Chronicles of the Martial God’s Return - Chapter 1

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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A man crouched with a sword in his grip.
His entire body was drenched in blood, and his eyes—burning with a crimson light as though they held flame itself—struck terror into anyone who met his gaze.
The man looked down at his own hands.
They were thick with blood.
He let out a soft laugh at the sight, then wiped his face with brutal indifference. The blood-soaked features only grew more grotesque for it.
“Bland.”
The word fell from his lips like a stone.
What did he mean by it?
The man’s gaze swept across his surroundings.
His vision filled with countless bodies—too many to count. Every figure strewn about lay utterly still.
All of them were torn, sliced, and burst open.
Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?
No—it must have been tens of thousands.
Not a single form moved except for the seated man, who alone drew breath.
The dead could not stir.
The greatest calamity that had ever befallen all under Heaven.
The strongest man in all history, East and West, ancient and modern.
People called him the Martial God Demon.
The man rose from his seat with a shuffle.
As he walked slowly toward the distant ridge, he moved with the certainty of one who possessed everything—an authority so absolute that none dared approach.
Crack!
But in an instant, the man froze mid-step. His body became a colossal block of ice, and he stood motionless.
Eight figures—men and women, young and old—had appeared before him.
Some rode clouds; others emerged from the earth itself; still others arrived upon the wind.
Their appearance was such that it was hard to tell if they were human or something beyond.
They possessed the otherworldly strangeness of Celestial Beings.
These eight gazed upon the mutilated corpses littering the ground, their faces twisted in sorrow.
“Tsk, tsk.”
One among them turned away, as if unable to bear the sight, and clicked their tongue.
“How tragic! There exists no force to check his slaughter!”
“How sorrowful! No one can stand against him!”
The two eldest of the eight spoke out, their words so thunderous that space itself trembled as if the heavens and earth were being torn asunder.
The two ancients fixed their wide eyes upon the frozen Martial God Demon, then turned their backs.
“Seal him at the deepest point of Dongting Lake!”
The six Celestial Beings bowed their heads deeply.

***

Ayang, located in the north of Hunan Province.
The waters flowing beside the city were tributaries of Dongting Lake to the north.
Because so many travelers came each year to glimpse Dongting Lake, Ayang was grander and more prosperous than other cities.
Thanks to this, most of the people who lived here never went hungry.
It had become quite famous as a destination for sightseers, and finding work was easy enough if one had the will; beggars were scarcely seen at all.
Yet in the heart of this thriving town sat a man, dressed in tattered cloth of unknown origin, slumped as though weighed down by exhaustion.
Every passerby cast a glance at him.
It was the strange aura that emanated from him.
“Time flows like the wind.”
The man, his head bowed, murmured the words.
They were hollow, tinged with emptiness. His eyes were vacant, as though something vital had been lost, and his voice carried only futility.
In truth, the man had lost everything.
For him, nothing remained.
A faint smile tugged at his lowered face—born of how utterly pathetic his own plight had become.
‘There is truly nothing left.’
The man lifted his head, a bitter laugh escaping his lips.
The Eight Immortals.
Those Celestial Beings who were said to guard the Central Plains.
Yet nothing changed the fact that they were merely indulgent creatures lost in their own pleasures, and having been struck down by their hands—that struck a crack through his very pride.
‘No, it was I who fell short.’
He had raged across heaven and earth, blind to his own limits.
The Cheon Sal Seong he was born with had made him ever more savage, and the world around him—shaken by this maddened man like a leaf in a storm—had descended into ruin.
Without blinking, he had shattered worlds, slain enemies, and made mockery of ages.
In the end, the Eight Immortals had imprisoned him in ice for a thousand years.
The time that had passed was beyond words to describe. The fact that he felt it in his very bones made the man feel all the more hollow.
Those he had known were gone, and those left behind had abandoned him.
It could not have been otherwise.
There were no humans alive who had lived a thousand years.
So he simply walked.
After being trapped for so long, the murderous intent of his Cheon Sal Seong had all but vanished, washed clean away.
He had no true destination, no small corner of the world to call his own. He simply drifted with the wind and clouds, moving like water, searching for traces of the ages past—this was what Dan Wuhyeon did.
Like a phantom haunted by the past.
Or rather, he was the phantom himself.
‘I, Dan Wuhyeon, master of this Cheon Ha…….’
Dan Wuhyeon surveyed his surroundings with a bitter gaze. Even after four days had passed, he could not adjust to how completely the landscape had transformed.
It all felt like a dream.
A dream from which he might wake at any moment and return to his ordinary life.
“Hmm?”
It was then, midst such thoughts,
that he discovered something discarded like refuse in a quiet alley.
A person—and a very small child at that. She was barely breathing, each breath so shallow it seemed death could come at any instant.
Dan Wuhyeon found himself drawn toward the child.
‘A beggar?’
The answer was obvious at a glance.
A beggar. An orphan.
A begging bowl lay beside her, and scattered around were scraps of food now so caked in dirt they were inedible.
She bore wounds all over—apparently someone had taken offense to her begging and left their mark.
Dan Wuhyeon approached slowly and felt for her pulse.
Faint though it was, it still beat.
Her shallow breath did not seem likely to fade immediately, but two hours—two shichen—was all she had left.
The child looked up at Dan Wuhyeon with a hazy, unfocused gaze.
He tried to ignore her and stand, but those eyes held his feet fast to the ground.
They reminded him of his own eyes, when he too had been a homeless orphan in his childhood.
He scratched his head roughly.
“Count yourself fortunate, little one.”
Dan Wuhyeon channeled his energy through her meridians. The Cheon Il Jo Hwa Gong—this very technique was why he had survived a thousand years in the Eight Immortals’ assault, why he could still draw breath.
As that energy poured into her, color bloomed across the child’s face. The pallor of death gradually began to retreat. But there was a problem.
‘She hasn’t eaten anything in far too long.’
Her malnutrition was severe. While the Cheon Il Jo Hwa Gong could breathe life back into her, it could not provide the nourishment her body desperately needed.
‘Is there any food?’
He looked around.
The scraps caked in dirt could not be eaten—they might only make her illness worse. So something else was needed.
Dan Wuhyeon thought for a moment, then reached into his robes.
He did have one thing.
A Dan Yak. Not a pill to raise one’s inner force, but a simple healing pill taken for internal injuries or wounds. It was also excellent for soothing an empty stomach.
The problem was…….
“It’s from a thousand years ago. Will it be all right?”
It was old. Far too old.
More than enough time had passed for it to have decayed into nothing.
His conscience pricked at the thought of giving such a thing to a child, and yet doing nothing seemed worse.
If it went wrong, she might have dysentery. If it went worse, she might die. But if he left her as she was, death would find her anyway.
Dan Wuhyeon felt anxiety creep into the corners of his heart, yet even so, he carefully placed the Dan Yak in the child’s mouth. The moment it touched her saliva, it began to dissolve smoothly away.
“The rest is luck, little one.”
He left that place.
Helping did not obligate him to responsibility. Besides, even the help itself was nothing more than simple pity and the stirring of old memories—it meant nothing more than that.
Only the child left behind in that alley continued to gaze after Dan Wuhyeon.

***

The next morning, Dan Wuhyeon awoke slowly to the sound of rustling and the approach of a presence as he lay sleeping in a secluded place.
It was the child.
Unmistakably the same child he had seen the day before. The face that had been fading into death now glowed with vitality. The skeletal thinness remained unchanged from then until now, but her eyes sparkled with life and light.
The child, beaming with inexplicable joy, extended both hands toward him.
Dumplings.
“What is this?”
“Dumplings…!”
“I can see what they are. I’m asking why you’re giving them to me.”
Why would she? It made no sense. Her own hunger must be greater than his, yet there was not a shred of hesitation in the way her hands extended toward him.
How could this be?
Was she repaying a debt?
In that moment, his thoughts became a tangled knot. He had received things from others before, but never had anyone offered him something with such innocent laughter, without the slightest trace of fear or murderous intent. This child was the first.
It was so foreign he could not adapt to it.
Without a word, the child pressed the dumplings into his hands and sat beside him. Her injuries seemed to have healed completely; she hummed softly, and whenever their eyes met, she smiled with a gentle, open warmth.
A child, naturally, gave no thought whatsoever to Dan Wuhyeon’s feelings.
“This is absurd….”
He wore an expression clouded with confusion, but the child offered no answer. The next day, and the day after that, she continued to bring food from somewhere and hand it to him.
When he refused to eat, her face would fall; when he brought it to his lips, she would beam. After this repeated itself so many times, enough days had passed that such a routine seemed unremarkable.
Thus, a fortnight passed.
Dan Wuhyeon met the child every day and ate the food she brought.
That day was a day of blazing sun.
The heat was so intense it seemed impossible to think of it as merely early spring, and the sky stretched endless and clear, unmarred by a single cloud.
Dan Wuhyeon, who habitually sought out only deserted and solitary places, ventured toward the marketplace for the first time in a long while. He had no particular plan.
He simply wanted to walk.
“You crazy bitch!”
The moment he entered the marketplace, he stopped. A shout rang out, and he recognized the familiar face of the child cowering with her body drawn inward.
In her arms were clutched several dumplings.
As if afraid to soil them, she hunched further, protecting the dumplings fiercely. The wounds scattered across her entire body—wounds that never fully healed and only continued to appear—were because of this.
Dan Wuhyeon lost his words.
‘Had she stolen them…?’
When a small child begs, people show them sympathy. They receive far more this way than an adult could. So Dan Wuhyeon had assumed this was how she obtained her food, never imagining she had stolen it.
A sudden surge of irritation rose within him.
For a fortnight, he had survived on what this child brought him. He had not even known how she obtained it, and simply took what she offered, pushing through each day that way.
It displeased him.
Why was that?
Dan Wuhyeon, who had never once received pity from anyone, stepped toward the child. It was the moment the man drew back his foot to strike her savagely.
Crack!
“Aaaagh!”
Dan Wuhyeon’s foot collided with the man’s leg. The sound of bone fracturing split the air, and a scream tore from the man’s mouth. The situation was crystalline—it was clear who was in the wrong—but to Dan Wuhyeon, such matters were irrelevant.
The man shrieked and writhed on the ground. At the sudden outcry, the child looked up at Dan Wuhyeon with a dazed expression.
With many eyes upon him, Dan Wuhyeon stared at the child for a long moment, then turned his back and walked away.
They could not be together anymore.
He walked without meeting the pitiful gaze of the child.
He heard her scramble to her feet behind him, but he ignored even this. He harbored no wish to remain entangled with a child who only brought ruin upon herself.
He simply walked on, his steps hurried.
In truth, even he did not know where he was going. He had never found a place capable of filling the void left by a thousand years.
Yet neither could he remain standing in this spot.
So he walked.
Following the wind, following the clouds.
And at some point, he came to himself.
“Dongting Lake….”
It revealed itself before him.
The vast lake seemed to stretch without end.
It was a space where quietude dwelt—so still that one could not imagine he had once lain sunken in its deepest depths.
The more he thought about it, the more it seemed absurd.
This Dan Wuhyeon, once lauded as a Martial God….
“I sought to shake you off, yet you grasp at my ankles in return.”
Dan Wuhyeon stared at Dongting Lake with an expression of helpless bewilderment. He had believed he would never set eyes upon this lake again, yet his footsteps had already turned toward it once more.
The thought that this was utterly ridiculous crossed his mind as he turned his gaze. At the edge of his vision stood the child, breathing heavily as though she had rushed to follow him.
Her feet were already drenched in blood.
A child could never keep up with an adult’s quickened pace. Dan Wuhyeon watched the girl and wondered: why did she chase after him so relentlessly?
He’d done nothing but treat her wounds once. Yet the child clung to him as though she would surrender everything—liver, gall, and all—with blind devotion.
Displeased by this, he frowned and asked.
“Why do you follow me?”
“……I…… don’t…… want…… to be…… alone anymore…….”
The child’s words struck something deep within him.
Not wanting to be alone.
Dan Wuhyeon had never once spoken of “togetherness” since childhood.
He had always stood apart, forever solitary.
He could not easily understand the child’s heart, and yet its genuine warmth reached him nonetheless.
The girl extended her hand and grasped the fabric of his robe.
“Don’t…… go…….”
Her trembling voice shook him again. The image of her being beaten bloomed in his mind, and his grip tightened without his willing it.
If all of this—this bond with the child, this destiny—was meant to be.
“What is your name?”
“Hwa…… Hwa Somi…….”
“Then I am Dan Wuhyeon.”
Perhaps this child could give him a place where he belonged—a thought tinged with selfishness, yet mingled with a warm desire to protect. His hand reached out.
His extended hand came to rest upon the girl’s head, gentle and steady.
“Come with me.”

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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