Obtaining Heavenly Demon Martial Arts in the Magic Era - Chapter 32

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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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32
Cheon Do-hyeon’s upper garment had been scorched beyond recognition by the surging flames, long past any usefulness as clothing.
Rip—
He tore away the cumbersome fabric without hesitation.
With rough hands, he wound the shredded cloth around his right hand, the one gripping the Three-section Staff.
Crack—
After securing the final knot with his teeth, he began walking toward Jang Ki-han, his movements deliberate and unhurried.
Jang Ki-han watched the figure approaching him.
The man before his eyes possessed a form of strength and ability he had never encountered before.
With each step Cheon Do-hyeon drew closer, Jang Ki-han’s composure fractured from within.
‘What is this feeling?’
Then, grappling with the intense emotion that gripped his mind, the answer came to him. It was unmistakable.
‘Am I… afraid?’
He had always taken pride in his talent—undoubtedly the finest of his generation. A fruit blossomed in the fertile soil of Mado Myeongga, the finest environment one could ask for.
But what was Cheon Do-hyeon?
A castoff. Born without any innate talent, burdened with a cursed body—a Noma.
And what of the world he’d grown up in? His home lay in the Slum District, on the city’s outskirts near the industrial zones.
The streets were garbage heaps crawling with drug addicts and criminals.
So how could this have happened?
Even with desperate magic wrought by the power of Mana Stones, he could not bring him down.
He had believed this a fight he could not lose. Now, the outcome had become impossible to gauge.
Worse—watching Cheon Do-hyeon walk toward him, he found himself thinking that nothing he did would ever bring this man to his knees.
Heat radiated from his body, the residual warmth of the magic he had consumed, shimmering in the air like the blade of a sword forged red in the furnace.
A blade red-hot from the forge.
The sight wrenched an involuntary cry from Jang Ki-han’s lips.
‘So that’s it.’
Not broken, but tempered. A true blade.
Cheon Do-hyeon’s form was like that of a legendary sword, forged at last after enduring countless trials.
How much heat, pressure, and tempering did it take for a single blade to be born?
‘The density of time we lived through was different.’
Jang Ki-han understood now. The abundance he had enjoyed had dulled him.
The harshness Do-hyeon had endured had instead honed him into a razor’s edge.
Only now did the family motto of Cheolheul Jangga make perfect sense.
“Hahahaha!”
Jang Ki-han suddenly erupted into wild, crazed laughter. His body was battered and broken by the backlash of his spell formula, yet his mind had never been clearer.
He felt alive.
Yes, that was it.
Break, or be tempered.
Jang Ki-han gripped the Mana Stone embedded in his Staff and tore it out with all his strength.
Then he shoved it into his mouth and bit down.
Crunch—
It was an act that could only be called madness.
A Mana Stone was a crystallized form of highly concentrated Mana.
For a human body to consume it whole was tantamount to suicide. Even the Mana Amplifier—diluted many times over—caused severe side effects. A Mana Stone would be exponentially worse.
Boom-boom-boom-boom—
But the effect was immediate and catastrophic. Like floodgates bursting open, a massive torrent of Mana erupted from Jang Ki-han’s body.
“If there is no Mana in this area, then I’ll fill it with my own!”
Jang Ki-han voiced the meaning behind his action with a cry.
Cheon Do-hyeon read in that mad visage the unbreakable will of the man before him.
“Exhale—”
Do-hyeon himself was far from unscathed.
In the process of forcibly burning away the magic, his meridians had already been torn to shreds.
But it was equally clear that his opponent had reached his limit as well.
In a fight driven to its absolute edge, victory went to whoever took one more step, threw one more punch. And Cheon Do-hyeon was a man who had lived his entire life that way.
Step—step—
Cheon Do-hyeon advanced once more. On his third stride, his form compressed the space around him and surged forward.
Cheonma Gunnim-bo
Clash—
Jang Ki-han blocked with a barrier of invisible force from above.
His reflexes remained sharp.
Crackle—crack.
Jang Ki-han’s nervous system was firing at maximum speed, driven by magic.
Chain Lightning.
In the same moment Jang Ki-han blocked Cheon Do-hyeon’s strike, he raised his hand and conjured a bolt of blue lightning in the blink of an eye. Gripping it in one hand as though it were a whip, he lashed it toward Cheon Do-hyeon.
Crackle-crackle-crack—crack.
A torrent of blue current came whipping through the air like a lash.
Seupseong Daebeop.
Cheon Do-hyeon did not dodge.
Instead, he reached out into the void and caught the surging lightning head-on.
Crackle!
The spell formula resisted violently and tore through the air with a piercing shriek, but the moment its mana was completely drained away, it lost its radiance and shattered into fragments.
Tingle-tingle.
Absorbing the lightning’s power brought none of the agony that had wracked him when he first consumed Jang Ki-han’s mana.
The energy that rushed into his dantian was instantly decomposed by the Tae-heo Honowen Shimgong and transmuted into Cheon Do-hyeon’s own strength.
Cheonma Hwanyeong-bo.
Cheon Do-hyeon immediately unfurled his movement technique, his form shimmering and vanishing as it multiplied into a dozen phantom images in an instant.
But Jang Ki-han did not allow those phantoms a moment to solidify.
[Earthquake]
Boom-boom-crack.
As Jang Ki-han slammed both hands into the ground, a violent tremor erupted beneath them.
The concrete of the rooftop buckled and heaved, sharp fragments of stone erupting upward like spears.
Smash—crash-crack-crack—smash.
The indiscriminate area attack obliterated every phantom image Cheon Do-hyeon had woven in an instant.
Whoosh.
Yet Do-hyeon’s true body had already torn through the gaps in the explosion, darting toward the flank. Both fighters were evolving in real time, locked in a collision at the edge of their limits.
A little more… a little more!
His entire frame groaned and screamed,
yet his legs carried him faster still, and each technique he unfurled grew more refined.
Jang Ki-han was no different.
In a clash that permitted not a moment of carelessness, he deployed spell formulas guided solely by a mage’s instinct, responding in real time. And in that process, the excess fluff fell away from his spellwork; his magic began to manifest in a form both elegant and perfectly optimized.
‘I see. Power alone isn’t everything. What matters is preserving the essence of the magic you’re casting.’
Cheonma Geomgong 1st Form – Black Break Flash.
Adamant Rising.
To intercept the arc of the Three-section Staff wreathed in force, Jang Ki-han summoned ultra-dense minerals from beneath the earth’s crust, raising a wall. The technique and the spell collided head-on, and a deafening metallic shriek tore through the air.
Clang—!
“Hehehek.”
“Heh… hehehehe.”
Strange laughter spilled from both their lips. To an outside observer, they might have seemed mad—yet with each exchange, they resonated with one another like tuning forks, each move influencing the other in real time, each growing stronger in turn.
The instant the first form was blocked, Cheon Do-hyeon’s eyes pierced through it and saw the path of the sword technique that lay beyond.
‘I see it now. The path of the second form.’
Cheon Do-hyeon perceived the trajectory of the second form—something he had never even glimpsed before.
‘So that’s it. The first and second forms aren’t separate at all. They flow into one another like water.’
The Three-section Staff rebounded and was swiftly recovered. In the next breath, Cheon Do-hyeon shifted into a peculiar stance, stepped forward with his front foot, and brought the staff down.
Once—
Crack.
Twice—
Thwack—
Three times—
Crack-crack-crack-crack—
Cheonma Geomgong 2nd Form: Demon Shadow Chaotic Blade.
Crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack—
An endless chain of techniques. A storm of countless sword strikes materialized before his eyes.
To enter that maelstrom would be to be torn apart as though fed through a meat grinder.
Watching the Demon Shadow Chaotic Blade that Cheon Do-hyeon unleashed, Jang Ki-han drew real-time inspiration and improvised a spell formula on the spot.
Railgun Bastion.
A dual-attribute composite spell.
As he raised both fingers,
the shattered fragments of Adamant rose into the air, lifted by electromagnetic force.
The fragments intercepted each of Do-hyeon’s sword strikes with precision, forming a perfect defense.
Clang-clang-clang, clang-clang, clang-clang.
Perfect attack and defense unified as one.
And in that same instant, lightning-quick revelation struck.
‘The next form…!’
‘The next spell…!’
Cheon Do-hyeon’s Three-section Staff rose high into the air.
The third form descended with the force of something that would cleave any barrier in two.
Cheonma Geomgong 3rd Form – Heavenly Descent Strike
A mighty vertical slash that seemed to split the very sky!
And Jang Ki-han’s next spell to counter it was…
Cough—
?!
Black, congealed blood sprayed from Jang Ki-han’s lips.
The price of swallowing a Mana Stone raw—his body was beginning to collapse.
But Cheon Do-hyeon’s assault showed no mercy, its trajectory unwavering.
Crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch! Screech—
With no spell cast and no defense prepared, he took the full brunt of the blade.
Aegis’s automatic defense system activated, but its power was insufficient to fully neutralize the Heavenly Descent Strike’s terrible force. The scattered shockwave bled into the floor and walls of the Abandoned Building.
Boom-boom-boom-boom!
The top floor, already at its limit, began to collapse.
The spot where Jang Ki-han stood crumbled first, and with his body rendered immobile by the Mana Stone’s side effects, he was swept up in the falling debris and plunged to the floor below.
Cheon Do-hyeon quickly found solid ground and hurled himself toward it. The decrepit building underwent cascading collapse, belching forth a massive cloud of dust.
Crunch-crunch-crunch- crunch
Once the Abandoned Building began its fall, the collapse became relentless.
That was when Cheon Do-hyeon caught sight of Jang Ki-han plummeting through the crumbling debris.
His body moved before thought could follow.
Tap-tap-tap- Snatch!
He barely managed to grab hold of Jang Ki-han’s arm as he was swept downward.
Jang Ki-han now hung limply, caught only by Cheon Do-hyeon’s grip.
The moment Cheon Do-hyeon released his hand, Jang Ki-han could be pulled back into the collapsing building’s crevasse.
“…What are you doing?”
Jang Ki-han asked, his face ashen.
“My body moved on its own.”
Do-hyeon spoke the truth. The crimes Jang Ki-han had committed were unforgivable, and Do-hyeon believed he deserved death. Yet his grandfather Cheon Woo-hyeok’s teachings moved Do-hyeon’s arm in this critical moment.
‘Do-hyeon. There are times when people act by the momentum of their lives. Should you meet such a person, offer them one chance—a chance to correct the path they’ve walked.’
Cheon Do-hyeon clenched his teeth.
The man deserved to die, but the fact that his grandfather’s words surfaced now was perhaps no coincidence.
Cheon Do-hyeon braced his grip and tried to pull Jang Ki-han up.
“Weak fool.”
Jang Ki-han sneered at the man trying to save him.
Then he raised his remaining arm and brought it down hard against Do-hyeon’s wrist.
Crack—crack— crack!
“Ugh, what are you doing?!”
“Don’t go soft. Don’t leave yourself with regrets.”
With that, Jang Ki-han twisted Do-hyeon’s wrist with the last of his strength.
“Ahhhhh!”
Do-hyeon’s grip finally broke.
The moment his strength failed, Jang Ki-han’s body plummeted into the abyss.
“When you trampled me, that was how it was too. So I don’t ask for mercy either. That would be far too shameful.”
And with that, Jang Ki-han slipped into the chaos of collapsing debris and was gone.
It had happened in an instant.
Crunch-crunch-crunch- crunch!
The building accelerated its descent into ruin.
Behind the motionless, vacant-eyed Cheon Do-hyeon,
the faint wail of a police siren drifted through the air.

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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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