Chapter 2: The Tragedy of That Day
Kang Hyeon watched the greenhorn’s back as she ran off, promising to report his demand for a professorship at once, and tipped the rest of the whiskey into his mouth.
Gulp, gulp!
“Khh.”
As the harsh alcohol burned its way down his gullet, the pain stabbing at his qi center was neutralized, at least to a degree.
‘They would never guess it, not in their dreams.’
Why he reached for the bottle.
Why he lay around like a wreck.
‘Asura’s venom.’
To explain that, he would have to go back to that horrific day of tragedy twenty years ago.
***
Thirteen years old, an orphan abandoned at a children’s home.
A dimensional gate had opened its maw before that young Kang Hyeon without any warning at all.
When he came to his senses, the place he found himself in was Murim, swarming with lunatics who lived by the blade.
A world where you turned your head and a man’s severed neck was rolling across the ground.
A brutal place where stealing a single rice ball out of hunger cost you your wrist, and begging for your life got your throat cut for being boring.
‘My dream was a humble one.’
I want to live.
I want to live and go home.
Whether it was good luck or bad, he never knew.
The ones who seized him by the scruff of the neck as he crouched shivering on the roadside were a pack of cantankerous old men.
“Gwahaha! It’s here! The Heavenly Martial Body!”
“And it carries the Heavenly Martial Star, born with the martial fortune of heaven itself! This child could summon the Heavenly God without fail!”
Cheering wildly, they dragged Kang Hyeon off to a cave deep in the folds of the mountains.
Hell began that day.
They called it training, but from where Kang Hyeon stood it was simply torture.
And not one of them was right in the head.
A man mad for the sword, a man who had thrown his whole life away on a single palm art, even a physician who regarded the human body as a sack of medicinal ingredients.
Take away the martial arts and every last one of them was a lunatic.
In any case, thanks to them, his skill alone grew at a monstrous rate.
Sword arts, footwork arts, qi arts, medicine, sound arts, palm arts, formation arts.
Honestly, it felt as though he had learned every martial discipline a human being could possibly learn.
And if he fell even slightly short of what they demanded?
They beat him until his bones broke.
Without ever understanding why, Kang Hyeon simply learned with grim desperation, because he wanted to live.
One of the old men even wielded a bizarre sorcery.
A miraculous formation art that warped the flow of time, stretching a single day outside into four days within the cave.
Saying there was no time, they threw Kang Hyeon into the middle of that formation and made him devour every martial discipline there was.
Only after several years did he understand.
That the Blood Cult, the Demonic Cult and the Murim Alliance could all have gathered together and still not beaten a single one of the old men in front of him.
And those men, who held such absolute power, had a phrase they repeated to Kang Hyeon like a habit.
“You must call the Heavenly God down into your body while standing upon the formation we lay out.”
“Only then can you stop the Demon God, Asura, who will soon descend.”
And so twenty years passed.
Then, exactly as they had prophesied, the sky tore open red and the Demon God Asura descended.
It felt as though the world were collapsing.
No, half of Murim really had been ground to powder.
The seven old men laid out the formation at once, and Kang Hyeon vomited blood as he ran the Heavenly God Scripture exactly as he had been taught.
The Heavenly God Scripture was a forbidden martial art that melted every martial discipline of Murim into one and drew out the power of the Heavenly God.
That was precisely why the old men had driven Kang Hyeon like a beast and taught him with such madness.
To save the world—no, to survive—Kang Hyeon dragged up his energy with everything he had, and he had to fight that monster for a full month.
The sky tore and the earth screamed.
Even those overwhelming old men died one after another, coughing up blood.
“Do not stop!”
“Pierce its heart!”
The desperate dying cries of the old men shoved Kang Hyeon forward by the back.
Rising on the sacrifice of his seven masters, he unleashed a single strike that held the essence of every martial discipline.
CRAAAASH—!
A roar that seemed to erase every sound in the world.
The energy gathered in Kang Hyeon’s hand pierced the heart of the Demon God Asura dead center.
“Kiaaaaaaaaah!”
The calamity that had seemed like it would never fall staggered, spewing blood.
But it did not die obediently.
“You.”
An unpleasant metallic rasp leaked out from between its lips.
“So these lowly worms dared to drag in a being from another world.”
Asura threw its head back in mad laughter and seized Kang Hyeon’s arm.
At the same moment, the deadly venom that burst from its heart bored into his qi center like a snake.
“Wait for me. I am the avatar of vengeance. My legions…… will cross over into your world before the end.”
Fssssh!
With that ominous curse as its last word, the Demon God vanished without a trace.
And that was the end of it.
When he opened his eyes again, he was looking at the blue sky of the South Korea he had left behind twenty years ago.
‘That thing I saw then was the little snake.’
The one they called Leviathan or whatever it was.
Compared to Asura it was on the level of an earthworm, so he had burst it with a single wave of his hand.
That was what had done it.
The government handing over a house of its own accord, carting liquor to his door.
Honestly, it left a bitter taste.
He had thought he would be happy once he came back.
The Earth he had dreamed of.
Living there without working a day in his life, eating whatever he wanted and lazing about reading webtoons—that had been his humble dream.
But reality……
‘Damn it all.’
Asura’s poison was gnawing relentlessly at his life force, and now he had to prepare for the Asura that would come someday as well.
‘Just when I thought I might finally live my own life properly……’
They were telling him to fight that horrific thing all over again.
Well, the one saving grace was that the Heavenly God Scripture that could wreck the thing was already inside his head.
The problem was that the old men who could lay out the Seven Luminaries Formation, the precondition for the Heavenly God Scripture, were gone.
That had to be laid out by others.
That was the reason.
The reason he wanted to go to the Academy.
‘I can never stop it alone. I need material to replace the old men.’
A month of searching on the phone the government had provided told him that was where the most talent gathered.
‘It really is a funny thing.’
He had learned until his bones shattered and he coughed blood, all to survive, and now the positions were reversed and it was his fate to teach others until they were half dead.
Honestly, his worries were a mountain.
He had no social skills, and he had never once formed a proper relationship with anyone.
He had spent twenty years being beaten by old men—where would he have learned such a thing?
The old men had not raised Kang Hyeon into a person. They had forged him into a blade to drive through Asura’s heart.
Thanks to them, in martial arts alone he was better than anyone.
‘By the end even those geezers were no match for me. That says it all.’
On top of that, he had killed a great many people.
He had cut down far too many.
He had traveled the martial world several times to witness every kind of martial art, and in the course of it Kang Hyeon had not left a single one of the men who tried to kill him alive.
And with humanity as withered as this, he was supposed to teach someone?
Letting out a short, empty laugh, Kang Hyeon rolled the last empty whiskey bottle carelessly across the floor and sank deep into the sofa.
‘Well, fine.’
What did any of that matter.
First he had to stop that damned Asura.
Otherwise this place he had to live and eat in would all be blown away.
He calmly closed his eyes.
The pain in his qi center still had not faded.
***
Outside the safe house.
Lee Se-a hurriedly pulled out her smartphone and pressed the call button.
It was a direct line to the Director.
– Ah, Agent Lee. How did it go?
“Director. Black has set a condition.”
– A condition? He set a condition?
Kim Hyeong-seok’s voice came through flushed with excitement.
Small wonder—up to now, communication with Black had been impossible in the first place.
– Oh my, so he’s finally opened his mouth! Well? What does he want? Money? Or a new identity? Or what, does he want us to set him up a distillery?
“The thing is…… he wants us to put him into the National Academy.”
– What?
“As a professor, no less.”
– A professor? No, why a professorship, all of a sudden? Is he drunk?
“……”
He did seem drunk.
He had said his head hurt, and on top of that he had emptied an entire bottle of whiskey.
– Hmm, even granting that Black’s ability is the real thing, a professorship is another matter entirely…… Honestly, the man’s an alcoholic. He won’t be easy to control, either.
The National Academy was where every top elite in South Korea gathered.
A place crawling with the children of conglomerate families, the Prime Minister, the masters of major guilds.
What would happen if a drunkard walked into a place like that was obvious without looking.
“There aren’t even any openings, are there?”
– Right. It’s the twentieth anniversary of the founding, so the professor lineup was finalized long ago. It’s all been in the press, too.
A brief silence fell.
“Should I just refuse him?”
– Wait, hold on. Agent Lee, why are you in such a hurry?
Along with a low groan came a bit more moaning.
The risk was considerable, but that meant the situation was equally attractive.
– Haa, all right. Black is asking, so we make him a seat even if there isn’t one. Agent Lee, I’ll work something out somehow, so tell Black we accept. In exchange, make it clear that he absolutely has to handle the Leviathan carcass.
“Yes, understood!”
***
Clunk!
When Lee Se-a came back inside, Kang Hyeon opened his eyes.
“The acceptance?”
“It’s been given. In exchange, the condition is that you dispose of the Leviathan carcass floating in the East Sea. Would that be all right?”
“Leviathan? That little snake from before? There was a carcass left?”
“Yes.”
“Lead the way.”
It was an easy job, so he went straight out.
About two hours in Lee Se-a’s car brought them to the waters off the East Sea.
“Urgh!”
The Association staff controlling the site were retching in gas masks and protective suits.
When he moved to open the car door, Lee Se-a hurriedly stopped him.
“Um, Mr. Kang Hyeon.”
“What.”
“You absolutely must not approach it unprotected. Even Yoon Tae-seong, an S-rank Hunter, went near it and his skin melted……”
“Wait here.”
“M-Mr. Kang Hyeon?”
Lee Se-a called out urgently, but he ignored her and stepped outside.
‘This is supposed to be poison?’
A snort escaped him.
If there was one thing to thank the old geezers for, it was that poison did not feel like poison to him.
He was not invulnerable to all poisons, but he had resistance to most of them, and compared to Asura’s venom something like this was practically refreshing.
Slish.
Approaching as though he were walking across the surface of the sea, Kang Hyeon looked down at the mountainous carcass of the Leviathan.
“Rotted vilely, hasn’t it.”
There was no need to use any impressive martial art.
He simply drew out a handful of the energy gathered in his qi center and balled it in his palm.
Fwoooosh!
Flames bloomed.
The Samadhi True Fire technique.
Not long after he threw it, the carcass vanished cleanly without leaving so much as ash.
That was when it happened.
In the empty air where the carcass had been, a small cluster of light glimmered and fell.
‘What’s this?’
He drew it in with the Void Grasp, and an old book landed in his hand.
[Flying Wind Steps – Upper Volume]
‘You kill a monster and a martial arts manual comes out?’
It was written in hanja, which he could read perfectly well, and moreover.
‘A martial art I know.’
It was a martial art that had existed in the Murim he had been part of.
A first-rate footwork art, learned by those with a fair amount of talent at that.
It was divided into Upper, Middle and Lower, and this was the first of the three volumes.
Kang Hyeon, of course, had already mastered it to the point of grand completion.
Had it taken about two days to learn it perfectly?
As he walked back holding the book, the greenhorn came running.
“Are you all right?”
She was busy calming her startled heart.
“I think I should be the one asking. Are you all right?”
“I think I need a moment to settle down. Haa, haa!”
A quick look around showed that things were indeed in an uproar.
The carcass that had been impossible to deal with had vanished in an instant, so confusion had set in.
“Are we not going?”
“We should…… Huh? But what is that book? Don’t tell me.”
The moment she saw the hanja written on it, her eyes went wide as a rabbit’s.
“I-Is that a secret manual?”
“Seems like it.”
“Congratulations!”
“Congratulations for what.”
Whip!
Kang Hyeon threw the book at the greenhorn.
“Take it.”
“Y-Yes?”
Catching the secret manual in spite of herself, Lee Se-a’s mouth fell open.
In this business, a single secret manual was worth enough to put up a building in Gangnam.
“N-No! I-I wasn’t asking for it! If you simply register it with the Association, the ownership belongs entirely to you, Mr. Kang Hyeon……!”
“Never mind that.”
Kang Hyeon waved a hand as though it were a bother and turned to leave.
“Call it even against the rent and the liquor for the month I’ve been freeloading in that expensive house.”
“B-But……”
Lee Se-a’s face filled with disbelief.
“What Hunter in this world pays their rent with a secret manual?”
“If you’re that grateful, buy more whiskey. The good stuff.”
