I died on a Tuesday.
The Demon King's sword punched through my chest with a wet, meaty sound that I'd heard a thousand times before—just never directed at my own body. Blood filled my mouth. My legendary blade, Nightfall, clattered from nerveless fingers and hit the obsidian floor with a sound like breaking glass.
Twenty years. Twenty fucking years of fighting, and this was how it ended.
"Disappointing," Azrakhan said, his crimson eyes gleaming beneath his horned crown as he twisted the blade. The Demon Prince's voice was almost... bored. "The great Blood Emperor. The Asura of the Battlefield. The man who killed my father. And you die here, alone, having saved no one."
I wanted to laugh. Would have, if my lungs weren't filling with blood. Because he was right.
Everyone was dead. Tae-Sung, my best friend—dead five years ago at the Northern Front, his back sliced open protecting civilians from traitors. Soo-Min, the girl I'd loved since childhood—dead in my arms in 2027, her healing light flickering out as demons tore through Seoul's defenses. Ji-Hye, my baby sister—crushed under rubble at twenty-one, her last words a choked apology for not being strong enough.
General Hwang. Yeon-Hee. The Shadow Broker. Song Ji-Won. All gone.
Humanity was down to three fortified cities. Maybe a few million survivors total from a population of eight billion. The world was a graveyard, and I'd spent two decades watching everyone I cared about get added to it, one by one.
I'd killed the Demon King an hour ago. Pyrrhic victory didn't even begin to cover it—I was dying, and without me, the last cities would fall within months.
"Any last words, Emperor?" Azrakhan raised his blade.
Yeah. I had plenty. If I could do it all over again, I'd start earlier. Train harder. Save them all.
The blade fell. Everything went black.
I woke up to sunlight stabbing through my eyelids. Which was wrong on about seventeen different levels, starting with the fact that I was supposed to be dead.
My eyes snapped open. A ceiling. White. Familiar. That water stain in the corner shaped like a dragon that I used to stare at every morning when I was—
No. No fucking way.
I shot upright in bed, and immediately wanted to vomit. My body felt wrong. Too light. Too weak. Like someone had replaced my muscles with wet noodles. I looked at my hands.
Young hands. Smooth. No scars. The burn marks from the Fire Drake in 2031? Gone. The mangled fingers from when a Demon General crushed my hand in 2037? Perfectly straight.
Twenty years of accumulated damage had vanished.
"What the hell..."
My voice came out wrong. Higher. Not the gravel-rough rasp I'd developed from screaming orders across battlefields and breathing dungeon miasma for two decades.
I stumbled out of bed on legs that felt like jelly and caught my reflection in the mirror above my desk. A twenty-five-year-old stared back at me. My face. Young me. Before the scar across my jaw. Before the grey streaks. Before the permanent exhaustion carved lines into my face.
I looked... soft. Naive. Like someone who still thought the world could be saved without drowning in blood.
My eyes found the calendar on the wall. January 1st, 2025.
"No. No, no, no—"
Twenty years. I'd gone back twenty years. The room tilted. I grabbed the desk before I could fall, knuckles white, breathing too fast. This wasn't possible. Temporal regression was theoretical bullshit, the kind of thing conspiracy theorists argued about on hunter forums at three AM.
But here I was. Breathing. Young. Alive.
And if I was here, then everyone else...
"Ji-Hye." The name came out as a whisper.
My sister was alive. Right now, probably at home sleeping, dreaming about college entrance exams. Not dead. Not buried under the ruins of our family home with her spine snapped in three places.
Tae-Sung was alive, struggling as a D-rank hunter, complaining about bills. Soo-Min was alive, going to university, completely unaware that in two years and three months she would die screaming my name while demons ripped her apart.
They were all alive.
My legs gave out. I hit the floor hard, hands pressed against cheap linoleum, and for the first time in fifteen years, I broke. Not the silent, empty grief of a soldier too broken to cry properly. Real sobs that tore out of my chest like shrapnel.
I cried for Tae-Sung, who'd died buying me time to escape. I cried for Soo-Min, whose last words were "I'm sorry I couldn't heal you." I cried for Ji-Hye, who'd looked up at me with hero-worship in her eyes and died because I wasn't strong enough to protect her.
I cried for all of them. Every face. Every name. Twenty years of failure pouring out of me until I was empty.
"Never again." My voice was raw. "I swear it. Never again."
I don't know how long I stayed there. Eventually, the tears dried up, leaving me hollow but clear-headed. I pushed to my feet, walked to the bathroom, splashed water on my face.
The man in the mirror looked young. His eyes didn't.
I knew what was coming. Every disaster. Every betrayal. Every gate break. I knew which dungeons held legendary items, which hunters would become traitors, where the demon invasions would strike. I had perfect information about the next twenty years.
But I also had this pathetic E-rank body that couldn't even solo a C-rank dungeon.
My status window appeared with a thought:
[STATUS]
Name: Han Do-Hyun Age: 25 Rank: E Level: 15
Stats: Strength: 18 Agility: 16 Endurance: 17 Mana: 12 Luck: 8
Skills: [Basic Sword Mastery Lv.3] [Danger Sense Lv.1] [Mana Circulation Lv.1]
Pathetic. At my peak, each stat had exceeded 500. Now I was weaker than some goblins.
But I had something more valuable than stats. I had experience. Knowledge. And twenty years of rage crystallized into diamond-hard determination.
I pulled on my old hunter jacket—cheap leather, worn at the elbows—and walked to the window. Seoul's skyline glittered in the morning sun. Peaceful. Whole. Not burning.
Beautiful. Worth saving.
A notification flickered at the edge of my vision:
[UNIQUE ABILITY DETECTED]
[Eternal Regression] - Rank: ???
You have returned. Your choices will reshape fate.
WARNING: Significant timeline alterations will have consequences. Fate Distortion Level: 0/100
Great. Even the system was being cryptic.
I dismissed it and pulled out my phone. ₩847,000 in my account. In my first life, that had seemed like decent savings. Now it was seed money for the most important investment of my existence: getting strong enough, fast enough, to prevent the apocalypse.
My mind was already racing through possibilities. The D-rank dungeon that would spawn three days from now northeast of Seoul—in my original timeline, I'd cleared it for basic loot. But I knew the secret. Behind a false wall in the third chamber was a B-rank skill book that would sell for fifty million won in five years.
I'd take it in three days.
Then there was the Cave of Beginning, a hidden dungeon that wouldn't be discovered until 2027. It contained Dawn's Edge, a growth-type legendary sword. If I could claim it early, it would evolve with me.
But first, I needed to test this body. See how much combat knowledge I could actually apply with these garbage stats.
I grabbed my sword—basic steel, bought from a Hunter Association vendor—and gave it an experimental swing.
Sloppy. Slow. My mind knew the perfect form, but my muscles were too weak to execute it. Like a concert pianist trying to play on a children's toy.
Frustrating as hell. But not impossible.
I spent the next hour drilling basic forms, testing my limits. My technique was buried in muscle memory, but I'd need weeks of training to rebuild the physical foundation. Maybe months.
I didn't have months.
A knock at the door interrupted my thoughts.
"Oppa! Are you awake?"
I nearly dropped my sword. That voice. Ji-Hye.
"Oppa, I know you're in there! Mom made kimchi jjigae and says you're too skinny!"
I stood frozen, sword trembling in my hand. The last time I'd heard her voice, she'd been screaming for help, trapped under rubble while I desperately tried to lift concrete that wouldn't budge.
"Oppa?"
Get it together, Do-Hyun.
I set down the sword and walked to the door. My hand hovered over the handle.
She's alive. She doesn't know you. To her, you're just her slightly weird older brother who became a hunter. She's eighteen. She has dreams. Plans.
This time, she gets to keep them.
I opened the door.
Ji-Hye stood in the hallway in her yellow hoodie—her favorite, the one she was wearing when she died—holding a container of steaming stew. Her face lit up.
"Finally! I was about to—Oppa, are you crying?"
I couldn't help it. Seeing her whole and alive shattered something inside me.
"No. Just... tired."
She pushed past me into the apartment, setting down the food. "You look terrible. Bad dreams?"
You have no idea.
"Something like that."
She started unpacking the container, chattering about school, exams, some drama with her friends. I sat down and watched her move around my kitchen like she'd done a hundred times before. In the original timeline, she'd stopped visiting after 2026, too busy with university and hunter training.
Then she was gone, and no amount of time could bring her back.
"Ji-Hye."
"Hmm?"
"I love you. You know that, right?"
She gave me a weird look. "Okay, did you hit your head? You're acting super strange."
I laughed. Actually laughed. "Just feeling sentimental. New Year's resolution stuff."
"You're so weird." But she smiled—that bright smile that died in 2029. "I love you too, dummy. Now eat."
The kimchi jjigae tasted like home. Like everything I'd lost and somehow found again. Ji-Hye kept talking, and I memorized every word.
When she finally left, I closed the door and leaned against it.
This was real.
The weight should have crushed me. Twenty years of knowledge. The responsibility of saving the world. The burden of preventing millions of deaths.
Instead, I felt something I hadn't experienced in two decades. Hope.
I walked back to my sword and studied my reflection in the blade.
"Azrakhan," I said to the empty room, "in the original timeline, you killed me in 2045."
I smiled. It wasn't kind.
"This time, I'm killing you in 2027, before you become unstoppable. This time, I'm saving everyone."
Lightning seemed to crackle along the blade—probably my imagination, but it felt right.
"This time, the Blood Emperor doesn't arrive at the end. He starts at the beginning."
Two years and three months until the Crimson Tower appeared. Time to get to work.
[QUEST GENERATED]
"First Step"
Objective: Clear a D-rank dungeon solo within 72 hours Reward: [Intermediate Sword Mastery] Penalty: None
I stared at the notification. Seventy-two hours. The Silverwood Den would spawn in about that time northeast of Seoul.
Perfect.
I grabbed my phone and started researching. Equipment suppliers first—I needed better gear, even cheap stuff. Then the Hunter Association to verify dungeon spawn predictions.
My finger hovered over a contact name.
Park Tae-Sung.
My best friend. My brother. The man who'd died because I wasn't fast enough.
Not yet. If I contacted him too early, acted too familiar, he'd think I was insane. I needed to orchestrate our meeting carefully.
But soon.
Soon, old friend. This time you don't die.
I set down the phone and returned to training, pushing this weak body through forms it could barely handle. Every movement was agony. Every swing a reminder of how far I'd fallen.
But I'd climbed from nothing to SSS-rank once. I could do it again. Faster.
Outside, Seoul sparkled in winter sunlight, unaware that its future had just changed.
The Returned Emperor had arrived. And this time, the ending would be different.