The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 62

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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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62
Chapter 62. The Tree of the Abyss, the Tree of Qliphoth
***
I cast one more bait.
It was a clear lure that left Ryu Gang-jin no choice but to take the exit I’d cut off.
“The person who killed Hunter Lee Do-hyeon. I can find them.”
The words that fell between my lips were brief, yet their weight was enough to sink the air of the Annex Courtyard in a single breath. Silence rolled in like a wave.
The space that had been filled just moments before with the roars of monsters and the sound of cutting wind became eerily quiet, as if someone had pressed a mute button.
“······What did you just say.”
The presence of the massive figure before me—Ryu Gang-jin—twisted for an instant.
Hairline fractures appeared in the facade he’d worn like an easygoing middle-aged man. Through those cracks, something raw and murderous emerged.
The operations chief who controlled the Gate Management Bureau’s hunting dogs. The predator’s true nature hidden beneath that title finally tore through the thick shell and raised its head.
The man’s gaze pierced through my pupils from behind his sunglasses. It was more than a simple threat.
The cold instinct of a veteran hunter who confirms the prey’s vital points and stands ready to sever the carotid artery at any moment. The relaxed smile vanished from Ryu Gang-jin’s lips.
In its place came a voice like metal scraping against metal.
“That’s not something I can just let slide. You must have solid evidence.”
“I do.”
I didn’t yield an inch. I met the heavy aura that transmitted through the soles of my feet head-on.
The dust beneath my shoe heel trembled finely, pushed back by his force.
“So I cannot hand over Hunter Lee Do-hyeon’s body.”
Ryu Gang-jin regarded me in silence. His thick fists clenched and unclenched repeatedly.
Each time his massive chest rose and fell, the flow of the surrounding air became erratic.
In the brief silence, I could hear the sound of countless cold calculations being weighed.
A balancing act had begun between organizational discipline, personal desire, and the value of the information I’d just thrown before him.
Before long, Ryu Gang-jin pulled out a smartphone from his pocket. His gaze remained fixed on me as his thick fingers pressed a speed-dial number.
“This is Ryu Gang-jin. Director.”
A peevish shout leaked through the receiver, barely audible. But Ryu Gang-jin’s expression remained unmoved as stone.
“Yes. The situation has changed. It appears we’ll need more time.”
His report was unobstructed. His gaze swept past my neck in a way that made my skin crawl.
“I’ll take responsibility for this. Trust me on it.”
With a click, the call ended. A one-sided announcement made before his superior could even grant permission. Ryu Gang-jin returned the smartphone to his pocket.
He opened his mouth heavily.
“Hunter Kim Do-jin.”
The lingering aura that had been pouring from his entire body withdrew like a lie.
“You have one hour.”
The negotiation was settled.
“You will prove that claim of yours right before my eyes. If you fail… then there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Ryu Gang-jin had just stood against the highest authority of the Gate Management Bureau.
He had defied orders and given me time by putting a blade to his own throat, shouldering a massive political risk in the process.
His thick fingers gripped the smartphone as if they might crush it. The call had been brief, but the weight it carried was anything but light.
‘What in the world for.’
I posed the question coldly to myself. Was it to find an internal traitor, or was this a ploy to confirm how much I’d already figured out—to check my depths.
The true thoughts hidden in this massive man’s chest remained shrouded in fog.
In that respect, Ryu Gang-jin and I are of the same breed. The type that turns inside-out the skin of outward emotion for the sake of purpose, playing a role.
But whatever the reason, the initiative in this tense standoff was now in my hands.
‘One hour.’
Enough. More than enough. Sufficient time to trace backward the visual information of the past by weaving the ripples of residual mana from a corpse with its detonator burned away.
“It’s possible.”
At my assertion, Ryu Gang-jin brushed his chin with his thick hand.
“Good to know you’re satisfied.”
***
Hunter Association Underground Medical Office.
A cool, heavy scent of disinfectant pricked the tip of my nose. We had discreetly moved Lee Do-hyeon’s remains here, the closest point to the Annex Courtyard.
White fluorescent lights flickered at regular intervals, illuminating the cold metal bed below.
“Everyone out, please.”
This came after I’d pushed all the miscellaneous medical equipment filling the medical office against the walls, securing a vast empty space at the center.
It was the minimum safety distance needed to deploy the spell formula.
At my instruction, Team Lead Kim Dae-han and the Association staff, including the injured Yu Hye-sung, nodded with grave expressions.
Silence continued until their footsteps disappeared down the corridor. As Kim Dae-han, the last to leave, paused and approached my side.
“Director Jung Eun-jin is resting in the Upper Floor Ward. You needn’t worry about that.”
Using his report as a pretext, he leaned close and whispered in a voice meant for my ears alone.
“I trust your judgment, Kim Do-jin, but this man Ryu Gang-jin—he’s a monster on par with S-Rank hunters. Crude deceptions won’t work on him. Please, exercise caution.”
Kim Dae-han left the grave warning behind and slipped out. As the thick soundproof door clicked shut, only three of us remained in the room: myself, Ryu Gang-jin.
And Lee Do-hyeon—the first-generation hero, now cold as stone.
This was the condition I’d set. The confrontation with truth would take place with only me and the Chief present, no one else.
I approached the cold stainless steel bed positioned in the center of the room. Carefully, I drew back the pure white sheet that had covered the corpse.
……
Thanks to Jung Eun-jin’s healing, the burn scars and wounds that had rotted for eight years were completely erased.
But that was only a suturing of the skin’s surface. The interior of the corpse was devastating.
The traces of forced Mana Reversal that had boiled the cerebral nerves. The pathway of the Core connected to the heart was charred black like a lump of coal.
It wasn’t a simple suicide. The Mana flowing through the blood vessels had lost its course, run wild, and torn the neural networks to shreds.
The pain would have been instantaneous, but the degree of destruction was brutally thorough. A perfect alibi—the medical examiner could dig for days and reach only the conclusion of cardiac arrest from Qi Deviation. This was a sorcery calculated with meticulous precision to silence a witness.
Yet despite dying in that hellish agony, Lee Do-hyeon’s face—his eyes gently closed—looked eerily serene.
The massive shadow of Ryu Gang-jin moved to my side, stretching long across the corpse.
“……Do-hyeon.”
A low, ragged sigh escaped between Ryu Gang-jin’s lips. Deep sorrow flickered across his angular face as he gazed down at the body.
His fists clenched, his shoulders trembling slightly.
‘An act?’
I observed the movement of his muscles and the rhythm of his breathing from the corner of my eye.
If even that grief was meticulously calculated performance, then Ryu Gang-jin was a far more terrible demon than I’d imagined.
My own insides twisted. In the world before my return, I’d never met Lee Do-hyeon directly.
Only encountered him as text on aged pages of magical theory—a great first-generation hero.
Last night I’d extracted him from that hellish Incubation-type Gate, and by draining Jung Eun-jin’s very lifespan, I’d managed to bring him back.
Yet barely a day passed before I faced him again like this—a cold corpse. From somewhere deep, black anger surged up.
Lee Do-hyeon the hunter had failed to find salvation in the past world, and he failed in this one too. Even the final dignity of his death had been violated with brutal indignity.
‘Kill them all.’
A chill of lethal intent rose from the bottom of my cold heart, but I let not a single strand of emotion slip through.
Peripheral emotions like sorrow or rage were the most dangerous poison to me now. The arithmetic of Magical Power and Incantations runs only on cold, perfect logic.
Snap.
I pulled off the black jacket I’d been wearing and tossed it onto a chair in the corner.
“Keep your word.”
With my sleeves rolled up, I looked Ryu Gang-jin straight in the eye.
“The hour given to me. No interference of any kind.”
“Understood. I give you my word.”
Ryu Gang-jin nodded, hands clasped behind his back. A clear signal that he would not interfere. As it should be.
Because from this moment on, I was about to do something monstrously cruel, far beyond the bounds of this world’s reason.
‘Forgive me, Senior.’
I slowly extended my right hand toward Lee Do-hyeon’s corpse.
Whoooom—!
In that instant, a geometric spell formula of brilliant blue light erupted with tremendous force from the empty space beneath my palm, unfolding layer upon layer.
The air inside the medical office grew heavy all at once, and the dense concentration of Mana filled the sealed space without a gap.
The moisture in the atmosphere froze solid in seconds, and white breath leaked from the corners of my mouth.
Following the trajectory of the spell formula, the whirlwind of Magical Power swept the dust from the medical office floor into a perfect circle.
“……You were a Mage.”
Ryu Gang-jin’s voice trembled with astonishment as he sensed the flow of Mana wrapping around my entire body.
I quietly closed my eyes. I let my consciousness sink into the deepest abyss of my inner self.
‘Innate Trait—Manifest.’
Above the blue spell formula, a dazzling golden phantom rose blazing bright. An enormous Tree of Life.
Ten spheres—the Sephiroth—and the twenty-two paths connecting them achieved perfect geometric balance, commanding the void.
‘The Tree of Sephirot.’
The source of my Magical Power Core, the form of the strength that once led me to the 9th Circle in my previous life.
Golden branches reached upward toward the ceiling of the medical office, radiating warm vitality.
Even Ryu Gang-jin held his breath for a moment at that overwhelming and uncanny force, his gaze fixed upward into the void.
“What in the world… is this power?”
But the true form of my Innate Trait goes far beyond this radiant tree.
Just as the cosmos is divided into light and darkness, behind the perfect Tree of Life there must exist its rotted shadow, perfectly mirrored.
To force my way into the dead man’s cerebral nerves and claw together the scattered remnants of a dispersing soul, the power of Sephiroth that creates life would not suffice.
What I needed was life in reverse. The realm of death and husk. A devouring hunger from the abyss itself.
‘No mistakes.’
Concentrating my will, I let a dark incantation flow between my lips.
[Light descends. Darkness ascends.]
[Ten branches shall I break and bury in the night.]
[Roots I shall plant in Reversal.]
The voice struck the medical office walls and resonated with eerie distortion.
The moment the final word fell, the golden light that had filled the medical office snapped away like a lie, severed clean.
A sickening crack of sound—as if an entire pane of glass had shattered—tore through the space.
Crack! Crackle!
The fluorescent lights in the ceiling overloaded all at once and burst. Complete, absolute darkness swallowed the room.
And from within that deep darkness, the sacred branches that had stretched toward the ceiling moments before began to twist and writhe in grotesque agony, buckling and reversing course.
‘Roots aloft.’
‘Branches below.’
The Tree of Life inverted itself completely.
The temperature in the medical office plummeted below freezing in an instant. The marble tiles beneath cracked and split, white frost collecting on their surface.
A suffocating pressure, as though every molecule of oxygen in the air had evaporated.
Where light had been devoured, murky Mana—redder than blood, blacker than the abyss—poured in voraciously to fill the void.
The ten sacred spheres had transformed into hollow demon shells, radiating revulsion with each obscene vibration.
Titanic roots of death, bursting through the floor and extending down toward the pit of hell. It was devastation itself—as though a rift in another dimension had been torn open into reality.
“This isn’t magic.”
Ryu Gang-jin’s ragged breathing echoed from the darkness.
The iron-will that had stood unshakable as a mountain was trembling now, seized for the first time by instinctive terror and revulsion.
That was natural. You could never grow accustomed to this aura, no matter how many times you faced it. It was tantamount to manifesting a piece of hell itself into reality.
I too had spent days and nights retching in agony the first time I confronted this vile Tree of the Abyss. A forbidden realm that devours life and violates the souls of the dead—a manifestation of cosmic despair, operating on an entirely different plane than the crude dark magic of necromancers.
‘Tree of Qliphoth.’
The inverted Tree of Death consumed Lee Do-hyeon completely, swallowing him in cold silence.

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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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