Chapter 270: The Void Space (1)
-x-X-x-
The red arena.
In the gap where the black-clad man had disappeared, the crimson creature was staring intently.
Zero hesitated.
The same crimson fiend that had only been watching the black-clad man moments ago was just now turning its head toward the tear where the man had been sucked in.
Riiip.
Its festering mouth twisted upward on one side.
The fiend that had been trampling users like a swarm of ants no longer spared them a glance.
It simply took a step toward the newly torn gap.
One step, then another.
And then it was swallowed beyond.
"..."
Where the two had clashed until moments ago, only the warped field and rapidly cooling users lay scattered.
— ....The chat window, which had been filling without pause, fell into silence the very moment both figures vanished.
...
"This place is...."
In the span of a single breath, the world had completely changed.
The wall had warped behind him once, then spat Dong Bongsu out to the outside.
A pitch-black void, empty like outer space.
There was nothing to set foot on.
No up, no down.
The power of the blood-red Force he had received from the World-Ending Demonic Lord, and the twisted energy the Qilin had dragged in, could not follow this far and were severed.
He had thought he might crash somewhere, but he collided with nothing.
He was simply floating.
Whether it was gravitational equilibrium that made it so, or some new physical law unique to this space, he could not tell.
'Probably the latter.
Because there was no issue with breathing.
More accurately, it was not breathing at all, but rather the sensation that he was fine without doing so.
"..."
Dong Bongsu quietly surveyed his surroundings.
A pitch-black space.
It was not pitch-black because there was nothing to call light, but rather that it was a place where what to paint upon it had never been decided.
It was only a sensation, so he could not articulate it precisely, but... it felt close to something half-finished.
Far away in the empty space, a mountainside floated askew.
A mountain drawn only halfway, half its slope rendered.
One side of the ridge was colored, while the rest remained only as outlines, the space beyond visible through it.
Beside it, a section of a fortress wall drifted by.
A surface upon which the pattern of the stones was only half applied.
A tree with not a single leaf was embedded upside down, floating, and a few hollow buildings drawn only with outlines drifted weightlessly.
None of it was fixed to anything.
It all merely drifted.
Ding-.
A short alert sounded from within his perception.
Distorted letters flickered into view at the edge of his vision, then scattered.
It was neither New Murim Online nor What is Hero.
It was the third channel.
The system that had pulled the Qilin into its own Domain, that had ground and inserted valleys.
[◼️◼️◼️ ◼️◼️_◼️◼️◼️◼️]
The letters were completely blurred and illegible.
But that hardly mattered.
It merely meant that even here, the system, though perhaps broken, was still functioning.
'How interesting.'
Before being a Predator, Dong Bongsu was fundamentally human.
Curiosity is a human instinct, and nothing can stop it.
And he believed he had come close to the root of these worlds.
The kind of root one does not yet fully understand.
He had, however, seen a space of this kind before.
On the day he had planted the fire spirit root in his Dantian, when the system had ultimately failed to stop him and he was pushed beyond the channel into the white, infinite conceptual space.
There, if mountain ranges and rivers were woven from the flesh of will, then this place, while similar, was undoubtedly a far more high-dimensional location.
Perhaps it was a tunnel connecting all these 'worlds'.
Or perhaps it was a primordial space where all manner of physical laws, the martial arts of Murim, or even definitions and laws like magic that might exist elsewhere, were naturally born.
Weightless.
Gently spreading his Super True Qi Field to move, he lightly touched a drifting mountainside.
At the point his fingertip met the half-drawn slope, it rippled like a wavelet before settling.
It had no weight.
There was nothing to obstruct him.
The half-built mountain slipped like a sheet of paper over his Super True Qi Field, which let everything that touched it pass through, drifting off to the side.
The phenomenon was in many ways different from the real world.
Speed and movement themselves were ever-changing, as if the applied physics engine was different from moment to moment.
It was clearly a place whose very texture differed from the two Murims or the game-like space he had just been in.
from the two murims or the game-like space ne had just been in.
Under normal circumstances, this would be the kind of place to test step by step, to gauge what lived here and what phenomena occurred.
But now, he had no such leisure, and fundamentally....
There was no prey in this vicinity.
Not invisible, but non-existent.
No matter how wide he spread his Super True Qi Field and extended it, no life activity was detected.
The buildings reduced to outlines, the leafless trees, they simply drifted weightlessly, lacking any sense of substance.
Things that would offer nothing to bite into, no matter how he cut them.
In essence, they were no different from the swarm of users that had filled the valley of the world he had just left.
His Chain Slash was already fully stacked to the maximum, so there was nowhere here to grow stronger.
It was a place where nothing more could be cut, nothing more could be bitten.
So, then, the primary function of this place became clear.
A tomb.
The first tomb.
"..."
Dong Bongsu stopped in his floating position.
Then he simply waited, one hand hanging loose.
The rift in space through which he had entered this place still had not healed.
The cracked fissure remained torn open, unsealed, and from beyond that tear, the presence of a familiar weight approaching could be felt.
Crack-.
The fissure split open another handspan.
Through it, a crimson figure squeezed in.
Its festering mouth was ripped open in a long, twisted grin on one side.
It was the face of prey that had sought out a place to breathe on its own, seemingly having followed at last into this space where only the two of them remained.
In a way, it was a face that seemed as if Dong Bongsu's inner self had been externalized.
What mattered was that Dong Bongsu's side showed none of it at all.
"You snuck into a nice place, you."
His voice struck the pitch-black void and spread out without direction.
Just this alone proved the physics of this space were nothing like outer space.
Proof that even though the medium appeared to be absent, it existed nonetheless.
Energies requiring a medium, like the Super True Qi Field or sound waves, propagated freely through an invisible medium.
Only the speed and mode of their interaction were entirely abnormal.
Dong Bongsu simply stood still, calculating and engraving the form of this atypical physics engine into his mind.
"..."
Only the two of them floated in the emptiness.
"Heh heh. Well, fine. Somehow, thanks to you, I'm getting to see all sorts of worlds."
The World-Ending Demonic Lord stared quietly at the unresponsive Dong Bongsu, and when no answer came from him, lightly scanned the surroundings.
"Whether this place is a half-finished formation, or a branch dimension of a heavenly realm, I don't know...."
Crick, crackle.
The World-Ending Demonic Lord twisted his head and wrists from side to side, flicking out his serpentine tongue.
"Well, doesn't matter. Because as long as I have you, it's enough for me."
The World-Ending Demonic Lord straightened his tilted head.
His twisting wrists also stopped.
"If you just keep your mouth firmly shut and don't even hit back, it's a total buzzkill, you know?"
His torn mouth pulled further to one side.
Then the laughter drained from it.
"So, at this point, I'll give it to you properly too."
The man let both arms hang loose and dropped his head.
He let both arms hang loose and dropped his head.
At first, nothing happened.
There was just a single crimson figure floating in the void, head bowed.
Thump.
Then the man's body bulged once.
Something thickened beneath his skin, pushing the outline of a person outward.
A dark substance seeped out through the gaps in the splitting flesh.
Instead of dripping down, it rose upward.
For this was a place where weight did not function.
Cr-cr-crack.
The sound of bones resetting themselves came from within the man.
His shoulders widened by another inch, his back bowing inward.
Crackle, cr-cr-crackle.
He was shifting, step by step, away from human form.
And from his body, energy began to erupt.
No, erupt was insufficient.
It surged outward in all directions.
A dark crimson energy drew circular bands around the man at the center and spread outward, and wherever it touched, the pitch-black space shuddered in revulsion.
Guooooong-.
Far off, the mountain floating askew, its slope only half-drawn, was swept aside by the tremor, shoved violently in one direction.
The tree embedded upside down without a single leaf was overturned from the roots.
A few buildings drawn only with outlines drifted away weightlessly, colliding with each other and distorting their shapes.
The fragments of the half-built world were swept away in their half-finished state.
The energy did not stop there.
Ssssssss—.
The fissure Dong Bongsu had pierced through split open further in the distance.
Even that line which this space held as its boundary screamed, unable to withstand the energy surging from the man's body.
A crimson radiance washed over the man from his feet to the crown of his head.
Patterns like veins rising along his skin bulged, swallowing the light from within.
The festering flesh now seemed rather solid beneath that glow.
The man raised his lowered head.
His upturned eyes gleamed, ripened to a ferocious red.
It was a light deepened by a layer.
"Now this is better."
A low, sunken voice struck the pitch-black void and spread without direction.
It was a voice of a different weight, the sluggish inflection from before stripped away.
"I've never really had a reason to bring this out. Thanks to you."
Dong Bongsu was quietly observing the transformation.
Ding-.
His Spiritual Eye overlaid a warning onto one side of his vision once more.
[...An enemy with a 10 level or greater... zzzt... difference from you has approached... crackle... within 20 meters...]
[Zzzt... The threat of the target is... crackle... being recalcu... crck... lated.]
The system, belatedly chasing it, repeatedly disconnected and reconnected.
Pressed down by the intensified demonic Qi, the messages could not maintain their form and flickered erratically.
What was more significant was that a new pattern of mechanical sound, which had not existed before, had been added.
Moreover, his Super True Qi Field read the man's body again.
The speed at which demonic Qi was rising from within his skin had changed.
What was wreathed upon his flesh reappeared in his Faith Sight.
A blood-red shell that let not a single strand of demonic Qi escape.
And its contents were also read quite clearly.
However....
The bottom was not visible.
Where his limits had been poorly measured just moments ago, now they were even further away.
It was not the quantity stored, but the storage space itself that expanded without end.
A vessel that lost its bottom, filling again no matter how much was drawn out.
That was the Dantian of the World-Ending Demonic Lord.
"That again. You were definitely here, and then you weren't. Is this your eye and hand?"
The World-Ending Demonic Lord spread his own hand.
It was a gesture as if the five fingertips were grasping and releasing something invisible.
The fiend cackled at him.
"Done looking around? If you're done looking, we gotta start again, huh?"
The end of his laughter cut off sharply.
"This time, it'll definitely be more fun. This one, I've saved it to the point of insanity."
Behind the man, something dark crimson shot upward.
Swelling into a sphere in the rear, it boiled over with something neither light nor darkness.
The patterns etched into the man's skin all flashed simultaneously, receiving the demonic Qi.
"Keuheuheu."
The fiend's pupils dilated to the maximum, and then the revealed black pupils, without any whites, began to fragment into fine pieces as if his cells were dividing.
-x-X-x-
"I see you. Every move you make."
The words came out disjointed.
Each syllable stretched then quickened.
"You're the first one in this new hunting ground that actually makes me tense. You, that is..."
The World-Ending Demonic Lord's form was erased from that spot.
"...should I say thank you?"
Only the two of them floated in the emptiness.
A space with neither up nor down.
Where the World-Ending Demonic Lord had vanished, in this pitch-black space without a single foothold, was impossible to even gauge.
But wherever that was, only one thing needed to be calculated.
Where, how, and through which path to pour out his Demonic Qi.
Dong Bongsu's thought circuits followed nothing but that.
Kurururung-!
The Demonic Qi boiled into a single mass and left the Demonic Lord's body.
A blood-red heap came crashing in, crushing distance itself.
It was a strike that pushed with sheer weight, like collapsing a mountain and pouring it into a river.
A vast quantity of Demonic Qi amassed by slaughtering tens of thousands, then boiled down, condensed, and compressed again.
The Super True Qi Field trembled in response, drawn into its vibrations.
Interlocking with the same amplitude he had read multiple times before, the bound Demonic Qi began to dissipate on its own.
The Super True Qi Field had undergone numerous evolutions alongside its creator, Dong Bongsu.
It was now closer to tens of thousands of controllable limbs and eyes than a mere field.
And the solution to this field was a higher-dimensional equation that only Dong Bongsu could solve.
Fwirururururururu-.
Yet, even as he unraveled one strand, the next wave of Demonic Qi covered it.
The speed of filling the dissipated spots outpaced the speed of dispersing them.
Solve one, and two more swelled up to replace it.
The supply and demand of Demonic Qi after its transformation had surpassed the Super True Qi Field's capacity by a level.
Reached the point where the hands reading and scattering it could no longer keep up with the quantity pouring out.
In the meantime.
Spat-!
The Demonic Qi, with even light and sound lagging a step behind, touched the Transcendent True Qi Wall that Dong Bongsu had firmly deployed.
It hammered at it simultaneously across a vast domain, like a gigantic fishing net.
Kwakwakwakwakwang!
Dong Bongsu's form flew to the opposite side of the Demonic Qi's forceful momentum as if struck by a sudden death blow.
Kwang!
He pierced straight through an unfinished mountain ridge.
The hollow cross-section crumbled, scattering ash-gray debris.
He smashed through countless unfinished fragments floating around, his back finally lodging into the cross-section of some piece of flotsam.
The distance he had traveled in that chaos was equally unknowable.
For the empty space was so vast and void that even that became unfathomable.
Pusus....
A thin wisp of white steam rose from his chest.
The hem of his clothes, where the Demonic Qi had touched, had melted slightly black.
This was the first time the [Public Enemy of the Murim Set] had sustained even minor damage.
"Impressive."
The exchange just now had told him something.
'Unraveling and dispersing them one by one cannot handle the massive quantity of Demonic Qi poured out all at once.'
Then....
Pit, pat.
Dong Bongsu lightly brushed the ash scattered on his chest and lifted his eyes to the upper-right.
The World-Ending Demonic Lord would be approaching, but still too distant to be seen as more than a dot.
At one quiet edge of his vision, a single number stood out prominently.
The [Chain Attack] count.
Other buffs were already applied, so there were no more stats to raise.
Things like Spirit Root Stones existed, but they were unsuitable to use right now.
However.
* Current Remaining Points: 47
He didn't know about the Murim Online side, but the stats on the What is Hero system side were stacked quite high.
Strength, Agility, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma, Luck, and so on.
Ding, diriririk.
He distributed the remaining points appropriately among all stats except Charisma.
His entire body tingled dozens of times, as if electrocuted.
"Good."
Dong Bongsu, who had been lodged in the flotsam's cross-section, finally pulled his body free.
Hududuk, tak.
His feet landed on another floating fragment.
He brushed the remaining ash-gray debris from his clothes with the back of his hand.
Then, he turned his head toward the World-Ending Demonic Lord, who was now close enough to have fully regained his form.
No. The moment he thought about turning his head, the collaboration between [Footwork] and Transcendent True Qi Lightness Skill was already erasing the space between them.
Dong Bongsu appeared before the Demonic Lord's nose, as if teleporting in a slashing diagonal line.
"Shall we continue?"
Kwang!
A fist slammed into his abdomen, and simultaneously, the Demonic Lord's skull rattled and his internal organs twisted.
Only then did the Demonic Lord see it.
How Dong Bongsu had moved.
Everything else appeared stretched to his eyes, which had squeezed Demonic Qi to its limit, but Dong Bongsu alone had cut through those stretched gaps and entered.
It was a step that severed time into pieces and stepped between them.
It wasn't that he was invisible; he had moved by cutting the very grain of distance itself.
What had happened in that brief moment?
In that very short interval, the other side had become sharper and faster.
Before the end of the voice saying "shall we continue" could even fade, the Demonic Lord's form flew back the way it had come.
Piercing a straight line through the floating debris.
The scenery on both sides stretched endlessly, as if pulled long front and back.
Puk, seok.
The World-Ending Demonic Lord crashed into the cut-away cross-section of a slope.
Jigeul, jigeugeul.
Red steam seeped from where he was lodged.
His torn flesh was mending from the inside out.
Cuts filled in, broken places reconnected.
Tadik.
Dong Bongsu had followed in an instant.
He had long since read where that persistent regeneration came from.
Before entering combat, the [Faith Sight] had overlaid one thing upon the man's skin.
A suit of blood-red armor.
"The Blood Demon Robe."
The lodged Demonic Lord pulled his body from the cross-section.
Wounds, scars, lost flesh-all were burning the stored Demonic Qi and rapidly regenerating.
"Armor that burns Demonic Qi to mend itself."
Along with his words, a sword rose in his left hand.
It was the Nine Demon Annihilation Wheel Sword he had drawn from his Inventory.
As he imbued its blade with Qi, the edge became a dimension heavier.
Seogeok.
The sword slashed.
The cutting outpaced the blood-red armor's mending speed.
It sliced again over the gap before it could fully fill.
The man, staggering back, laughed between ragged breaths.
His face still looked as if he was dying of joy, but an unprecedented light now overlay it.
"Keukeukeu... And how'd you figure that out?"
Even though even the precious treasure inside his own skin had been completely read.
"No matter how much I slash, no matter how much I kill and kill again, it's always been the same dull things! Only you are this different.
Good. Good. Insanely good."
Instead of anger, something else welled up on his hardened face.
"I truly love you. I do, you. Let's roll around together forever! Keuheuheuheuheu!"
Dong Bongsu did not answer.
Just as there is no reason to answer a dish sitting across the dining table asking how it knew its own recipe.
Receiving no reply, the Demonic Lord's retreating foot instead kicked back hard against the ground.
A will to extract an answer with his hands if he wouldn't receive one with his mouth.
His ten fingers, clad in black gloves, spread wide.
From the rings and shells fitted like thimbles on each knuckle, a single node of blood-red light rose, sharpening his fingertips into ten Finger Auras-no, ten Dagger Auras.
This time, he did not thrust straight away.
"I already learned that trying to stab is a wasted step."
The ten fingertips scattered into a circle around Dong Bongsu at its center.
They did.
Literally, as if they were truly separable objects, the fingers all detached simultaneously and surrounded Dong Bongsu.
One blade in front, two on either side, the rest diagonally above and below.
It was a different pattern from the previous fan-rib of strikes targeting limbs and neck.
This was a hand not aiming to pierce a single point, but to encircle the space where Dong Bongsu stood and imprison him with blood-red blades.
"So this time, I'll lock you in and grind you down.
If there's no empty space, just make it so nothing is empty, right?"
Spapapapapapapapapat!
The ten blades whirled simultaneously.
The encircling blades rotated in one direction, constricting inward.
It wasn't a stabbing hand, but a churning one.
As the circumference narrowed, the space trapped within was drawn into a blood-red grinder.
Since it wasn't aiming for an empty spot, there was no empty spot to miss.
A chunk of the unfinished mountain ridge merely grazing the edge of the cage formed by the Demonic Qi field was ground down and scattered like sawdust.
It was certainly a cleverer move than the futile strikes before.
Dong Bongsu watched it.
Watched the flow of Demonic Qi dragged along as the fingers rotated in one direction.
A rotating thing has an axis.
Holding the sword in his left hand, his free right hand gently touched one strand of that flow.
The Super True Qi Field seeped along the whirlwind and twisted the rotating axis once from the inside.
He didn't grab and stop it, but pushed the spinning direction in reverse.
He didn't grab and stop it, but pushed the spinning direction in reverse.
Kiiiiiik-.
The constricting cage of blood-red Demonic Qi began to rotate backward, one beat late.
The finger blades grinding inward were swept toward their own master.
"..Huh?"
The ten blades freed from his hand instead surrounded the Demonic Lord.
The one who tried to trap was trapped.
The blood-red blades swept a full circle across their master's shoulders and flanks.
Chwararak-.
"Strange. They're my hands."
The Demonic Lord looked down at his shoulder, sliced by his own finger blades.
The torn flesh was bubbling up from the inside and mending itself again.
As a layer of blood-red energy filled in, even the trace of where the earlier cut had been became indistinct.
"Aha. So that's why I don't die either."
Dong Bongsu did not miss the gap as the reverse-spinning Demonic Qi cage unraveled.
He slipped his form between the loosened Demonic Qi blades, tore through space, and shoved his left hand through.
Seogeok.
The lightning-like sword tip ripped open the Demonic Lord's chest-cheok-revealing the void behind him completely.
But the cut filled back up immediately.
"...Hey. That stings quite a bit, I'll admit."
The Demonic Lord rubbed his chest, now mended after being split, with the back of his hand, grinning hideously again.
"But isn't that a little lacking...?"
Seogeok.
Seogeogeok.
Seogeogeogeok.
Lacking?
Following the Nine Demon Annihilation Wheel Sword, Dong Bongsu drew the Evil-Slaying Sword as well, and didn't stop there; he pulled out every blade in his Inventory and floated them within his Super True Qi Field.
A truth in the world of capitalism.
There is nothing in this world that money cannot solve.
It's just that money was lacking.
And.
A truth in the Murim.
There is nothing in this world that power cannot solve.
It's just that power was lacking.
Lacking?
It was the swords that were lacking.
The cutting was lacking.
Then a clear answer exists.
Add swords until it is annihilated, and cut until it disappears.
Seogeok.
Seogeogeok.
Seogeogeogeok.
-x-X-x-
Shrrrrrrrrrk.
Every time the swords multiplied, the places being cut multiplied with them.
When one blade cleaved his shoulder, two crossed his back, and three passed through his side all at once.
Wherever the World-Ending Demonic Lord's flesh was cut, it seethed, and as it seethed, it healed shut once more.
Then the blades added twice the wounds again.
And in between, the crimson energy packed flesh right back into those wounds.
Twice over.
"Keuk, kuhahaha! That's it! That's it! This is it! This is what I'm talking about!"
The more he was cut, the harder the World-Ending Demonic Lord laughed.
Even amidst that, chunks of flesh torn away were refilled before they could scatter anywhere into the Void Space.
By now, the sheer volume of that flesh was so vast, it felt as if interstellar matter made of blood and flesh was spreading throughout the entire void.
Even so.
Shrrrrrrrrrrrrk.
The Super True Qi Field never ceased its blade dance.
Added to and added upon, now thousands of swords and sharp edges tirelessly slashed, cut, and ripped at the World-Ending Demonic Lord.
"...."
Dong Bongsu, even in this, did not stop his dispassionate calculations.
Just before, the wounds carved into the bastard's body numbered 1,712 glancing cuts and 2,555 severe injuries.
The glancing cuts and severe injuries that fully healed up and recovered were 1,707 and 2,602, respectively.
Before, there were spots among the severe injuries that hadn't fully recovered; this time, that deficit was filled in.
'The bastard's recovery is almost, almost perfectly constant.
But 'almost' means it is not perfect.
Whirrrrrrrr.
He summoned more blades.
Everything from the very bottom of his Inventory was dragged up and set upon the Super True Qi Field-broken sabers, notched daggers, even ones with only the hilts left.
He didn't care if the edges were intact.
They just needed to cut.
He mobilized even the sharpest of the bone fragments from the corpses.
When thousands became tens of thousands, the Demonic Lord's flesh had no moment left intact.
Yet the speed of recovery itself did not fall.
Even if not constant, every single increment that was cut away was filled back in, almost exactly the same volume each time.
Whether he added a hundred more swords, or a thousand, the Demonic Lord's demonic recovery energy kept up, matching the increased amount precisely.
Whirrrrrrrrrrr, shrrrrrrrrrrrrrk.
"Good, good. Whether you win or I win, let's keep going! Because I'm still perfectly fine."
Yes, he was perfectly fine.
He appeared so.
But there was no way he could be perfectly fine.
Just as the laws of physics clearly differ between Earth and Murim, and this Void showcases yet another set, the established physics anywhere are different.
However, mathematics must be the same wherever, in whatever dimension.
An apple plus an apple must equal two apples.
Two apples minus one apple must equal one apple.
Cut after cut, the bastard's wounds were filled, and he endured as much as they were.
But to endure means somewhere there must be a negative to match that recovery.
It might be that endlessly increasing the blades and endless cutting wasn't the answer, but just as the bastard's seemingly endlessly refilling, seemingly bottomless dantian would eventually reach its end, just like my Super True Qi Field, which draws upon nature's energy but will ultimately meet a terminal point in offense due to limits in my stamina and concentration.
Without withdrawing the suspended swords, Dong Bongsu continued to study the Demonic Lord's demonic energy.
The reason it kept filling, no matter how much it was cut.
Where that endlessness came from.
'The stock of the refill is clearly demonic energy.
Either drain that stock until not a single handful remains, or the cutting side must finally outpace the recovery.
It had to be one of the two.
However, that 'outpacing' seemed difficult to achieve by merely increasing the number of blades, because in terms of time and space, an uninterrupted clash with the World-Ending Demonic Lord was already occurring without a single gap.
Not a volume increase, but a single cut surpassing the recovery-a different move was needed.
He decided to probe the lighter side first.
Without withdrawing the black sword in his left hand, a point of white light gathered at the tip of his right hand.
Hwoong-.
A single white spark grazed the World-Ending Demonic Lord's side.
The touched spot caved in, billowing white steam.
Flesh surrendered to the demonic, so where the light touched, it crumbled twice over.
But the Demonic Lord's demonic energy immediately rushed in to fill the caved-in place.
Over the white steam, crimson steam covered it.
A single breath of 'Sacred Qi' seemed insufficient to outpace the bastard's recovery.
Then what about more than a breath?
Hwoooooooong!
Tens of thousands of blades cascaded down in unison.
Broken sabers, chipped swords, mere hilts, sharp bone fragments.
Every piece of metal set upon the Super True Qi Field formed a gigantic steel whirlwind and descended upon the one World-Ending Demonic Lord.
It was a whirlwind of metallic colors with a single person at its very eye.
Into its heart, the black line of the left hand pierced through darkness like a black river, and the white light at the right hand's tip poured alongside it, a white blade following the edge of that black channel.
A devouring river, a cutting blade, and ten thousand pieces of metal fell upon the World-Ending Demonic Lord as one mass.
Like a failed experiment in an animation, the grotesquely distorted Demonic Lord laughed and spread his arms wide.
"I like it. This is it!"
Then he stopped recovering.
The demonic energy that had been filling the cut places simultaneously reversed and burst outward.
Kwa-deu-deu-deu-deu-deu-.
Every tissue in his entire body exploded at once.
Skin, hair, organs, bone marrow.
The streams of demonic energy churning beneath his flesh erupted like a dark-red volcano, pushing back the surrounding metal.
A blood-red pillar of flame, swollen dozens of times the size of a man, attempted to swallow the entire steel whirlwind.
The tens of thousands of descending blades met that eruption, halted in the void, and began to melt right where they stopped.
Chiiiiik-.
The blades all melted down at once.
Metal touched by the dark-red demonic energy softened, burst, and flowed as molten steel.
As hundreds dissolved and scattered, Dong Bongsu disgorged another heap from behind them, but those too corroded and fell the moment they touched.
The arrested molten metal scattered into the void like black rain.
A half-built mountain ridge floating weightlessly in the distance was hit by that rain, its upper section rotting away and collapsing.
The torn-away earth and rock were sucked into the blood-red pillar of flame and promptly melted into nothingness.
The demonic energy didn't stop there.
With the momentum of having melted all the metal, it surged towards the black line and the white light.
The black river swallowed that demonic energy one mouthful at a time.
The black maw swelled as much as it swallowed, and into the swollen places, more demonic energy surged in, pushing back against the sword.
Conversely, the white pillar of flame burned the attacking demonic energy.
New demonic energy gushed into the burned spots, gnawing away to corrode the white into a dark red.
The edges of the white blade darkened, festered, and scattered.
"..."
Dong Bongsu brought his two hands together.
The black river and the white blade joined from left and right, becoming a single black-and-white spear, and with its tip, he drove straight into the very heart of the blood-red volcano.
Kwa-uuuuuung-!
A light that was black yet sacred and the dark-red demonic energy collided at a single point.
At the point of contact, demonic energy was devoured and burned away, while at the same time, the white energy was corroded and chipped.
Neither side yielded.
Rather, the Void caught between them couldn't bear it and distorted.
The unfinished sculptures floating weightlessly-bare fortress walls, buildings barely outlined, leafless trees were torn apart, caught in the aftermath, flying away.
An entire fortress wall tilted, sucked towards the blood-red side, and upon touching the white light, half blackly rotted and half whitely scorched.
Cracks spread across a place without up or down, black fissures tearing open chaotically in every direction.
Uuuuuuung.
A single streak of blood trickled from the corner of Dong Bongsu's mouth.
Even for one who had already transcended the human realm, the World-Ending Demonic Lord's demonic energy was powerful enough to push him to the brink.
Yet, Dong Bongsu pushed and pushed again.
Still with an expressionless face holding the extremity of 'Nothingness'.
Swallowing another mouthful of demonic energy, pouring fresh light onto the chipped white blade to stand it up again, he steadily advanced the black-and-white spear, inch by inch, step by step, towards the World-Ending Demonic Lord.
Kwa-reu-reu-reu-reu-reung-!
The pushed-back volcano was forced right back into the World-Ending Demonic Lord's body.
The erupting blood-red pillar buckled inward, and the Demonic Lord's flesh was scorched from within by the white light.
The dark-red patterns faded one strand at a time, raising white steam.
"Huh-eok-."
Shrouded in molten metal and ash-grey steam, the World-Ending Demonic Lord was pushed back a single step.
The erupting blood-red pillar subsided to half its height.
But even in the midst of that dying core, the World-Ending Demonic Lord laughed harder.
"This is it.... This is it!"
Demonic energy poured forth again.
Dong Bongsu poured blades over it once more; the black river swallowed, the white blade burned, and he advanced another inch.
The World-Ending Demonic Lord was pushed back another half step.
The blood-red pillar shrank by a hand's breadth with each clash.
Dong Bongsu's black-and-white spear advanced the same distance.
Little by little.
But it was still insufficient.
Though the flesh touched by the white light crumbled, the dantian beneath it still showed no bottom.
No matter how much he shaved and shaved away, the demonic energy leaking from the core of the World-Ending Demonic Lord, and the source-unknown demonic energy radiating from every cell, still gushed forth endlessly.
New crimson seeped up from beneath the shaved spots, propping the pillar back up.
It felt not yet enough to force the Sacred Qi's bit that far.
Nor could he stop and switch to another direction.
The moment he stopped, the pressure of that demonic energy volcano would swallow him whole instead.
He could push it back, but not perfectly burn it away.
"Keukeukeukeuk! At this point, there's nothing left to save."
Demonic energy churned simultaneously from the entire body of the World-Ending Demonic Lord, who had already completely lost his human form.
Something, boiled down and condensed, began to strip away even the color of humanity from within the Demonic Lord's body.
"It's not right if it doesn't end."
Even the blood-red skin, every single cell, simmered down to ashen grey.
All the churning demonic energy, except for the outer wall maintaining the power struggle with Dong Bongsu, extinguished strand by strand, gathering into the very center of the World-Ending Demonic Lord.
It was his last remaining move.
Chijik, chijijik.
Except for the sounds of energies burning and leaking at the boundary, a complete stillness worthy of the Void flowed.
Simultaneously, the light subsided.
Now, all that remained of the World-Ending Demonic Lord was pure Killing Intent.
He had erased everything else.
A lump of will, coalesced with no thought, no texture, but with the single-minded purpose of swallowing, crushing, and digesting Dong Bongsu.
He crammed the essence of all the malice and demonic energy accumulated in distorted Murim into that single handful and collided it against Dong Bongsu.
Matching that, Dong Bongsu's left hand clasped blackness.
Darkness spread along the sword's blade.
An energy that swallowed everything it touched, leaving nothing behind-the Super Black Hole Sword Aura.
But he raised his left hand, then lowered it.
The flesh that had simmered down to ash-grey because the last hand had been crammed into it.
He watched it quietly, and eventually stopped the rising fingertips.
Because the spot, emptied of every last grain without leaving a single one behind to replenish, was revealed there.
Then [Faith Sight] swept over it.
Just moments ago, it had been a vessel with an unfathomable bottom.
A lost dantian that refilled no matter how much was taken.
That endless spot was now laid bare down to its very floor.
The bastard probably doesn't know, though he revealed it thinking it was his final card...
"...."
Finally, he saw it.
The bastard's bottom, the hole of the demonic energy.
That tenacious energy that had made the flesh fill back up whenever it was cut-now there was none left.
Because in molding the essence of his killing intent, he had drawn out and poured in everything within himself.
With nothing left to take in, there was nothing left to fill with.
That thing which had never once been emptied during this long battle.
That space, emptied for the first time, was charging at Dong Bongsu, void.
Then it's not something to cut.
If it had been something he couldn't withdraw because he couldn't cut it, then when the place that draws it in was emptied, it wasn't about withdrawing, but filling.
Fill it, and finish it from the inside out.
The blackness subsided.
The darkness of his left hand faded in a single breath, and instead, his right hand rose.
From the Inventory, a second sword emerged.
The Evil-Slaying Sword.
A faint light rose over the sword's blade.
The same white light that had gathered at his fingertip moments before now filled the entire sword.
When touched by 'Sacred', the demonic scatters.
And what's more, for a body that had surrendered its very essence to the demonic, it would crumble twice over wherever touched.
Piercing through the killing intent that was consuming the void like massing clouds, intent on swallowing even Dong Bongsu, he drove the white sword in.
It was the moment the white sword touched where the core of the being called the World-Ending Demonic Lord had been.
The last handful burst.
Ku-kwa-aaaaaaang-!
Just before completely swallowing Dong Bongsu, the killing intent that had lost its target swelled and exploded where it stood.
It was the lump crammed with the essence of demonic energy, leaving not a single grain behind.
As it unfurled in all directions, it pushed the entire Void away.
Mountain ridges, fortress walls, barely outlined buildings... this time they didn't just break; they vanished without a trace.
In a space without up, down, left, or right, they split apart as if light were permeating them, and those split fissures split again.
The Void itself cracked.
Past one layer, and past another layer of darkness, cracks spread, snap, snap.
In the very center of it all stood Dong Bongsu.
Kwajik-.
His left arm detached from the shoulder and fell.
A beat later, below his left knee was crushed and swept into the light.
Yet even with his footing lost, his body did not lean.
He didn't care anyway, and there was no gravity.
The dark-red epicenter passed through, mincing flesh and grinding bone.
Still, he did not withdraw the white sword in his right hand.
There was no reason to.
The light was already inside that bastard.
An arm, a leg?
They were just temporarily detached.
Dong Bongsu didn't even glance at his fallen arm.
He drove his one good leg into the bottom of a fortress wall like a meteorite, bracing himself, and simply pushed the white sword planted in the empty dantian further inward, tearing it apart.
It came from within, not drawn from without.
Through the emptied dantian, following the vacated path, the light permeated from the very center of that thing's body to every corner of the World-Ending Demonic Lord's entire system.
There was no demonic energy to block it.
Nothing to fill with.
Everywhere the permeating light touched, the flesh surrendered to the demonic, the bones surrendered to the demonic; they all faintly burned away from the inside out.
Every single cell, without exception.
Kureureureureureureu....
At the very heart of the epicenter, in the middle of the fissures he had created himself, the World-Ending Demonic Lord....
No, what was now only ashes, laughed.
— ....Good.
Strangely, the ashes laughed, shaping sound with killing intent.
In some ways, a magnificent lifeform.
— This... is a first. But you too, you... an arm and a leg... a gift... good good... waiting...
Dong Bongsu gave no answer, spoke no word.
There was no longer any reason, need, or value to.
The light spread twice over from within.
As much as it had been consumed by the demonic, faster, deeper.
With no energy left to refill, there was only fading.
The ashes, that handful of ashes that had surrendered its body to the demonic, finally scattered and dispersed across the Void.
The Sacred Cloud also faded away together.
That tenacious energy which had endlessly burned the demonic energy also quietly extinguished from within.
And.
At the same time.
This time, light surged up from within Dong Bongsu.
It was time to settle the price for sending an arm and a leg as a gift to the bastard's final journey.
Swoosh.
Once.
Swooosh.
Again.
Swoooosh.
Without pause, light streamed continuously in all directions of the Void.
That light flowed first to the limbs that had fallen away from Dong Bongsu's body.
Light gathered where the detached left arm had been, and from shoulder to fingertip, it grew anew.
Below the crushed knee rose again, filling down to the toes.
The slashed and ground-away spots healed without a trace.
Naturally Dong Bongsu felt nothing.
It was something that had always happened, something that would always happen, and had all been calculated.
By the time the Sacred Light subsided, Dong Bongsu finally raised his head.
The fissures torn by the World-Ending Demonic Lord had not yet healed.
Cracks upon the Void hung everywhere, gaping open.
Within each crack, a different light shimmered.
In one gap, two moons hung in a black sky.
In another, endlessly arrayed spires were burning down.
In yet another, a place filled only with light, without water or land, and next to that, a scene of something colossal swallowing a star.
"Worlds?"
They could be dimensions.
He had guessed this Void was a tunnel connecting worlds, and it truly might be so.
Witnessing such endless rifts unfurled before his eyes suggested as much.
But even at this point where he glimpsed the secrets of the universe, Dong Bongsu was seeing something different from an ordinary person.
Because the deeply emotional sentiment that first struck him was not awe at the cosmos, but that countless worlds, countless hunting grounds, were facing him from beyond each rift.
Dong Bongsu took them in, one by one.
-x-X-x-
"....I just can't figure out... what the hell is going on. Damn it."
Every screen covering the wall displayed pitch-black coordinate grids.
Just a moment ago, the maps of GOR were shown there, but now half of them were taken up by an empty space beyond the boundary.
That was not all.
Coordinates that had never been planned, programmed, or deployed were multiplying at a rate where two lines would light up for every one that was turned off, and unknown things were blinking right next to them.
When they patched a broken spot, the patched area would distort again.
Maps appeared where the textures had caved in, and the floor had shot upwards, and a hundred mobs would spawn overlapping on the same coordinates before stretching out in a single line and spilling off the screen.
The physics engine seemed completely out of sync, as perfectly fine objects twisted in place and turned inside out.
In one dungeon, the ceiling and floor were swapped, and in one field, the sky was pouring down to the ground.
And there was another major problem.
The Red Arena.
The field boss that had disappeared for a while and suddenly popped back up, the Azure Gold Qilin.
It was still there, grinding up the users.
"What's the death count on that thing right now?"
".... ..I can't count it."
"Roughly how much, you punk?"
"To the point where the packets can't even keep up?"
Every time the massive creature swung its head, a group of people clinging to it shattered into gray ash and scattered.
Wherever its hooves landed, human shapes were crushed and ground into powder.
At the edge of the screen, death logs were surging and pouring down endlessly.
By the time one tried to read a single line, a hundred more had piled up.
And it never stopped.
It also did not disappear.
Originally, a field boss would disappear when defeated, and even if it wasn't defeated, it had a cooldown time, so by design, it was supposed to return to its lair at a specific time.
Of course, in the actual program, it just vanished and then regenerated when the cooldown was over.
However...
That thing just would not disappear.
A boss that couldn't be killed, sitting in the arena and wiping out every user and GM that came in?
There was no such thing in the GOR data.
Even so, the users never stopped coming.
While hundreds were turning to dust on one side, pillars of teleportation light shot up from all directions.
The empty spaces were immediately filled by the newly arrived numbers.
On the single rumor that defeating it would drop crazy rewards, they stubbornly crawled in even while clearly seeing people die.
They set coordinates from where they regenerated and crawled right back in.
They were ground up as soon as they entered, and they kept entering where they were ground up.
With those two bugs from earlier gone, the Qilin was left all alone, continuing its massacre.
"Why the hell won't that thing turn of....."
The team leader glanced at that screen and quickly looked away.
There was too much to look at.
There was nothing they could turn off either.
"What did we decide to do about the refund calls?"
The team leader brought his cold coffee to his mouth and then put it back down.
"The customer service team completely blocked the lines. They said picking up would just get them cursed at."
All the server management personnel were glued to their chairs like that, with their headsets just hanging around their necks.
The state of emergency showed no signs of lifting.
There were still plenty of simple-minded users who believed this was just a simple error, but a good number of the people sitting here staring at the servers day and night had already sensed that this was a strange phenomenon completely inexplicable by science.
Some even believed it was the kind of thing they would have rather not known about.
Perhaps... to the point of worrying if this was a sign of the end of the world.
Like that, everyone talked less.
Except for the operations team leader and the server manager, of course.
"This, no that... no fuck, where are all these things leaking from?!"
"I don't know. I said I don't know, team leader. Please stop asking."
"Do you know anything at all, huh?"
"Yes, yes, I'm sorry for knowing nothing. But right now, there's probably no one on Earth who knows what's going on."
"Then is it a bug... or whatever, anyway. You can't catch a single one of them?"
"No, I can't catch them. Catching them is hard in the first place, but it's not just one hole that's leaking."
The server manager pushed the headset down from one ear.
"It feels like various parts of the core are being ground away, but where that is... no, I can't figure out what the problem is at all, like entirely. Perhaps... those empty areas acting like noise are playing a part in it too."
The development team had thrown their hands up a long time ago.
It wasn't the kind of thing that could be blocked with a patch.
That empty area where not even coordinates could be caught, that space spread beyond the edge of the map that had never been filled.
Over there, those two unidentified bugs from earlier had been clashing for hours.
It didn't show up directly on the screen.
Since there were no coordinates, it couldn't be displayed.
However, through the holes all over the server, they could at least faintly tell there was a battle going on.
But because they could only see incredibly vast, fast, and fragmented movements, there was no way to know everything exactly.
Except, every time those two clashed, the aftermath crushed the inside of the server and spread out to the maps in all directions.
To the point where the entire server shook every time they collided.
Perfectly fine dungeons were crushed inside out, and dozens of fields warped simultaneously.
Even countless amounts of noise, impossible to identify what kind of data it was, pushed in and inevitably caused the server to lag.
The most absurd thing was that the server itself wouldn't close at all.
Even though the president gave the approval earlier and the power was cut... the server did not turn off.
In other words, the GOR server was currently running without power.
That was the root cause.
The reason why this situation was considered closer to a sort of server armageddon rather than a simple error.
Now, the only thing the operations team could do was just wait.
But it seemed the saying that waiting is the best medicine when you don't know what to do was right.
The server anomalies that seemed like they would never end suddenly stopped.
"Huh?!"
The server manager let out a short shout of surprise without taking his eyes off the monitor.
At that moment, a corner of the screen flared white.
Bbeeeeeep-
"...What is that now?"
"I don't know... Wait a second."
The server manager's hands moved urgently over the keyboard, but no changes occurred that particularly dealt with the current strange phenomenon.
Just beyond the boundary, in that unreleased area.
Something shot up from there.
Flash!
It was a pure white light source.
In a space where the coordinates were completely unknown, a light bloomed as if a sun had shot up, and then it flowed back up toward the server.
Until now, what flew in were broken codes, leaking resources, or at least bits of data like half-read text.
This time, it wasn't even data; it was just light.
Flash.
Flash.
Flash.
The same light exploded a dozen or so times in a row.
Every time it burst, warnings covered the monitors.
The traffic graph hit the ceiling, and the ping bounced all over the place.
Values they had never seen before completely filled the logs.
"Haa... Is it over now?"
"What is?"
"I think the server might blow up? Seeing the state of everything bursting like that."
"Team leader."
"What?"
"That thing, the load didn't originate from within the server. It's coming in from the outside. From that empty unknown space over there, something keeps crossing over to our side. As something like light."
"Light is just data anyway, isn't it?"
"Yes, that's true, but..... this is very strange."
"Can things get any stranger than this?"
"Do you see that pattern over there?"
What the manager pointed at was a part of the log densely packed with numbers.
"What about it?"
The server manager tapped several coordinates where the light source had shot up.
"There's only one thing with a pattern like that."
The windows popped up, broke, and broke again, but they did seem to have a consistent shape.
It just wasn't the GOR format.
"What pattern?"
"Level Up."
"...Huh? What is that supposed to mean?"
".....I don't know either. I just said it because it was a familiar pattern."
"..."
The team leader pressed his temples.
Curses rose to his throat, but he didn't even have the energy left to spit them out.
"Is that happening only to us right now?"
The server manager's gaze fixed on one end of the monitor, on the industry channel window that was always kept open.
"Ah... Team leader. That light, it's not just us. Just like those bugs from earlier."
The server manager dragged the channel window and enlarged it.
Emergency notices from companies in the same industry were lining up.
Earlier they were talking about broken codes, but now everyone was saying the exact same thing about an unidentified light.
Breaking news was also endless in the external news windows.
Screenshots of the same light source covering the screens in every game were piling up in real time.
Earlier it was bugs, and now, all kinds of online servers were being covered by an unknown light.
"What the... all those bugs blew up on the exact same day at the same time, and now even that light is happening everywhere at once?"
The team leader pulled his chair and came closer.
His eyes, tracking the screen, were bloodshot.
The word coincidence had been discarded a long time ago.
It couldn't be a coincidence if it was this identical.
However, the server manager's face, as he looked into the enlarged screen, stiffened in a different way.
"But... there's something strange."
"What now?"
"That light. It's coming right now."
"What kind of bullshit is that now? It's coming? Where to?"
The server manager moistened his dry lips.
"...Here."
On the screen, a white radiance filled the empty coordinate grid once again and then subsided.
However, a single hole where that light was leaking in was clearly torn open toward this side.
...
At the very edge of the Red Arena, the gap that had opened up and not closed rippled once again.
Until now, everything beyond the wall had just been sunk in pitch black.
Half-made scraps floated around weightlessly, only to ruthlessly explode and shatter every time the two clashed.
The slanted tear that the black-clad man had been sucked into was also still there.
Flash!
Flash!
Flash!
The darkness and the scene visible through the gap fiercely undulated along with rays of light over a dozen times, and the floating incomplete fragments were all swept to one side by the surging waves before scattering.
A mountain ridge that was floating sideways lost its ruggedness and spun around.
A chunk of a half-built fortress wall split in two and was pushed to both sides.
The opened crack took the impact and tore a few handspans longer.
In the end, it was impossible to see exactly what was clashing and grinding against what.
But the rays of light spewed out at the end of that collision leaked all the way to this side of the wall, causing a perfectly fine coordinate grid to shift out of place once before returning.
"...."
Zero stared at that trembling for a long time.
He wanted to try going beyond that wall.
Not to conquer it, nor to destroy it.
It was just curiosity.
Unlike the notices or the users who still hadn't come to their senses and were blabbering about bugs or viruses, he instinctively felt it.
The fact that this was some kind of sign or omen where the source or the laws of this universe had unconsciously leaked out.
So, he wanted to just follow into that torn space and properly see it with his own eyes, even if just once.
But strangely, unlike those guys from earlier, Zero couldn't cross over.
Because he was still nothing more than a piece of data.
The sensation of the things on this side, the game world, becoming trivial.
At a certain moment, when a corner of his chest was intensely leaning toward that dark gap.
From that gap, something suddenly popped out.
At first, he thought the darkness had just gotten a layer thicker.
Since a pitch-black figure was coming out of a black space, there was no boundary.
He didn't know how such a thing was possible, but by spreading the wide-open gap even wider with both arms, it brought its upper body over to this side again.
It was that unidentified black-clad man from earlier.
Of course, he was Dong Bongsu.
"...."
Dong Bongsu casually looked around at Zero and the surroundings once, then rotated his arms.
The weight had returned.
In other words, he confirmed that he was once again placed under specific laws of physics.
And in a physics engine very similar to Earth at that.
The red dirt was the same too.
Tap.
One foot touched the ground first, and the other foot followed, stepping down.
His knees bent and straightened once, bearing his own weight.
It was the leg that had newly sprouted after swallowing the World-Ending Demonic Lord.
The hands were the same.
"I arrived properly."
This place was no different from when he had left.
Users were still crumbling into gray powder and being laid down, and the cooling masses were piling up on top of them.
A space that was just like that, where there were corpses but not corpses, ruins but not ruins, and an arena but not an arena.
But the floor right in the middle of it kept shifting out of place every once in a while.
It wasn't that the textures were breaking, but rather it looked as if something else lying underneath was bulging up.
The cause of the distortion that had sent him beyond the wall.
And the master of that distortion was right in the middle of that arena.
The Azure Gold Qilin.
The massive creature turned its head.
The brilliance over its five-colored scales was deepening.
The spots that had been ground away were covered, and its colors grew deeper.
A lion's mane, a dragon's whiskers, and a single tall horn on the crown of its head.
Its eyes, mixed with five colors, coincidentally turned toward Dong Bongsu.
Dong Bongsu met those eyes.
And then.
Smirk.
"It really is you, the key."
He laughed happily.
-x-X-x-
Dong Bongsu's gaze did not shift anywhere else.
Not to the gray powder spread at his feet, nor to the users flickering and growing cold upon it.
The reason he had fallen here, the very reason he had returned, was solely for that single beast.
Looking at that Kirin, the corners of Dong Bongsu's mouth were uncharacteristically raised on one side.
Though he could not know the exact mechanics, it was because he had realized that the rift error between worlds was happening because of that guy.
An engineer studies and applies physics, but there is no need to know its origin.
A hunter knows their gun well and uses it, but there is no need to know its inner workings.
Dong Bongsu was an outstanding engineer, a hunter, and a predator.
The origin and mechanics of his prey?
There was no need to know.
He just had to keep in mind the fact that his goal had become clear.
"...."
He had just seen beyond the wall with his own eyes.
Countless rifts were present there, and within each and every crack, a never-before-seen hunting ground was laid out.
That beast would tear off a corner of those places and cover this red arena with it.
That was undeniably the key.
It was obviously a dimensional rift caused by some error, but it did not matter anyway.
He had arrived the same way when he first came to the Murim, and he still didn't know the exact details even now, right?
It was not important.
The smile on his lips faded.
Now, all he had to do was grab a key that he could use over and over again.
[R◼️alm ◼️n◼️ursion — K◼️r◼️n's D◼️ma◼️n]
A line of distorted text appeared in a corner of his perception and then blurred away.
Ding-
The Kirin, which had been staring at Dong Bongsu for a long time, was once again unfolding that phase from before, a skill that had now become a divine power.
The floor across the red arena faded, and a strange land surfaced from beneath it.
Suddenly, rain, a torrential downpour, poured into this GOR world, and as the rain absorbed the light, the boundaries of the world faded.
Every single drop of rain held five distinct colors and paused in the air.
Concentric circles spread out with the Kirin at the center.
The area where Dong Bongsu stood was dyed in a different color.
It was in the middle of replacing the board that could open onto this arena.
"Are you already scared?"
Dong Bongsu quietly looked down as the concentric circle dyed the tips of his feet.
A piece of a tile dragged in from somewhere.
It was a fragment of a world with a very familiar feel.
Murim.
Specifically, that of the second Murim.
"It seems it is still only one place."
Well, it doesn't matter.
He could figure out the rest later and just level up.
Because for Dong Bongsu, who had entered a world where everything was already possible, nothing could be an obstacle.
Wooooong.
The concentric circles did not stop at his feet.
Starting from the dyed area, it spread beyond the red arena.
Unfamiliar dirt seeped up over the things that were cooling into gray.
Collapsed walls settled over the game ruins, then solidified halfway out of alignment.
Another floor was layered over the surging ground, turning the inside and outside upside down.
Whatever was supporting this world could not withstand the entanglement.
[G◼️ds of R◼️a◼️ms — ◼️◼️◼️c ◼️rror]
The distorted letters crackled in a corner of his perception and blurred.
The same sensation spread wherever the coordinates were scrambled.
The distortion did not stop at the arena but leaked and spread beyond it, into this entire red world.
Two worlds were temporarily overlapping, and the mere framework of GOR's physics engine and frame could not handle it.
For Dong Bongsu, that was enough.
This collapse was exactly his way back to the other side.
Purrrr, pruk-pruk.
In the midst of it all, the Kirin lowered its head.
Its one-gil horn locked on, aiming toward Dong Bongsu.
And just when the boundary blurred so much that it was impossible to tell if it was here or there.
Boom!
The massive body kicked off the ground.
Wherever its hooves stepped, the red dirt crumbled away.
The scattered powder rose and fell with the vibration.
The surrounding five-colored rain accelerated along with the beast's charge and was sucked into the tip of the horn.
The five energies condensed into a single bundle.
A vortex created by drawing up the five lights from the scales all over its body; its tip condensed right in front of Dong Bongsu.
Dong Bongsu did not draw his sword.
Rumble rumble-!
Even as the five-colored aura slammed into him, he stood still.
Without taking a single step back.
The five colors collided at a single point.
Naturally, the point of impact was Dong Bongsu's chest.
The red dirt was gouged out in all directions.
The rain bounced and scattered everywhere.
The gray powder rose again and was pushed far outside the center of the explosion.
In the very center of it all, Dong Bongsu stood.
Even though the five colors were crushed against his chest, not a single thread of his clothes was scorched.
Before the five energies could even touch his skin, the bundle deformed right where it made contact.
The condensed bundle lost its point and unraveled in all directions.
The fiery light with the fiery light, the watery light with the watery light, they lost their way and scattered.
Super True Qi Field.
Just a span away from Dong Bongsu's front.
Having already perfectly understood the physics engine of this GOR world, a Qi wall that was twice as strong as before had been erected.
Even though it was much more condensed than at Transcendent Wind Cliff, the five energies unraveled and scattered the moment they touched that wall.
Not a single light, not a single scale of the Kirin's five-colored aura could touch or inflict a blow on Dong Bongsu.
"...."
The Kirin flinched.
The beast that had become a live-action version from the virtual world stared once again at Dong Bongsu, the man who had also become a live-action version from the virtual world and was standing perfectly fine.
Soon.
Its scales stood on end all at once again.
Rustle-
As if to say, 'Right, it should at least be this much.'
The Kirin raised its head straight up again.
This time, it was its mane.
The white mane bristled stiffly all at once.
Every single strand harbored aura, becoming tens of thousands of swords, sabers, and spears.
That bundle spread open like a fan and swept over the man from the front.
It was a mane he had seen in the valleys of Transcendent Wind Cliff too.
Something endless if cut one strand at a time.
That day, he had wrapped Super Black Hole Sword Aura around his two swords and blocked it head-on.
Now, there was not even a need to block it.
Dong Bongsu laid out his Qi one more time from the tips of his feet right where the bundle of manes reached his front.
From blocking to pulverizing.
The manes, which harbored aura and sharpened their blades one by one, vibrated against an unseen tremor and expelled their own aura.
Craaaack-!
The tens of thousands of hairs that held aura collapsed all at once.
The sharpened manes lost their aura right in front of the man's nose, returned to being white hair, and fell to the ground with a patter.
They could not step even one pace inside.
Gwooar...
The Kirin let out a low cry for the first time.
Its five-colored eyes traced the ground where its mane had scattered all at once.
What he did, or how it happened, this creature had no way of knowing.
It could only perceive that its divine power had unraveled and scattered on its own right in front of the man's nose.
A different light flickered in the beast's eyes for the first time.
Panic.
Or something similar to it.
— Try more.
There was no emotion in the eyes of the man, Dong Bongsu.
The Kirin urgently made a beam of light shoot up from the horn on its crown.
The rain over the arena all turned into aura and poured down diagonally.
It was a rain of aura.
At the same time, its five-colored scales drew the five lights into the horn to form another vortex bundle.
The rain, the vortex, and even the mane on top of that.
It unleashed all three at once and poured them onto a single man.
Swooooosh-
At Transcendent Wind Cliff, these things had come one by one.
This time, all three came in together in a single breath.
Even so, nothing was different.
Dong Bongsu stood right in the middle of it and did not withdraw the Qi at his feet.
He merely raised and lowered a single palm lightly.
The pouring rain was pulverized right in front of him.
The mane bundle was expelled before it could even touch him.
The vortex untied the knot that bound it into a bundle and scattered it into five colors.
Even if all three came at the same time, the limit of their reach was uniformly a span in front of him.
That distance was a line he yielded to no divine power.
Craaash- Crack- Shhh-
The three skills collapsed with their respective different sounds.
Not a single ray of light, not a single scale, not a single strand of hair could reach the man.
When the center of the explosion settled, all that remained in the red arena was the gray powder, the cooling crowd, and the red dirt.
Right in the middle, Dong Bongsu stood exactly as he had in his initial stance.
Without a single thread of his clothes out of place.
Gwooooo...
The Kirin took a step back.
The new creature, reborn as an absolute master with a new divine power due to some sort of error... could do absolutely nothing.
Of course, if it were the previous Dong Bongsu, he wouldn't have been able to pull it off to this extent.
But as always, he had become the new Dong Bongsu through yet another evolution.
It could only be described as another misfortune that had struck this world, no, this universe.
[Faith Sight] swept over the beast. A vessel where five colors were mixed. Scales, manes, and aura alike, a vessel in which none could leave a scratch on the man.
The important thing was its divine power.
The truth was that it had not even properly bloomed yet.
"...."
Dong Bongsu took a step closer.
It was just one step.
Yet at that step, the Kirin retreated two paces.
With its one-gill horn aimed at the man, the massive body walked backward.
Another step.
The Kirin stepped back again.
Its hooves clumsily stumbled on the red dirt.
The scales that had stood on end lay down one by one.
Neither the pursuer nor the fleeing one crossed swords even once.
The man simply walked.
The beast simply retreated.
The distance between them closed step by step.
It kept curling its massive body smaller before the footsteps of a single man.
For the last time, the Kirin gathered all five colors into the horn on its crown.
Pulling the light from all its scales, it condensed them into a single bundle, over and over again.
It intended to pour out every single one of its skills and divine powers.
A final struggle.
The moment the five colors were condensed to a single point at the tip of the horn.
Dong Bongsu stood in front of it.
Meeting the man's eyes, the condensed divine power lost its way.
The single point that trembled at the tip of the horn could not be fired and wavered right there.
The beast remained frozen, unable to withdraw or unleash its divine power.
"Stop."
The Kirin's five-colored eyes looked up at the man.
— Stop when you are told to stop.
An empty gaze that seemed to say exactly that.
The five colors at the tip of the horn unraveled.
The unfired divine power scattered into its scales and subsided.
The massive body folded its knees.
Slowly, the front legs first, followed by the hind legs.
The one-gil horn tilted sluggishly toward the man's feet.
The beast that all under heaven was said to follow bowed its head before a single man.
Dong Bongsu looked down at that head.
He didn't care about legends anyway.
Whether all under heaven followed it or not.
Swish.
Dong Bongsu raised his hand.
It was not a hand reaching to grasp a sword.
It was not a hand reaching to pull something out of the Inventory either.
It was just an empty palm.
That hand rested on the crown of the bowed beast.
Right below the one-gil horn, the place where the five lights gathered and unraveled again.
The man's hand gently stroked it.
The Kirin trembled once.
He stroked it again and again.
The bristling scales lay down smoothly one by one under his touch.
The eyes where the five colors had fiercely mixed subsided beneath that touch.
The massive body's trembling calmed down.
"Good. Good. Though I'm not sure if doing this is right."
As if in response, a faint light flickered over the beast's crown.
It was neither sacred light nor the five colors of its scales.
It was a pale purple light.
A light of a color he had never seen before spread as if seeping into the beast's massive body beneath the man's palm.
From its horn to its back, and from its back to its four legs.
All sorts of illegible letters floated up over that purple light.
Almost none of it was readable.
Amidst the completely crumbled strokes, only one fragment made sense.
[◼️◼️◼️'s ◼️◼️◼️]
That was enough.
To realize that doing this was right.
Smirk.
"Then let's go together, friend."
The Kirin had given yet another smile to Dong Bongsu, a man who rarely smiled.
-x-X-x-
Dong Bongsu stroked the Qilin's horn, mane, and back once again, looking around.
Rumbbbbble....
It was as if two tectonic plates had overlapped; everywhere he looked, the world was shifting out of alignment.
Wet soil seeped up over the red earth, and red earth was layered on top of it again.
A mountain spur rose above the gray ruins and hardened while half misaligned.
The boundary of which was this side and which was that side kept coming loose.
The framework that supported this world was finally unable to endure the entanglement.
[G◼️ds of R◼️a◼️ms — ◼️◼️ c ◼️rror]
The distorted letters sizzled on one side of his perception before crumbling away.
The same signs spread along the edges of the scattered coordinates.
Kugugugugugugugu.
Eventually, a layer of the red ground beneath his feet was pushed out in all directions, and another land rose from beneath it to expand its place.
An empty hole opened up where the sky used to be, only to be filled back in.
The rules that made up this world went out of alignment piece by piece, and the world began to collapse under its own weight.
The risen terrain collapsed, and something else fell and piled up on top of the ruined things.
'Is this the price of forcing two worlds into one place?'
It seemed the physics engine of this red world did not have the capacity to handle that weight.
This might be the medium of this rift.
Of course, none of that mattered at all.
Crack, craaackk.....
The only thing that mattered was the fact that, somewhere deep down, the sound of the pillar supporting this world entirely collapsing could be heard.
That was enough for Dong Bongsu.
Because this collapse was undoubtedly the path to return to the other side.
The red world began to fade.
He did not walk anywhere or pass through any door.
Right on the spot where he stepped, right on the coordinates where the red earth was laid out, another world was seeping through.
The two worlds were overlapped from the very beginning.
Ever since the Qilin replaced its plate over this, the Red Arena and the Murim pressed beneath it had been sharing the same coordinates.
As one of them collapsed, the remaining one floated up as if permeating through.
The dry heat of the red earth faded from beneath his feet.
Cool moisture seeped up in its place.
The smell of long-wet stones and moss spread through the air where gray dust used to scatter.
It was the fishy scent of water.
The smell of a narrow valley that had been beaten by rain for a long time.
Dong Bongsu did not move a single step from where he stood.
There was no need to move.
The one moving was not him, but the world.
The covered red plate was clearing away piece by piece, and the coordinates of the Murim pressed beneath it were finally being revealed again.
'Is it only at this level for now?'
The countless worlds he saw beyond the wall, places where two moons rose, places where spires burned, places where stars were swallowed up; to call all those places and overlap them on a single coordinate, this guy's talent definitely could not reach that far yet.
'It does not matter.'
He would just figure out anything beyond that as he slowly leveled up this beast.
Everything that was red finally cleared away entirely.
The collapsing red world faded and turned gray in all directions.
The remains of what used to be users, the terrain that crumbled as the two plates misaligned, all of it faded and retreated.
Brrrr, snort.
The Qilin bowing beside him straightened its folded legs.
Its massive body slowly stood up and stood next to him.
A purple light flowing from the spring of recovery beneath its long horn flowed down its white mane, faintly illuminating the beast's back in place of the fading red light.
The ground felt soft under his feet.
It was not dry red earth, but soil that had become soft from being wet for a long time.
Water seeped up, slightly submerging the tips of his feet.
The sound of rain could be heard.
He was suddenly in the middle of a narrow valley.
Sheer gray cliffs rose on both sides, leaving only a sliver of the sky, and a fine drizzle of rain struck down diagonally between them.
It was neither heavy rain nor stopped rain, but a perpetual rainy season that always rained this much.
The mud pooled on the valley floor rippled slightly from the raindrops.
Windshear Cliff.
Dong Bongsu scanned the wet valley.
The sheer gray cliffs, the rainwater pooled in the mud; nothing had changed.
It looked exactly as it did when he left.
'I am back. Now, is it time to finish what I was doing!
However.
Something had changed.
"This is.... I didn't expect this."
Dong Bongsu smiled once again as he looked around.
Hehe.
Laughter kept leaking out.
He shouldn't be like this.
But with the sight entering his eyes, what could he do when he couldn't help but laugh?
Hehehehe, mwahahahaha.
...
"It has been settled like that, Chairman."
After listening to the entire report from the General Manager of Server Operations, Pantheon Chairman Choi Dong-ryeol buried his body deep into his chair and lightly tapped the desk with his index finger.
"Is that what you consider settled?"
"...Excuse me?"
"I mean the fact that three GOR servers were completely destroyed and 73.6% of our stock price evaporated."
"...."
"Ah, well, forget it. What can we do about a landslide that has already happened? We just have to clean it up piece by piece now."
Choi Dong-ryeol raised his buried body and asked the team leader again.
"Did you figure out what those bugs are?"
"Ah, yes. It is not exact, but... our programmers have deciphered some of their codes."
"Oh! Really? What were they?"
"Not all of them. We read a peculiar code trace from one of them."
"Ah, so what is it?"
The team leader, who hesitated for a moment, soon parted his lips.
"I do not know if this makes sense but... a data pattern from another game was discovered in the bug that disappeared at the end."
"What? Another game!? What game?"
"A game that ended its service a few years ago....."
A game that was sensationally popular at one time.
A game that, in a way, was like the parent of GOR.
Because, starting with the release and unprecedented hit of this game, virtual reality games featuring perfect AI-based NPCs and physics engines began to spring up everywhere.
The name of that game was.
"Murim Online."
[Welcome to Murim Online, The World of True Powerhouses.]
Amidst the countless noise, the code containing this phrase was clearly identified.
Murim Online.
It was just as the name suggested.
A virtual reality game where you held a sword and learned martial arts, transferring the entire Murim into it.
By the standards of those days, it was a crazy game.
Each and every NPC moved with their own backstory.
When slashed by a sword, flesh would split, and bones would be exposed.
If you took away the pain, there was no way to distinguish it from reality.
The problem arose from there.
The sensation of slashing and killing a person was far too vivid.
It showed the sights of limbs flying off and heads rolling without any filter.
Controversies constantly followed that the murders in the game encouraged murders in reality, and several genuinely gruesome real-life incidents were tied to this game and talked about.
In the end, they shut down the servers before they could even reach a few years.
"Murim Online? Isn't that a game that ended its service a really long time ago?"
"...Yes, that is correct."
"Why is that suddenly coming up?"
"We haven't figured that out yet. Because this incident was so global..... and every part of it lacks logic."
"True, that is the case."
Choi Dong-ryeol quietly repeated the words Murim Online a few times before soon shifting the topic.
Since it was something they could not understand at all yet anyway.
"Keep investigating that part and continuously follow up on the reports."
"Yes, Chairman."
"Anyway, everything turned out well, whatever. Dozens of games went down the drain together. Didn't they?"
"...Excuse me?"
"No, isn't that right? Aside from us, the competitors' games all went kaput at the same time, right?"
"Ah, yes, Chairman. That is correct."
Tap, tap.
"But tell me. Did they all go through that too?"
"Excuse me? What are you referring to?"
"The game companies I just mentioned. Did they also get that, you know? The comas. That thing."
"Ah, yes. Are you talking about the mass comas?"
"Hey, hey, calling it 'mass' sounds a bit scary, doesn't it? Let's just call it comas, here."
The team leader urgently bowed his head and continued the report.
"Ah, yes. Chairman. For now... they say everyone is going through it. The counts aren't clear yet, but it seems certain that a global 'blip' has occurred."
Blip.
"That's an interesting expression. Well, it's appropriate too. Good to use for a whole bunch of people."
It was an expression that appeared in a movie series.
A cosmic catastrophe where half of humanity disappeared.
And this incident, which was similar to that cosmic catastrophe, was very good news from Pantheon's perspective.
Because the servers of multiple games evaporated simultaneously, it was like a natural disaster that equated to the annihilation of latecomers with weak foundations.
Pantheon?
GOR?
'We just have to restore it, and that's it.'
Pantheon was a company with that kind of overwhelming financial power.
At the same time, natural disasters and catastrophes serve as excellent political justifications and excuses.
With this, the chance of being interrogated by the National Assembly or the international community disappeared.
Even so, curiosity remained.
"How many got blipped?"
"...Excuse me? What do you mean by that?"
"Ah, I am asking how many people fell into a coma. Leaving out all the other games, just ours from GOR."
'That bloodless, tearless Psychopath bastard. Do you really want to talk like that in this kind of situation, fuck.
"From what has been identified so far...."
The team leader only chewed on those thoughts internally as he answered.
"It is 30,174 people."