WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: DereKimchi
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became the Mad Demon in a Novel ◈
Chapter 7: Return Seekers
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I lay perfectly still, waiting to recover.
Death was as common as catching a cold in this world.
By now, I no longer needed to remind myself that this was a world governed by entirely different rules.
None of the rules I knew from modern life would work here.
Oddly enough, that made me calmer.
When I thought about it, laws, morality, and conscience were all snares that bound modern people.
They were bothersome codes meant to keep the system running.
But what if I threw off all those restraints?
Looking at the world as though civilization had regressed made everything simpler.
All I had to do was become strong.
All I had to do was stab someone in the back before they stabbed me.
If there was an obstacle, I could cut it out by any means necessary.
As long as I followed a few rules, this place was simpler than a game.
The moment I realized I was smiling, a chill ran down my spine.
‘...’
Why did I feel liberated?
Was I becoming a Galler like that Swordwood Lord?
What had settled into the space left by morality and conscience was an unmistakable thrill.
“You were grinning to yourself, then suddenly got serious. What are you doing?”
I looked at her. She was leaning against the wall with a crooked smirk.
In truth, I had already made up my mind.
The moment she revealed her intention to screw me over with reverse spoilers, this deal had effectively ended.
Joining hands with a sly Galler had been impossible from the start.
Still, Silent Aeon Demon Soul, the item I had handed over, dangled irritatingly from her waist.
I had handed over this SSS-tier item, the Mad Demon’s avatar that could make me the strongest, far too easily.
“That look in your eyes is terrifying. Is this what it means to be the Mad Demon? My hair is standing on end just looking at you.”
“Give it back. The deal’s over anyway.”
“No. Why should I return it? If you want it, take it from me.”
“Fuck, it’s bound to me anyway. What are you even going to use it for?”
“I could put it on display. Or just having it means one of history’s worst villains is effectively neutered. That’s not so bad.”
“Haah.”
I really wanted to kill her.
I could say with certainty that if I recovered Silent Aeon Demon Soul, modern morality and conscience be damned, I could kill this bastard in one stroke.
But why was she still staying in this cabin?
Our relationship had turned hostile. She could simply kill me now and be done with it.
“What the hell do you want from me?”
She tucked Silent Aeon Demon Soul under her arm and squatted beside my head.
“What do you think I spend my days thinking about after becoming a menopausal woman overnight?”
Hmm. Putting myself in her shoes, that did sound horrible.
“Strong martial arts? Expanding Swordwood? That’s all dopamine. Do you think that’s what I really want? When you have to squat down to piss several times a day, there’s only one thing on your mind.”
“You want to go back.”
“Correct. Fuck, even looking at the muscles of those gym-rat bastards in my sect makes my heart pound against my will! Do you have any idea how disgusting that feels?”
Maybe every comedy was a tragedy up close.
Listening to her confession made me oddly solemn.
I had assumed someone like the Swordwood Lord would be living grandly as a supreme master, but apparently that wasn’t the whole story.
“What does that have to do with me?”
“A clean ending.”
“An ending?”
Her throat bobbed tensely.
“Do you think a human caused something this absurd? What if some omnipotent being, a Constellation or something, sent us here? Maybe it was thinking that even the readers could write better than that asshole author. If so, a neat, perfect ending could be the key to our return.”
“Heh. You’ve got quite an imagination.”
“Don’t laugh. Do you think we came to that conclusion for no reason? We put our heads together and thought about it for a long time.”
It was so absurd that I had laughed it off, but the more I considered it, the less baseless it seemed.
Right. More than ten thousand souls had been crammed into a martial arts novel. There had to be the will of some godlike being behind it.
But the reason was just that it didn’t like the ending? What kind of god was that?
“But the problem is that nobody saw the final chapter.”
Huh? Now that she mentioned it, that was true.
Just like me, everyone must have been transported into Mad Heaven Records the moment they clicked on the final chapter.
That meant not a single Galler knew how it ended.
“Does that matter? By your logic, it was an ending that didn’t satisfy the god anyway.”
“Come on. We still need to know the original ending to avoid whatever parts were a complete shitshow.”
“What?”
What was this? Were they idiots?
Protecting the chapters meant recreating the original novel’s conclusion as faithfully as possible.
Yet they wanted to avoid the predetermined ending? What kind of nonsense was that?
“Then why have you been desperately protecting the chapters?”
“I never wanted to protect them from the start! But if I openly refused, I’d get ganged up on! The others are too scary!”
“Oh?”
I narrowed my eyes at that unexpected truth.
Behind the grand cause of “protecting the chapters” was ultimately fear of retaliation from the group.
A kind of martial arts world bullying where anyone who did not perform according to the script was branded a lore-wrecker and punished.
I looked at her with greater interest.
“Then that means the Gallers who want to return are a minority?”
Naturally, most of the users who had possessed lowly lives would want to go back to modern times.
But what about the ones who had properly established themselves here?
“Those bastards. A guy who was only a convenience-store clerk becomes the Lord of the River North Alliance overnight, commanding tens of thousands. If you were him, would you want to go back? This is ancient China, where keeping three wives and four concubines isn’t illegal. It’s considered a man’s virtue.”
Deep disgust and envy crossed her face.
Hmm. If that was the life they had...
Those Gallers who held enough influence to interfere with the original novel’s chapters.
To them, this place was not a prison to escape from, but a theme park where they wanted to stay forever.
“Why are you suddenly drifting off-topic after trying to use me for your dopamine?”
That confession had been the true feeling she had secretly hidden for a long time.
I couldn’t immediately understand why she would reveal it to me, an untrustworthy Galler and a newbie at that.
“You’re the Mad Demon. Aside from the protagonist, Han Yubaek, you’re one of the few characters who can sway the core of this story.”
“So?”
“Will you join our Return Seekers’ group? If you move, you might even be able to change the ending itself.”
“...”
If possible, I really wanted to slap her just once, very hard.
If she was going to make an offer like this, she should have done it before stabbing me, crazy bitch.
Of course, I desperately wanted to return too, but I didn’t want to agree so easily.
“No. If you had an SSS-tier deck like the Mad Demon, would you just go home without even taking it for a spin?”
“Hey, you’re still a newbie. You could really die. If you die, it might just be over for you here.”
“Who knows?”
The Gallers had a hypothesis.
A hypothesis that if they died, they would return to modern times.
It was probably nothing more than a hypothesis born from their vague hope.
“First, Silent Aeon Demon Soul.”
Swish!
With lightning-fast fingers, she placed Silent Aeon Demon Soul on my stomach.
My mind froze.
She could control the Mad Demon just by holding this item, yet she was giving it back so easily?
I couldn’t even imagine how badly she wanted to return home.
“I’ll think about it, at least.”
“Really?”
The human heart was strange.
It had been mine to begin with, but watching Silent Aeon Demon Soul rise and fall with every breath made this feel like a favor.
Either way, it seemed the initiative was mine now.
“Where should I go now? Any route you’d recommend?”
“The Heavenly Demon Divine Cult, obviously. If I were you, I’d lie low there until I could properly handle Silent Aeon Demon Soul.”
“Damn it.”
The moment I pictured the location of the Hundred Thousand Mountains, I felt faint.
I would have to walk more than several hundred kilometers with a body that didn’t possess even a thread of internal energy.
Still, getting out of Orthodox faction territory as quickly as possible came first.
“But that... Return Seekers’ group? You all live in different places. Is that kind of socializing really possible?”
“You can make private posts in the Gallery. We share the password among ourselves.”
Ah, so that was it.
The Gallery post titles that had nothing but a single Chinese character or a special symbol.
When I had lurked on the site, there had definitely been posts grayed out so they couldn’t be opened.
Those posts, abandoned in some corner of the Gallery interface, had been their only channel.
“Gui, as in return. We always use that as the title. The password is 1818218.”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“I know. I’m just telling you.”
Then her expression turned coy as usual.
“Hoho, shall we wrap things up now? Hundred Snakes Valley will be moving soon. If they learn this old man is dead, Swordwood will be in an awkward position too.”
“...”
But I couldn’t quite bring myself to say something as blunt and cold as the original Mad Demon would have.
Maybe I was still a newbie after all.
Then she suddenly pulled something from her robes.
“I’ll leave you another Bright Return Pill, like the one you took earlier. It’s an unprecedented elixir that can heal even wounds a Great Luo Immortal couldn’t save with a single session of breath regulation. Oh my, listen to me. You don’t have internal energy, do you?”
“Haah...”
How could every word out of her mouth be this infuriating?
“Ah, I think it’s already too late.”
She was squinting toward the cabin door.
“Their internal energy is cultivated to at least Early Thousand Bright Blade... Huh? One of them is at Blue Flame Perfection? Three, four... Ah? Fuck!”
In that instant.
Her body blurred like an afterimage, and before I knew it, she had vanished without a trace.
What?
Hadn’t she wanted to use me as her ending fairy?
Blue Flame Perfection meant an unbelievably powerful master.
Yet she was leaving me here after I had been stabbed and could barely move?
“Hey! Are you insane? Come back!”
But the man who entered the cabin was not the Swordwood Lord.
Creeeeak.
A pitch-black leather windcloak squeezed through the narrow doorway.
He wasn’t a sword, but my entire body felt as though it were being pricked.
The man’s presence was darker than the night settling outside.
They said the eyes were the windows to the heart, but I could feel no emotion in his.
Bottomless eyes that revealed no intention.
I had never seen such nauseating eyes in my life.
“...”
At last, those black pupils slid across the cabin.
He checked the old man lying there with his face split in half, then swept his gaze over the brazier and fishing rod in the corner.
And finally.
The moment he saw the dried bloodstains on my body.
A dark red haze burst grotesquely from his eyes.
“...This lowly servant has failed to protect the Divine Cult’s Chuk-ang.”
Chuk-ang was a religious title meaning “Revered One.”
The huge man’s body tipped toward me.
His broad back, bent in prostration, trembled as though made of iron.
I immediately understood why the Swordwood Lord had fled.
Through the half-open cabin door, fanatical followers of the martial arts world were all dropping to their knees at once.
“The Divine Cult Rules All Under Heaven; Ten Thousand Demons Bow in Reverence!”
Their thunderous shout rang out as though it would bring down the cabin.
Yes, yes. My precious lackeys, do come in.
These men were the strongest single combat force within the Demonic Cult.
They were the Ten Armies of the Mad Demon.
Footnotes:
“Gallery” refers to an online message board; its hosting service is unnamed in the source.
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