A Purpose Worth Regressing For
Sohee narrowed her eyes at the hotel she had never once considered a threat. Sure, Chunrok the hotel manager smiling at her all the time got on her nerves, but fine — that side of the street had done nothing wrong.
That's right, they're just following the rules over there, same as anyone.
She was just beginning to feel a little guilty for getting so worked up over nothing when Chunrok, sensing her gaze, looked up and met her eyes. He flashed a beautiful smile, then smoothly turned his gaze toward the motel's utterly empty entrance.
……?
Is he mocking me?
It lasted only a heartbeat, but one corner of his mouth had definitely curled upward. Even from that distance, she could tell!
He's ignoring me. He is absolutely ignoring me!
Sohee glared daggers at him, but Chunrok paid her no mind whatsoever, effortlessly turning to welcome the guests pouring into his lobby. She whipped her head away. Better for her sanity not to look at all.
"Moon Jar, Esteemed Elder."
"What."
"I'm going to succeed. I'm going to bring this place back to life — enough to carve our name into the history of the RPR Motel itself."
"Do as you. please."
Sohee clenched both fists with a flourish.
The words came out gruff, but Moon Jar's heart quietly ached. Sohee burning with fresh resolve every single time — he found her admirable, and pitiable, in equal measure.
The truth was, compared to the managers who had come before her, Sohee was on the remarkably well-behaved end of the spectrum.
One had sunk into depression and lost months to it. Another nitpicked the motel to pieces, complaining about every last trivial thing. And one had refused to grant any regressions at all, declaring he would simply sit himself down here for eternity.
Sohee, at least, never complained about her own circumstances. All her frustrations were on behalf of her clients — their agonizing over the terms of their Regression, Possession, and Reincarnation.
Even so, Moon Jar had no choice but to put her through brutal mental conditioning. Who knew how long she would have to stay in this place? The more she resented the world, the harder her days here would become.
The tilted scale. Fate that cannot be defied. The absolute order of things.
If she could be made to understand just how unfavorable the conditions of Hoe-Bing-Hwan truly were, then even if a regression failed, she could at least blame the rules instead of drowning in guilt. That was all Moon Jar wanted for her — for a girl with such a heavy sense of responsibility never to fall into the depths of self-blame.
Sohee pulled open the drawer beneath the front desk. Inside, fortune pouches in red, green, and white sat in a neat row.
Red for Regression. Green for Possession. White for Reincarnation.
Each pouch held the new story of a client marked for Hoe-Bing-Hwan, and each had to be carried on their person when they left this place and returned to their world.
Sohee stared hard at the pouches for a long moment, then, as if settling on a decision, drew out the red one.
"I'm going to meet every one of these conditions and send Elder Dang Jaeik back. Watch me."
Exactly three days later, Sohee climbed the stairs to Dang Jaeik's room with the red fortune pouch and a file folder full of story pages in hand.
"Miss, is this… right?"
Dang Jaeik stared, utterly dumbfounded, at the regression story Sohee had prepared for him.
"Please read it through first, Elder. Then we'll talk."
He looked at her for a moment, then bent his gaze back to the pages she had laid out.
Dang Jaeik, Patriarch of the Sichuan Tang Clan in the web novel I Became the Immortal Heavenly Demon.
He regresses to twenty years before his death in the great war — to the moment when the Heavenly Demon suffers his first death and is born again. And there, he takes in the protagonist, abandoned the instant he drew breath, and raises him under his own protection.
He has one purpose in regressing: to become the master of the protagonist fated to become the Heavenly Demon, and to stop the end of the world….
So far, so understandable. This much was what Dang Jaeik himself had wanted. What unsettled him was the next line.
Master? To stop the end of the world?
He had said it plainly — his only purpose was the safety of his family.
With what patience he could muster, he read on, at last fixing his eyes on the section titled The Purpose of Dang Jaeik's Regression from I Became the Immortal Heavenly Demon.
"Hongseon."
"Yes, Elder."
To Hongseon — who had lived his past life to its end as the Heavenly Demon — Elder Dang Jaeik had been the only pillar he could lean on. It was by that devotion that he had endured, and endured, and endured again. But once he was reborn and his memories returned in full, the contract bound into his soul set a vicious fury smoldering in him, flaring up again and again, until he could bear it no longer.
A sister driven to take her own life by the mockery of some aged noble. Parents tortured like beasts. The people who had done nothing but insult him, trample him, and treat him as a toy. More than once he had fled from them, only to be caught and beaten within an inch of his life. And in the end, the parents who tried to shield him were sold off and put to death as well. From that moment, Hongseon's life ceased to be his own — for someone came to find him, a boy seething with nothing but rage and the hunger for revenge.
[I will make it so no one may ever stand above you. All you need do is make a contract with me.]
It was a contract offered by something nameless and ominous, but Hongseon could not refuse. A rage that wanted only to slaughter them all had swallowed him whole.
He had no way of knowing that this would become the destiny of an eternity — the fate that would make him the Heavenly Demon….
'And even if he had known — would he have refused? Back then, if he could only have crushed them beneath his heel, he would have sold his soul without a second thought.'
Hongseon could feel something violently convulsing inside him — himself, and something that was not himself. His eyes were already turning yellow and red, just like the Heavenly Demon's.
Hongseon burned alone in his own crucible, and Dang Jaeik simply watched him in silence. Something beyond the reach of words passed through the old man's eyes.
He had known the boy's destiny from the start, and still he had raised him and cared for him from the cradle. He had first taken him in with the intention of winning him over — but the heart he carried now was not the same heart as then.
"So you must walk that path after all."
"……."
"It is not something I can stop, is it."
Hongseon sank to his knees and held out the longsword lying beside him — the blade Dang Jaeik himself had bestowed upon him, back when his peerless skill had made him one of the Tang Clan's most trusted guards.
"Please go to Maam Temple. That place alone lies beyond my reach. So I beg you — lead the household and flee there, to…"
"Hongseon."
"No — just kill me! If you won't, then I will follow my fate and kill every last one of them."
I cannot bear this any longer — this heart of mine, tearing itself to shreds….
Hongseon beat his fists against his own chest.
Destiny.
Dang Jaeik could not speak. The Heavenly Demon's contract — that destiny — was once more driving Hongseon into the pit. By now, the mark announcing the Heavenly Demon's return would have flown to every last clan in the world.
Dang Jaeik's throat bobbed heavily.
"Then let me die…"
He gazed at Hongseon for a long, long moment.
"I have no intention of adding weight to your grudge."
Hongseon lifted his reddened eyes to him. The elder who had always been so gentle, so steadfast, looked strangely gaunt today, and the boy's hands clenched into fists.
Dang Jaeik withdrew the warm gaze he had fixed on the boy and looked instead at the distant mountains.
"I can protect you no longer. To shield you against every orthodox clan and family in the world — that, too, ends today."
Hongseon closed his eyes. Tears slid, drop by drop, down his cheeks.
"I am sorry. That in all your countless past lives I did not come to know it sooner, that I could not hold you close. That when you were drowning in the mire and longing for death, the hand you grasped was not mine — it was the hand of that wretched contract."
"……!"
Hongseon, who remembered it all, stared at him in shock. Dang Jaeik had known of this cursed destiny all along!
The breath caught in his throat.
He had taken him in knowing full well that one day Hongseon would slaughter every clan and every servant in them….
Why. Why on earth.
"Remember one thing."
Dang Jaeik's eyes were rimmed with red, and his smile was unmistakably his last. He held out to the boy a short dagger — the blade that marked a servant of the Tang Clan.
"Remember that there was someone who tried to become the sword that would cut that stubborn destiny of yours free."
Sohee studied Dang Jaeik's face as he finished the pages. He still seemed bewildered to learn how intimately he would stand beside the one fated to become the Heavenly Demon.
"Your purpose, Elder, is 'a regression to save your family from the Heavenly Demon.' By sheltering and raising the protagonist from his earliest years."
"…That's right."
Sohee let out a short breath.
"But a goal that small and personal won't get you through the gate. So I bent it. Just slightly. Not 'to save your family' — but 'to attempt to stop the end of the world.' It may not be the truth, but from this moment on, that is our purpose."
Her gaze hardened. From here on, not a single thread could come loose. The purpose — a regression to save the world — had to root itself firmly in Dang Jaeik's head and heart alike.
"So in the end, the Heavenly Demon's manifestation cannot be prevented."
"Because that's the author's intent. With something as vast as the Heavenly Demon's dozens of rebirths off the table, the only option is to work within it — to find a way to achieve your purpose inside that framework."
Dress it up as the grand cause of saving the world, then go home and quietly fulfill the true purpose of saving his family.
Dang Jaeik seemed to read her unspoken design perfectly; he gave a slow nod.
"……"
He drew a long breath. This deep emotional entanglement with a Heavenly Demon he had never once crossed paths with was still hard to accept.
And yet, he decided, this direction was not so bad. If it was for the sake of protecting his family — what would he not do?
Having swept through the pages once more, Dang Jaeik turned to Sohee.
"Might this be the Heavenly Demon's final rebirth? If so, then if I return and stand beside him… perhaps…"
At the unspoken question hidden beneath his words — might he truly save the world, after all? — Sohee smiled.
"It's possible. Who knows what breakthrough a Heavenly Demon who has been reborn dozens of times might find in the one life he spends at your side."
I see.
He read the pages again, and again. Somewhere along the way, he found himself sinking into the story, and nodded.
"You speak true. I will take the Heavenly Demon in and try to set him on a better path. And through that, I will stop the end of the world…"
And with those words, Dang Jaeik's eyes drifted closed of their own accord. Watching him, Sohee opened the mouth of the red fortune pouch she had brought.
In an instant, the room fell utterly silent. When the stillness settled so deep it seemed as though nothing existed in the world but Dang Jaeik with his eyes closed and Sohee seated before him, she looked at him straight on.
"Dang Jaeik, Patriarch of the Sichuan Tang Clan in the novel I Became the Immortal Heavenly Demon — desires regression."