The Regressed Magic Swordsman Devours the North - 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. First Day of Regression (1)
Duckie.

After the world’s end.
The Resistance Army, which fought to the last against the invasion of the Demon Race.
That was the codename they gave me there.
On the surface, it sounds like praise······.
But it means mediocre.

A duck flies, runs, and swims—a true all-rounder—yet it never soars as swiftly as a hawk, sprints as fast as a cheetah, or cuts through water as smoothly as a fish.
Because my talents were unremarkable.
I took on every odd job imaginable.
In the end, I became a duck.

Whiiiiing—

A cold wind scraped my cheek. The blizzard raged with savage intensity. Once, this landscape had felt bleak and desolate. But from the edge of the world—

“There’s a certain charm to it, isn’t there.”

Cough!

Blood poured from my mouth in a sudden torrent.
My internal organs had twisted, causing blood to reverse its course.

Damn it.
It wasn’t just my insides that were ruined.

My left arm was gone—simply vanished—and a damaged Prosthetic Eye filled the empty socket of my right eye. Both legs, too, were Prosthetic Legs made of Mado Engineering material.

Thud—thud—

I walked across the snowy field on Prosthetic Legs.

Blood that had run down what remained of my arm dripped steadily from my right hand. Brilliant red spread softly across the pristine white snow.

I stopped for a moment and looked up.
A single column stood towering before me.

‘How pitiful.’

My father, my brothers, my friends, my retainers, the grand manor that seemed to be a replica of a heavenly palace, my mother’s tomb······ everything in my memory had left not a trace.

All that remained was this:
A single column rising from an ancient ruin.

Damn it.
I didn’t even have good memories to mourn.
Yet this hollow ache in my chest irritated me.

—The mediocre third son of the Northern Regional Duke.
—A failed heir of a Swordsmanship lineage.
—A worm who destroyed himself through inferiority.

What came to mind was only mockery and reproach, eyes that looked at me as though I were vermin, the sighs of those who wished the ground would swallow me whole. And now, what was this feeling?

Longing? Or was it regret?
I swallowed the bitter ache that rose in my throat.
And I kept walking until I reached the column.

Thump—thump—

And finally.
I leaned my exhausted body against the pillar, drawing cold air deep into my lungs, exhaling shallow breath a few times over.

“How much longer will you watch?”

Then.

——Boom!
As if the ocean itself had descended from the sky.
A suffocating, crushing weight pressed down.

“So this is where your flight ends?”

A sluggish voice of darkness resonated in my ears, and she appeared in the empty space before me.
A woman’s sensuous form. A beautiful face. Captivating eyes. Hair black as pitch. And above it, six horns rising upward. The Demon King herself, the Dragon-Slayer.

And.

“Damned bastard.”
“Sion Karsen. What brings you here?”

Spit—

I spat out the blood pooling in my mouth and answered.

“How flattering that you know my name, Demon King.”

I spoke with deliberate sarcasm.
The Demon King paid it no mind.

“As if I wouldn’t know. If not for you all, mopping up those insects would have taken five years less.”

That ‘you all’ referred to the leadership of the Resistance Army, who fought until humanity’s final breath.
Five heroes including myself. Comrades I would never see again, bonds scattered as a handful of ash.

“In the end, I failed to stop you.”
“But you did your best.”
“Best? Damn you. Everyone’s dead, I’m dying, and that’s what you call a word? If we’d weeded out the human traitors who sided with the Demon Race faster, if we’d prepared sooner, then you’d be… cough!”

Blood spilled forth again in a rush.
There was much I wanted to say.
But nothing went as I wished.

“Enough.”

The Demon King spoke in a tone of mounting tedium.

“This would have, that would have. The whining of the defeated means nothing to me. But surely you didn’t come all this way just to spill such words?”
“Curious?”
“Will you die without speaking?”
“You never gave even the slightest attention to creatures weaker than yourself.”
“Your talents were different from those insects rolling about in abundance. Though.”

The Demon King continued with a sneer crossing her lips.

“You ended as mediocre.”

Damn it. She was right. I possessed a talent so rare that even the Demon King who destroyed the world saw fit to acknowledge it. What was this talent?

Whoooosh—

Flames rippled outward from where I stood.
The snow around me and the pillar began to melt away.
Clear water trickled down in streams.

A fool blessed by Flame Mana, yet born in the frozen North where bitter cold mana saturated everything—too blind to recognize his own gift.
It took the Demon Race’s invasion, the collapse of the Northern Region and Central Empire, and a desperate flight to the fiery South—where blazing mana churned—before he finally understood what he was. A mediocre talent, that’s what I was.

That was me: Deki, also known as Sion Karsen.

Whiiiiing—

A cold wind swept through.
The flames that had been melting my body extinguished helplessly.
The trickling water froze solid on the ground.
The Demon King extended her hand with an indifferent expression.

“…A waste of time, it seems.”

Her fingertips flickered with black light. I knew that technique. One of the Demon King’s skills—the Dark Breath. A single blast of that breath had taken half the Imperial Palace with it.

“How considerate of you to send me off with such spectacle.”
“Go well. Last survivor of mankind.”

Intent on finishing me thoroughly, the Demon King narrowed the breath’s spread precisely toward me and fired.

—————Crash!

A deafening roar that shook the very earth.
For a moment, all sound vanished.
Even the relentless blizzard ceased.

Whiiiiing—

The howling wind poured through the gaping hole in my abdomen. But my body was already modified—machine and Mado Engineering woven through me. Losing everything below the chest didn’t mean immediate death.
Which meant.
I was still alive.

“Thank you. For not grinding me to powder in one stroke.”

I meant it sincerely.
It bought me time to verify something.
The result of my final gamble.

Of course, the Demon King couldn’t have understood my gratitude, so she raised the only reasonable objection.

“What meaning does this pathetic prolonging of life hold?”

I didn’t answer.
I simply turned my head slowly.
And checked the pillar behind me.
It was shattered completely, as expected.

“Khehehehe…”

Laughter erupted from me as though I’d lost my mind.

…

The Demon King’s easy expression hardened.
She raised her hand again.
This time, she meant to finish it for real.

But in that moment.

A brilliant flash—

A pure white orb began to spill out from within the shattered pillar. The hope I’d barely dared to entertain was becoming reality. My lips curled upward even further.

“Kkhaha! It was real! Cough, hak. Ha… ha… I was right! I was right! I was RIGHT!!”

I was genuinely delirious with joy.
For the first time, the Demon King’s eyes wavered.

“…Surely. Lumen’s Holy Orb?”

Lumen.
According to the mythology passed down through the Karsen Family in the Northern Region, one of the world’s supreme deities—vanished more than a thousand years ago. The fact that even the Demon King knew of it only confirmed it further.

I recited the prayer from mythology that would be my final breath.

“Sun God Lumen, I beseech you. By your other name Chronos, I pray.”
“You wretch!”

The Demon King moved to stop me, but the radiant orb blocked her path, and I poured every scrap of my Mana into reciting the rest of the prayer.

【At the world’s end.
When the pillar holding up the sky crumbles.
Once alone.
Time shall flow backward.】

The world had already fallen into ruin.
It was almost a gamble.
But this was my last hope.

Then.

“Lumen! This violates our contract!”

The Demon King spat out something incomprehensible.
But the orb was already flooding with the sun god’s holiness, so I gathered every last ounce of strength and raised my right hand’s middle finger.

“Eat shit.”

Within the blinding white radiance, I could see the Demon King’s face twisted in fury. She desperately opened her mouth to unleash Dark Breath, but it was already too late. Damn dragon.

A deafening roar—

That was the last memory of my first life.
***

A sensation of floating above clouds.
A hazy feeling, as though fog had settled in my brain.

‘…Am I alive?’

My consciousness hadn’t been severed—it was continuous—so I didn’t seem to be dead, but my eyes wouldn’t open properly.

《Prophecy detected. Commencing fine adjustment. Implanting Lumen’s divinity into the heart. Implantation successful. I wish you fortune.》

An unknown voice echoed in my ears. A moment later, clarity began to return. The floating sensation subsided. Sensation crept back into my limbs—strange, yet vivid.

‘Am I truly alive?’

Without opening my eyes, I took inventory of my body. Both legs—which I’d replaced with prosthetics long ago—felt perfectly intact. Not the artificial sensation of limbs connected by Mado Engineering, but actual flesh. My own legs.
My left shoulder, which had been hollow and empty, was no different. The absence had been filled; the hollowness was gone. Yet paradoxically, where my Core and Sacred Wheel once resided, I felt only emptiness.

Thump-thump.

My heartbeat announced that I lived. I swallowed hard, and my throat felt real and present. Cool air—not quite cold—flowed through my nostrils.

Sniff, sniff.

An unfamiliar scent stung the bridge of my nose. Or rather, not unfamiliar—a smell I’d forgotten for so long.

Soft sound—

Slowly, I opened my eyes. My right field of vision was no longer dark. Joy flooded through me. But alongside it—

“Where am I?”

The space was dim and enclosed, hazy smoke drifting like dawn mist. Women, scarcely clothed, danced and swung wine cups.
Men flush with excitement panted beside them, their vitality on display. The amber glow of oil lamps cast everything in a lurid, heated red.

A strange sense of recognition stirred my memory.

‘Ah. An illegal pleasure house—Jui Mong Ya Hwa.’

That’s right. When I worked as an agent for the Inspection Bureau in the Northern Region. I’d gone undercover here to catch a fugitive. Which meant—

‘The Northern Region hasn’t fallen yet.’

I dragged both hands across my face.

“Ha, ha ha.”

Laughter leaked through my fingers.

“Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha.”

The gamble had paid off. I felt tears burning behind my eyes. At the same time, faces I longed to see flickered before me.
My comrades. My brothers. And—my father.

Then.

Thump, thump.
A massive frame—three times the bulk of an ordinary man—approached and settled naturally into the seat beside me.

“By your appearance, you look nobility. Come to sample the finer wares?”

An unremarkable brute with prominent buck teeth.

‘This day. It’s this day.’

The Hashman Brothers—who committed crimes as casually as drawing breath: smuggling, rape, murder. Yoen Hashman, the younger of the two.

I had been tracking him in secret. And today was when I would meet him.

Ordinarily, I should have requested backup and accepted help from the Inspection Bureau operatives. But I didn’t.
At that point in my life, I was consumed by inferiority, enslaved by the desire to monopolize the credit. So I attempted the arrest with reckless confidence, and the result was···.

‘I let him slip away.’

I lost to that bastard.
Spectacularly, at that.
And I took a beating that nearly killed me.

When the Inspection Bureau operatives came rushing in after sensing the disturbance, he had me as a hostage, and he used me to escape. How I felt that day was truly—

‘Wretched.’

“Why so quiet? You didn’t come to Jui Mong Ya Hwa without some purpose in mind, did you?”

Yoen Hashman rubbed his fingers together with a sinister expression. The patrons of Jui Mong Ya Hwa gravitated toward him. A nobleman, they whispered. A big spender? Isn’t that him? The mediocre one from the Karsen Family. What a fool wandered in. Hehehehe.

The murmur drifted in on the scent of alcohol.

‘Trash, all of them.’

They wouldn’t know I was an Inspection Bureau operative. I’d only recently gotten this posting through patronage, and my conduct so far had nothing in common with bureau work.
I picked up a glass of vodka.
I tossed it back lightly.

Ahhh—

Ilyuna Noble. True to its famous name, it was smooth, not too strong, and the finish was exquisite. How long had it been since I’d tasted this? Superb.
I made sure to say it loudly enough for all the onlookers to hear.

“You really are ugly!”

Yoen Hashman blinked. The man had quite the complex about his appearance, so hearing someone call him ugly outright left him stunned.
His expression screamed: What the hell is this guy?

I twisted my face as if my stomach was unsettled and waved a dismissive hand.

“Sorry, but if I look at you any longer, I think I’ll see that fancy liquor again. Could you maybe move your face out of the way? Urrgh!”

I added in a little retching sound.
Veins bulged at Yoen’s temple.

“I tried to treat you as a guest. Turns out you’re just a moth drawn to flame, looking for a place to die. Everyone who smirks at me ends up dead. Especially pretty boys like you who look like they belong in a pleasure house.”

Screech—

Yoen drew his long blade and released a wave of killing intent. He stared at me as if he truly meant to murder me.
He didn’t seem to consider what might happen for killing the third son of the Karsen Family. Or rather, he lacked the depth of mind to think that far.
He was furious enough, though.

Of course, I held up my hands to my eyes as if shielding them and spoke.

“Drawing your blade right off the bat! Proves you’re really ugly!”
“You bastard!”
“Ugh! Just go! I don’t even want to fight someone so ugly—urrrgh! Wait, I’m actually going to throw up!”
“Damn it!”

Slash!

Yoen Hashman drew his blade.
Reason had shattered.

In that instant.

Clang!

I flashed forward like lightning, intercepting his blade with my own, and twisted my lips into a cold smile as I spoke.

“Self-defense.”
The Regressed Demon Swordmaster Devours the Northern Region
Author
: Bangshim
Production Date
: June 16, 2026
Publisher
: Ace System Media Inc.
Editor
: Ace System Media Editorial Team
Address
: 10F Urban Bench Building, 325 Teheran-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul
Email
: [email protected]
※ This work is published by Ace System Media Inc. in accordance with the copyright holder’s contract,
and its contents may not be used in any form or by any means without the permission of the publisher and author.
This e-book is protected by copyright law, and unauthorized reproduction or duplication may result in legal liability.
UCI
: G720:N+A129-20260615032

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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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