Dropped Into the Murim with an Instant-Kill Skill - Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Dropped Into the Murim with an Instant-Kill Skill
TL/ED – Miso
He was on his way to sit the college entrance exam.
The bus crossing the overpass slammed into the guardrail and plunged twenty meters down onto the asphalt below.
‘Is this right?’
The moment he realized he was going to die, Yeon So-wol felt less fear than sheer disbelief.
He was a student aiming for Seoul National University.
For that he’d given up games, given up his phone, given up spicy tteokbokki rice cakes. A full stomach made him sleepy.
All of it had been for this one day, for the exam.
‘And I die like this?’
The hulking bus dipped its nose toward the black asphalt, and his body floated up off the back of his seat.
None of it felt real enough to be frightening.
‘Insane world.’
An insane world made a fool of a sensible person.
A student was supposed to study.
Wasn’t that common sense?
And yet, instead of rewarding someone who’d lived his whole life by common sense, it handed him a punishment like this.
If he’d known this was coming, he would have blown off studying and had fun.
That would have been a much better deal.
‘It’s not fair. There’s nothing I can do.’
The world was screwing him over for no reason at all, and there was nothing he could do about it. It made him feel worthless.
The humiliation the world inflicted on a person.
The bus fell.
Through the windshield,
the black asphalt rushed closer.
CRUNCH!
Like a pitch-black mouth, it ground the front of the bus to pieces.
Steel plating crumpling, seats torn loose and flying, glass scattering like sugar. People flung about like dancers.
And now the pitch-black ground, right in front of his nose.
RRRIIIIP!
Something sudden happened.
As if a thousand layers of thin silk had been stretched taut and stacked, and a blade had been driven straight through the middle with a thunk! to tear them all at once, the sound of something ripping rang violently against his eardrums,
‘What is this?’
In front of Yeon So-wol, to his left and right, the world tore apart.
It was as if the whole world had turned into a sheet of paper.
The black asphalt that had been grinding the bus apart split to either side and hung in tatters, and even the people around him fluttered like scraps.
Time.
Space.
Event.
Information.
Everything that made up all creation came unraveled around Yeon So-wol, scattering loose threads.
A gap in the world was opening right before his eyes.
‘What is this? An otherworld gate?’
Yeon So-wol thought of the anime and novels he’d been into up through middle school.
Getting hit by a truck and ending up in another world, that was how it usually went. Was a bus crash close enough?
All over again, Yeon So-wol felt dumbfounded.
‘This is such bullshit…….’
He’d lived his whole life by common sense, and it turned out the world had none at all.
‘Is this seriously right.’
Filled with disillusionment and sorrow, Yeon So-wol fell precisely into the seam of the world.
Into the enormous wave formed by the threads that rose fluttering along the world’s cut edge and crossed over one another.
‘Fuck……. my life.’
SPLASH-!
He was inside a darkness more transparent than ice.
Not the world of the living, not the world of the dead.
With no way to tell front from back or left from right,
unable even to guess whether he was falling or drifting,
‘Uuurrrgh!’
Inside it, Yeon So-wol suffered horrific pain.
‘So it wasn’t reincarnation into another world, it was a one-way trip to hell!’
Was this what it felt like to fall into a sea of hydrochloric acid?
The word hell came out on its own.
It was pain he had never even imagined.
The feeling of his whole body and mind being taken apart piece by piece.
‘What. Exactly. Did I do to deserve this……!’
Even in pain that threatened to make him black out at any second, Yeon So-wol clenched his teeth and forced himself to hold on.
He embraced the pain.
He did it because it wasn’t fair.
‘If I’m going to die, then fine, but I’ll watch every last second of it first.’
His life had been thrown away without his say in it, but he still wanted to keep his eyes wide open. That was the only defiance he could show this garbage world.
RRRIP-RIP-RIP-RIIIIP!
From somewhere, the sound of tearing went on and on. Like the skin of the world being peeled away, a sound that raised goosebumps and yet carried a strange satisfaction.
SHRRRAAAAAK!
Then, with the sound of a thick curtain being torn,
WHOOOOSH-!
a blue sky suddenly spread out.
“Guh!”
The pain, burning and tearing, vanished completely.
In its place, a dizzying sensation of falling wrapped around his body.
The feeling of his heart dropping straight down.
A fierce wind battered both his ears without mercy.
Without even a moment to be glad he’d been freed from the pain, Yeon So-wol thrashed and screamed.
“Aaaaaaah!”
What the hell. He was going to die from a fall after all?
RRRRRIP-
Just then, a strange sensation caught at his fingertips.
As if something thin and taut had been snagged.
Instinctively, Yeon So-wol clamped down on it.
A white hairline crack ran across the sky.
Like a single thread pulling loose from a cotton shirt in one long run, the sky came unspooling into Yeon So-wol’s fist.
“Hurgh!”
The more he snatched at the sky’s threads, the more his fall slowed. Even the wind that had been beating painfully at his body disappeared.
Yeon So-wol desperately clawed at the loose threads in the empty air.
RRIP! RIP!
The fall grew slower and slower.
Yeon So-wol felt hope.
Maybe.
Could he actually live?
And so he passed through the clouds. Just as the ground was starting to come into fairly clear view.
「 It’s the Star of Thousand Deaths. 」
「 The Star of Thousand Deaths. 」
「 The Star of Thousand Deaths has appeared. 」
“?!”
Suddenly there were damp voices beside his ear.
“N-now what?”
It was empty air with nothing in it but wind.
Only the voices could be heard.
「 Starlight falling from a torn sky 」
「 A foreign fate that belongs not to the Nine Springs 」
「 One who by chance overlapped with the fissure of heaven and earth 」
「 Either terrible fortune or terrible misfortune 」
「 Having passed through torn principle, whatever it touches is brought to its end 」
「 It is the Star of Thousand Deaths 」
The voices swarmed in.
Yeon So-wol felt cold hands and cold breath touching his forearms and the back of his neck.
Though there was still nothing to see.
‘Ghosts? Now ghosts too?’
Like the time sleep paralysis had pinned him down while he was studying before dawn, he suddenly couldn’t move a finger.
Instead, the damp voices grew louder and clearer.
「 Now is the time. Now, while he still straddles the living world and the dead! 」
「 Devour the Star of Thousand Deaths and we may break free of the yoke of the Nine Springs! 」
「 What does the Star of Thousand Deaths taste like? 」
「 That power! Give me that power! 」
Sssliiip-
Every hair on his body stood up.
Cold, rank things burrowed into Yeon So-wol’s nostrils, his ears, his mouth.
He tried to thrash.
But his body wouldn’t move.
He was simply terrified.
Terrified.
Terrified.
Terrifiedterrifiedterrifiedterrif…….
Unbearable terror and helpless rage finally tore through his throat and burst free.
“Aaaargh! Die! Die, you ghost bastards!”
Snap!
Yeon So-wol felt several of the rank threads rummaging around inside his body break.
Whoosh!
His body went light at once.
“Huh?”
A dry, soft wind brushed his cheek.
「 The Ghost Kings have been annihilated? 」
「 They’re gone, completely 」
「 It is the Star of Thousand Deaths 」
「 The Star of Thousand Deaths 」
「 His body is steeped in the fissure of heaven and earth 」
「 Nothing that he touches can survive 」
The frightened voices circled his ears and then scattered.
“Ngh!”
Before he could even wonder about it, Yeon So-wol felt a sharp headache.
Unfamiliar memories burrowed into his head. Most of them were warped past recognition, like a corrupted video file forced to play.
But the parts where those memories overlapped surfaced fairly clearly.
Language, for instance, or the common knowledge of this world…….
‘This language? These memories? Where is this. Ancient China? Murim? Martial arts? ……So this really was reincarnation into another world?’
They were the memories of the ghosts that had burrowed into his body and been annihilated.
But Yeon So-wol had no time to think it through.
The ground, suddenly much closer, filled his entire field of vision.
“Aaaaaah!”
Reflexively, he snatched at the sky’s threads.
The sky’s threads came ripping loose along his flailing fingertips, and his falling speed dropped fast.
And then, impact.
THUD!
Yeon So-wol hit the dirt back-first.
“Kuagh!”
Stars burst in front of his eyes, an impact that felt like it would send his guts up out of his throat.
“Urgh……. Cough! Ugh!”
As he rolled across the ground, then knelt and dry-heaved, the toe of a black shoe came into his view.
“……?”
He lifted his head and saw an old man, scrawny as a skeleton.
Not a beard, not a single hair on his head, and this withered old man, looking like nothing more than a skull with a sheet of leather laid over it, was staring down at Yeon So-wol with bewilderment in his eyes.
Yeon So-wol, thinking that at least he’d survived, almost felt a rush of relief.
Then he saw the other old man pinned beneath the man’s foot, and shut his mouth.
It was an old monk.
With a smooth scalp, white eyebrows, and a white beard.
The kind of man whose unworldly bearing would have made anyone passing him on the road turn for a second look.
But now the white beard and eyebrows were caked with dirt, and more to the point, his neck was under a foot.
The foot of the bald, skeletal old man.
“……Listen to me. Killing Demon. That boy has nothing to do with any of this……. As a grand senior of the Jianghu, why not show a little mercy?”
The skeletal old man, the Killing Demon, answered simply.
“Spare me the bullshit.”
CRACK!
Beneath his foot, the old monk’s head snapped over like a rag doll’s.
When the Killing Demon lifted his foot, the monk’s head lolled loosely to one side.
Yeon So-wol swallowed his breath.
“At last. Shaolin’s Great Restoration Pill, in my hands.”
The Killing Demon smiled a repulsive smile and rifled through the monk’s robes, drawing out a wooden case.
Brimming with delight, he opened the case, closed it, stroked it, and lingered a while in the afterglow, and then, as if the thought had only just occurred to him, he turned back to look at Yeon So-wol.
“So then. What have we here?”
Unusually large black irises, too large to belong to any human eye, glistened.
**
Ironically,
only now did Yeon So-wol get the chance to calmly take stock of his situation.
At least he wasn’t falling anymore.
He tried to make sense of the situation.
First.
Where was this?
Keeping his eyes lowered, Yeon So-wol studied his surroundings.
A skeletal old man in a black robe.
Beneath his foot, an old monk in a yellow monk’s robe, dead with a broken neck.
Judging by the clothing.
Judging by a man being stomped to death by the neck.
This was definitely not Earth.
‘So it really is another world…….’
Even sifting through the ghosts’ memories flashing in his head, that much was certain.
‘But the Star of Thousand Deaths? What was that?’
The ghosts’ damp voices still seemed to be squelching in his ears.
“A person falling out of the sky. A marvel. A strange thing indeed.”
Just then,
the skeletal old man called the Killing Demon stepped up abruptly, seized Yeon So-wol’s wrist, and hauled him to his feet. The grip was like an iron shackle clamping shut.
“Clothing I’ve never seen in all my life. Hair cropped short……. Sniff, sniff. What’s this scent? Is it coming off the clothes? Faint and clean. A fragrance I’ve never smelled before. So it’s true, a person of the immortal realm has fallen to earth. I’ve wandered the Jianghu and seen all manner of marvels, but this one is strange even among them. Let’s have a look…….”
The Killing Demon’s fingers dug into Yeon So-wol’s pulse gate.
“Ghk!”
Yeon So-wol shuddered.
Horrific pain surged up from his wrist. It was as if ice-cold tongs were scraping out his muscles and tendons.
“Hmm? Ha…….”
The Killing Demon’s brow furrowed.
“Why is this energy so muddled? This is an immortal?”
As if he couldn’t believe it, he shoved his energy in harder.
With that shocking energy he combed every inch of Yeon So-wol’s body.
“——!!”
It hurt so much that he couldn’t even scream. Yeon So-wol just trembled with his mouth hanging open.
‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’
There was no way not to curse.
How many times had he nearly died in such a short span?
Vicious, undeserved screwing over.
Deep helplessness.
The stretch of horrific pain passed, and at last the Killing Demon withdrew his energy.
Contempt settled into his eyes.
“Even a beggar scraping up spoiled rice wouldn’t have qi and blood this muddy and this blocked. How can a man who fell out of the sky have such a filthy constitution?”
A gaze like one aimed at garbage raked Yeon So-wol up and down.
“Dishwater the immortal realm threw out, then. What shall I do with it? Haul it back to my order and make a spectacle of it? Or just kill it? Though the effort of carrying it does seem a waste.”
The Killing Demon’s unusually large black eyes glistened.
Yeon So-wol’s shoulders shook.
His body, swept through by the old man’s energy, ached and stung with cold.
But more horrific than the pain was this,
‘I die after all?’
No. Hold on.
He’d gone down with the bus,
fallen out of the sky all over again,
somehow shaken off the ghosts,
and made it this far.
And now he was going to die?
‘No way!’
Suddenly, time seemed to slow.
For the first time, Yeon So-wol watched his life flash before his eyes.
The bus slamming into the guardrail.
Space tearing like taut silk.
The endless fall.
The ghosts.
Every step up to now flashed past vividly.
In the middle of it, one fact suddenly caught Yeon So-wol’s attention.
‘……The Star of Thousand Deaths!’
What the ghosts had said.
「 The Ghost Kings have been annihilated? 」
「 Having passed through torn principle, whatever it touches is brought to its end 」
「 His body is steeped in the fissure of heaven and earth 」
「 Nothing that he touches can survive 」
Words that had felt like nonsense before came back to life carrying vivid meaning.
Reincarnation into another world was supposed to come with a special ability.
Yeon So-wol had always thought of that as a convenience cooked up by the author, but today he realized it wasn’t.
Dimensions.
Having crossed one himself, he’d found it was no ordinary thing.
‘In wuxia novels, people land a fateful windfall just from falling off a cliff. If I fell clear across a dimension, obviously I ought to get something out of it.’
That something seemed to be the Star of Thousand Deaths.
A body steeped in a dimensional fissure, able to kill anything it touched.
The moment he realized it, Yeon So-wol felt something uncanny.
It was a sensation as if the whole world were made of threads.
The feeling that, just as he’d snatched at the sky’s threads earlier, he could snap those threads with nothing more than a touch.
The instant he felt it, Yeon So-wol moved on reflex.
He turned his hand over and seized the bony hand still gripping his wrist. Hard!
And wished with everything he had.
“Die.”
Enough of being screwed over already.
Tick-!
With the feeling of something invisible snapping,
Roll-
the Killing Demon’s huge irises slid loose, swam a full circle inside their sockets, and turned toward the sky.
The bony hand holding his wrist went slack.
The scrawny body suddenly sagged and collapsed, as though it had become a heavy waterskin.
Flump.
From the crotch of the Killing Demon, limbs sprawled every which way and stuck to the ground, a warm, acrid fluid trickled out.
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