Obtaining Heavenly Demon Martial Arts in the Magic Era - Chapter 35

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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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35
The world firmly believed that Mana Stones were first discovered at the South Pole a hundred years ago, and that the Energy Revolution had sprung from this discovery. But this was a fact manipulated to suit the tastes of the victors.
These were the words that fell from the lips of Seon Young-hun of the Ark of Opening—truths about the hidden world that had been concealed all this time.
The truth reached back not a hundred years, but five hundred years into the past.
The beings now called the Mado Mingga, who reign as the ruling class of the world—their roots sprang from a tiny Austrian ethnic minority, the Illumina tribe. Despite their grandiose name, “Those Enlightened by Light,” they were regarded as nothing more than a mysterious people: a closed community that analyzed the world’s secrets and mysteries and wrought small miracles. Yet they were no more than folklore to the unaware.
Then one day, into the hands of the Illumina came something like a gift from the gods themselves—a Mana Stone.
“What is this?”
In the eyes of those who conducted periodic trade with nearby cities, a mysterious blue-gleaming ore had appeared.
“It’s ore that was recently mined. Quite beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It truly is magnificent.”
To ordinary people, the ore might have seemed nothing more than a pretty stone, but to those who could perceive Mana, its potential was apparent at a glance.
“I’ll take all of it.”
When they returned to their tribe, they divided the Mana Stones among themselves. The stones explosively expanded the Mana Circuits that had lain dormant in their blood, and they were granted new knowledge and absolute power.
And so a month passed.
With power in hand, the Illumina unleashed the destructive instincts that had been hidden within them without restraint.
They attacked first the very city with which they had traded.
“Crumble—”
At a mere gesture from an Illumina hand, entire city walls collapsed, and a mountain was reduced to ash.
“Demons! They are demons!”
With geometric runes carved across their entire bodies and glowing Mana Stones clasped in their hands as they razed the city, they were the very image of demons incarnate.
“Surrender the glowing stones. Do so, and we shall spare your lives.”
The Illumina began to monopolize the Mana Stones across the region.
“We surrender!”
“Please, spare us!”
Before this power called Magic, cities and nations crumbled like fallen leaves.
The Illumina swallowed villages and cities indiscriminately. They proclaimed Mado Supremacy, spreading the terrible doctrine that humans without Magic were primitive livestock, and only the Illumina were the chosen race destined to rule the world.
Enslaved humanity was dragged to Mana Stone mines, and the Illumina secured an endless supply of the stones.
With the source of magical power in their grasp, there was nothing the Illumina had to fear.
They consumed cities, and from cities, nations,
and from nations, entire continents.
The birth of the Holy Mado Empire, Liecht.
“Please, have mercy!”
“Great and mighty ones!”
Fear of Liecht and the Illumina had already spread far and wide, and nations began to surrender of their own accord.
“Tribute us your jewels and your women.”
The Illumina scattered their seed across the entire continent, teaching Magic only to their own bloodline.
In the course of this, they reduced to ash the fundamental sciences, research facilities, and records that were beginning to flourish in one corner of the globe. They ensured that the unawakened would have no possibility whatsoever of standing against them.
Within less than half a century, the Liecht Empire had consumed half the continent.
As talents multiplied, the system of Magic grew more refined, and Magic itself grew stronger. No one could stand against Liecht and its ruling class, the Illumina, and none doubted that the remaining half of the continent would soon fall into their hands as well.
Then, the moment Liecht’s army crossed into the Asian Continent, something no one had foreseen came to pass.
The tent flap burst open urgently, and an aide prostrated himself, his face drained of all color.
“The army—the entire army has been annihilated!”
The general commanding Liecht’s forces could not believe his ears at the report.
“What are you saying? Our Magic was pierced by the arrows of savages?”
“No, sir! With every step they take, our soldiers are being slaughtered by beings whose very forms cannot be discerned!”
It was a report beyond belief.
“Impossible. I shall go to the battlefield myself.”
And so the general, fully armored, made his way to the battlefield, only to witness a scene he could not fathom.
Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh! Crack!
Spears and blades flew at speeds the eye could not follow, and bodies vanished like phantoms only to materialize in the void and slit the throats of their own comrades.
Crash!
“Aaaaagh!”
A Shield deployed by dozens of high-ranking mages at the cost of their lives was torn to shreds like wet paper by a single blow from those creatures’ fists.
Whoooosh—
Crack!
A massive fireball was cleaved in two by a single slash, and even the magical force kindled by burning Mana Stones was drawn into an undefined abyss at a mere gesture from those beings’ hands, vanishing without a trace.
“Ugghhhhh!”
Screams erupted from all around.
The general had witnessed countless battlefields and was accustomed to the sound of agony itself. What was strange was that these screams—these final death cries—were being torn from soldiers of Liecht, whom he had believed invincible.
He stammered out a question.
“You… what are you?! Monsters… you’re all monsters!”
It was the first time the Illumina race had encountered Wulin Practitioners.
“What… what exactly are you?”
The general pushed past his fear and studied the warriors before him, analyzing the mechanism by which they wielded their power.
Each of them concealed beneath their dantian a concentration of force that exceeded even Mana Stones. As he watched their essence spiral and churn with every exertion of strength, the Illumina general understood at last.
Mages manipulated the external world through Mana; these beings shattered the world itself with their flesh.
“They stand in perfect opposition to us…”
With that lament, the skull of the man once hailed as the Illumina’s greatest commander and undefeated general burst open like an overripe melon.
The man in black, drenched in viscous blood, gazed coldly upon Licht’s scattered remnant as they stared in horror at their fallen leader, and pronounced their doom.
“By the name of the Celestial Demon Divine Church, you shall not set foot forward one step more.”
Before such overwhelming violence, the Illumina learned the true meaning of despair, deep in their bones.
Thus began an unbreakable cycle of enmity between mages and Wulin Practitioners.
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The Illumina, the ruling class of Licht, could not accept the existence of Wulin Practitioners nor their own bitter defeat. They mounted four more expeditions, only to be repulsed each time by the transcendent martial might of their foes, suffering loss after loss. In the end, they squandered their military strength to the point where they could no longer defend the heartland of the empire itself.
Faced with this desolate reality, Licht convened its supreme council to deliberate the empire’s survival and countermeasures against the Wulin Practitioners.
“They are beyond defeat.”
“They are as natural enemies to us Illumina as if crafted by the gods themselves.”
By the methods we now employ, we can never surpass them.
“We need not conquer through force alone, need we?”
After a long silence, someone spoke. They resolved to overturn their entire approach.
“Then what do you propose?”
“If the battlefield proves unfavorable, why not change the battlefield itself?”
“What do you mean?”
“Until now, the world has been governed by the logic of pure strength. In such a place, we could never withstand such crude swordsmen. But if we altered the rules of the world itself… would that not suffice?”
Conquest by brute force had failed.
So what if they changed tactics—binding them through culture, strangling them through capital?
How could these stubborn Wulin Practitioners, who had known nothing but blade and fist their entire lives, possibly resist the pressure of an invisible system of economy and society?
“That is a most intriguing notion.”
A year after the Grand Scheme was agreed upon.
The absolute empire of Licht, which had shaken the world in terror, collapsed without fanfare.
Nations under Licht’s tyranny, harboring long-standing grievances, rose up simultaneously in rebellion. Stripped of strength, Licht could not contain the fractures within and, seemingly eternal, closed the doors of its empire forever.
Yet the world did not know: even this fall was but a play performed with meticulous precision by the Illumina.
Under the guise of the fallen Licht Empire’s legacy, they disseminated throughout the world a systematic method of cultivation that could awaken any person to magic—and did so freely.
Of course, the true Secret Transmission, known only among the pure bloodlines of Illumina, remained carefully concealed.
Nations that had witnessed firsthand the terrible power of Licht’s military magic eagerly adopted the cultivation methods, and mages proliferated explosively across the globe. This was the beginning of what they called the false Energy Revolution.
The Illumina, leveraging the Mado Engineering technology they had already monopolized centuries ahead, and their unparalleled mastery of magic, absorbed the world’s capital like a sponge.
In place of the fallen military empire, a new form of invisible empire arose—one that monopolized the wealth and power of the entire world.
They called it the Mado Mingga.
The Mado Mingga now began to pressure the Wulin Practitioners, wielding the enormous power of capital as their weapon.
Even the greatest master under heaven, whose skin was hard as steel and whose Sword Qi could cleave mountains—even he would falter and lose his strength after three days without food.
They severed the Practitioners’ lifelines and isolated them; they manipulated law and custom to brand them as criminals; and they ceaselessly propagated the lie that a new, civilized era had dawned—one in which one could no longer survive by fist and sword. In the end, they forced the Practitioners to lower the blades they had held in their own hands.
Thus, to permanently sever the breath of the Wulin organizations—now as toothless and weakened as a dying tiger—the Mado Mingga executed a sweeping purge in secret.
It was called the Great Purification.
And that bloodstained day was the very day when Cheon Do-hyeon’s father, Cheon Song-kyung, met his tragic death.

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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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