It's Hard Being the Villain in a Third-Rate Novel

[Lemor]

Ended up as the tragic villain of a third-rate Korean novel? Think it can't get any worse? Brace yourself, you shameless victim of circumstance—this is only the beginning! Know-it-alls? Walking plot armor? Cheaters who suddenly think they can cheat time itself? Oh-ho-ho, if only it were just them!

***
​

I would've bet my entire collection of matchstick towers (hope it's doing okay without me) that the walking pile of evil dust was up to something seriously bad. Each pass of that bony, mummified hand above the newborn did something to him. Black energy—wrong, evil, and so cold I could almost feel it—was seeping into the little body and gathering into an even smaller knot in the middle of his tiny chest.

And to round out the atmosphere of evil for its unwilling witness-slash-participant, all this was happening in the lavish chambers of some rich, vaguely Asian woman. Hard to say for sure: the snow-white hair and slightly narrow eyes threw me off. I would've pegged her for some sort of half-blood, but with all the ancient-China architecture around, probably not. The evil dust was even harder to read. A black robe of sorts, hands that were literally bones with skin stretched over them, a slight hunch, a face lost in the shadows of the hood. I couldn't shift my viewing angle, either. Or didn't know how. What do you expect from a disembodied clump of consciousness?

It didn't take a genius to figure out the owner of these chambers had stopped being alive ten or fifteen minutes ago. With my emotions switched off, I had the best seat in the house for her final moment: a big red stain on the sheets, and a face frozen in pain and horror, pale and strangely shriveled. She'd survived the birth, which the old dust heap clearly hadn't appreciated. Tradition, probably. A peculiar one. The midwife's body nearby barely deserved a mention. Given the general vibe, it was just more grim set dressing.

I was pretty sure a minute earlier, the set dressing had still been making death rattles.

Oh, great start. Just radiating good vibes. Fan-freak-ing-tas-tic!

And the grand finale: the baby on the receiving end of all this evil business was me. The only reason I could see straight and not lose my mind from sheer terror was a strange state of… being out of my body. It was like I was standing (or just existing) next to my new little body, watching it from the outside. I barely felt anything. Somewhere at the edge of my mind I registered I was scared—not as a loss of control, but as a piece of information I could ignore. Which I was doing. Valiantly.

There was also a trickle of cold, mostly around my heart. I could've slipped back into my new body and felt that alien energy in full, but…

Hell no. I'd start shrieking on the spot, and annoying the ancient mummy that just murdered your mother isn't exactly a smart move. Okay, fine—I loved annoying people. But only when I knew I could get away with it, or at least have room to maneuver. Right now I was a good, law-abiding hostage who couldn't resist even in theory. I'd keep my mouth shut.

I could hardly keep up with what was going on. A couple minutes earlier I'd been chilling on a bench outside my building, and then…

Something had happened, and it had killed me. I didn't doubt that for a moment. It erased me from reality, split me into atoms, annihilated me, ripped apart the very structure of my body—the list goes on. Fortunately, I didn't have time to process any of it. My brain most likely never got around to, ahem, "delivering" the news, which is why I took it all relatively well. Thanks, brain. Good guy. Bit glitchy, but good.

The relic croaked something nasty in what I can only call "Asian" (no clue which language—it just sounded very… Asian), which dragged me out of my thoughts.

I winced inwardly, grateful to this strange state for keeping me in control. Because it stung. It really, really stung. Sure, I had no family, but I'd had plans. Lots of plans. And now a living heap of bony dust was running experiments on me. The more it did, the more clearly I could feel something changing, even through the detachment. Something cool had gathered in my chest, wrapping around it and—absurd as it sounds—warming me.

The surrealness of it only made things worse. The kicker was that in this strange state, I could somehow see that equally strange energy. I don't think I need to explain how it feels when an evil old wreck, fresh off murdering your brand-new mother, pumps black stuff into you against your will.

Luckily or not, it couldn't go on forever. Eventually the relic, visibly tired, made one last pass with its hand and pressed down hard on the baby's chest. A stream of energy, scorching and freezing at once, flooded the little body. It hit so hard that it knocked me out of the observer state and slammed me back inside.

In that instant, I felt everything the evil dust had been doing to me.

With no way to hold back—not even in theory—I screamed my lungs out. Something was pulsing in my chest in time with my heartbeat. Energy coursed through my arms, my legs, my entire body to the rhythm of that metaphysical second organ, filling me with something entirely new. An orgasm? Paying off your mortgage? Finding out you're doing better than the rich kid from high school? Nope. Not even close. All those were pale shadows of what I felt.

It was cold, and fierce all the same. It was agony, like being dunked, completely unprepared, into water cold enough to freeze your soul. And at the same time it was a twisted kind of pleasure, as though that water were the first spring you'd found after days of trudging through the desert with no hope of making it out. Like the orgasm, the mortgage, and running into the rich kid from high school who turned out to be a total loser—all at once!

…for some reason, I feel like I just summed up the entire cycle of Samsara…

I could already feel myself drifting off into merciful sleep (which, as it turned out, was a filthy lie) when something was poured over my face. It didn't take me long to figure out what. I was swallowing it, practically soaking it in through my skin, and something inside me shifted. That metallic, burning taste was hard to mistake. They were pumping me full of blood! A baby whose mother had just been killed!

And it wasn't hard to guess whose blood it was. As my mind slipped under, I heard the vaguely Asian geezer cackle, and somehow I knew for a fact that this would come back to bite me.

If I could've, I would've grinned from ear to ear, which surprised even me. Some irrational thrill was rising inside me, a giddy kind of anticipation.

Or perhaps it would come back to bite the evil dust.

Those were my last thoughts before I blacked out completely. Only I didn't land in sweet, temporary oblivion. I landed in a sea of blood my own mind had cooked up.

Frankly, whoever's running this party—I'd like to speak to the manager…


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Author's note: This is an English translation of my own novel, which I finished back in 2023. As you can tell, I'm not a native English speaker, so you will probably come across some awkward sentences and mistakes. If you notice any, please let me know.

More chapters will be available on my Patreon, but the whole story will be posted here as well, just with a small delay.

Enjoy the read!

 

[Lemor]

I dreamed (or at least I think I did) of a sea of black, bubbling blood with bodies floating in it—dozens, hundreds, thousands of them, all some sort of vaguely Chinese warriors. A crimson sky stretched from horizon to horizon and stung my eyes a little, and every so often screams full of pain and despair rang out from everywhere at once. The stench of blood was scary strong. The only reason I didn't throw up was that I'd slipped out of my body on pure reflex. Either that, or being inside my own head rather than the real world let me ignore the, ahem, sordid details. Depends how you look at it. My eyes were watering, though. Hopefully not with blood.

My gaze drifted down on its own, and once again, only the detached state kept me calm.

Twenty-three years of life, and I'd never felt—or, technically, not-felt—such a strange range of emotions.

"Rough day?" I flopped down into the black muck without stopping to wonder why it wasn't swallowing me, or why I was back in my old… um, packaging. I was steering my body from the outside, same as before. A bizarre but genuinely useful trick. "Trust me, you're not the only one…"

Perhaps in my own dream I was some sort of minor god? I wondered if I could turn this sea of blood into wine and the warriors' corpses into virgins. Living ones. Of sound mind, ideally.

…though that already sounds kind of demonic, to be honest…

"Ghaaaa!"

A man tried to grab me. Gray-haired, probably middle-aged, in heavy armor, he was half swallowed by the black blood, which seemed very much alive. His eyes were clouded with insane pain, terror, rage, and despair. I'd never seen that many emotions on one face. For some reason I felt that all this wasn't just (or wasn't only) a glitch in my sick mind—and after all that "stress," my mind had every right to be sick, having just managed to outli… out-exist death. No, this was something far more frightening and vile.

"I guess there are scarier things than an unpaid loan," I said with a wide grin. For a moment my face twisted, my new emotional detachment notwithstanding.

The unreality around me seemed to shudder for an instant.

Just for a second.

With a frighteningly blank face and completely irrational glee, I got up and walked on, past the corpses… and not only corpses. I knew where I had to go. I didn't doubt for a moment that if I didn't walk this road, something inside me might break. My inner self (my subconscious acting up, maybe?) was practically screaming that the evil dust had gotten something wrong and it needed fixing—or it would come back to bite me, and more than once.

I'm afraid that if I'd really been an ordinary baby—or even just an ordinary person who couldn't keep their emotions in check in this bizarre dream—things could've ended pretty badly.

Little by little, the red sky darkened to black. Fewer bodies floated in the blood, at some point the screams stopped, and even the smell began to fade. It got noticeably colder, though outside my body I didn't so much feel it as receive it as information—odd information, but still. The longer I spent as a disembodied scrap of consciousness pulling my body's strings, the easier it got. Like a puppeteer getting some practice in.

I don't remember having any abilities like this before my body got annihilated. I was a perfectly ordinary person, no question. Something has clearly happened to me (boy, am I quick on the uptake), but I doubt I'll find out what anytime soon, if ever. The scariest part is that something in my personality has definitely changed, and I can't put my finger on what. Not some new "ability." Something deeper, something that feels natural to me.

Did I have fits of irrational glee before? Am I sure I didn't?

At some point I started hearing a beat. Quiet at first, then louder. Unhurried, rhythmic, familiar in some ways and utterly alien in others. It matched my own heartbeat exactly, and the synchronicity was unsettling—as though the beat were a part of me, just one that didn't belong.

I had to fix that. Right now.

"So that's what you look like," I murmured, studying the tiny—literally baby-sized—black, terrifying heart with the keen interest of someone who doesn't understand a damn thing.

The heart was giving off so much cold that my body was close to freezing solid. I could hardly feel it, and it threatened to give out at any second. Being outside it somehow compensated: I was sending orders straight to individual body parts and forcing them to move. That couldn't last long.

Trying not to think about the fact that, technically, I didn't have a body here, I followed my instincts, reached out with a hand gone white, and grabbed the heart. Somewhere at the edge of my awareness, a report came in: insane pain had erupted in my chest. I didn't stop. I squeezed the black heart harder.

To my sincere disappointment, all that dramatic posturing wasn't enough. The heart refused to give. Something underfoot started vibrating in a very unhealthy way, as if…

I'd triggered some shady security system.

Okay, okay, okay, okay, this is bad… THIS IS VERY BAD!

Oh craaap…

The sea of blood under my feet began to boil, and a whirlwind rose in the black sky. The bone-chilling howl of hundreds of vaguely Chinese warriors slammed into my ears. It took me a second to realize that one of the howlers was me. Even outside my illusory body, even without really feeling any of it, getting only dry reports of what was going on to me—it was enough to grasp just how messed up the situation was.

The black blood came alive and began crawling up my body, as if trying to stop me, to crush me. It wrapped around me, and I couldn't fight it—no way, no how. My screams started to harmonize with the locals'. In an instant they'd become my old buddies, the kind you've been through some shit with. And were still going through it with.

I think my new buddies felt the same way.

Only one thought pounded in my head, my one hope of climbing out of the hole I'd dug myself into: the black heart, the fossil's gift and curse.

Come on, give, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, you idiot, this is going to suck for everyone…

When the black blood had swallowed my entire body, long-suffering head included, and was about to take the hand still stubbornly (by now, mechanically) squeezing the black heart, the heart appeared to realize, as if on instinct, that it couldn't stay "neutral" anymore.

Something cracked in my hand, loud and clear, and then…

A black, all-consuming flash swallowed the entire illusory space, and this time it put me under for good.

***

​

As it turned out, being the mad dust's victim wasn't all that bad. Nobody tortured me, there were no more evil rituals, and on the whole I lived like a little prince. Two black-haired girls, no older than twenty, came to my nursery regularly to clean (yes, the same room where my new body's mother was killed). Their eyes were bound with white cloth, which didn't slow them down one bit. As far as I could tell, they saw me as a piece of furniture. A valuable piece of furniture: not to be touched, not to be looked at, to be kept at a respectful distance, never to be spoken near or disturbed by a loud noise.

Or any noise at all.

Their cleaning was nearly a dance: smooth, synchronized, precise, careful. Sometimes it looked like they were catching the dust (the regular kind, not the geezer, sadly) with their bare hands and steering it away from me, but really they were just waving their arms around. Without my ability, I wouldn't have noticed a single one of their visits—I was a baby, after all. I have no idea how my skull was processing this much information. Let's call it part of my "quirk." I could think outside my own body, after all. Maybe there was some other memory storage in there too, and that was perfectly normal. Sure.

The rare outings deserve a special mention. From time to time, a very old biddy with dull, clearly blind eyes would come and move me into something like a stroller (more of a bed on wheels, really). Then she'd wheel me out for some fresh air on an empty training ground, screened off from prying eyes.

I was clearly in some sort of palace. The corridors were long, and the entire place had an air of… uh, evil solemnity. To my displeasure, there was a lot of red: runners that looked soaked in blood and reminded me of that sea. And it was depressingly empty and… cold. Not literally—they bundled me up like crazy, so no danger of catching a chill. The cold was more spiritual, and to my surprise, I felt it better outside my body, when every other sensation faded into the background.

As I said, we normally stopped at the training ground, though sometimes we went out into a small courtyard instead. Morning or night, it didn't matter. The old woman moved as though she were running on some algorithm. If she hadn't occasionally let her gaze linger (blind or not) on the full blue moon, I would've seriously suspected she was an android that didn't respond to stimuli at all. Sure, when I put on a show of crying, she'd pick me up and try to soothe me, but…

Even then, her movements were mechanical. No feeling at all. Like she was following an instruction.

Which leaves the question of who fed me, right? I wasn't running on solar power. For the first couple of weeks, middle-aged women came—blindfolded, naturally—but then… ahem, something changed. Changed so much it turned the rest of my life upside down.

Let's just say our first meeting didn't go smoothly. It's hard to describe how stunned I was. There you are, lying peacefully in your crib, trying to make sense of the supernatural energy inside you, when into your nursery walks a big, burly guy with long red hair, in red, bloody-looking robes (I think I've developed a mild phobia of that color). He has a face like a brick wall, detached, unnaturally calm red eyes, and a big, long sword. He walks right up to you, stares into your very soul, and then suddenly starts taking off his robe. Or is it… what's it called… Right, a hanfu! Or something like it.

The panic that hit me then was worse than anything I'd felt while getting acquainted with the black heart. Pure, primal terror. I announced it immediately by bawling at the top of my lungs, hoping someone would come save me. Slipping out of my body (I couldn't stay out all the time, and my eyesight had gotten a lot better by then) helped me calm down, but I had no intention of stopping the waterworks. None. I even seriously considered trying to detonate my supernatural energy generator and take that way-too-red creep down with me.

My terrified wailing cooled the half-undressed guy's enthusiasm a little. He stared straight into my teary little eyes with that same cold, detached look. And then my whole understanding of the world fell apart: the big guy tilted his head, grabbed the skin of his face, and started peeling it off. I was living in a horror movie. Someone was peeling off their own skin, alive, while staring right at me!

Beneath the rough skin was another layer, much softer and… more feminine. Mentally slack-jawed, refusing to believe makeup this good could exist, I found myself looking at a perfectly attractive—beautiful, even—red-haired woman. Not exactly delicate, granted, but the transformation was so unbelievable that I barely noticed.

The woman touched her neck, fiddled with something, and coughed. I tried to pretend I hadn't noticed her voice change mid-cough, from a low, rough male voice to a perfectly normal high female one.

The scary lady with the even scarier hobbies lifted me out of the crib and began rocking me, apparently trying to calm me down, and even started singing. I didn't understand a word, but she had a nice voice—gentle, soothing. If not for that expression of hers, practically begging for a slap, it would've been downright pleasant.

With the primal terror gone and the worst apparently avoided, I switched off the biological alarm and waited to see what would happen next. The woman hummed a bit longer, until she was sure I wasn't going to cry again, then put me back in the crib. With the same cold, detached face, she took off her top completely and spent quite a while unwinding the bandages around her chest; they'd been wrapped way too tight. So she was passing herself off as a man for some reason. Good to know, but not very useful.

By then I'd figured out what she was about to do, so I stopped resisting. Talk about a stern wet nurse…

The entire time, the redhead kept her eyes fixed on my face, which was a bit unnerving. After the feeding, she kept looking at me for a while, as if trying to make something out, then gave up, put me back in the crib, disguised herself as a man again, and left without a word.

And that was how my days went: the cleaners came regularly, I got fed regularly (luckily or sadly, the wet nurse never changed again), I got wheeled out for walks, and sometimes the same old woman bathed me. That was about it. Oh, right. Every week or two, the evil dust would come by to check on something. Gradually the evil geezer came less and less often, until he stopped coming altogether—apparently convinced I wasn't going to die and everything was "going according to plan."

The warmest one towards me was probably the lady with the odd habits. Every day she got softer with me, more… homey. I even began to think she saw me as her own son. During feedings she hummed all kinds of songs, told me things, and found time to play: she made little spots of energy dance across the walls like reflected sunlight, literally levitated me around the nursery, that kind of thing. Once she showed me her sword and sliced a passing fly clean in half, which made me laugh with delight. The redhead definitely liked that. She'd brought an unexpected little miracle into my life, and I brought one into hers, even if mostly by accident.

But the real turning point wasn't these little things. They mattered, but they were more like the bricks of a future house than the house itself.

At some point, around three months in—maybe four—the redhead held out a finger to my little hands and waited. She waited stubbornly, and I could tell from her face that I absolutely had to do something.

Not really understanding what she wanted, I grabbed her finger on reflex—and probably for the first time ever, I saw a sincere, wide smile on her face. Um, a slightly unhinged smile, and somehow a sad one too. The way the locals show emotion is just so vivid. I still can't get used to it. Especially beside her usual brick-wall face.

"You have done […] well, […]," the woman said, kissing me on the forehead. For a moment her gaze turned warm, truly motherly, then went cold and distant again. "[…] heir, […] Cult Leader…"

I was picking up the language abnormally fast. Something insanely strange was clearly going on in my space-time-mangled brain, energy-based or otherwise, because I was memorizing and understanding everything maybe ten times faster and more easily than before I died. Making sense of the sounds coming out of my wet nurse's mouth didn't happen instantly, naturally, but a couple of repetitions were enough to get the gist. Frankly, it scared me. I couldn't explain how or why it worked, and that was quietly wrecking my picture of the world and pulling me further and further from reality. Believe me, I tried to find a reasonable explanation, but no matter how wild and far-fetched my theories got, I just couldn't.

Well, fortunately, I gave up on that pretty quickly and started using my abilities to the fullest.

Truth be told, I'd stopped believing anything in my daily life would ever change. I'd gotten too used to it. Used to watching the energy inside me, used to not knowing my own name, used to my new energy brains, used to the redhead, used to the cleaning virtuosos, even used to the old woman. I'd started to believe it would always be this way. Apparently this unhinged and extremely weird world had other plans, because one day I was brazenly kidnapped—and not by just anyone, but by the good guys! With help from the very person who was supposed to make sure nothing like that ever happened!

That was probably when I first started doubting the sanity of the reality around me—and along with the doubts came the certainty that what was happening here was some…

Grade-A lunacy.

 

[Lemor]

I figured out that today might turn into a total shitshow the moment my wet nurse walked in. She didn't tell me anything outright (what would be the point?), and she acted the same as always, humming and floating my chubby little carcass around the room with honest-to-god telekinesis, like a Sith. But…

Ah, that "but." Such a small word. So much baggage.

I'd gotten a lot better at noticing little things. Outside my body I caught more details than I ever could from inside it. In the eyes of my big red-haired lady-in-disguise I saw a faint worry, a tension—one of those cases where I didn't so much see it as almost physically feel it, like a string pulled tight. Usually the wet nurse's face said one of two things: either she was about to brutally off somebody, or—very, very rarely—something tender and genuinely motherly. Today it was some odd in-between. Like she was about to off somebody, but not in the usual way.

…Wow. Beautiful imagery. Truly.

My suspicions weren't confirmed until night. Babies sleep a lot, and I was no exception, but it's hard to stay asleep when somebody picks you up and starts bundling you in rags. It was like a bucket of cold water to the face. I opened my eyes and almost screamed at the sight of some creepy guy in a ninja getup, face covered. If my wet nurse hadn't started singing to me the way she always did, and if some part of me hadn't already sensed that something was coming, I really might have screamed.

Why scream? Element of surprise, mostly—and to screw over any would-be killer, just in case. Somebody might come running. Makes things easier on my petty little soul. Heh-heh-heh.

Once she was sure I wasn't about to sound the alarm, the red-haired woman (who, by the way, had dyed her hair black but hadn't cut it) gave me what I think was the faintest smile.

"[…] Cult Leader […]."

She said it with respect, I think, and a sort of pride. Like a mom whose kid just brought home his first good grade. Well, thanks, I guess. I wondered whether she would've knocked me out if I'd screamed after all. And if so, how.

Uh, let's not go there.

Without wasting a second, the woman strapped me to her chest and slipped soundlessly out into the corridor—where she ran smack into a vaguely Chinese witness in guard's armor who just happened to be walking by. I'm sure the odds of that meeting were astronomically low. I'd never seen anyone "extra" wandering around here before.

Well, I didn't have to wonder for long what came next.

For a moment, time froze. My wet nurse clearly hadn't seen this coming, and her eyes filled with an intent to kill so heavy it was almost physical. In the guard's eyes I caught a flash of surprise, then understanding, then horror, and then…

I didn't see the wet nurse move. I saw her silhouette blur, and at the same moment I registered my little body had been given a good shake. That didn't stop me from seeing the result: the guard's head had been twisted around. Literally—a full one-eighty. His body apparently didn't get the memo and stayed standing. His face was frozen in a grimace of horror, as though he'd known he was a dead man the moment he laid eyes on the kidnapper. I swear he felt it on some spiritual level.

The wet nurse caught the body as it started to topple and silently tossed the extra "evidence" into my nursery. Then, after making sure I was strapped on as tight as humanly possible, she took off through long, winding corridors. My brain couldn't keep up with how fast she was going. It didn't help that she'd wrapped us in that downright cheaty energy of hers, which let her ignore little things like sound and headwind…

Sure. Little things.

Like a silent shadow, the wet nurse ran a route only she knew. By minute two I'd given up trying to figure out where we were. Every so often the scenery changed enough for me to tell that we'd made it outside and were passing training grounds and assorted courtyards. A couple times she leaped up onto the roof tiles, somehow canceling out nearly the entire weight of her not-exactly-delicate body. Okay, I should've stopped being surprised the moment she started levitating me around the room, but come on…

These martial artists are goddamn battle mages, is what they are.

Outside, it was already autumn. The moon had risen long ago, and it lit everything up pretty well. As though she could tell I wanted a look around, the redhead stopped on one of the roofs and let me take in the view.

"[…] of the young Cult Leader […]," she whispered in a rough voice that wasn't hers.

We were in a valley. Two mountains hemmed us in from the north round to the west, and thick forest stretched from west to east. The view was gorgeous, and I got the distinct feeling that the location of this… gathering of shady superhumans was no accident. Just getting here would be a pain, never mind storming the place. And if the locals knew those forests—which I was sure they did—forget it. Near-perfect defense and cover.

If I hadn't learned to swivel my metaphysical head while outside my body (how else would I check out the energy inside me, duh), I wouldn't have made out half of what the redhead was trying to show me. With my "real" field of view—no chance. Lady didn't think that one through. Thanks anyway, though.

Special mention goes to the bells. For some reason there were tons of them: up on towers, strung right between the houses if you looked closely, hanging off the houses themselves. I'd never seen any at the training grounds or in the corridors, but out here, once you started looking, there were way too many.

Weird bunch, these vaguely Chinese locals. And the place was empty. Deserted, even, night or not. Somewhere far off, the local wildlife hooted and howled, a couple of lanterns burned here and there, and now and then stern guys in armor walked back and forth, but the overall gloom didn't budge. Not that this surprised me. Come on. This was the place where the mother—oh, mother of God—of my new little body got murdered in the creepiest way possible, while I got treated like a priceless vase from some dynasty or other.

Anyway.

I gave a grateful "ah-fu-agoo," which—by accident, I think—made the woman smile, and I'd already started naively believing we'd get out of here without any more incidents. Of course, I was wrong.

At some point we ran into the not-quite-blind-enough old woman.

It came out of nowhere. The redhead hopped down off the roof and ducked around a corner between two buildings, slipping past the occasional guard and the occasional clearly-more-important type (those didn't wear armor, just knockoff hanfu in assorted colors). And right there we stumbled onto a very familiar motionless robot, staring with blind eyes at the moon peeking between the buildings. My wet nurse didn't attack at once. She just froze and stared at the old woman. The old woman wasn't in any hurry to say or do anything either. She kept gazing at the moon.

Wait, was I witnessing the legendary telepathic link between two women?

Nope. Turned out they were just being mysteriously silent, lost in thoughts only gods and demons could follow (or, more likely, other women).

"The Cult Leader […] will not allow the young […] to grow," my wet nurse said coldly, in that rough male voice. It bugged me that the gist kept slipping away. Spoiled, I know, but I still wanted to know what exactly she was talking about.

"[…], I do not know, Red […]" the old woman rasped. The red-haired wet nurse went rigid—she'd been made. The old lady, who suddenly didn't seem like much of a robot anymore, kept looking at the moon (again, let's ignore the whole blind thing) and smiled. "[…] to think I would not figure it out."

"You cannot […] me. All that awaits you is […]."

And once again my wet nurse's eyes filled with a physical urge to kill, welling up from somewhere deep in her very being. I'd always figured that if eyes could show the state of the soul, it was only in a very loose sense. Now that phrase took on a whole new meaning. Granted, a big part of that was how insanely expressive everyone's faces were around here, and that outside my body I was obviously picking up on things beyond normal human perception. And considering that my chest now had two hearts beating in it—my regular one and a purely energy-based black one, which I'd either merged with the original or swallowed whole on nothing but a scarily accurate intuition—being surprised by a little extra weirdness was…

Kind of weird. Then again, that's what makes me human.

Corny and obvious as it sounds, the fact that I can still be surprised means there's life and feeling in me. For a guy whose body got annihilated to hell, that's a pretty good reason to celebrate.

"I do not even […]," the old woman said, shifting her gaze from the moon to my wet nurse with the faintest smile. A nasty one. Then her eyes settled on my long-suffering little body. "I do not […]. But…"

She never got to finish. My wet nurse lunged at her without giving her a chance to do anything, but the old lady sprang back with shocking agility, bounced off a wall, and landed on a roof. My freshly dyed wet nurse leaped after her, but there was one catch that complicated everything…

Me.

She clearly had to put in extra effort not to hurt me, and that slowed her down and cramped her movements. The old woman took full advantage and slipped out of that genuinely iron grip yet again by hopping to another building (spry old rabbit, dammit). Then, done tugging the tiger's tail, she pulled something like a flute out of her robe.

No need to guess what she did next.

So that's what all those bells were for.

The old woman began to play under the full moon, showing a frankly ridiculous amount of emotion, as though it gave her physical pleasure. Softly, unhurriedly, as though she didn't want to draw anyone's attention, but… I could see she wasn't just playing. Outside my body, my perception was wider and, well, abnormal. It let me see things ordinary eyes couldn't.

Waves. Waves of energy started spreading out across the area, unhurried but relentless, and somehow sinister. My wet nurse didn't let the old woman finish her melody of pure evil. In a single lunge, flaring with something like a red aura, she was at the mad crone's side and slit her throat with a dagger that came out of nowhere. But it was too late. The waves were spreading, and nothing could stop them now.

The waves didn't touch us—we were inside my wet nurse's red aura. Everything else, though…

The old woman's body fell, a smile frozen on her face. My wet nurse, already well aware of what came next, put the dagger away and, out of nowhere, stroked my head.

"Please bear with me, Young Cult Leader. Now […]…"

With that, she stopped hiding and wrapped us in a red aura that blazed in my perception and was starting to physically affect the world. I literally felt it on my skin (or, more accurately, my energy brains received a report that I'd felt it): the air around us was getting hotter.

The roof tiles under our feet trembled. Just a little.

The bells…

Ding.

Ding.

Ding.

Ding.

Dozens of bells started ringing from every direction. The sounds merged into one, drawing, to put it mildly, unwanted attention. Shouting and cursing broke out, shadows flickered. Before anyone could catch their breath, flashes of energy and pounding feet came from everywhere at once, creepily coordinated, like cockroaches. Someone was already up on the roof and running straight at us. And as though that weren't enough, drums started beating.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

The red-haired kidnapper-slash-rescuer had no intention of waiting around for the local devils crawling out of their holes. Apparently deciding that stealth was for wimps and we only had one shot, she went big. She lunged and went bounding straight up into the sky, pushing off—as far as I could tell—the headwind itself, blissfully unaware that she had once again trampled all over my entire worldview. Arrows flew at us. Someone tried in vain to run up the sky after us and fell after two or three "steps." I found myself staring at the full moon, humming a symphony of every swear word I knew under my breath.

For me, time stood still. For an eternity.

The full moon.

I sighed mentally.

Ye-e-eah. Lovely view…

And that's where my brain clocked out.

 

[Lemor]

To be fair, the sprint across the sky itself didn't last long—two or three minutes, tops. But I'm afraid those few minutes are burned into my mind forever. Every bounce my wet nurse made felt like our last. I could see her energy draining fast with every use of that technique. I could see us slowly losing altitude. I could see a plague of evil devils pouring after us, more and more by the second, and arrows whistling right past us, trying to bring my wet nurse down.

…I wonder if they know she's carrying precious cargo.

As a scrap of consciousness hovering next to its own body—one that had learned to swivel its metaphysical head all the way around—I had a truly magnificent view. Somewhere at the edge of a mind badly dented by harsh reality, I wondered how loudly I'd be screaming if I went back into my body right now.

Fortunately, at some point the woman made it out of the valley and into the woods: thick, and even gloomier. Moonlight seeped through the trees now and then without doing much for visibility, but that didn't bother her in the slightest. My wet nurse moved strangely, and certainly not at random. Sometimes she made sudden leaps, probably clearing some sort of trap. Sometimes she skipped a fairly open clearing and went the long way around…

Besides that, she'd stopped taking risks. She mostly quit broadcasting that supernatural energy all over the place and played it careful. I could feel in my bones that nobody had given up on us and the chase was still on, but my wet nurse's skills outclassed our pursuers by a whole order of magnitude, if not more. Little by little we pulled further ahead of the baddies, skirting the occasional rat holed up among the trees. If you ask me, the woman knew how things worked around here a bit too well.

Unfortunately, I'd started relaxing too early. Again.

Out of nowhere, a man's silhouette nearly slammed right into us, trailing dark-gray, almost black emanations. My wet nurse dodged in time, and I would've bet my collection of matchstick towers (I doubt it's doing too well back there) that if that goddamn torpedo had hit us, it would've hurt. Because the tree it flew into got knocked flat!

It was a freaking oak! AN OAK!!!

My wet nurse was impressed too. She pushed herself as fast as she could possibly go and, as far as I could tell, left the small fry and this midboss behind in one go. She was badly winded by now, right up against her limit, but she flat-out refused to give up and squeezed every last drop of strength out of herself. Our pursuer, way too quick and way too strong, was closing in fast. Apparently, he'd noticed too:

"HahaHAhahahaHAH!!!"

His laughter, full of hysterical glee, was punctuated by the occasional attempt to flatten us with his bulk, but every time, my wet nurse managed to dodge. She was getting closer and closer to her limit. Her body was visibly shaking, her blood-red aura had lost most of its gleam, and her movements weren't almost as precise anymore. They'd turned choppy and jerky.

Running across the sky had cost her too much.

Still, we were getting close to the edge of the woods. Up ahead, the end of this madness was in sight, though the end of the woods didn't mean the end of the chase. All I could do was hope my wet nurse had planned for that and wasn't running for her life on nothing but her own strength.

Alas, they weren't about to just let us go.

The midboss figured this game of tag was dragging on, and in an instant he was in front of us. The woman stopped dead. She knew that if she tried to slip past him now, she might pay dearly for it. The short breather, at least, gave me a good look at our pursuer.

Moonlight fell through the leaves onto a tall, muscular, hairy, middle-aged man in the same robe-like thing—a gray one, torn and beat-up. His long hair, going gray now but clearly black once, hung loose and looked like someone had ruffled it. His eyes were black, but cloudy. In those eyes I saw glee sparkling, and his wide grin only confirmed it. Funny—I noticed the glee in his eyes first, and only then got around to the rest of his face.

Something is definitely wrong with my brain…

"Tired, Shin Won-gi?" The big guy's grin turned into a snarl. My eyebrow twitched—mentally. That was a name, I think. Probably. Come to think of it, it was the first name I'd heard in this world. It sounded super strange to me, and kind of masculine. I doubted it was my wet nurse's real name, but even so… Okay, let's skip the name thing. While I was busy with my new discoveries, the strong baddie lowered his gaze to me. "Do you truly think […] is forgiven for the […] of the young […]?"

"I am acting in […]," my wet nurse said in her man's voice, breathing hard. "The Cult Leader […] something bad!"

The big guy's grin faded a little. He didn't look so cheerful anymore.

"He acknowledged him."

"That is a lie, Yoon Bo-kyung," my wet nurse all but growled.

She started listing what my days looked like and how I'd been treated. I didn't understand a lot of it, but even someone who didn't speak the language could have caught the gist: something was wrong here. This wasn't how things were supposed to go. And from what I gathered, she'd found out how my days went by means that weren't, let's say, entirely honest.

Oh, please. I'd figured that out on day one, guys. Stop the presses. So, what, they didn't know my new body's mother had been murdered? They thought she just hadn't survived the birth? And the midwife had mysteriously wandered off into the fog, sure? I knew I was in a villains' den, but who knew these villains also casually murdered, betrayed, and framed their own? So much for honor among thieves!

And here's the best part: the one doing it was supposedly the biggest shot around. Wonderful.

A big bad who whacks and frames his own people left and right is a lousy big bad, period.

The woman's speech got both me and the big guy thinking. He'd stopped grinning. At some point he just looked up at the moon, thinking hard about something. For my wet nurse and me, those probably weren't the most thrilling minutes of waiting, but they were definitely the tensest. Her muscles were practically cramping.

Sadly, diplomacy didn't work.

"Even if you are not lying," the meathead said, snarling again as he shifted his gaze from the moon back to us, "what of it?"

The woman barely dodged his lunge. He seemed to literally teleport to her and throw a punch strong enough to nearly flatten the nearest tree. If that punch had hit me, there wouldn't have been enough of me left to wipe up…

And I wasn't the only one who knew it.

"You… How dare you?!"

My wet nurse, who had just saved me from a truly horrible fate, stared into the big guy's eyes in shock. Still grinning wide, he lunged again. And again the woman barely dodged. If I hadn't been outside my body, the dance of these battle mages would probably have made me seasick. My metaphysical butt cheeks were clenched as tight as they'd go—and not just for my own sake. For the redhead's, too.

Because even if I could, in theory, survive this, she couldn't. I'm not some heartless demon who can calmly watch his wet nurse get closer and closer to death. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do. Not unless someone gave me a chance.

Unluckily for the big guy, someone did.

At some point the woman didn't quite dodge in time, and the big guy jumped on it instantly, switching from punches to a grab. He towered a full head above the red-haired woman. He clamped his bare hand around her throat and lifted her off the ground.

My wet nurse's body shook in convulsions, and a pained wheeze came out of her mouth.

"[…]," the big guy sneered. "Your […] is too […]. I always […] you were hiding something. Who would have thought…" His face twisted. "Who allowed a woman to become a Black […]?"

Oh-ho-ho. I didn't catch all of it, but if this clown had blurted that out back in my world, superpowers or not, he would've been canceled into oblivion by now. Idiot.

Then again, I was kind of grateful to him. The brute brought his face way too close to my wet nurse's, about to pull off her mask, and didn't stop to think that along with an exhausted woman, he'd brought something else dangerously close to his chest. Me. I didn't know if I could do anything at all, but not trying wasn't an option.

You only live once? Not in my experience!

The black heart, which had become an energy extension of my real one, started pounding with something like childish delight, as though it could sense a chance to pull something nasty. Refreshing energy rolled through my body, then gathered from every corner of it into a single bundle. Using everything I'd figured out by trial and error outside my body, I sent that bundle out and straight into the heart of the big guy, who'd let his guard down.

In theory, given the gigantic gap in power, the guy should've crushed my energy on pure instinct. But, as I said before, there was one catch…

My little black heart was a pretty scary thing. Besides that, the guy had burned through a decent chunk of his own energy chasing us. And most importantly, he'd relaxed. That was his main mistake. Even after it left my body, the supernatural energy—genuinely sinister and black, as I perceived it—stayed on my radar for a while, so I could see what I'd done. Like a hungry, evil beast, it started eating away at his energy. The effect was instant. The midboss's face literally twisted.

A crazy wave of weakness washed over my body, and I got thrown back into it against my will, which made things even crappier. But I was pleased. The worn-out black heart inside me seemed even happier than I was, sending pulses of already-recovering strength through my body.

The baddie coughed, loosened his grip, and clutched at his chest with his free hand, where my power was now running the show. It wouldn't last long—a measly instant—but in a real fight, especially a fight between battle mages, that's a crazy long time. My wet nurse didn't let me down. Finding what must have been her third wind or so, she pulled a dagger from her sleeve and rammed it, nice and deep, into his throat. Then she jumped away from him and almost fell over herself.

Confusion mixed with pain froze on the hairy man's face. Still rooted to the spot, he touched the dagger's hilt, and his hands began to shake. I could already feel myself drifting off to sleep, but when I saw the stupid mug of the soon-to-be corpse, lit by moonlight through the thick trees, I burst out laughing. Really laughing, the way only little kids laugh when their evil parents decide to tickle them.

My wet nurse, on the brink of passing out herself, hugged me and started stroking my head. I kept laughing.

"Y-you…"

That was the last thing he said before he fell for good. And I would've bet my collection of matchstick towers that he was looking straight at me. I was laughing too hard to really notice a new surge of strength. Not that it did much good when my brain had completely stopped working, but thanks to it I got a fresh dose of irrational happiness. I think that even scared my wet nurse a little.

The euphoria washed over me, and I don't remember what came next very well. We got out of the woods, and beyond them a group of people was already waiting for us: a teeny-tiny old man with a broom and a couple of others in white. Unhinged as I was, I somehow remembered perfectly how they looked at my wet nurse—like she was a dangerous animal. All of them except the gray-haired old man with the broom.

My wet nurse handed my happy and definitely unhinged self over with obvious reluctance. Trembling a little, she kissed my forehead one last time and said something I couldn't forget even if I wanted to. She said it to no one, really, without hope, knowing full well that a baby wouldn't remember it—wouldn't even understand it:

"Live, Young Cult Leader, Ahn Ha-yan."

That was the last thing I heard before I passed out for good.

My life, dear wet nurse, was shaping up to be seriously weird…

 

[Lemor]

I started doubting my wet nurse's judgment the moment I first came to after a long sleep. And how could I not? I woke up on the floor, which was bad enough, surrounded by elderly people in white robes and strange, slightly elongated hats. Besides that, we were in some small temple, which didn't exactly lift my spirits. I could only hope the supposed good guys (white robes, come on!) wouldn't toss me on an altar in the name of whoever.

As it turned out, I was right to worry: nothing good was waiting for me.

The old baboons argued for a long time. Every so often they examined me, and sometimes they sent their energy inside me, trying to figure out what the hell was going on in there. Strangely enough, they found the "source of the problem" pretty fast. The venerable old masters didn't hold back. Some of them started cursing. One literally jumped away from me, like I was patient zero of some deadly plague. Somebody screeched something about a "creature" or a "demon." I sort of worked out the word, but only sort of—I would've needed to hear it, and especially the feeling behind it, a couple more times. In any case, the screeching wasn't what you'd call positive.

One old woman flat-out suggested they just kill me. The scariest part was that the "good guys" all took the idea very seriously. They were most likely already working on an excuse for their consciences. Then someone standing off to the side of this "council of sages" stepped in: none other than the very same teeny-tiny old man with the broom.

"We made a promise."

He was probably the only one who looked at me with pity instead of like I was one giant source of problems.

My brain still wasn't working very well, so I don't remember much of the arguing. One thing I know for sure: once again, my life was hanging by a thread. If not for the little old man's voice, only the baboons know what would have happened to me. In the end, they reached some sort of compromise and…

Somehow started suppressing my black heart!

I watched in horror as they ganged up and poured their power into me together, straight into my chest, crushing the heart, which had gone berserk at the sheer nerve of it. In my eyes, their smug mugs instantly sprouted red skin and horns. Needless to say, I didn't last long outside my body under that sort of abuse. I got slammed back in, and there I screamed my lungs out for real, while mentally cursing in every language I knew and wondering what on earth had possessed my wet nurse to hand me over to these sadists.

Once my supernatural energy generator had been smothered by their foreign energy—blue, as I perceived it—they finally calmed down. It took them at least a couple hours. At least now most of the baboons no longer wanted to kill me… immediately. I took the whole ordeal about as badly as humanly possible. It felt like something important had been ripped out of me. Someone else's power was running the show in my chest, wrapped like a cocoon around the energy source that had become my own.

And even that wasn't the end of it. The old bastards started arguing about something again, but I couldn't hear a word anymore. I felt sick, my head was spinning, and my body felt like it had lost a couple pints of blood. I was blacking out, and that is CERTAINLY not something that should happen to a baby! I swore on my damn collection of matchstick towers that if I ever got the chance, I'd… Eh.

To hell with them.

***

​

A bright moon lit up the entire sky, so huge it crowded out everything else. I kept thinking that no moon could be that big or that bright, but nobody listened—probably not even me. The sky itself had turned a dark red, shot through with strange flecks of blue that looked a bit like clouds. The blood underfoot had gone black and even thicker. All these changes were more than enough for me already, but they didn't stop at the scenery. They got to me, too.

For some reason, my clothes had changed. Before, I'd been wearing perfectly normal twenty-first-century clothes. Now I was showing off some black knockoff of a knockoff hanfu. Not that I minded. I actually liked the style of these vaguely Chinese locals with their even weirder names. It breathed, and it suited the atmosphere, putting me in a melancholy sort of mood, like I belonged to something new and unexplored. My appearance was changing, too. My fingers were stretching, turning… um, thin and long. My hair was changing color. It had been light before and was now getting darker, but in an odd way. Some strands went the other way and "bleached," so my head, already battered by everything, was now partly gray. Anyone looking would think my clumsy little hands had tried to dye it themselves. And my eyes, gray before, looked like someone had hit them with a can of spray paint: red, almost burgundy. That put me on edge, frankly. As far as I could tell, I was somehow taking on the adult look of my current little body, with a bit of "customization" courtesy of my subconscious acting up.

As you can probably guess, my mug was changing too, practically in real time. Barely noticeable, but relentless and merciless on my psyche. I never thought of myself as a delicate flower, but when the scenery inside you starts rearranging itself at random—scenery that would pass for some bloody purgatory—and you start rearranging right along with it…

Damn. That's starting to sound like a diagnosis, isn't it?

"You know," I complained, lost in thought, "so far I'm getting the impression that I'm a punching bag with a grenade inside. It feels like everyone here wants to screw me over, except for a couple of people who are going to die anyway. And I'm not even a year old!" My voice went up a little, and I grabbed my hair. I really needed to vent to someone. I didn't want to spend all my time outside my body, after all; I liked actually "feeling" things, thank you very much. "I've only ever seen this in romance novels for women. There's some 'dark prince' everyone bullies and hates, then he gets revenge on all of them, becomes the scariest guy around, and dies tragically at the end. Or," I stumbled a little and scratched my head, "like a total loser. The main problem is, I'm not planning to croak, but I'm certainly not against stomping on a few faces. I just hope reality doesn't smite me for it, because the trend is already worrying. What do you think I should do?"

"Ghaaa…" the guy offered, fairly profoundly by his standards.

I'll take that as a yes.

The armored warrior had stopped trying to attack me, and so had the other residents of this strange place. When I'd called the locals my old buddies, the only lie was the "old" part. All it took was a bath in blood (and I had a pretty good guess whose) and a little screaming together, and look how much we had in common. Their bodies were still in the blood, but they weren't making those agonized sounds anymore, which was probably more of a good sign than a bad one.

Sadly, it hadn't made them any smarter. I'd just tried to share my pressing problems with one of the tenants of this bloody purgatory and got zilch for my trouble. Perhaps it was because I was speaking a language the warrior didn't know, but expressing myself in the natives' language was still a bit of a stretch for me.

Fortunately, my little bout of soul-searching didn't last long. I already knew the way, so I strolled over to the heart. This time I got there much faster than on my last walk. No idea how that works. I'm just glad it does.

"Gorgeous." The venom dripping from my mouth could have killed that midboss. "Just gorgeous!"

The black heart was locked inside some sort of blue sphere. It wasn't trying to hurt me, but the way it just sat there was plenty. I could still feel my potential ticket to a better life (or a worse one), but I had no access to it, and that drove me up the wall and stirred up a quiet fury in me. Besides that, just having that blue thing there made me uncomfortable deep down. It certainly didn't belong. I had to get rid of it. My life depended on it.

Even knowing the evil dust hadn't given me this present out of the goodness of his heart didn't stop me. The black heart had long since become a part of me. Taking it away was like cutting off my hand. Sure, I'd helped make that happen myself, but what difference did it make now?

I clicked my tongue, settled down beside the sphere, and started thinking about what to do. It had no outside power source, and my body treated it as foreign, so the rejection should only get stronger. There had to be options. The main problem was that I wasn't even a year old. What could I do without being able to tap into my own power directly? I should probably learn the language and how to wipe my own butt first, and here I was, already making plans. Yep. Genius!

Which meant all I could do was wait patiently. They weren't going to kill me, apparently—something about a "promise"—and I seriously doubted they'd dump me in some little village, what with the heart and all. In their shoes, the obvious move was to keep the "dangerous object" close and steer it in the right direction.

Getting a little ahead of myself here: they did give me that chance, though not right away. And along with that "chance," I finally figured out the main feature of my power, the one that had eluded me for so long. Let's just say it's fairly sinister, and it changed how I see a few things.

But first things first.

Let's start with this: I turned eight…

 

[readsalot]

And along with that "chance," I finally figured out the main feature of my power, the one that had eluded me for so long. Let's just say it's fairly sinister, and it changed how I see a few things.

But first things first.

Let's start with this: I turned eight…

Click to shrink...

Nice, a time skip, also can't wait till the MC beats up those oldies for locking up his power.

 

[Lemor]

In the Murim—which is what this local society of shady superhumans called itself, for some reason convinced it was "hidden" from ordinary people—everything rested mostly on sects. There were also small schools, mercenary outfits of third-rate and the occasional second-rate martial artists, and plenty of other little gangs of shady uncles and aunties in every line of work. But the backbone of the Murim was the sects. They (mostly—I'm not generalizing) passed down the teachings. Sects were where "techniques" were born, lived, and bloomed—and techniques were what let people here go beyond human limits at all.

Someone who hasn't been inhaling the local fumes long enough would probably assume the main conflict was between the sects, since they ran everything, and they'd be right. Partly. Martial artists (or goddamn-battle-mages, depending on my mood) fundamentally came in two kinds: "righteous" and "demonic." At first glance, there wasn't much difference between them, especially early on. Dig deeper, though, and the details piled up until you could believe people were picking a specific evolutionary path and literally turning into two different races that couldn't stand anyone who'd chosen the other path.

That was how the sects formed: the "righteous" huddled in one corner, the "demonic" in another. Setting aside the constant petty squabbling within each crowd, the main conflict ran between the "light" and the "dark." Whole alliances formed around it.

Actually, the system was a little more complicated. Mostly on the demonic side. The "light faction" was dominated by sects, and everything was, by and large, open and straightforward (yeah, minus a terrifying number of "catches," ha). The "dark faction" was far more chaotic. Besides the straight-up demonic sects, there were hidden schools that everyone sort of knew about and that kind of existed, except nobody had ever seen one, so it was all campfire stories. There were even shadier cults that supposedly worshipped someone or other, though in practice they worshipped whoever happened to be the current head. The list of exceptions went on and on. Because of all that chaos (skipping a couple of not-so-nice places), the righteous masters were the ones who dominated the regions, and ordinary folks liked them better, which made fitting in a whole lot easier.

With all that, you can probably guess why everyone took an instant dislike to me, right?

To the sect elders, I was—and still am—the living embodiment of the demon from the legends: let it grow up, and it'll destroy the world. Babies here, it turned out, didn't have a hint of supernatural energy. You had to cultivate it yourself, even if you were the son of some mighty big shot (um, up to a certain stage, I'd guess). The only perks you got were powerful backing and a body built for cultivation from the beginning. Which isn't nothing, I suppose.

Martial artists here were sorted into clear ranks: third-rate, second-rate, first-rate (also called "true" masters). There were scarier guys out there, too, but it was still a little early for me to know about them.

My situation had been unique from the beginning, as a nasty old sect elder hammered into me nearly every day. He and his "friends" were the ones who'd put that blue crap in my chest. After a lot of arguing, they made me the disciple of an actual elder, which was supposedly prestigious. In practice, it didn't get me much—except for one fascinating detail. While kids my age were "third generation," I could boast of being second. By sect rules, even kids way bigger than me had to address me respectfully, so long as they were third generation. Of course, the local toddlers tried to knock my "authority" down a peg. However… Well, ahem, let's put it this way.

I can already hit pretty hard these days.

The particular gathering of superhumans my wet nurse had sent me to was called the Cloud Sword Sect. These days it didn't stand out much, though it was considered fairly prestigious—mainly thanks to the Cloud Sword technique and the founder of the Cloud Sword art itself. And that, basically, was it.

Anyway, back to what the fossil was saying…

"You are the most horrible thing I have ever seen in my life," Dust Number Two shared for the thousandth time, looking down at me. As in, like I was dirt on his boot. Handing me to a man who hated me beyond all reason was a stroke of genius, really. The only better idea would have been handing me to the old biddy who'd suggested just killing me. "The most vile and terrifying creature ever born of the Underworld, Ahn Ha-yan." Fun fact: nobody bothered giving me another name. Either they didn't care or figured it wasn't worth it. "The forefather of our sect would curse us for dozens of generations if he knew to whom we are passing the secrets of the Cloud Sword."

Pretty sure he'd be a lot more freaked out if he heard even half the crap you say, you old asshole.

…and before you ask, no, I don't know his name. Never bothered to remember it. All he had were nicknames, same as every other elder except one. Not that anyone noticed. I barely talked to other elders (meaning, not at all), and my teacher cared more about putting me down in his monologues than about whether I knew his name. I just called him "master" or "teacher," and everybody was happy.

Lost in these thoughts, I knelt before the seated elder-slash-Dust-Number-Two and listened to his practically daily monologue. I was only eight, and I already knew so much about myself. The guy would have been right at home in an internet comment section. To be fair, while I was still wetting myself, nobody bothered me much. But the moment he started teaching me to read and write, I got whacked with a switch for the tiniest mistakes and sat through hours-long lectures on who I was and what sort of filth I was made of. How can anyone treat a kid like that?! Good thing I could cheat the system: slip into the out-of-body state and stop feeling the pain. And if I couldn't… What then?

Seriously, how would a normal kid turn out if he got treated like this? I can keep smiling shamelessly and flip the old man off behind his back afterward. But what if some ordinary little kid were in my place?

Madness.

The elder talked a lot and didn't skimp on the flourishes. I could feel him pouring his soul into every word. The hatred coming my way made the heart in my chest beat a bit faster, giving me a strange jolt of energy and an urge to punch the old man, but the feeling faded fast, like it had hit a wall inside me. I wanted to sigh. I'll most likely never stop wondering: what sort of idiot torments a potential "most horrible thing" for no reason? Why, you senile whatever-you-are? I haven't done anything yet! Why are you giving me motivation, why?!

…seriously, sometimes I feel like the tragic victim in some romance novel for women.

Now, what's this latest fossil droning on about?

"…but you have the chance to remain at least the semblance of a human being that you are now. That is your duty," Dust Number Two concluded his monologue. Admittedly, his behavior had long since earned him the title of Dust Number One. "Are you doing what I taught you?"

"Yes," I lied shamelessly, beaming like a proud kid showing off for his parents. It drove the elder up the wall. Controlling my facial expressions from outside my body was a piece of cake. It just took practice.

The elder stared into my honest eyes (they weren't) for a while, like he suspected something. I saw his eyebrow twitch. I could feel myself getting more comfortable from his irritation and helpless rage—the negativity was feeding me, little by little. Not like when the midboss died partly because of me, but still nice.

The heart, even locked in its sphere of energy, was practically dancing.

"Give me your hand."

I held it out and wasn't surprised when he grabbed it roughly and pushed his energy in to check my condition. That was how all medicine worked here: you take your energy, run it through another person, find the problem, and fix it. It took skill, of course. There were even entire sects devoted to this weird kind of healing.

I'd naively assumed they'd block my access to the black heart once and then forget about it. Sadly, it was way more complicated. At first they checked the sphere regularly, topping it up with energy so that, God forbid, nothing "leaked." Then, when I turned five and started training to toughen up my little body, they handed me the Cloud Sword qi-gathering breathing technique in advance. Every martial artist (skipping the details, I'm more of an exception that proves the rule) started with body tempering and breathing techniques. Nobody has an energy source at the beginning. Future second-rate masters build one once their bodies are strong enough and, under the influence of qi, purified. So, as you can see, you can absolutely gather energy of a particular spectrum without a source.

Question is, why did they let me learn to absorb it in the first place, right?

The old men (my dear sweet teacher in particular) decided to get clever, or so they thought, and brainwash me about "hidden evil." Apparently, my destiny was to suppress the "evil" inside me myself, and that was the only way for me to be "purified." Posthumously, of course. I'm still a total bastard either way.

I would've happily ignored those instructions and used that energy to try to free my little heart instead. Which, to be fair, I did now and then, but mostly as an experiment, since the elder regularly checked whether I was carrying out their baboonish will. What I'd learned in the sect wasn't enough to quit the whole self-abuse routine, but I did manage to partly fake what the elder felt when his energy ran through my body. As far as he could tell, the blue sphere around the black heart was as solid as ever. In reality, it was just an outer layer of energy I could disperse at any second. It had no fixed form—just a side effect of decent energy control and knowing what the hell I was doing.

Without the supernatural perception I got from leaving my body, there's no way in hell I could've pulled that off. Not that it did much good, but it was better than nothing.

The elder's checkups normally happened towards evening. The rest of the day I trained with the third-generation kids. Fortunately, only the elders knew about my "little" quirk. Um, in that department I dominated the little ones in every possible way.

Take running. An essential part of life for any Cloud Sword disciple. The runs were long, often down the mountain and back up, which gave the kids a lifelong phobia of stairs. In the detached state, I barely felt tired. I could monitor my little carcass's fatigue in real time and top myself up with external energy. Not to mention I'd lucked into a body with a pretty decent constitution. So I…

Was a dirty, rotten cheater, and I shamelessly took advantage of it.

Jogging past exhausted, desperate-faced kids with the calm mug of a man out for a stroll was one of my all-time favorite things in the sect. Same went for sparring. They gave us wooden swords, taught us stances, made us drill strikes, and now and then put us in one-on-one duels for hands-on experience.

And here, too, I was a terrifying opponent. Top dog of the entire mountain, toddler division!

"My master taught me a move that not every teacher can do!" bragged the boy standing across from me. "Ahn Ha-yan, you cannot—"

"What did you just call me?" I narrowed my eyes, sensing someone was questioning my authority as a second-generation honorary uncle. "I'm practically your master's brother, squirt. Show some respect."

My opponent got instantly and explosively butthurt, which gave me a nice little energy boost. The other kids watching out of the corner of their eyes started giggling, until they caught my warning glare, which promised them heavenly (or, if you believe the elders, infernal) punishment. The black-haired boy in front of me (nearly everyone here has black hair, for the record—they're the wrong kind of Chinese, after all, and even my own hair is partly black) really lost it:

"I am nine! I am a year older than you! You are not equal to my master! Take thiiiis!"

Squealing like a stuck pig, the future superhuman killer charged with his wooden sword, twirling it dramatically. Apparently he was trying to pull off some little trick he mistook for a "move." I just stuck out my foot at the right moment, steering my body like a puppet from the outside, and the future killer tripped and went down. He tried to jump right back up, but got an educational kick in the butt, boosted ever so slightly with external qi. That was enough to send him tumbling head over heels, bawling, with no desire to continue the "battle."

I nodded, satisfied, seeing how the kids were looking at me. Authority preserved. As though I'd let some toddlers push me around.

Like hell I'm going to be a victim of circumstance!

…naturally, afterward I had to sit through a lecture from our sword instructor.

"You do not kick a man when he is down," said the man, trying to set me on the "righteous path." Well, more of a guy still working his way up to that "title" of a man. "And you must use your sword, little demon. Your sword, not your feet."

I don't know if fate has a sense of humor, or if there's even such a thing as fate, but thanks to my behavior, people in the sect sometimes call me a little demon or some other unholy thing. Mostly as a joke, but it doesn't exactly make the elders love me any more, ha-ha-ha!

…actually, sometimes I got the feeling that one night I might just not wake up. The elder had a very expressive way of glancing from me to his sword and back…

"Why limit yourself, sunbae?" I asked, quite sincerely, twirling the wooden sword in my hands. "In a fight, anything goes."

"Sunbae" is what you call a senior colleague or upperclassman. So, technically, I'd just pointed out that whatever our relationship was, it wasn't teacher and student, even if I was showing him a certain formal respect. I'd spent a long time wondering what language I was even speaking and concluded it was some mishmash of ancient Chinese and modern Korean. I did have a passing familiarity with Asian languages. Not that I'd ever studied them, but a few basic words and phrases had slipped through from TV and the internet—enough to draw the parallel.

How a parallel reality like this came to exist, I don't want to know. Otherwise I'll end up believing in the Matrix.

The sword instructor frowned at my conclusion. Judging by the small jolt of inner satisfaction I got, he didn't love my formality, but denying reality in this case would have been dumb.

"That is how demonic masters think, hoobae," he said with a smile, seeing me raise an expressive eyebrow. Technically, he'd just confirmed his status as my "senior colleague." He even patted me on the head, the nerve of this guy, ha! "You must keep yourself under control, or you will fall into the Underworld. I want to believe, little demon, that this will not happen."

Oh, really?

Outside my body, I snorted and scratched my ghostly head, which had started taking shape. I was turning into a ghost, an honest-to-god ghost. Just one with a living body, heh-heh.

If this "Underworld" gives me enough power, then why not? I don't want to get split into atoms again. I don't want a bunch of losers trying to push me around. And I don't want, at the end of the day, to lose my future collection of matchstick towers. Only the creator of the universe knows how much effort went into my very first little tower, built from online tutorials. I want outside forces to stop being able to affect me. I want to be the one affecting them, with complete freedom to do as I please. In this world, there are people who can literally run across the sky.

I want to be one of those people. At the very least. I don't know if it's the black heart, whose power sometimes leaks through the blue sphere somehow, or if my way of thinking has started changing from everything piling up in my life, but I've gotten a lot more selfish.

If not for one particular short old man with a broom, who unhurriedly swept the sect every day, I really might have turned bitter. Leaving my body let me ignore my emotions, sure, but it was nowhere near a cure-all.

I remembered the kind old man well and had been watching him for a long time. As far as I could tell, the old man was something in between a respected elder and…

A plain old sect janitor. I didn't know his story or how he'd ended up like this, but the old man was a sect elder with a say in things and, at the same time, he wasn't. The other elders were pretty hostile towards him, though they mostly left him alone and even listened to what he had to say. The old man baffled the disciples, too. They had no clue how to address him: respectfully, or like a regular janitor? Mostly they chose to ignore him, which suited the old man just fine.

"You should not help me, Ahn Ha-yan," the kind grandpa said with an open smile. His name was Ko Hyun-soo. He was probably the only person so far whose name I'd actually wanted to remember. "Your teacher might take offense. I do not wish to cause you more trouble."

He wielded the broom in a perfectly ordinary way, no fancy flourishes, but I could feel it in my gut—well, a little lower—that something was off here. In all my time watching him, I'd found exactly one oddity, and it was almost scary: no matter how hard the wind blew, his piles of trash never scattered. Never, ever. I could walk up and do whatever I wanted with a pile of fallen leaves, but on their own, they didn't give a damn about their surroundings. I was probably the only one who'd noticed, not counting the same old elders. Not to mention how ridiculously smooth and light his movements were, like a little cloud, heh.

"So what, I just watch?" I asked, a bit disappointed.

"Rest, little demon. Gather your strength," the old man said, smiling into his beard, and went back to work.

The sect was pretty big, and the old man's sweeping took the whole day. He never looked tired, though. Given how unhurried he was, I'm not sure that counts as another oddity, but still.

That was how my days went. I quietly looked for ways to get rid of the blue crap inside me fast, since it was choking not only my black heart but the energy circulation in my entire body. I trained my body like a true cheater, without breaking much of a sweat. I entertained myself with other people's irritation, nursing my chained-up black heart back to health, bit by bit. I spent whole days taking apart the Cloud Sword breathing technique, trying to work out what determined the spectrum of initially neutral energy and how I could use that to my advantage. I made life miserable for the elders, and particularly for my "teacher." And I often spent my evenings in the company of the old man, who was invariably wielding his broom.

Everything changed abruptly when my beloved teacher was poisoned. That was also how I finally got free of my shackles—and how I fully grasped what the original dust had gifted me.

***

​

Poisons were an interesting field in the Murim. They weren't all that dangerous to superhumans, since even a third-rate martial artist could flush one out with qi like it was nothing. But, as everybody knows, for every smart-ass there's a smarter ass. Countless poisons could easily kill even a true master—which the elder, by the way, was not. He most likely had been in his youth, but now that he'd gotten old, he'd lost most of his strength, and somebody had shamelessly taken advantage of that.

I was training with the other kids at the time. A terrified third-generation disciple came running up, which instantly put our sword instructor on alert. Mumbling and stammering, the boy told us he'd been sent to deliver some piece of paper to the elder's house, and in the courtyard he'd found an unconscious body, drooling. Training was over for the day. The sect descended into total chaos: every adult and almost-adult martial artist went hunting for the poisoner and, as it turned out, found no one.

They tried to help the elder right away, but it was no use. As the master's direct disciple, I was in his quarters while they worked on him. Surprisingly, there was nothing they could do. The poison was strong. It was destroying the very structure of his energy, killing him slowly and with excruciating pain. The Cloud Sword Sect was considered fairly prestigious (mostly because of its history), but it didn't have the expertise to save the elder, or even to identify the poison properly. Calling in a neighboring sect was pointless: the closest one was in another region. Though the real problem most likely wasn't the distance, which strong masters could cover fairly easily. It was the price.

As cynical as it sounds, an old elder who wasn't good for much anymore wasn't worth the fortune it would have cost to save his life. Not just for the services, either, but for a potential antidote. He didn't have much time left as it was. And this was probably the first time anyone had so brazenly tried to take out a high-ranking member of the Cloud Sword. Nobody was ready for it. Nobody could have been.

And it wasn't hard to guess who got stuck looking after the elder in his final days. Nobody was going to hire him a nurse or anything like that. He had a disciple, didn't he! Besides, the poison wasn't contagious. It's not like I was going to drink his blood, right?

The poison stood out not just for the insane pain it caused as it slowly killed its victim, but also, as I got to feel firsthand, for the negative emotions it stirred up in that victim. The elder couldn't stand me to begin with, and with that strange poison working on him…

"Spawn of the Underworld, I hate you, hate you, hate you…"

Just standing next to Dust Number Two, I could feel his emotions on my skin. Insane rage, amplified by disgust and some sort of hidden fear. The half-dead skeleton lay in his bed and thrashed in convulsions, refusing the water I'd brought him. Scary as it sounds, all those negative emotions aimed at me filled me with pure delight. Fear, pain, disgust, contempt, hatred…

It took the elder eight days to die. Nobody checked on my condition. Everyone appeared to have forgotten I existed, busy with all the problems the poisoning had stirred up. With every day, the heart in my chest beat faster and faster, as though it really were feeding on negative emotions. At some point, I clearly felt the energy sphere starting to crack. And sensing that I might not get another chance anytime soon, I helped it along, doing more and more damage to the sphere with external qi. Any moment now, I thought, my little scheme could be exposed, but there was no stopping anymore.

I guess any ordinary kid who'd been tormented practically since birth wouldn't have been able to stop either, in my place—though for different reasons.

On his last day, the elder's emotions ran especially strong:

"Why must it be you here… Why did I have no other disciples, why…"

The elder's cloudy black eyes were fixed on my red ones. I clicked my tongue without meaning to. Personally, I didn't get any inner satisfaction from this jerk's agonizing death. Only the purely physical kind, caused by, ahem, external factors. He'd gotten what was coming to him, so I didn't see any point in mocking him.

I had the feeling that all it would take was one last push to free the black heart, and I could easily give it one: say something hurtful to the old man, needle him somehow, or even insult him outright. But I wasn't going to, no matter how hard something inside me begged. I'm not a total monster, seriously.

Out of nowhere, a perfect calm washed over me, along with love for the entire world. I even felt like I'd seen the light. Ye-e-es, just a couple more days, and I'll be able to free the heart myself by finishing off the sphere with external energy. Better to try to give the old man some relief. Good for my conscience, and for my karma…

Filled with these benevolent thoughts, I squeezed the hand of the elder, who clearly hadn't seen that coming. Looking into his wide-open eyes, I smiled sincerely, like an angel descended from heaven:

"I forgive you!"

Contrary to my predictions, the old man shrieked in horror and felt so many negative emotions all at once that he not only died, but also helped my black heart break free for good. The blue sphere cracked and seemed to shatter. A wild flood of refreshing energy rushed through my body all at once, merging with the scraps of Cloud Sword technique energy and the fragments of the crumbling sphere.

But against all logic and common sense, I didn't feel even close to happy.

It was like he'd spat in my face.

"You have got to be kidding me," I muttered in disbelief, letting go of the dead man's hand. His face had frozen in bone-chilling horror. Sulking, I closed his jaw and his eyes, so nobody would think he'd died of fright and not from the poison. "Well, go to hell, then."

All in all, the freeing of my black heart turned out to be less of a happy occasion than I'd expected. But at least I was now completely sure what ability the black heart had given me. I'd probably figured it out a long time ago—after all, plenty of people don't like me—but the sphere had kept it muffled, so I couldn't fully make sense of what I was feeling.

Yeah…

It's definitely hard being a normal person when you literally absorb the negative emotions aimed at you. But setting the heart aside, there's another question, every bit as pressing:

Who poisoned the elder, and why?

 

[readsalot]

Who poisoned the elder, and why?

Click to shrink...

Very important question.

"I forgive you!"

Contrary to my predictions, the old man shrieked in horror and felt so many negative emotions all at once that he not only died, but also helped my black heart break free for good. The blue sphere cracked and seemed to shatter. A wild flood of refreshing energy rushed through my body all at once, merging with the scraps of Cloud Sword technique energy and the fragments of the crumbling sphere.

But against all logic and common sense, I didn't feel even close to happy.

It was like he'd spat in my face.

"You have got to be kidding me," I muttered in disbelief, letting go of the dead man's hand. His face had frozen in bone-chilling horror. Sulking, I closed his jaw and his eyes, so nobody would think he'd died of fright and not from the poison. "Well, go to hell, then."

Click to shrink...

Hahahaha
What a reaction, the MC was just trying to be nice, is this a hint to his future, he tries to be nice but everyone take it the wrong way?

 

[Lemor]

The elder's death brought problems from outside and plenty from within. Strangely enough, one of those problems was little Ahn Ha-yan, forgotten by fate. Me, that is. After all, they would've to assign me a new master—no way around it. Setting aside that they needed someone to keep an eye on my condition, someone who could quickly kill me if it came to that and steer my growth in the "right" direction, there was also the interesting matter of my standing in the sect.

Sure, in theory the elders could dump me on, say, some sword instructor qualified enough to train me properly, and let him in on the secret of my "nature" (which might even end well!). But sect rules forbade it: members of the same generation couldn't take each other as disciples, never mind that I was eight and my so-called "brother" was thirty.

Only someone from a generation above mine could be my master in the sect. That didn't apply to formal mentorship, of course—they could easily find me a sort-of-personal-teacher-but-not-really-a-personal-teacher from "my" generation (that's how everyone gets taught, mostly). But this was about a real master, so there wouldn't be even more embarrassment over an eight-year-old who outranked older, stronger kids without having an actual mentor. So why not hand me over to some keeper of sect knowledge from the first generation?

…a living one, I mean, obviously.

For the same reason they'd made me an elder's disciple in the first place: like I said, to control me, keep an eye on my condition, and quickly kill me if it came to that. You don't trust a bomb like me to just anybody. There were still some first-generation people left in the sect who "weren't" elders, but they were pretty useless. I doubted any of them could even properly check for that damn sphere with their qi, let alone put up a real fight. And if they did find anything "suspicious," they'd act decisively, regardless of their promise.

And that's not even counting how a future mentor might feel about a pint-sized "demonic master." The poor guy's heart might not take it. I'd partly figured out why they hated me so much. On top of the natural dislike and the brainwashing, around seventy years ago yet another faction war had broken out and taken, honestly, way too many lives. The kids of that era saw things they shouldn't have. And now those same kids—what do you know—were running the sect. If anything, the elders were the restrained ones. Their position demanded it.

They're still old bastards, though.

All in all, history, rules, and traditions piled on extra hassle and kept the question from being simple. And I haven't even brought up my talent yet—there was no denying I had it. The fame of the little demon (I hope they won't ship me off to that "Underworld" just to be safe over such dubious fame) was in full bloom! A small thing, but annoying.

…for the elders, heh-heh.

The sect had originally had seven elders: six men and one woman. Since my venerable master (may he be reborn as a snail) had recently set off on his next journey, there were six left. They'd find a replacement, but not quickly. First they would've to decide: take some old man from the first generation (like, again, the one running our mini-library), or bring in young blood from the second. Or perhaps it was time to start thinking about a new era and retiring altogether.

Of course, given how long the sect had existed (seven eras, according to my now-deceased master), there were way more than three or five actual generations. There are even sects that count them literally, giving each new kid their own, ahem-ahem, serial number. Our system was a bit different, though: eras came first. One era could have three to five generations of disciples. When the era changed, the count effectively reset to zero and everything started over from the first generation, though disciples kept their "titles," of course. Even if the era ended and a new one began, I'd still belong to the second generation—you'd just have to specify the era. In my case, the seventh. So I was a second-generation disciple of the seventh era. There was no fixed length for an era (except, I think, that one era can't have more than five generations, but don't quote me). It depended on a lot of factors and was decided directly by the higher-ups.

But whatever, those are just details.

So: picking a master. The elders' decision came as a real surprise to me. It was hard getting used to kneeling in front of them, waiting to learn my fate—and the old janitor wasn't there, and things always felt calmer with him around. My previous master had explained, quickly and peacefully, why I had to show the utmost respect. And even if it didn't hurt, my body still took a beating pretty often, and I felt sorry for it.

I'm scared to picture the face of my master, now off on his next journey, if he found out his disciple flat-out didn't know his name. He'd definitely turn into a vengeful spirit and try to drag me along with him.

I'd thought about running off somewhere, but for now, the sect was the best option in every sense. Sects generally only take in babies. There are exceptions, but they're extremely rare, so I would've nowhere else to go to grow stronger, and I needed that. On my own, at my tender age, I might survive, but proper training would be out of the question. Naturally, if they found out there was no trace of the restraining sphere left in me, all I could do was hope for a miracle. Then again, that would be hard to spot. It would take a deep examination, and why bother, when you can just take a quick peek, confirm that the right spectrum is there at the right density in the right place, and call it a day?

"Whether we admit it or not, you are making progress, 'little demon,'" the female elder said, wincing slightly as she looked down at me.

I used to think she was ancient and barely alive, but now I could see that wasn't true. Setting aside the heavy pressure of her qi, the old woman's posture was straight, and her gaze was sharp (I'd love to say "debatable"), full of life and some sort of inner cruelty. What "inner cruelty," God rest my matchstick towers? Well, how else am I supposed to describe something I sort of see, but that's also sort of ethereal and unreal? Seriously, I can feel it with my energy brains!

I'd thought a lot about how my brain managed to handle an adult's consciousness at all. A baby's skull just can't do that, physically. I'm leaning more and more towards the idea that I don't think with my brain, but some other way. If my physical brain is used at all, it's at a basic level, as a backup organ. That partly explains how in the out-of-body state I can steer my body like a puppet, while inside it I move like a normal person. Maybe. I'm not sure. Same goes for memory. The harder I dig into my memories, trying to reflect, the more I realize I've forgotten not just my name, but where I lived. I barely remember who my friends were, and the list is longer than you'd think. All that's left are blurry images. But the more time passes, the harder my mind clings to the image of those little matchstick towers. Fragmented memories are the key to loving peculiar hobbies, definitely.

"Thank you, honored elder." I cupped my fist in my palm and bowed my head even lower.

I'd probably come close to the highest possible show of respect. All that was missing was pressing my forehead to the floor, but she could do without it. I'm not a slave. Still, being cheeky in this situation was very, very dangerous.

…too cheeky, anyway.

The old woman didn't react to how I'd addressed her, her whole manner saying that this was exactly how it should be. She was most likely still wondering how my master had trained me so well, ye-e-es.

Yeah, right…

"Sadly," she went on, "since Elder Han Man-joon—" Right! That was his name! Whatever. "—has left us, we have no choice but to assign you a new master."

"Will one of you be my new master?" I asked, a purely formal question, knowing I was still a kid who'd easily be forgiven for breaking really minor conventions, triple "little demon" or not.

Though I got a light smack on the back of the head from the evil old woman almost instantly. Mostly a formality.

I rubbed my head, sulking.

Sure, sure…

"We have no choice," another elder put in, wincing. Stern, tall, and muscular, he gave the impression of a recently retired nightclub bouncer. With piles of wrinkles and gray hair, naturally. "This is your blessing and your curse, little demon."

They love me so much. Well, so long as they don't kill me.

We were in an empty training ground. Apparently, they'd decided to settle the matter of my master on the fly, between other business. Luckily or sadly, I didn't know much about what the elders normally did (how would I, am I the local accountant or something?), but I was sure the sect's entire economy ran through them. What "economy"? Well, a sect needs to live on something. First, there were donations from the parents of the many kids who'd been given to the sect practically as babies; not everyone here was an orphan, but they didn't take older kids. Then there was support from the Righteous Alliance (yes, that very alliance of fighters against "absolute evil") and some sort of tax on ordinary people. On top of that came all sorts of jobs—ones only superhumans could do, or ones others could do too, but superhumans did faster. Plus, reputation: better to hire a trusted "firm" than go to some mercenaries, right? Ordinary mercenaries might be cheaper, but the odds of somebody getting brutally screwed over were a lot higher.

And of course, the elders handled all of it. Not just keeping the sect alive, either—there was the social side, too, like relations with other sects. Seriously, the elders here weren't so much the strike force as managers. Managers who could also kick your butt, granted.

…I just wonder if the old janitor does any of that. Perhaps he just decided to cheat the system? I barely held back a smile, reflexively slipping out of my body for a moment to suppress the emotion.

Nah, there was probably some murky story behind it. The old man seemed too honest for that. Then again, who knows.

While I was pondering the existential fate of an administrative manager in a gang of superhumans against a vaguely Chinese backdrop, the old men started discussing something again. Not for long this time, though, and without much arguing, which was rare.

"We have thought long about who should be your master, little demon." The elder's gaze grew a little cooler, though it barely seemed possible. By the way, only two days had passed since the death of my magnanimous master. Or was it a whole two days? "And we have concluded that the right decision is to let you choose. You have earned it with your progress in the early stages of the Cloud Sword style. But know this: it will affect your path more than you think."

I made a show of bugging out my eyes, mouth hanging open.

"Really?"

"You doubt my words?" the old biddy flared up instantly.

A pleasant coolness washed over me, along with a jolt of energy. My heart beat a bit faster, and my mood instantly improved.

"Am I allowed to?" I made big, innocent eyes, feeling the black heart in my chest rejoice at the petty little prank, egging me on to more and more dangerous stunts.

One of the elders, a guy with short hair, a rare sight here (at least in the Cloud Sword Sect), made a sound I'm pretty sure was a quack, which got barely noticeable smiles out of the other elders despite themselves. The old biddy kept quiet, but narrowed her eyes… murderously, rewarding me with another jolt of energy. Apparently, she couldn't tell whether I'd done it on purpose or not.

Heh-heh-heh. Of course it was an accident. How could an eight-year-old possibly…

The stronger a person is energy-wise (or, more precisely, the bigger the gap between our strength), the more their negative emotions feed me. Hers felt richer and brighter. They probably carried some imprint of her power. No wonder I got such a high when that midboss died.

"Either way," the old biddy said, narrowing her eyes in a way I didn't like, "the choice is yours."

I nodded, looked the old men over, then stood up without a care in the world and strolled off the training ground, hoping deep down that the sect rules would do their job and nobody would kill me on the spot.

…please…

My little stunt left the elders frozen for a couple seconds, and then I felt someone grab me roughly by the scruff of my neck. I turned my head and met the eyes of the biggest of the elders, brimming with love for the second-generation disciple.

"Where do you think you are going, little demon?"

I slipped out of my body again so my knees wouldn't shake under such a kindly look, and puffed out my cheeks for show.

"You said I could choose!"

The elderly gang of superhumans exchanged glances. The old woman chewed her lips oddly.

"And why are you leaving?" the old bouncer asked peaceably, his grip on my clothes tightening slightly.

I hope they don't finish me off right here.

"You said I could choose," I repeated with a supposedly carefree shrug, then smiled radiantly. "But how can I choose someone who isn't here?"

The old men froze again. It was like they'd been struck by lightning, and my body got another jolt of energy, practically begging me to pull some other nasty trick to get more. I'd better not get hooked.

The retired bouncer silently let go of me, allowing me to go looking for one particular old man in peace. Unexpectedly, the whole pack of local bosses followed me without a word, exchanging the occasional glance. We left the training ground and made a leisurely round of the sect. Disciples kept flashing past us, staring at me wide-eyed.

I lifted my chin proudly for show and started throwing superior looks at the little kids (and the not-so-little ones), getting a light jolt of energy every time—and that energy demanded more and more. If I hadn't been outside my body, I really might have gotten hooked. The elders didn't care about my childishness. I was the little demon, after all. What do you expect? It's like being "the sickly one," only worse.

We found the janitor-elder in a small courtyard full of training dummies. When he spotted our delegation, the old man's face fell a little.

"Has some problem arisen?" he asked, coming over to us.

"For you, yes, Ko Hyun-soo," the battle granny snapped. The other elders did their best impression of living furniture. "The little demon has decided to choose a master to match."

The old man blinked in confusion and lowered his gaze to me.

I grinned from ear to ear, realizing I'd gotten the best possible option.

"Now I can help you sweep the sect, master!"

The old man froze up a little. He scratched his head, leaned on his broom, and looked up at the clouds. He looked like he could use a smoke. He seemed unusually deep in thought, and now and then like he was listening for something. In the end, he just smiled good-naturedly, having made some decision.

"If that is truly what you wish, Ahn Ha-yan, then so be it."

 

[dude123]

Very nice, looks fun. I have been craving a murim novel for a while now, I just found this.

 

[Despacitoleo]

Peak China slop but it turned out to be good and not slop story

 

[Lemor]

The victim of space-time had always been in an odd position. Everyone knew from the very beginning that he was an elder's disciple, but it didn't get him any of the perks every other elder's disciple enjoyed. While other elders' disciples slept in their masters' houses, away from the other kids, Ahn Ha-yan, as befits an orphan the sect had graciously taken in, was lumped in with the rest. The problem was the women who looked after his group. They revered the rules far more than the people who'd written them, and they couldn't bear to watch a second-generation disciple of an actual elder—the still-tiny Ahn Ha-yan—glaring evilly at a boy who kept shoving him. And not even an equal, but a third-generation kid! Unthinkable!

The kid laughed merrily and kept pushing his foot into the victim of space-time's face. The victim's eyebrow was already twitching like crazy.

"This will not do!" The woman watching them clutched her apron.

The other nannies backed her up. They were servants of the sect and genuinely revered its laws and customs. A second-generation disciple, and an elder's disciple at that, could not sleep alongside third-generation children!

So the victim of space-time got singled out early: the women built him a crib with their own hands and put him to sleep separately. It didn't help that Ahn Ha-yan sometimes looked down, very smugly, at the plebs lying on the floor (a warm floor, granted, but still a floor) in a heap of fellow toddlers. At first the kids just didn't get those looks, but by about two, the first rudiments of a brain (questionable) had appeared. The little ones couldn't work out what exactly they didn't like, but they understood one thing: that red-eyed weirdo was shady.

Plus, he didn't play with them, didn't talk to them, barely paid them any attention at all! And actual elders came to see him sometimes! Why him and not them? Were they worse or something? Unforgivable!

At three came the first (relatively meaningful) conflict. A whole mob of tiny scoundrels tried to take the victim of space-time's very own crib, drooling mockingly all over his pillow. They even tore the pillowcase, the cruel bastards! For the victim of space-time—nobody was calling him "little demon" yet—it was a blow to everything he held dear. An ordinary kid might have burst into tears, but not someone with an adult mind. The band of rebel toddlers regretted it fast, then spent another hour and a half listening to a long lecture on why that was wrong, delivered in the style of an extremely evil and cruel grown-up. With words alone, and without really meaning to, Ahn Ha-yan crushed the kids so thoroughly that they cried all the next day.

The other kids, who'd had the misfortune to witness it, could only blink. It was probably the first time in their lives they'd felt real fear.

After that, nobody bothered Ahn Ha-yan for a while. Then, at around four, out for a walk in the yard, he saw some scrawny kid fall victim to childish cruelty for refusing to share a basket of apples he'd gotten his hands on. Lectures weren't going to cut it anymore, so he had to get a bit more creative: the entertainment program gained a whippy stick and somebody's well-tanned behind. And having already familiarized himself with the sect rules, Ahn Ha-yan knew he was within his rights.

…so long as his master didn't do the same to him later…

"Do we understand each other?" Ahn Ha-yan raised the stick menacingly and bit into an apple.

Behind him knelt the victim of the bullying, white as a sheet, clutching the basket of apples.

"Y-YES, HYUNG!" three kids shouted desperately in unison, bowing their heads.

The victim of space-time narrowed his eyes and smacked the stick against the ground. They'd just addressed him as an older kid, but still not the way sect rules required. He'd been stripped of almost every perk of being a first-generation elder's disciple, but he had to hold on to something, or it might come back to bite him later. Kids are way crueler than adults, and in a world and an age like this—doubly so.

"I'm your sasuk! We're not the same generation!"

"Y-YES!"

"And why are you yelling?" Ahn Ha-yan turned his head in surprise. The boy with the apple basket was shaking.

The kid burst into tears and started begging for mercy like a little girl, offering up the whole basket of apples if only he wouldn't get hit.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Needless to say, all this only drew unwanted attention. Little by little, the conflict with the other kids escalated. Other groups started showing up, with older kids, and if word hadn't reached first the nannies and then the elders themselves, who knows where it would have ended. The more conflicts there were, the more people got dragged in, and sometimes even the kids' masters showed up. In the end, Ahn Ha-yan's master gave up and took him to live in his own house, but it didn't help much. For one thing, the victim of space-time still went out for walks now and then and often ran into other kids. For another, there's an age when training starts: five. That's when the toddler wars flared up with new force. The adult-minded cheater had no intention of falling behind a bunch of kids, so he gave every training session his all, every time remembering what his wet nurse had been capable of.

He wanted to be like that! He wanted it so badly!

At first the gap between him and the other kids wasn't that big, because the victim of space-time couldn't exactly be called big himself. He beat them in agility and speed but lost in strength and stamina. That was offset by the Cloud Sword qi, which he used shamelessly, developing much faster than his peers.

Kids couldn't use qi right off the bat. Their bodies and the energy channels inside them weren't ready for it and needed strengthening. More importantly, you needed a reasonably mature, fully formed mind to give the qi tasks yourself; otherwise the energy helped only passively, if at all, which was wildly inefficient. He'd taught himself how to use it, sure, but it was the old dust heap that had let him use supernatural energy literally from birth.

Without realizing it, Ahn Ha-yan was changing a certain story more and more. But he'd only find that out later.

***

​

Truth is, when you live in this world, it's hard to spot anything strange at first. I mean, there's a hell of a lot of strangeness, from people running across the sky to the fact that two languages from my old world somehow got mixed up here, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something much scarier and more fundamental. Something I hadn't noticed, or had been scared to notice, all this time, because I'd been burned before.

…is it just me, or were Koreans into this sort of thing back in my world? Perhaps I'm mixing something up. I'm mixing it up, right? This is nuts.

My sense of what counts as normal got shaken so badly that paranoid thoughts started following me around, and they kept finding more and more proof.

Once I started leisurely sweeping the sect with my new master, I got the chance to watch people without drawing much attention. Sure, an eight-year-old with red eyes—the not-at-all-unknown "little demon"—draws attention by default, but people somehow forget that staring goes both ways.

Apart from training with the other kids, my new master and I spent the rest of the day cleaning. And over a couple weeks of observation (kind of boring, I'll admit), I arrived at a terrifying and highly… ambiguous discovery:

"Master, they're women, aren't they?" I glanced sideways at a group of… guys walking past.

Sure, they were girly, but there were plenty of "girly" guys around here, and I'd gotten used to that long ago. Scary to admit, but you could doll me up and pass me off as the little young miss of some rich family.

…I'd sooner blow up my own black heart. They'll never take me alive, the bastards.

The problem is that guys around eighteen, give or take, normally have more of an Adam's apple. They don't powder their faces in each other's company. They don't wear baggy clothes that just happen to hang a little loose around the chest. And that's before you even get to their training: I'd watched them do stances a couple times. There's a reason separate styles exist for men and women. There's a reason…

Setting aside their ordinary movements, which reeked of "grace" instead of the "power" men normally put into a lunge, in some of their sword moves I picked up, from outside my body… let's say, a different "idea." The same Cloud Sword technique, but with a different resonance.

Qi starts out neutral: just energy spilled literally everywhere, as far as I know. Then again, qi very easily takes on all sorts of forms, picks up all sorts of properties, and grants all sorts of abilities (or worse). Every shaped kind of this originally neutral energy has a certain spectrum, and what shapes that spectrum isn't so much the environment, though that matters too, as…

Your mindset. The images and emotions you pour into your power without meaning to. The main difference between demonic and righteous masters is the way they think; everything else follows from that. Techniques start with an idea, and only then come the movements, the breathing, some particular philosophy, and finally the weapon. How you move, how you breathe, what you feel, do, say, and, goddammit, how you wash. They drill this into us here practically from birth, and frankly, I suspect even the people doing the drilling don't quite get what they're saying.

From the name alone, you could probably tell the sect is going to degenerate within the next few eras. Cloud Sword, sure. The idea gets lost. It's a contradiction, really. The founder's big idea was some cloud "swords" we polish around here on a regular basis? I don't buy it. The sect has a rich history; the founder couldn't have thought that narrowly. Or I'm getting full of myself and missing something. Anything's possible.

Anyway, as experience has shown, where the locals see a purely philosophical subtext you just have to know by heart like the Lord's Prayer, I look at the technical side. God rest my matchstick towers if there's anything that can't be explained.

Abstract or not, it works somehow. Everything can be explained, even something this weird. The only catch is that the explanation sometimes comes out even trippier and… uh, weirder. Yeah. The further a martial artist goes down the path of a technique, the more he polishes it and adapts himself to it. Sometimes people even reshape the technique itself to fit them, who knows. Nobody's stopping you from "comprehending" several techniques at once and learning to restructure your qi, but it's a long, thankless process and, done wrong, a harmful one in a lot of ways. Anyway, I'm getting carried away. My point is, the energy of these "guys" carried something more… more…

I clicked my tongue without meaning to. I had no idea how to describe what I'd seen and felt.

Long story short: something more purely feminine. Hell of a way to put it, but I know what I mean, damn it.

Master Ko Hyun-soo (so far, he was still the only person whose name I'd genuinely made an effort to remember) was unhurriedly sweeping the courtyard with me. When he heard me, he faltered slightly.

"That is not something you should be thinking about, Ahn Ha-yan."

"But… but how?!" I whipped my head towards the old man. "Is that normal? Women aren't banned from training here, so why are they in disguise, master?"

The old man was quiet for a bit, then sighed sadly.

"I have never meddled in it. Most likely some arrangement between their families and our sect." Seeing that if I didn't get at least some sort of hint, I'd start tearing my hair out, the elder sighed again. "Not everyone is glad when a daughter is born. Do not dwell on it, little heavenly demon." Now that's a new one. It actually felt kind of nice—not just "little demon" anymore. Wonder what brought that on? "It should not concern us."

It was like the wind had been knocked out of me.

"And how many of these… reverse traps are walking around the sect?" I mumbled, barely audible, not believing I was asking.

I've lived here for eight years. Eight years. That explains why some of the kids I'd chewed out looked like little girls who'd been picked on by a mean boy. Should I start calling myself a heartbreaker?

And there was no way to check. The little future ladies I'd run into before always had personal teachers and lived separately, in their teachers' houses. So what, some of the second-generation masters' personal "disciples" could easily turn out to be women? And how many of those are there in the second generation?! The sect has close to a hundred second-generation masters, and more than half of them certainly have personal disciples. Besides that, a future teacher can easily take two disciples: one boy and one girl.

Jeez, this is starting to sound kind of shady…

This world is way scarier than I thought. And it was right under my nose the entire time!

"Reverse traps?" The elder didn't follow my turn of phrase and scratched his head in surprise.

I graciously shut my trap and lowered my eyes to the yellow leaves. Winter was on its way.

That night I had nightmares. Women were dressing up as men en masse. I got truly scared when I realized the… ahem, future ladies had started dressing up too.

Meanwhile, time went on at its own unhurried pace. I wasn't doing anything remotely big, just slowly growing and sweeping the sect, with the feeling that at this rate I'd master the broom, not the sword. I spent most of my free time copying the old man's movements. Repeating his trick with the leaves that never budged? Not even in my dreams. That said, you can't claim I wasn't preparing or doing anything at all. Oh no. This isn't just about pumping up some energy muscle. It's about a whole image and way of life that I had to adjust, like it or not. The Cloud Sword Sect's ideas I'd picked up so far suit me in a lot of ways, but far from completely. The black heart comes with a lot of quirks, and fighting it is pointless—just like fighting yourself. In any case, like I said, my personal "idea" is still in its infancy, so there's no point worrying about it.

Another year went by. I turned nine.

Something interesting happened: my master got another disciple, one I'd never seen around the sect before, for some reason. Only it was a girl (my master reassured me a little later that yes, it really was a girl). And I didn't like her from the beginning. Come on, who would like a person who starts looking at you like you're the devil incarnate?