The spear had tasted Yoon Hwiyul's liver like it was hungry.
Blood pooled beneath him in the secret execution chamber far below the Murim Alliance's towering headquarters. Each heartbeat sent more of it bubbling up his throat, thick and metallic. He stared up at the man who owed him everything.
Baek Wol-seong — the quiet, calculating second-in-command whom Hwiyul had personally crowned Alliance Leader through seventeen years of forged documents, silenced witnesses, staged ambushes, and countless sleepless nights — looked down with the calm of a man who had already filed the incident away as finished business.
"You were magnificent, Secretary Yoon," Baek Wol-seong said softly. Almost regretfully. "Truly. Without you, the throne would still belong to that sanctimonious sword-saint from Mount Hua."
Hwiyul tried to speak. Only pink froth came out.
Baek Wol-seong crouched, bringing their faces close enough that Hwiyul could smell the faint cedar incense the man always wore.
"But secrets are heavier than loyalty," he continued. "And you carried mine for too long."
The spear twisted once — a practiced, economical motion — then came free in a wet rush.
Pain became everything.
As the darkness swallowed him whole, Baek Wol-seong's final words drifted down like snow:
"Tell the King of Hell the strategist died because he knew too much."
Then silence.
Until it wasn't.
A jolt ripped through him — violent, like being yanked backward through thirty years by the scruff of his soul.
Cold. Damp. The sour stink of rotting straw, river mud, and endless hunger.
Yoon Hwiyul's eyes flew open.
He was small again. Filthy. Six years old.
Lying on a pitiful layer of straw inside a shack that sagged sideways like a drunkard against the alley wall. Moonlight leaked through every crack, painting thin silver bars across his bony arms.
He remembered this night.
This exact, cursed night.
The night she almost broke.
The night before she found the strength to keep refusing.
The flimsy door of rags and splintered wood creaked open.
She stepped inside.
Tall, even when exhaustion bent her shoulders. Long black hair hung in heavy, tangled waves down her back, wild from the night wind and the hands that had tried to grab it. Her patched hemp skirt clung to wide hips and full thighs; her upper garment — once a proper blouse, now threadbare and repeatedly mended — strained against the heavy curve of her breasts. At thirty-four, hardship had etched faint lines around her eyes and mouth, yet the raw, stubborn beauty still burned beneath the grime and weariness.
She clutched an empty hemp sack to her chest like a shield.
For a long moment she simply stood there, staring at the dirt floor, breathing shallow.
Then, in a voice so small it barely crossed the room:
"…I'm sorry, Ah-yul."
The name she had given him when she carried the starving, abandoned child out of a famine ditch sixteen winters ago.
"I couldn't get anything tonight," she whispered. "Not a single coin. Not even rotten vegetables. They… they laughed when I begged. Said my face was still pretty enough, but…" Her voice cracked. "But if I wanted real money… I would have to…"
She couldn't finish.
Her knuckles whitened around the empty sack.
"I stood there for hours," she continued, almost to herself. "Thinking… maybe just once. Just tonight. Close my eyes, let one of them… and tomorrow you could eat. Tomorrow you wouldn't have to curl up so small because your stomach hurts."
Tears gathered but refused to fall yet.
She sank to her knees beside the straw mat, hair falling forward like a dark curtain.
"I'm a failure," she said, voice thick with disgust directed entirely at herself. "What kind of mother even considers it? What kind of woman thinks about selling her body while her child starves? I should be stronger. I should be better. I should—"
She stopped when she realized his eyes were open.
"Ah-yul… you're awake."
He pushed himself up on trembling arms.
She flinched as if afraid he would recoil from her.
Instead, he reached out with one small, dirty hand and touched her cheek — gently, carefully.
Her skin was cold from the night air.
"You're not a failure," he said.
His voice came out high and childish, strange after decades of giving orders in smoke-filled war rooms, yet the words carried an impossible weight.
"You're the best mother anyone could ever have."
She stared at him, stunned.
A broken, watery laugh escaped her. "Don't say that, little one. Don't lie to make me feel less ashamed. Look at this place. Look at how thin you are. I can't even—"
He shook his head.
"Ma."
The word landed soft but certain between them.
She blinked rapidly.
"Ma," he repeated, slower, letting it settle deep.
It was a word he had almost never allowed himself to say in his first life. By the time he could have spoken it with pride, he had already traded it for power, blood, and cold calculation.
Her eyes filled completely.
He kept speaking, voice quiet but steady.
"You picked me up when I was dying in a ditch. You carried me for three days without food so I could live. You gave me the only rice you found, even when your own stomach was eating itself. Every night men offer you money. Every night they look at you like meat. And every night — every single night — you come home to me instead. You choose me."
The tears finally spilled over, carving clean tracks through the dirt on her cheeks.
"You think tonight makes you weak because you thought about it," he continued. "But thinking isn't doing. You didn't do it. You walked away. You came back here. That's strength. That's more than most people have in a lifetime."
Her shoulders began to shake.
He leaned forward and wrapped his thin arms around her neck, pressing his small face against the side of her throat.
She smelled of river mud, night wind, exhaustion, and something warm beneath it all — something that had kept him alive when nothing else would.
"I don't need food tonight," he mumbled into her hair. "I just need you to keep being you. So please… don't ever think you have to sell yourself. Not for rice. Not for anything. We'll find another way."
A long, shattering sob tore out of her chest.
She pulled him close — too tight, too desperate — as though afraid the world would steal him away if she let go even a little.
"I'm sorry," she kept whispering between sobs. "I'm so sorry, my baby…"
He let her cry until the storm quieted to shuddering breaths and hiccups.
Only then did he speak again, voice muffled against her collarbone.
"Things are going to be different from now on, Ma."
She gave a small, broken laugh through her tears. "You're only six."
"Doesn't matter."
He pulled back just enough to look into her eyes.
A small, fierce, dangerous smile curved his childish mouth — the smile of the man who once orchestrated the rise of an empire and would now orchestrate its fall.
"I promise you," he said quietly.
"This time… we rise."
Her brows furrowed in confusion and faint hope.
He didn't explain.
He simply rested his forehead against hers, closed his eyes, and whispered — so soft only the two of them would ever know:
"This time… I'll tear the Murim Alliance down brick by bloody brick."
Outside, the winter wind screamed through the broken walls.
Inside the crumbling shack, a weary woman held her son.
And inside a child's fragile body, an old strategist opened his eyes once more.
And began to plan.