The Heavenly Demon of the Blue Sky - Chapter 2
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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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Cangthian Demon Tyrant 002
From a woman bearing beauty as cold as frost and snow, to a woman as seductive as a brilliant peony, to another as pure as an orchid.
It seemed as though every beautiful face in all creation had been gathered here at the Namgung Household.
“Sob, sob! Hyeok! Our poor youngest! Do you have any idea how worried we’ve all been?”
I could read the room instantly. These three were my sisters—my sisters as Namgung Hyeok.
“…… Don’t come any closer! I’m not the sheltered young master you think I am…….”
I had no connection to them, no reason to welcome their company. I was about to lash out with cutting words when—
“Ugh, nngh!”
Before I could finish, one of them rushed forward and threw her arms around me in a fierce embrace.
And then came the softness—sudden, overwhelming. My face was buried in the cleft of their chests, and I could barely draw breath.
“W-what is this! Let go at once!”
The Snake Hiss that once made the world tremble should have erupted from my lips.
But instead, all that escaped was a muffled whimper, smothered against their embrace.
‘The demons of Shipman Mountain Ridge would go weak in the knees at a single glance from me, and yet these foolish Orthodox Faction dregs show no fear!’
Finally, unable to bear it any longer, I forced the energy from my core to rise. Then I shoved hard against their shoulders.
“Enough!”
Bang! The thrust was feeble—my sickly body could muster no real force—but the sudden resistance made all three women stare at me in bewilderment.
I swept my tangled hair back roughly, and fixed them with eyes that burned with icy fury.
“Fool! Lay hands on whom do you think you are? Do I still look like your foolish younger brother to you? My name is Tianchen! I am the Pacheun Majohn who commands Shipman Mountain Range!”
At once, the room fell silent as if plunged into cold water.
Now that I’d revealed my true identity, they should either recoil in shock or draw their weapons.
I stood waiting for their response, my bearing imperious. Then, that moment came.
“Ah, ah……. Ladies…….”
Sidong, who had observed me earlier, poked his head through the door gap and spoke with careful hesitation.
“Young Master has been acting strangely since earlier. He’s been asking where he is, and it seems he doesn’t even know who he is…….”
The moment Sidong’s words ended, the pupils of all three sisters widened dramatically.
“Yes, now do you finally suspect? Now realize that my soul has been transplanted into this body…….”
But my expectations were shattered completely.
“My heavens……! Hyeok!”
“Oh, how you must have suffered……. To have lost your senses!”
The women seized my hands, tears streaming down their faces like drops of chicken droppings.
“Pacheun…… what? Yes, our Hyeok, do whatever you need to do!”
“If Hyeok is a demon tyrant, then I’m the demon tyrant’s sister! We don’t need your memories—we’ll remember everything for you!”
What……? At their words, I was so flabbergasted I nearly shouted.
“That’s not what I’m saying!”
“Yes, yes, Great Pacheun Majohn!”
Ignoring my protests entirely, they thrust their faces close and began to sniff.
“Oh, heavens! Hyeok, how much you’ve been sweating! And this stench…….”
It was from the dark, viscous Turbid Qi that had been expelled through my pores as my Qi Vessels were opened.
“This won’t do! If we leave it like this, your cold will only worsen. Girls, heat some warm water at once!”
At the eldest sister’s command, the younger ones moved with perfect coordination.
In moments, a wooden basin was filled with steaming water, wisps of steam curling up from its surface.
Soft towels, worn but immaculately embroidered, were stacked neatly beside it.
“Come now, Hyeok. Let your sisters clean you up.”
“W-what are you saying! Who washes whom! Let go of that! I’ll wash myself! I order you to let go!”
“You haven’t the strength to lift a finger. If you push yourself and collapse, what then? Just let your sisters help.”
The warm, damp towel gently wiped my face and neck. Soft hands slipped carefully beneath my arms.
“Oh, our poor youngest. Look at you—nothing but skin and bone.”
“Be careful, Second Sister. Don’t scrape his skin.”
I was utterly bewildered.
In all my existence, had anyone ever come this close to me?
People trembled at a mere glance, scrambling to bow their heads—they wouldn’t even dare to touch me.
Fear and solitude. As an absolute being, that was all I had ever known.
But now.
Careful hands wiping my forehead, terrified I might be hurt.
Gentle breath blowing softly on my skin, lest I feel pain.
It was a strange warmth I had never experienced, not once in all my years.
‘What…… is this…….’
I tried to push it away coldly, to tell myself it was just the hypocrisy of the Orthodox Faction, but my body would not obey my will.
“Why so glum, Hyeok? Is the water too hot? Your ears are all red.”
The worried eyes of the women looking up at me.
Before such pure, unblemished affection, even the strength to stay angry had drained away.
I should have pushed them back.
Yet somehow, I was melting helplessly into this strange warmth.
Or rather, to be precise…….
‘I’m pleased. I’m actually pleased.’
After a lifetime standing alone through storms of blood, was I really being swayed like this?
“Tch…….”
Unable to accept the truth of it, I clenched my teeth.
Yet each time that warm hand brushed my cheek, it felt so comforting.
Like a stray cat permitting human touch for the first time in its life, I resigned myself and closed my eyes.
* * *
After the small commotion passed.
Namgung Hyeok’s sisters, closing the door behind them, quietly reddened their eyes.
They had shown brightness before their youngest brother, but in truth their hearts lay under clouds.
“Sister…… did our baby brother really make such a cruel decision on his own…….”
“Perhaps…….”
The Pond was surrounded by a high fence—not the sort of place one could fall into by accident.
Yet their ailing youngest brother had deliberately sought out the Pond’s edge in the early morning hours.
Fortunately, the eldest, who had been training nearby, discovered him; had she not reached him in time, it would have been far more than a simple cold.
“Sob…….”
The third sister wept, covering her face with both hands at the thought of what might have been.
“The way he acts like a completely different person since he came back…….”
“It must be from the anguish of having tried to end his own life…….”
How much pain and despair must he have endured to harbor such a terrible thought.
“Still…… I find myself grateful for how he is now, rather than before.”
At the second sister’s words, the eldest and third nodded silently in agreement.
Their youngest brother had been trapped in a deep nihilism. He cursed his sickly condition with utter loathing.
‘Don’t pity me. How disgusting. Do you think I’d be grateful to you?’
He had overturned medicinal decoctions painstakingly prepared, and spurned offered hands with a face full of barbs.
‘A ruined clan—is there anything left but to gnaw on the very foundations? Whether it’s the worthless parents who spawned a cripple like me and died irresponsibly, or you pathetic wretches prolonging my miserable breath—you’re all equally disgusting!’
His cries still echoed clearly in their ears, raw with the fury of one spitting blood.
‘There’s no hope anyway, so what’s the use of clinging to life! Why do you stubbornly keep me alive, trapping me in this hell?!’
A great spike was driven through the sisters’ hearts as they witnessed this. And yet.
“It was a mercy that even his strange words, we did not meet with cruelty. That he would look us in the eye…….”
Their youngest brother, now conscious, was different from before—strange, yes, but no longer despairing.
More precious than the old days when he withdrew into himself and withered away, his anger now as he opened his heart moved them to tears.
The three women clasped hands together and made a firm vow.
“Whoever he wishes to become.”
“Whatever he might desire.”
They would cherish their one and only youngest brother with warmth.
* * *
At that very moment.
In the room, after the ritual ablutions were complete and all the sisters had withdrawn.
I lay stretched out on the bed, gazing up at the ceiling.
A fresh silk garment changed into, the faint scent of plum blossoms drifting across my entire body.
“Sigh…….”
In the end, I had not gained recognition that I was not Namgung Hyeok, but Jeok Mu-wol.
What more could I say, when they would take on that expression of understanding no matter what words I spoke?
I gave up when I saw their gratitude merely for my being alive.
Instead, I committed to memory the faces and names I had learned. The second sister Namgung Yeonhwa, the third Namgung Seolhwa…….
All of them possessed the beauty for which beauty is praised, yet what captured my attention was the eldest, Namgung Yuhua.
‘She alone wore not women’s garments but martial robes like a man.’
The firm forearm briefly glimpsed below the sleeves rolled up for washing. And the rough calluses densely packed into the palm that had caressed my cheek.
Those were marks that only one who gripped and wielded a blade could possess.
My mind worked quickly.
The only man here who might die tomorrow without surprise was myself.
‘So the eldest has taken up the blade to continue the line.’
How bone-deep the agony must be for a woman to bear the weight of an entire household on her shoulders—but I, who had lived at the peak of the strong devouring the weak my whole life, saw it coming from a mile away.
‘And worse: there’s no master to teach her, no one to protect her.’
All that remains is past glory. And plenty of vultures circling to claim even that. The situation is bleak in every way.
‘Entertaining, though.’
My lips curled into a bitter smile. Who was I, after all?
The Cangthian Tyrant Demon Sage—clawed my way up from the abyss and reached the pinnacle.
This game will be rewritten exactly as I desire.
But first, I need to find a way to manage these Severed Meridians, however gradually.
The fortune is that I’ve specialized in the Medical Arts.
Life in the Demonic Sect was walking on thin ice every moment.
A hell where loyal retainers smiled and offered medicinal decoctions, yet you could never know when a poisoned dagger might slip from their sleeves.
To survive in that harsh, merciless world, I couldn’t trust even my own shadow.
‘Rather than entrust my life to another’s hands, it was far safer for me to master the Medical Arts myself.’
I chewed and swallowed every precious elixir under heaven, drove needles into myself tens of thousands of times, and danced across the line between life and death.
Bitter mistrust and raw survival instinct elevated me to the realm of the Divine Physician—a height where even the greatest physicians of the realm fell beneath my feet.
‘Good, then.’
Strike while the iron’s hot—I rose from the bed and threw on my coat lightly.
* * *
At that same moment……
In a humble Medicine Chamber tucked to one side of the Namgung Household:
The stooped Elder Baek kept watch before the brazier, accompanied only by a deep, weary sigh.
As a child with nowhere to go, he had been taken in by a long-departed patriarch of the Namgung Clan.
In gratitude for that kindness, he had vowed to repay the debt until his hair turned white.
He had witnessed it all—the glory of the Cangthian age, and now, the decline of a household cornered at the edge of a cliff.
Once, when the Namgung Medicine Chamber was mentioned, people spoke of mountains of rare elixirs piled high and the scent of simmering decoctions spreading ten li in every direction.
That thriving, magnificent apothecary had long since become nothing but a dilapidated cottage, its paint peeling in patches, its paper doors in tatters.
All those physicians had long departed. Only he remained, old and alone.
“The Young Master has collapsed again, I hear…….”
He stirred the bubbling decoction, and stirred it again, as if to soothe the burning in his chest.
The greatest physician of the realm, and yet he could not save even a single drop of his lord’s bloodline.
Every night, he felt he deserved to hang himself for his own incompetence.
Creak— At that moment, the heavy door of the Medicine Chamber swung open.
“The medicine hasn’t finished steeping yet. Wait a little longer,” he said flatly, not even turning his head. He assumed it was Sidong come to hurry along the herbs.
“I came myself, Elder Baek.”
In an instant, Elder Baek’s shoulders went rigid. If this wasn’t an auditory hallucination, what he’d just heard was unmistakably the voice of the Young Master.
That voice, which always trembled ever so faintly at the end from labored breathing, now rang out with a calm and steadiness that seemed impossible.
“Y-Young Master?!”
Elder Baek spun around so hastily that the medicine packet slipped from his hands and fell with a soft thud. The Young Master stood in the doorway.
And there, on a face that had always been pallid—even when wrapped in layers of fur clothing lest the cold wind touch him—a faint bloom of color had returned.
“Elder Baek.”
I picked up the fallen packet and handed it back to him.
‘This old man has suffered considerably, keeping breath in this wretched body that’s been dying this whole time.’
That dim-witted loyalty and sense of duty peculiar to the Orthodox Faction.
“You’ve been well? I hear you’ve been suffering greatly on my account?”
“Young Master…….”
“Don’t torment yourself anymore. I’m on my feet now.”
I had no intention of clumsily mimicking the old Namgung Hyeok.
What would the Tyrant Demon Sage of the realm be whining about?
I fixed him with an arrogant expression.
‘He’ll feel the strangeness. He’ll suspect. Go ahead, feel free.’
I’d expected some resistance, but surprisingly, Elder Baek was no different from my sisters.
“Sob, sob……. Young Master, you speak such warm words…….”
Instead, he was overcome, tears spilling freely.
‘This is enough to move him? Namgung Hyeok, you bastard. How the hell have you been living?’
The atmosphere suggested he’d clap if I soiled my pants.
The absurdity of it all made a hollow laugh spill out.
“So don’t worry about it, and help me out a bit.”
“Y-yes! Of course! Just tell me what you need.”
I approached the dusty medicine cabinet at a leisurely pace.
‘Well, this is something.’
I pulled open drawer after drawer, then let out a sigh.
The wooden boxes that held the medicinal herbs had absorbed moisture and warped stiffly.
The scattered herbs, old as they were, gave off a sour, musty smell that hit me like a wave.
“M-master! If there’s something you’re looking for, I can fetch it for you at once——!”
“Never mind. I need to see for myself.”
I ignored the old physician’s protests and rummaged through the drawers, where withered angelica root and faded ginseng lay scattered about.
The condition was dismal, but the traces of effort to preserve what remained were unmistakable.
Soon I found something worth using in the corner of a forgotten drawer.
‘Ah, so this was shoved back here all along.’
Low-grade toxic herbs saturated with yin energy and poison lay abandoned.
An Orthodox physician wouldn’t glance at them twice, but for me, it’s different.
“Bring me two bundles of Frost Jade Grass, one drop of Death-Severing Tree sap, and that dried centipede there — grind it into Centipede Powder.”
The old physician gasped sharply at my prescription.
“M-master. Frost Jade Grass, you say? And the Death-Severing Tree sap along with Centipede Powder — surely these are lethal toxins…….”
“I know how to handle them, so don’t worry.”
The old physician hesitated, then reluctantly gathered the materials I’d pointed out.
“Still, you must be careful. I’ll stand by and keep watch.”
I nodded and selected only the intact portions of the Frost Jade Grass.
Then I lowered the brazier’s temperature to the proper level and added the Frost Jade Grass, Centipede Powder, and Death-Severing Tree sap in sequence.
As the Frost Jade Grass’s vicious Cold Energy began to freeze the Death-Severing Tree’s deadly poison, the murky Qi from the Centipede Powder tore through the gap, writhing savagely.
Each yearning to devour the other.
“N-no, look at this. These were never meant to mix in the first place. At this rate, you should stop now——.”
If I’d listened to the old physician, the pot would have shattered.
“What are you talking about? This is just beginning.”
But I had no intention of stopping. I spread my palm open above the pot.
Whoosh—! At my gesture cloaked in Demonic Energy, the medicinal decoction began to wrap around itself.
Then, as it surged upward, it began to emit a violet mist.
Using Poison to Overcome Poison—a secret transmission that the Orthodox Faction would never dare even imagine.
This is the ultimate Demonic refinement method that I, a Demonic Sovereign of old, gleaned from countless brushes with death.
‘The faint Demonic Energy scraped together from unblocking sealed Qi Vessels, yet sufficient to subdue the materials’ resistance.’
A harsh gasp escaped the old physician watching the sight unfold.
“G-gasp! What, how is this possible?”
These were forces that should have been devouring each other.
Yet they were harmonizing, reborn as an entirely new miraculous elixir.
The nauseating stench of toxic herbs that had assailed the nose vanished without trace, and a deep, mysterious sandalwood fragrance that cleared the mind filled the Medicine Chamber.
“The heavens……. The medicinal properties overcome their natural opposition and aid one another…….”
An old physician who had spent his lifetime following only the principles of Rightness and Compliance.
The sight of poison subduing poison to forge life itself appeared to him as nothing but divine harmony.
“This is a miracle, a true miracle, master!”
Confronted by such exquisite skill that shook the very foundation of Medicinal Principles, the old physician’s legs gave way and he collapsed to the floor.
“A miracle, he says.”
But I thought differently.
This wasn’t some stroke of fortune granted by heaven.
What has heaven ever done for me?
It merely thrust me into an alien body without permission.
This, at least, is my overwhelming experience accumulated through countless encounters with death.
And the inevitable result of perfect technique.
Right, I should speak plainly.
“Old Physician Baek.”
“Y-yes! Master……!”
“You’re wrong. This isn’t anything like a miracle.”
“Yes? Then, then…….”
I looked down at the old physician and twisted my lips upward slowly.
“I’m just that damn good.”
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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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