Chapter 1

Chapter 1. Prologue

A tremendous mass of light flashed and filled every direction, and then a colossal explosion erupted.

VOOOOOOOM.

The veil-like curtain of dust shattered, and beyond it, a dragon roared with a ferocity that seemed ready to burst.

Just as it raised the blades of its claws, sharp enough to crush even steel reinforcement bars like tofu, and tried to bring them down, space itself shook, and an unprecedented force born from a powerful slash plunged straight down.

SCREEEEEECH!

With a painful roar that seemed to tear even the soul to shreds, the dragon’s claw stopped.

“You persistent bastard…….”

No matter how tenacious a lich was, if its head was completely obliterated, that was the end.

All the more so for a living being rather than an undead creature. If its skull itself was destroyed, nothing could make it survive.

[Notification.]

[As of this moment, one of the Three Calamities, the Explosive Annihilation Dragon Atranaja, has been defeated and extinguished.]

[Therefore, we hereby inform you that Earth’s subjugation has been deferred.]

At the message floating before his eyes, Jeong Hyeon-su reflexively spat out a curse.

“What utter bullshit.”

If he could, he wanted to butcher that thing called the System first, whatever it was.

THUD!

But in his current condition, he could do nothing. The greatsword he had been clutching in his completely mangled hand clattered to the floor.

Jeong Hyeon-su lowered his gaze.

The blade of the divine weapon that had accompanied him for so many years had lost all its edges.

“Yes… you held out as long as you could, too…….”

When he pressed a hand to his stomach, a hot, wet stickiness soaked his palm.

The savage dragon’s claw had gouged his abdomen like a trench. His organs, of course, could only be a mess.

Even he could scarcely believe that he had fought that thing in such a state.

The Three Calamities were said to have joined hands and invaded in order to subjugate Earth.

Among them, he had succeeded in killing the Explosive Annihilation Dragon, the one that had especially tried to enslave humans and claim even their souls as property. The counterattack would begin now.

Of course, he had not waged this insane battle out of self-sacrificing devotion to humanity.

“Saintess. Hurry and cast that miracle or whatever it is.”

“A-Ah, yes! Y-You did well.”

He had a means of defying this death.

Something to fall back on.

However.

“G-Ghh!?”

Blood spilled from the mouth of the Saintess who was supposed to perform a miracle and heal Jeong Hyeon-su’s injuries.

A hand protruding from behind her had seized her heart.

Even as the Saintess spewed a gush of blood, her mouth opened and closed, her eyes filled with disbelief.

“Ch-Chairman… why…?”

The owner of that hand was none other than Seon Woo-hyeon, the chairman of the World Hunter Association.

The scene unfolding before his eyes was shocking enough to make even Jeong Hyeon-su, who had lived through harsh years as a Black Hunter under a black warrant, hesitate for a moment.

Because he could not understand why this was happening.

The Saintess was not inexhaustible, but under the right conditions, she could be considered an extra life. Why, at such a crucial moment?

“Seon Woo-hyeon! What the hell are you doing?”

When Jeong Hyeon-su shouted, only laughter returned.

“You have done well.”

The man clutching the Saintess’s heart was smiling.

The only reason Seon Woo-hyeon, chairman of the World Hunter Association, and the Dark King Jeong Hyeon-su, called the worst criminal in history, had joined hands was that they needed to survive.

The damned System had appeared, and one day, without warning, otherworldly races had invaded along with a countdown to destruction.

Even their turf wars were only possible if the world still belonged to them, so they had cast everything else aside and formed a united front.

“Do not make such a face. Suppose you were revived and killed the last of the Three Calamities. What would happen afterward?”

“What?”

“I am sorry, but I have lost confidence. In the end, it is your fault.”

He could not understand.

The Explosive Annihilation Dragon and the Titan King had fallen, but one of the Three Calamities still remained perfectly intact.

Jeong Hyeon-su and the Saintess should have been indispensable to its subjugation……

“A world I cannot possess has no meaning. I would rather challenge the remaining Calamity alone, defeat it, and become the supreme ruler. Sharing it with you afterward, or losing to you, would be meaningless.”

“What kind of insane bastard are you…! Nnnnngh!”

After hearing the chairman’s true intentions, Jeong Hyeon-su could not hold back the blood surging up his throat and vomited it out.

“This world is mine. No one can take it from me. If I cannot have it, it would be better for it to disappear.”

It was the face of a madman, twisted by a fanatical obsession.

And at the chairman’s next words, Jeong Hyeon-su froze.

“I never expected you to become this strong when only one of the Five Kings’ Martial Arts had been passed down. That is why I truly consider myself fortunate.”

His train of thought stopped.

Runes, the language of magic, wove themselves in intricate patterns around Seon Woo-hyeon. The power of Seon Woo-hyeon, called the Archmage, crushed Jeong Hyeon-su, who was close to death.

“BLEEEARGH!”

Along with a mana explosion erupting inside his body, blood and fragments of viscera poured from Jeong Hyeon-su’s mouth like a waterfall.

Even so, Jeong Hyeon-su writhed desperately.

He could not possibly ignore what Seon Woo-hyeon had just said.

The massacre of his family. The massacre of the family and guild represented by the Five Kings’ Martial Arts. The clues Jeong Hyeon-su had missed while digging into that incident suddenly assembled themselves with startling clarity.

“Seon Woo-hyeon…! It was you…?”

“Farewell. Your Jeong family is a future threat to me, but it has always served as a stepping-stone to my victory. Heh heh.”

Jeong Hyeon-su forced himself up and tried to pick up the fallen Ghost King Sword, but Seon Woo-hyeon was faster.

The current Jeong Hyeon-su had no way to stand against Seon Woo-hyeon, who had already recovered through a miracle.

SLASH.

The sky and the earth changed places.

Jeong Hyeon-su realized that his head had been severed.

No words came out.

‘Like this…….’

He could not die like this.

He had finally found the true culprit behind the destruction of the Jeong family, a prestigious family of awakened ones in South Korea famed for the Five Kings’ Martial Arts……

His family had been massacred, and in the midst of being branded criminals worldwide overnight, even he, the sole survivor, had become a criminal.

He had survived tooth and nail, gathered forces in the underworld where he had no choice but to live, and pursued the mastermind, yet he had never reached him. To think that mastermind had been the chairman……

Now he knew.

He had to kill that detestable piece of trash who had confessed with his own mouth. He could not die like this.

However, the clear sky revealed for the first time in ages by the death of the Explosive Annihilation Dragon was simply blue.

Knowing nothing of what he felt.

***

Why was life so wretched?

So hard?

So cursed?

He had never wished for a glamorous, successful life.

He had thought that he would have no regrets if he could clear his name as a wanted criminal and avenge the family who had embraced him while he endured that wretched life.

Out of nowhere, the world had kept twisting, and because Earth was supposedly going to be destroyed, he had finally stepped to the forefront. Yet the result was that he had helped his true enemy and had his head cut off by that very hand.

“Young master. At this rate, you really will be expelled from Cradle.”

“Ah, I do not care. Just let him get expelled. That is what he deserves. Letting him attend would be a waste anyway, would it not?”

“Young lady. Even so, your words……”

“Did I say anything wrong?”

A sudden commotion reached his ears. The voice ringing within it felt nostalgic, familiar, and guilt-laden.

‘Where had I… heard that voice before?’

But his mind was utterly dark, as if a veil had been drawn over it.

At the same time, a thought occurred to him. But it was so absurd, so impossible, that he had not dared even to imagine it.

“Why are you not saying anything? Usually, you would be bragging about how great you are, would you not?”

In that instant, the thick darkness lifted, and his surroundings brightened. Beyond it stood a bob-haired girl glaring at him as if she wanted to kill him.

“Hy… Hyeon-a?”

It was Jeong Hyeon-a, his younger sister, who had died along with everyone else when the guild was annihilated while Jeong Hyeon-su was nineteen.

It was impossible to believe.

No matter how much the world had changed, no matter that magic and monsters had poured into it, there was no way for the dead to exist so perfectly except through the highest level of illusion magic.

‘Could this be Seon Woo-hyeon’s trick?’

For a moment, he suspected it might be illusion magic cast by Seon Woo-hyeon, the Archmage, but all his senses told him it was not.

“Who gave you permission to drop my surname? Use my full name. It makes me want to vomit when you call me that.”

“It really is you, Hyeon-a…!”

Even if someone tried to reproduce a person through an illusion, it would be crude if they did not know the subject.

How could Seon Woo-hyeon reproduce the distinct sharp-tongued manner of the younger sister who had despised Jeong Hyeon-su for living a worthless life?

“Jeong Hyeon-a.”

At the sudden interruption of a low voice, heavy and deep like a cave, Jeong Hyeon-su reflexively turned his head.

“Even so, what kind of way is that to speak in this situation?”

“I… I am sorry……”

“And Jeong Hyeon-s……”

Jeong Hyeon-su immediately embraced his father, who stood beside him.

He felt the solidity of that trained, imposing frame. Honestly, it was the first time he had ever felt it.

Jeong Hyeon-su had never lived a life in which he could feel such warmth with his father……

CRACK.

“Gah!”

“What do you think you are doing all of a sudden?”

The embrace lasted only a moment.

A fierce strength seized him, and the world immediately spun. Before he knew it, he had been forced to his knees.

It was the instant he felt the technique of a master who had devoted himself solely to martial arts ever since the Great Cataclysm changed the world.

“Formless True Art!”

It really was Father!

The Formless True Art, one of the Five Kings’ Martial Arts, was a combat technique his family had developed and refined.

Feeling its distinctive power, founded on using softness to overcome hardness, Jeong Hyeon-su looked up at his father, Jeong Cheol, with a complicated expression.

At those eyes, endlessly sorrowful and dripping with longing, Jeong Cheol flinched in spite of himself.

It was the opposite of the eldest son who had always caused trouble and stubbornly talked back, but……

“That will not change anything.”

“I……”

“Jeong Hyeon-su.”

Jeong Cheol looked down at Jeong Hyeon-su with cold eyes and spoke.

“I cannot stand the sight of you right now, so go up to your room.”

A fragment of memory that flashed through his mind became clear.

This had happened before.

The day he had finally done something reckless at nineteen, glamorizing troublemaking, and been suspended had been exactly like this.

“What in the world is going on…….”

“Ah, hurry up and go upstairs! Can you not see you have ruined the mood in this house?”

“Hyeon-a. By the way, how old are you……”

BANG!

As the door was slammed shut behind him, the interior of the room came into view.

The cadet uniform of Cradle, the Hunter Military Academy, hanging there.

A sword with a thin, long blade, one he had used simply to look stylish, hung on the wall with all kinds of decorations.

“All style and no substance…….”

It was unmistakably his room.

The photograph of his mother hanging above the desk.

Everything belonging to the guild had vanished, and he, the survivor, had been branded a criminal and forced to flee. He had not even been able to save this beloved face. Now, seeing it again, Jeong Hyeon-su’s voice trembled.

“Mom…….”

The face reflected in the mirror was young as well. There was no trace of having vomited out everything inside him after his desperate battle with Seon Woo-hyeon and the Explosive Annihilation Dragon.

Jeong Hyeon-su, bearing not merely a young face but the face of his younger self, stared back at him.

All his senses were vividly crying out.

This was reality……

‘I returned to the past?’

Jeong Hyeon-su sat down blankly on the edge of the bed.

A single photograph lay by the pillow.

His expression soured in an instant.

The photograph of the woman he had once loved one-sidedly, an embarrassment possible only at that age and no better than a dark chapter in his past, proved beyond doubt that this was his room and that time in his life.

“Damn it.”

He really had returned.

Jeong Cheol, leader of the Swordsman Guild ‘Garam,’ which had once been one of South Korea’s ten great guilds and had been considered likely to grow into a world-class guild.

The Dark King Jeong Hyeon-su, a black-warrant Black Hunter who had led the world’s worst criminal organization, had returned as the nineteen-year-old son of that very Jeong Cheol.