Chương 59: Chapter 26 Part 1

The sky over Elyndria was not supposed to bleed. It was a sickly, churning crimson, heavy and suffocating, thick with the stench of pulverized stone, boiled marrow, and vaporized blood. The grand, towering walls of the Zareth capital, fortifications that had stood unyielding for a thousand years, were gone. In their place were jagged mounds of molten slag that hissed and spat beneath the unnatural, eclipse-darkened sky. Ryu Jin-woo could not breathe.

When he tried, his chest rattled with a sickening, wet wheeze, the air bubbling through the jagged puncture wound that had collapsed his left lung. He was on his knees, sinking into a layer of hot, grey ash that was knee-deep. The ash wasn't just from the burning buildings; it was the incinerated remains of two million citizens. Their screams, abruptly cut short in reality, continued to echo in an endless, deafening chorus inside his shattered mind.

All around him lay the broken, mutilated remnants of the continent's vanguard. To his left, the High Paladin of the Silver Order lay face down, his impenetrable holy armor peeled open like a tin can by the sheer physical force of an Abyssal thrall. To his right, the Grand Archmage of the Ivory Tower stared blankly at the burning sky, her jaw missing, her legendary staff splintered into useless kindling. These were the men and women Ryu had bled beside for a decade.

They had survived the siege of the northern glaciers, the rot of the deep-swamps, and the betrayal of the eastern lords. They had been unbreakable. Until today. Ryu's fingers twitched. He was gripping the hilt of his sword so tightly his metacarpals were fracturing under his own strength. But the weapon was dead. The legendary mythril blade, a divine artifact meant to sever the dark, was shattered cleanly at the crossguard. He was holding a jagged, useless shard of metal. A shadow fell over him.

It was completely absolute, swallowing the ambient light of the burning city, dropping the temperature so violently that the hot ash instantly crystallized into frost. Ryu forced his head up, his neck muscles screaming in protest. Descending through a massive, jagged tear in the fabric of reality was the Demon God. It did not have a face that mortal geometry could comprehend, but Ryu could feel its gaze, a crushing, unfathomable weight of pure, ancient malice pressing directly against his soul.

And then, the God laughed. It wasn't a sound meant for human ears. It was a tectonic event. The sheer auditory force vibrated through the earth, shattering the remaining glass in the ruined city and completely fracturing Ryu's sanity into a thousand jagged, irreparable pieces. A hand composed of writhing, absolute darkness reached down from the rift. Ryu's survival instincts, honed by ten thousand hours of apocalyptic warfare, flared one final time.

He spat a mouthful of black blood onto the ash, gripped his broken hilt, and lunged upward with a scream of pure, unadulterated agony, ready to die on his feet, His eyes snapped open. His head violently slammed backward against the solid oak headboard of his bed with a sharp, grounding crack. Ryu Jin-woo did not thrash. He did not cry out for a medic, nor did he swing blindly at the shadows. He simply sat perfectly, terrifyingly rigid in the darkness.

His mouth was open, gasping for air in measured, rhythmic, desperate intervals, pulling the oxygen deep into his chest. Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon. He touched his ribs. There was no hole. His lungs expanded completely, filling flawlessly without the wet, bubbling rattle of internal bleeding. The overpowering, gagging stench of burning ozone, sulfur, and cooked flesh was gone.

It was entirely replaced by the crisp, sterile, almost painfully delicate scent of crushed lavender, polished wood, and old parchment. He was sitting inside a plush, velvet-lined bed. The room around him was pristine, quiet, and untouched by war. He was in the private, heavily warded dormitories of the Zenith Imperial Academy, located deep within the safe, prosperous borders of the Nakterngard Empire. He looked at a clock. It was an hour before dawn. The world had not ended yet.

Ryu slowly released his death grip on the silk sheets. His knuckles were stark white, the joints aching from the tension. He raised his hands in the pale moonlight filtering through his window, holding them up to his face. They were the hands of a sixteen-year-old boy. They were mildly calloused from standard academy sparring, but they were entirely wrong. The thick, interwoven webs of silvery scar tissue that should have coated his knuckles were missing.

The jagged, necrotic burn mark from a Death Knight's curse that had permanently stained his left forearm black was simply not there. The skin was smooth. The muscles beneath were lean and defined, but they entirely lacked the condensed, terrifying physical mass he had earned over a decade of frontline commanding. He was trapped in an unrefined, fragile vessel. Before the Demon God had crushed his heart on the plains of Zareth, Ryu hadn't just been a survivor holding a broken sword.

He had been the vanguard of humanity's resistance. He was the continent's Youngest Sword Saint, a prodigious, battle-scarred monster who had dragged himself through hell to touch the absolute pinnacle of human martial limits, a state of being known as the Zenith. He had led armies. He had severed the heads of Blood Cult High Priests. He had watched empires crumble into dust and rebuilt them with sheer, bloody willpower.

And then, exactly three months ago, he had opened his eyes, choked on a breath of clean air, and found himself sitting at his old mahogany study desk, exactly ten years in the past. He was a Regressor. Ryu wiped a thick layer of cold sweat from his brow, swung his legs over the edge of the mattress, and stood up. He didn't bother trying to lie back down. He knew from a decade of trauma that sleep would not return.

If he closed his eyes, the silence of the dormitory would simply fade away, and the screams of his dead comrades would start all over again. He needed to move. He needed the physical reality of pain to ground his racing mind. He stripped off his sweat-soaked sleeping tunic, tossing it carelessly onto a velvet chair, leaving his bare chest exposed to the cool morning draft. He walked across the polished hardwood floor, his bare feet silent, and approached the reinforced stone wall of his spacious room.

Embedded in the stone was a heavy brass dial, intricately carved with geometric runes. The Zenith Academy, catering to the wealthiest and most powerful noble scions of the Empire, provided its top-ranking students with adjustable environmental wards for optimal comfort and light conditioning. Ryu placed his palm flat against the cool brass. If he had been a lesser man, or a naive, idealistic boy given a miraculous second chance, the past ninety days would have looked very different.

Most newly awakened regressors would have panicked. They would have immediately rushed out of the safety of the Nakterngard Empire, riding desperately into the night. They would have tried to warn the neighboring kings, shouted prophecies in the town squares, or charged blindly into the shadows to hunt down the fanatic cultists before the war began. But Ryu was a Sword Saint. He was a creature of ruthless pragmatism and terrifying martial discipline.

The very first day he had regressed, he had gripped the doorknob of this room, ready to sprint to Elyndria. But he had looked down at his soft, unscarred hands, and a cold bucket of reality had washed over him. Future knowledge was completely, utterly useless without the physical strength to enforce it. The Blood God Cult wasn't a gang of street thugs; they were an ancient, decentralized network of terrifying blood-mages and corrupted nobles.

If he had marched into their territory three months ago in the frail, unrefined body of a first-year student, a mid-level Blood Priest wouldn't have even bothered to interrogate him. They would have casually decapitated him, strung his corpse from the city gates, and the world would have still burned. If he wanted to save the timeline, he had to become a monster again.