Chen Mu-mun

Chen Mu-mun, better known by the hunter alias Venomous Snake, is the master of the martial guild that shares his displayed name. His personal name is Liao Fan. A one-eyed Chinese swordsman who begins as one of Babylon's strongest guild leaders, he inherits the last orthodox lineage of a ruined martial world, governs the oni race through possessed representatives, and eventually defines righteousness as protecting the small happiness by which ordinary people endure.

Biography

The one-eyed master of Babylon

Venomous Snake is introduced as Babylon's fifth-ranked hunter and the guild master of Chen Mu-mun. He had helped clear the second floor, carried an eye injury from challenging Marcus Calenberry, and built a combat guild whose members trained rather than swinging their strength recklessly through the streets. His standing is therefore founded on both personal martial ability and the responsibility of organizing other fighters, even though his coarse speech and impatience make him look less calculating than the other great guild leaders. (Chapters 11, 18, and 20–21)

When Kim Gong-ja clears the tenth floor, Venomous Snake first approaches him as a valuable recruit. He offers a trainer's position, recognizes that the newcomer is too capable to be manipulated by an ordinary bidding contest, and accepts Gong-ja's card game as a practical way to settle competing guild claims. Although his pride makes him easy to provoke, he agrees to Gong-ja joining all the guilds and becomes part of the coalition rather than insisting that Chen Mu-mun monopolize the new hunter. (Chapters 19–21)

The Aegim stages turn that coalition into shared government. Venomous Snake chooses the role of Head Bodyguard, fights on the front line, and is forced to lead the terrified imperial soldiers attached to his office rather than treat them as disposable non-player characters. He also opposes hunters who want the rewards of strength without responsibility, arguing that powerful people who withheld help had worsened the casualties on earlier floors. These choices establish the tension that later shapes his martial path: he loves competition, but repeatedly accepts that strength binds him to the people standing behind him. (Chapters 24, 26, and 28–30)

The last disciple of the orthodox path

In the Chronicles of the Heavenly Demon Apocalypse, Venomous Snake enters a world where martial artists have become jiangshi and the final leaders of the orthodox and demonic factions are slowly dying. He carries the debilitated Martial Alliance Leader Namgung Un, protects the Medicine King during repeated attempts, and witnesses Gong-ja pursue So Baek-hyang's demonic lineage. When Namgung Un asks him to become the old man's last disciple, Venomous Snake accepts partly because the master is skilled and partly because giving him a successor gives both Namgung Un and So Baek-hyang a reason to complete their long contest as themselves. (Chapters 63–69 and 76–79)

As Namgung Un's disciple, Venomous Snake becomes the proxy of the orthodox faction opposite Gong-ja. During their snowy-field spar, he rapidly applies his master's instructions, combining the Butterfly Sword, Precept of Life and Death, Rotten Leaf Earth Technique, and the habits of his own everyday martial arts. Neither man fights to kill. Their clash instead lets the dying masters see their traditions continue in new bodies, and it ends only when both disciples are too exhausted to lift their swords. (Chapter 77)

The conclusion leaves Venomous Snake with an institution to preserve as well as techniques to practice. After Gong-ja's recreated final battle gives the old martial world an ending, Venomous Snake moves Chen Mu-mun's entire headquarters to the twenty-second floor, installs Namgung Un as its senior guardian, and turns the jiangshi-filled territory into the guild's new base. He coordinates with Gong-ja, the Alchemist, and the Medicine King so that hunters pass through vaccine and medical services on their way there, making inheritance a working settlement rather than a ceremonial title. (Chapters 80–88)

A guild leader among changing worlds

Venomous Snake continues to serve as one of the coalition's dependable combat leaders through the academy, demon-world, and early civilization stages. His role is often less spectacular than Gong-ja's, but it is institutional: Chen Mu-mun supplies fighters, takes part in major decisions, and helps stabilize the floors the coalition has opened. In private, Liao Fan remains absorbed in martial arts and genre novels, yet he is also one of the first leaders to entrust Gong-ja with his real name, an intimacy that distinguishes the person from the public alias and guild office. (Chapters 91–123, 151–169)

That trust does not remove rivalry. Liao Fan measures himself against Gong-ja's rapidly growing martial art and feels increasingly displaced by a younger hunter who seems better suited to both heroism and the orthodox ideal. His jealousy is not initially resolved through conversation; it becomes pressure to find a sword and a purpose that are actually his rather than an imitation of Namgung Un, Gong-ja, or the heroes in the stories he reads. (Chapters 157–169 and 274–276)

The oni race and seven borrowed bodies

On the race stages, Venomous Snake becomes the god responsible for the oni, also translated as the Noble Race. The oni heroes he possesses are not alternate names or permanent bodies of Liao Fan: Sword Princess, Silent Swordsman, and the other members of the Seven Heroes remain distinct oni whose bodies he operates through the stage's possession authority. By using multiple possession, he divides his awareness among all seven at once, fights through their different bodies and weapons, and gives the oni army several player-guided champions on the same battlefield. (Chapters 243–246)

He refuses Gong-ja's request that the oni surrender to Uburka's goblins. Liao Fan knows that an early surrender would reduce casualties, but the oni have repeatedly lost ground to other civilizations and regard the war as a mutually accepted contest over collective pride. Because his children have “only lost,” he cannot order them to accept another humiliation. The decision is protective and dangerous at once: he fights to keep their dignity from being erased, but his intervention escalates a war that the oni bodies themselves must suffer. (Chapters 243–245)

Uburka demonstrates the limit of numerical possession by breaking one hero's leg with a flicked stone and deterring the others. More seriously, splitting himself among many bodies consumes Liao Fan's mental strength. As anger overtakes him, the separate consciousnesses and the strain of controlling them push his aura into Disharmony, turning the protection of the oni into an unstable obsession. The condition belongs to Liao Fan, not to the possessed heroes, and its cost prevents multiple possession from functioning as effortless multiplication. (Chapters 243 and 248)

After the conflict, Liao Fan forfeits the stage rather than let the rivalry destroy the two races. Before the separation becomes final, he calls out his real name and demands that Gong-ja remember it and use it at their next meeting. The gesture changes their conflict from two titles colliding into a continuing relationship between people: Liao Fan accepts defeat without abandoning the intention to answer it through his own life and martial art. (Chapters 249–251)

Seclusion and the righteousness of ordinary happiness

Liao Fan receives decades of subjective time for secluded training, but his first efforts fail because they imitate heroic clichés rather than reveal his own nature. He fasts for sixty days, contemplates scenery, and tries to force himself into the image of a solitary orthodox master. After hundreds of days, he admits that grand mountains and waterfalls move him less than watching people commute, work, complain, drink, and return home. His jealousy of Gong-ja remains, but the failed training strips away the excuse that borrowed ideals can answer it. (Chapters 274 and 276–277)

He finds his answer in a fairy blacksmith who makes unbearable labor survivable by turning hammer strokes and hidden curses into a private rhythm. Liao Fan works beside him without using aura to trivialize the task, then spends more than twenty-two thousand days living as a farmer, bank employee, miner, blacksmith, and other ordinary workers among several races. These lives teach him that a brief song, drink, dance, or joke after work is not false happiness merely because suffering returns tomorrow. He decides that righteousness is recognizing and protecting that small proof that people still want to live. (Chapters 277–279)

His rematch with Gong-ja becomes the 991st battle between the orthodox and demonic paths. Liao Fan's sword carries the rhythm of the work and lives he experienced, allowing one body to express many learned weapons, occupations, and intentions. He challenges the Infernal Heavens for dwelling on screams without being broad enough to shelter people who are suffering yet still find ordinary joy. Even while outmatched by Gong-ja's autonomous aura swords, he remains lucid and happy to fight, showing that his former Disharmony has been replaced by a chosen doctrine rather than suppressed jealousy. (Chapters 278–281)

The duel ends in a mutual check: Gong-ja's blade stops at Liao Fan's neck while Liao Fan's fist stops at Gong-ja's heart. Liao Fan then offers a contest that may last centuries. He will remain close enough to restrain or kill Gong-ja if the Demonic Sect leader ever falls into Disharmony and turns the Death King Family against the world. Gong-ja accepts the challenge and thanks him, making Liao Fan not merely a rival seeking victory but the orthodox safeguard whom Gong-ja authorizes to oppose him. (Chapters 281–282)

Rival, judge, and continuing guild master

After the duel, Liao Fan returns to coalition life without losing the insight gained in seclusion. He helps organize the Tower's public meetings, celebrates with the other guild leaders, and later judges Gong-ja's seventy-third-floor trial in Martial Heaven. Because their decisive life-or-death contest has already ended in his defeat, he passes Gong-ja immediately rather than manufacture another obstacle for pride's sake. (Chapters 283–287 and 350)

Chen Mu-mun also grows beyond its original human membership. Oni followers enter the guild and walk Babylon beside goblins and people from other opened worlds, while Liao Fan continues living with the coalition in its shared residence. His home and guild responsibilities therefore join the two parts of his race-stage experience: he remains the Chinese master of a Babylon guild, but the oni bodies he once borrowed now belong to people who can join that institution in their own names. (Chapters 364 and 371–376)

When a prophecy identifies Mutia as a future enemy of Gong-ja, Liao Fan approaches the constellation himself. He activates Unparalleled Under Heaven to read her predicted movements, but cancels it when he judges that her forged anti-regressor weapon was an accidental product she herself rejects. Rather than force a fight, he offers his experience as a blacksmith and helps her create the intended tool. He later returns to Babylon and reports what happened, resolving the panic without turning prophecy into a self-fulfilling war. (Chapters 390 and 399)

By the end of the supplied corpus, Liao Fan is alive and remains Chen Mu-mun's guild master. He is simultaneously Gong-ja's friend, rival, housemate, and pledged check against Disharmony. The title Venomous Snake still identifies a blunt, competitive swordsman, but the path beneath it now rests on remembered labor and the conviction that people who have endured another day deserve the space to rest. (Chapters 371–399)

Appearance and personality

Liao Fan is a Chinese man with a strong martial build, thick eyebrows, and only one functioning eye. He wears an eye patch over the injury associated with his old challenge to Marcus Calenberry, and his remaining eye is repeatedly used to convey shock, focus, and killing intent. Later chapters describe his hair as gray. The oni heroes he possesses vary widely in age, sex, size, and appearance; none of those borrowed bodies should be used as Liao Fan's own physical description. (Chapters 20, 77, 243–244, and 390)

He is loud, profane, competitive, emotionally transparent, and more comfortable with a duel than an abstract plan. He reads martial-arts and genre fiction, enjoys dramatic hidden identities, and is prone to trying storybook training methods even when they do not suit him. Beneath the comic impatience is a strong sense of debt and responsibility: he accepts Namgung Un to ease the old masters' ending, refuses to abandon the oni when they have lost repeatedly, and turns jealousy of Gong-ja into open training rather than covert sabotage. (Chapters 21, 79, 243–251, and 276–282)

His mature outlook is neither pure optimism nor the Infernal Heavens' focus on extreme suffering. Liao Fan believes ordinary people may hate their work, complain that they want to die, and still find a real reason to continue in a small pleasure after the day ends. He remains jealous, abrasive, and fond of fighting; his development lies in giving those qualities a constructive target. He strives to surpass Gong-ja while standing close enough to stop him, treating rivalry as labor performed for the person and world he refuses to abandon. (Chapters 279–282)

Abilities and skills

Liao Fan is one of Babylon's highest-ranked martial artists. His abilities combine practiced swordsmanship and aura with a predictive hunter skill, techniques inherited from Namgung Un, and temporary authorities supplied by specific stages.

Swordsmanship and aura

Liao Fan can reinforce his body and weapons with aura, move at speeds that ordinary observers cannot follow, and fight with swords, twin blades, gauntlets, improvised tools, and unarmed strikes. His basic style is fluid and close-ranged, using changes of level, twisting contact, pursuit, and attacks that rise like a striking snake. He can read an opponent's shift from counterattack to evasion and adapt his next movement without pausing. (Chapter 77)

His endurance is as important as his technique. He continues fighting through numerous cuts, blood loss, and exhaustion, and can keep several layers of offense and defense in mind at once. This does not make him invulnerable: Gong-ja repeatedly wounds and overwhelms him, Uburka defeats a possessed hero before it can close the distance, and Liao Fan's final duel ends only because both men stop at mutually fatal positions. (Chapters 77, 243, and 278–282)

Namgung Un's orthodox inheritance

As Namgung Un's final disciple, Liao Fan learns the orthodox leader's principles and techniques. Named instructions include the Butterfly Sword, Precept of Life and Death, and Rotten Leaf Earth Technique, which he can combine with the tricks of his preexisting martial arts. He also reproduces the deeper bodily method Namgung Un used while dying, directing muscle and internal force with enough precision to make decaying or exhausted movement into deliberate technique. (Chapters 77, 79–80, and 275)

The inheritance is not a fixed list of attacks. Namgung Un teaches that martial art remains as long as the heart remains, and Liao Fan's later progression follows that principle by finding a worldview his sword can carry. His orthodox art eventually communicates the rhythms of farmers, smiths, laborers, and other people whose work he personally lives through. Its effectiveness depends on experience and comprehension; copying the outward movement without the life behind it would miss the method he spends decades developing. (Chapters 79 and 275–281)

Multiple possession

Multiple Reincarnation Possession is an SSS-rank authority Liao Fan uses as the oni race's player-god during the civilization stages. It lets him possess a chosen person only within one minute of that person's death; when the possessed body dies, his consciousness returns to the original mind. He applies the authority across the freshly dead bodies of the Seven Heroes and operates them simultaneously. Because each hero has a different physique and equipment, the authority expands the number of positions, weapon types, and tactics he can employ at once. The possessed Sword Princess, Silent Swordsman, and their companions remain distinct oni bodies rather than transformations or aliases of Liao Fan. (Chapters 242–246)

The authority carries severe mental cost. Dividing one consciousness among many bodies drains his mental strength, and the strain rises as he tries to control more fragments. Rage and identification with the oni's losses push him into Disharmony, making the multiplied force less stable and his judgment more dangerous. It is also stage-bound in the supplied corpus: after leaving the race conflict, Liao Fan fights in his own body and is not shown freely producing seven physical copies of himself elsewhere. (Chapters 245 and 248–251)

The long-term benefit is experience rather than permanent extra bodies. Liao Fan learns the movements of many weapons and lives through roles across the stage's accelerated time. In his later duel, those accumulated wills and techniques emerge from his single body: a blacksmith's hammer-like fist, a farmer's sickle, scissors, nets, swords, and other forms become possible responses. This is the inverse of the Seven Heroes display—many bodies once carried one divided will, while one mature body later carries lessons gathered from many lives. (Chapters 279–281)

Unparalleled Under Heaven

Unparalleled Under Heaven is Liao Fan's SS-rank predictive skill. When activated, it shows an opponent's anticipated movements so that he can choose a response in advance, functioning like seeing the other side's move before committing his own. In an expert martial artist's hands, the information supports counters, traps, and rapid exchanges rather than replacing the need to execute them. (Chapter 390)

Prediction is not automatic victory. Liao Fan still needs enough speed, strength, positioning, and technique to answer what he sees, and the skill's displayed information must be interpreted in context. During his meeting with Mutia, he deactivates it voluntarily after deciding that cooperation better serves the prophecy than combat. The corpus does not establish that it reads thoughts, guarantees an opponent cannot change course, or overcomes an otherwise impossible difference in power. (Chapter 390)

Disharmony and recovery

Disharmony is not a power-up Liao Fan controls safely. It appears when the strain of multiple possession, anger, and unresolved jealousy distort his aura and identity. The state intensifies his hostility but threatens sober judgment, exactly the failure he later promises to prevent in Gong-ja. Its presence during the oni war explains why multiplying his bodies cannot be treated as an unlimited tactical benefit. (Chapter 248)

His recovery comes through prolonged self-examination and ordinary labor rather than a named cleansing skill. By testing false ideals, living through difficult work, and identifying the happiness he genuinely wants to protect, he can wield strong emotion without losing himself. In the 991st duel, his jealousy remains visible, but his eyes and laughter stay clear; the emotion has become fuel for a chosen contest instead of a force that fractures his mind. (Chapters 276–282)

Power progression

Relationships

• Kim Gong-ja: Liao Fan's ally, martial rival, and the person he vows to restrain if the Infernal Heavens falls into Disharmony. Their relationship develops from guild recruitment to inherited factional rivalry, race-stage opposition, mutual recognition by real name, and a centuries-long promise to remain close enough to fight.
• Namgung Un: Liao Fan's master and the last leader of the ruined orthodox martial world. Liao Fan accepts his lineage, preserves him as Chen Mu-mun's senior guardian, and turns the inherited techniques into a doctrine grounded in ordinary labor.
• So Baek-hyang: The Heavenly Demon opposite Namgung Un and the source of Gong-ja's demonic lineage. Liao Fan does not become her disciple; he serves as the orthodox proxy whose fights with Gong-ja allow their masters' contest to continue without confusing the two traditions.
• Uburka: The goblin champion whose overwhelming strength stops the oni advance. Uburka defeats one possessed oni hero, exposes the limit of Liao Fan's multiplied bodies, and forces him to confront the cost of defending his race through escalation.
• Shiny: Gong-ja's sentient sword and later Liao Fan's romantic partner. Their relationship begins after the major race-stage duel and gives Liao Fan a bond independent of his rivalry with Gong-ja.

Items

Liao Fan uses swords, twin blades, aura-reinforced gauntlets, and work tools, but the supplied corpus does not establish a single named personal weapon that consistently belongs to him. His oni-stage weapons belong to the distinct heroes whose bodies he possesses, and Unparalleled Under Heaven and multiple possession are skills or authorities rather than items.