"Hu."
After loosening up my body at the training ground for the first time in a while, I let out a light sigh and sheathed my sword.
Perhaps moving my body without a single thought had done me some good. The fog that had clouded my head all day—a side effect of overdrawing my Intent—felt like it was finally beginning to clear.
Gazing up at the sky, dyed red and gold by the setting sun, I muttered to myself.
"Guess it's about time I head over."
After washing up briefly and wiping away the sweat, I made my way straight to Seomun Hwa-rin's room.
Standing before the firmly shut door, I let my presence be known and spoke.
"Senior Seomun Hwa-rin. May I come in for a moment?"
"…It's open. Come in."
Her voice sounded strangely listless. When I opened the door and stepped inside, there was a caterpillar there—one that had rolled itself up in its blanket and become one with the floor.
To be more precise, it was Seomun Hwa-rin, rolling around blankly enough to look like that.
"…What are you doing?"
"Nothing at all."
"…"
"I'm joking. Truth is, I have a lot on my mind, so I was just thinking."
"Yes, well. That would be so."
I nodded vaguely and sat down beside Seomun Hwa-rin, who had poked only her face out from the rolled-up bedding.
A brief silence passed. After waiting quietly without a word, it was Seomun Hwa-rin who spoke first.
"What brings you here?"
"Tang So-wol said you've been low on energy lately, so I came to check on you."
"So-wol…"
"Well, I'd planned to stop by anyway, even if no one had said anything. It just got moved up to today."
"Hm?"
Seomun Hwa-rin tilted her head. Since she was lying down and could only move her neck, her white hair spilled down and covered her eyes.
She squirmed, finding it uncomfortable, but there was no way she could tidy her hair without using her hands.
I let out a soft chuckle and brushed her bangs aside. Then, looking down at her face, which had gone strangely stiff, I continued.
"So it does bother you after all."
"N-ng?! O-of course it bothers me!"
"What is it that bothers you so much?"
"What do you mean, what?! That's what I should be asking! You went out of your way to sit beside me, who can't even move, and did whatever you pleased with my hair. And now I see you even washed up before coming…!"
"I was talking about the journal the Sword Demon left behind."
"…"
"…"
Silence flowed once more. Seomun Hwa-rin, who had been rolling her eyes this way and that, now pulled the blanket all the way over her head.
She had become nothing but a lump of cotton. I began rolling her, blanket and all, back and forth.
"What on earth were you thinking?"
"Eep! I-I'm getting dizzy! Dizzy!"
"You've simply got nothing but demons filling your head."
"Even thinking back on it now, that's your f—no, I'm joking! I'm joking, so stop rolling me up and down instead of side to side! It's making me even dizzier!"
Seomun Hwa-rin was half-begging me now. But I don't listen to people whose heads are filled with demons.
So I rolled her around mercilessly until she became one with the blanket.
Ugh. Ack. Guuueck. After she was reduced to only being able to make those three sounds, I carefully peeled the blanket off her.
There she was, curled up into a ball. At a glance, she looked like a pill bug, but there was one difference.
Poke.
If you jabbed her side once, as if to tell her to snap out of it, she'd actually stretch her body out instead.
With her eyes squeezed shut, Seomun Hwa-rin lay sprawled out like a starfish. She cracked one eye open to glance at me, then—
She scooted away with a rustle, pressed her back against the opposite wall, and shot me a wary look. Covering herself with the loose blanket was just a bonus.
"…No, seriously, why have you been so obsessed with that blanket this whole time?"
"Because I feared you would torment me again."
"Torment you? You're exaggerating. I've already reached the Harmony Realm and undergone the Bone-Exchange Rebirth, so you know full well I wouldn't do something like that."
It wasn't from overusing internal energy or Intent—it was pure dizziness from being rolled around on the ground.
There was no way my sense of direction would be shaken to that degree, and even if I were dizzy, a single circulation of internal energy would settle it.
When I said in a calm tone that she was overdoing the fussing, Seomun Hwa-rin, as if wronged, reached out from under the blanket and pounded the floor.
"Right now! Is that what matters?! It's you! You, of all people, harassing me while I was resting peacefully—that's the problem!"
"Is it really to the point of harassment? If anything, it seems like Senior Seomun Hwa-rin's false accusations came first."
"What! You dare claim my lewdness came first? That's going too far!"
"I said false accusations…"
The two words only share a single character, so how on earth did she mishear it?
Shaking my head, I pulled out the simple snacks I had prepared before coming.
The moment I took out the neatly wrapped candy, Seomun Hwa-rin sniffed the air and focused on my hand.
After a moment of hesitation, she threw off the blanket and crawled over on all fours, snatching the candy right out of my hand.
Seomun Hwa-rin squatted down beside me, letting the candy melt slowly in her mouth. Seeing how satisfied she looked, I let out a dry laugh and took out another one.
"I brought plenty, so eat as much as you like."
"Ahem. There was no need for you to bring something like this."
She looked noticeably better than when she was in her caterpillar state.
I let her eat for a while, and only when she picked up her second candy did I speak.
"Are you troubled by the contents of the Sword Demon's journal?"
"…It's not only that, but it is one of the reasons."
A voice heavy with weight. At the end of Seomun Hwa-rin's gaze, which she lifted with a subtle tilt of her head, lay a tattered book in the corner.
It was during the cleanup that followed the Heavenly Demon's disappearance.
While moving the Sword Demon's corpse to bury it in a suitable place, we discovered the journal he had used in life.
It began with a statement that merely reviewing his memories was insufficient, so he had started keeping a separate journal.
Naturally, being a man utterly mad with the sword, most of the contents were related to swords and martial arts.
At first, it was about how to grip the sword and how to swing it. A little later, his analyses of why superior sword methods were superior, along with his own thoughts, were organized there.
As it went on, it led to deeper and deeper enlightenment.
However, Seomun Hwa-rin was a fist artist, not a swordsman. Moreover, she had reached the Harmony Realm long before the Sword Demon and had stabilized her own state—how could something like this surprise her?
There was something else that had driven Seomun Hwa-rin to bury herself under the blankets.
It was near the end of the journal. The part about how the Sword Demon had reached the Harmony Realm.
There, the Sword Demon was despairing over his own talent.
To build real combat experience, he would challenge any swordsman who looked strong to a life-and-death duel, yet even so, the realm beyond Transcendent Peak remained invisible to him.
In truth, before his regression, he had remained stuck at Transcendent Peak for over a decade.
The Sword Demon believed his talent was lacking, and that his foundation—the purity of the internal energy he had built—was insufficient, but…
Well. Even if it was for the sake of reaching a higher realm, to me, who believed the Sword Demon's way of thinking—that a person must become the sword and that such a thing was possible—was wrong, it only left a somewhat skeptical impression.
At any rate, what appeared before the despairing Sword Demon was the Heavenly Demon.
He coaxed the Sword Demon, saying there was a way to reach the Harmony Realm, albeit through a shortcut.
The Sword Demon, who had been blocked by a wall for so long, was initially suspicious, but in the end he accepted the offer and agreed to receive one secret manual and one Grand Ritual.
They say the secret manual contained a perfected form that the Sword Demon's sword could reach, as if it had been created by his future self.
Perhaps it really was a martial art established by the Sword Demon of the future.
The one who received and mastered the secret manual, and Seomun Hwa-rin, who must have read this journal countless times, would simply believe that the Heavenly Demon was such an incredible genius that he had learned the Sword Demon's martial art and refined it to fit perfectly.
But from my position, knowing that he is a regressor or something similar, I see it a bit differently.
What the Heavenly Demon has shown so far. And judging by the atmosphere, it seems highly likely that he actually copied the martial art developed by the future Sword Demon and wrote it down verbatim.
Of course, this too is not particularly important to Seomun Hwa-rin. She would just think that the Heavenly Demon is an incredibly impressive fellow.
The problem is what comes next. The part about the Grand Ritual that the Sword Demon supposedly received.
"I thought… it was all over, and that if I just did my part, I could live an ordinary life."
"It doesn't seem like it was Senior Seomun Hwa-rin's fault."
"No. These hands are already stained with blood. Wouldn't it have been better if they were a little more poisoned?"
"Then you wouldn't be the Senior Seomun Hwa-rin I know. Above all, without the Sword Demon, the Heavenly Demon would have come alone—nothing would have changed."
The Grand Ritual the Sword Demon received worked on a principle similar to the Spiritual Medicine the Demonic Cult had been developing recently.
Like the Blood Essence Pill, which herded beasts together and killed them one by one in the most agonizing way possible to extract their vital blood.
Or like the Spirit Blood Pill, which—though it was made using volunteers driven by vengeance and malice—was nonetheless created by grinding several people into a horrific pulp.
The Heavenly Demon gathered followers willing to give their lives for revenge and killed them through every kind of gruesome method.
Then he made them drink the extracted vital blood without any refinement. And the grudges—too dangerous to simply let flow away or purify with a separate shaman—he had the Sword Demon take directly into his upper Dantian.
Because he had sought to become a sword rather than a man, the Sword Demon was someone who, ironically, could not grasp what Intent truly was.
Into that man, he poured an Intent so intense that he could not help but perceive it, even if he wished not to.
Under ordinary circumstances, when internal energy that was not one's own and grudges that were not one's own flowed in, one would most likely go mad.
Well, the Heavenly Demon's words—that the Sword Demon, having carved himself down to the extreme in his pursuit of becoming a sword, would be fine—do remain in the journal.
For that reason, those mobilized for the Grand Ritual the Sword Demon received were people who harbored grudges as similar to his as possible. For instance…
They had all learned the same martial art, and they were survivors of the Unorthodox Sects of Gangseo Province who bore vengeance against Seomun Hwa-rin.
Their numbers were not great. Seomun Hwa-rin had spared the innocent even among those of the same affiliation as her enemies—but in other words, that meant she had killed everyone who bore even the slightest guilt.
Moreover, those from the Black Heaven Sword Gate, the greatest power among them, had sided with the Black Alliance rather than the Demonic Cult.
When my escape with Seomun Hwa-rin became a topic of discussion, they paid various prices to the Lord of the Black Alliance and came to cross swords with me.
All of them were turned against me by my own hands.
But not all of those who survived dream of revenge.
Some knew they had cowardly brought about the Seomun Clan's extermination first and felt ashamed, while many others wanted nothing more than to live out the rest of their lives in peace, revenge be damned.
At most thirty. Twenty-eight, if I excluded the two who couldn't endure the torture-like process of the Grand Ritual and gave up midway, saying they just wanted to live quietly.
The Heavenly Demon had used them to force the Sword Demon to grow into the Harmony Realm.
The Sword Demon had wanted to become a sword himself… and he handed that sword's hilt not to himself, but to those who sought revenge against Seomun Hwa-rin.
Unlike the Sword Demon's Intent and sword techniques, which were harder and sharper than any famed blade, his Aura was not just unstable—it was oddly soft. That must have been the reason.
Because it was a realm reached through a whip technique, not a true Enlightenment.
Even if it was a shortcut, the very fact that it could open a path to the Harmony Realm was absurd in itself…
What tormented Seomun Hwa-rin was the realization that the mercy she had shown in the past had flown back at her as a hidden dagger.
Even with a candy in her mouth, Seomun Hwa-rin let out a deep sigh, her expression dark.
"I don't know. I truly don't know."
"What do you mean?"
"If I continue to live as a martial artist without retiring, and as a martial artist of the Orthodox Sects at that, wouldn't I need a clear line to draw?"
"If a thug with a sword wants to be called a Great Hero, the line does matter."
"But I can't figure out where to draw that line. I've never learned such things. All I've learned is that clumsy mercy turns into poison—whether it was with the Black Heaven Sword Gate or this time. But to deal with that absurd creature called the Heavenly Demon…"
Seomun Hwa-rin let out another sigh after saying that.
I see. I roughly understood the situation—Seomun Hwa-rin had become one with her blanket and spent the entire day digging at the ground.
I nodded and rose from my seat.
"Let's sneak out for a bit, just the two of us."
"Hm? Where are you talking about?"
"A good place."
"…"
For some reason, Seomun Hwa-rin stiffened, her face flushed red.
He pulled her up and opened the door.