The Demonic Physician.
As one might guess from the alias, he was not a proper sort.
A former master from the Demonic Cult, after achieving his revenge he left the cult and became one of those physicians who wander from place to place.
However, perhaps because he had no fond memories of the Central Plains, he mostly roamed the Outer Murim, so his name was famous but opportunities to actually meet him were rare.
Having lost his family in his youth, he still suffered from fits of madness to this day, but his skill in medicine was so outstanding that he earned the alias of Demonic Physician.
As long as room and board were properly provided, he would treat patients without demanding any particular payment, but he only treated those patients who piqued his interest.
If a patient failed to interest him, he would pretend not to know even if they brought a thousand gold pieces; conversely, if he was intrigued, he would go to any lengths to treat them even at his own expense, and since he possessed a Transcendent Peak martial level uncharacteristic of a physician, he was a madman difficult to deal with by force.
For reference, the Demonic Physician's criteria for interest were said to be only two: how critical the patient's condition was, and how unusual the reason they had reached death's door.
This was the information used to assess the Demonic Physician up until now—no, until the Demonic Cult's invasion began.
All of it was false.
In the first place, the Demonic Physician had never achieved his revenge.
He came from a family of physicians, and his father had been a reasonably well-known doctor in the surrounding area.
That was probably why he had received the summons from the Jinzhou Eon Clan.
At the time, the Jinzhou Eon Clan belonged to the Five Great Families in place of the Hebei Peng Clan, but their position was being threatened as they gradually lost the Corpse Puppetry Arts.
It was because the number of people who could properly use them, along with the Taoist arts, had dwindled.
The Eon Clan had amassed corpse puppets crafted over many long years, yet with no one left who could command them, the family's strength gradually waned, leaving them at a crossroads.
Either abandon the Corpse Puppetry Arts and devote themselves to conventional martial arts… or somehow find a way to modify the arts so they could still be put to use.
The current Eon Clan appeared to have chosen the former path, and though they had stepped down from the Five Great Families, they still maintained their dignity as a noble house…
But that had not been their initial choice.
After all, people tend to grow more conservative in the face of crisis, don't they? What the Jinzhou Eon Clan chose back then was the latter.
They decided to rework the Corpse Puppetry Arts to make them easier to use, and to simplify the method of creating corpse puppets accordingly.
On the surface, it seemed a reasonable choice, and they did achieve decent results… but time was not on their side.
It wasn't as if they could produce results before the Jinzhou Eon Clan was forced out of the Five Great Families, and even if they succeeded later, it wouldn't be enough to reclaim their seat among the Five Great Families.
As fewer and fewer people knew how to handle the Corpse Puppetry Arts, the Jinzhou Eon Clan chose a rather extreme method.
That method was to gather people well-versed in the human body from outside the clan and have them research together.
It meant revealing the clan's secret arts, but for the Jinzhou Eon Clan, already standing at the brink of ruin, there was no other viable option.
The condition was that they would be bound by a seal preventing them from speaking carelessly about what they learned during the research or using it themselves.
The clan offered enormous sums of money, rare Spiritual Medicines, or the martial might of the Jinzhou Eon Clan.
Any physician with real skill received an invitation from the Jinzhou Eon Clan, and most of them accepted.
The father of the Demonic Cultist was one of those people.
…But the Jinzhou Eon Clan did not keep their promise.
Letting out a sigh of relief after achieving their desired results, they decided that the seal alone wasn't enough to put their minds at ease, so they resolved to massacre the physicians they had summoned.
Of course, they didn't kill them openly. They killed them one by one, separately, disguising each death as an accident.
It was the belief that surely the Jinzhou Eon Clan, one of the Five Great Families, would never commit such a heinous act. And the knowledge they had accumulated from handling the corpses of the dead allowed them to fabricate the causes of death.
Most people dismissed the deaths as unfortunate incidents caused by corpse curses or some such, never once suspecting that it was a slow and secretive slaughter.
All except one person. Except for the Demonic Cultist in his youth.
Possessing outstanding talent as a physician, he one day discovered something amiss from the corpse of his father, who had returned home.
Upon learning that his father's death was the doing of the Eon Clan, he went to the government office to protest…
And when he finally managed to shake off the officials who, for some reason, kept evading the issue and stalling for time, he returned to find that even his remaining family members had all been killed.
His elderly mother, who had waited for her husband with unwavering devotion. His younger sibling, still a child. His wife, whom he had married not long ago. …And the baby, pulled from his wife's swollen belly, cut open—whether as a warning or to make certain, he could not tell.
The Demonic Cultist lost everything in a mere few sijin.
It was not difficult to guess who the culprit was, and it was an obvious fact that he would be next.
So the Demonic Cultist fled without even burying his family. To Xinjiang, as far from his hometown as possible. No—beyond that, to the Demonic Cult.
Whether he had talent in martial arts as much as medicine, the Demonic Cultist grew stronger quickly, and after over twenty years of training, he reached the Transcendent Peak.
Having started martial arts late in life, and considering that the Demonic Cult's martial arts were generally poor, it was a commendable growth.
Feeling that this was enough, the Demonic Cultist left the Demonic Cult and headed for the Central Plains.
Throughout his journey toward the Jinzhou Eon Clan, he displayed the medical skills he had honed, beginning to raise his own name.
By the time he returned to Hebei Province, he had earned the respectable alias of Divine Physician.
Until then, the Demonic Cultist had never revealed his Demonic Qi, let alone his thirst for revenge, so he was regarded as nothing more than a benevolent physician with extraordinary medical skills who had appeared out of nowhere.
Arriving at the Jinzhou Eon Clan, he used his reputation to naturally blend into their ranks.
And in the end, he succeeded in identifying the one who had commanded the physicians and ordered their deaths when the time came—his very enemy.
The problem was that his actions had stirred considerable backlash even within the Jinzhou Eon Clan.
Fearing for the clan's future, they had strayed from the right path, yet the Eon Clan insisted on remaining an Orthodox Sect.
Judging that their obsession with corpses and their fixation on power and status kept causing trouble, they resolved to start over from the beginning.
The remaining corpses had their spells undone and were given proper burials.
Instead of burying the secret manual related to Corpse Puppetry Arts deep within the secret vault, they created a new martial art based on it.
That was how the Jinzhou Eon Clan we know today came to be.
They did not go out of their way to expose their own shame, so the Demonic Cultist's enemy was not publicly punished… but he lost all real power and was reduced to a state of waiting for death in a small, isolated annex.
Though his opponent had become far more pathetic than he had imagined, the Demonic Cultist's grudge was not something he would abandon. He visited him secretly in the middle of the night and challenged him to a life-and-death duel.
And he lost.
He had fought with outstanding Martial Talent, a unique martial art based on medical skills, and even the Demonic Qi he had hidden all along… yet he still could not reach his opponent.
In fact, it was only natural.
The Demonic Cult's martial arts may be vicious, but they are not profound; its internal energy cannot be pure; and within its very heart, it harbors a demon that one cannot control on one's own.
Wasn't his opponent someone who had learned advanced martial arts from a young age, consumed fine Spiritual Medicines, and devoted himself solely to Training in an environment that allowed it, until he was called an Elder after so many years of dedication to martial arts?
It was the Heavenly Demon who was the anomaly; most Demonic Cultists could not easily surpass the Martial Artists of the noble Orthodox Sects. And the higher the realm, the more true this became.
Thus, having lost the life-and-death duel, Ma-ui, just as he had in his youth, barely managed to preserve his life and fled Hebei Province like a coward.
It was to rekindle his thirst for revenge and build his strength once more… but the problem lay in what happened afterward.
The Elder of the Eon Clan, who was already quite old, had won the life-and-death duel against Ma-ui, but died shortly after, his lifespan exhausted.
The Eon Clan, having learned of Ma-ui's grudge belatedly, sent a letter of sincere apology.
His enemy had lived out his days in peace, dying of old age rather than in the agony of revenge. And the clan he belonged to had bowed their heads so cleanly that Ma-ui couldn't even direct his resentment toward them.
A thirst for revenge with nowhere to go. And the self-reproach of having thrown away his last chance with his own hands. The regret that he should have died fighting that day, or at least that he should have made his enemy die from the wounds he had inflicted, not from a natural death.
All of this became the name of Qi Deviation, burning Ma-ui from within.
As a physician, he could correct the rampaging flow of blood and energy, but he could do nothing about the madness, and so he began to commit all manner of eccentric acts.
While he was called the Divine Physician, he had focused, in a manner befitting a healer, on saving lives; but after the madness took hold, he focused on killing people first.
If a patient had a rare disease or was in such a critical state that their life could not be preserved, instead of trying to save them, he would satisfy his curiosity through various human experiments.
He began to repeat deeds that anyone could see were the acts of a man not in his right mind, and it did not take long for the alias of the Divine Physician to become Ma-ui.
…Of course, in the present timeline, these circumstances are not well known.
That is because the Jinzhou Eon Clan kept silent to hide their own shame, and also because Ma-ui had gone mad from the revenge he ultimately failed to achieve.
If, as the rumors circulating among the people claimed, Ma-ui had truly succeeded in his revenge, it would have been better.
The current Ma-ui has not succeeded in his revenge, and he still belongs to the Demonic Cult, occasionally carrying out tasks for them, all while suffering from the madness of needing to kill the enemy he failed to kill.
He must kill a person who is already dead with his own hands.
Ma-ui's madness manifested in many ways, but this was perhaps the most problematic part of it all.
A proposition that did not hold together. Surprisingly, the method Ma-ui chose to force that coherence was the very method his enemy had been obsessed with—the Corpse Puppetry Arts.
The insane idea that he could just resurrect them with Corpse Puppetry Arts and kill them again.
But to Ma-ui, this was a supreme imperative he had to achieve, and it was originally a countermeasure to the Corpse Puppetry Arts that he had learned in order to accomplish his revenge.
And while staying with the Eon Clan, he pieced together fragments of the Corpse Puppetry Arts he had gradually encountered, attempting to create his own version of the art.
All of it failed.
Even the Eon Clan, which had spent far longer developing the Corpse Puppetry Arts, had abandoned it. For Ma-ui to succeed alone was impossible.
In fact, before the regression, Ma-ui had his true intentions exposed and met his end at the hands of the Righteous-Unorthodox Alliance without ever coming close to succeeding.
However, the attempt itself was the problem.
Some of the patients Ma-ui had treated began to suffer sudden madness and run amok during the war with the Demonic Cult.
Among them were quite a few high-ranking figures who had entrusted themselves to Ma-ui's skill.
If the Beast Palace Lord had received Ma-ui's treatment and had his poison cured, then he too would have developed some kind of problem before the regression.
The sudden alliance with the Demonic Cult. And the fact that the Beast Palace, which had been rampaging like mad, was satisfied with just Guizhou.
Once he considered that Ma-ui was involved, the things he had thought were compromises by the Beast Palace Lord began to look different.
Perhaps… the Beast Palace Lord before the regression had already lost his mind.
As a Harmony Realm martial artist, he would have been able to hold out a little longer. That was why he had taken the lead in seizing Guizhou.
But what if, afterward, he had been consumed by madness like Ma-ui's other patients?
What if that was why he had stopped, unable to expand his territory further? What if, to treat the maddened Palace Lord, or because they judged they could not face the Heavenly Demon without their lord, they had bowed their heads and submitted?
I could understand more deeply the attitude of the South Man Beast Palace, which had turned docile as if its people had been replaced the moment they took Guizhou.
Ma-ui had to die here and now—to spare the South Man Beast Palace, which had gone so far as to form an alliance, from its destined ruin, and to prevent the large and small internal conflicts of the Righteous-Unorthodox Alliance that would erupt from the madness breaking out when they most needed to join forces.
And yet… I knew all too well the heart-wrenching pain of a revenge unfulfilled, a revenge that could never be fulfilled.
Like most martial artists of the Demonic Cult, Ma-ui had his own pitiful circumstances, but he was one who had crossed far beyond the line of good.
And so, I erased the killing intent I had been directing at Maeng-gyeom and curled up the corners of my mouth.
Whether Ma-ui had come for the Demonic Cult's schemes, or Maeng-gyeom had brought him here to expand his own influence, I couldn't say.
Either way, our paths would soon collide. If that was the case, there was no choice but to cut down one side and continue down my own path.
Once I had steeled my resolve, I sank it deep into the pit of my stomach. Hiding my true feelings like that, I opened my mouth.
"I understand. Maeng-gyeom, your argument is reasonable."
"Then…!"
"Yes. Ma-ui and Tang So-wol. Which of you is the better physician—let the sword decide."
"…?"
Maeng-gyeom looked at me as if I were a madman he couldn't understand.
Now that I looked around, the others wore much the same expression.
Why?
It seemed like the most exemplary answer a martial artist could give.