Baek Woo Jin complained in his heart that time seemed to flow so quickly.
He had barely managed to earn his contribution points on the last mission and had taken a few days off to relax, and suddenly, the start of the Dragon and Phoenix Gathering was only a day away.
To be precise, it was the start of the Eve festival.
The Dragon and Phoenix Gathering was a festival. It was a celebration where countless martial artists gathered to witness the birth of the future leaders of the martial arts world.
The Eve festival marked the grand beginning of the event. It wasn’t much, just a time to laugh and talk, announce the start of the Dragon and Phoenix Gathering, and reveal the match schedule.
“The real beginning, huh?”
The Dragon and Phoenix Gathering was the episode in the novel where the protagonist first revealed his true abilities.
With the martial arts he learned from the Sword Immortal, he would defeat the leading contenders of the Dragon and Phoenix Gathering one by one. Only for him to finally secure the position of the Divine Dragon.
In truth, up to this point, there was no problem.
It’s a common cliché in any novel for the protagonist to suddenly showcase his true abilities and surprise everyone.
“The problem is what happens after that….”
However, the problem lay in the drift that the so-called writer who had no talent whatsoever introduced afterward.
“From here on, elements like obsession, despair, and regret were added.”
The targets were of course Shin Ye Hwa, Yoo Ha Yeon, and another heroine the protagonist would encounter later.
Whenever Baek Woo Jin thought of Shin Ye Hwa, he felt so suffocated that it drove him to the brink of madness.
“I tried to pair her with my brother before the Dragon and Phoenix Gathering.”
He hoped that by pairing her with Baek Moo Hyeok before the start of the obsession and regret drift, she would drop out of such a storyline completely but he failed every time.
To be exact, this was all because of Shin Ye Hwa’s attitude of constantly worrying about him and clinging to him.
“Did it already start…?”
When he treated her coldly, she would sulk and leave, only to come back the next day with a pout as if to tell him, “I’m upset.”
If he handed her a few snacks he had set aside as appetizers, she would cheer up and start chatting away as if nothing had happened.
Perhaps this was an early sign of obsession.
“How troublesome, really.”
He looked up at the sky with eyes reflecting his complicated feelings.
Suddenly, he felt a hollow emptiness inside.
“What am I doing….”
What was the driving force that motivated humans?
If asked, people might say money, love, fame, power, or strength, and they would come up with hundreds or thousands of answers.
In the end, all these reasons converged into one.
A goal.
The “Baek Woo Jin” who had entered the body of the dead Baek Woo Jin had no clear goal.
“Returning doesn’t seem that appealing either ….”
When he first fell into the fantasy world, he dreamed of cutting off the Demon King’s head, offering it to that damned mediocre writer, before returning to Earth as soon as possible.
But when he finally went back, the pleasure was only fleeting.
No matter what he did, he got bored easily. No matter what he tried, he couldn’t feel any tension. The strong mental strength he had diligently cultivated in the fantasy world became the driving force to do anything, but after a while, it also became the reason he felt he didn’t need to do anything.
Every experience on Earth paled in comparison to the thrilling adventures he had in the fantasy world.
“I’ve grown mentally ill.”
It felt like being a soldier suffering from PTSD after experiencing war and returning to everyday life.
Cutting someone off and killing them eroded a person’s spirit. It didn’t matter if it was someone hostile toward you.
Worn down, worn down, and worn down again.
A spirit worn down like that was like the lungs of a heavy smoker who constantly had a cigarette in their mouth. It looked like they were breathing fine on the outside, but if you cut them open, their lungs were completely rotted and barely able to function.
He had killed and witnessed so many deaths.
Maybe the reason the god, or writer, kept pushing him into this harsh world without ever showing their face was because he couldn’t adapt to life on Earth.
“Oh, shit.”
What am I even thinking?
“Trying to defend that kidnapper? This is beyond Stockholm syndrome.”
It was just some drunken thoughts which were influenced by the night’s atmosphere that flitted through his mind.
“A goal, huh.”
What Baek Woo Jin needed now was a goal.
He had the goal of breaking all the tags plastered on that bastard’s novel, but that would happen naturally as he continued to live in this world, so he needed something he could be more devoted to.
“The ending point here is still…”
The way to attain freedom from the world was to reach the final goal of that novel, in other words, to see the ending.
In the case of the first fantasy world he went to, the ending point was clear.
The Demon King.
It was to send back the creature dreaming of humanity’s annihilation to the demon realm.
There was something similar here as well.
A group that used demonic energy drove humans into madness and gathered fanatics.
The Demonic Cult.
The leader of that cult was the Heavenly Demon.
He could be seen as the equivalent of the Demon King in the fantasy world.
“We have a long way to go.”
So far, he had only slain a single demon.
“First, let’s get the elixir… then I’ll think about the rest later.”
It was an incredibly long path with no end in sight. Aiming for such a distant goal from the beginning would only lead to quick exhaustion.
During his first transmigration, he suffered from burnout several times by obsessing over beheading the Demon King without any strategy in mind.
What he needed most now was definitely the elixir.
What Baek Woo Jin learned in the first fantasy world were all techniques that consumed energy like crazy.
To use even one of them, he needed to reach at least the level of an expert with decades of internal energy cultivation.
“I hate training.”
Preparing to behead the Demon King was harder than actually doing it. He had vowed never to overwork his body with such training again.
From Baek Woo Jin’s point of view, this martial arts world was ruled by the logic of power. If you don’t have power, you can’t do anything; your beliefs wouldn’t even reach anyone.
Though he didn’t like it this way, it couldn’t be helped. Every world was the same. Every world was ruled by the logic of power; only the type of power differed.
Baek Woo Jin set down the gourd he had kept in his hand all day.
Then,
He grasped his sword.
In the Central Plains of this martial arts world, there were more sects than met the eye.
The Virtuous Heaven Sect was one of them.
Hidden in the secluded mountains, they lived solely for one purpose.
To foresee the birth of a hero and record their life.
The Virtuous Heaven Sect which once had hundreds of disciples had fallen and was forced to become a one-man sect.
The reason was that no hero had been born for hundreds of years.
They could only be active when a hero emerged and colored their life with brilliant light.
The young disciples did not want to waste their time hiding in the deep valleys of the mountains. And so, they left one by one which led to the present situation.
The priestess spent another night staring endlessly at the hero’s star that was faintly visible in the night sky.
“Do heroes really exist?”
Two years ago, the 38th head of the Virtuous Heaven Sect who was like a mother to her passed away.
Now that she was the 39th head, the priestess faithfully carried out the teachings of the Virtuous Heaven Sect, but her heart was filled with doubt.
The hero’s star had not shone brilliantly for hundreds of years.
Perhaps heroes no longer existed. Was it ever possible for one person to change the fate of the world?
Doubt continued to swirl in her mind.
She was virtuous and wise, but still, she was only slightly past her youth. She could not shake off her longing for the world she occasionally saw and her desire to live there.
Imagining herself growing old and lonely in the secluded mountains brought her unbearable sadness.
“Haaah.”
It was at that moment.
The light emitted by the hero’s star which had not changed for hundreds of years began to intensify.
She doubted her eyes. She started thinking it was a hallucination or illusion conjured by her weary mind.
However, it was neither a hallucination nor an illusion.
“The star…!”
The star that was once so faint that it seemed it might disappear at any moment started to shine brightly and began to pulsate.
“Ah, ah.”
How long had she watched?
How long had she lived holding her breath?
How many disciples had died hoping for the birth of a hero for centuries?
The priestess who finally witnessed the birth of the star with her own eyes began to weep like a child.
“Master…!”
She recalled the wrinkled face of her master who had spent a lifetime in these deep mountains, living only for the teachings of the Virtuous Heaven Sect and then passed away.
She remembered the tears that flowed along the deep furrows of those wrinkles.
Her master’s last words, like those of a mother, echoed in her ears. She was urging her not to waste her youth and to leave the mountains, for it seemed that a hero was no longer needed.
“Ah, master…!”
She felt both sadness and joy.
The fact that a hero had descended from the heavens meant that a great crisis might be approaching in this world, and she no longer had to grow old in loneliness in these deep mountains.
After weeping with repentance and joy for a long time, she staggered to her feet.
She then entered the now old and shabby master’s quarters of the Virtuous Heaven Sect and gathered a leather-bound book, a worn brush, and an inkstone.
She packed these and other items into a small bundle, and as a final step before leaving, she visited her master’s grave to pay her respects.
Please wait for me, great hero.
I will soon come to help you.
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