You can never cross that gap.

Never.

It was the verdict of one who, even after staking his life, had failed to overleap a span of roughly a hundred and fifty years.

“I had neither intent for the martial way nor talent. Same for him. But as we fought again and again and returned to life, we came to grasp the workings of the world. That much was natural.”

Naturally, martial skills unfolded, inner power accumulated, and the flow became intelligible.

To surpass an opponent we began to pursue strength, and in that pursuit, gaining insight was only to be expected.

“We had time, and a world rewinding its past could not catch us.”

At first, the martial attainment that reached no more than second-rate by the end of a life rose to first-rate in ever shorter spans as lives repeated.

Insight once gained became the groundwork for attaining the next life’s realm.

“It’s the same principle as you possessing power extraordinary for your years.”

At scarcely the age of twenty, Seolhwa had climbed to the realm of Flowering.

To the eyes of the world, it was an achievement beyond imagining.

“I concede you were born with martial talent. You amazed me in the last life as well. However, what you have achieved now...”

“I know.”

Seolhwa admitted it without resistance.

Most of the reason she could be overwhelmingly strong lay in memories of her previous life.

And if, with those memories layered, she repeated cultivation again, she could become stronger in a shorter span than now.

“We have outstripped the world. As I have, so has he.”

In that instant, Seolhwa felt as if the space around her warped.

It was as though the air about the man, rolling another stick of poison-herb, were twisting out of true.

Is this...

A realm beyond Heaven Beyond Heaven?

Does something beyond that truly exist?

Alien.

Her sense of reality skewed; her insides lurched.

Before this man, she felt no different from furniture whose shape had been bent.

As if to engrave once more the words he had just spoken to her.

You can never cross that gap.

“...”

Seolhwa clenched her fist.

Watching him calmly draw on the poison-herb, she spoke.

“There’s a way.”

The man regarded her with a steady look.

“If you thought it impossible, you wouldn’t have called me here.”

“...”

“You must have a reason for appearing before me.”

Hoo...

The man let a long stream of smoke from the poison-herb.

For a moment his gaze measured something in empty air.

“Fine...”

He gave a faint, wry laugh.

How many lives had it been since he abandoned the fight with the Blood Demon and hid himself in the Demonic Sect?

He had no thought to gild it with other words.

He was a fugitive.

Seating himself within the Demonic Sect was a flag of surrender: that, unable to defeat him, he would live a life unrelated to him.

Knowing that, the Blood Demon had likewise left the Demonic Sect untouched, and thus several lives slid by.

And yet this was the same man.

“A vicious bond.”

A truly vicious fate.

He had thought all of it was already over—so why had that one made a twisted choice?

The man turned back to Seolhwa.

“You are the first to whom he granted a return.”

He fixed his eyes on the one who had made the spark of defiance, thought extinguished, stir again.

“In your previous life you were the Blood Demon’s dog.”

“...Yes. That’s right.”

The Blood Demon’s dog.

If he said kill, she killed; if he said burn, she burned; if he said hurl yourself into death, she hurled herself.

Thus, knowing nothing, she killed her family and toppled her clan.

“I thought he was my benefactor.”

“Yes. You never betrayed him. Not in your last life, nor the one before.”

“...”

“That is why, in this life, I tried to stop what you were doing.”

Because he had taken all that Namgoong Seolhwa did—returning to her clan, solving the Namgoong Clan’s ills, reviving Central Plains martial society, founding the Martial Alliance and building power—as the will of the Blood Demon.

“I thought you would never betray him. Or even if you did, that everything you did would only provoke him more than necessary.”

When threatened, the Blood Demon only grew stronger.

Even after he realized Namgoong Seolhwa truly sought vengeance on the Blood Demon, this was why he still obstructed her work.

“So that’s why you told me that.”

Do not assume that everything you do leads along the right road.

“Then why did ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) your thinking change? Why appear before me?”

“...Because I learned you were the Sado Union Lord.”

The man let out another dry laugh.

Even now, it beggared belief.

The child he had thought a dog of the Blood Demon, upon returning to life, took steps even he, after dozens of cycles, had not foreseen.

“As far as the orthodox path, I could accept it. I’ve walked it myself. But that you would lay hands on the unorthodox...”

Though by the unorthodox way she must have felt loathing enough to make her teeth chatter, she gathered the unorthodox’s strength and founded the Sado Union.

“It’s true he looked away from you. Had he moved, you would not have accomplished this much. And had I not kept watch on your course, I would never have known the Shadowless Demon God was you.”

When Namgoong Seolhwa, whom he had thought plunged into closed-door cultivation, appeared as the Shadowless Demon God, it had been staggering.

From there he had stirred the Green Forest so the Green Forest War King would meet Seolhwa, and at the tournament he went to her himself.

And he saw it.

Her full power.

Possibility.

He weighed the scale of victory.

“He underestimated you. And that carelessness will become the dagger that severs his windpipe.”

“So you’re saying there is a way? A way to stop the Blood Demon.”

The possibility of bridging a gap that could not be overleapt.

Because that possibility existed, he had called her here and told this long story.

“Not yet.”

Seolhwa knit her brows.

“You are not ready.”

“Then tell me what I must prepare.”

“I intend to test you.”

“...”

A test?

“To see whether you can truly become his adversary. The size of your vessel.”

He flicked the half-burned poison-herb aside.

“If you pass this test, you will gain great power. Perhaps enough to rub shoulders with him.”

“And if I fail?”

“You die.”

“...”

His expression was tranquil.

In his unwavering eyes the ‘death’ of failure was neither jest nor exaggeration.

“So you choose. If you fear death, you need not choose now. Since he has revived you, you will return and return to life as we do. There is time without limit.”

His words accounted not just for this life but the lives to come.

Once revived, the person repeats the same life.

Since the Blood Demon had revived Seolhwa, she had stepped into the same abyss as the two who could neither die nor live.

“...Give me time.”

“Very well. How much do you require? A wait that must cross a life?”

“A day.”

Seolhwa lifted her eyes to him.

“A day is enough. Today... I have a prior engagement.”

The man’s eyebrows arched, as if unexpectedly.

Having just learned that even her own life would now repeat, he had thought she might think a little more at leisure.

“A prior engagement...”

Not time to deliberate, but a day needed because of a prior engagement.

“A day, to me, is but a blink. Agreed. I will have it prepared.”

“...All right.”

With that, Seolhwa turned on her heel.

Watching her turn away, the man rolled a fresh stick of poison-herb.

As he set it aflame, Seolhwa, still with her back to him, tossed a question.

“How much influence do you wield in the Demonic Sect as it stands?”

Presently, the man held the Strategist office in the Demonic Sect.

That the Demonic Sect had grown so mighty must owe to his influence.

Before he could even set the poison-herb to his lips, he answered with a deep smile.

“It is no exaggeration to say the current Demonic Sect is one I built. Because I chose the Heavenly Demon.”

Among the many children of the Heavenly Demon, he picked the one who listened best and was easiest to move, and set him upon the seat of Heavenly Demon.

For a man who had repeated his life dozens of times, it had not been difficult.

“Then do you also know how the Heavenly Demon came to lose his child?”

Seolhwa looked back at him again.

A faint tension edged her expression.

If Yu Gang was the Heavenly Demon’s child, why had he grown up on the streets?

Why had he, in the previous life, met such a wretched death?

“He was not lost. He was cast away.”

“...What?”

“At that juncture, a child would only hinder the ascent to the seat of Heavenly Demon.”

The man drew in the poison-herb as if it were nothing.

“It was on my counsel, but he discarded the child without delay. The problem, perhaps, is that afterward he could produce no successor.”

He chuckled under his breath.

Seolhwa’s face went cold and hard.

“What is so... funny... about that...?”

Is it such a laughing matter, to throw away a child to seize the seat of Heavenly Demon?

“Is it not absurd? To fawn now over the child he cast off so coldly, calling him the sole heir... They do not know that this is the first life in which that child has returned to the Demonic Sect.”

He pointed a finger at Seolhwa.

“That, too, is thanks to you.”

At the man’s lightly tossed words, Seolhwa’s clenched fist trembled in fine shivers of anger.

She knew whence the man’s indifference toward Yu Gang sprang.

In any case the life would return; what became of the Heavenly Demon’s heir did not matter.

But.

Even so...

“...Do you... know how that man died in the last life...?”