Gaining A Power

I drew the chilly evening air deep into my chest. A few breaths shook off the distaste the sight of Gu Jin-ha had raised in me; it faded the way an insect’s sting does, unpleasant for a moment and then gone from the memory altogether.

By that reckoning, Gu Jin-ha was an insect as far as I was concerned.

By the time I reached Namgung Mu-baek’s quarters there was a commotion going on loud enough to carry out past the moon gate.

“Hey! Being Master Scholar Cheon’s cousin is no excuse. You can’t just talk down to people like that.”

“Why can’t I? You get to and I don’t? If you want me to speak politely to you, then you speak politely to me.”

“Whoaa! This brat really is a nasty piece of work. How a man like Master Scholar Cheon ends up with a cousin like you, I’ll never know. Even if you did lose your memory, your true nature ought to still be in there.”

“Listen to who’s talking. You’re the one who took one look at me, wrote me off as a little kid, and dropped the formalities first.”

Watching Cheon Yeo-seol trade arguments with Namgung Mu-baek, all I could do was stare.

“Eh? Master Scholar Cheon. Is this brat really of Master Scholar Cheon’s blood? She has no manners whatsoever.”

“How very refined of you, squabbling with a brat like me. What’s with you, anyway, having to beat me no matter what?”

Cheon Yeo-seol was a girl a little past ten, so her I could understand. Namgung Mu-baek, fighting at the same mental age, struck me as a man with a long road still ahead of him.

“Young master, Yeo-seol was a good-natured child by nature, and losing her memory has left her behaving like an infant. Do bear with her.”

I turned to Yeo-seol.

“Yeo-seol, apologize to the young master. You don’t speak to your elders any way you please.”

“Brother, they say you don’t have to treat a person who ate his years through his arsehole like a grown-up. That one looks like he ate his years through his arsehole.”

“You — where did you hear that?”

The trouble was that a coarse thing said with a face that sweet did not sound coarse.

“I heard people saying it in the street.”

“Master Scholar Cheon. You see that? She talks to me like that — how am I not supposed to be angry?”

“Apologize anyway. The young master is good to your Brother.”

“How?”

That set Namgung Mu-baek off.

“‘How,’ she says. I gave your Brother money, eh? Taught him the oral formula of a martial art, eh? Showed him around North Road when he first came, eh? That is the sort of man I am.”

“Is that true?”

“That’s right.”

Every one of those, of course, was something Namgung Mu-baek had set in motion while trying to put one over on me. It was true enough, all the same, that I had come out of them the better.

“Thank you.”

Just as Namgung Mu-baek was about to say something, Cheon Yeo-seol bent at the waist and spoke with perfect courtesy.

“Eh?”

“I was young and did not understand. I did not know you were so fine a gentleman.”

“Hahaha. Well. Just so. Little kids don’t understand grown-up affairs.”

Namgung Mu-baek let out an awkward laugh, and Cheon Yeo-seol went on.

“—is what you thought I’d say? I’ve already heard about it. Every one of those things happened because you were trying to do my Brother harm. Don’t come peddling that here.”

Cheon Yeo-seol had evidently picked up a great many turns of phrase in the street, and it worried me.

Eun-bi came toward us with refreshments, thought better of it, and quietly took herself out of sight.

A misunderstanding built up between people is bound to come loose once enough time has passed. Looking at these two, though, I did not think time would improve matters.

They were, near enough, a big hellion and a little hellion.

The quarrel showed no sign of ending, so I separated the pair of them.

“Young master, a word with me. Yeo-seol, go inside and rest.”

Today, if only for Cheon Yeo-seol’s sake, I meant to absorb Namgung Mu-baek’s energy.

“How did the errand to Miss Jong turn out?”

At my question Namgung Mu-baek hesitated.

“Miss Jong was out, so she wasn’t at the clinic. Tsk — no lady physicians either, the place was empty as anything.”

Namgung Mu-baek’s voice came out sullen, as though the wasted trip did not sit well with him. Hearing it, a thought crossed my mind.

“And the patients?”

“They had shut the clinic altogether, so the patients came and went away again.”

Now that I had heard it, their movements looked suspicious to me. There had been any number of lady physicians at that clinic, and not one of them was to be seen, which was strange in itself. If the physician had gone out on a house call, the lady physicians ought to have been there.

The Saintess, who appeared in Hefei out of nowhere a year ago. And the doors shut all at once, just at the moment Cheon Yeo-seol appears. Is this really coincidence?

And on top of it, the Blood Cult and the Demonic Cult had turned up the instant Cheon Yeo-seol did.

Can I write this off as coincidence as well?

Coincidence piled up often enough becomes necessity.

Cheon Yeo-seol had been born with the Heavenly Immortal Divine Meridian, and I felt sure her appearance was bound up with these people. Not least when men who shy away from a clash with the Murim Alliance were moving this openly.

I looked hard at Namgung Mu-baek’s face.

“Young master, your color is not good.”

“Ah, that is from having had a round with Master Scholar’s cousin. It got me worked up.”

I answered with a smile.

“That may be, but let us take your pulse all the same. There may be something wrong with the body.”

I had taken his pulse and examined him now and then before, in preparation for a moment exactly like this, so Namgung Mu-baek suspected nothing.

I absorbed Namgung Mu-baek’s Wuqu Star spirit energy, and for an instant the spirit energy inside my own body swelled explosively.

Namgung Mu-baek, for his part, cracked his neck from side to side and muttered.

“Ah — my head feels clear somehow, and my spirits have picked up. Why would that be?”

That was only to be expected. All his life the Wuqu Star’s energy had worked in him as madness, and merely drawing that mad energy out of him had brought him mental calm.

“Training while the mind is clear like this brings a great deal of understanding. I shall go and train.”

As it happened I had been wanting to send Namgung Mu-baek off quickly myself. He went to the training ground of his own accord, and I sat down in my room and put everything I had into gathering the spirit energy in.

Back when I absorbed Paeng So-un’s Lucun Star energy I had not really understood, because that energy had lain quietly asleep inside my body. I had only ever used the spirit energy as a vibration when I needed it and made a Void Shattering Palm of it, which brought me as far as handling a martial artist of the second-rate level. Beyond that I could bring out nothing, and a certain regret had stayed with me.

My expectations of the Seven Stars and Seven Primes wheel-energies rose as time went on.

Nobody knows exactly what power arises as those wheel-energies are added one by one. It differs from man to man, but the teaching holds that when the spirit energy first turns, a similar power manifests in everyone. That alone was of enormous practical use to me.

The moment I took Namgung Mu-baek’s Wuqu Star energy into my body, the two energies answered each other and began to move.

This is…

The two of them were moving strangely.

They are turning.

The Lucun Star’s energy, which had never once stirred while it was alone in me, took to the meridians and began turning slowly along them. And the Wuqu Star’s energy turned counter to it. I had known the energies of the Seven Stars and Seven Primes well enough, but having it happen inside my own body was a strange feeling.

Spirit energy moving by the principle of the Seven Stars and Seven Primes.

Watching the two turn against each other and make vitality in the body, I grasped at last that the spirit energy of the Seven Stars and Seven Primes had become a wheel-energy.

The spirit energy of the Seven Stars and Seven Primes is a spirit energy that nothing but the Heavenly Martial Sacred Body can set going, so in the whole murim there is nobody who holds it but me.

I had become the one and only man in the world who held it.

Shall I raise the speed of the turning? See whether it really goes as Esoteric Buddhism says.

Holding the two spirit energies in mind, I raised the speed at which the wheel-energies turned. Vitality rose inside my body, and strength surged up in me all at once.

I went over to the ornamental boulder standing in the corner of the room, a scholar’s rock about the size of a small child.¹ White mineral ran through it from top to bottom so that it called a waterfall to mind, and it was thick enough that three or four strong grown men together would have struggled to get it off the ground.

Can I lift this?

What a man gains first, once the wheel-energies of the Seven Stars and Seven Primes begin to turn, is strength and agility. The powers gained from the second onward cannot be pinned down at all, and are so various that the ones discovered so far were said to run to several dozen. Now I could find out whether the Esoteric Buddhist book had it right.

I got my arms around the stone and lifted.

“Nnngh, mm?”

The instant I went to put my strength into it, the stone came up light. I set it down again.

— Clunk!

The stand under the scholar’s rock shook as though it would split.

“Hold on. Let us not hug it — let us try it with both hands.”

It had come up easily, perhaps because I had held it against me, so this time I took the stone in both hands and lifted. It came up with about the heft of a radish coming out of the ground.

“This much?”

This time I caught the stone’s center of weight with one hand and lifted.

“Hnngh!”

It took about the force of pulling up a flowering plant. Holding the turning of the wheel-energies in mind, I raised the speed.

“Ngh!”

I lifted the stone with about the force of taking a fistful of grass and pulling it up. Raising and lowering that stone one-handed put no strain on the muscles at all.

It is spirit energy lifting the stone and not muscle — that is why there is no strain.

I had read as much in the Esoteric Buddhist book. Feeling it in my own body was another matter; the strength was not an easy thing to take in.

So this is why they said a man who acquires every one of the Seven Stars and Seven Primes’ wheel-energies is no different from an immortal. I see it now. And this is the force of it with a mere two wheel-energies.

The faster the wheel-energies turned, the greater the strength I could bring out. And then a thought came to me.

What if I applied this strength to swordplay? That would be heavy swordsmanship straight away, and if I put the weight on agility it would be swift swordsmanship. In sword learning, heavy swordsmanship and swift swordsmanship are levels of attainment no man reaches at once — and I can use the two of them at the same time. Heavy swordsmanship wielded like swift.

I am no martial artist, and yet that one thought set my heart beating. Scholar though I am, it meant I could command a martial learning the history of the murim had never held. How should a man not be moved by that?

If I swing heavy swordsmanship like swift, who is going to stop it?

Merely imagining it rang through my whole body.

If you had to divide the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique up, its opening stretch is swift swordsmanship, its middle stretch heavy swordsmanship, and its closing stretch nearer to illusion swordsmanship. Holding the principles of all three sword techniques as it does, the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique can fairly be called the last word among every sword technique there is.

My thinking ran on further.

But there has never yet been a martial artist of the Namgung Clan who became the first swordsman under heaven with the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique. Because there has never been a martial artist who could properly command the principles of those three swords at once.

Only now did I see where the sense of disjunction came from, the one I had felt every time I watched the Namgung Clan’s martial artists train.

Having devised this great Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique and then having no martial artist able to command the three principles at once, they must have devised a sword learning like the Emperor’s Sword Form.

Every Namgung man who trained in the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique had taken up whichever of heavy, swift and illusion swordsmanship suited his own bent, and trained in that alone. Reduced to one of the three, the art fell of itself into an incomplete sword technique.

I brought a wooden sword out of the room and took up a stance. Then I set the wheel-energies turning, put strength and agility into play together, and unfolded a move of the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique.

Having unfolded the move, I marveled at it myself. With strength and speed added to it, the art gave off the beauty that had been in it all along. In the space I had passed through, an azure dragon made of spirit force had taken faint shape.

The art’s oral formula said that when a sword stroke is completed the shape of an azure dragon appears, and until now I had taken that explanation for an exaggeration.

“It wasn’t bluster. The formula’s explanation was real.”

All this while I had understood the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique’s oral formula and unfolded it, and still felt something wanting in the way it came together. And to think what was wanting was strength and agility.

And then one more thought came to me.

“If I add strength and speed and unfold the Plum Blossom Sword Technique, would plum blossoms appear?”

I had seen the oral formula of the Twenty-Four Plum Blossoms Sword Technique in the secret archive during my time at the Murim Alliance, and it carried that same explanation. The Plum Blossom Sword Technique leaned toward illusion swordsmanship, while the Twenty-Four Plum Blossoms added the principle of swift swordsmanship on top of illusion.

I felt I understood a little now why a martial artist sinks into martial learning. Advancing and coming to understand a little at a time ran, in its own way, along one vein with the awakening that comes in scholarship.

I gripped the wooden sword and took the opening posture of the Twenty-Four Plum Blossoms Sword Technique. Just as I set the wheel-energies turning and was about to unfold the move, the sound of something splitting the air came from behind me.

— Whoom! Whoom! Whiiing!

“Mm?”

I turned around. There stood Cheon Yeo-seol with a stick in her hand, unfolding the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique I had just unfolded. She was carrying the first move, Myriad Illusions in a Single Flash, and the second move, Myriad Changes in a Single Merging, through to perfection.

I could see the qi of nature around her drawing a round circle with her at its center and going into her. The qi of nature is close to spirit energy, which was why I could see it.

“Madness! Heavenly Immortal Divine Meridian or not, a small child watches a move this abstruse once and copies it? A move with strength and agility worked into it, no less!”

Cheon Yeo-seol, who had been tilting her head, looked over at me and spoke.

“Brother, from here to here.”

The move she was whipping the stick through was the middle form of the second move, Myriad Changes in a Single Merging.

“Is it right to shift the force to the left here? When I shift it to the right, something comes shooting out of my arm.”

And with that she swung the stick at a flowering plant. The stick never so much as touched it, and the plant’s neck came away with a light snap.

“Hold on! Wait! Put the stick down. Yeo-seol.”

I went over and looked at the flower of the fallen plant. The cut face was clean, as though a keen blade had sheared it.

This — was this cut with sword qi?

I had caught a glimpse of a transparent energy bursting out of the stick, and even so I could not make myself call it sword qi.

A girl a little past ten who knew no martial arts, sending sword qi out of a stick, bordered on delusion.