Chapter 4

He had worn the same raw regret down to the bone. If only I had abandoned those hollow delusions of nobility and looked after Myeong-in… If only I had never married her off, but had broken my back so she could study whatever she wished… none of this would have come to pass. Once regret found a purchase, it devoured a man whole.

Yet through some impossible miracle of providence, Cha Myeong-joo had been handed a second chance. He would pour every breath of it into his sisters.

Leaning over the handlebars, he pumped his legs harder, cutting through the frosty mist toward the Special Defense Science Research Institute nestled at the foot of Mount Akdal in Hanseong. The distance made the journey an agonizing ordeal on a rusty bicycle, but if his flesh was truly rotting from within, he could not afford to squander a single hour while his limbs still obeyed him. Since he had been dragged back to the shores of the living, he would ensure his existence finally counted for something.

By the time dawn had fully broken, the clock showed a little past eight. Waiting at a major intersection, Myeong-joo found himself halted before a small noodle shop exhaling billowing clouds of steam into the crisp morning air. His empty stomach cramped violently enough to make him falter. Yet the hospital fees had devoured nearly every brass coin in his pockets; after one longing, bitter look, he forced his boots back onto the pedals.

By the time the silhouette of the research institute loomed in the distance, dizziness pulled at his vision. He had already vowed to hoard every spare coin for his sisters. Squandering hard-earned cash merely to fill his own belly was out of the question; swallowing the sour saliva pooling in his dry mouth, he kept pedaling.

“Halt! What business do you have here?”

A corporal standing sentry at the main gate eyed Myeong-joo’s haggard frame with bristling suspicion. Dismounting from the squeaking bicycle, Myeong-joo did not reply at once, his gaze rising toward the forbidding concrete perimeter walls.

He had never understood why a research facility required ramparts as towering as a fortress. Near the market intersection, the streets had teemed with early commuters; around the institute’s perimeter, however, scarcely an ant was in sight. He could not tell whether the eerie stillness stemmed from the facility’s oppressive aura or simply the utter absence of civilian dwellings nearby.

When Myeong-joo failed to offer an immediate answer, the sentry’s eyes narrowed into hard slits. His hand tightened over the sling of his rifle, poised to treat the scruffy cyclist as a trespasser at the slightest false move.

Given that demonic fiends capable of mimicking human guise—while exceedingly rare—were not entirely mythical, the soldier’s high-strung vigilance was entirely warranted.

Demonic fiends had begun overrunning the peninsula without warning decades ago: some spawned beneath lightning strikes, some clawing out of stone hearths, others riding the crests of sudden deluges. A few were as colossal as imperial pavilions; others were scarcely larger than calves. Yet scale mattered little. Once a demonic fiend descended, fifty civilian lives could be snuffed out as cheaply as summer flies.

At the time, the nation had only just transitioned from the old dynasty into the democratic republic of Great Han, sweeping away hereditary caste distinctions. The populace had been triumphant, believing that only peace and modern prosperity lay ahead. That fragile dawn curdled into a nightmare of blood overnight.

Monstrous entities surged across the provinces, butchering the innocent until the land was ground to powder. An elder’s mangled corpse in a barley field. A young bride hanging lifeless from a weeping willow. A toddler drowned by a well. A fisherman’s mutilated remains washing ashore. So overwhelming was the carnage that entire counties ceased holding private family funerals, digging communal trenches to bury their dead by the cartload.

When the creatures began slaughtering even mountain tigers, the state deployed the legendary tiger hunters and seasoned mountain trackers in force. The outcome was horrific: those iron-limbed frontiersmen were annihilated. Only after the hunters were wiped out did the government finally mobilize the standing army, and by then the disaster had metastasized. Grim dispatches flooded military telegraphs reporting that provincial settlements were being erased whole.

Before a hundred days had passed, the empire of Ilyah across the eastern sea abruptly declared its intent to “protect” Great Han. In exchange for leasing modern rifles and artillery, it demanded the unilateral right to construct military outposts across sovereign Han soil. These garrisons, Ilyah insisted, were intended purely for wartime contingencies, yet nowhere in the draft treaty was a termination date specified. The vague condition until the threat has passed served as their sole justification.

Worse still, Ilyah reserved the sole authority to determine what constituted an active “threat.” One outrageous clause dictated that if an Ilyah soldier killed or maimed a Great Han civilian after allegedly mistaking them for a human-mimicking demonic fiend, that soldier could never be tried in a Han court. Every resulting incident would be arbitrated strictly under Ilyah military jurisdiction.

At long last, Confucian scholars throughout the provinces rose in thunderous protest. While the republican constitution had reduced their noble privileges to historical relics, men whose lives were anchored to classical philosophy and moral duty refused to believe that abolishing an institution meant abandoning the integrity of their names. They took to the roads in their thousands.

Under the guise of mutual defense, Ilyah demanded unhindered military transit not merely through deep-water ports, but along national railways, main highways, and strategic mountain passes. In response, scholars loosened their topknots, spread their white robes across the frozen mud, and bowed until their brows touched the snow. Ilyah called it rapid deployment against monsters; to the scholars, it was nothing less than surveying every vital artery of Great Han for conquest. They commenced an indefinite hunger strike.

To an imperial power harboring colonial ambitions, such unyielding men were a thorn in the eye. Accustomed to the absolute decrees of their Dairyōshu—their Great Lords—the Ilyahans could not fathom common scholars kneeling in freezing mud to defy a modern empire for the sake of national sovereignty. They demanded that Great Han disperse the gathering by bayonet and bullet.

The Great Han government flatly refused. If anything required dispersal, the state declared, it was not the patriots gathered in defense of their motherland, but the flotilla of Ilyah warships anchored menacingly in the eastern reaches of the southern sea.

The Ilyah envoys made no attempt to veil their fury. During one diplomatic conference, a delegate young enough to be a senior vice-minister’s son jabbed an index finger into the elder official’s face, barking insults in the Ilyahan tongue. Public outrage erupted nationwide. Backed by that surging fury, the administration rejected the unequal treaty once more.

Then the demonic fiends—curiously dormant while the treaty negotiations had raged—struck with renewed savagery. They ripped out the throats of the scholars, systematically singling out the men in unbleached cotton robes who knelt peacefully upon the frozen earth.

The timing was so grotesque that whenever three citizens gathered in tea shops or alleyways, rumors inevitably spread that the beasts were marching to Ilyah’s drum. Whispers of doom followed: if Ilyah truly commanded such demonic horrors, the history of Great Han might be snuffed out before its second decade.

Ilyah seized the panic to tighten the vise: You cannot defend your soil alone. Our artillery and rifles are absolute. If you desire our protection, then submit to our terms.

Great Han was too fragile an infant to weather such relentless coercion. Consumed by the monumental task of constructing state infrastructure and modern institutions, the treasury had possessed little capital to invest in armaments or domestic defense. Defeatist voices advocating capitulation to Ilyah’s treaty began to multiply in parliament.

It was right around that desperate hour that wild rumors began trickling out of a remote mountain hamlet in Anwon Province. A colossal peasant had reportedly beaten demonic fiends to bloody pulps with his bare fists, severing their heads to hang above the village shrine before holding a grand exorcism rite to bless the realm. As the tale spread like wildfire, the Ilyah delegation suddenly panicked, frantically attempting to force the treaty’s signature—terrified that Great Han might realize it possessed the indigenous power to annihilate the monsters on its own.

Almost simultaneously, an equally miraculous phenomenon occurred in the heart of Seowon. Newspapers and radio broadcasts trumpeted the news: Prince Jun-ik, Lee Hui-eum—the son of Grand Prince Gyeonghyeon—had rescued a young servant girl from a demonic fiend at an estate well.

Prince Jun-ik was reported to have seized a Water Demonic Fiend by its dripping mane as it surged from the stone basin, slamming it into the flagstones with brute force no mortal should possess. Ilyah sneered at the reports, dismissing the incident as an accidental adrenaline surge and staging satirical puppet shows caricaturing the prince. Later, their intelligence services bought up domestic presses, publishing fabricated editorials claiming such unstable gifts could never be systematized and posed an existential threat to public order.

The Great Han government, however, refused to bury the miracle. They dispatched clandestine researchers to examine Lee Hui-eum and the champion from Anwon. The following year, the state officially designated individuals possessing such miraculous power as Aberrants, commissioning the nation’s very first specialized combat regiment: the Azalea Brigade.

Three decades passed since then.

Under the shield of the Aberrants, the demonic fiends’ incursions gradually dwindled until they vanished from public life entirely. While the brigade had fought valiantly, the retreat appeared almost as though the entities had received a synchronized command to withdraw.

Eventually, an entire generation grew to adulthood without ever catching a glimpse of a demonic fiend—living proof that peace had taken root. Then, in the spring of a devastating drought year, the nightmare resumed. Like vipers that had spent thirty years condensing their venom beneath the frozen earth, the creatures struck in coordinated assault, slaughtering the port town of Okpo in Jeonna Province.

Having tasted three decades of false dawn, the peninsula was devastated. The brief illusion of security made the renewed bloodshed unbearable, and public fury turned against the authorities. That was when the true war for survival commenced.

Before Myeong-joo turned back the wheel of time, Lee Hui-eum’s youngest son, Lee Yi-tan, had marched into that very crucible, forging an unbroken chain of miraculous victories. Across seven punishing campaigns, he reduced to ash the four ancient demonic fiend sovereigns whose wills governed the horde: the Temporal Demonic Fiend, the Frost Demonic Fiend, the Earth Demonic Fiend, and the Solar Demonic Fiend. Those triumphs crowned him a living national legend and the supreme pillar of the Azalea Brigade.

Yet the present into which Myeong-joo had awakened was situated just prior to Yi-tan’s third or fourth major campaign. The monsters’ vanguard had been checked, but their strength was far from broken.

Having lost their alpha leaders, the surviving demonic fiends had scattered into shadowed valleys or burrowed into the viscera of livestock, eking out a wretched existence. Some still rallied enough strength to launch bloody skirmishes, yet even that sporadic violence was a blessing compared to the slaughter that had preceded Yi-tan’s campaigns.

By their very nature, demonic fiends congregated more densely around the concentrated lifeforce of major cities than in rural backwaters. Mount Akdal sat near enough to the capital that its defenses could never afford a moment’s laxity. Myeong-joo understood the sentry’s prickly posture all too well.

He deliberately smoothed his tone into effortless calm. “I am here on personal business. I wish to speak with Section Chief Kim. Inform him that retired Sergeant Cha Myeong-joo has arrived. He will recognize the name.”

He pitched his request casually, as though he had merely been passing through the district and thought to pay a friendly social call. It was absurdly early in the morning for a social drop-in, but Myeong-joo betrayed not the slightest awkwardness.

The corporal remained unyielding, his sharp eyes scrutinizing Myeong-joo from head to toe. The guard appeared to be an ordinary conscript rather than a soldier attached to the Special Corps where the Aberrants were housed, and his professional discipline was evident in every line of his posture. The fact that he did not immediately click his heels and salute the mention of a military veteran confirmed as much.

“I served with the Special Corps,” Myeong-joo added softly. “Please relay the message.”

“…Understood, sir.”

The hostile edge in the sentry’s posture softened perceptibly at the words Special Corps. As the guard stepped into the booth to ring Section Chief Kim’s office, Myeong-joo’s gaze wandered across the distant ridgelines. Looking back, the very staging grounds where he had once drilled under the Special Corps banner had been right here, in the shadows of Mount Akdal.

In those days, Cha Myeong-joo had been nothing more than a lowly Grade 5 Harmonizer. His resonance capacity was so meager that even when deployed to forward bases, his utility amounted to little more than an emergency tourniquet for Aberrants teetering on the brink of violent burnout—a dispensable stopgap, nothing more.

His bleak military existence had brightened, if only marginally, when young Lee Yi-tan first manifested his aberrant potential. In that chaotic era, demonic fiends were laying siege to both the northern border and the capital’s perimeter, leaving the brigade without a single veteran Aberrant to oversee the prodigy’s foundational development; every senior combatant had been marshaled to the front lines. By an astonishing twist of bureaucratic circumstance, the mentorship of the imperial scion had fallen upon none other than Sergeant Cha Myeong-joo.