The Other [2]

Far south in Mansai, the state where the war between the imperial army and the barbarians was occurring up, was a large desert that extended over 2000 kilometers in all directions.

Known as the Konairi Desert, it was a harsh place where sand grains were more abundant than air particles. 

During the day, the desert was a scorching hot land that required a high level of pain tolerance to travel.

But as soon as the sun sets, the desert becomes freezing cold making the weather as unforgiving as a strict and abusive father. 

In the middle of nowhere in the Konairi Desert with the moon directly above his head was a young body and his horse. The horse was lying down on its side while the boy had his back against the wall of a boulder the two had stumbled across a few hours ago.

Both horse and boy were asleep, recovering the energy they had burned during the day.

If it wasn't for the thick blanket that the boy had brought along with him, he would've been shivering throughout the night.

The boy was a person of Mansai; he had pitch-black hair darker than the night, pale and fair skin that was starting to tan from the sun, a face that looked soft and squishy but also one that was projected to become extremely handsome in the future, and underneath his closed eyelids were black eyes with greater depths than the void itself.

This boy looked eerily similar to Sunyoung who was also resting all the way up north as his first-ever battle against the barbarians had come to an end.

The two weren't just similar, they were identical.

The reason for the resemblance was that this boy was also Sunyoung; it wasn't the one up north but rather a different version who was roaming the world at the same time as the imperial soldier Sunyoung.

Which one of them was the original?

Both and neither simultaneously.

The nature of Zero's clone-making ability was that it duplicated the DNA and genetic structure of its host down to the atom and created a perfect replica that was identical to the original which made every version as original as the original.

Theoretically one of the two Sunyoungs was a clone but even if the original died, the clone was as original as the clone so that didn't matter the slightest.

The only difference between the two Sunyoungs was that this one had longer unkempt wild hair reminiscent of a wolf's mane while the imperial soldier Sunyoung had shorter hair befitting his status as a soldier.

Typically, when Sunyoung split into multiple bodies, they were their own individual person who grew separately, had their thoughts separate from the rest, and each memory they made belonged to that specific body.

However, when one dies, the closest Sunyoung absorbs their memory, growth, skills, etc. 

But that wasn't the only method of sharing these things.

As dreams served as a middle ground between life and death, they also served as a connection between the Sunyoungs, allowing the one in the desert to acquire the memories, skills, and experiences of the other Sunyoung, and vice versa.

As he opened his eyes, Sunyoung thought to himself, 'That's how it feels to take a life...'

It hadn't even been an hour since he had drifted to sleep but he had exited the dream world because he had sensed a presence watching him sleeping.

Although Sunyoung was merely a regular warrior who was still incapable of using the ki that was dormant in his dantian, his senses themselves were trained more than most.

This ability to sense someone's presence was one of the few things that his master taught him.

In a way, it was a sixth sense.

"This ability will be very useful when assassins inevitably start coming for you," his master, Ranmin, had told him the day he began teaching Sunyoung how to acquire it.

The few downsides of the ability were that it only helped him sense that he was being watched, not how many presences were there or where they were watching him from.

"Once you unlock your ki, the ability itself will also grow alongside you. You'll be able to do those things in the future. But even without ki, it's already an additional layer of armor to protect your neck."

Pretending to yawn, Sunyoung was secretly hyperfocusing his hearing to listen for any sudden movements.

It was very quiet and most wouldn't hear it because it would've been drowned out by the natural sounds of the desert but he heard a very slight shuffling of clothes behind the boulder he was resting on.

'They reacted to a fake yawn. Either they are a nervous and inexperienced ki-user or... they are a regular human like myself.

Sunyoung felt that it was more likely the latter.

Casually, he pulled the blanket off of him and muttered, "Why do I have the urge to pee now? Just when I finally fell asleep."

Sighing to make his act more convincing, he stood up.

Stretching his arm, he secretly pulled out two daggers which he kept hidden in his back.

'There's a chance they might just be innocently watching me with no bad intentions but... I can't risk the odds that they aren't hostile towards me,' he determined.

Whatever happened next, it was their fault for watching someone sleep in the middle of the night.

If they were indeed a good person/people then they should've known better than to hide their existence behind the boulder.

They should've introduced themselves by approaching him out in the open where he could see them.

The fact they had hidden their presence and were hiding behind the boulder only reinforced the idea that they had bad intentions even further.

Step. Step.

He walked forward as if searching for a spot to relieve himself.

Then suddenly, he turned around.

Step step step!

Sprinting full speed towards the boulder, he leaped into the air.

"Eh!?"

"Shoot!"

Two people, surprised by the leap, made noises. But there was also a third who remained silent.

All three men were looking up at him as he descended onto the peak of the boulder.

One of them was bald, one had a burn scar that covered the entire left side of their face, and the third was extremely short.

[They look like bandits. And if they aren't, that's a poor fashion choice.]

Agreeing with Zero, Sunyoung leaped into the air again. High up in the air, he separated into two different bodies. Then he repeated the process and the two Sunyoungs had split once more.

Four versions of Sunyoung were in the air.

"What the fuck!?" the bald bandit screamed.

"He's a ki-user!" the short one falsely concluded while raising his cutlass sword upwards; using the flat side of the sword, he blocked one of the daggers that one of the four Sunyoungs had thrown at him.

Zero didn't just copy and duplicate the genetic structure of Sunyoung's body. He had also done the same for his weapons and clothing.

That didn't mean that there now existed four versions of every item. All of the items were technically real but they would disappear if the corresponding Sunyoung died.

Only when all but one of the items remained was the item truly the real one that could continue existing even if Sunyoung was to permanently die.

But as long as the four Sunyoungs existed, their weapons were all technically real.

That meant eight daggers had been thrown. Most of them were blocked but two managed to hit their targets, stabbing into the right shoulder of the scarred bandit while the other sliced off the bald bandit's ear.

"Argh!" the bandit with a missing ear yelped.

As the four Sunyoungs landed, they pulled out their swords which were sheathed on their left hip.

Ting! Swing! Ting!

"You messed with the wrong person," Sunyoung told the bald bandit who wielded a light mace in one hand and a chain in the other. 

"I was scared at first seeing you turn into four people but... you're weaker than I thought," the bald bandit scoffed at him with a smile that reached the level of his eyes.

Ting! Thud! Bang!

Although Sunyoung had the number advantage, the reason why he didn't split even further to overwhelm them with numbers was because of the nature of Zero's cloning ability.

Whenever Sunyoung duplicated, although his skill level, proficiency in weapons, knowledge, and his five senses were untouched, his physical attributes were equally split amongst the different Sunyoungs.

These physical attributes included his strength, dexterity, endurance, stamina, constitution, agility, etc.

However, that didn't mean that each clone was physically equal.

Depending on the situation, if Sunyoung split into two then one of the two split into two once more, there would be three Sunyoungs and the one who chose not to split a second time would have the combined states of the other two.

"Help me out one of you!" the short bandit with the cutlass sword was being double-teamed and was calling for assistance.

Sunyoung chose the short bandit to double because he was the same height as Sunyoung who was a child and felt that out of the three, it'd be the easiest to deal with him first.

"We're dealing with our own bastards over here!" the scarred bandit responded.

"Die!" the bald bandit screamed as he pulled his chain which was wrapped around Sunyoung's neck. He pulled Sunyoung towards him and proceeded to smash Sunyoung's skull with his mace until he died.

About to turn around and assist his bald comrade, suddenly a new Sunyoung was created from the Sunyoung who was dealing with the scarred bandit.

"You... you demon!" the bald bandit screamed as he blocked Sunyoung's sword with his mace.

"Hahaha," Sunyoung laughed at the name he was called. "A bad person like yourself calling me a bandit. The irony."

"Fuck! I knew we should've ambushed him and stolen his horse before he woke up! You motherfuckers were worried about him being a ki-user and because of that... we're going to fuck die! We're screwed! Son of a bitch!" the scarred bandit cursed in frustration as he realized that killing the child in front of him wouldn't matter because he would be replaced by another one.

"Watch your language," the Sunyoung facing the scarred bandit jested.

'No matter how many times I die, it still feels as terrible as the last,' Sunyoung thought to himself.

After a few deaths, Sunyoung's persistence was wearing down the three bandits.

Even with his stamina reduced to a fourth, or an eighth once you consider that half of his physical attributes belonged to the imperial army Sunyoung, he still had more stamina than the bandits who were at full strength.

That was the result of all the cardio and exercises Ranmin had Sunyoung do throughout the years the two of them were together.

When the short bandit who was facing two at the same time succumbed to two swords, one in the neck and the other in his stomach, the momentum of the battle shifted drastically in Sunyoung's favor.

After another minute or so, all three bandits had died.

One by one, the four Sunyoungs began reducing in number as they began to merge back into a single body.

Once there was a single one of him left, the three separate experiences of killing a human had also merged together and Sunyoung fell to his knees, leaning his torso forward to vomit.

"Zero... how many more people do I have to kill before I become completely numb to killing people?"

[I estimate 10-15 more people.]

"Wow, that's a pretty big number," Sunyoung muttered as he walked over to the other side of the boulder where his backpack was.

Taking out the gourd water bottle, he poured a little bit of water into his mouth and then proceeded to swirl it around a bit before spitting it back out.

Wiping the excess liquid from his mouth with his forearm, Sunyoung walked back to the corpses of the three bandits.

"The three of you planned on killing me and then looting my body. Now, it's the other way around," he chuckled.

One body at a time, he rummaged through their clothes and bags.

Once there was nothing left of value to loot from them, he looked up at the night sky and used the location of the moon to estimate how many more hours of night remained.

"Let's head back to sleep." 

He was no longer sleepy after the tiring battle but he needed the rest regardless of how he felt.

Leaning back against the boulder, as he placed the blanket over him once more, he peeked at his horse, Kiara, and said, "Despite all that noise, you didn't move a single bit. How does an animal sleep this deeply?"

Kiara was a horse gifted to him by Ranmin who stated that the horse was one of the best in the land of Mansai.

Sunyoung had a habit of doubting his master's words so he took the claim with a grain of salt.

Based on his personal experience with Kiara, he was correct to do so because the horse was slower than most, ate and drank more than most, and was harder to wake up than a corpse.

The only positive was that Kiara rarely got tired and could walk for a very long time without getting tired.

Waking up just as the grains of sand in the desert were starting to heat up, Sunyoung cleaned up everything, tossed his equipment onto Kiara's back, hopped on the saddle, and began heading further south.

Hot and dusty, Sunyoung was traveling with a thin fabric wrapped around his face and he had on many layers less than he did during the night.

A little over two hours into his day, he saw in the distance another group of bandits on horseback.

He could see them attacking a caravan of merchants and their bodyguards.

"More bandits?" he muttered. "That must mean I'm getting closer to the Southern Badlands."

The Southern Badlands existed southeast of the Konairi Desert and technically, it was still a part of the desert itself despite the land being full of grass, trees, and rivers.

That place was where Sunyoung was heading towards. It was the home of the Demonic Cult.

'Do I help out or not?' he wondered. He was contemplating which choice would benefit him more.

"They might be able to guide me to the Southern Badlands directly," Sunyoung concluded as he used his leg to gesture for Kiara to speed up.