The first gate opened above the Pacific, a bruise on the heavens that bled monsters and miracles into the world. Humanity adapted. A global System appeared in every retina: levels, stats, skills. S-rank hunters rose like new gods. Cities were rebuilt around guilds and dungeons. The young dreamed of shining armor and legendary drops.
I did not.
I lived in a library.
While my classmates sparred and speed-ran low-level gates, I shelved returns, copied obscure diagrams, and traced the margin notes of dead scholars. Between cracked spines and dust, I found a book with no author and too many titles—A Treatise on True Power. On the Uselessness of Shortcuts. The Way Past the Wall. The pages were palimpsest: scripture written, scraped away, and written again.
It whispered that skills were only blueprints. That power came when understanding fused with intent.
I followed that whisper through a gate that never closed.
The Murim Dimension was a world of mountains taller than clouds and rivers that cut canyons in a single season. There, no System blinked helpful numbers into your eyes. Your sword either learned to sing—or you died.
I bled for seventy years.
I starved, broke, rebuilt, and broke again. I learned to hear rain split on the edge of my blade. I learned how silence gathers before lightning chooses a tree. In the end, I wrought a martial scripture out of my bones and breath and blade:
The Heaven-Severing Codex.
With Eclipse Severance, I cut the shadow from a mountain and watched it collapse into noon. With Heaven-Sundering Stroke, I split the clouds and called the tribulation down. With Judgment of Silence, I erased a battlefield's sound and all within that hush fell apart like ash.
When I returned at last—an old sword immortal wrapped in scars—the sky above Earth was already gone. The Void ate quietly, like frost. Cities were soft outlines. S-ranks screamed numbers at a darkness that did not care.
My sword was a line of white fire in all that black.
It did not matter.
The Void was not an enemy. It was an eraser.
As it took me, the library's nameless book opened again where there should have been no pages, no ink, no time.
"Knowledge transcends time. Scholar of the sword—shall we try again?"
Light closed. The world inhaled.
And I woke in the smell of paper and dust.
Back in the library where it had all begun.