Chapter 1 — I Am a Reincarnator
I am a reincarnator.
Someone who died once and was born again.
If anyone were to call my second life a “blessing from God,”
I would call those words blasphemy.
Because this life is not a blessing, but a vicious curse bestowed by the devil.
In my previous life, I was a Hunter.
Hunter sounded impressive and all, but in reality, I was nothing more than a bottom-tier D-rank Hunter barely scraping together enough money to survive.
A life spent barely hunting low-grade monsters in dungeons, struggling day by day.
Every single day felt like standing at the edge of a cliff, risking my life just to earn enough for a meal.
Then one day, while solo-clearing a D-rank dungeon, I ran into a B-rank monster—an Ogre.
“Seriously, what kind of bullshit luck is this? How the hell does a B-rank Ogre appear in a D-rank dungeon?”
What could a bottom-feeding D-rank Hunter possibly do against a B-rank monster?
I struggled desperately to survive until the very end… but the outcome was obvious.
… Crack. Crunch.
My head was torn off while I was still alive.
A dogshit fate.
A pathetic life.
A meaningless end that suited it perfectly.
Like the insignificant D-rank nobody I was,
I died alone in misery, remembered by no one.
That was how my life ended.
… Or so I thought.
“Huh? What the hell is this?!”
When I opened my eyes again, the world before me was completely different.
It wasn’t the Unified Republic of Korea of 2095 where I originally lived.
The place where I was reborn was China.
More precisely, Murim.
A world where swords split the heavens,
Where bald monks shattered cliffs with their bare fists,
And martial artists who had transcended human limits overturned heaven and earth as they fought.
It was the real Jianghu martial world straight out of fantasy web novels.
I went from being a Hunter to reincarnating into Murim?!
“Ah… wait, is this one of those insanely overpowered destiny routes?”
… If only that had been the case.
But the second life I faced was far removed from any fortunate encounter.
No, it was hell itself.
Murim.
A brutal world ruled entirely by the law of the strong, where one’s place in life was determined by the level of martial arts they possessed.
And in the middle of this savage world, I was reborn into a body with absolutely no talent for martial arts.
To learn martial arts, one must be able to sense and control qi.
But I couldn’t even do that basic thing.
No matter how much I steadied my breathing and focused on my dantian,
All I felt inside myself was exhaustion and helplessness.
It felt as though the meridians throughout my body were completely blocked.
A worthless body incapable of even basic qi circulation.
I had been reborn with a trash destiny that could never accomplish anything in the world of Murim.
Even if I lacked talent in martial arts,
I would have been satisfied if my second life could at least be peaceful.
But my cursed fate wouldn’t allow even such a modest wish.
Around the time I turned sixteen, I was kidnapped.
By the Shadow Corps, a secret underground organization created by the Orthodox Alliance—the very faction that claimed to represent justice in Murim.
“The Orthodox Alliance… those filthy hypocritical bastards.”
Even now, just thinking about them makes my blood boil.
On the surface, they preached about protecting peace and justice in Murim with righteous faces,
Yet in the unseen darkness, they carried out every kind of vile conspiracy imaginable.
The true nature of the Shadow Corps, hidden from the world, was evil itself.
Under the false banner of “peace in Murim,” they committed countless atrocities as the true darkness lurking within the martial world.
Schemes and assassinations against individuals or factions opposing the Orthodox Alliance were merely the basics.
They even carried out widespread kidnappings targeting innocent civilians.
The kidnapped were turned into tools for the various secret experiments conducted by the Orthodox Alliance.
The victims used in those experiments were no longer called people, but merely “test subjects.”
Experiments to verify the effects of poisons and medicinal pills created within the Shadow Corps,
Even illusion techniques that disturbed the mind and forced obedience.
To confirm the results of all those processes, they sacrificed human beings.
Every single day, the underground prison echoed with the curses and agonized screams of dying people.
The stench of burning flesh mixed with blood and medicinal herbs was suffocating.
I, too, was one of those test subjects.
And yet, I survived in that horrific place for over thirty years.
No… even if I wanted to die, I couldn’t.
Why?
Because during one of the Shadow Corps’ biological experiments, a damned awakening manifested by accident.
The regenerative ability I had possessed as a D-rank Hunter in my previous life awakened once again in this life.
Only now, it was dozens of times stronger than before.
So what became of my life after that?
Oh, they treated me very well.
Calling me a “special specimen,” they poured every horrific experiment imaginable onto me.
A human guinea pig used to test secret poisons manufactured by the Sichuan Tang Clan,
A human scarecrow used by martial artists secretly trained by the Orthodox Alliance to sharpen their real combat senses,
Forcing me to consume pills that explosively drew out the body’s latent potential—granting internal energy at the cost of burning away one’s lifespan.
Upon a table drenched in blood and screams, I continued my agonizing existence.
From dawn until nightfall, without a single day of exception.
Regeneration.
Because of that cursed ability, I couldn’t even die.
Even if both my arms were severed, even if the lower half of my body melted away in flames, within days my body would return to normal.
And because of that, they tore me apart more.
Cut me deeper.
Burned me hotter.
Since I wouldn’t die, they could experiment on me to death.
And in the end,
All of it led me to this very moment.
Fwoooooosh!
The sky, red like blood, was splitting apart.
From beneath the torn heavens, gigantic torrents of flame poured down.
This was no ordinary fire.
The Myriad Calamity Flame.
The infernal fire that reduced everything to ashes.
The final battle between the Orthodox Alliance and the Heavenly Demon Cult.
Just as the might of the Orthodox Alliance was about to finally destroy the Demonic Cult,
The cult chose to invoke its last forbidden taboo.
Before those cursed flames, everything returned to nothingness.
Humans.
Martial arts.
Even souls themselves.
Fwoooooosh!
The flames of destruction, once thought to exist only in legends, were devouring the world.
And within those catastrophic flames…
I alone remained alive.
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