Possession

"Yoo Hyun, is your name Yoo Hyun?"

"……."

"Hey!"

"That's what's written here. Apparently, his crimes were failing to pay taxes during the winter and punching the magistrate of his jurisdiction. Judging by how he beat dozens of government soldiers bare-handed in the process, he seems to have quite a talent for martial arts..."

"Who cares about that crap? Hey, you good-for-nothing moron! If you don't want to be beaten to death, grab a weapon and get down below the wall!"

"Next!"

The first few days after possessing this body were confusing. Naturally, everything was different from the world I knew, from one end to the other.

Exotic clothing I had never seen before. A precipitous mountain range stretching out below the fortress wall.

At least, I could tell from their features that this was some country in the East. The era, however, seemed very different from the Earth I had lived on.

The golden-clad soldiers treated me and those around me like insects, their attitude openly hostile. Still, by listening to their conversations, I was able to figure out what situation I was in.

The Cheonyu Empire.

A country situated at the center of the Eastern Continent—in every sense, the center of the heavens. Of course, the boy whose body I had possessed, Yoo Hyun, had lived in a nameless mountain village in the backcountry and was no more than eleven years old.

I had been dragged here for the grave crime of assaulting an official who collected excessive taxes. This was none other than the frontier, where I became a member of the Border Guard tasked with protecting the Empire from barbarians who constantly sought to invade in search of food and supplies.

It was called an organization created to defend the border, but in truth, it was nothing more than a den where criminals were sent to die. This place was crawling not only with barbarians but also with strange, monstrous beasts, and the casualties were too high to station an ordinary army here.

The operation of penal units. That was the solution the Empire had devised long ago.

Being enlisted a second time. From my perspective, it felt as if the heavens had collapsed, but I had no choice but to take up a spear if I wanted to survive.

And so I descended below the fortress wall and began holding back the swarming magical beasts. I survived the first battle purely by luck.

"Huff, huff... Kid, are you all right?"

"Yes."

A man named Park Gyu spoke to me. He was a prisoner in much the same situation as me. Apparently, he had beaten an outsider to death with a rock when the man tried to violate his wife.

In truth, his wife had been the one to actively cheat first, and she had about twenty other lovers scattered across the country. He always regretted being caught at a checkpoint while trying to deal with them all. Still, he had gone as far as Cheondo, the capital of the Empire, to track down those cheating bastards, so he was a good person to ask about the things I had been curious about.

"There's something I'm curious about. Is there anything like martial arts here?"

"Huh? Martial arts?"

"You know, things like internal cultivation or sword techniques."

It was a fairly common-sense question for two reasons. First, until that point, I had thought this was a wuxia world.

I was in a place resembling the Imperial Guard, and I expected to find the orthodox and unorthodox factions I knew once I made my way to the Central Plains. To survive in such a harsh world, learning martial arts was essential.

Yet no one knew any of the names or techniques I had vaguely picked up from wuxia novels. Park Gyu simply saw me as some poor child who had gone insane after losing his parents.

"Right. Kids like you, who haven't committed any real crime but were dragged here unjustly, often escape reality that way."

"……."

"More importantly, how did you kill that magical beast? It's clearly not an ordinary size."

"Who knows? Maybe the thing, already dying from an arrow wound, just happened to have its last breath snuffed out by my spear. Guess I got lucky."

Despite Park Gyu's startled expression, I deliberately kept the other reason to myself: the fact that, at the moment I felt the terror of death, an unprecedented power had gathered at the tip of my spear and pierced the beast.

For now, I decided to keep this energy—which could be called internal force or mana—to myself.

And so, five years passed since I possessed this body.

*

"Captain, our catch is good today. How about we take the afternoon off?"

In Pamagok, where magical beasts swarmed, the immutable truth was that to survive even one day longer, you had to stay close to someone powerful.

By then, I had become a veteran of the Border Guard. The average survival time was only a year, two at most, so that was more than enough for the others to trust and follow me.

In particular, anyone who had seen me fight up close even once refused to leave my side, as if they were volunteering to be human shields.

"Ahem, Captain Yoo Hyun."

"Why am I your captain? And why are men older than me speaking so respectfully?"

"Heh heh. Heaven's Mandate gives birth to people, not people to Heaven's Mandate, does it? Of course we should speak respectfully to a great man born with the destiny to protect the Empire."

"If you can flip a six-legged bear bare-handed, that beast that just fell over would have begged for its life if it could talk, wouldn't it?"

Could there really be such a thing as Heaven's Mandate or fate? If there were, I, who had been living a perfectly normal life on Earth, would never have possessed this body.

I had never killed a person, let alone a small animal, but fortunately, once I began properly handling the power I had felt on the first day—the power I had named 'qi'—hunting magical beasts was no longer difficult for me.

"Captain... That divine technique of yours—couldn't we learn it too?"

"Divine technique?"

"It's a miraculous technique, so we call it a divine technique, sir."

"It's too early to teach you."

"Aw, but we're not completely illiterate, you know?"

"That's right. If you teach us even a trick, we'll devote our lives to you!"

"I said it's too early."

It wasn't that I distrusted my subordinates simply because they were criminals. I myself still wasn't skilled enough to teach anyone else. I needed more time to study how to use it properly.

The problem was that I didn't have that kind of time.

'I don't know where these beasts keep popping out from.'

Magical beasts appeared from thin air without warning, accompanied by purple rifts. By disrupting supplies and damaging nearby villages, they were the chief culprits making life miserable for the people near the border. The peculiar thing was that some of them occasionally had forms familiar to an Earthling like me, such as orcs and goblins.

Could they have crossed over from another dimension?

There was still much about this world that I didn't know. Just as I was pondering that, Park Gyu, who stood beside me, shouted while staring at the plain beyond the gorge.

"What's wrong?"

"Look there! They're barbarians!"

"What!?"

A small cloud of dust was rising at the end of the horizon. I enhanced the flow of qi and peered closely in that direction.

They carried composite bows and wore tack, while black beasts' manes fluttered from the tips of their spears. The Yashin—one of the largest powers among the nomads beyond the frontier. Tension spread in an instant.

"They look like scouts."

"It would be pointless. Even if it's a small force, leave them alone and they'll soon return with their warriors."

"What should we do? Should we engage them?"

"No."

I shook my head. We were merely a penal unit under the Border Guard. Direct combat and tactical decisions were not ours to make.

We decided to return quickly without bothering to retrieve the magical beasts' corpses. There was quite a crowd inside the fortress.

It was the day a wagon carrying prisoners arrived. The expressions of the unit members twisted.

No one was unaware of what happened on days like this. From all around came the sounds of prisoners begging the soldiers, insisting they were innocent, followed by the thuds of fists striking them.

"Tsk, this is..."

"The timing isn't good."

Some even took money or food from the prisoners. Even with an enemy seemingly about to invade, the situation was utterly undisciplined.

I headed straight for the barracks. The Border Guard commander's post was empty, with only a sentry yawning nearby.

I picked up my pace and headed for the banquet hall. When I opened the paper-paneled door, the smell of alcohol and nauseating incense flooded out.

"Oh, isn't that Yoo Hyun? Perfect timing."

"Who's this fellow?"

"He's the one who leads the convicts in our unit. Maybe because he's survived five years without dying, the men under him listen to him better than they do their own commander."

The drunken Border Guard commander staggered toward me. He was holding a liquor bottle in one hand and a girl by the hair in the other.

Though she was draped in long, flowing silk garments, they couldn't conceal her gaunt, scarred body. This was what happened on the day prisoners arrived.

\\

"This bitch won't even heed me when I tell her to give us a song and dance! Is she mute or something?"

"This is no time for this. Yashin scouts are skulking outside the fortress walls."

"Hic—what? It won't be anything serious this time either, will it? As long as I, Jang Mu, am guarding this place, the barbarians will never set foot on the blessed land ruled by the Celestial Emperor! Hic!"

My hand tightened into a fist at the sight of him, utterly unaware of the situation and lost in drink and women. If all I cared about was saving my own life, I wouldn't hesitate to flee, but if the Yashin invaded, it was the common people who would suffer.

Neither the countless comrades who had died over the past five years nor those still alive would ever be able to close their eyes in peace when their time came.

Above all, with still no idea what kind of world this was or where the monsters I knew from Earth had come from, I couldn't throw my life away meaninglessly.

"If they decide our defenses are lax, they may invade at once. We must stop the banquet and assemble the troops..."

"Enough, shut up! Since you've got strength, open this woman's shut mouth for me."

There was only one way. Having made up my mind, I met the captive girl's eyes once, then quietly rolled up my sleeve once.

And then.

"Screams or moans, either is fine, so give us one to the tune..."

Snap!

With his neck lightly twisted toward the ceiling, the Border Guard commander toppled forward. The others in the banquet hall only belatedly grasped what had happened.

"From this moment on, I will take command here."

As silence and horrified stares fell upon me, I spoke calmly.

"If you want to live, follow my orders."