Chapter 11

Gluttony 

Yes.

“So this is the place. The place that smells delicious…”

With blue ghost fire streaming from his eyes, Yeon Sohyeon burst into mad laughter.

The sound was horrible, like metal scraping against an iron plate.

Inside his mouth, blade-like fangs gleamed chillingly, and his crimson throat was like an abyss whose end could not be seen.

“U… uaaaaah!”

At that grotesque sight, the man who had wet himself suddenly charged in a frenzy.

An ordinary person would have lost their senses before such a nightmare.

But these men had roamed the back alleys of Luoyang, a place no different from a battlefield.

Though they were not martial artists who could protect their minds with inner force, the spirit they had forged amid blood and violence was real.

“Die!”

The blade in his hand flashed.

There was no trickery in the strike, but it was so clean and fast that even he was impressed with himself.

“…!”

But in the next instant, he realized his wrist had been caught by the other party.

For a moment, he thought the other’s palm was small and soft, without a single callus.

And it was colder than a river in the depths of winter.

So cold that frost began spreading from his wrist.

“Uaaaaah…!”

He kicked at his opponent.

No, he tried to.

But the other party squeezed his hand far faster.

As if there were no bones or muscles at all.

As easily as crushing a cold dumpling.

Crunch.

The hand holding the blade rolled across the ground, spraying blood.

“Gyaaaaaaah!”

The monster’s grip had been so powerful, so far beyond common sense, that his hand had been torn clean off.

As he collapsed backward, clutching the arm from which blood gushed wildly, one of the thugs rushed in.

Gripping his blade tightly with both hands, he intended to throw his full body weight behind it and drive the weapon straight into the monster’s torso.

But—

Clang!

Sparks flew from the place where the monster’s palm met the blade.

“Ugh!”

The impact felt as though he had struck a stone wall, and the thug lost his grip on the weapon.

He hurriedly tried to retreat and look for another chance, but the monster was far faster in seizing both of his wrists.

“L-let go…!”

He screamed something incoherent and struggled with all his strength to escape the monster’s grip.

But no matter how violently he thrashed, the other party’s hands did not budge.

They did not even tremble.

Then they slowly began to squeeze.

“Aaaaah! Stop! Stoooop…!”

It was as if the monster regretted having squeezed too easily the first time and torn the wrist off at once.

This time, as though curious to see what would happen, it leisurely increased the pressure little by little.

There was no need to draw upon demonic energy.

It simply, leisurely, calmly added more strength.

Soon came the sound of bones breaking, followed by the sound of flesh tearing apart.

“Aaaaaah! Gyaaaaaaah!”

Even then, the thug kicked wildly at his opponent, but it was no different from kicking a wall.

Rather, his own broken ankle now dangled uselessly.

“Gyaaaaaah…!”

The sound of bones shattering and flesh being squeezed apart rang through the back alley along with his screams.

Like squeezing a juicy piece of meat, a mist of blood rose with a thick, metallic stench.

“Ghh… gurgle…”

Collapsed in the filthy back alley, the thug writhed like an insect with part of its body crushed.

His broken teeth, mixed with blood, spilled from his mouth in a steady stream under the unimaginable pain.

If left alone, he would have died from blood loss and agony.

But the other party had no intention of letting him go like that.

The thug felt both of his ankles being seized.

In the next instant, his legs were torn off one at a time.

Blood sprayed from the legs that had been ripped out as though uprooted, painting long arcs across the alley walls.

It was neither martial arts nor combat technique.

It was pure violence.

A mockery performed through overwhelming physical strength.

“Uhh…”

The thug twitched a few more times, then stopped moving.

“Hmm?”

A strange light settled in Yeon Sohyeon’s eyes as he looked down at the corpse.

Pale hands were rising from the darkness on the ground and dragging the corpse down.

Dozens of white hands, large and small.

Among them were the hands of children, the hands of old people, and the hands of women.

Just like that, the corpse sank into the dense darkness beneath the ground.

Even the blood he had sprayed everywhere was absorbed and disappeared before long.

Thump! Thump!

Yeon Sohyeon felt his dantian pulse powerfully.

His vitality rose even higher, and a soaring exhilaration surged through him.

“Hm?”

With blue ghost fire blazing from his half-lidded eyes, Yeon Sohyeon savored the refreshing sensation.

“U… uaaaaah!”

At that moment, one of the men who had been frozen stiff by the nightmare before him turned and began to flee without looking back.

The back alley was dark and full of obstacles.

He tripped and rolled into a pit, then kept running even as his clothes and skin were torn by something that caught on him.

Even when it felt as though his lungs would burst from his throat, he did not stop.

Yet for some reason, the alley did not end.

Though it was only a back alley, no one looked out from outside.

Not a single one of the common lights of Luoyang’s night streets could be seen.

The alley before his eyes spun round and round.

Then a hand burst out through his stomach.

The hand gripping his intestines was stained with his blood, glistening even in the darkness.

Not even the faintest trace of humanity could be seen in that gaze.

Thump—

He drove his arm straight into the man’s back.

His spear-hand tore through the man’s body again with the sound of ripping a leather sack, then violently churned inside him.

He had used no demonic qi, only pure physical strength, so there was nothing clean about it.

And that rough, filthy brutality was precisely what he intended.

Yeon Sang-hyeon casually shoved aside the corpse whose torso had been torn open.

Thump—

He wanted to scream with all his might, but his abdominal cavity had already been destroyed, and even his diaphragm had been torn apart.

On his knees, he desperately tried to gather up his own intestines.

Yeon Sang-hyeon looked down at him without saying a word.

As before, the corpse of the dead man was dragged down by white hands rising from the ground.

Not a single drop of blood remained.

Thump—

Yeon Sang-hyeon’s reason remained sharp, but his mind overflowed with madness, and his heart ran wild with joy.

“This makes no sense…!”

That meaningless mutter came from the fourth man, who sat collapsed in a corner.

“This is a dream. It has to be a dream.”

By now, this space had already been eroded by the demonic qi flowing from Yeon Sang-hyeon—from The Ruler Of Darkness.

The third man, who thought he had fled down the alley, had in truth not managed to escape even a few steps. And the man sitting nearby had long since had his mind suppressed.

This was the true face of Yeon Sang-hyeon’s demonic qi—the demonic qi of The Ruler Of Darkness.

Compared to this, what he had done earlier to frighten and intimidate the servants had been nothing more than a childish prank.

The demonic qi he now fully unleashed was enough on its own to shatter a person’s mind and twist their reason.

He had not even directly injected that demonic qi into their heads.

Simply by deliberately raising it, he had taken control of that entire space.

Thump—

It took only an instant to tear apart the body of the man whose mind had been suppressed.

His limbs, ripped into several pieces, sank into the ground.

“Hm…?”

Then Yeon Sang-hyeon sensed that the man whose wrist he had first torn off was escaping into another alley.

The man had tried to flee as carefully as possible, but this entire domain already belonged to Yeon Sang-hyeon.

Letting out a low laugh, Yeon Sang-hyeon lightly kicked off the ground.

It was Abryuhwa.

***

“Damn it, where am I? Where’s the road?!”

This was a familiar back alley, one he had always considered as good as his own front yard.

But not now.

Clutching his wrist, the man was going in circles.

To be precise, he was only circling through the complicated alleyways in the shape of a square.

He had succeeded in escaping that horrific place for the moment, but his mind had already been eroded by demonic qi.

“Is anyone there?! Is anyone out there?!”

The man shouted, coughing up blood.

His unfocused eyes wandered through empty air.

What on earth was happening?

He could not understand it.

A ghost? A monster? A god of death?

Of course, like everyone else in Luoyang, he had believed in superstition to some extent.

But that meant believing in unseen things such as fate, gods, or luck.

It did not mean believing in monsters from ghost stories meant to frighten children.

Then what was that thing?

He shouted hysterically.

“Why the hell are you doing this to me?! Why me?!”

Perhaps because he had lost too much blood, he grew dizzy and collapsed to his knees.

Then he wailed.

“There are so many worse bastards in the world… so why me?!”

In that instant, he felt as if his entire body had frozen solid.

Because he could clearly feel breath against his ear.

It was a freezing exhale mixed with the thick stench of sulfur and the intense smell of blood.

It whispered into his ear in a voice filled with metallic resonance.

[You are only the beginning.]

Then it swallowed the man whole, body and all.

***

“You devoured them, did you not?”

At the old man’s question, Yeon Sang-hyeon slowly stroked his stomach.

“…Now that you mention it, I no longer feel hungry.”

Overflowing blood.

The texture of raw, uncooked meat.

He had just committed the appalling act of cannibalism, a violation of heavenly law.

Yet he felt nothing in particular.

Having escaped that agonizing hunger, he was merely satisfied by the faint fullness he now felt.

“Devouring villains is the first and final demand The Ruler Of Darkness makes of its successor.”

Yeon Sang-hyeon recalled the words.

A scripture that defies the heavens, meant to devour and burn away all the darkness of the Saha World in place of the indifferent, lazy heavens.

“Moreover, the more villains you devour, the more of The Ruler Of Darkness’s power you will come to understand.”

So he received as much as he gave.

It was a reasonably logical system.

“But Elder, it does not seem that ‘eating’ refers only to the act of eating with my own mouth.”

Yeon Sang-hyeon recalled the corpses being dragged down into the ground by countless hands.

“That is correct. Those hands are the hungry ghosts of The Ruler Of Darkness. Within the ‘domain’ you unfold using demonic qi, they can exert physical influence and assist with your ‘meal.’”

At that moment, the ceiling began to tremble.

Stone dust fell from here and there, and clouds of dust rose.

The shafts of light descending through cracks in the ceiling also began to narrow little by little.

“It seems time is running out.”

“I see…”

The shaft of light shining down on the old man gradually shrank as well, and his body seeped into the deep darkness.

“We will meet again soon.”

Within the darkness, the old man’s eyes rose like blue ghost fire.

“Until then, I wish you good hunting…”

Yeon Sang-hyeon bowed deeply to the old man.

Soon, a terrible darkness swallowed everything.