Han Seojin

Han Seojin is a modern-day otaku transplanted into the body of a lowborn orphan boy inside «Bloody Path», a web novel he once read. For ten years he has lived quietly on the outskirts of Mount Emei, running a leather shop and weaving rope and sandals, determined to stay out of the martial world whose bloody fate he knows in advance. The «shopkeeper» cover hides his only real weapon: foreknowledge of the plot and cold calculation.

Bored in a world without games or smartphones, he idly built a set of gear for his private tastes in the shop's cellar. A chance meeting with the Emei nun Cheongwol, caught mid-slaughter, drags him into a deadly game: to survive, he passes his hidden room off as «a place where inner demons are tamed» and takes on the role of a stern master. Thus a timid coward becomes a secret dominant, the «Healer of Inner Demons», through whom, from the shadows, he steers the Central Plains' most dangerous beauties.

At a glance Han Seojin is an unremarkable commoner: a large, stocky body, slumped shoulders, timid eyes with no perceptible flow of internal energy, and rough, work-hardened hands full of calluses. He wears tattered clothes and straw sandals, overgrown with beard and unkempt hair, and is easily mistaken for a Kaebang beggar.

Yet once he washes and trims himself, a handsome, well-bred face emerges — Tang Soran privately calls him a «jade qilin», and Cheongwol catches her own breath at the sight. He stands a head taller than both women who orbit him, and is noticeably broader in the shoulders.

By day he is a cowardly, petty, greedy shopkeeper who dreams only of getting rich, finding a plain wife and settling far from other people's feuds. He pathologically avoids the martial world, for he knows the Great War of the Righteous and the Wicked is coming, and he justifies every act of meddling as pure survival instinct.

In private, in the cellar, he is a cold-blooded sadist and the dominant half of a pairing in which the women devoted to him are the masochists; for him the essence of the game lies not in the body but in feeling — the hierarchy of power, the structure of trust, the alternation of humiliation and generous praise. Beneath the coward's mask is a firm, responsible and genuinely kind man: he secretly pays for medicine for a childhood friend's dying father and cannot walk past a broken fate, even as he resents himself for it.

Ten years ago the soul of a modern otaku woke in the body of a lowborn orphan beggar on the outskirts of Mount Emei. He never knew that body's parents; he was fed and raised by the Kaebang uncles — above all Kwak Tu, head of the Beggars' Sect's Emei branch, whom he regards as a father.

Splitting off from the beggars, he set up a leather shop, and out of the deadly boredom of this world without amusements he built gear for his private tastes in the cellar and kept two handwritten books: one on the craft of his games, the other a record of the future events of «Bloody Path», so he would not forget the plot.

It all began with a nighttime meeting on the mountain: Cheongwol, caught by him standing over a heap of butchered bandits, nearly killed him, but he talked his way out by passing the cellar off as «a place for taming inner demons». Ever since, he «treats» her with games that alternate shame with the long-awaited «good girl», and then treats the Sichuan clan's Tang Soran as well, quietly steering both off the path of ruin and raising them to Peak level.

Fleeing others' attention, he flits to Chengdu and then hides inside the Tang Clan itself; secretly, through the Hao Gate, he becomes the anonymous patron of Namgung Yeon — the true heroine of this world — funneling her his entire fortune and the poison-drawing Immortal Root. When the Demonic Cult's infiltrator Dugu Chinmuk deduces his role and buries him alive, hiding is no longer possible.

After the death of Namgung Yeon's teacher and the annihilation of the Murim Alliance's vanguard corps, the Great War begins. So that his Kaebang elders will not die in his place, Han Seojin stops hiding and founds the Hidden Dragon Society: he installs Tang Soran as its public leader while he rules from the shadows, leading the four of them on their first campaign.

In the martial arts Han Seojin is a complete zero: an ordinary man without a drop of internal energy, whom any fighter could overpower. He cannot even use the lightness art, and so slows the group down on the road.

His true power is knowledge of the plot of «Bloody Path», a strategist's mind, and a gift for manipulation: he bluffs, blackmails, bargains and plays roles honed in his secret scenes. He is a skilled leatherworker and inventor of gear, and his fame as a «Healer of Inner Demons» plus his ties to the Hao Gate open every door. In effect, he moves murim's strongest women forward like pieces on a board.