The Knight Who Devours Magic - Chapter 1

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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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Episode 1. Past Life, and Meeting
“Director, I’ve sent the money.”
[You didn’t need to. I know how hard you’re working…….]
“I know the Orphanage is struggling. How could I not send it? I’m fine. Please buy the younger ones another set of clothes.”
A long exhale.
He blew warm breath into his numbed fingers and adjusted his grip on the phone.
He’d have given anything for a padded jacket without holes in the pockets, but he couldn’t let it show.
[But still, that’s too much…….]
“I’m earning more than I thought. I’m working hard, after all.”
[Even so…….]
“And Gi-won needs hospital bills. There won’t be any more support coming in now. Please take it. Anyway, I promised to meet some friends, so…….”
Though in truth, he couldn’t afford the luxury of seeing friends.
[Are you really okay, Han Mun-ho?]
“Of course. I’m Han Mun-ho, Han Mun-ho. Don’t worry.”
He answered with his usual cheerfulness and hung up.
Then he checked the text message that had arrived just before the call.
……Withdrawal 2,000,000 won
**Orphanage
Balance 605,532 won
There still seemed to be some room.
‘Once I factor in rent and utilities…….’
A sigh came naturally.
‘Looks like ramen tonight.’
Even the snowing sky felt oddly resented.
‘I need it not to snow tomorrow if I’m going to work…….’
White Christmas.
The cheerful music and laughter of passersby suddenly felt foreign to him.
The bright smiles of people passing by only filled him with envy.
‘When will I ever smile like that.’
For him, life had always been cruelly hard.
An orphan with no memory of his parents’ faces.
After studying hard to land a job, he’d punched a boss who made unreasonable demands, and got fired for it.
He didn’t regret that decision.
– That’s what you get from an orphan bastard who never served in the military…….
Having lived through a harsh world and met all manner of people, that was the only pure son of a bitch he’d ever encountered—one who’d target him for the fact that he didn’t serve, because orphans are exempt.
But since then, things kept going wrong, and he couldn’t help but think his fate was cursed.
‘Life, what a damned mess…….’
He tried to live earnestly, and yet the world kept saying “die, just die.”
It was as if the world mocked him, asking “You’re still standing after all that?” while he hung on grimly.
Even now, sometimes he remembered the dark temptations that had reached out to him when he left the Orphanage.
A dirty world—what’s the point of living right when only I suffer……. Thoughts like that.
But he shook his head again and brushed away the pointless thoughts.
“I swear I’ll live right, damn it. I’ll hold my head high and live with pride. If I live that way…….”
He tried to steel himself with the usual self-talk, but the words “and I’ll succeed” wouldn’t quite come out.
The hope he’d held since childhood was slowly dimming under the weight of the world he’d come to know.
“……I’ll make a good life. Come on, stay strong, stay strong.”
If he’d had a family to lean on, it might’ve given him more strength, but even that one resolve scattered emptily into the air.
“Sigh…….”
The only ones he felt family-like affection for were the teachers and younger ones at the Orphanage.
Even that had become difficult recently, and he’d had to keep sending them money.
Not that he was forced to, but seeing his nearly empty bank account made him feel bleakly sad.
‘Should’ve toned down my temper back then……. No, wait. Day labor actually pays better than office work. Stop overthinking.’
For now, what mattered was doing what he could.
If he just kept living like this, worked hard…….
“……someday the sun will rise.”
From now on, he’d study again and learn new skills, moving forward one step at a time, steadily.
Just as he always had.
“I can do this.”
He told himself, offering his own comfort.
But perhaps that train of thought had gone on too long.
When he suddenly looked up, he spotted the pedestrian crossing’s blue light blinking about ten meters ahead.
Right.
‘The interview!’
Clarity flooded back, and he broke into a run.
The evening shift interview wasn’t far off.
‘They said it was an easy job. I have to make it…’
The dread that seized him whenever he glimpsed his hollow bank account drove his legs faster.
Bang!
A shadow suddenly darkened his right side of vision, followed by a deafening roar.
A massive truck came into view.
Its brakes seemed to have failed—the panicked Knight behind the wheel was blaring the horn in desperation, his frightened face flashing past in an instant.
Crash!
The world spun violently, as if his vision had come loose.
Seoul’s haze-choked sky, the looming buildings, the roadway, the vehicles—everything careened past his eyes in succession.
Thud.
As his body crumpled onto the street, screams erupted from all around.
“Aaaaahhh!”
“Someone’s been hit!”
“!@#!…….”
His body wouldn’t obey him, and his consciousness was already dimming.
Some instinct told him this was the end.
‘Damn it, damn it, damn it……!’
The unfairness of it all burned inside him.
He’d worked so hard. He’d endured, clinging to the belief that a better day would come someday.
‘Is this how it ends?’
Just like everyone else.
‘Earning good money, having leisure time, starting a family……’
He’d hoped that one day he could have those things.
But now it was impossible.
Han Mun-ho’s life was over in this moment.
Or so he thought.
Yet the god—or demon—who had dealt him such cruel fate seemed to have no intention of letting him off with just one life.
* * *
A gray-haired boy sat slumped atop a pile of rubble in the Ruins.
He couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. Eyes the same ashen gray as his hair stared blankly upward at the sky, his body too broken even to think of moving.
A scarred Knight in shattered Armor approached the boy.
The Knight gazed at him with pity before hesitating and extending a hand.
“Child. Those who tormented you—they’re all gone…… ahem, chased away. Are you alright?”
Only then did the boy’s vacant eyes lift to regard the middle-aged Knight.
“Alright……? Me……?”
Clang.
As if hearing such words for the first time in his life, the boy’s pupils widened—his shackled hand rising to point at himself.
“Yes, you. Are you alright? What’s your name? What is your name?”
“My name……?”
Ugh.
The child scrunched his face and gripped his head in both hands.
“My, name…….”
As the boy strained and groaned, sweat beading on his brow, the Knight grew alarmed.
“Han……Mun, Ho……?”
The answer came out haltingly, as if he were repeating something rather than stating it.
The Knight tilted his head at the unfamiliar pronunciation.
“Hans Muno?”
“Ah, ah. My name is Mun-ho…….”
Though the boy’s speech remained strange, the Knight reasoned it was surely from trauma—from being trapped in this horrible place as a small child.
“Poor thing…….”
His sympathy for a boy who couldn’t even remember his own name properly swelled deeper.
“Well then, Muno. If you have nowhere to go, would you come with me?”
The boy, who had been staring at the Knight with empty eyes, suddenly glimpsed the warmth shining within those brown eyes. He nodded slowly and tentatively extended his shackled hand.
Clang.
“These Shackles… well…. Let’s leave this place first, and then we’ll find a way to free you.”
The boy nodded obediently once more.
The Knight released his hand and turned back first.
Clang. Thud.
The boy, fitted with gray Shackles on all four limbs, dragged the chain—long for his small frame—and followed behind.
The boy, Mu-no, was more unusual than the Knight had anticipated.
He’d thought the steep mountain path would be grueling for a child, but it was nothing of the sort.
“Hey, your hand…….”
“Over there……?”
“Yes, we need to go that way. It’s dangerous, so your hand…….”
Just as he extended his hand and the boy stared blankly at it—
Whoosh-whoosh.
Clink. Clink.
“What the—!?”
The four chains extending from the boy’s Shackles moved as if possessed by a will of their own, their weighted ends tapping and grasping at the ground and branches, bending and coiling until they gently lowered the child’s body down to a rock below.
“……What is this?”
Though he’d lived through a harsh world and endured considerable adventure, this was the first time he’d witnessed such a thing.
Yet reasoning soon followed.
The Body Enhancement Technique—a power that evolves mankind.
The Divine Method—which works miracles of the divine.
The Spirit Arts—which command the forces of nature.
The Demonic Magic—which wields the power of demons.
He’d heard tales that beyond these Four Great Abilities, a rare few possessed Special Abilities born into them from birth.
‘Metal manipulation, then…….’
Moreover, if a child wielded such power, he almost certainly would have been in that place.
Those Demon Spawn were collecting special offerings.
His decision to visit that location, perhaps to root out any lingering remnants, suddenly seemed wise.
“Should I……not?”
“Ah. Come on, let’s go.”
The Knight hurled himself down past the massive boulder.
He couldn’t perform such tricks, nor did he need to.
Thud.
For a high-ranked Knight like himself, one who’d undergone four evolutions through the Body Enhancement Technique, leaping down more than ten meters in full Armor was almost trivially easy.
Even with accumulated fatigue and minor wounds.
But.
“Now, where……?”
Despite possessing such a Special Ability, the boy’s halting speech weighed heavy on his heart.
“Boy.”
“…….”
“Mu-no?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you remember anything that happened in that place?”
“That……place?”
“Where I brought you from. What happened there, or your memories before that.”
“Ah…….”
The boy seemed to be reaching for something in his mind.
Then—
“Ugh……!”
He clutched his small head between his hands and began to whimper.
The sight of it—whatever he struggled to remember seemed to bring him pain.
The Knight immediately scooped the boy up and cried out.
“No, no! Don’t think about it!”
“Ugh. Ugh…….”
“Damn it…….”
But the boy continued to whimper in distress.
Holding the boy, the Knight had no choice but to dash desperately into the forest in search of shelter where they might rest.
And then—
Crackle-crackle.
Whoosh.
Only after tending a campfire beneath the darkening sky for some time did the boy’s eyes flutter open slightly.
“Are you……alright?”
The Knight, observing the child’s condition, could not help but feel a pang of sympathy as he gazed into those hollow gray eyes—the same shade as his hair.
From that gaze alone, he could discern that this child had endured considerable suffering.
And on top of that.
“……Voices in my head.”
“Hmm?”
“I can……hear them…….”
The child was saying such strange things.
“Don’t dwell on it, Mun-ho. Breathe deeply…….”
The Knight decided he would ask no further questions about what had befallen this child at the hands of those Demon Spawn.
Still.
“I’ll……live……. I’ll be……fine…….”
The murmured words of this poor child, who had drifted back to sleep, weighed heavily on him.
Especially since he himself had a son—born only recently.
‘If Rian had to endure something like this…….’
As his son’s face overlaid itself upon the child’s features, a quiet resolve crystallized within him.
“……Yes, I will help you.”
At the very least, he wanted to ensure that this exceptional child could adapt to the world and live.
“That’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Mm…….”
When daylight broke again, the Knight took the sleeping child’s hand and made his way down the mountain.
And so, ten years passed swiftly.

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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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