He had no doubt his thrown punch would land on the boy’s body. As if sensing the verdict in an instant, a deep shade of defeat flashed across Moyong Seo’s face. Something soft yet firm met his hand. Cheon-oh intended to crush his ribcage right then and there.

In that exact fraction of a second, Moyong Seo’s body launched backward, moving far faster than Cheon-oh could process.

Flung the entire length of the alleyway without a moment to regain his balance, Moyong Seo slammed violently into a stack of sacks piled in the corner with a sickening thud.

The sacks absorbed the brunt of the impact, bursting open and violently spewing their contents. Plumes of fine white flour exploded outward like smoke, completely blanketing Moyong Seo’s motionless head and shoulders.

Cheon-oh slowly lowered his gaze, his eyes tracking downward in stages.

First, the pale hand firmly wrapped around his own outstretched fist. Then, the translucent veil resting delicately over that wrist. Beneath the fabric, the blurred but unmistakable silhouette of those shoulders and jawline. And finally, that deeply familiar bamboo hat.

As the un-dyed cotton robes fluttered gently, stirring a faint breeze, the scent of aged medicinal herbs finally washed over him.

Ah… 

Only after an unconscious groan slipped from his lips did Cheon-oh realize his blood was boiling with a bizarre, ecstatic thrill.

Perhaps hearing the pathetic sound escape him, his master—who had been staring down the alleyway at Moyong Seo’s collapsed form—slowly turned his head.

Even through the veil, Cheon-oh could somehow sense his master’s profound agitation.

Cho Yoon silently inspected Cheon-oh’s battered state before speaking in a measured, deliberate tone.

“…That must have been painful. You endured well,” Cho Yoon murmured. “There do not appear to be any mortal wounds, but you are bleeding heavily and risk severe scarring. We must hasten.”

“I am fine, Master.”

“You are absolutely not fine,” Cho Yoon cut him off flatly.

At his master’s stern reprimand, Cheon-oh obediently snapped his mouth shut.

Now that he thought about it, he was covered in lacerations despite fighting an opponent significantly younger than himself. He had flagrantly disobeyed the order to remain inside the guest house, and worst of all, he had forced his master to intervene physically.

If I had known this would happen, I would have crushed him the second he drew his blade, Cheon-oh thought bitterly.

Feeling utterly indifferent to his own injuries, he had casually entertained the fight, only to end up looking like a butchered mess.

As he hung his head in dejection, something incredibly soft brushed against his cheek. Looking up blankly, he saw his master gently wiping his face with the sleeve of his pristine robes. Only then did Cheon-oh realize the entire right side of his face was slick with his own blood.

For a long moment, his master’s hand hovered around his wounds in absolute silence. Cheon-oh’s perception of time, which had slowed to an agonizing crawl during the fight, gradually returned to normal.

Since his master had explicitly declared he was ‘not fine,’ Cheon-oh couldn’t offer any of his usual reassurances. He couldn’t claim it didn’t hurt, or that these scratches were nothing, or apologize for being a weak, pathetic disciple.

Finding nowhere else to look, Cheon-oh’s eyes wandered aimlessly over his master’s shoulder. Misinterpreting the boy’s restless gaze, Cho Yoon spoke with a distinctly tender, fatherly warmth.

“He will not regain consciousness anytime soon, so you may put your mind at ease. Can you briefly explain what transpired here?”

“Yes, Master,” Cheon-oh reported crisply. “While I was dining, that boy approached my table uninvited and demanded to share my seat. When I attempted to leave, he became erratically confused, eventually referencing your illustrious title. I dragged him outside to interrogate him, but he refused to offer a coherent explanation. Just as I decided to abandon the matter and return, he abruptly drew a live blade and launched a lethal ambush from behind, forcing me to engage. He introduced himself as Moyong Seo of Liaoning, and explicitly referred to me as ‘Joo Cheon-oh.'”

“I see.”

Cho Yoon delivered his customary, concise acknowledgment, his voice dripping with an ancient, profound wisdom. To Cheon-oh, it sounded as if his master already knew exactly who the boy was and precisely why this entire incident had occurred.

Perhaps this sudden, chaotic ambush truly was a random coincidence. Or perhaps it was a variable his master had already anticipated, a mere prelude or stepping stone for some grander scheme.

The boy’s manic ramblings felt far too specific to dismiss as a total accident, yet there were still far too many missing pieces for Cheon-oh to conclude this was entirely orchestrated.

Firmly believing that every single word and action his master took held profound meaning and contributed to an unfathomably intricate master plan, Cheon-oh furiously analyzed the possibilities before finally shaking his head. Whatever the truth, his current capabilities were insufficient to grasp it.

Only one absolute certainty remained.

I need to become stronger. I need to be wiser, and I need to be more perfect.

If he ever wanted to stand beside his master and view that grand, overarching design from the same elevated perspective, his current level was pathetically inadequate.

Solidifying his resolve, Cheon-oh tightly clenched his resting fists.

With the absolute pinnacle of existence actively guiding his path right before his eyes, he couldn’t afford a single moment of complacency. He eagerly anticipated the day he could finally reach out and touch that distant back.

Naturally, Cho Yoon did not possess a ‘grand, overarching master plan.’ Currently, Cho Yoon simply wanted to burst into tears.

Why?! Why?! Why is he so hurt?! What the hell did that psycho do to my kid’s face?! Look at his arms, his legs, his stomach—what is all this?! If those cuts were just a fraction of an inch deeper, this could have been catastrophic! Are you out of your damn mind?! A grown adult in a child’s body lost his temper and butchered my kid?!

While projecting an aura of absolute tranquility on the outside, Cho Yoon was internally shrieking in panic, completely paralyzed by a profound, agonizing sorrow for his battered disciple. Seeing the child he had so fiercely and meticulously raised for eight years suddenly covered in blood after just a few hours apart caused Cho Yoon’s chest to constrict and his throat to burn with unshed tears.

It felt exactly like discovering your precious, sheltered child had been brutally mugged and beaten by a grown man in a dark alley. Were he not physically bound by the rigid, dignified constraints of ‘Cho Yoon’s’ body, he would have collapsed into the dirt and wailed.

And why is that bastard even here?! In a city as massive as Tongguan, why the hell is he in this exact alley?! How did he even find Cheon-oh?! Does the protagonist just naturally magnetically attract violent incidents, and this is just an extension of that trope?! An ambush from behind?! Are you fucking insane?!

Cho Yoon’s previously neutral assessment of the protagonist, Moyong Seo, instantly plummeted through the floorboards into the abyss.

The moment he had arrived via Lightness Art and intercepted Cheon-oh’s lethal strike—gently shoving Moyong Seo backward to absorb and diffuse the fatal kinetic energy—his actions had been dictated entirely by his desire to protect Cheon-oh.

Cho Yoon felt an absolute parental obligation to shield the boy from highly toxic, traumatic experiences until he reached adulthood.

Experiencing the act of murdering another human being, or even inflicting a permanently crippling injury, was definitively harmful to a child’s psychological development.

Regardless of how resilient Cheon-oh’s mind was, or how thoroughly the opponent deserved it, Cho Yoon had to prevent it.

However, had Cheon-oh not been standing right next to him, and had Moyong Seo not currently inhabited the body of a ten-year-old child, Cho Yoon would have beaten the regressor to a pulp himself out of sheer, boiling hatred. He desperately wanted to sprint over to the unconscious boy, grab him by the collar, shake him awake, and scream in his face.

The only thing keeping his erupting fury in check was the bleeding child standing before him. Forcing his rational mind into overdrive, Cho Yoon frantically analyzed their catastrophic reality.

First and foremost, I need to treat Cheon-oh’s wounds. Second, now that Moyong Seo has met Cheon-oh, there is absolutely no way to hide the fact that this timeline has violently derailed from his past life. He mentioned my title? That means he either deduced I crafted the medicine that saved Moyong Jeong and Moyong Dan, or he somehow knows I snatched Cheon-oh and raised him. It’s almost certainly the former…

If categorized strictly by the orthodox (Righteous) and unorthodox (Demonic) moral alignments of the martial world, the protagonist of The Returned Hero, Moyong Seo, was undeniably a ‘Demonic’ archetype.

In his previous life, Moyong Seo had lost his family and his entire clan at a devastatingly young age.

Following the death of the Clan Head, Moyong Jeong, the eldest son, Moyong Dan—the undisputed genius known as the Seven Star Sword—ascended to leadership. However, every decision Dan made as Clan Head was utterly baffling and disastrous.

Eventually, fabricated evidence ‘proving’ Moyong Dan had colluded with the Demonic Cult surfaced.

Overnight, the Moyong Clan of Liaoning became public enemies of the martial world, their estate reduced to a sea of fire exactly like Cheon-oh’s Seomun Clan.

Only then did Moyong Dan regain his sanity.

Shoving a raven-shaped necklace into Seo’s hands, Dan shoved his younger brother into a secret escape tunnel before remaining behind to face a gruesome death.

Stripped of everything, Moyong Seo miraculously survived and encountered a highly skilled wandering vagrant, following the wanderer across the Central Plains. However, just as Seo attained a decent level of martial prowess through the wandering vagrant’s teachings, the Demonic Cult—which had by then conquered the Central Plains—murdered the only family he had left.

Consumed by an abyss of hatred stemming from these back-to-back tragedies, Moyong Seo dedicated his life to a singular goal: erasing the Demonic Cult from the face of the earth. However, the martial arts he learned from a street-wandering mercenary possessed a hard ceiling, and Moyong Seo ultimately died a meaningless, pathetic death, unable to breach the wall of the Profound Realm.

Upon regressing to his seven-year-old self, Moyong Seo never once entertained noble, heroic thoughts like, ‘I shall restore the lost justice to this corrupted martial world!’ 

Instead, he possessed absolutely no rigid moral convictions or unbreakable mental fortitude.

Operating under the twisted philosophy that ‘the weak naturally deserve to have everything stolen from them,’ he sought strength through any means necessary, determined to defeat evil by becoming something infinitely worse.

Moyong Seo possessed only one objective: ‘In this life, I will not allow a single thing to be taken from me.’

Consequently, whenever an enemy threatened ‘his people’—the family or friends he had lost in his past life—the novel frequently depicted him completely losing his sanity, launching into feral, blood-soaked rampages.

A significant portion of the readership adored scenes where the unhinged protagonist unilaterally slaughtered his enemies or achieved violently desperate, razor-thin victories.

Furthermore, Moyong Seo was a character defined by profound trauma. The stark contrast between his usual brazen, sadistic cruelty and his moments of raw, psychological fragility was a major part of his appeal.

Fully aware of this dynamic, the protagonist would often intentionally feign madness or deliberately act pathetic to manipulate his allies’ sympathy.

Of course, that appeal only existed when reading a novel written strictly from Moyong Seo’s perspective.

Thrust into this horrific reality, Cho Yoon harbored absolutely zero goodwill toward the psychopath who had just butchered his kid.

Anyway, that rabid, traumatized maniac just discovered that Cheon-oh—who should currently be rotting in the Demonic Cult—is alive and well. What happens now?

Cho Yoon’s prediction that Moyong Seo would immediately attempt to execute Cheon-oh to eliminate a ‘future threat’ had proven terrifyingly accurate. But the real problem was the aftermath.

What happens when the protagonist realizes Cheon-oh is already vastly stronger than him? What happens when he realizes a completely unidentified, transcendent martial god is actively backing the future Sovereign of the Underworld?

Cho Yoon couldn’t even begin to guess.

Part of the problem lay in Moyong Seo’s inherently unstable, unpredictable psychology, but the primary reason was far more concrete.

Cho Yoon had simply altered too much over the past eight years.

He had forfeited the right to claim he ‘knew the future’ a very long time ago.

Sensing a massive, apocalyptic wave of karma preparing to crash down upon him, Cho Yoon clamped a firm hand onto Cheon-oh’s shoulder.

Whenever confronted with a convoluted, unmanageable crisis orchestrated by other people’s trauma, Cho Yoon’s solution was always exactly the same.

We’re running away!