The snow-covered Hundred Thousand Great Mountains were filled with a pure white light, as if they belonged to another world.
In the north wind slicing across the snowfield, the right sleeve of the one-armed Heavenly Demon fluttered like a torn banner.
But the Heavenly Demon was unmoved by nature's wonders and by the pain of his wounds alike.
And before him stood an old man.
The Murim Alliance Leader, the Martial Emperor.
He was the man who had lost every one of his comrades to the Heavenly Demon and survived alone.
"Even with the orthodox and the unorthodox joining forces and throwing everything into this......"
Thousands of masters had charged in with their lives on the line, and only at the end of all that sacrifice had they managed to sever one of the Heavenly Demon's arms.
The raging blizzard seemed to mourn every one of those deaths.
"......A single arm, that is all. So...... the prophecy of a calamitous fate was right after all."
The Martial Emperor sensed his defeat.
One of his arms had been torn away, and the nerves of the other had been cut, leaving it useless. His legs had lost all feeling long ago.
Yet the Martial Emperor did not retreat, not even at the very end.
However.
The Heavenly Demon had to die here, no matter what.
"Long ago."
The Martial Emperor began to speak.
"Long ago...... I went to a mountain village on orders from the Imperial Family. Simple folk lived there. When they learned I was an outsider, they said they had nothing to offer, then slaughtered a scrawny pig and laid a table for me. I still have not forgotten that meal. Nor that pipsqueak, the village chief's grandson perhaps, chattering away that he wanted to be a warrior too. I...... still remember that boy's name."
The Martial Emperor let out a breath. Blood spread through the white mist of it.
"I cannot forget it. Whether I was hungry from the long road, or that village simply had a special way of cooking...... it was the finest meal I have ever eaten. Even after I left that village, I missed the taste so much that I searched the whole Murim for a cook who could make the same dish, and I still have not found one."
His laughter was hollow, and deep.
"......But now I finally understand."
The old man tipped his head back and gazed at the sky.
"Perhaps it was never the meal I missed. Perhaps......"
The deep blue sky was reflected whole in his eyes.
It was no different from the sky on that day in the past he was recalling.
"I was searching for that bloodline. I wanted to find that bloodline to ease my paltry guilt. I wanted to find it and console myself that I was not a wicked man."
Crunch.
The weary steps of his worn leather shoes trampled the snow piled on the ground.
He could feel nothing.
Still, the Martial Emperor approached the Heavenly Demon.
"What was in their hearts, I wonder, when they so lovingly set a table for the man who had come to kill them?"
The Heavenly Demon slowly blinked.
At first he did not understand. But soon, a memory he had buried long ago surfaced, faintly.
Faintly.
Very faintly.
He lowered his eyes to the snowfield, then fixed his gaze on the Martial Emperor.
A red light kindled in his hollow eyes.
"Seon-ju."
The Heavenly Demon's heart lurched. His heart demon stirred. His veins swelled fit to burst.
"So in the end...... you set foot in the martial world. Yes, born with that fate, it must have been inevitable."
Seon-ju.
It had been his name before he became the Heavenly Demon. A name no one remembered anymore.
The Heavenly Demon's lips trembled as if he were sobbing. But the sob soon turned into a cough of blood.
The memories he had forced himself to bury came rising back.
The burning village, the villagers run through with spears and blades, the wailing children.
His father, stepping out past the doorway with a club in hand. His mother, holding him tight and soothing him that it would all be over soon.
-Live. You must live, no matter what.
"What happened that day."
The memory unfolding before his eyes scattered like mist at the Martial Emperor's voice.
Then the Martial Emperor's blade lunged at the Heavenly Demon.
"What happened that day...... I am sorry for it."
The Heavenly Demon's eyes turned red. Disgust, rage and contempt, all tangled together.
He dared to apologize?
With that mouth?
But the question never left his lips.
Only his hand shot forward.
But just before the Heavenly Demon could seize the Martial Emperor's sword, his whole body convulsed.
Dark red blood burst from his seven orifices. He crumpled.
"Gkh, khhhk. Khuk......!"
Soon the Martial Emperor collapsed too. With the last of his strength, laughing and sobbing, he spoke.
"Heh, heh-heh. Hahaha, hahahaha......"
"Khak, kkhh......"
But the pain did not last long.
The Martial Emperor's presence was snuffed out, and the Heavenly Demon could not hold on either.
His fingertips dropped onto the cold snowfield.
.
.
.
「Is it over? Hmm. For one who has lived only a single life, he should be rather tasty as lower-realm mortals go...... but he is still far from properly ripe.」
A deep, booming voice rang out. It came from a star in the night sky.
That star was the Heavenly Slaughter Star.
「Let us see. In his next life, I should raise him somewhere better than this backwater.」
The countless stars in the night sky scattered flashes of light, as if refusing to be outdone.
***
Blink.
How much time had passed?
The Heavenly Demon's eyelids slowly lifted.
Silver eyes, cold as steel, were revealed.
His vision was hazy. Even so, the glare of the pure-white snowfield was vivid.
The Heavenly Demon frowned.
'Did I survive?'
He immediately set about confirming whether he was alive.
The surrounding scenery had not changed much.
But the Martial Emperor was nowhere to be seen.
Nor was there the agony of twisted qi and blood.
To grasp the situation, he went back over his last memories.
'......All because that bastard brought it up.'
And then the Heavenly Demon recalled once more the past the Martial Emperor had spoken of.
His heart demon surged again as well.
The beginning of everything. The origin.
It had to be traced back to his birth.
He had been born with the Heavenly Slaughter Star.
It was a fate that bound him to build up the karma of killing. No, it was Heaven's Mandate.
That was why hell had unfolded upon his home village when he was a child.
It was the price of producing a child who bore the Heavenly Slaughter Star.
A day in the dead of winter, when a bitterly cold wind was blowing.
In a barbarian village on the frontier, a baby boy was born, and in the Imperial Palace, a famed sorcerer prophesied calamity to the Emperor.
-A boy bearing the Heavenly Slaughter Star has been born! He is a calamity who will one day plunge the world into cataclysmic fire, so find the child with all haste and tear out the root of disaster!
And so the Imperial Family sought to kill the child before he could grow, and be rid of the root of disaster.
The first order to come down was a single edict. An imperial command to dispose of the child within the village.
The simple villagers could not bring themselves to kill a little child.
So the Imperial Family colluded with the Murim Alliance.
They sent a single swordsman to the village and slaughtered everyone who lived there.
That was how cruel, and how heavy, the sin of pitying a child turned out to be.
But the Heavenly Demon, Seon-ju, survived.
He survived, and he vowed revenge.
From then on, his rage became the force that kept him alive.
When he left his burned hometown behind, utterly exhausted, and set out on an endless journey far, far away.
When a band of mountain bandits he happened across dragged him off and reduced him to a slave.
When he learned the bandits' third-rate martial arts by stealing glances over their shoulders, killed a man for the first time, and escaped their mountain fort drenched in blood.
When, starving on the run and collapsed by the road, he misjudged the old couple who had saved him and murdered them.
And when, at long last, he had to admit that he bore the destiny of killing.
Each time, he remembered his burned hometown, and his family and neighbors, murdered so miserably.
It would be a lie to say he had never wanted to give up.
But he had to survive, however desperately.
Because he had to live on for the family and neighbors who had died in his place.
But had it not been said that nothing in this world lasts forever?
His rage, too, slowly faded with time.
His vow of revenge weathered away as well.
Around then, he reached the peak realm. And wherever he passed, his fame spread.
A young peak master who belonged to no sect and had appeared out of nowhere.
Moths dazzled by that fame stood in his path.
Whoever stood in his path, he took their life.
If he did not, he would be the one to die.
With his past and his revenge buried in his chest, that was the only mission left to a man hollowed out.
No one could stand in his way.
Day after day, only the corpses piled up.
As time went on, everything grew numb.
His heart was empty.
And so, one day, he fled the mundane world.
Fleeing the world, he sought out the Hundred Thousand Great Mountains, where it was said few people ever set foot.
Even there, there were those who tried to kill him.
Among them were wicked men, and madmen too.
Either way, theirs were lives that would never do any good even if they lived. He killed them.
Those who did not threaten him, he left alone.
The people of the Hundred Thousand Great Mountains who had not been killed began to revere him.
Without ever meaning to, the Heavenly Demon had become the hero who cleared the trash out of the Hundred Thousand Great Mountains.
Then many masters of the Murim heard the rumors and came to him, begging to become his disciples or hoping to serve him, but no matter how many followers came after him, the emptiness was never filled.
Naturally.
It was emptiness precisely because it could not be filled.
However many countless stars might shine in the night sky, did their light ever erase the darkness of night?
The only way to soothe his heart was to train, and train again, until he reached the realm of no-self.
In the moment of enlightenment, at least, there was no pain.
To forget his suffering, he clung to the martial arts all the more.
With each passing day he grew stronger, and the stronger he grew, the more lives fell by his hand.
Paradoxically, every time a life vanished by his hand, the men of the martial world who followed him and called themselves demons multiplied several times over.
At some point, they could no longer be called a mere few.
In the end, the orthodox masters of the Murim, who deemed him dangerous, and the swords of the Imperial Family turned toward the Hundred Thousand Great Mountains.
But even they fell short. With a single wave of the Heavenly Demon's hand, heads were severed and spears and blades snapped.
In the end, the world named him the Supreme One of Ten Thousand Demons, the Heavenly Demon.
Such was the history up until the Murim Alliance Leader and his successors climbed the Hundred Thousand Great Mountains.
「Have you awakened?」
A voice suddenly rang out inside his head as he went back over his memories.
The moment he grasped what it meant, his blood pressure shot up in an instant.
The flow of his qi and blood, already unsteady from his heart demon, quickened.
A pale fist pressed against the snow-covered ground and pushed his upper body up.
'Heavenly Slaughter Star......!'
The enraged Heavenly Demon shouted. No, he tried to. But no voice came out.
Hack, hack.
Instead of a voice, only a dry cough came out.
「You seem to be in poor shape, so I shall send word later.」
With that, the Heavenly Slaughter Star vanished.
His tone had been thick with ridicule.
The Heavenly Demon's hollow eyes looked up at the sky.
'Why did you bring me back? Are you telling me I can never be free of you?'
The voice he had heard at every opportunity ever since he took his first steps.
All his life, that voice had urged him to kill and goaded him into hating the world.
The Heavenly Demon had to spend nearly all of his willpower to keep from becoming the calamity the Heavenly Slaughter Star demanded.
That struggle withered his emotions even further.
'......Heavenly Slaughter Star. If not for you, I......'
They said the fate of the Heavenly Slaughter Star was something one was born with, but the truth was different.
The Heavenly Slaughter Star was a transcendent being with a personality of his own.
He had 'chosen' Seon-ju, and bestowed 'karma' upon him.
That made Seon-ju the Heavenly Slaughter Star's apostle, and his sacrifice.
Worse, the Heavenly Slaughter Star had twisted even the fate that should have been Seon-ju's, making him hate the world and take ever more lives.
'If you had only left me alone......'
He would have lived the life of a common man in that peaceful, rustic country village.
Just as his parents had. Just as his neighbors had.
Tilling a small field, raising a family.
That simple but happy life.
The life that should have been his had been toyed with, for nothing more than the Heavenly Slaughter Star's amusement.
It had been one misfortune after another. Could not even death free him from that past?
Would he be toyed with all over again?
'I......'
What was he supposed to do now?
For a long while, the Heavenly Demon had lived without a path.
Even the first under heaven was only human in the end.
Too much time had passed for him to thirst for revenge as single-mindedly as before.
He had clung to growing stronger because, in the moment of enlightenment, he could forget his suffering.
That was the whole of the reason he had devoted himself to the martial arts after becoming the Heavenly Demon.
'Heavenly Slaughter Star...... If only there were no Heavenly Slaughter Star......'
As he chewed over his resentment, his vision slowly blurred.
It was a symptom of a heart demon grown too strong.
'Heavenly Slaughter Star, you......'
His vision blurred. His limbs seized.
Writhing in the pain that welled up in him, the Heavenly Demon screamed.
Yet even as he screamed, the Heavenly Demon's hollow eyes were slowly regaining their light.
'I will kill you.'
He would wipe out the source of all his misfortune.
He would not waste this life the way he had wasted the last.
With bloodshot eyes, he swore it to himself.
'You will regret bringing me back.'
If being the first under heaven was not enough, then in this life he would ascend to the heavens above.
And then, the star.
The Heavenly Slaughter Star, he would annihilate.
Slump.
The strength drained out of both his arms.
Thud.
The unconscious Heavenly Demon's face slammed into the snow.
A long while later.
Twitch.
The tip of the Heavenly Demon's finger moved slightly.
'......Hot.'
All at once, he became aware of heat.
When he reached the peak realm, his body had already become impervious to heat and cold.
And yet, heat?
In the middle of a snowfield, no less.
'Was snow always hot?'
After a moment's thought, the Heavenly Demon realized that the heat he felt was a signal from a body on the verge of freezing to death.
'I am in danger of freezing to death?'
Thanks to his heart demon, his condition was already at its worst. That was why he could not tell what state his body was in. He forced his heart demon down.
He crumpled up the memories of his past, folded them, and buried them deep in his heart once more.
Only after the heart demon had lifted, just a little, could he roughly work out his condition.
His body temperature was far too low, he had almost no strength left, and his whole body was heavy.
Above all, he could not sense even a trace of inner arts.
It was a body that had never cultivated inner arts.
Even its innate true qi was badly damaged.
'This is not my body. And this is another world.'
Memories surfaced dimly. They were only fragments, but he could make out the broad strokes. A despair at having been abandoned stabbed at his chest. Along with a splitting headache, the body's memories flickered in and out, over and over.
The very moment the Heavenly Demon grasped his situation, a shadow fell before his eyes.
With no internal force, it was only natural that he had not noticed the enemy approaching.
"Grrrrr......"
Long, yellow fangs.
The wolf's yellow eyes were full of hunger.
They gleamed with the wild excitement peculiar to a beast about to seize its prey.
Scrape.
The wolf's claws raked the snow-covered ground with an ominous sound.
When the Heavenly Demon did not run, the wolf came right up to his face.
Soon the savage beast's breath cut through the cold air and reached his forehead, pale from the cold.
'A wolf.'
The Heavenly Demon needed a moment to understand the situation.
'......A wolf?'
In an instant, the Heavenly Demon's eyes flashed.
Killing intent so fierce it seemed as though a blood-red light had flared in them.
The drooling wolf met the Heavenly Demon's silver eyes as they poured out killing intent, and the fur along its spine stood on end.
The wolf bristled its gray fur, then turned around and fled.
The Heavenly Demon stared blankly for a moment at the tracks the fleeing wolf had left in the snow, then slowly got to his feet.
'No different from a damned cripple.'
It was a garbage body.
Not only had it never cultivated inner arts, it was also smaller than he had originally been.
It was probably still growing.
But the bigger problem was that if he stayed stranded on this snowfield, he would freeze to death for certain.
Just then, a faint voice reached him.
"—Young Master!"
It was the voice of someone searching desperately for somebody.