The night air was thick with ash and silence—a silence so profound it gnawed at the soul. It clung to the ruins like a suffocating shroud, smothering even the faintest whisper of life. The once-proud halls of the Falling Plum Sect, once a beacon of justice and strength in the chaotic murim world, lay in charred ruins, a testament to a massacre so brutal it bordered on sacrilege.
In that godforsaken night, the sect was erased as if it had never existed—branded demonic, its disciples slaughtered with merciless precision under the guise of righteousness. The so-called justice wielded against them was nothing but a convenient lie, a smokescreen hiding greed, envy, and the cowardice of those who feared the truth the sect embodied.
Amid the smoldering ruins, where even the scent of plum blossoms had been reduced to acrid bitterness, one figure stirred.
Jin Mu-Won.
Ten years had passed since that hellish night, and the murim had long whispered of the sect's obliteration. Yet here he was, a ghost among ashes, walking through the remnants of his blood-soaked past. His eyes, cold and unyielding, reflected the moonlight like shards of broken glass—sharp, unreadable, and deadly.
He hadn't survived by becoming some superhuman badass in the traditional sense. No, the bastard had done something far more dangerous. He had burned away his strength, purging himself of the raw power the murim so desperately craved and worshipped. Like a fucking wildfire devouring a forest, he refined himself into something unseen, a shadow slipping beneath the notice of the blind beasts who called themselves warriors.
As his boots crunched against the brittle remains of what once was home, memories assaulted him—visions of laughter, camaraderie, and ideals so pure they seemed like relics from another lifetime. But those memories were poisoned by betrayal and blood.
The Central Alliance—the very entity sworn to uphold peace—had condemned the Falling Plum Sect with a hypocritical fervor, labeling their art demonic, justifying their massacre in a flood of propaganda and half-truths. Jin Mu-Won knew the bitter truth beneath the lies. Their so-called "demonic" techniques were never designed for conquest or domination but to purge arrogance and false righteousness from the murim.
A bitter laugh escaped his lips, dark and cynical.
"Fuck their righteousness," he muttered, voice barely a whisper over the crackling embers.
The murim was a cesspool of hypocrisy, and Jin Mu-Won was the stain they couldn't scrub out. His survival was a blasphemy to the Central Alliance, a wound that refused to heal.
Word of his return would spread like wildfire—some would call him a ghost, others a monster, but none would ignore the fact that the weakest-looking cultivator carried a blade that cut deeper than the sharpest sword. His blade was not just steel but a manifestation of his cold resolve, forged in loss and restraint.
The murim's strength was its currency of truth, but Mu-Won's path was quieter, darker, and infinitely more dangerous.
The wind whispered through the skeletal branches of dead plum trees, their blossoms crushed underfoot or reduced to ash. Yet, despite the desolation, a single plum blossom hung stubbornly on a cracked branch—pale, defiant.
Jin Mu-Won's gaze lingered on it for a moment, the symbol of his sect's spirit that refused to die.
The flame of vengeance flickered in his chest, but beneath it lay something colder—a steely determination not just for revenge but for retribution, for justice untainted by lies and bloodlust.
The murim was a cruel world—where the strong devoured the weak, and the weak often masqueraded as pawns to be sacrificed. Yet, beneath the ashes, the plum blossom would bloom again. Not to bask in revenge's fiery glow alone, but to decide what the cost of true justice should be.
Mu-Won stepped forward, boots crunching over rubble, and the shadow of the past began to unravel.
The city beyond the ruined sect was a stark contrast—alive, noisy, and corrupt. The Central Alliance's banners fluttered like mocking ghosts, proclaiming order and justice while the streets seethed with greed, deception, and backstabbing.
Everywhere, cultivators boasted of their strength, their techniques, their victories. But Mu-Won felt nothing but contempt. The true power lay not in brute force or hollow titles, but in the unyielding will to survive, to adapt, and to outthink those who deemed themselves gods.
He had survived by burning away the vanity of strength, by mastering the subtle arts of restraint and patience. A predator cloaked in weakness, a goddamn ghost in the murim's carnival of beasts.
His return was not a fucking coincidence; it was a reckoning.
That night, as the city drowned in lantern light and raucous celebration, Mu-Won slipped through the shadows like a blade slicing silk.
His mind replayed the last moments of the sect—the screams, the betrayals, the cold eyes of those who condemned them without a shred of mercy.
Why had they destroyed the Falling Plum Sect?
The answer was buried beneath layers of lies and political scheming—a truth that threatened to unravel the very fabric of the murim.
And Mu-Won was ready to uncover it.
His first stop was the ruins of the sect's inner sanctum, a place where the surviving secrets might still linger. He knelt, tracing the patterns etched into the stone floor, symbols of an art misunderstood, feared, and labeled demonic.
"This fucking world," he spat bitterly, "doesn't deserve the truth."
But truth was a double-edged sword, and Mu-Won wielded it with deadly precision.
The stone beneath his fingers was cracked and worn, but the intricate runes and seals they had etched were still faintly visible, glowing with a residual power only the trained eye could detect. The "demonic art," the technique that had doomed them all, was not some perversion of cultivation—it was an evolution, a refinement of nature's harshest laws. It tore away the rot of arrogance and false virtue, leaving behind only the raw essence of strength and balance.
But such power was a threat to those who built their thrones on lies.
Mu-Won's thoughts were interrupted by a faint noise—the scrape of stone, the whisper of a footstep.
He spun, hand moving instinctively to the hilt of his blade. A slender figure emerged from the shadows—a young woman, her eyes wide with a mixture of fear and awe.
"You're… Mu-Won," she breathed, barely daring to speak the name.
He didn't answer immediately, his gaze piercing through her like a blade.
"Why are you here?" she asked, voice trembling.
"To reclaim what was stolen," he said coldly. "And to remind the murim that truth cannot be buried beneath ashes."
Her eyes flickered with something deeper—a flicker of hope, or perhaps despair.
"Be careful," she warned softly. "They're hunting you. The Central Alliance won't let the past die so easily."
Mu-Won nodded once. "Good. Let them come."
As dawn broke, painting the sky with hues of blood and gold, Jin Mu-Won vanished into the waking city—a shadow reborn from ashes.
The plum blossom beneath the ruin was no longer a symbol of death—it was a herald of rebirth, a promise that justice, no matter how long buried, would rise again.
And the murim, in all its twisted glory, was about to learn a brutal lesson.
End of Chapter 1