The Worst Awakening Ability
The worst awakening ability. And the emotions surging up with it.
This wasn’t some menopausal mood swing. It wasn’t because I’d ended up in a woman’s body and suddenly became a crybaby, either. After dying and reviving a hundred times, the feelings that came with finally escaping that nightmare were bound to be complicated beyond words.
“Kahahaha! I’m out! Hic… hic… I’m finally out!”
I laughed, then cried, then laughed again. The demonic prisoners probably thought I’d lost my mind, but I didn’t care. What did their opinions matter to me?
…Still, just don’t call me ugly. That one actually hurts my self-esteem.
“That bitch is even uglier when she laughs through her tears.”
…That son of a bitch.
I closed my eyes and looked up at the ceiling at the center of the Repentance Cave. In my mind’s eye, I saw every single one of those demonic prisoners doing the same—eyes shut, staring upward. I raised my hand high and flipped them all the middle finger.
It’s just a dream. Just a dream.
Letting out a sigh of relief, I turned my gaze on the Heavenly Poison Old Man—the possible mastermind behind this entire disaster—with eyes burning like will-o’-the-wisps.
“Mister Cheon! What the hell kind of fucked-up thing did you teach me?!”
“Madwoman, it was we who suffered the humiliation, so why are you the one throwing a tantrum? And is that language really appropriate coming from the mouth of a pretty… I mean, a young child?”
The old man’s nonchalant reply made my insides boil.
“That’s not the point right now! Just tell me! Is there some penalty for learning the Dark Heaven-Defying Sword? Side effects? Anything like that?!”
“Speak more clearly. I can barely understand a word you’re saying.”
I tried my best to calm down… but it wasn’t working. So I just spewed everything out in a chaotic mess.
“No, listen! I went to sleep, right? When I woke up, I was in some white room. Wait, was it a dream? But it hurt! I pinched my arm and it hurt! Then this black thing—some egg-shaped ghost bastard holding a sword—used the Dark Heaven-Defying Sword you taught me and stabbed me with it! I died! Then I woke up again! So I charged at it and died again! My waist got sliced, my neck got cut— a hundred times! A hundred fucking times! Do you get it now?!”
The Heavenly Poison Old Man naturally looked like he had no idea what I was talking about. Frustrated, I pounded my chest and shouted.
“Argh! You’re so old you can’t even understand basic speech!”
As an Ultra S-Class Awakened and humanity’s hero, I summoned every ounce of my enormous patience and explained it again. Several times. Only then did the old man reluctantly nod.
“…It must have been a nightmare. In all my years, I’ve never heard of anything so bizarre. The Dark Heaven-Defying Sword is an extremely orthodox martial art. If what you say is true, every past head of our family would have gone completely insane.”
“Really? You can swear to that? Really? You’re sure?”
“Sigh… Yes, I swear it. Satisfied?”
“Hmm…”
Judging from the Heavenly Poison Old Man’s reaction, something clicked. While I was deep in thought, the demonic prisoners’ chatter reached my ears.
“Can’t she wake up like a normal person even once? Being ugly is one thing, but she really commits to the bit.”
“Ugly and crazy? What are we supposed to do?”
Demonic Prisoner 1, Demonic Prisoner 2… These bastards had no fear and kept running their mouths.
“If you’re up early, shouldn’t you be doing morning qi circulation? Everyone, get up already! How are we ever going to escape at this rate? Are you planning to settle down and live in this damp cave forever?”
Tsk. There was clearly deep meaning behind the Great Hero’s words and actions, yet these mere demonic prisoners dared to chatter away… There was a brief commotion, but I needed to cool my head and organize my thoughts.
First, the Heavenly Poison Old Man probably wasn’t lying. Based on the thousands of martial arts novels I’d read to build up my cultural knowledge, there was no way learning a technique would make you die a hundred times in a single night’s dream. This was a quasi-murim world, but it was still a place where people lived. And people everywhere were fundamentally the same.
Who in their right mind would willingly learn a martial art that killed you a hundred times in one night? The pain I felt when my body was sliced apart in that dream wasn’t fake. It was real. I had to go through that a hundred times. And even though it was supposedly just one night’s dream, the perceived time inside it had felt unbearably long. There was no guarantee it would only last one night, either. Who knew if that black Pepsi Man bastard would be waiting to kill me again tonight?
Learn a hellish technique like that? Only a crazy person would.
Of course, there were suspicious points. The Heavenly Poison Old Man had said no one in his family wanted to learn the Dark Heaven-Defying Sword, so only the family head ever did. If it killed you a hundred times in your dreams, it made sense no one would touch it. So maybe only the family head, burdened with heavy responsibility, learned it while crying and eating mustard.
But if I imagined myself as that family head and had to endure dying a hundred times every night, I would quit the position immediately.
Crucially, the Heavenly Poison Old Man himself had said he trained the Dark Heaven-Defying Sword for a year. He had no reason to lie to me, and the black doll in last night’s dream had executed the forms of the Dark Heaven-Defying Sword with perfect, ideal precision. Sure, he claimed he had no internal energy left and his strength had declined, but the difference between his “fountain gymnastics” and the black doll’s “light sword” was like heaven and earth.
This was the key point. If the Heavenly Poison Old Man had experienced that perfect form a hundred times per night in his dreams for an entire year like I had… If he had endured that hellish curse for a whole year, there were only two possible conclusions.
First, if he had survived being killed thousands upon thousands of times, his own forms should have reached the same perfection as the black doll’s. Second, if he couldn’t endure it, he should have already gone mad.
But the Heavenly Poison Old Man was neither. He was simply an ordinary(?) old man who had learned the art “roughly for a year” and had not lost his mind.
Therefore, the Heavenly Poison Old Man wasn’t lying. The Dark Heaven-Defying Sword itself did not carry that curse.
Then… the worst possible assumption came to mind. It was a thought I didn’t even want to consider, but unfortunately, the scales tipped heavily in that direction.
Fuck.
How long has it been since I came to this quasi-murim world?
A little over a month. And I had resumed training the Heaven-Shattering Divine Power Art starting from my second day trapped in the Repentance Cave. As a result, the arm that had been smashed by the bald murder maniac had healed in just a week, and the severed meridians had recovered in two weeks—twice as long. And I could feel a faint trace of something like internal energy in my heart and throughout the muscles of my entire body.
Normally, the Heaven-Shattering Divine Power Art created a perfect body capable of exerting power within a week of training. And it would awaken an ability within roughly a month at the earliest.
It had been exactly one month since I resumed training the Heaven-Shattering Divine Power Art.
If the woman’s body I had taken over reacted faster than I expected, it meant an ability could awaken within that one-month window.
And… if the ability that had awakened was last night’s “that”…
…I’m screwed!
The martial art I learned comes to kill me in its perfect form every time I fall asleep? That’s my awakening ability?!
What the hell is this trash ability?
I had never heard of anything so dogshit in my life. Shouldn’t a beam of light shoot down from the sky with a *whoosh* while a voice declares, “From today, you are an Awakened”?
I’m ugly, I’m a woman, and now my ability is the absolute worst.
Why is this happening to me…
For twenty years after the Great Catastrophe, I devoted myself to humanity like a madman and was designated a UNESCO Human Cultural Heritage Site. I was the ‘Ultra S-Class Awakened,’ ‘Humanity’s Hope,’ and ‘Guardian of the World’ officially recognized by the UN! So why was this happening to me?!
I underwent consciousness transfer to the past, only to fall into this bizarre murim world. The moment I arrived, I got beaten half to death by a gang of psychopaths. I was thrown into a prison with a fake monk who treated the great me like a dog and a bunch of vicious demonic prisoners as cellmates. And now I was facing nightly torture in the name of “awakening”…
…I need to learn martial arts.
A goal had formed. Tonight, my objective was to die at the hands of that monstrous thing as few times as possible. I wasn’t even hoping to win. That black doll was probably manifesting the most perfect and ideal “imaginary form” of the sword forms.
The silver lining was that its physical level seemed strictly calibrated to my current realm. If its realm had been set higher than my standard, I would have died two hundred times in one night.
The only difference right now was my “understanding” of the forms. That gap was simply too vast.
I have to practice. I have to practice until I die.
The level of the Dark Heaven-Defying Sword as a martial art was beyond imagination. If I could unfold those perfect forms at my current level, I would already be at least D-Class Awakened. I couldn’t even predict how strong it would become as my realm increased.
I need to wring Mister Cheon dry! Today!
That was the path to becoming stronger, and the only way to die less tonight.
“I need to wring Mister Cheon dry!”
My resolve slipped out naturally. The Heavenly Poison Old Man’s eyes widened.
“Suddenly?”
“Yes. Right now.”
My determination was firm. I immediately began hounding the old man. In the end, he raised the white flag and had no choice but to watch me demonstrate the forms of the Dark Heaven-Defying Sword.
“Hah… Haaa…!”
The Heavenly Poison Old Man stared at me with his mouth hanging open. Well, it was understandable. The “fountain gymnastics” he had taught me just yesterday had already transformed into the trajectory of a “light sword” in a single night. He was utterly shocked, saying that while I had originally been talented, this was far beyond any normal rapid improvement.
The original plan had been “morning Heaven-Shattering Divine Power Art circulation, afternoon Dark Heaven-Defying Sword training.” But when had I ever followed plans? To die less tonight, “practice” was the only way to survive.
Thanks to that, every demonic prisoner in the Repentance Cave was forced to “watch” me train the forms of the Dark Heaven-Defying Sword from morning until evening.
At first, they grumbled things like “That crazy bitch is at it again.” But they were all hopeless “martial arts maniacs” whether they liked it or not. They watched my sword forms—which had reached an entirely different dimension from last night’s pathetic display—with gleaming eyes. Eventually, they began secretly rising from their spots and copying my movements.
…Of course, that was as far as it went. They had only trained the Heaven-Shattering Divine Power Art for a single day, and their bodies were already terribly weakened. After copying the basic forms of the Dark Heaven-Defying Sword a few times, they soon collapsed to the floor with groans of “Ugh… ugh…”
“Aigo, I’m dying!”
“I can’t do any more! My joints are killing me!”
Tsk. Such pathetic stamina. Ah, right—they were all old!
No, at this rate, when are we ever going to escape? Did I make a mistake in the escape plan?
The question suddenly crossed my mind.
Maybe it would be better if I escaped alone?
I should probably prepare a scenario where, if things went south, I would ditch them and run by myself. Of course, only after I had sucked every last drop of martial knowledge out of the demonic prisoners first.
After training forms all day, my mouth tasted bitter and my entire body was drenched in sticky sweat. Normally, a hot shower followed by a cold can of beer would be pure heavenly bliss… Damn it. In this damp, dark, smelly, irritating place, that was obviously impossible.
Once I escaped, the first thing I’d do was take a refreshing shower and down a bowl of soup. I’d drink as much clean water as I wanted.
…But did this quasi-murim world even have soup? It had to. Please.
This place probably wasn’t the past of the world I came from. The moment I first possessed this woman’s body, the murder maniacs who came flying to kill me—judging by their movements and speed, I knew instantly this wasn’t the Earth I knew. Good grief, they were practically flying. When in Earth’s history had people ever run like that? Humans can’t fly. What would that make the Wright brothers?
The murim I knew was a product of ancient Chinese imagination, later mixed with modern adaptations and original creations. So where exactly was the place I was trapped in right now? It was none other than ‘Shaolin Temple.’ A quasi-murim world where the imaginary creations of modern Earthlings had taken physical form. In short, this wasn’t our Earth. It seemed like some parallel universe or something.
…In that case, since it wasn’t ancient China, there was a chance soup existed! Please…… I really wanted to drink a cool glass of clean water.
But there was no way that fake monk would provide clean water. To drink here, I had to scoop up the groundwater flowing beside the prison with my hands. Had I mentioned it? They also shit and piss in the place where that groundwater trickled. And I had to drink that water. How inhumane and wicked. It was almost admirable.
In my original world, I owned two homes. A 200-pyeong and 180-pyeong penthouse with Han River views and Haeundae ocean views. After beating up monsters and coming home, taking a shower and drinking a can of beer while looking at the Han River and the Busan sea with a bowl of soup—that was true luxury and healing. As the most important being in the world, I more than deserved that much.
But now? The situation was enough to make me curse out loud. On top of that, I had died a hundred times last night. One more reason to escape quickly and return to my original world had been added.
The only times I stopped training were when the fake monk brought evening offerings. There was no benefit in letting him know I was practicing martial arts. Of course, even if a girl with a broken dantian and severed meridians was training, he might not care, but there was no telling what kind of wickedness those evil Shaolin monks might pull.
So during evening offering time—since there was no clock, I had to guess by feel—I had no choice but to pause my training. After eating the evening gruel, I continued training again. My whole body’s muscles were screaming that they were dying. It was so exhausting I felt like I would actually die, but it was still better than really dying.
The demonic prisoners muttered “crazy bitch” and “vicious bitch,” but there was nothing they could do about it.
…By the way, who was the one who called me an “ugly bitch” in the middle of it?
I trained like a madwoman all day, then went to bed with the solemn resolve of someone preparing for battle. A weak ordinary person would have been consumed by fear and thrown a fit about “I’m not sleeping!” But who was I? Humanity’s hope, the absolute hero, the epitome of a superhuman, the lover of all people. I had to sleep eventually, didn’t I? How long could I stay awake? I had training to do tomorrow, too.
With a solemn heart, I closed my eyes. Then one worry suddenly occurred to me. No matter how much Ultra S-Class mental strength I possessed, I couldn’t completely shake off the fear of death, could I? If I stayed this tense and solemn, I might not be able to fall asleep at all. That was what worried me.
Don’t be too nervous. Even if I die, I’ll just come back to life anyway. Sure, dying hurts like hell… but it’s fine…
Puu. Purrrr. Grrrr.