Sensing the rushing blades was purely instinct. He knew it would be too late if he turned to see. Cheon-oh twisted his shoulders and whipped his right hand back; just before the tip could pierce him, he struck the flat of the blade with the back of his hand. If the sword had been standing upright instead of lying sideways, half his hand would’ve been cleaved off in that single, decisive move.

The razor-sharp blade grazed Cheon-oh’s back and violently deflected off his evasive maneuver. Through the shower of severed, flying hair, the boy’s hardened face came into focus. As Cheon-oh kicked off the ground and glided smoothly backward, the sword brutally swept through the exact space he had occupied a fraction of a second prior.

Watching Cheon-oh evade the strike and establish a safe distance, Moyong Seo erupted into a capricious, erratic laugh.

“I knew it! You have learned martial arts!” the boy crowed. “And you still claim you have no connection to the Demonic Cult?!”

“…”

What does learning martial arts have to do with the Demonic Cult? Cheon-oh wondered dryly. It’s not as if they hold a monopoly on martial arts in this world.

However, Cheon-oh knew that attempting to debate logic with a lunatic would only waste his breath. As long as this boy remained entrenched in his massive delusion, entirely convinced of his own manufactured reality, nothing Cheon-oh said would penetrate that thick skull.

Therefore, Cheon-oh snapped his mouth shut, widened his stance, and lowered his center of gravity. Blood streamed down the back of his raised, defensive hand, soaking his wrist. It seemed his skin had been deeply lacerated while deflecting the blade, yet his expression remained utterly impassive.

Moyong Seo stood in an obnoxiously arrogant posture, casually tapping the tip of his sword against the ground. He wore a profoundly bored, cynical expression that looked grotesquely unnatural on the face of a child barely ten years old. Yet, considering it fit him infinitely better than the bright, cheerful facade he had worn inside the guest house, it seemed this was his true nature.

“I’ve realized a few things in my life,” Moyong Seo drawled. “Whenever you leave loose ends, you always end up regretting it. Those sons of bitches always have the longest lifespans and the absolute worst grudges.”

“…”

“I don’t know exactly how things got this twisted,” the boy continued, “but I think I’ll only find peace of mind once I’ve killed you. Don’t resent me too much, even if you haven’t actually done anything yet. Just consider it karma from your past life.”

Leaving behind those incomprehensible words, Moyong Seo launched himself forward in a single, explosive burst. For a movement initiated by a light tap of the toes, the sheer velocity was terrifying.

Armed with nothing but his bare hands to deflect the blade, Cheon-oh calmly ducked inside the guard to evade the upward slash aimed to bisect him.

He backpedaled continuously to escape the relentlessly pursuing flurry of strikes. Glancing down, he noticed the side of his waist was already stained crimson. The previous attack had apparently found its mark.

I was certain I dodged all of them, Cheon-oh noted blankly.

Moyong Seo also seemed dissatisfied with the exchange. Frowning deeply, he demanded, “Why aren’t you drawing a weapon? Do you not have a sword? Are you still not taking this seriously?”

“…”

As the boy noted, Cheon-oh had nothing to draw. His training wooden sword was back at Estate of Deep Mists, and his master’s Sudden Rain Sword was safely stored in their guest house room. However, instead of pointing out that he was unarmed and pleading for the lunatic to stop attacking an innocent bystander, Cheon-oh asked an entirely bizarre question.

“Inflicting a wound with a live blade… that constitutes a definitive, lethal threat, correct?”

“What?”

“May I interpret this to mean we have no potential for a long-term relationship, nor any room for future amicable interactions?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Completely ignoring Moyong Seo’s irritated confusion, Cheon-oh retreated into his own thoughts. He recalled a teaching his master had imparted long ago—a doctrine that had formed the absolute bedrock of his approach to interpersonal relationships. Briefly tracing his bleeding waist with one hand to confirm his physical state, Cheon-oh spoke quietly.

“Since this is such a unilateral, completely irrational act of hostility, there is no need to meticulously debate the nuances… I shall not overcomplicate this.”

Staring down at the blood smeared across his palm, Cheon-oh wiped it casually onto his trousers and resumed his fundamental martial stance.

Watching Cheon-oh move with the mechanical, unmotivated precision of a programmed automaton, Moyong Seo let out a scoff of utter disbelief. Instantly, his face hardened into a mask of pure ice. Leveling his sword, he snarled.

“There’s a limit to how much you can look down on me. Did you really think I spent all this time doing absolutely nothing?”

“You certainly talk a lot for someone hoarding all the cowardly advantages,” Cheon-oh retorted.

“Honor doesn’t save lives,” Moyong Seo spat. “And I have absolutely zero desire to debate morality with you.”

The distance between them evaporated in a flash.

Having not yet mastered the profound art of catching a live blade barehanded, Cheon-oh slipped gracefully past the strike and smoothly snatched Moyong Seo’s wrist. He intended to seamlessly transition into a joint lock and hurl the boy away, but his body seized the moment he registered the sheer, crushing weight transferring from the boy’s arm to his own shoulder.

It was a level of physical strength that was biologically impossible for a boy more than a full head shorter than him.

In the fraction of a second Cheon-oh felt a flicker of genuine shock at the unexpected resistance, Moyong Seo thrust his face forward, closing the gap to a hair’s breadth. The boy’s gaze clung to him with a sticky, suffocating intensity, as if violently dissecting Cheon-oh’s very identity. His eyes burned with an opaque, obsessive paranoia and raw, unfiltered desire.

I knew he was crazy, but he has completely lost his mind.

The moment Cheon-oh registered the murky, blind fanaticism in those eyes, Moyong Seo’s lips split into a grotesque grin. It was a vile, degraded joy—the look of a man who had violently extracted another’s deepest secret to use as leverage, or the absolute certainty of a predator realizing it could effortlessly crush and toy with its prey.

“You’re… really not that strong, are you?” Moyong Seo mocked.

A long, horizontal gash ripped across Cheon-oh’s chest, sending a spray of blood into the air.

Once again, the physical blade had not visibly connected.

Twisting violently to break Cheon-oh’s grip, Moyong Seo utilized the momentum to execute a spinning back kick aimed directly at Cheon-oh’s face.

Cheon-oh leaned back just enough to evade the heel, but he was immediately forced to weather a sporadic, relentless storm of razor-sharp slashes.

Amidst his ferocious offensive, Moyong Seo erupted into genuine, deranged laughter and began babbling uncontrollably.

“Your footwork is decent! Your eyes aren’t bad! But is that really it?! I almost have to believe you when you say you have no connection to the Demonic Cult. There is absolutely no way those bastards would raise you to be this pathetic! Haha!”

“…”

There is absolutely no way they would raise you to be this pathetic?

The moment a deep, vivid crease finally marred Cheon-oh’s brow—which had remained perfectly placid despite accumulating countless wounds—a deafening, concussive BANG! echoed through the narrow alleyway.

The loose dirt and debris blanketing the unpaved ground erupted violently upward, completely obscuring vision. Moyong Seo, having barely managed to block the sudden, explosive burst of internal qi with the flat of his blade, felt the muscles beneath his eyes twitch uncontrollably. His wrist, having absorbed an impact so monstrously heavy it felt barbaric, began to throb a painful second later.

From within the settling dust cloud, Cheon-oh spoke, his voice entirely devoid of emotion.

“This is my very first time actually ‘fighting’ someone. While I have studied martial arts, I have never once unleashed lethal techniques against a human being. The extent of my combat experience consists solely of sparring with my senior siblings several years ago. Since then, my master has personally served as my sparring partner, but those sessions consisted entirely of him unilaterally absorbing my attacks rather than genuinely fighting back.”

“…Hah?”

“Since you seem to harbor absurdly disrespectful misconceptions regarding my master’s teachings, allow me to clarify.”

Honestly, I have absolutely no idea why I feel compelled to share my master’s wisdom with a piece of trash like you, Cheon-oh muttered under his breath.

He casually shook out his right hand. Blood from his lacerations beaded at his fingertips and splattered against the alley wall.

The vast, oceanic reservoir of internal energy coiled tightly within his danjeon slowly began to unfurl, melting seamlessly into every fiber of his being.

Every individual muscle fiber pulsed, roaring to life. A thick, white mist accompanied his long exhale. Having flawlessly inherited his master’s martial arts—which emphasized absolute harmony with nature—Cheon-oh’s previously feeble, undetectable presence began to rapidly, monstrously expand.

The fact that his aura was flaring so violently, rather than blending seamlessly into the environment like his master’s, was entirely due to his own inadequacy. Yet, while Cheon-oh was currently frowning in self-deprecation over his perceived weakness, Moyong Seo swallowed hard and frantically adjusted his grip on his sword. It was exactly like watching a terrifying demonic beasts slowly peel off its human skin.

“My master explicitly wished for me to remain unaccustomed to indiscriminate violence,” Cheon-oh stated coldly. “Initially, I questioned the purpose of cultivating martial arts if I wasn’t allowed to adapt to its brutality. However, looking at you, I finally understand his wisdom.”

“…What the hell are you trying to say?”

“You are the end result of a child raised while overexposed to excessive violence,” Cheon-oh declared. “I have absolutely no desire to become a rude, logic-defying animal like you.”

“…Haha, to think I’d live to hear Joo Cheon-oh lecture me about morality.”

Having utterly upended Moyong Seo’s psychological state with a few precise words, Cheon-oh surged forward, stepping directly inside the trajectory of the aggressively pursuing blade. He threw his shoulder back, drawing his elbow back as far as it would go, and meticulously curled his fingers into a tight fist, starting from the pinky.

When he had passively absorbed the one-sided assault, the sensation slicing his flesh hadn’t been cold steel. It was an invisible, highly compressed density of air shrouding the blade—attacks that left deep gashes even when he completely dodged the physical metal, as if the sword itself had magically extended.

Cheon-oh was absolutely certain this was the ‘Sword Qi‘ his master had once described.

It was a technique achieved when a martial artist accumulated a specific threshold of internal energy, allowing them to project it outward to coat the blade, exponentially increasing both its durability and its lethal range.

Those capable of this feat were hailed as peak-level masters, while those who could further condense it into ‘Sword Aura’ were revered as transcendent masters.

However, his master had also dismissed it all as ultimately useless.

No matter how vastly or thickly you coat a sword in internal energy, it remains nothing more than a superficial shell. If you wish to strike harder and reach further, the true power must reside in the attack itself, not the weapon. Why do we fear landslides and tsunamis? Not because the dirt and water composing them are inherently special, but because of the sheer, devastating momentum they carry.

Fortifying the weapon is a secondary concern. Only when your weapon threatens to shatter under the sheer force of your own attack should you bleed off a fraction of your internal energy to stabilize it.

A sword is, at best, a mere extension of your hands and feet. The only two things that truly matter are how flawlessly your body obeys your commands, and the absolute limits to which you can push that physical vessel.

Therefore, the true art lay in drawing every ounce of power from the entire body into a single focal point and releasing it instantaneously. It required solidifying the bones like steel to prevent them from shattering under the strain, while keeping the muscles fluid and elastic like a drawn bowstring.

Cheon-oh ruthlessly pinned the boy’s sword arm with his off-hand, ensuring evasion was impossible. For a fleeting second, a gentle breeze swirled around his feet. The kinetic energy coiled tightly in his powerful lower body spiraled upward, surging through his waist and pooling explosively at the very tip of his knuckles.

Driven by the violent, snapping elasticity of his fully contracted back and shoulders, Cheon-oh launched his fist forward like a fired cannonball.

The distance between his knuckles and the boy’s sternum felt agonizingly vast, the movement excruciatingly slow.

No… It’s me. I am simply that fast. 

He could see everything.

He saw Moyong Seo desperately trying to channel strength to break free, only to realize with dawning horror that he was utterly outmatched in raw internal capacity.

He saw the boy’s face bleach white with sheer terror as the trapped body locked up in panic.

He even saw Moyong Seo frantically attempting to scrape together a pitiful barrier of qi over the center of his chest in a desperate, belated bid for defense.

It was so absurd, so profoundly pathetic, that Cheon-oh actually felt a wave of refreshing clarity wash over him. 

If I completely shatter his ribcage right here, at the very least, he won’t be able to spew any more of that disrespectful garbage.

Reflected in the terrified boy’s widening eyes was Cheon-oh’s face.

Seomun Cheon-oh was smiling brightly.