#📌 ficlet under cut!!

[azu1as]

【 "Righteousness"? What a joke. 】

Tang Bo stares at his captors—his own family—with a tired, embittered expression on his face.

The Dark Saint's revenge was finished. Now, he can't help but wonder what Chung Myung thinks of the monster Tang Bo become for him.

Tang Bo couldn't stop the resentment and anger that choked him after he woke up from his near-death coma.

They paraded the Mount Hua Sect as heroes for their "noble sacrifice" with a fervor that instead should have been spent on helping rebuild the weakened sect properly.

Despite being in the middle of still recovering, Tang Bo leaves the Tang Estate to help and protect his hyung's sect in the same way he had asked Chung Myung to do the same for his family.

But he saw it in the way Mount Hua's disciples carried themselves. The invisible weights.

Tang Bo saw them rummaging through their surviving archives, a large portion burnt and destroyed by the last Demonic Cult attack, and realize that they were missing after Zhongnan came to aid them.

Tang Bo realized that staying here was not enough. It simply would not be enough to protect his hyung's legacy.

He could see the sect's slow decline in the years come without a leader to guide it. But Tang Bo could not fulfill that role for them.

Perhaps he was more clouded by grief than he could recognize. Perhaps a near-death experience made him more reckless.

But if he couldn't bring the Mount Hua Sect back to the top...

He'll simply have to settle with bringing down everyone else.

The Great Sects don't see it coming. Tang Bo's poison moved faster than they could fight back.

He can't bring himself to care about the growing blood on his hands. There was no rush of satisfaction or guilt or regret. All that was left was apathy.

Maybe it was because Chung Myung was dead.

And with him, the part of Tang Bo that was human enough to care.

It was a relief, almost, when the Tang Family finally found him and captured him. His hands were cut off for his crimes.

But Tang Bo couldn't bring himself to care. He was done and all he wished for was silence.

But it wouldn't be granted to him as his powerful cultivation punished him in a curse of immortality.

An unwanted endless lifetime for all the lives he had cut short. Funny.

It takes a century before he is freed from his isolation by a familiar, albeit too young, face.

"Ah, you're truly going to break my heart if you continue wearing such a wretched expression, hyung-nim."

It seemed that fate made him wait for a reason, at least.