Prologue
The Alliance Leader had vanished.
BOOM—!
The Martial Alliance Leader's sword came hurtling at the Alliance Leader with all his might, and the instant the Alliance Leader struck it aside.
The shattered waves of force scattered in every direction with a tremendous explosion.
“Argh!”
The elites of the Martial Alliance and the Demon Alliance, who had been facing off with the duel between their leaders at the center, hurriedly retreated.
The Martial Wheel, Ga Jeong-hak, one of the Demon Alliance's Four Wheels, had the ability to withstand it on his own and saw everything clearly.
“Huh?”
Right in the middle of the fierce battle.
The Alliance Leader was nowhere to be seen in the murky cloud of dust.
Thinking it might be some scheme of the Martial Alliance, he opened his eyes wide and searched for the Martial Alliance Leader, but the man had vanished as well.
“Wh-what?”
Startled, he muttered and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, trying to check again.......
The wind swept the dust away. On the battlefield laid bare, the Martial Alliance Leader and the Alliance Leader stood facing each other as if neither had ever disappeared.
‘Did I see it wrong?’
Ga Jeong-hak's puzzlement did not last long.
The Alliance Leader abruptly claimed that someone from the Martial Alliance had launched a surprise attack, left the perfectly unharmed Martial Alliance Leader right in front of him alone.......
Because he had charged into the Martial Alliance's main camp and begun beating the Mount Hua Sect Leader.
The Righteous-Demonic War, which had begun with such great momentum, fizzled out after that incident, but Ga Jeong-hak was certain.
That day.
Something had unquestionably happened!
One month later.
The Alliance Leader had changed.
“Jeong-hak, Jeong-hak. Were you terribly upset when I broke that sword you cherished?”
“Th-that......”
His heart pounded when the man suddenly brought up something from five years ago.
What fault is he going to find with me this time?
But.
“Thinking back on it, I believe I went too far. You bragged about it so much that I thought it would survive a clash with my Ink Abyss Sword.”
“I apologize.”
“Well, it is fine. You should forget what happened back then as well.”
“Y-yes! I under... stand?”
Something was strange.
He was the one whose sword had been broken, yet he was also the one who had to apologize.
But what did it matter?
The mere fact that this was happening felt like a miracle, and Ga Jeong-hak trembled from head to toe.
His lord was arrogant enough to hold his nose to the heavens, as fickle as rain in the monsoon season, and as coldhearted as an ice crystal of the Northern Sea. Yet he was being this kind......?
“M-my lord.”
“What?”
“My... lord?”
“...What?”
When his lord answered him twice with the same words instead of immediately unleashing killing intent and firing a finger blast, Ga Jeong-hak's face turned white.
“What is wrong? My lord? They say people die when they start acting out of character! There is no possibility that someone managed to harm you....... You said you were learning a divine art. Have you perhaps suffered qi deviation or been afflicted by heart poison?”
He asked with an expression that seemed on the verge of dissolving into tears, but no answer came.
“Look! I have said this much, yet you are still tolerating me! Something must......!”
“Enough of your bullshit.”
Hearing the familiar curse brought Ga Jeong-hak some relief.
“Then why in the world are you doing something so unlike you?”
Ga Jeong-hak asked cautiously as he looked up at his lord.
His lord was a beautiful man who, despite being of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult's direct line, had left the cult, unified the demonic path with his own hands, and become its master.
The Demon Alliance Leader, Wi So-baek, slowly opened his mouth.
“I promised I would.”
“You promised?”
“Yes. I promised to admit when I was wrong, think once more before killing someone who deserved to die, and beat someone a little less when they deserved a beating.”
“With whom?”
His lord was not a man who made promises lightly. Nor did he have anyone with whom he shared a bond close enough for such a promise, did he?
Ga Jeong-hak searched his mind for every renowned figure of the demonic path, only for a thunderbolt from a clear sky to strike his ears.
“The Martial Alliance Leader, Jang Se-jin.”
“What?”
Ga Jeong-hak blinked both eyes and let out a strange groan without realizing it.
Our Alliance Leader really seems to have gone mad!
Chapter One: Demon Alliance Leader Wi So-baek
“Hmm.”
Wi So-baek slowly tilted his head to one side.
Even that trivial movement made the air in the great hall sink heavily.
Ga Jeong-hak, who had been staring blankly, seemed to come to his senses. He swallowed dryly and watched his lord's mood.
“What? Is it amusing to hear that I made a promise with the Martial Alliance Leader?”
“N-no, my lord!”
“No. The Martial Alliance Leader came out of nowhere. It may well have sounded amusing.”
“It... truly did not. It is simply that while the struggle between the righteous path and the demonic path has been fierce, wasn't the Chang'an Plains the first time you met the Martial Alliance Leader in person? I was wondering when you could possibly have had the time to make such a pr-promise.......”
Wi So-baek gazed down at the man as he rambled out excuses, then gave a faint laugh.
Outside these walls, this man was called the Blood Wheel rather than the Martial Wheel, crushing everything that stood in his way as he rolled onward. Wi So-baek knew that only before him did the man show such a foolish side.
No. In truth, he had not known.
Not until someone took great pains to teach him over an exceedingly long time.
He had believed that everything he possessed and everything he could do had naturally been given to him, and that he had the right to do with it all as he pleased.
Of course, that did not mean a man like Wi So-baek had completely overturned the beliefs at the foundation of his being.
But there had unquestionably been meaningful change.
Wi So-baek regarded his incomparably loyal subordinate and opened his mouth.
“That day.”
Ga Jeong-hak tensed all over as he waited for the words to follow.
“While dueling the Martial Alliance Leader one on one, I was sucked into a strange space. When I came to my senses, I was at the summit of a colossal mountain, and the Alliance Leader and I were the only people there.”
As if recalling that day, Wi So-baek tapped the armrest of his grand chair with his forefinger, tap, tap, and continued.
“At first, we tried to descend the peak, but there was no way to break through the fog surrounding the foot of the mountain. However long we wandered, we always ended up where we had begun. So we had no choice but to climb the mountain again.”
Merely hearing it made Ga Jeong-hak feel stifled, and he rubbed his throat with one hand.
Wi So-baek nodded.
“Yes, it nearly drove me mad. I thought, so this is what it truly means to lose one's mind. A reputation as the greatest under heaven meant nothing there.”
Wi So-baek spoke as a matter of course of what was an impossible dream to some and a throne others yearned their entire lives to touch just once.
Yet neither the man speaking nor the man listening found it strange in the slightest.
To them, it was simply too obvious a truth.
“Then I looked around and saw a hateful bastard beside me whom I had to kill anyway. What do you think I did?”
“You must have attacked him at once.”
“Correct.”
Ga Jeong-hak tilted his head.
“But how can the Alliance Leader still be alive?”
“The Martial Alliance Leader was stronger than I expected, while I had fallen prey to heart demons after trying everything imaginable to descend the peak and could not bring my full power to bear.”
“Ah!”
Unlike Ga Jeong-hak, who exclaimed in surprise, Wi So-baek remained composed.
“Everything there seemed to have stopped, and we did not even age. So for the first hundred years, we fought ourselves sick in a battle that had no end. For the next hundred, I ignored the Alliance Leader entirely, and in the hundred after that... yes, we talked.”
Even Wi So-baek could not remember what had prompted it. Only this.
“By then, I had already escaped my heart demons, yet I no longer felt like killing the Alliance Leader, while he had kept trying to speak to me all that time. Perhaps I was simply lonely. For the first time, I felt like answering him, and that was how it began.”
Three hundred years, he said.
Even after that, the sun rose and set hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of times.
They remained trapped there so long that eventually they forgot even to measure the passage of time.
Everything passed so peacefully and quietly that they forgot they were trapped at all.
Then, one day.
“I thought it was finally time to leave that place. We had been there for such an unfathomably long time that I expected the world we came from to have changed completely. So I told the boy, what did it matter if the Central Plains murim had vanished, or if the kingdom had changed its name and another dynasty had risen?”
Ga Jeong-hak could not begin to fathom his lord's feelings as he affectionately referred to the Martial Alliance Leader as the boy.
Then again, the same could be said of everything he had just heard.
His lord did not stop even as Ga Jeong-hak struggled with his confusion.
As though he had wanted someone to know.
“I told him that he was an orphan with no one in the world, while I was alone after being abandoned by my blood, so we had become sworn brothers and family and could live relying on each other. I said that perhaps we would be freer once the husks called the Martial Alliance and Demon Alliance had vanished, and suggested that we roam the realm and travel the world. But when I tore the sky open with my sword, was sucked into another strange space, and emerged......”
The scene from that day flashed like lightning through Ga Jeong-hak's mind.
“Contrary to your expectations! You returned to the same place, the same moment, among the same people from which you had vanished?”
“Hahaha! Yes. How did you know? That is precisely what happened. And so I had to give my precious sworn younger brother back to the Martial Alliance. How could I allow the Martial Alliance Leader, the Gentleman's Sword renowned as the loftiest and most upright man in the world, to be accused of consorting with the Demon Alliance's Evil Fiend?”
His tone was indifferent, but a keen edge lay beneath it.
“Is that so? You m-must have been terribly upset, my lord.”
“I was. Indeed I was. But, Jeong-hak.”
Wi So-baek straightened from his languid posture, leaned his upper body forward, and rested his chin on his right hand.
“Do you believe me?”
“Was it a joke, then?”
“No.”
“I knew it was true!”
“How could such an absurd tale possibly be true?”
It was neither one nor the other, and Ga Jeong-hak's eyes shook violently.
Wi So-baek waved a hand at the flustered man.
“The Martial Alliance sent an idiotic proposal to hold a conference to discuss the future course of the murim while dealing with the aftermath of the Righteous-Demonic War that ended in such a muddle. The Law Wheel and Literary Wheel have something to say about it, so you may leave.”
Ga Jeong-hak was on exceedingly bad terms with the Law Wheel, who valued rules and principles above all else. He was grateful for Wi So-baek's words, yet hesitated slightly.
“Alliance Leader.”
“What?”
“How should I treat the Martial Alliance Leader when I meet him later?”
“Indeed. What would be best?”
The question applied not only to Ga Jeong-hak but to Wi So-baek as well, yet he did not need to ponder it for long.
“In your heart, treat him as my sworn younger brother, but show no sign of it before outsiders. When you are with the boy, do as you please depending on how he treats you.”
It was difficult for Ga Jeong-hak to understand, but instead of thinking deeply, he answered.
“Understood!”
When the time came, anything the Alliance Leader said would always become clear to him on its own.
With that, he quickly left the great hall.
Left alone, Wi So-baek once more sank deep into the grand chair.
“Who but Jeong-hak would ask me such a stupid question?”
It was precisely why Wi So-baek had felt inclined to tell him the story.
A short while later.
Two figures appeared side by side at the entrance of the great hall.
“The Law Wheel and the Literary Wheel.”
With those two, the Martial Wheel who had just left, and the Dark Wheel who was presently away.
They made up the four wheels that drove the carriage called the Demon Alliance as it forged a new history for the demonic path.
Together with Jang Se-jin, who had become his sworn younger brother, Wi So-baek had spent a long time discussing why they had been taken to that strange place.
They had agreed that an ancient ‘formation’ might have been activated.......
Which meant that a group had carried it out and made it possible.
Who could it be?
Who had recreated a wonder found only in legend?
And who had tried to use Jang Se-jin and him as sacrifices?
Wi So-baek thought of his sworn younger brother, who would be searching for their hidden enemy within the Martial Alliance just as he was.
Was the culprit in the Martial Alliance, the Demon Alliance, or some third faction outside them both?
Perhaps they had a foot in all three.
But it did not matter.
If they had possessed the power to kill him directly, they would never have laid a trap like a formation.......
Activating a formation required an enormous amount of preparation. If they had the capacity to use such a thing twice, there was no reason they would not have taken direct action instead.
So just show yourselves.
And I hope it is none of you in the Four Wheels. For your own sakes, if no one else's.
Wi So-baek's eyes curved coldly.