Chapter 2: 1. Star-Sucking Grand Art (Knockoff)

His lower abdomen was hot.

It felt as though something other than blood was circulating through him. Ever since his dimensional displacement, he had continually felt the flow of qi over his skin.

At some point, he realized that flow had entered this body as well. And while it moved with perfect freedom outside his body, within him it thudded as though trapped inside his lower abdomen.

Were his acupoints blocked?

He had taken spiritual medicine, but perhaps a body already in its twenties, its meridians blocked, simply could not bear spiritual energy.

"I didn’t cross dimensions just to be stopped by something like this!"

But he refused to care about that.

A sudden surge of blood rose into his mouth, leaving the thick taste of iron on his tongue, but he ignored it. Opening his closed eyes, Lee Yohan slowly guided the flow in his lower abdomen into his arm.

Clouds of dust slowly drew apart and split. His skin sensed that currents of air, seemingly made up of differing weights and sizes, were reacting to his forceful movements.

Lee Yohan’s arm merely pushed through them. When he tensed his lower abdomen and breathed as though wringing every last drop from his entire body, energy gradually gathered in that arm.

The flow streaming into his arm churned, accompanied by tremors that seemed to howl with every inhale and exhale.

It was as though the mountains trembled and the heavens wept.

The dantian acupoint in his lower abdomen, practically the center of his physical body, perceived every one of those flows. Resonating with the flow of spiritual energy outside his body, he felt strength beyond what his muscles could produce settle into each finger and every joint in his arm.

It was internal energy.

The true qi of his cultivation method, accompanied by the sensation that the muscles beneath the skin of his arm were themselves stretching.

"Circulating my qi...!"

He suddenly felt a strange pleasure amid the pain of that reaction.

Was it because, these days, there were so many horned bastards trying to grab him whenever they saw him? As he began to acquire power, his vision seemed to blur.

Not with tears. If anything, his already red vision seemed to grow darker, but he ignored that too and unclenched and clenched his fist.

He exerted force against the qi pressing down as if to obstruct his fingers, then slowly curled his open hand shut, regulating his body.

As he repeated that process—releasing power, drawing it in, releasing it, drawing it in—and circulated it without omission through every corner of his body, he felt it at some point.

Woooooo...

As his fist closed, the boundless current of qi blanketing this world twisted.

It had not affected a particularly wide area, nor had it caused any great disturbance, but the result was clear. As a result of circulating qi and operating his cultivation method, the currents that had surrounded his hand vanished for a moment... and all of them were caught within his grasp.

Slowly looking down at his palm, which had somehow become rough, he came to his conclusion.

This was no ordinary cultivation method.

This was... the exceedingly wicked [Star-Sucking Grand Art]...!

And wasn’t the Star-Sucking Grand Art a demonic art??

"...Wh-wh-what!!!!!"

Fuck this!

I became a demon cultivator?!

*

But on second thought...

Maybe becoming a demon cultivator was not such a bad thing.

Watching the sun rise in the bizarre-looking sky of Terra, Lee Yohan calmly defended himself inside an ownerless shack.

What mattered, in the end, was whether one used demonic arts for good.

Even if he used something evil and unorthodox, there would be no problem as long as its user was a chivalrous hero, wouldn’t there?

Therefore, there would be no issue with this Star-Sucking Grand Art as long as he used it kindly.

The pulling force emanating from his palm. The tangible sensation of qi in the air being drawn in and accumulating ever so faintly in his body and lower abdomen.

Granted, after a few experiments, he had realized that the energy accumulated in his lower abdomen generated that pulling force, and had consequently become seized by the wicked desire to eat more spirit stones so that the force would grow stronger...

But that was not important.

For some reason, there were quite a lot of horned people in the shantytowns of Kazdel who had become blackened, stone-like things.

He recalled seeing piles of such stone-corpse lumps throughout the streets of abandoned shacks, but that was not important either!!

"Oripathy..."

Only now that he had come to his senses did he remember it.

Still, no matter what...

Eating corpses made from horned people who had turned to stone?

If he did something like that, what would make him any different from the horned bastards?

"No, of course it’s not that bad."

...Come to think of it, it was not quite that bad, and perhaps it was even something worth doing from his perspective. Regardless, his superior modern human capacity for empathy told him that it was a little too much.

It was not simply because of the saying that one might become a horned bastard by eating horned bastards.

He merely thought that trying to eat the spirit stones from corpses so readily, and seeking out corpses to obtain them, would not look very good.

After all, the horned bastards of Kazdel—otherwise known as Sarkaz—already looked upon him poorly for looting corpses.

If he started hunting down spirit stones to eat too, they would disdain him even more. Well, perhaps they might stop at disdain if he were pulling stones from living people’s bodies. But if he went about seeking not just the belongings of the dead, but their corpses themselves, in this ruined city, it might not end at mere contempt.

"Being hunted down, seriously? Just because I rummaged through a few corpses and pinched an arm or leg or two..."

And it would probably become even more dangerous than being chased by red-eyed bastards was now.

The horned bastards had their own tradition of inheriting and using the belongings of the dead, but he was an outsider, while they were locals.

Following that logic, they would probably turn him into meat soup.

Entirely certain of it, he sprawled on the floor and lamented.

"...Just like everyone says, things were at least better here when the Queen ruled."

It had only been two years since he had fallen into Kazdel.

By Terra’s calendar, he had arrived in 1085, and had not even experienced a full year under the person called the Queen, but still.

In truth, the ethnic character of the races living in Kazdel was already utterly hopeless, so they would have been just as barbaric even under the Queen’s rule. But as a proud son of Korea, for real, he could tolerate that degree of barbarism on the assumption that the country was ruled by a cute girl Queen.

Of course, present-day Kazdel was ruled not by a cute girl Queen, but by a lunatic man!

"Drop dead, Theresis. Your name looks like a woman’s name, too."

Thus, after mentally butchering the horned bastards of Kazdel into seventeen pieces, he slowly rose to his feet.

"Either way, I still need spirit stones."

He had been wasting time on pointless thoughts, but the survival experience he had accumulated over two years in hell-Kazdel was not going anywhere.

For some reason, he was violently hungry, but that was normal. It had absolutely no effect on his thinking.

So, sitting cross-legged, he began thinking efficiently.

"Whether it’s to grow stronger, properly refine the Star-Sucking Grand Art, or sell them... I need spirit stones. The more, the better."

Then how was he supposed to obtain spirit stones, that universal commodity?

Inside, the [Military Commission] and mercenaries roamed about collecting valuables and food. Outside, [Babel] and Babel rioters simultaneously distributed relief supplies and carried out sabotage.

Unless he looted corpses or killed horned bastards, obtaining those damned spirit stones—those damned chunks of Originium—was no easy task.

Perhaps he could get some if he went to the mines at the other end of Kazdel, in the direction opposite the outskirts where he was staying.

But weren’t the horned bastards working there risking their lives too?

He had heard that they mined and sold it much like gold under Japanese occupation, and that it all went off to somewhere called Leithanien.

More importantly, though, was that in those transactions the Leithanien horned bastards exchanged spirit stones for food, and in this place, where there was already nothing to eat, food was more precious than life.

"If I take the spirit stones they use to trade for food, they’ll try to kill me."

And if a whole mob of prospective Babel rioters sincerely tried to kill him, he would probably die.

It was depressing, but compared to the horned bastards, he was physically weak. He was weaker even than their children.

So... with his Star-Sucking Grand Art barely at one-tenth mastery, he needed another way.

He racked his brains.

Somehow, he could hear water dripping, so he used it as white noise and put his brain through a centrifuge.

And as a result...

Having cast off the two most useless emotions in Kazdel, conscience and guilt, he reached a conclusion.

"Let’s loot corpses."

After going in circles, he had returned to where he started.

"How much lower can my reputation possibly get, you fucking assholes?"

Yes, that was the truth.

The horned bastards’ view of him was endlessly complicated, and since they had not even spoken the same language two years ago, the fact that he was an outsider had been exposed long ago.

Without Lee Yohan’s genius talent for languages, he would not have even lasted two years before becoming meat soup.

That was the degree of contempt and exclusion directed at him in Kazdel right now. So if he was going to be despised, all he had to do was live in a way that gave them a reason to despise him!

"...How many years of cultivation do I even have right now?"

He did not know, but he made up his mind.

Until he had accumulated at least thirty years’ worth of cultivation, he would stay even quieter than before. Quietly, moving only at night, he would gather high-quality spirit stones from the bodies of those who had burst apart and become stone lumps, accumulating spiritual energy.

Or was it demonic qi rather than spiritual energy?

...Either way, he resolved to keep building his power.

Lee Yohan’s resolve hardened as his gaze turned to the book written in Chinese characters that lay beside him.

He was firmly resolved not to stop gathering demonic qi through the Star-Sucking Grand Art until he was ready to properly wield the [Thirteen Forms of Shaking Thunder]...

Only an assassin personally trained by the Regent watched from afar, wary of Lee Yohan’s strange sensations.

What she had seen since last night.

Watching him put Originium into his mouth and chew it, she had unhesitatingly concluded that the outsider who had fallen from who knew where had finally gone mad.

She was agonizing over whether she should report this to her lord—and to Babel...

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