Chapter 1

Chapter 1

A man stood at the highest peak of the Hundred Thousand Mountains, where even the perennial snow was stained crimson.

At his feet, thousands—tens of thousands—of weapons lay heaped like a mountain. The prized swords of famed masters who had once commanded the martial world, the divine arms that were supposedly the pride of the orthodox sects—here, they were nothing more than lumps of scrap metal. The eyes of the one who had broken them all and claimed the summit were like an abyss of unfathomable depth.

Bloodstream Heavenly Demon, Kang Somyeong.

For a hundred years, all he had done was kill and survive. When he first fell into this unfamiliar land, he was merely a twenty-one-year-old youth. Sucked through a rift in space without understanding why, he had arrived in a hell where the strong devoured the weak.

'It's time to end this.'

Somyeong looked down at his own hands. These hands had taken countless lives. But there was only one reason he had endured while dirtying these hands—the singular determination to return to the family he had left behind. That desperation had transformed him from an ordinary young man into a lord of the demonic path who held the entire world beneath his feet.

He slowly raised his right hand and extended it toward the empty air. A hundred years' worth of accumulated internal energy gathered at his fingertips. The air screamed and began to twist.

"I'm going back."

With that brief declaration, the edge of his hand cleaved the void.

CRACKLE—!

A shrill sound, like a glass window shattering, accompanied the tearing of space. Beyond it lay nothing but fathomless darkness. Somyeong didn't look back. He hurled himself into that pitch-black rift. Behind him, the landscape of the Hundred Thousand Mountains—a hundred years of his life—receded into the distance.

***

"Damn it, are we going to die here?!"

Inside a B-rank Gate that had formed near a subway station in Gangbuk, Seoul.

A tanker wielding a shield screamed and toppled backward. Before them, a boss monster towering over five meters—the Savage Armored Bear—roared. It had fur harder than steel and forepaws capable of crushing boulders.

"Healer! Where's the heal?!"

"I'm completely out of mana! Team Leader, this is impossible. They said it was a B-rank Gate, but this is A-rank level!"

The faces of the Blue Dragon party members, affiliated with a mid-tier guild, were filled with despair. Their main damage dealers had already been injured and were down. The bear's massive forepaw shot up into the air. The moment that paw came crashing down, the party members' heads would be crushed like watermelons.

That was when it happened.

BOOOOM—!

The empty air on the Gate's ceiling tore apart like a sheet of old paper, and a dark silhouette dropped from the rift.

"Huh?"

The bear tilted its head up with a look of bewilderment. But before it could even complete the motion—

The man clad in tattered robes—Somyeong—channeled all the momentum of his descent into a single stomp on the bear's skull.

CRUNCH—!

With a thunderous boom, the bear's massive head was driven into the ground. No—driven was an understatement. The head of the boss monster, over five meters tall, was crushed beyond recognition, and blood sprayed in every direction.

A single strike. No surge of magical energy, no flashy skill effects. Just one light stomp was all it took to snuff out a B-rank boss monster's life.

Through the thick dust, Somyeong slowly rose to his feet. Around him, the bear's carcass convulsed and collapsed.

"......?"

The surviving hunters stared at the scene, dumbstruck. A man had suddenly fallen from the sky, then stomped to death the monster that had driven them to the brink of annihilation.

"E-Excuse me......"

Team Leader Kim, the party leader, pulled a hunter scanner from inside his jacket with trembling hands. When he aimed the device at the man, it let out a sharp beep.

[Measurement Impossible]

[Error: Unable to determine the subject's grade. System retry recommended.]

"An error? Is the scanner broken? Or is he an unawakened whose grade can't even be measured?"

Team Leader Kim's eyes flooded with shock. The idea of an unawakened person crushing a boss monster's skull with their bare body was beyond imagination.

Somyeong paid no attention to the stares directed at him, surveying his own body instead. The familiar air, the familiar gravity. And the faint scent of exhaust grazing the tip of his nose.

'I'm back.'

He staggered toward Team Leader Kim, who was standing nearby. At the sight of Somyeong's blood-drenched figure approaching, Team Leader Kim fell backward onto his rear and scrambled away.

"E-Eek!"

"I have something to ask."

Somyeong's voice was low and ragged. His mother tongue, unused for a hundred years, felt awkward—but the weight it carried was more than enough to overwhelm the other man. Somyeong casually grabbed Team Leader Kim by the collar and lifted him.

"What year is it?"

"What? Wh-what kind of......"

"Just answer what I asked. What year, what month, what day is it?"

Team Leader Kim saw the vast abyss contained within Somyeong's eyes. It felt as though he had come face-to-face with something that should never be provoked. He trembled violently and checked his wristwatch.

"September 14th, 2024!"

Somyeong's eyelids trembled.

'2024......'

The day he had gone missing was September 14th, 2023. While a hundred years had passed in the martial world, only a single year had elapsed here on Earth.

The heart that had been frozen for a hundred years began to pound violently. In the eyes of the one once called the Heavenly Demon of neither blood nor tears, an unfamiliar wave of emotion surged.

One year. Not a hundred years, but just one. That meant his family was still there. His mother. His younger sister Jina, who had been in middle school.

"Clothes."

"What?"

"I'm borrowing your outer jacket."

Somyeong snatched the jacket off the dazed Team Leader Kim as though stripping it from him, then threw it over his tattered robes. Without so much as a glance at the bear's carcass or the hunters around him, he launched himself toward the Gate's exit.

"W-Wait! What about the bounty......?!"

Team Leader Kim's voice called out from behind, but nothing reached Somyeong's ears. His figure had already vanished toward the light beyond the Gate at lightning speed.

***

A run-down villa neighborhood on the outskirts of Seoul.

The scenery was largely unchanged from a year ago, yet everything looked both unfamiliar and achingly nostalgic to Somyeong. He sprinted through the alleyways in his wrecked state. Passersby shot him bizarre looks, but he couldn't have cared less.

At last, he stopped before a familiar front door. Unit 202, with paint peeling in patches.

Somyeong raised a trembling hand and placed it over the doorbell. The same hand that had severed the throats of countless enemies over a hundred years was now quivering like a child's.

DING-DONG.

Silence followed. Somyeong held his breath. Please, please let someone be there—he repeated the plea to himself over and over.

—Who is it?

A voice from beyond the door. It was far more haggard and weaker than a year ago, yet it was the voice of his mother—one he had never forgotten for a single moment.

With a click, the door opened. A middle-aged woman in an apron peered out through the gap. The moment she saw the blood-soaked young man standing outside, she recoiled in shock, and the pot she had been holding slipped from her hands.

CLANG—!

The sound of the pot rolling across the floor echoed through the hallway. Her eyes grew wider and wider, and then tears came flooding out.

"S-Somyeong? Is it really my Somyeong?"

The aura of the Bloodstream Heavenly Demon who had drenched the martial world in blood was nowhere to be found. Standing there was simply a young man who had been lost and, after a very long time, had finally found his way home. Somyeong forced the corners of his mouth upward into a smile. Something hot gathered at the edges of his eyes.

"Mom, I'm home."