Episode 1
Episode 0
“I want to go home.”
Yu Minhyeon muttered in Korean out of habit.
It had already been roughly twenty years since he had fallen into this world called Murim.
The youth who had been twenty-seven was now a middle-aged man of forty-seven.
Even so, he still missed home.
He missed the modern era, laughing and eating while staring at his smartphone under the covers.
More than anything.
“It’s because there’s no carbonation.”
Beer! Cola! Cider!
He could somehow manage to make chicken as long as he procured the ingredients, but carbonated drinks were impossible.
That electrifying thrill that felt like it burned the moment it went down his throat!
In Murim, no matter what method was used, these demonic… no! These devilish beverages couldn’t be made!
That was why Yu Minhyeon wanted to return to the modern world.
Unable to overcome his addiction to carbonation that he hadn’t tasted for twenty years!
“But everything failed, huh?”
He visited every spellcaster in the Central Plains and asked, but they all shook their heads and said it was impossible.
It wasn’t a lie.
In Murim, there was no one who would dare lie to Yu Minhyeon, who was called by the moniker Demon Immortal and was the second person in history to reach Talma.
Was the character for ‘demon’ attached to his moniker for nothing?
By Yu Minhyeon’s standards, he had simply stepped forward because he couldn’t overlook actions that violated human ethics, but by the standards of Murim, they were absurd and preposterous, so they were defined as evil.
Rather, if only out of a desperate wish for him to die or disappear, they would have prepared some method.
In other words, there truly was no way to return to the modern world in Murim.
“Right, there’s still one place left.”
The Western Regions!
He headed to the place where the Tang Monk, Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, and Sha Wujing had gone to obtain the Buddhist scriptures in *Journey to the West*.
“No, they say the Western Regions have everything!”
They were all wrong.
They only had what they had, and lacked what they lacked.
He felt like he’d been had.
He couldn’t find a way to return home.
But neither did he want to keep living here.
“F*ck! Should I just ascend to immortality or something?”
The last method that came to mind was becoming an Immortal.
It was said that Immortals lived in a world completely different from Murim.
Perhaps they might have a way to return to the modern world.
And so, ten years passed.
Finally surpassing Talma, his Nascent Divinity could see beyond the heavens. Unlike when he had created his Nascent Divinity and reached the Half-Immortal realm, he had now truly stepped into the realm of an Immortal.
His Nascent Divinity naturally transcended the mundane, left his physical body, and began to ascend.
But at some point, he realized something had gone terribly wrong.
“Is this really ascension?”
Yu Minhyeon lost consciousness amidst the pain of his body being torn apart.
Episode 1
When Yu Minhyeon came to his senses, everything around him was pitch-black.
‘A cave?’
He tried to move his body to check where he was, but he couldn’t feel any sensation of his body moving.
It seemed he had completely lost all sensation.
His body also felt like it was floating—hanging in midair.
It was like being trapped inside squishy slime straight out of a fantasy novel, submerged deep in heavy water.
The internal energy that had once been as vast as the sea and as deep as the abyss now flowed narrowly and shallowly like a stream at the foot of a mountain.
‘No, can I even call this a stream?’
It was worse than a few droplets barely trickling down the dirt ground after the rain had stopped.
Somehow, he felt sorry for the stream.
‘Besides, I strangely feel comfortable too. Where on earth is this?’
Ascending to immortality had failed.
It was difficult to explain exactly what the reason was.
He just knew instinctively. So he thought that he had flown off somewhere, or that someone had found him unconscious and brought him here.
‘For now, should I take out my Nascent Divinity and check?’
The Nascent Divinity was a type of avatar and clone created by cutting off a portion of one’s soul upon reaching the realm of Talma. However, not just anyone who reached Talma could create a Nascent Divinity.
First, one’s ability to apply qi had to be exceptional.
Though called an avatar and a clone, what composed it was ultimately qi.
What the people of Murim called internal energy!
It was important because the avatar did not move 100% on its own; its radius of movement and actions varied according to the original body’s thoughts and the application of qi.
More importantly, it was the ability to perceive the separation of flesh and soul.
Even if one’s ability to apply qi was exceptional, if one couldn’t perceive the difference between flesh and soul, the Nascent Divinity couldn’t be completed and would scatter. With repeated practice, it could be made, but if concentration faltered even slightly, it would become unstable.
In that regard, Yu Minhyeon was exceptional in both abilities, so he created a Nascent Divinity without difficulty and quickly became able to move it freely.
That was why he was trying to take out his Nascent Divinity even now to check his surroundings.
‘It’s smaller than I thought.’
Barely scraping together the qi from within his body and the surrounding qi, he took out his Nascent Divinity.
Then, a tiny thing the size of a finger popped out with a pwing!
He couldn’t see it because it was dark, but he could feel it since it was a part of his soul.
‘So that’s why my body felt so strange.’
A short while later, after examining his surroundings with his Nascent Divinity, Yu Minhyeon couldn’t help but be shocked.
‘I was inside a person’s stomach?!’
Indeed.
Moreover, it was a place called the womb, inside a woman’s body.
‘I… I’m a baby!’
At that, not even a newborn baby’s form, but the form of an embryo at 8 weeks—though of course, Yu Minhyeon didn’t know it was the form of an 8-week embryo.
‘Wait. Then… will I have parents too?’
A baby inside a woman’s womb.
Then the woman carrying(?) him would become his mother.
Once his thoughts reached that point, his feelings grew strange.
Originally, Yu Minhyeon had no parents. No. Precisely speaking, they must have existed, but it would be correct to say he had been abandoned immediately after birth.
The director had told him that he had been left in front of Somang Orphanage before he was even a month old. So to him, the existence of parents was no different from the director.
There was the debt of raising him, but there was no blood bond of giving birth to him. So the fact that he was now a baby and existed inside a mother’s womb was quite(?) shocking, and yet it gave him a strange, ticklish feeling in his chest.
Amidst such feelings, Yu Minhyeon felt drowsiness rushing in fiercely.
‘Ah… sleepy.’
It was said that when humans or beasts are young, they sleep for most of the day. Perhaps that was why it was hard to resist the drowsiness. Yu Minhyeon fell asleep in an instant.
* * *
When Yu Minhyeon realized his body was inside his mother’s womb, he gave up on examining the outside surroundings. The Nascent Divinity was an avatar and clone created by the fusion of his soul and qi.
Though qi could penetrate flesh, he didn’t know what adverse effects it might have on the body of the existence called mother.
‘What if her body is frail?’
Qi—internal energy—strengthened the body and allowed one to exert superhuman strength, but if the body was frail, it would instead backfire, causing immense pain and physical collapse.
If the body was frail, it was natural that the acupoints and organs would be weak as well.
Then they wouldn’t be able to withstand the internal energy, and the acupoints and organs would be damaged, which would soon lead to internal injuries, called internal damage in Murim.
Having gained the existence called a mother for the first time, Yu Minhyeon became much more careful, unlike the world of Murim where he had only done as he pleased for thirty years.
Of course, a baby’s body would be frail as well. But if his ability to apply qi was exceptionally outstanding, the situation changed.
‘Is it like annihilating a squad of Zealots with six Zerglings without losing a single one?’
He wasn’t sure if the analogy was correct. It had been thirty years since he’d played that game called *War of the Stars*.
He was speaking in analogy based on faint memories.
Annihilating a squad of Zealots with six Zerglings without losing a single one was impossible.
It was tremendous control that even the world’s top pro-gamer couldn’t achieve.
Assuming one didn’t control them, you would need three or four Zerglings to kill one Zealot, so no other explanation was needed.
Explaining it easily in Murim terms, it was like moving qi delicately so as not to damage the acupoints, but in truth, just like the *War of the Stars* game analogy, this was also absurd.
If you touched a baby’s body even slightly, you would know.
How fragile a body that felt like it would break with the slightest force!
Naturally, the organs inside the body would be fragile too.
So fragile that they would burst with a mere touch!
Right now, Yu Minhyeon was trying to manipulate qi delicately so that not even a hair of such a fragile body would be hurt.
‘Then shall I try qi breathing exercises today as well?’
Originally, when circulating qi, one should accumulate qi bit by bit through the process of inhaling and exhaling to receive and expel the qi of nature, but the reproductive organs as well as the eyes, nose, and mouth had not yet properly developed, making breathing impossible.
So he created his Nascent Divinity and made it enter his own body.
The Nascent Divinity was a type of clone or avatar created by the mixture of Yu Minhyeon’s soul and qi!
Since its very existence carried qi, once he felt the qi inside and outside his body through the Nascent Divinity, from then on it was as easy as picking his nose while lying down.
Slowly but surely, drawing it in became possible.
Of course, there was the drawback that the efficiency was extremely low, but he was doing it thinking that it was better than not doing it.
‘A baby who hasn’t even been born, doing qi breathing exercises?’
Yu Minhyeon snorted inwardly.
Even the great martial families and major sects called famous in Murim would cleanse the meridians of newborn babies whose Ren and Du meridians were not blocked, raising geniuses to lead the next generation. But he was doing qi breathing exercises before he was even born, so it was an unprecedented event in the history of Murim.
‘Yeah, that’s right. I’m the first and the last.’
The eight extraordinary meridians and the Ren and Du meridians, as well as all the blood vessels throughout his body, were wide open, and no waste had accumulated.
More than anything, the Baihui acupoint was open!
The Baihui acupoint was the gap where the skull bones met, called the fontanelle in children.
As one grew older, the bones would fuse and the Baihui acupoint would close, but in Murim, it corresponded to the upper dantian that had to be opened upon reaching the realm of Talma.
In other words, Yu Minhyeon could gather qi in his upper dantian from the very beginning.
“Wow. Only a tiny amount of qi is coming in, but it’s incredibly pure!”
Though the person in question was too busy marveling at it.
* * *
A golden-haired woman whose hair fell to her waist gently caressed her slightly swollen belly with a warm gaze and expression.
The woman’s cheeks were not chubby but pleasantly plump, giving a healthy feeling, and her slender, sharp nose and jawline, along with her sparkling green eyes, made one feel she was incredibly beautiful.
Indeed, a woman who had been evaluated as one of the most beautiful in the Oren Kingdom, she was a famous figure who had refused countless proposals and married Baron Jyupeto Perian of a domain with a mere population of 40,000 and a territory the size of a fingernail on the kingdom’s map—though in reality it was hard to call it small—striking a chord in the hearts of many men.
The woman’s name was Airi, and now that she had married Baron Perian, she was more often called Baroness Perian.
Beside Airi stood a man gazing at her with eyes brimming with a pinkish glow, and he was the very Baron Jyupeto Perian who had “snatched” (?) the famous woman who had touched the hearts of men.
Jyupeto’s irises were black with a slight blue tinge, just like his hair, and his thick, sharp nose and jawline made him a handsome, manly man.
If Airi had a slender figure, Jyupeto had the physique of a lithe panther.
Moreover, a scabbard was tied at Jyupeto’s waist, so he was clearly a swordsman.
Airi’s beautiful voice flowed from between her lips.
“It’s so fascinating.”
“What is so fascinating?”
Jyupeto asked in a low, attractive husky voice.
Both of them had lowered their voices lest the child in her belly be startled.
Indeed.
These two people were none other than Yu Minhyeon’s parents.