Obtaining Heavenly Demon Martial Arts in the Magic Era - Chapter 34

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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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34
Before the press had published a single article about the building collapse,
Buzz.
Kim Seung-yeon’s smartphone on the desk emitted a short vibration. Her eyes, buried in her problem set, drifted absently toward the screen.
[Cheon Do-hyun: Class rep, where are you?]
The moment she saw the sender’s name, Kim Seung-yeon bolted upright from her chair.
Because he had vanished so suddenly from school, she’d been nursing a quiet worry about Cheon Do-hyun in the corner of her mind.
She threw on her jacket haphazardly and raced downstairs to the apartment lobby. Breathing hard through the front door, she found a familiar silhouette waiting beneath the streetlight.
He looked somewhat exhausted.
Kim Seung-yeon, unaware that he’d just finished a brutal confrontation with Jang Ki-han, blurted out without preamble:
“Where have you been?! Why didn’t you come to school today? Suspension’s over — you should be back. Are you giving up on college or something?”
Despite the torrent of demands, Cheon Do-hyun simply offered a faint smile and said nothing.
“I haven’t eaten yet.”
He dropped the words out of nowhere.
“Want to grab something? Oh—you have to study, don’t you?”
Ordinarily, Kim Seung-yeon would have refused, claiming her study momentum would be broken, but not tonight.
She didn’t want to refuse.
“No, actually. I’m hungry too.”
The two of them set out into the night streets. The autumn air had grown crisp and cool.
The road toward downtown was quiet. An unremarkable evening stroll, nothing more. They entered an ordinary restaurant, sat across from each other, ate their meal, then stopped by a nearby café to wrap warm drinks in their hands.
“It’s warm.”
As Kim Seung-yeon held the cup to her cheek, smiling contentedly in the drowsy heat, Cheon Do-hyun offered her his drink.
“Oh… thanks.”
Even in something as simple as walking side by side and facing each other, there was an odd warmth between them, mixed with tension.
“Want to go there?”
Cheon Do-hyun pointed to the Neighborhood Playground.
Tucked away in a quiet corner, the playground had a rather desolate air about it, but Seung-yeon didn’t seem to mind.
“The swings!”
She quickly claimed one of the swing seats.
And so the two of them sat side by side on the old swing set.
Creak, creak.
As she pumped her legs to keep the swing moving, Kim Seung-yeon spoke up carefully.
“Is something wrong?”
The Cheon Do-hyun she knew wasn’t someone who would suggest grabbing food or going for walks unprompted.
Do-hyun held the swing’s chain, looked up at the night sky, and spoke flatly.
“Just… I wanted to say thank you. You’ve always done your best to help me. But it occurred to me that I never properly thanked you.”
Kim Seung-yeon felt a chill of unease.
His tone was like a farewell.
As if he was about to leave for somewhere.
“You’re not… going somewhere?”
Kim Seung-yeon asked, barely suppressing the tremor in her voice.
Do-hyun turned to look at her and laughed lightly.
“Where would I go?”
Even with that answer, Seung-yeon’s anxiety didn’t fade. The swing gradually came to a stop. Kim Seung-yeon stared down at her clenched fists in silence for a moment, then spoke as if she’d made a decision.
“At first, I thought it was sympathy.”
Do-hyun’s attention turned to Seung-yeon.
“Then I wondered if it was gratitude. Because you helped me break through a wall I was stuck behind.”
Seung-yeon drew a deep breath.
“Then maybe it was admiration? Watching you with such incredible power, I thought maybe I was unknowingly looking up to you. But… I don’t think it’s any of those.”
Creak. The swing moved gently. Seung-yeon lifted her head and met Do-hyun’s eyes directly.
“I don’t understand my own heart yet. So don’t run away anywhere. Just stay by my side. That way, maybe I can figure out what I really feel.”
It was a confession disguised as a non-confession—straightforward and matter-of-fact, true to the class rep that Kim Seung-yeon was. Do-hyun didn’t look away from her steady gaze.
Kim Seung-yeon could see the same complicated, delicate emotions flickering in Cheon Do-hyun’s eyes.
Cheon Do-hyun gave a small nod.
At that subtle gesture, Seung-yeon released a sigh of relief that no one else would hear.
‘Yes, that works.’
Believing without doubt that this everyday life would continue tomorrow, and the day after.
But the next day, Cheon Do-hyun didn’t come to school.
#
Shinnam High School, nestled partway up a mountainside, cycled through seasonal changes like clockwork due to its geography. Green leaves turned crimson, fell as autumn debris, and bare branches laid their skeletal frames bare.
The students’ coats grew thicker, layered against the cold.
Cheon Do-hyun, who had returned to school after completing his disciplinary suspension, had bolted from the classroom before morning assembly even began on his first day back—and still hadn’t returned.
Kim Seung-yeon and Kim Jun-pyo stared at the vacant desk with anxious eyes, as though the empty seat itself might answer their unspoken questions.
“Where on earth could he have gone……?”
Ill omens rarely miss their mark.
The memory of Cheon Do-hyun’s precarious state the night before wouldn’t leave Kim Seung-yeon alone.
‘I shouldn’t have let him go. I should have asked more questions.’
That was the refrain running through her mind, over and over.
Morning assembly began, and their homeroom teacher entered the classroom with an unusually hardened expression.
What came from his lips was news that struck like a thunderbolt from a clear sky.
“Do-hyun from our class was caught in a structural collapse at an abandoned building in the urban outskirts…… and passed away.”
It was Korean, certainly, but her mind refused to parse the sentence. Or rather, instinct itself rejected understanding.
“That can’t be!”
Seung-yeon shoved her chair back violently and lunged to her feet.
“H-hold on! Class president! What are you doing! Calm down!”
Caught off guard by the vehement outburst from what he’d always taken to be a model student, the teacher raised his voice in alarm.
But neither Seung-yeon nor Jun-pyo heard a word.
She’d seen him just yesterday evening—and the timing didn’t match.
The information had been fabricated.
Kim Seung-yeon was certain of it.
The moment the commotion settled and the teacher slipped out of the classroom, a hulking figure who had been crouching in the back row shot to his feet. It was Kim Byung-hak, who had been living like a mouse ever since that brutal encounter with Do-hyun.
“Ha…… hahaha! So he finally kicked it! That monster bastard finally bit the dust!”
Jun-pyo and Seung-yeon glared at him with daggers in their eyes, but Byung-hak paid them no mind, whooping loud enough to shake the classroom. His spineless nature—the craven flattery he’d resorted to for survival—was laid bare.
“Ahh, I feel like I’ve finally coughed up all this old phlegm.”
Whatever animosity had existed before, the fact that he could express relief at the death of a classmate revealed the depth of his cruelty and brutality in stark relief.
As Byung-hak’s true colors emerged, the air in the classroom seemed to thicken and darken.
And it wasn’t just him. The delinquents who had been holding their breath under the weight of Do-hyun’s presence began crawling out of the woodwork, as if on cue. At the center of it all, predictably, was Kim Min-ho and his crew.
“Bring the full amount by tomorrow. Or you know what happens.”
Shinnam High School reverted in an instant to the ecosystem it had been before Cheon Do-hyun. As though the existence called Do-hyun had never belonged to this world at all.
“Hey, Kim Jun-pyo. Go to the school store and get some milk and bread.”
Lee Chan-hee bumped Jun-pyo’s shoulder in the hallway with a smirk. In the old days, Jun-pyo would have lowered his head and dug out his wallet. But.
“Why should I?”
What came from Jun-pyo’s mouth was a firm refusal.
The world seemed to have returned to normal, yet something had changed forever.
“What? This bastard was hanging around that dead freak Do-hyun, and now he thinks he’s got guts?”
“That dead freak? Take that back right now! Take it back!”
If Kim Jun-pyo surrendered now and slipped back into the weak days when he too was a victim of bullying, then all proof that Cheon Do-hyun had ever walked these halls would vanish. The thought drove him to overextend himself. His hands still trembled when he looked at these thugs, but he gritted his teeth and seized Lee Chan-hee by the collar with fierce momentum.
“Take. It. Back!”
The delinquents were taken aback. This was the same boy who’d always been a punching bag.
“Th-this crazy bastard has actually lost it!”
Lee Chan-hee, enraged, was pulling mana into his fist as the scuffle threatened to escalate into something far worse.
Flutter—flutter—
Into the tense standoff drifted a single butterfly wreathed in blue light, moving with elegant grace. In the moment when everyone’s gaze was captured by this otherworldly beauty,
Flash
Brilliant—!
The butterfly of mana erupted in a blinding radiance like the sun itself. This was the refined signature spell of Kim Seung-yeon, who had ascended to the 3rd Circle Ignition. Far more than simple light—it was a crowd-control instrument that forced microscopic electrical currents directly into the optic nerve, temporarily paralyzing vision.
“Aaaaaagh! My eyes!”
“It feels like my retinas are burning! Kraaaah!”
The searing pain of burned retinas was indistinguishable from electrocution. Standing over the delinquents writhing on the hallway floor, hands clamped around their eyes, Seung-yeon’s voice dropped to something cold and measured.
“You try to squeeze one more won from these students while I’m watching, and next time it won’t just be your eyesight. Understand?”
Fortunately, Cheon Do-hyun had left behind a legacy—a spirit of resistance that had taken deep root in this school.
Seung-yeon gripped Jun-pyo’s hand and pulled him back to his feet, murmuring to herself as she did.
‘Cheon Do-hyun…… where could you possibly have disappeared to.’
#
Meanwhile, in the pitch-black underground where no sunlight ever penetrated,
In the heart of the Gaebangs—the secret information hub where rumors and intelligence from across Seoul converged like a spider’s web—lay the Yongsan Station Underground Bunker. Intelligence of the highest caliber, refined and verified from every corner of the country, was stacked with meticulous precision in the reading room of Bangju, the leader of the Gaebangs.
Bangju himself hadn’t stirred from his worn armchair, yet he saw the mechanisms of the world turn with a clarity none could match. His expression had hardened like stone. A top-secret document had just been delivered to him.
‘Emergency assembly of the Cheonhyeol Family, a prestigious magical family.’
‘And from the lips of the Cheonhyeol patriarch himself—the forbidden word: Martial Artist.’
“So the calamity I feared has finally arrived…….”
Bangju had sensed it the moment Cheon Do-hyun first found his way into this underground bunker—that helping the boy would crack the peaceful, carefully maintained facade of his ordinary life.
Yet Bangju willingly placed Lee Sang-won, his own right hand, at the boy’s side and threw his full support behind his plan. It was because in that instant when their eyes met, he had felt a pull—an irresistible, intense gravity of destiny that could not be defied.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Lost in thought, the rhythmic tapping on the study door pierced the silence.
“Master Bangju. A distinguished guest has arrived.”
It was Lee Sang-won’s measured voice.
“Show him in.”
The aged iron door swung open, and a man stepped into Bangju’s study.
Perhaps because of his massive frame—the moment he entered, the space felt cramped.
It was Cheon Do-hyun. The victim and the dead. The one whose tragic accident had set the entire city ablaze with scandal.
“You’re looking rather well for a dead man.”
“I’ve made my decision. I must learn the family’s secrets now.”
Do-hyun fixed his gaze on Bangju, his eyes burning with quiet, unshakeable resolve.
Once, Bangju had warned the boy: the moment you uncover all the secrets hidden beneath the surface, you will never be able to return to an ordinary life.
Bangju studied the young man’s face in silence.
Because the Cheonhyeol Family had intervened, the man known as “Cheon Do-hyun” had been transformed into a victim of the collapse—legally declared dead, his status entirely erased. The timing of fate was truly impeccable.
“If I exert my influence, you can reclaim the identity you’ve lost. If your resolve was born of hasty impulse, there is still a chance to turn back.”
“No. I have no intention of returning there.”
“The moment you face the truth, you can never return to the bright, ordinary life you knew. Even if it means betraying the earnest wishes of your grandfather, Cheon Woo-hyuk, and your father, Cheon Song-gyung—men who longed only to live plain, unremarkable lives—you would still walk that path?”
“Yes. I will walk it.”
His answer came without hesitation, without a shadow of doubt. Holding that gaze—deep, burning with intensity—Bangju understood at last: the great tidal wave of destiny he had long known would come had finally arrived at his doorstep.

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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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