Allen J. Asron.
That was my name.
No, to be precise, it used to be my name.
Why the past tense?
Hear me out.
As you could probably tell from my middle name and surname, I was an imperial prince of the Asron Empire.
The life of royalty meant having wealth, honor, and power in the palm of your hand, enjoying a life of luxury without a care in the world… my ass.
A bloody struggle over the right of succession raged without end.
Plots and schemes ran rampant.
Of the three imperial princes, I was the Third Prince, born with the weakest political backing.
The Empress came from a ducal house, and the First Imperial Consort came from a marquess house.
But the Second Imperial Consort—my mother—was merely the daughter of an impoverished viscount.
The Emperor had fallen in love with her beauty at first sight and brought her into the palace.
As a result, our lives were like candles flickering in the wind.
The Emperor might have been a wise ruler to his people, but he was no good father to his children.
He stood by and watched the struggle for succession unfold within the imperial palace.
No, it would be more accurate to say that he tacitly condoned it.
It was an unmistakable message: let the strongest take the throne.
And so I fought desperately.
I built my strength and gathered allies.
My mother died along the way, but even then, I never gave up on surviving until the very end.
…Because that had been my mother’s final request.
In the end.
I emerged as the final victor in the struggle for succession.
Up to this point, it sounded like a happy ending.
You would think the hard part was over and only good days lay ahead, would you not?
“I, Varkan K. Asron, for the everlasting glory and boundless prosperity of our great empire, hereby appoint the Crown Prince who shall succeed to the imperial throne….”
It happened during my investiture as Crown Prince, when I thought everything was finally over.
Without warning, I heard a whisper in an incomprehensible language.
‘Magic…?’
I was bewildered.
Who in the world…?
No, more importantly, how could anyone possibly do something like this?
The Emperor, the entire imperial family, and all the most prominent nobles of the empire were gathered here.
The Imperial Guard Knights should have been on the highest level of alert, while the Court Mages maintained defensive magic around the hall…?
The incantation continued.
The voice was chilling, like something sharp scraping against metal.
I grew increasingly anxious.
‘Why is the defensive magic not activating?!’
There was something else strange about the situation.
The nobles remained perfectly still, wearing mildly bored expressions.
The Emperor continued reading the proclamation in a dry, emotionless voice.
‘Could it be… Am I the only one who can hear this?’
Growing desperate, I raised my bowed head slightly to warn the Emperor.
But the moment our eyes met—
‘Uh…… Father?’
He was laughing silently.
Grinning.
It was a cold, horrifying smile.
An unmistakable sneer.
The instant I saw it, my mind went completely blank, and I could no longer think.
Then, as I stood there in a daze, the final trigger words of the completed spell reached my ears.
[фхцч шъыэ.]
BZZZZT….
At that moment, a pitch-black hole suddenly appeared beneath my feet.
FWOOOOOSH―
“Aaaaaaargh!”
My body was slowly dragged into it. Starting at my toes, an excruciating pain tore through me as though my entire body were being ground apart, accompanied by an immense surge of Dark Mana.
“Aaaaaah!”
“H-Hurry! Summon the Court Mages……!”
“The Imperial Guard! Where is the Imperial Guard?!”
The ceremonial hall erupted into chaos.
But it was already too late for anyone to do anything.
“Urgh… Damn it!”
SWOOOSH― SWOOOOOSH―!
I drew upon my Aura and struggled desperately to escape, but it was useless.
The more I fought, the deeper I was dragged into the darkness.
“Kgh… hrrrk……!”
The darkness devouring my body surged up to my chin in an instant.
Even screaming had become difficult.
And through it all, the Emperor merely watched.
‘Damn it……!’
Something had gone terribly wrong.
What had I overlooked?
Father… Could the Emperor’s behavior somehow be connected to this dark magic?
I desperately racked my brain, trying to understand what was happening.
But my once-clear consciousness steadily faded, and all sensation throughout my body began to dull.
‘Ha… This is how it ends?’
It was infuriating.
To meet such a futile, meaningless end….”
Despair overwhelmed me.
Then the darkness swallowed me completely, and my consciousness was severed.
At the time.
I thought I had died.
But when I opened my eyes again—
I found myself in another world known as ‘Murim.’
* * *
Who was it that said life was an endless succession of struggles?
Even in the new world where I awoke, I had to fight constantly to survive.
There, I became the ‘Heavenly Demon,’ the leader of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult, while those damned hypocritical bastards of the Orthodox Faction started the Orthodox-Demonic War for the sake of their pathetic hold on power.
Countless lives were sacrificed in that war, regardless of whether they followed the Orthodox or Demonic Path.
…Fucking lunatics.
SWISH.
“Any last words?”
I now held the tip of my sword against the last surviving member of those lunatics.
The old man’s right arm and left leg had already been severed.
He was the mastermind behind the entire catastrophe—the Martial Alliance Leader.
“Heh, heh heh… How regrettable. When I killed your master, I should have found some way… to kill you alongside him.”
“Bullshit. Shut the hell up.”
The harsh years I had endured had coarsened my tongue considerably.
It would have been unimaginable when I was still the Third Prince.
“F*ck it. Just die.”
SHNK―
It had taken ten long years for this sword to pierce that heart.
COUGH!
“Kgh, ugh… urk…….”
The Martial Alliance Leader coughed up a mouthful of blood.
He choked and gasped as though he could no longer breathe, then let his head fall limply.
“Ha, at last…….”
The Orthodox-Demonic War, which had stained the Central Plains with blood, was over.
And my master, the previous Heavenly Demon who had taken me in, had finally been avenged….
“Ah, the Alliance Leader has finally…….”
CLATTER―
Only after witnessing the Alliance Leader’s death did the Orthodox martial artists let their weapons fall from their hands.
“You dare murder the Alliance Leader……!”
“Heavenly Demon! This blood debt… will be repaid!”
Some of them could not bring themselves to release their weapons and glared at me with bloodshot eyes, as though they wished to tear me apart.
Meanwhile, the members of the Divine Cult wept tears of joy.
“At last… At last, we have avenged the previous Cult Leader and the brothers who died that day!”
“The Heavenly Demon Returns, and All People Bow in Reverence!!!”
“The Heavenly Demon Returns, and All People Bow in Reverence!!!”
They all prostrated themselves before me as I stood blankly over the Alliance Leader’s corpse.
The Heavenly Demon Returns.
All People Bow in Reverence.
It was the central doctrine of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult.
It meant that the Founding Heavenly Demon, who had established the Divine Cult in the distant past, would descend upon the world once more, and when that day came, all people under heaven would look up to him with reverence and awe.
Yet as every member of the Divine Cult bowed joyfully before me—the man who had brought all under heaven beneath the Demonic Path—I felt no happiness whatsoever.
‘This emptiness… What is it…….’
It felt as though a vast hole had been torn through my chest.
For ten years, I had lived solely to avenge my master and my brothers, and at last, I had succeeded.
But the dead would never return, and once all the rage and hatred had drained away, my heart felt completely hollow.
‘This is f*cked….’
Overcome by uncertainty, I raised my head and looked toward the sky.
Rain began to fall from clouds that had looked ready to burst at any moment.
SHHHHHHH―
The rain that day fell equally upon the heads of the Orthodox martial artists and the followers of the Divine Cult.
TRICKLE, TRICKLE.
Blood diluted by the rainwater flowed endlessly away.
Thinner.
Ever thinner.
As I stared blankly at the rainwater streaming past beneath the torrential downpour….
A thought suddenly occurred to me.
‘I have accomplished everything now.’
Watching the blood that had dyed the earth red wash away, I sank deep into thought.
‘If revenge is this hollow… were all the battles I fought over the past ten years meaningless?’
…No.
Revenge might have been hollow, but it still had to be carried out.
It was the right of those who had been wronged and the responsibility of those who had survived.
‘Right, f*ck… The bastards who deserve to die should be killed.’
Besides, I still had another vengeance to carry out.
It was an old grudge I had buried deep within my memories during the twenty years I had spent in Murim, fighting desperately to survive.
‘Father… No, Emperor!’
GRIND.
The memory of that horrifying smile, which still appeared in my dreams from time to time, made me grind my teeth without realizing it.
The emptiness that had briefly filled my eyes vanished, replaced by a sharp gleam like the edge of a honed blade.
FLASH―
KRAK-BOOM!
Lightning flashed, followed by a thunderous roar.
SHHHHHHH―
The pounding rain drowned out every other sound.
On the day the Orthodox-Demonic War ended.
I resolved to return to Arvania, no matter what it took.
To carry out my long-awaited revenge.
Four years passed after the Orthodox-Demonic War came to an end.
* * *
The Verdin Marquisate stood on the frontier of the Asron Empire.
It was a small territory that had struggled to develop because it bordered the Behamag Mountains, which teemed with monsters.
At that moment, a spirited, hulking knight and a young boy were swinging wooden swords in the training ground of the lord’s castle.
“Hahaha! Excellent, Third Young Master! Let us go one more time!”
SWISH―
The knight with dark brown hair launched himself toward the boy.
He was Haver Randolph, the Knight Commander.
“All you have to do is what you did before!”
WHOOSH―
His green eyes flashed, and before anyone knew it, his wooden sword was already descending toward the boy’s head.
“Urgh… Haver! Do you think that is as easy as you make it sound?!”
The boy bit his lip and spoke as though he were struggling, but his body had already reacted, moving naturally to the left.
At the same time, the wooden sword in his hand flowed exquisitely from a high guard toward the lower right diagonal.
CLACK!
The boy’s wooden sword struck Haver’s descending blade at an angle, diverting its path sharply to the right.
Considering his age, it was an astonishingly skilled deflection.
“Wooooah! Third Young Master, you truly are incredible!”
Haver snorted excitedly as he shouted in admiration.
His enthusiasm surging, he immediately brought the sword that had been knocked toward his lower right sweeping back up diagonally from the left.
“One more time! We are going one more time!”
WHOOOOOSH―
The wooden sword came at the boy with increasing power and ferocity.
The boy’s eyes narrowed sharply at the sight.
“Ah, f*ck! Take it easy already, Haver!”
“Hahaha! You still have plenty of energy left, Third Young Master! Then I shall put in even more effort myself!”
Aaargh!
Please, just stop already!
They had already been swinging their swords for three hours.
The more attacks he blocked, the more fiercely Haver’s enthusiasm burned.
‘Damn it… If I block this one, he will only attack again.’
Should I just stop blocking and take the hit with my body?
Exhausted beyond endurance, the boy decided to deliberately release his wooden sword at the moment of impact.
But just then.
“Enough!”
A deep, powerful voice rang out from somewhere nearby.
When the boy turned, he saw a middle-aged man standing beside the training ground, his jet-black hair neatly combed back.
“Wh-When did you arrive, my lord?!”
Haver immediately bent at the waist in a perfect right angle.
How many people in the lord’s castle could make the Knight Commander show such deference?
“Ahem! I have not been here long, so think nothing of it.”
The man possessed a face almost identical to the boy’s, save for his rather cold gray eyes and the mustache whose tips curled slightly upward.
This handsome middle-aged man was Marquis Pervan Verdin.
“Haa, haa…….”
The boy drew several ragged breaths.
“Your son… Evan, greets you, Father.”
Jet-black hair and skin so pale that it was almost bloodless.
A prominent nose, smooth facial contours, and sharply angled eyes.
Every feature was identical to the Marquis’s, but his blue eyes bore no resemblance to him whatsoever.
This beautiful young boy was—
‘Evan Verdin.’
The Marquis’s illegitimate son, whom he had formally acknowledged three months ago, and the youngest member of House Verdin, now known as its Third Young Master.
He was none other than… ‘me.’