Current Young Clan Head of the Dang Clan (Genuine Article), Former Monster
The Heavenly Demon Cult — even among the sects of the Central Plains, the most closed and reclusive of them all, a brotherhood devoted above all else to the supremacy of the strong.
"There, there, don't cry, little one. Cry, and the demon men of the Demon Cult will come and take you away."
Such was the reach of its infamy that in Xinjiang, it was the bogeyman of choice for hushing fretful children.
But the Heavenly Demon Cult of today was in the thick of a very different kind of turmoil — one of its own making.
"This Sovereign is entering seclusion. Unless the Murim Alliance itself comes storming through our gates, no one is to disturb me behind these doors."
With those parting words, Cult Leader Cheon Wi-cheol sealed himself away — and when he remained shut in far longer than anyone expected, the cult's power fractured into two camps: that of Vice Cult Leader Ji-yul, and that of Young Cult Leader Cheon Tae-sang.
As the standoff dragged on and questions about the leader's well-being began to seep out through the cracks, Ji-yul — as though he had been waiting for precisely this moment — started pushing one scheme after another through on his own authority.
"If the Cult Leader is to conquer the Central Plains when his seclusion ends, then the groundwork must be laid starting now. You'd agree, wouldn't you?"
"That is true, but—"
"Then I shall take your silence on the matter of breaking the Five Great Clans as consent, and proceed accordingly. Let them drown in their own suspicion, each man seeing demons in his own shadow."
The so-called 'Break the Five Great Clans' operation was, in name, a scheme to make the pillars of the Orthodox faction tear themselves apart from within; in truth, it existed to raise Ji-yul's own standing and win the backing of the middle powers.
And to its credit, the operation ran smoothly at first.
"Poison King... surely you don't believe the Hwangbo Clan would stoop to a trick that shabby? What conceivable reason would we have to commit such an atrocity?"
The suspicion born from the death of the Dang Clan's young master spread, bit by bit, to the other clans as well.
"Ha... strange, isn't it, how every one of the Five Great Clans except Namgung has bled..."
"And your point being?"
"Can you look me in the eye and tell me you find nothing strange in it? That misfortune after misfortune seems to swerve, uncannily, around Namgung alone..."
"You would do well to mind that tongue of yours..."
The mood between them had frozen to the point where blades might have cleared their sheaths on the spot, and only the mediation of the Murim Alliance — which dreaded a schism within the Orthodox faction — managed to stitch the wound shut, barely.
With the affair patched over in the usual half-baked way, the Vice Leader moved to strike the tinder once more and set the fuse alight again, poking at the Dang Clan a second time — but...
"The dead man came back to life? And you stand there telling me that makes any sense?!"
"I merely repeated, word for word, what my spies reported to me..."
Because Dang Muyeong had, without warning, flung open his own coffin and popped out of it, everything had begun to tangle.
"Tch... what does the Vice Leader take this for, swinging an ox-cleaver at a chicken..."
Chu Seon-yeop — the Soul-Snatching Sword, and one of the first to throw in his lot with Ji-yul — grumbled his way to Sichuan over the Vice Leader's order to make absolutely certain the youngest son of the Dang Clan stayed dead.
"You've arrived, Elder."
Reaching the safe house prepared near the Dang Clan's estate in Sichuan, Chu Seon-yeop addressed the cult underlings who had come out to receive him.
"This business is important. There will be no mistakes. When word comes from the spies, you will escort them along the route — and do it properly."
With those orders given, he had settled in to unwind from his journey — until the underlings, a greed kindled in the corners of their hearts by those words important business, struck out ahead of him on their own initiative. And so he had no choice but to go racing off toward the mountain hermitage Dang Muyeong was said to be heading for.
"Haah... these lowlifes. Of course they would."
By the time Chu arrived at the hermitage, he found the rabble — at most First-Rate, more likely Second-Rate — flung about brutally for having dared to rush a Peak-Realm master. Clicking his tongue, he drew his sword and drifted around behind Dang Muyeong.
"Heh heh... 'wait for this old man,' I told them — and here the work is, already started without me."
Closing in at Dang Muyeong's back, he let out a single sigh of exasperation — then, with a blade swift enough to have earned his epithet, took the boy's head in one flash of steel.
Thud.....
The head hit the ground still wearing an expression of pure bewilderment, as if its owner hadn't fully grasped what was happening even at the moment of his death. Chu spared it a glance, then swept his gaze around the area and spoke.
"Now then... what am I to do with you lot, I wonder..."
At the low murmur from Chu's lips, the cult's rank-and-file could do nothing but stare at him, the tension plain in their eyes.
And then—
"Hm? What's wrong with your faces all of a sudden?"
Men who, until that very moment, had worn the eyes of prisoners awaiting sentencing were now staring back at him with naked, throat-clenching horror.
That instant—
CRUNCH—
"Gghaaack....."
At the violent pain erupting across his chest, Chu Seon-yeop looked down — and saw a hand, having punched clean through his body, jutting out of his breastbone with his heart clutched in its grip.
Grrrkk— grrrkk—
"Kkhh... ugh... ghk..."
The hand wrenched itself free of his body with a sound like bone being ground to pieces, and he crumpled where he stood — dead before he could manage so much as a proper scream.
Masked though I was, I smiled as I took in their faces — every one frozen in a horror so raw it was as if they could see straight through the mask — and said:
"Haah... welcome... It's your first time seeing the True Ancestor, isn't it?"
A little earlier—
Thanks to having my head sent flying in a single instant, I had the leisure to calmly size up my own toppling body.
'Huh... it really has been a long time since someone took my head off...'
Thud—
The head that had been spinning lazily through the air on its own touched down, and I found myself gazing out at an upside-down world.
'For me to lose my head without even managing to react... Transcendent Realm, at the very least, then?'
Having spared me one glance, the old man had turned his attention to terrorizing the men he apparently commanded — and as I watched him, I began drawing power up out of the heart still sitting in my fallen body.
'Ah... shit. Well, I did spend the past several months grinding myself into the dirt. Surely it can hold together for at least this much.'
Praying under my breath as I pulled the power higher, thin cords of blood began creeping out of my body one after another, reaching up toward my severed neck.
The moment body and head — split in two — were laced together by those threads of blood, my head was drawn gently back toward my shoulders and settled into place, home again at last.
And through every bit of that grotesque little performance, the old swordsman who had taken my head never once spared a look at his own underlings' faces — too busy scaring them into line...
'You're dead.'
CRUNCH—
I seized that opening and ripped his heart straight out of his chest.
Deprived of his heart, he collapsed in a heap without even a final word to his name. As for me — having exerted myself for the first time in ages, I was short on blood, so I chewed the freshly harvested heart to pieces, and then addressed the masked men in the sweetest voice I could manage:
"Welcome... It's your first time seeing the True Ancestor, isn't it?"
Eung-pal, a rank-and-file foot soldier of the cult, could not make heads or tails of the situation. In truth, he had joined out of no fervent sense of duty, let alone loyalty. His parents were farmers tilling land for the cult, and he had simply figured that rather than learn the family trade, he'd become even a bottom-rung martial and live a little easier. An ordinary cultist, nothing more.
Like most bottom-rungers, he had whiled away his days on petty errands — the occasional dispatch to some other region, sending off messenger pigeons... that sort of thing. Then word came down that a high-ranked figure of the cult was arriving on important business, and once again, as always, he had set out on the assignment thinking only, 'Just stand next to the other fellows and keep my head down.' The ending, however, was tragic.
"Haah... it's been so long since I've had a proper feast. Quite the delicacy, this."
The sight of him pushing the heart — still twitching faintly — into his mouth, chewing it down with slow, squelching bites, and then opening that maw again... at the sight of that thing, Eung-pal could only stand there trembling like a mouse before a cat, unable to manage so much as a single move.
A man who had not yet quite shed the last traces of boyhood, crimson eyes raking over them with something cold and lethal, carving a grin into a blood-smeared mouth — of all the sights in thirty years of life, this was the most chilling Eung-pal had ever witnessed.
At last, the man let his hand hang limp, wearing a satisfied expression.
Plop— plop—
At the sound of blooddrops striking the ground from the fingertips of the blood-drenched man, Eung-pal barely clawed his sanity back into place — and then he screamed and ran.
"AAAAAAAARGH!"
With Eung-pal's flight as the starting gun, the other underlings broke as well, scattering in terror. Some collapsed where they stood as their legs gave out beneath them; some foamed at the mouth and fainted outright. In the chaos of that single instant, I raised my right hand and said:
"No... that won't do."
The blood scattered across the snowfield, drawn up and compressed into a single hovering sphere — the foundation of the True Ancestor's arts.
The blood scattered all around us gathered in an instant above my right hand, swirling into the shape of a sphere.
"If any of you live to go spreading the tale, I'm the one who ends up dealing with the mess..."
I murmured it low, half a sigh — then clenched my fist tight.
Fweet— fweet—
The bead of congealed blood shattered in an instant and sprayed outward, every shard of it aimed for the heads of the fleeing men.
Like hidden weapons loosed from a master's sleeve, the lances of blood cut down the runners, the fallen, even the ones already unconscious — and not one of them managed so much as a scream.
Gazing out over the red lines scrawled chaotically across the once-beautiful white snowfield, I muttered:
"Ha... normally I'd reclaim every last drop... but leaving behind a field of desiccated mummies for whoever comes poking around wouldn't do me any favors, so I suppose it can't be helped."
I glanced around, licked my lips, and launched myself after the man who had run hardest and fastest of all.
"Ready or not, here I come... I can see your hair..."
Drunk — for the first time in a very, very long while — on an omnipotence that seemed to wrap itself around my whole body, I went crashing through the midnight snowfields like a lunatic, humming to myself as I hunted for the quick-footed one from before.
Hoo— hoo—
With the cries of an owl for accompaniment, as though cheering me on, I kept humming as I traced the marks left in the snow — and then I found him.
"There you are?"
There he was, leaning against a great boulder, head swiveling as he nervously scanned his surroundings. His foot must have caught on something mid-flight and sent him tumbling into the rock — blood trailed stickily down from his hairline, and he shook where he sat, sick with fear. I staggered toward him.
"AAAAARGH! A monster... a monster..."
He had seen me, apparently. He screamed as though the entire mountainside might come sliding down, then kept mumbling the word monster at me in a voice shaking itself to pieces. So I answered him.
"'Monster,' he says... That's the sort of talk that hurts a man's feelings."
"Please..."
I smiled at him with eyes curved like crescent moons, watching him beg through a flood of tears and snot, and answered in a voice laced with mischief:
"You know that's not happening, don't you? What can I say... I do want to let you live, but..."
At those words, he shook his head faintly from side to side, despair written across his face, trembling all the while.
Watching him, I laid a hand on his neck and murmured, as if sharing a secret:
"You saw me, didn't you."
Those words were more than his terror could bear — he fainted dead away, eyes rolling back to leave nothing but whites. I clutched the back of his flopped-over neck, wearing the expression of a man whose fun had just been ruined, and muttered:
"Aw, come on... what am I supposed to do with you if you faint before the fun even starts?"
Snap.
With those last words, I wrenched the hand around his neck with all my strength. Something in the man's neck gave way with a crack, and moments later, his breath stopped for good.
I tossed the cooling body aside, lowered myself onto the boulder, and murmured:
"A monster, he says... I wonder how long it's been since I last heard that one."
I sat there on the rock, sinking for a moment into my own thoughts — then gritted my teeth, and with the image of a certain slit-eyed someone floating up behind my eyes, spat out a curse.
"That bastard Dang Giyeong... he was a bat all along, wasn't he?"