Chapter 37 – Blood Cult (1)

A forest thick with greenery. People playing joyfully. High school student Sun-woo was setting up a tent with his parents.

‘Ah, it’s a dream.’

While pitching the tent, Sun-woo recognized that this was a dream. It was always the dream he’d had about the day his parents died.

‘Now there will be a fire and people and families will die and it will end.’

When he had dreamed it recently, he sometimes had additional different dreams, but the nightmare hadn’t changed.

Fortunately, this time the dream started a bit earlier. Soon the hellish scene would begin, but at least he could see his family’s bright faces for a moment.

Sun-woo’s parents were warmly organizing the tent, and his younger sister was talking with friends in the center of the clearing.

“Sun-woo. Go to the car and bring the rest of the luggage.”

“Yes.”

At his father’s words, Sun-woo moved toward the car parked behind the tent.

‘Is it about time for the fire to start?’

As Sun-woo had such thoughts while watching himself in the dream gather luggage.

“Kyaaa!”

A scream came from the center of the clearing.

Everyone’s attention turned toward where the scream came from. There, a female student was grabbing her head and screaming.

The one screaming was his younger sister’s friend. His sister and her other friends didn’t know what to do, and the girl’s parents were running toward her.

‘Huh? This isn’t in my memory.’

Sun-woo was bewildered, but the situation continued to unfold.

Following the girl, Sun-woo’s younger sister and all her friends collapsed on the ground and began moaning.

As startled Sun-woo ran toward his sister, the situation got even worse.

More and more people began suffering in pain. The family friends who had come to play together, other people, and even Sun-woo’s parents.

“What.”

Sun-woo watched with surprised eyes as he himself wavered between his parents and younger sister. These were all scenes he was seeing for the first time.

Clearly a scene of fire should have unfolded, but the forest and campsite showed no red color and different scenes were playing out.

At some point, the screams of people inside the campsite disappeared, and those who had been sitting and screaming began awkwardly rising to their feet.

The young him in the dream let out a sigh of relief at that sight, but Sun-woo watching from a third-person perspective was shocked.

Because the bodies of the people standing up had become murky, and their eyes were all dyed red.

“Is everyone okay?”

His dream self shouted toward his family in bewilderment, but Sun-woo knew what this phenomenon was.

‘Contamination. That’s impossible.’

Sun-woo was stunned, but regardless of him watching, the situation continued.

The contaminated people began destroying everything around them indiscriminately. Household goods and cars, pet animals they’d brought, and even some uncontaminated family members.

Sun-woo’s parents also rushed toward Sun-woo. Faced with the two people running toward him with tent poles and a knife, Sun-woo had no choice but to back away, and he soon collided with his sister’s friends standing in the center of the clearing.

Thud.

Though they collided strongly, he didn’t tumble from the impact or anything.

“Kyaaa!”

Instead, the girl he collided with swung her arm, and Sun-woo was knocked to the ground by her frail-seeming fist. It wasn’t the strength of a young girl.

His sister and her friends, whose eyes had turned red, surrounded the student who had fallen first in a circle while glaring at the fallen Sun-woo and screaming sharply. It looked as if they were protecting the girl in the center.

Sun-woo’s parents approached as he tried to get up while enduring the pain.

“Mom? Dad?”

When Sun-woo called to them with a desperate voice, the faces of the two people approaching with red eyes contorted.

“Sun, Sun-woo? No, no.”

“No, no. He’s my son. Still.”

The two trembled while seeming very conflicted, but such conflict seemed to gradually disappear.

Their expressions became menacing, and the sharp skewer and knife gradually approached Sun-woo.

At that moment.

Splash!

Red blood spray filled the air before Sun-woo’s eyes. The blood shooting up like flames seemed to make the entire world appear to be burning.

The blood was shooting up from Sun-woo’s parents. Sun-woo could only stare at the scene before him with a blank face.

“Tsk, did I come too early? Seems like they can’t distinguish between enemy and ally yet.”

Behind the sight of his parents collapsing while spurting blood stood a man.

He held an antique sword dripping with blood in one hand while wearing a menacing smile.

He looked at Sun-woo sitting with a blank expression and chuckled.

“I didn’t expect a future summoned to be here.”

He raised his sword with killing intent, but turned around at the sound of gunfire from behind.

“Already summoned? How fast.”

He rushed toward the female students. The female students blocked his approach, but his sword showed no mercy.

Blood spurted again and the girls fell. He killed all the students who blocked him and swung his sword toward the trembling girl who looked at him.

Thud!

The girl hit on the neck by the flat of the blade fainted on the spot, and he hoisted her on his shoulder while glancing at Sun-woo.

“You’re lucky. We might meet again later.”

He threw those words to Sun-woo and began running toward the opposite direction from where the gunshots were coming.

Sun-woo watched that sight while sitting with a dazed face, and the area around him filled with screams along with gunshots.

A while later the gunshots stopped, and people approached beside Sun-woo.

“No contaminated creatures escaped. The combat team is currently pursuing the contamination source.”

“Tsk. Wonder if they can catch it. Well, that’s not something we need to worry about. This incident is big enough that cleanup won’t be ordinary.”

“We’ll have to roughly clean up and handle it as a forest fire.”

The tent village was a sea of blood, and several men were walking among it checking corpses.

“Ugh, that’s the only way. I’ll go make the forest fire, so you handle that student and come.”

“Understood.”

After the two men’s conversation ended, a hand spread before Sun-woo’s eyes.

“Now, look at this hand.”

Along with the words, light poured from the hand and Sun-woo’s expression became blank.

“A forest fire is happening here now…”

The man’s words continued into the blank Sun-woo’s ears.

***

“Ha. Ha. Ha. So in the end, the forest fire was all fabricated memory.”

Sun-woo who woke from sleep burst into bitter laughter while looking at the ceiling. He remembered everything. During the dream, all the fake memories had shattered, and the original memories he’d seen in the dream had taken their place.

It was ridiculous. He had been very troubled by the fact that summoned could also be contaminated, but his original memories had brazenly returned.

Though his family had died long ago so it wasn’t painful again, anger began coiling deep in his chest.

“Actually, this is better. Now I have a reason to fight.”

Sun-woo muttered in a cracked voice and got up from bed. He had been considering whether to go to the association, but now he’d decided to go.

Of course, he couldn’t trust the association either, but he needed to find out more information. About the enemy, and whether there were ways to prevent contamination. Now that his memories had returned, he couldn’t retreat.

Sun-woo immediately entered the bathroom and began showering.

The tears flowing down his face were washed away by the water.

***

Two days later. Dimension Delta (commonly called Central Plains).

20 kilometers east of Lanzhou.

A middle-aged man with a goat beard and a cute-looking girl were leading several young women across the plains.

The two leading young and old moved across the field without hesitation, having learned martial arts, but the following women seemed to be ordinary women as they could barely keep up.

“It seems running any further would be too much.”

“Tsk, can’t be helped.”

The two in front stopped walking, and the following women sat on the ground breathing heavily.

Watching this, the middle-aged man Wang Mun-pung tore at his sparse remaining hair.

“Why is luck like this lately? Nothing goes right.”

He glared at the girl beside him who was giggling.

“Why?”

“What do you mean why! Why did you crawl into that place and make me suffer like this!”

Wang Mun-pung burst out angrily at the girl who looked at him puzzledly.

“That was because I received a commission. I’m a girl who boasts a 100% mission success rate, you know.”

“Hah, sure. Who would believe someone from the Underworld Sect.”

At his words, the girl’s lips pouted, but she didn’t object to his statement.

Seeing the girl’s dissatisfied face, Wang Mun-pung sighed again.

Wang Mun-pung and Hwangbo Ja-gyeom, who had recently emerged from the forbidden area, stopped by the Righteous Alliance branch in Sichuan to report to the alliance via messenger pigeon, and received a reply shortly after.

The alliance called Hwangbo Ja-gyeom to the main alliance to hear a more detailed story, and gave Wang Mun-pung orders to go to Gansu to assess the Blood Cult’s movements.

Apparently, Blood Cult movements had been detected around Gansu.

Wang Mun-pung grumbled a bit at the alliance’s orders, but his expression wasn’t that bad. He had already disguised the stolen goods as other items and sent them to his shop through a trading company, and it was about time to handle solo missions anyway.

Having leisurely come up to Lanzhou, he caught the Blood Cult’s tail faster than expected. There was no way former divine thief Wang Mun-pung wouldn’t notice Blood Cult movements active enough to be caught by the alliance’s surveillance network.

He carefully tracked the Blood Cult members and discovered that a remote estate far from Lanzhou was their hidden branch.

His objective was achieved. Just as he was thinking about returning to make a report, he saw a figure secretly infiltrating the estate he was monitoring.

It was dark dawn and her face was hidden so he could only tell she was a young woman, but Wang Mun-pung followed her movements.

Because her movements over the wall were very similar to his own.

“I practiced the techniques you taught me every single day, so now I’m the fastest in the Gansu branch of the Underworld Sect. Thanks to that, I’ll be able to move to the inner sect soon.”

At her excited bragging, he could only shake his head.

Ten years ago, there was a cute girl at a pleasure house he frequented for drinking, and what was supposed to be teaching her a few moves ended up with her completely stealing his heart.

After that, he taught her a few moves whenever he occasionally met her, and his teachings ended up changing her future of living as a courtesan.

The Underworld Sect noticed she had learned martial arts and immediately took her from the pleasure house to raise her at their branch.

She was very grateful to Wang Mun-pung and considered him somewhat of a teacher, but Wang Mun-pung wasn’t sure if leading her from a courtesan’s life into the world of sword-fighting warriors was the right thing to do.

Moreover, being part of the Underworld Sect, which gathered people from the bottom rungs like courtesans, thieves, and pickpockets, meant her life wouldn’t be very different.

Anyway, recognizing her immediately from her movement technique as Cho Ryeong, he had no choice but to follow her into the Blood Cult den.

Fortunately, the estate had only a few second-rate guards for some reason, so Wang Mun-pung was able to help her rescue the women confined in the estate.

“Since it’s come to this, let’s hear what this is all about.”

“Ah, a few days ago a commission came to the Underworld Sect.”

She began laying out what had happened.

A few days ago, the daughter of Lanzhou’s largest trading company went missing while on an outing with friends. This caused an uproar in Lanzhou, and a formal commission came to the Underworld Sect.

“Recently, outsiders suddenly started gathering in Lanzhou. Blood Cult members were seen, experts were seen, so the atmosphere was quite bad when this incident happened. So everyone was on edge, but I stepped up and solved it. Ahem. Starting from where they disappeared, I used the tracking techniques you taught me to continuously track them all the way to the estate.”

She had hidden to observe the estate and infiltrated when the personnel had left.

“No, then you should have reported it above and that’s it, why did you jump in!”

“Women were kidnapped, you know what could happen to them! And looking at the situation, I thought I might be able to rescue them alone. Hehe.”

From her appearance, it seemed she’d jumped in more from ambition than worry about the women.

Wang Mun-pung examined the girls crouched on the ground. They all wore quite fancy clothes, appearing to be daughters of wealthy families.

“What were these bastards trying to do by kidnapping them?”

Wang Mun-pung couldn’t understand the situation. He couldn’t think of a reason for the Blood Cult to kidnap them.

“Well, since they’re trading company children, they must be after money.”

Normally Cho Ryeong’s words would be right, but the opponent was none other than the Blood Cult.

While Wang Mun-pung was pondering, a voice came from among the girls.

“It seems we should move now.”

Among the girls, a girl alone wearing plain white clothes stood and pointed behind them.

Dust clouds were rising in the distance.