The stream ran through the dark cracks of the ceiling, flowing down into the worn stone basin just as it always had. When the cold water finally settled, a face became visible on its surface.
Wol leaned over the basin and washed his hands.
The water was freezing. It was always freezing. He had long since stopped feeling the cold, just as he had stopped hearing the steady drip of the stream. He rubbed his knuckles, working the dark ink out of the deep creases in his skin—a mindless ritual he had repeated every single morning for twenty-four years. He never quite managed to scrub all of it away.
He straightened his back, his joints popping loudly in the damp air, and examined his arms.
They were sickly pale, the kind of colorless hue that only came from two decades without seeing the sun. Old, yellowed bruises and faint, jagged scars mapped his skin. He couldn't even remember how he had gotten half of them. He checked his arms the way a farmer checked a barren field—out of habit, expecting absolutely nothing to change.
Nothing had.
He picked up a heavy, threadbare robe from the floor and pulled it over his shoulders. It had seventeen crude patches sewn into the fabric. He had stitched every single one of them himself using scraps of binding thread and a rusted needle he had begged the guards for. Seventeen times he had sat in the dim light, mending the cloth, foolishly thinking he would actually live long enough to need it.
He was still here. The robe was still holding.
Turning back to the stone basin, Wol stared at his reflection.
The man staring back at him was a stranger. A thick, unkempt beard covered the lower half of his face, and his long, matted hair was rapidly turning gray. His skin was rough, weathered by exhaustion and despair. It was the face of a fifty-five-year-old man who had been locked inside a single underground room for twenty-four years, slowly rotting away.
Wol looked away and pressed a trembling hand flat against his chest.
The pain was back.
It wasn't a sharp, stabbing agony. It was a low, hollowing ache deep beneath his sternum, like an hourglass finally running out of sand. He had only felt a sensation like this twice before in his entire life: once, distantly, on the morning he realized his father was never coming home. And once, with terrifying clarity, when the enforcer from the Murim Alliance had pressed two fingers against his lower abdomen and shattered his dantain, crippling him forever.
He exhaled a slow, shaky breath.
You've survived worse, he told himself. It's nothing.
He walked past the iron door without stopping. Seven wooden plates were stacked against the damp wall, the food on them completely untouched and rotting. The foul smell had faded into the background months ago.
Wol picked up a rusted oil lantern from his small desk and went to work.
The Grand Archive had no end.
He had stopped searching for the back wall around his twelfth year in captivity. The underground labyrinth just kept going room after room, the air growing thicker and the dust settling deeper the further he walked.
It was a graveyard of forbidden knowledge. There were martial arts manuals hoarded from sects that had been wiped off the face of the earth centuries ago. Dusty journals written in dead dialects that took Wol years to decipher. Ancient histories of legendary clans, bloody regional conflicts, and forgotten wars that the current Murim had completely erased from their records.
He had read almost all of it.
It had started purely out of mind-numbing boredom. A crippled man with a shattered dantain had nothing else to do, and a mind left in total isolation eventually turns on itself. So, he read.
He read profound breathing techniques he would never be able to practice. He memorized the histories of legendary masters he would never meet. He studied ancient scripts until reading was no longer just something he did to pass the time—it became the only thing keeping him tethered to his sanity. The knowledge hoarded in this dark abyss was the only thing in twenty-four years that truly belonged to him.
Wol moved past the front sections. They were meticulously organized, the bamboo slips and silk scrolls sorted and labeled. His life's work.
He ducked through a low stone archway, moving deeper. He bypassed the historical records and the decayed language journals. He passed the older manuals, their bindings worn down to frayed threads, requiring extreme patience and the lantern held dangerously close just to read the faded characters.
The second archway required him to bend entirely in half to slip through. He did it without thinking.
The oldest, most forbidden section was buried at the very back of the archive. The ceiling here was suffocatingly low, and the dust was so thick it coated his sandals. The texts in this room predated the current generation of the Murim Alliance by centuries. The writing systems were so archaic that absolutely no one in the outside world could comprehend them.
Wol set his flickering lantern on a stone ledge, crouched down, and got to work.
Pick up a scroll. Inspect the binding. Translate the title. Sort it. Move to the next.
His mind went blissfully blank. At fifty-five years old, this was all he was good for. Being quiet. Moving carefully. Putting broken things in their proper place.
The stack of scrolls in front of him had fused together from decades of underground moisture. He carefully peeled them apart, working through the pile one fragile layer at a time.
Suddenly, his calloused fingers brushed against something hard hidden between two rotting bamboo scrolls. He stopped.
Wol pulled it out into the dim light.
The texture was wrong. That was the first thing his mind registered. Everything in this archive was made of bamboo, silk, or occasionally treated animal hide. He knew those materials intimately. This object wasn't any of those.
It was a book.
He held it up to the lantern flame. The cover was a deep, mesmerizing crimson that seemed to swallow the light, shifting toward absolute black at the edges. It was uncomfortable to look at directly, as if the color itself carried a heavy weight.
Unlike the crumbling scrolls around it, the book was perfectly preserved. Wol pressed his thumb against the smooth surface.
This doesn't belong here, he thought.
He flipped it over. The back was entirely blank. He brought it closer to the lantern, inspecting the front cover again.
There were faint characters etched into the crimson surface, but they were severely worn away. Only jagged fragments of an ancient script remained. It was an angular, aggressive dialect that he had spent three agonizing years piecing together from scattered references across the archive.
Wol traced the incomplete grooves with his finger, filling in the missing strokes in his mind.
Demon.
He froze, the breath catching in his throat.
In the modern Murim, anything even remotely connected to the Demonic Cult was supposed to be incinerated on sight. It was not meant to be archived. It was not meant to be studied. If the Alliance elders discovered a demonic text in his hands, they wouldn't just kill him—they would torture him until his mind broke.
I should put it back; a frantic voice screamed in his head. Set it down exactly where it was and walk away.
Wol stood perfectly still in the dusty tomb, the heavy book resting in his palms.
He thought about his twenty-four years locked in this suffocating darkness. He thought about the iron box on the Tang Clan's carriage all those decades ago—how he had opened that, too, even when every instinct had screamed at him to run.
At least this time, Wol thought, a bitter, humorless smile touching his cracked lips, there are no guards to ambush me.
He opened the book.
The first page contained a single line of text. The ancient script was far clearer here, the ink looking terrifyingly fresh. Wol leaned in, holding the lantern closer, deciphering the angular strokes the way he always did—one fragment at a time.
He finished reading the sentence.
His heart stopped.
It wasn't out of fear. It wasn't from shock. It was a sudden, violent cessation of life, like a complex gear mechanism snapping under immense pressure. His hand locked rigidly around the crimson cover.
The heavy iron lantern slipped from his numb fingers. It shattered against the stone floor, spilling a pool of highly flammable oil across the ancient dust.
Wol tried to move, but his limbs refused to obey. A blinding, agonizing white light pierced the edges of his vision, violently tearing away the darkness of the archive.
And then, there was only red.
Red ground. Red sky. The very air felt impossibly heavy, suffocating his lungs with the coppery stench of blood.
Wol blinked rapidly, his vision slowly resolving. He wasn't looking at the air—he was looking at the ground beneath his boots. It was completely soaked. He lowered his trembling hand and brushed against the wet earth, instantly understanding what he was touching.
Bodies.
Thousands of them stretched out in every direction, forming a horrific ocean of the dead. Every single corpse wore the exact same dark, intricately forged armor. It was a military faction Wol didn't recognize, a style of warfare completely absent from any history book in the Grand Archive. Broken swords littered the mud. Severed limbs were scattered like discarded firewood.
Wol turned slowly, his mind reeling as he tried to comprehend the sheer scale of the slaughter.
They are all from the same army, Wol realized, a cold dread pooling in his stomach. There are no enemy casualties.
Then, he saw the lone figure.
Standing at the far edge of the blood-soaked field, atop a small mound of corpses, was a single man. In a horizon defined entirely by the dead, he was the only thing left breathing.
In his right hand, he held a long, pitch-black sword. The killing intent radiating from the blade was so dense it possessed physical weight—a deep, rhythmic aura that pulsed like a living, breathing beast.
In his left hand, the man held a book.
Wol stared at it. That's the crimson book. The one I just opened.
He squinted, trying to make out the man's features through the heavy red mist. He was tall, dressed in dark robes completely saturated with blood. His hair was stark white, falling loosely down his back. The oppressive aura bleeding from his sword violently distorted the air around him, making it impossible to look at him directly without feeling a crushing pressure on the chest.
An illusion, Wol rationalized desperately. A remnant of intent left behind in the ink.
He had read theories about this. Supreme martial masters who had transcended the limits of the mortal realm could leave behind traces of their will inside the artifacts they forged. It wasn't a living consciousness, just a lingering echo of their final moments. He had simply been pulled into the memory of the book's creator.
It was a logical, scholarly explanation. Wol desperately clung to it.
And then, the white-haired man turned his head and looked at him.
He didn't look through Wol. He didn't look at the field of corpses. He looked directly into Wol's eyes, with the intense, unwavering focus of a man who had been searching the world for a specific face and had finally found it.
Echoes don't make eye contact, Wol thought, raw panic finally piercing his calm exterior.
The man's face was still obscured by the distance and the bloody haze, but his emotion was unmistakable. It radiated through the thick air, cutting straight into Wol's soul.
It was absolute, overwhelming relief.
It wasn't the arrogant triumph of a victor. It wasn't the bloodthirsty madness of a demon. It was just the quiet, exhausted relief of a man who had been carrying an unbearable weight for centuries and had just watched someone arrive to finally take it from his shoulders.
The white-haired man smiled.
Wol's eyes were wide open. At that moment, he saw the man's lips move, and at the same time—
The man's voice didn't echo across the bloody battlefield. It bypassed the air entirely, manifesting directly inside the deepest recesses of Wol's mind.
"I will leave it to you."
The voice was quiet, calm. It had a weight that couldn't be explained unless one heard it for himself, and Wol understood that weight.
The man's smile lingered for a fraction of a second. Then, his body began to dissolve.
It happened without any dramatic explosion of qi. He simply crumbled into ash from the edges inward. First the stark white hair, then his broad shoulders, followed by the terrifying black sword. The crimson book in his left hand was the very last thing to fade into the red mist.
"Wait—!"
Wol's voice finally tore free from his throat. It sounded pathetic—old, raspy, and weak.
"Who are you?! Leave what to me? I don't understand what you want from me..."
The bloody horizon rapidly shifted to gray. The sky collapsed inward, the crushing pressure vanishing in an instant, leaving absolutely nothing behind.
Wol slammed onto the hard stone floor.
He was back in the Grand Archive.
The spilled lantern oil had ignited. A slow, crawling line of orange fire was steadily burning across the ancient dust, rapidly approaching a massive stack of highly flammable silk scrolls.
Wol watched the flames but made no attempt to rise. His arms had completely lost all sensation. The dull ache in his chest had violently mutated into a hollow, gaping void. It was the sensation of a mechanism completely breaking down, of a fire finally running out of oxygen.
So, it ends today, Wol thought, his mind surprisingly calm.
He had known this moment was coming for weeks. He had simply been in pain for so long that he hadn't recognized the final warning signs until it was far too late to do anything about them.
Summoning the absolute last dregs of his willpower, Wol dug his fingernails into the stone and tried to drag his broken body toward the iron door. He managed to move a few inches before his muscles gave out entirely. He collapsed flat on his back, staring blankly at the damp, cracked ceiling.
In the novels he had read, dying men always experienced profound revelations. They saw the faces of their loved ones. Wol had assumed he would see his father's warm smile, or Jo Mak's arrogant grin, or the sneering faces of the Alliance elders who had chained him in the dark.
He saw none of them.
There was no grand revelation. There was only a crushing, suffocating weight. It was the formless, heavy guilt of a life completely wasted. The quiet, devastating certainty of a man who realized he had run in the wrong direction his entire life, only discovering the truth at the absolute end of the road.
Wol closed his eyes.
The crawling fire finally reached the silk scrolls, violently erupting into an inferno. Behind the thick stone wall, the underground stream continued to flow into the basin, entirely indifferent to the dying man.
The darkness rushed in to claim him.
But it wasn't silent.
Every medical text he had ever studied described death as a cessation of sense—a final, absolute stillness. This was not still. Deep within the suffocating void, there was a strange, terrifying warmth. It felt deeply familiar, though he couldn't connect it to any specific memory. It was the feeling of being very small, wrapped in absolute safety before the world had taught him how to be afraid.
Then, he felt it.
Two fingers pressing gently against his lower abdomen. Right over his shattered dantain.
It wasn't a destructive strike. It was the exact opposite. It felt like something impossibly heavy was being poured directly into his soul.
A sharp, agonizing surge of pure pain tore through his entire body.
Wol gasped violently, his lungs expanding as he desperately sucked in air.
His eyes snapped open.
Blinding, golden sunlight pierced his vision.
Wol lay perfectly still, staring blankly at the ceiling above him.
It was made of wood. Rough, uneven wooden beams with a distinct, dark knot in the center panel. He stared at that knot for a very long time, his mind struggling to process the image.
A buried, childhood memory slowly floated to the surface of his mind.
A wild dog chasing a street cat.
He used to argue about the shape of that wooden knot when he was a little boy. His father had insisted it looked like a fat rabbit. They had never agreed on it.
Wol didn't move a single muscle.
Am I dead?
It was the only logical conclusion. He had felt his heart stop. He had felt the heat of the archive fire. A man didn't survive that.
But the afterlife shouldn't feel like this.
The dead shouldn't be able to smell the damp mud of the nearby river. They shouldn't be able to hear the distant, chaotic shouting of a street vendor firing up a wok in the early morning market. And beneath it all, the sharp, pungent scent of dried medicinal herbs hanging from a nearby window frame.
He hadn't smelled those herbs in twenty-four years. He recognized them instantly.
Wol slowly turned his head to the right.
A large, faded water stain marked the plaster wall.
He stared at it until his vision blurred.
Trembling, Wol pushed himself up into a sitting position. His arms buckled slightly, but not from the crippling weakness of a dying old man. He looked down at his trembling hands.
They were incredibly small.
He pushed back the sleeves of his worn robe. The skin was pale, but completely unblemished. There were no faded yellow bruises. No jagged scars. No dark ink permanently stained into his pores. He raised his small hands and frantically touched his face. His cheeks were smooth. The heavy, matted gray beard was completely gone. His hair was cut short.
He looked at his legs stretched out on the thin woven mat. They were painfully skinny, the legs of a child who hadn't hit his growth spurt yet.
What is this?
He looked around the cramped, dusty room. The water stain. The wooden beams. The morning sun cutting through the paper window. Outside, a heavy wooden cart rumbled over the uneven cobblestones of the slum streets.
It all felt violently, terrifyingly real. The smell of the dirt. The weight of his own small body. The rhythmic beating of his heart in his chest.
He opened his right hand and stared at his palm.
A faint, pale scar rested directly in the crease of his skin. He traced it with his thumb, his breath hitching. He knew exactly where this scar came from. He had gotten it when he was eight years old, frantically pushing through a crowd of armed mercenaries looking for any news of his missing father, only to catch the sharp end of a careless guard's spear shaft.
He remembered the wound stinging bitterly through the entire winter.
Looking at the faded scar now, he calculated the healing time.
I'm not eight, Wol thought, his mind racing. Nine... maybe ten at most.
He sat completely frozen in the quiet room.
He was sitting in the exact bedroom of his childhood slum house. He was trapped inside his own ten-year-old body. And his absolute last memory was dying in a burning archive as a fifty-five-year-old man.
Wol didn't immediately try to rationalize it. He didn't panic. He simply sat in the silence, employing the only skill twenty-four years of solitary confinement had taught him—waiting until the chaos in his mind settled enough to see the truth clearly.
The impossible, reality-shattering conclusion finally draped over his small shoulders like a heavy winter cloak.
He had regressed.
At first, the mere thought felt completely absurd. But deep down, in some buried, desperate corner of his soul, this was the solitary miracle he had prayed for during his darkest nights in the archive. As the decades had bled away in the dark, he had convinced himself that the heavens didn't grant second chances to ruined men in the Murim.
Yet, here he was. He didn't know what god or primordial demon had orchestrated this, but as a heavy, dark presence pulsed faintly in the back of his mind, he knew with absolute certainty that the crimson book was the catalyst. It had violently rejected his death and sent him back.
And then—striking him like a physical blow—he remembered.
Wol threw himself off the woven mat before he even made the conscious decision to stand.
The room violently tilted and he fell hard onto the floor. He pushed himself up, slammed his shoulder against the doorframe to steady himself, and scrambled down the narrow hallway. His short legs felt clumsy and foreign, causing him to stumble twice, but he didn't stop. He threw himself into the main living area, past the worn dining table, and slammed his hands against the back door.
He threw it open.
The small dirt courtyard was completely empty.
A neat pile of chopped firewood sat against the left wall. A rusted wooden bucket rested near the dry well. A chipped wooden stool was sitting in the center of the dirt—his father had always left it outside, stubbornly claiming that the indoors were only meant for sleeping.
There was no one there.
Wol stood frozen in the doorway, his small hands gripping the wooden frame so hard his knuckles turned white.
He could be at the river, a desperate, frantic voice whispered in his mind. He could be at the market gathering supplies. He could be—
Wol spun around and sprinted back inside the house. He ran down the hall to the small room at the very end. The door was half open.
A single iron hook was nailed to the far wall.
His father's heavy traveler's robe had always hung on that hook. From the earliest moments of Wol's childhood, that hook only ever existed in two states: holding the heavy robe, or completely empty because his father was wearing it out on a job.
The hook was empty.
Wol stood in the center of his father's dusty room, staring at the bare wall.
He knew exactly what that meant. That hook was only ever empty when his father wore the heavy robe out to work as an escort. Combined with the faded scar on his hand—a wound he got looking for news after his father vanished on that exact job—it meant only one thing.
His father was already gone. He had vanished two years before Wol woke up in this bed.
Wol's legs gave out. He collapsed onto his knees, sitting heavily on the wooden floorboards.
His vision blurred. His cheeks felt strangely warm.
Wol raised a small, trembling hand and touched his face. His fingertips came away wet.
It surprised him. He couldn't even remember the last time he had cried. In the early, terrifying years in the archive, there had been nights he wept until he choked on his own breath, but those tears had dried up decades ago. He had honestly believed that the part of his soul capable of crying had simply died.
Apparently, it had just been waiting.
He didn't try to wipe the tears away. The fifty-five-year-old man trapped inside a ten-year-old body sat on the floor of his missing father's empty room, staring at a rusted iron hook, and let the grief violently wash over him.
He sat there in the silence until his breathing finally settled into a slow, steady rhythm.
Wol placed his small palms flat against the wooden floorboards. He closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of the slums.
Find out what really happened to him.
It wasn't a passionate vow. It wasn't a fiery declaration of vengeance. It was simply the next logical step, presenting itself with terrifying clarity.
Find out if he is alive. If he is, tear the world apart to get him back. If he isn't... hunt down every single bastard responsible, and do not stop until the rivers run black with their blood.
Wol slowly stood up.
He walked back to his own room and sat cross-legged on the edge of his thin sleeping mat.
There was a strange, heavy presence resting in the deepest corner of his mind. He had been faintly aware of it since the moment he opened his eyes, like a predator quietly sitting in the corner of a dark room, waiting to be acknowledged. He had purposefully ignored it during his panic. Now, he turned his absolute focus toward it.
It didn't feel like a normal memory.
The Grand Archive had given him twenty-four years of stolen knowledge. He remembered all of it—the forgotten manuals, the bloody histories, the advanced footwork techniques he had never possessed the physical qi to execute. All of it was neatly organized and accessible in his brain.
But this presence was entirely different.
It didn't sit in the logical, scholarly part of his mind. It sat deep in his core, intertwined with his very soul. It felt more intimately real than his own childhood memories.
Wol knew exactly where it had come from. The crimson book. The single line of ancient text. The white-haired sovereign standing atop a mountain of corpses, smiling at him through the blood-soaked air.
Whatever forbidden legacy that man had sealed inside the pages, it had followed Wol through time.
Sitting on the mat, Wol closed his eyes and slowed his breathing. He hadn't meditated properly in years, but his spirit remembered the forms. He let his mind plunge into the darkness.
The image manifested instantly.
The crimson book. It floated in the center of his consciousness, the dark red cover shifting slightly as if it were breathing. It was as vividly clear as if he were holding it in his physical hands.
Wol waited for the cover to open.
It didn't move.
He focused his intent, trying to mentally force the pages apart. Nothing happened. The heavy book simply sat there in the dark, an immovable, absolute presence that refused to yield to his demands.
Wol sat with it for several long minutes, testing its boundaries, before finally letting out a long breath and opening his physical eyes.
Right, Wol thought, an exhausted smirk touching his lips.
In his previous life, his greatest failures had always come from rushing blindly into situations before he was truly ready. Searching for his father without martial backing. Defying the Murim Alliance without the strength to protect himself. Every single time he had overreached, the world had brutally crushed him for it.
The crimson book was safely locked inside his mind. It wasn't going anywhere. He could feel the terrifying; overwhelming shape of the martial arts sealed within it. He knew instinctively that a divine manual of that caliber would only reveal its secrets when his mortal body was physically capable of surviving the burden.
When I am strong enough, Wol promised himself, staring at his small, frail hands, I will understand what you are.
He looked through the open door, his gaze drifting toward the empty hook in his father's room.
He was ten years old. He had absolutely no money, no powerful sect backing him, and no martial arts training. His physical body was weak, and his meridians were entirely undeveloped. But his mind was a weapon loaded with twenty-four years of the Murim Alliance's most strictly guarded secrets.
He knew exactly who would rise to power. He knew exactly which clans would fall. And he knew that he had exactly eight years before the event that would ultimately lead to his capture and ruin.
Eight years.
One step, Wol told himself, the quiet, chilling voice of a man who had already died once and had absolutely nothing left to fear. One step at a time.
His stomach let out a loud, painful growl, breaking the heavy tension in the room.
Wol blinked, his intense expression breaking. He stood up from the mat, rubbing his small stomach. He hadn't eaten a real meal in a very long time, and a ten-year-old body demanded food.
It was time to see what was left in the kitchen.