Chapter 1
Dark clouds filled the sky.
As if unwilling to allow even a handful of sunlight to shine through.
That day remained dark all day, and the cold was enough to freeze blood in its veins.
The comrades who had shared rice balls that morning died spilling blood and entrails to the weapons of the suppression army.
The annihilation of the Divine Martial Sect, successor to the Heavenly Demon Cult.
That was truly coming to pass.
Though still alive, Seo Mugyeom was in bad shape.
Too much blood had flowed from the sword wound in his side, and he had been dizzy for a while.
The reason the suppression unit didn’t bother to finish him off was because they figured he’d die anyway.
In the once-handsome face of the twenty-five-year-old young man, no hope could now be found.
“Senior, don’t you have any regrets? Aren’t you disappointed?”
Seo Mugyeom asked with a fading voice to the comrade lying beside him.
At first there had been a few replies, but now there was none.
He no longer had the strength to even turn his head to check if his comrade was still alive.
“I don’t know. If I were born again, would I still become a disciple of Divine Martial Sect… No. I think I would still become one, but I don’t know if I’d become a martial artist of the Guardian Ten Division again. I never had the qualities of a martial artist from the start. Martial logic was too difficult for me, and I wasn’t even physically suited, was I?”
Seo Mugyeom’s gaze turned wistful.
He didn’t know why the Blood Demon, Cheon Gyeong, suddenly came to mind in the face of death.
“Senior, what happened to the Blood Demon that Master Gwei created? If the Blood Demon had been there, the headquarters wouldn’t have been destroyed so helplessly like this.”
Master Gwei was a man who had mastered all sorts of sorcery and medicine passed down from the Heavenly Demon Cult.
That same Master Gwei had, after a mission, infused profound internal energy into the dying Cheon Gyeong and performed a great technique, creating a peerless master immune to swords and blades—he became the Blood Demon.
Creating the elixir essential to the great technique consumed thirty years of Gwei’s cultivation, and since then, he hadn’t been able to create another Blood Demon.
‘The Blood Demon wouldn’t die so helplessly and painfully, right? If only I had been the one chosen by Master Gwei back then… What a pity.’
By then, even his voice wouldn’t come out.
Yet he was still conscious, thanks to his strong attachment and determination to live.
Seo Mugyeom himself didn’t realize it, but he was becoming one of the last surviving members of Divine Martial Sect.
At that moment, about twenty li away from there, Master Gwei was surrounded by numerous imperial experts.
The Blood Demon he considered the achievement of his life had already met a miserable end.
Driven into a frenzy by Qi Deviation, the Blood Demon had slaughtered around thirty thousand people in the imperial city and palace alone.
The imperial experts who barely managed to kill the Blood Demon and pursue Master Gwei were all trembling with horror.
But Gwei felt no guilt.
He was not one to feel such emotions to begin with, and the imperial court also bore responsibility for the Blood Demon’s rampage.
A peerless master immune to swords and blades.
Who wouldn’t want to keep such a Blood Demon close to ensure their safety?
Once the imperial court learned of the Blood Demon’s existence, they coveted him early on.
However, the Blood Demon had shown signs of Qi Deviation from the start, so the court had essentially swallowed deadly poison.
“Gwei, surrender your life peacefully!”
The leader of the imperial experts pointed his sword at Gwei and shouted.
His face, stained with blood from the fierce battle with the Blood Demon, was filled with exhaustion.
The pursuers gasped for breath, but Gwei looked rather calm.
“Now that I’ve come this far, I no longer wish to live. But I don’t want to die by your weapons. Let me die by my own hand.”
The imperial experts looked at each other, and the leader eventually nodded.
As long as he accepted death, it didn’t matter how it came.
With permission granted, Gwei pulled out a small sword from his robe.
The blade bore strange patterns, and when Gwei infused it with internal energy, a chilling light erupted from within.
Sensing something strange, the imperial experts instinctively tried to stop Gwei, but with all of his energy channeled into the blade, the final technique he had prepared was instantly unleashed.
“O Demon God! Grant us another chance. Do not turn your gaze away from us.”
He sought to turn back time and prevent the fall of Divine Martial Sect.
At that moment, a blinding white flash burst from the blade, and an immense wave of Qi devastated everything around.
The imperial experts were torn apart into unrecognizable chunks of flesh with desperate screams, while earth, wood, stone, and humans were evenly reduced to dust and scattered.
The wave of Qi showed no signs of stopping, surging forward until it finally reached Seo Mugyeom.
In his final breath, Seo Mugyeom saw the massive pillar of light explode toward him and closed his eyes without emotion.
His head drooped to the side amid the frenzy of light.
---
The first person to regain consciousness was Gwei.
Slowly opening his eyes, Gwei looked up at the sky unfolding before him.
After gazing at the scene for a moment, he suddenly shot up and hastily examined his body.
‘Did it… really work?’
It was a great technique he had found in an exceptionally old book buried among the many volumes in the Martial Arts Repository.
He had attempted it without believing it could truly succeed, yet here he was, alive.
“Huh. Hahaha…”
A hollow laugh escaped his lips.
‘I’ll never create another Blood Demon this time. Divine Martial Sect was destroyed because of the Blood Demon.’
He reaffirmed his resolve.
Even if he corrected only that one mistake, Divine Martial Sect would be safe.
‘But… where is this?’
He was in the middle of a dense forest, and as someone who had rarely left Divine Martial Sect, it puzzled him why he was in such a place.
Then, a thought suddenly struck him.
‘Is this… that day?
The day I returned from isolated training for the elixir?’
Once he assumed that, everything started to make sense.
Frantically rummaging through his robe, he pulled out an ornate wooden box.
‘Why now… of all times….’
Gwei let out a sigh heavy enough to sink the earth.
The presence of the elixir in the box meant that his thirty years of cultivation had already been used to create it.
This time, he hadn’t even planned to create a Blood Demon, yet he had expended his precious power crafting the elixir.
‘Decades of cultivation… turned to nothing.’
Unable to hide his bitterness, Gwei moved to crush the box containing the elixir.
Just then, a groan reached his ears.
The sound triggered something he had completely forgotten until now.
“That’s right! There was someone still alive!”
He rushed off in a panic to find the person.
On the day in his memory, Gwei had been ambushed on his return to Divine Martial Sect by an unidentified group.
It was later revealed that they were outcasts from a large sect who had attacked thinking Gwei's carriage held valuable treasures.
The Divine Martial Sect Leader had sent men to protect Gwei, but hadn’t expected an ambush.
As a result, they had sent martial artists from the Tenth Division of the Guardian Ten Division, whose martial skills weren’t particularly strong—and that proved to be the problem.
The Guardian Ten Division of Divine Martial Sect was structured such that the First Division had the strongest combat power, while the Tenth Division was the weakest.
It was only because some of the division's leaders were present that total annihilation was narrowly avoided.
Following the groans, he found a young martial artist dressed in the uniform of Divine Martial Sect’s Guardian Ten Division, lying in a pool of blood.
Gwei felt a sense of déjà vu.
But he couldn’t remember exactly who the young martial artist was.
The young man had fought poorly and been injured early on, but his will to survive had proven to be the strongest.
As Gwei recalled, only he and this young martial artist had survived that incident.
Originally, Gwei had returned to Divine Martial Sect alone.
He didn’t even know whether the young man had made it back safely.
Even if several martial artists from the Tenth Division had sacrificed their lives for his sake, he had felt no guilt at the time.
But now, he was seeing that young martial artist again.
Whether it was fortunate or tragic that he had survived such a brutal ordeal was unclear.
Had he died, he would have been free from pain.
At that moment, Gwei’s thoughts turned to the elixir.
‘With this…’
His gaze darted between the martial artist and the elixir.
The elixir was now practically useless, but destroying it still felt like a waste.
‘Could he withstand the power of the elixir? If not, he could die.’
The odds of survival were likely less than one in ten.
Feeding him the elixir was no different than killing him directly.
After some deliberation, Gwei finally decided to give the young man the elixir.
The main reason was his reluctance to waste the immense effort and cultivation he had invested in its creation.
Once he made up his mind, Gwei hesitated no longer and fed the elixir to the young martial artist.
Only moments before, it had seemed he might never open his eyes again, yet suddenly his eyes snapped wide open.
A storm of power began to surge through his acupoints, the likes of which no ordinary body could endure.
Whatever pain he had known before, it now seemed trivial in comparison.
The more terrifying fact was that this was only the beginning.
---
It was five days after Gwei had fed him the elixir and taken him to Divine Martial Sect that the young martial artist, Seo Mugyeom, finally regained consciousness.
“Gah!”
The moment he woke, he let out a scream.
But there was no one else in the room to hear it.
‘What’s going on? I clearly died at the hands of the imperial suppression force. And Divine Martial Sect… Divine Martial Sect should have been annihilated…’
In his mind, he could still clearly see Divine Martial Sect engulfed in flames.
Yet now he was back in the lodging of the Guardian Ten Division, where he had originally lived.
Moreover…
The room looked different from how it had been when he had left to defend Divine Martial Sect.
Wondering if something was wrong with his head, Seo Mugyeom tried to spring up.
But an excruciating pain surged through his entire body, stopping him in his tracks.
‘Right. My side was badly cut. But how am I alive? Who saved me?’
Slowly, Seo Mugyeom looked down at his body.
The wound wasn’t on his side.
His side was perfectly fine.
Instead, his shoulder and upper arm were wrapped tightly in bandages.