TRDS 01

 Chapter 1

Return of the Sword 

The Blood Demon Cult.

Its exact name was the Asura Blood Demon God Cult, an evil religious organization that worshiped the Blood God, a deity that had come from another realm.

They deceived the people with the false doctrine that receiving the Blood God’s blessing would allow one to escape the cycle of reincarnation and the cycle of life and death, granting them the power of eternal life.

Because of them, bloodshed and screams had continued throughout the Central Plains for the past several years. It was truly a horrific tragedy that went against the laws of heaven.

However, Heaven’s net is vast and wide. Though it may appear loose and full of gaps, nothing can ever truly escape it.

Now, with Cheoseo—the season said to arrive carried on the backs of crickets on land and fluffy clouds in the sky—just around the corner, dozens of yellow flags were fluttering proudly in front of the Blood Demon Cult’s main temple.

Embroidered on them were the characters for “martial” and “forest.”

They were the banners of the Murim Alliance, an organization formed when the righteous and unorthodox factions of the martial world united as one to oppose the Blood Demon Cult’s atrocities.

The fact that the Murim Alliance’s flags were now flying over the Blood Demon Cult’s main temple meant only one thing.

The long war between the Murim Alliance and the Blood Demon Cult was finally coming to an end.

Amid the desperate screams echoing from every direction, two groups faced each other across an ancient altar deep within the Blood Demon Cult’s main temple, a place as grand as a royal palace.

One group was led by a middle-aged man dressed in a blood-red robe.

Despite the splendid robe covering his body, one side of his face looked as though it had nearly melted from severe burns. He was also naturally hunchbacked, giving him a truly hideous appearance.

He was none other than Gu Cheonrak, the Blood Demon Cult Leader, known as the Nine Heavens Blood Demon.

Facing him was the representative of the other group, a middle-aged man dressed in a white robe.

He was Namgung Hwi, the Murim Alliance Leader, who had earned the title of Azure Heaven Sword Emperor through this very war.

Namgung Hwi had once been famous by the title of Jade Kirin. Even now, having passed forty and approaching fifty, he still possessed a refined and handsome appearance.

The two men could not have been more different.

“With this, you are the only ones left. Give up this pointless resistance and surrender, Nine Heavens Blood Demon!”

Gu Cheonrak glared at Namgung Hwi as though he wanted to tear him apart.

“Hehehe. Azure Heaven Sword Emperor. How arrogant you are. But even that ends today.”

“Hmph! Being cornered must have driven you insane.”

“Kakakak! Let us see if you can remain so dignified even when death is right before your eyes!”

With an enraged shout, Gu Cheonrak pulled a talisman from inside his robes.

At the same time, an indescribable red light began to pour out from the altar.

“Alliance Leader! He’s using some kind of sorcery!”

“It is dangerous! Please retreat at once!”

Namgung Hwi nodded at his subordinates’ cries.

Gu Cheonrak, the Blood Demon Cult Leader, was famous for mastering not only the Blood Demon Cult’s supreme martial arts but also all kinds of strange and mysterious sorcery.

However, just as Namgung Hwi was about to retreat—

Fwoooosh!

The talisman in Gu Cheonrak’s hand suddenly burst into flames on its own, and Namgung Hwi’s body abruptly froze.

“What?!”

Startled by the unexpected phenomenon, Namgung Hwi hurriedly pushed the power of the Azure Vault Great Evolution Divine Art to its absolute limit.

Yet his body did not move an inch.

An enormous, translucent serpent invisible to ordinary people’s eyes had wrapped tightly around his entire body.

Gu Cheonrak smiled triumphantly at the sight.

“Hehehe. It’s useless. No matter how powerful you are, you will be helpless before the Blood Mang Talisman. This is the end, Azure Heaven Sword Emperor!”

No sooner had he finished speaking than the red light pouring from the altar grew even stronger.

Anyone could tell that something was about to happen now that the light had reached its peak.

But Namgung Hwi, unable to move because of the bizarre sorcery rather than martial arts or poison, had no way to do anything about it.

Just then—

Slash!

Kiiiiieeeeeeek!

Along with a flash of sword light, the enormous serpent wrapped around Namgung Hwi’s body let out a painful shriek.

However, it was a spiritual sound, so no one except Gu Cheonrak could hear it.

Thus, even Namgung Hwi, who suddenly regained control of his body, could only hesitate in confusion.

And at that moment, a masked man dressed in a black cloak suddenly appeared before him like a ghost.

Namgung Hwi’s eyes widened when he saw the man’s back.

‘The Eunwol Guard Leader…!’

The masked man’s identity was the leader of the Eunwol Guard, Namgung Hwi’s personal guard unit.

“That bastard…!”

Gu Cheonrak was stunned by the unexpected interference.

‘How did he cut the Blood Mang spirit?’

It should have been impossible unless the man had cultivated the profound power of the orthodox Daoist sects or the demon-subduing force of Buddhism.

But there was an even greater problem.

Gu Cheonrak had used the Blood Mang Talisman not only to restrict Namgung Hwi’s movements.

His greater purpose was to use it as a marker, ensuring that the blood light being gathered by the altar would never miss its target.

He hurriedly reached for another Blood Mang Talisman.

That was when—

“Grrk!”

The Eunwol Guard Leader suddenly stopped with a groan.

The Blood Mang, which Gu Cheonrak had thought had completely disappeared after the earlier attack, had already reappeared and wrapped itself around the man’s body.

Gu Cheonrak’s heart sank.

‘What?!’

At that moment, the light from the altar, which had reached its absolute peak, transformed into a single beam of blood-red light and shot straight toward the Eunwol Guard Leader.

“N-Nooooo!”

Regardless of Gu Cheonrak’s desperate scream, the blood-red beam instantly swallowed the Eunwol Guard Leader.

BOOOOM!

At the same time, a thunderous explosion that seemed to shake heaven and earth resounded throughout the entire stone chamber.

Fwoooosh!

The blood-red beam then pierced through the ceiling of the chamber and shot high into the sky.

It looked as though a new pillar of red light had appeared, connecting heaven and earth.

The blood-red beam continued rising as though it would never stop, but it gradually weakened before disappearing without a trace.

The Eunwol Guard Leader, who had been swallowed by the beam, was nowhere to be seen.

Even the altar from which the blood-red beam had originally been fired had vanished.

Gu Cheonrak’s face had become even paler than before as he muttered,

“D-Damn it…! The Blood Cult’s trump card…! To fail so pointlessly like this…! I-I can’t believe it…!”

Gu Cheonrak spoke with a face filled with resentment, but before he could finish, he collapsed onto the ground like a sandcastle crumbling apart.

His body soon began to shrivel up like a dried corpse.

In the end, it crumbled into dust and scattered across the ground.

It was the price he had paid for recklessly using the altar—or, more precisely, the Blood God’s artifact—without properly carrying out the necessary ritual.

However, the members of the Murim Alliance who witnessed this thoroughly misunderstood what had happened.

“It seems he intended to take us down with him…”

“The Blood Demon… He truly was a terrifying man…”

“Still, thanks to the Eunwol Guard Leader’s sacrifice, the Alliance Leader is safe…”

Hearing the murmurs of those standing there in a daze, Namgung Hwi finally came to his senses and bit his lower lip.

“Grrk… Eunwol Guard Leader. No, Heoncheon! I will never forget your loyalty, even after your death.”

With the death of the Nine Heavens Blood Demon and the sacrifice of the Eunwol Guard Leader, the long and miserable Righteous-Demonic War finally came to an end.

The Murim Alliance did not even have time to fully savor the joy of victory before they set fire to the Blood Demon Cult’s main temple.

The magnificent and enormous complex of buildings, as grand as a royal palace, was devoured by flames in an instant and reduced to ashes.

How much time had passed after that?

An unprecedented downpour began to fall over the ashes of the Blood Demon Cult.

Even though it was not the rainy season, torrential rain continued day and night for seven days.

The overflowing river swept over the Blood Demon Cult’s main temple, now reduced to nothing but ashes, like a tidal wave.

When the flood finally passed, nothing remained.

The area had become a barren wasteland so completely transformed that it was impossible to imagine that the Blood Demon Cult’s main temple had once stood there.

Winter soon arrived, and pure white snow quietly piled up before eventually melting away.

The sprouts of nameless plants carried in by the freezing eastern winds poked their green heads out when spring came.

Then, after countless cycles of growing old and bowing their heads like old men covered in the frost of time, how many seasons had passed?

Spring returned once more, covering the land with colorful flowers and trees.

The place had become a home for animals such as rabbits and deer.

It was such a peaceful sight that anyone who saw it would never have imagined that the main temple of the Blood Demon Cult, which had once bathed the entire world in blood, had stood there.

But that peace was soon shattered.

Rrrrrumble!

The field suddenly began to shake.

Startled by the sudden earthquake, the animals on the field fled in terror.

After all of them had disappeared, a short while later, a pillar of blood-red light suddenly shot up from the center of the field with a sharp whoosh, as though it were going to pierce the heavens.

Just like when the Blood God’s artifact had activated in the past.

The pillar of blood-red light that had shot high into the sky soon disappeared, and the earthquake subsided as though it had never happened.

The animals that had fled cautiously began to return.

Then they suddenly perked up their ears.

“AAAAAAAH!”

Along with a scream, something suddenly dropped from the sky.

THUD!

The loud impact startled the animals, and they fled once again.

As the clouds of dust slowly cleared, someone began coughing while brushing the dirt from his body.

“Cough, cough! Ugh, damn it. What the hell was that? I was sleeping just fine!”

The owner of the voice was a young man in his mid-twenties.

He spoke not the ordinary language of the Central Plains but a strange foreign tongue. His appearance was just as foreign as the language he spoke.

For starters, rather than wearing his hair in the traditional tied-up style, he had what was known as a see-through dandy cut.

His clothes were equally unusual.

He wore a white T-shirt and jeans.

The young man looked around and tilted his head.

“No matter how I look at it, I’ve never seen this place before. Where am I?”

He had gone to sleep and woken up in the sky, only to fall into a completely unfamiliar place.

From his perspective, it was enough to make even a ghost cry.

Yet he remained calm without showing any signs of panic.

As though this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened to him.

“First, I need to figure out where I am.”

The moment he finished speaking, the young man kicked off the ground.

In a single step, he covered more than ten jang and demonstrated an astonishing movement technique. He swiftly ran a full circle around the field before returning to where he had started.

Despite moving so quickly, he was not even breathing heavily.

Instead, for some reason, his face was filled with shock.

“No fucking way. This used to be the Blood Demon Cult’s main temple, didn’t it? Don’t tell me… I came back?”

The young man—no, Heoncheon, the Eunwol Guard Leader—realized that he had returned to the Murim world.

But rather than being happy about it, he could not hide his sadness.

He even dropped to the ground and let out a desperate cry.

“No!! If I’d waited just one more day, the final episode of Squid Game Season 3 would’ve been released! I should’ve seen the reveal about that Front Man guy or whatever with my own eyes…! Sob! This is a nightmare! A nightmare!!”

He had spent the past twenty years living in a country called Korea.

It was a society of cutting-edge civilization, clearly hundreds of years ahead of the Central Plains.

Compared to that place, the Central Plains was not merely backward. It was practically primitive.

He had spent all those years completely immersed in Korean culture, and now the thought of how he was supposed to adapt and live here again already left him feeling hopeless.

After carrying on like a complete madman for who knew how long, nothing changed with the passage of time.

In the end, Heoncheon had no choice but to force himself to accept the reality before him.

Once he had finally calmed down, he looked around.

“Whew… To think this place changed so much. Just how much time has passed?”

To get more accurate information, he first needed to travel to a nearby village or city.

Without wasting any more time, Heoncheon immediately set off.