Already broken in half. He would have no reason to pick it up again, no reason to use it.
A wet slap. The blade sank into a pool of blood.
"That's enough."
He walked among the corpses. He just wanted to get away from this nauseating smell of blood.
That was when it happened.
A low, resonant hum rolled through the valley. The space of Bulgwigok shuddered, and the man stopped walking. A slender tear opened in the empty air. Through that pitch-black gap, a familiar light leaked through.
"It can't be..."
He knew what it was. The same light he had seen long ago, on the day he had been dragged into this world. His lips trembled faintly.
"All those years I searched, and it never left so much as a trace."
It had appeared only at the moment he gave up everything.
The Spatial Rift widened. He had no certainty that it would take him back to his original world. It didn't matter.
"Anywhere's better than here."
He wanted to be free of this nauseating life of washing blood with blood. The man walked into the rift.
The Spatial Rift swallowed him.
And on that day, the Number One Under Heaven—who had single-handedly slain one hundred and twenty-seven of the greatest masters of the Righteous Path, the Evil Path, and the Demonic Cult—vanished from Murim without a trace.