Chapter 1036

Had I failed to guess it from the start? Or had I tried to deny it because the truth was so hard to believe?

This time, I could answer that question myself.

I think it was the latter.

It was true. All of it.

The realization struck my mind, leaving it blank as a sheet of paper.

At the same time, I felt the last shred of faith I’d held on to crumble, along with everything I’d thought I knew about this world.

The strange Moving Formation, whose existence had already been revealed long ago in Henan and Sichuan.

The Water God Dragon and countless Blood Fish, corrupted by something in Hubei and driven into a frenzy.

An utterly ordinary fisherman who’d eaten those Blood Fish and gained a monster’s appearance and strength.

The cause of all those phenomena—and not just that, but the rift that had appeared once more in the jungles of Nanman.

Even the familiar beings called Black Ghosts, whom I’d faced right here today.

And.

And…

At last, it was unmistakable.

It was unfolding right before my eyes. I could hear it, feel it flowing clearly through my senses.

All the warnings that had come before—call them signs, omens, whatever you wanted.

They had finally broken through a great dam and come crashing down on me, turning the suspicion I’d only entertained in private into certainty.

In two characters:

Magic.

Shaaah.

The wind blew. A shadow moving with speed and power far beyond human limits glided toward me, trailing a long afterimage.

But I couldn’t even twitch a finger.

In a world gone slow, with my whole body feeling as if the blood in it had turned cold, all I could do was stare, dumbfounded.

What is this…?

Where a massive bomb had exploded, nothing remained but ruins and the shock wave.

My mind was wreckage now. Words and questions scattered through it, caught in the blast.

Magic. Mage. Monster. Blood-Sword Demon Lord. Buff.

A large-scale attack spell. Allies sacrificed. Countless deaths, blood spilling everywhere, broken bodies floating in it.

How was any of this possible?

How had it come to this?

And finally—

What am I supposed to do now?

Every thought scattered. Only that question remained, and I had no answer.

Grab.

A hard, rough hand—one I knew—closed around my shoulder.

No. The instant I felt it, a powerful force had already dragged me backward, sending me stumbling without strength.

Only then did time begin to move again. A streak of light was swung through the gap like lightning.

Whoooom—KABOOM!

A roar like the sky splitting apart brought my senses rushing back.

I was already airborne somewhere behind where I’d stood. As I hung weightless, an enormous shock wave struck.

KRRRACK!

The ground heaved like an earthquake had hit. Two immense forces melted and shattered everything around them.

At the center of the clash, which swallowed dozens of jang¹ in every direction, stood Jeok Cheongang. He had shoved me aside when I froze like a statue and stepped in to stop the Blood-Sword Demon Lord.

“Hah!”

How had I flown so far already?

Even at this distance, I could tell Jeok Cheongang’s shout, charged with profound internal energy, was more than a battle cry.

That was for me. He’s trying to wake me up.

It reached my ears and jolted my half-dazed mind awake. At last, I let out the breath I’d been holding.

Right. It’s not over yet.

I still couldn’t understand how any of this could be happening. But with death right in front of me, what did understanding matter?

There was no use in understanding when the water had already spilled.

All I could do on this battlefield was accept what was happening and find a way through it.

That was how I’d save everyone.

Srrk.

Still suspended in the air, I twisted smoothly around.

My muscles and internal energy, fully restored by that last Level Up, obeyed the command in my mind without the slightest delay or error.

Now.

Boom—shwaaash!

I kicked off the air with a foot charged with qi and shot toward Jeok Cheongang, who was clashing with the Blood-Sword Demon Lord more than twenty jang¹ away.

Or I tried to.

As I cut through the wind, an immense, invisible force descended on me.

Wooooong.

The air vanished. The wind vanished.

The instant I noticed, I heard a faint voice from far away.

“Taishan.”

“……!”

I knew what that quiet invocation meant. My eyes widened, but I couldn’t stop the clear voice issuing from beneath a pure-white veil on a hill fifty jang¹ away.

“Bring him down. Crush him.”

At that very moment—

Fwooom!

A weight as immense as Taishan bore down on my whole body.

No—it sent me plummeting.

Straight toward the countless enemies who had gathered like clouds during the brief moment I’d been airborne, their spears and bows aimed at me.

Gravity magic…!

I swallowed my cry of shock.

Instead of resisting this second, unexpected spell, I let it take hold and turned it into a weapon.

KWA-BOOM!

I struck the ground under the weight of ten thousand geun.² The earth split, and the enemies around me staggered off balance. At the same time, I felt the pressure pinning me down dissipate.

Of course.

Gravity acted on an area, not a single person.

While I was airborne, I’d been the first to feel the spell’s effects. Once I landed, that was no longer true.

The white-robed figures were clearly mages. If they wanted to bind me even a little, their gravity magic would have to target the Dark Heaven followers who were their allies, too.

So they meant to delay me from joining Jeok Cheongang, even if only this way…

Fine by me.

The followers staggered like soulless wooden puppets. I turned in place and swept White Flame across them.

KWA-AAAH!

The spear’s passage through the air sounded more than fierce—outright destructive.

Anyone could swing a spear sideways. But none of the enemies surrounding me could stop the wave of Force that burst from White Flame’s translucent spearhead.

Not one.

SHHK! KRRRACK!

Everything was cut apart and crushed.

Weapons. People.

In the blink of an eye, the ground within a three-jang¹ radius had become a field of death. Yet the fear had been stripped from them. They stared at me with dark, unseeing eyes and kept charging.

They murmured the eight-character creed as if entranced.

“Heaven above, earth below.”

“All demons bow.”

“Heaven above…”

CRUNCH!

A headless body toppled. My spear flashed sideways through three more enemies closing in from the flank.

SHK!

Weapons imbued with Sword Energy and bodies hardened by the external arts alike were helpless against overwhelming force.

I drove through the scattering fragments of steel and flesh without hesitation.

I streaked like lightning between the enemies blocking my way like a wall, thinking and commanding without pause.

Open Inventory. Summon. Summon. Summon.

SHHK, THUNK, KRRRACK!

I cut, stabbed, and crushed my way forward.

Weapons stayed in my hands only briefly. Each took one life, or two or three, before it left me. Countless more blades still lay hidden in that vast subspace whose limits I couldn’t begin to guess.

For a moment, the thought crossed my mind that perhaps I could make some ridiculous idea real.

No. There’s no way.

But why?

CLANG!

I knocked aside the weapons coming at me from every direction.

THWACK!

I crushed the head of an enemy approaching from my blind spot with a single punch.

SHWEEESH—SHHK!

And the more enemies I cut down, the stronger that inexplicable certainty grew.

Could this really be nothing more than a fantasy?

SHWAAASH!

I turned and swung my spear, leaving a mist of blood along its path.

As enemies surged in from every direction to fill the gap left by the dead, I took a short breath.

I won’t know until I try.

Thinking back, it had always been like this.

Every time I needed to break through a wall, I had to go beyond it. I had to make the impossible possible, turn imagination into reality.

Just as I would now.

Open Inventory.

One breath. That was all the time I needed.

With countless enemies still blocking my path, filling every space no matter how many I killed, I quietly closed my eyes. I pictured the mountain of sharp, gleaming steel somewhere in the void called the Inventory.

Then I gave the command.

Summon.

It was madness. The sort of thing that could exist only in my imagination.

But the System answered that absurd, desperate call.

The way it always did.

Ding.

One small, clear chime.

Ding. Ding. Ding-ding.

Chimes layered over one another. Their faint ripples grew into a wave that swallowed the space around me.

Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!

My ears grew muffled. This was the first step toward making imagination real.

I opened my eyes to a chime vaster and more majestic than any I’d ever heard.

And saw it.

Shaaah.

Something had forced its way through a gap in unseen space above my head, casting a shadow below.

I heard it, too.

Shrring.

The cold sound of hundreds of pieces of steel sliding against one another.

And finally—

I can do this.

I felt it. I understood.

What I was capable of, the limits I had been given, stretched far beyond anything I’d imagined.

I had the power to make at least part of that ridiculous idea real.

Fwoosh.

In the slowed world, immense qi surged from deep within me.

The fire dragon coiled in my lower dantian flowed through every limb and bone. Blood rushed with the pounding of my heart.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

A fierce tremor. A racing pulse.

No. That’s not it.

The beat wasn’t coming from my heart alone.

The Jade Hall Acupoint.

What the people called martial artists had newly named the Middle Dantian.

Every nerve, every sense I possessed was fixed there.

Past the lower dantian, where lava surged in waves, to that lofty peak rising toward the heavens.

To a realm of Will that strength and speed could not measure.

Kiiiiing.

My vision blurred. Agony stabbed through my head as though someone were driving a needle into it.

But I spread my arms as if entranced.

A flash filled my sight, and I felt a thrill greater than the pain. My hands were empty, yet somewhere beyond the reach of touch, I felt and grasped each thing, one by one.

One, two, three.

Ten, twenty, thirty.

And at last…

One hundred.

I opened my eyes.

In that time that had felt like eternity, yet lasted no more than an instant.

Beneath a mountain of sabers and a forest of swords—a hundred blades aimed at countless enemies as if held by an invisible hand.

I parted my tightly closed lips.

“Move.”

SHWAAAAASH!

The sky filled with flashes of light.