People Change

“And what has brought the clan head here?”

Namgung Hak’s eyes were still on the room Yeo-seol had disappeared into. I pressed him, curious what could have brought the clan head here in person.

“A father calls in at his own son’s quarters. Is that so strange?”

“Ah. No, not at all.”

“Though it is not Mu-baek I came to see. When Scholar Gu came yesterday, I knew no better and seated Scholar Cheon with us, and it seems I put him to shame for nothing. I was sorry for it, and so I have come.”

“He is not a man I am bound to closely enough to warrant that much concern. Whatever ill feeling there was, I forgot it long ago.”

“Ho ho ho. Is that so? Was it your sister’s business, then, that you wished to see me about?”

“Yes. It seems I shall have to keep my sister with me for a while, until her memory comes back.”

“Why ask about a thing so obvious? The Namgung Clan is Scholar Cheon’s own house, for as long as he likes. Use whatever you please and be at your ease.”

Namgung Hak leaned in close and whispered.

“Is Scholar Cheon not this house’s Protector of the Person?”

“Ah.”

I gave an embarrassed laugh, and Namgung Hak went serious.

“I did not give you the Protector’s plaque as a jest. There is authority to match it.”

“I am always grateful for the clan head’s consideration.”

I bowed from the waist at his thoughtfulness. At that the window of my quarters flew open, and Cheon Yeo-seol shouted.

“Old man! Don’t you go bullying my Brother!”

Yeo-seol’s words drew a wry smile out of me.

“That little…”

I glared at her, and she shut the window in a hurry. It struck me again that what Yeo-seol needed before anything else was manners, and I sighed.

For several days after that I schooled Yeo-seol, repeating the same nagging things over and over. What she needed now was not to read or to write but to know, straight away, the position she was in.

“Yeo-seol. If you go on swinging a stick about any way you please, the shit-eating people will come and take you away.”

“This isn’t allowed either?”

I looked down at the ground where she was standing. A great many flying insects lay heaped dead about her feet.

“Those ones bully the flowers.”

“They’re not bullying them. They came to play.”

“Oh. Those bugs came to play with the flowers?”

“Of course. Flowers can’t move; they only stay where they are. So the insects that can fly come to the flowers to play.”

I went on.

“Would you want to kill a person who came to play with you?”

“No.”

“Then no swinging the stick, whatever happens.”

Seeing the insects lying dead, cut clean through, put gooseflesh on me. I was watching with my own eyes a small girl draw out sword qi that a man must be a first-rate master to draw out at all, and still I could not make sense of it.

Thanks to several more days of teaching that came near to brainwashing, Yeo-seol stopped picking up sticks. I lied and told her sticks smelled of shit, which kept her from taking hold of one. I warned her, over and over, about every way she might show her power without thinking, and taught her manners besides. She had no memory and next to no schooling behind her, so at first it was chanting a sutra into a cow’s ear; now, little by little, it was beginning to tell.

Namgung Hak, having heard Gu Jin-ha’s report, put men out to look for the Demonic Cult and Blood Cult crowds. No movement of theirs worth the name had been made out yet, but he kept a fighting body standing ready to go out at any moment. The Murim Alliance’s White Tiger Corps and Inspection Corps had thrown themselves into the search, and they had nothing to show for it either.

“Keep the Namgung Demon-Repelling Corps standing ready at all times. There is no telling when they may have to march.”

Just as the Namgung Clan had its Demon-Repelling Garden, so it kept an armed body able to face the Demonic Cult or the unorthodox sects.

Namgung Hak heard out the reports from the intelligence work and left the clan head’s hall. On the way it struck him that he wanted to see the darling child he had met the other day, and he turned his steps toward Scholar Cheon’s quarters. He found her sitting in the flower bed watching a butterfly, and he smiled.

Yeo-seol was crunching her way through a piece of scorched rice and looking at the flowers when a butterfly settled on one, and she picked up a twig that had fallen on the ground.

She was about to swing the twig at the butterfly when her Brother’s words came back to her, and she muttered.

“Did you come to play with the flowers too? If you came to play, then Brother said I mustn’t swing wooden chopsticks either.”

Yeo-seol let the twig drop. When she did not do as she was told, Brother gave her nothing to eat. She wanted badly to cut the butterfly in two with it, but she disliked the look of something like sorrow in her Brother’s eyes, and she threw the twig away.

“The butterfly is a pretty thing, is it not?”

Namgung Hak asked it when the girl went on staring at the butterfly for a long while.

“Dunno.”

“You do not know? Why is that?”

“Because you can’t see a butterfly’s face.”

She could not call it pretty because she could not see its face, and at that Namgung Hak snorted out a laugh.

“Why has the old gentleman come again?”

The name she called him by had changed, and Namgung Hak laughed heartily.

“Before, it was ‘old man.’”

“Brother said so. He said calling an old person an old man hurts their feelings. I learned that old people are to be respected.”

“And so it is ‘old gentleman’ now?”

“Mm.”

“That is not so bad either. Far better than being a hellion’s father.”

“But that one’s just the truth, so the old gentleman mustn’t feel bad about it. When I break a dish and Brother scolds me and calls me a fool, I put up with it too. You can’t be angry at something that’s true.”

“Just so. That is a fair thing to say.”

“Did you come to bully Brother?”

“I did not come to bully anyone. Today I have come to see the hellion.”

“Really? The hellion’s over that way. He swings a stick about a lot these days.”

Namgung Hak brought his hand up toward the darling girl’s head to stroke it.

— Clack!

Cheon Yeo-seol struck his hand away before it so much as touched her head.

“Brother said not to let just anybody stroke my head. Only Brother is allowed to touch my head.”

“Just so. That was a discourtesy.”

The girl was so darling in saying it that Namgung Hak’s hand went to her head of its own accord.

— Clack!

Cheon Yeo-seol, striking the hand away again.

“They say anybody can make a mistake. But he said a mistake you make twice isn’t a mistake, it’s on purpose. Brother said not to go near a person like that. I’d better be careful of the old gentleman who’s the hellion’s father.”

She must have been put out, to tack the hellion’s father onto him like that.

“I am sorry.”

Namgung Hak apologized without demur.

“The hellion never once apologized to me, so the old gentleman who’s the hellion’s father is a bit better.”

“It is kind of you to say so.”

Talking with Yeo-seol made Namgung Hak feel he had a child’s heart again, and it pleased him.

Namgung Hak smiled at the energy flowing out of Namgung Mu-baek’s training ground.

My youngest has come up another step in his level of attainment.

He had not expected it. Among his children he had reckoned this one the poorest in martial talent, and yet the growth the boy had shown of late was such that to call him a rare talent still fell short. A year had gone by with no progress at all in the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique, and then all at once he had mastered the whole of the first stretch and was training the middle stretch; at this rate it seemed he would grasp the ultimate truth of it before long.

“Mm?”

Thinking so, Namgung Hak reached the training ground, and inwardly he was startled. Only a few days ago the boy had plainly still been working through the middle stretch, and now he had the whole of it?

Is this not a talent that outstrips my eldest’s martial talent altogether? Is he one of those great vessels that are late in the making¹?

The Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique was a sword learning of the highest order, and without enlightenment a man could not advance a single step in it. And yet no flaw showed in his moves through the middle stretch.

“Father, you have come.”

Namgung Mu-baek, deep in his training, had felt his father’s presence, and he greeted him courteously.

He has changed. His eyes, his bearing, his martial arts. How can a man himself change so much in so short a time?

The pace of his son’s change was more than he could keep up with.

“Is the training going well?”

Namgung Mu-baek put on a bashful look.

“It has come along a little, but there is still a great deal wanting.”

Hearing it, he could make no reply. The answer was not the one he had looked for. Was this not the boy who would put on airs and crow about the smallest scrap of progress? He had turned so composed that his father wondered whether this were some other person, and looked at him closely.

“It seems you have grown up.”

“Ever since I saw Master Scholar Cheon the other day, it has been as though a black curtain over the inside of my head were drawn back, and everything grew bright. My whole frame of mind since then, and my thinking too, have changed a great deal.”

Namgung Mu-baek too, naturally, had not yet caught up with the change in himself.

My choice was the right one after all. Bringing Scholar Cheon in as my youngest’s master of letters.

Namgung Hak nodded, and then spoke quietly.

“When your father saw you before, it seemed you had only just begun the middle stretch of the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique. How is it your progress is so quick?”

A smile hung at the corner of Namgung Mu-baek’s mouth.

“Father, hear me without taking it amiss. The truth is that I have come on by taking Master Scholar Cheon’s advice. When I unfold a sword stroke, he puts his finger on exactly where I fall short and corrects it.”

That was a level not even the Namgung Clan’s own martial-arts instructors could reach. It would take a man able to grasp the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique entire.

“What part did he advise you on, and how?”

He could not set his mind at ease until he knew whether Scholar Cheon advised the boy out of exact knowledge. If the man were leading him in a wrong direction he might fall into qi deviation, and so he was wary.

“Here.”

Namgung Mu-baek unfolded the moves as he went and explained case after case. Namgung Hak listened a long while, and admiration filled him.

“Haa. Did Scholar Cheon point that out as well?”

“Yes. Had it not been for Master Scholar Cheon, I should not have grasped it in months.”

“That is true. It is a place I labored over a long while myself. Your elder brother wandered three months there.”

Namgung Hak was speaking of the sixth move, Twin Dragons Breaking the Mountain. The name means two dragons coiling about a mountain and bringing it down, and no man made progress in the move until he read those two dragons rightly.

“For several days I split my sword qi in two and sent it out that way as I unfolded the move, but I could not walk the form properly.”

Namgung Mu-baek’s tone lifted a little, as though the excitement had come back to him. His father knew that feeling well enough, and nodded along with him.

“And?”

“However I split it into two sword qi, the working of the internal qi would not come right — and Scholar Cheon, who had been watching, threw out a single remark.”

“Which was?”

“That the qi coming out of the two dragons is indeed two, but that both do not come out of the sword. That one comes from the sword and the other comes from somewhere else.”

“From where?”

“From the left hand.”

“Haa.”

A cry of admiration broke out of him of its own accord.

“That while the sword pours out sword qi, the left hand scatters palm force. And that it must be the Three Palms of Heavenly Thunder, which does not clash with the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique at any point. So I scattered the sword qi and unfolded the Three Palms of Heavenly Thunder at the same time, and the working of the internal energy came right.”

The Three Palms of Heavenly Thunder was a supreme art, handed down only to the direct line, to the Elders, and to high officers of Corps Chief rank. And unless a man grasped that Twin Dragons Breaking the Mountain drove two supreme arts at once, no amount of time would ever teach him the move.

This is a thing our house’s high leadership does in fact know. But how in the world could Scholar Cheon know it? Is the man truly one who hears one and knows ten?

To hear one and know ten meant a mind quick enough to grasp the whole of a matter from only a fragment of it; the same praise was given to a man who needed only a single glance to understand everything before him, down to its last detail.

Namgung Mu-baek stole a glance at his father’s face and then spoke.

“The truth is that I made no progress on Twin Dragons Breaking the Mountain, so I asked the other martial-arts instructors, and not one of them gave me an answer I could accept. That is why I had no choice but to seek Master Scholar Cheon’s advice.”

He had made the excuse for fear of being scolded for needlessly exposing the family’s secret supreme art to an outsider, but his father’s answer was not the one he had braced for.

“Whatever blocks you in your martial training, go and ask Scholar Cheon’s advice.”

“Am I permitted to?”

“It is quite all right. Scholar Cheon is as good as a man of our own clan.”

If his father saw it so, there was no reason left to hold back. He wanted to complete the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique while Scholar Cheon was at his side, and that did not look so very far off.

“The closing stretch of the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique is the part that wants real fighting and experience. So this time you will join the Namgung Demon-Repelling Corps as a member, on their hunt for the Demonic Cult and the Blood Cult. The Demon-Repelling Corps marches tomorrow, so see that you are ready.”

It might be dangerous, but Namgung Hak chose his youngest son’s advancement. As it happened, Namgung Mu-baek had been coming to that same realization himself, and he accepted gladly. And besides, a son of a martial house did not shy from a fight, however dangerous the field.

“I understand, Father.”

His youngest bowing so courteously struck him as strange, and he looked the boy over several times. Since the Wuqu Star energy that had roused his madness was gone, Namgung Mu-baek had been changing, little by little.

The change was clear enough for everyone to feel.