The thick, luminescent green sap of the Heavenly Cleansing Herb dripped from between my bruised knuckles.The heavy droplet hit the dry dirt floor of the shack. In the suffocating, absolute silence of the room, the sound was as loud as a war drum.I remained on my knees, my breath locked in my throat. The dust motes swirling in the thin shafts of afternoon sunlight seemed to freeze. I stared at the little girl lying on the filthy straw mat. Her chest was completely, terrifyingly still. The torn grey blanket draped over her fragile frame didn't rise. It didn't fall.[System Scanning...]The blue text hovered in the center of my vision, casting a pale, cold light over the squalor of the slum shack.No, I thought, the word a frantic, desperate echo in the hollow cavern of my skull. Not after all of that. Not after the arena. Not after the blast.I tried to stand, to rush the final three feet between us, but my body violently rejected the command. The adrenaline that had carried me throug

My right hand, pressed flat against the little girl’s fragile sternum, burned with a blinding, golden intensity. But the rest of my body was freezing. The Karma System was forcibly converting my own life force, draining the heat from my blood and the marrow from my bones to sustain the Healing Palm.My heart stuttered. It skipped a heavy beat, sending a hollow, agonizing flutter up my throat.Push, I commanded my failing meridians.I leaned my weight forward, driving the concentrated energy directly into her chest. The golden Qi acted as a physical ram. It bypassed her skin and ribs, slamming into her paralyzed esophagus. It forced the pooled, luminescent green sap of the Heavenly Cleansing Herb down her throat, pushing it straight into her stagnant bloodstream.The silence in the rotting shack was deafening. The only sound was the harsh, ragged rasp of my own failing breath.My vision narrowed to a pinprick. The dust motes floating in the thin shafts of afternoon sunlight vanished. T

The chanting rolled over the uneven, rotting rooftops of the Beggar District like the low, heavy rumble of an approaching thunderstorm.It was distant, echoing down from the affluent, stone-paved rings of the capital, but the sheer volume of tens of thousands of voices unified in a single, frenzied rhythm allowed it to bleed through the cracked wooden walls of the slum shack.“Merciful Blade. Merciful Blade.”I sat on the hard, dry dirt floor, my back resting against a termite-eaten support beam. The sun was beginning to set, casting long, bruised shadows across the room. The little girl lay on the filthy straw mat a few feet away. The horrifying, translucent grey hue of her skin was gone, replaced by the soft, warm flush of returning life. Her chest rose and fell in a steady, rhythmic, beautiful cadence.She was safe.My body, however, felt entirely alien to me. The massive influx of pure Karma had forcibly knit my shattered collarbone back together, but the new bone felt unnaturally

The damp, heavy fog rolling off the eastern canals smelled of rotting cabbage and stale rice wine, but tonight, it was the sweetest thing I had ever breathed.I kept my chin tucked down, letting the frayed, blood-crusted collar of my ruined grey robes hide my face. The cobblestones of the lower neutral ring were slick with evening dew and discarded ale, catching the faint, flickering amber light of the paper lanterns strung outside the cheap taverns.I dragged my straw sandals through the shadows, moving with the instinctual, predatory silence I had spent a lifetime perfecting.In the affluent upper rings of the capital, the sky was still bleeding with the bright, explosive colors of the Murim Alliance’s celebratory fireworks. The distant, rhythmic thumping of war drums and the muffled, unified chanting of ten thousand drunken voices echoed down the narrow alleyways. They were still screaming my title. They were raising gourds of expensive liquor to the "Merciful Blade," toasting the

The sweet, heavy scent of black tobacco hung in the stagnant air of the inn room. It was a smell I had known for fifteen years in my past life. It meant the planning phase was over. It meant the blood was about to flow.I stood half-naked in the dark, my bare feet planted on the uneven wooden floorboards. My blunt iron sword lay exactly three feet away from my right foot. I didn't look down at it. I kept my eyes locked on the glowing red cherry of the pipe hovering in the corner of the room."Playing the hero, Mu-Kang?" Jang Mu-Rak whispered softly, the smoke curling around his hidden face. "Or should I still call you Number Seven?"He didn't wait for me to answer.The red cherry of the pipe suddenly dropped, falling toward the floor. Before it even hit the wood, the darkness in the corner violently expanded.Mu-Rak didn't step forward; he blurred. He used the Phantom Step, the highest-tier movement art of the Shadow Hall. It was designed to erase the physical sound of a footfall by s