The True Second Power

The Namgung Clan swept Hefei from end to end for the Demonic Cult and Blood Cult bands and turned up no further trace of them. The moment their plan to secure the Ice Sacred Body failed, they had vanished from sight.

“Still, it is strange that Elder Yu is nowhere to be seen.”

Jong So-bin spoke heavily. All through the fighting with the Blood Cult and Demonic Cult bands she had expected Yu Yeok-rip to step in by one means or another, and yet for whatever reason the elder had never shown her face at all. Now that the whole affair was over, it remained a question to Jong So-bin. Nor had anyone seen her anywhere near Yeo-seol.

Jong So-bin was lodging in the annex on the opposite side from Namgung Mu-baek’s quarters, and I had gone there to talk with her.

“If she makes no other move there is no need to trouble yourself over it. For now, put your mind on recovering.”

When I had finished, Jong So-bin drew out a slim volume.

“I had meant to give you this when I left for the Murim Alliance.”

“What is this?”

“It is a secret manual gathering the whole of the Ice Palace’s martial learning. This is what I meant to give you. I had meant to give you the teahouse and the clinic as well, but let me hand those over when we leave Hefei. There is no telling how long we shall be here, but we shall keep them running until we go.”

“Do that, then. But if you give away the Ice Palace’s manual, how do you mean to teach Miss Ye-won?”

“I know it myself, and there is a hand-copy besides.”

“I shall give it to Yeo-seol when she is grown and can read and write.”

“No. It is quite all right for Master Scholar Cheon to read it and pass it on to her.”

“How could I look at the Ice Palace’s supreme arts?”

Taking it for a probe to test my reaction, I answered coolly.

“Because Yeo-seol is a child who will one day be the Palace Lord of the Ice Palace. And Master Scholar Cheon is elder brother to that Palace Lord, so you can hardly be called an outsider to our Palace.”

Since she could not teach Yeo-seol herself, she had settled on me as the next best thing.

“At Master Scholar Cheon’s level of attainment I believe you will teach even the hardest of our Palace’s martial learning well. And most martial arts Yeo-seol will grasp by her own gift. An Ice Sacred Body is born with that much.”

With the Ice Palace standing at the point of ruin, Jong So-bin meant to preserve its martial learning under a twofold system, its survival through herself and its survival through Scholar Cheon. It was, she judged, the safest way: if things went wrong and the Ice Palace was wiped out to the last by the Blood Cult, or the Demonic Cult, or its own Elder Faction, there would be no room left to rebuild the learning. It was the conclusion she had come to after long deliberation with Hwa-yeong.

“If that is your intent.”

I accepted her wish.

Wang Cheong put the White Tiger Corps in order and left at once for the Murim Alliance. The dead were given temporary burial, the lightly wounded went with them, and the gravely wounded stayed at the safe house.

“Be sure to send word when you come to the Murim Alliance. We shall take a cup with the Azure Dragon Corps Chief then. And as for Inspector Gu Jin-ha, I shall see him answer for his crime without fail.”

With that, Wang Cheong went.

A few days later I sat down face to face with the Namgung clan head.

“Had it not been for Scholar Cheon, a great many of our house’s disciples would have been hurt. Because Scholar Cheon took the Demonic Cult’s Pavilion Master upon himself, we were spared a calamity. I am truly grateful.”

Namgung Hak rose and made me a cupped-hands salute. I rose with him and returned it, accepting his courtesy.

“There is another thing I have to thank you for. Thanks to Scholar Cheon our youngest has at last come to play the part of a human being. I am truly grateful.”

Beside him, Jeon I-an beamed.

“Our youngest has come by a byname, I hear. The Namgung Azure Dragon Sword, they call him. Hohoho!”

I had heard the Namgung martial artists saying as much, so the byname was no news to me. A great many of the clan’s warriors had seen the azure dragon he threw out while fighting, after all. Calling that scene to mind made me proud beyond measure myself.

“The Namgung Azure Dragon Sword. I am so very proud. It is all owing to Scholar Cheon’s teaching.”

“Not at all. There is nothing I did. The young master won the enlightenment by himself, that is all.”

“Hohoho, look how modest he still is.”

Jeon I-an looked in better spirits than I had ever seen her, and no wonder. The hellion of a youngest son who had looked set to remain the Namgung Clan’s disgrace had been born again as a splendid chivalrous hero, the Namgung Azure Dragon Sword. How should she not be glad?

“To come straight to the point, how could I simply let pass the kindness of a man who has made a human being of my hellion of a son? And so I have prepared a gift.”

Namgung Hak set a black-lacquered wooden case up on the tea table.

“This is a spirit elixir our house prizes, called the Azure Sky Pill. It does not stand comparison with the Shaolin Temple’s Great Revitalization Pill, but it is a spirit elixir we take pride in as better than the Wudang Sect’s Great Clarity Pill or the Mount Hua Sect’s Purple Mist Divine Pill.”

I nodded. A spirit elixir was made by gathering rare spirit medicines together, so its price ran past all reckoning. A faction or a family without money could not begin to come by ingredients that costly, and everyone knew that only a house as rich as the Namgung Clan could obtain proper ones and make a spirit elixir of them. That the Five Great Clans’ spirit elixirs therefore worked better than the Nine Great Sects’ was a point I would not have disputed either.

When I only went on gazing at it blankly, the clan head leaned his head forward and spoke low.

“For the Protector of this house’s Person, ought there not to be a gift of at least this much?”

Even if I refused, he would find some justification or other and press it on me in the end, so it seemed better to take it gladly.

“Since the clan head thinks of me so, I shall receive it gladly. I know that a spirit elixir like this is more precious than any gold or silver or treasure. Thank you.”

“Ho ho ho! Far from grudging a spirit elixir given away, I never knew it could feel this good. When I gave one to that younger brother of mine a while back it galled me so. That a man’s heart should be as fickle as this.”

He burst into a delighted laugh.

“Even I, watching from the side, am this pleased — I cannot begin to imagine how my lord must feel.”

Of late the two of them, husband and wife, seemed to be getting on altogether too well, and it quietly frightened me.

“And when you take the spirit elixir, use our house’s training chamber. If need be, I shall stand guard for you myself.”

At the sincerity in Namgung Hak’s words I shook my head.

“How could I put you to such trouble? If I have need of it I shall borrow the training chamber.”

Back at my quarters with the spirit elixir, I found Yeo-seol asleep, went into my room and opened the wooden case. A faint scent of flowers spread out of it. Good ingredients mixed together usually left a medicinal smell behind, and yet this spirit medicine gave off a rich scent of blossom.

I had meant to take it later, when I had need of it — but the times are dangerous, and for Yeo-seol’s sake if nothing else I have to grow stronger.

Until now I had felt no particular need to form a dantian. Spirit energy alone was enough to let me stand against a master of about a Demonic Cult Pavilion Master’s order. But with the Azure Sky Pill in my hands, a greed for internal energy rose in me as well, and it occurred to me that internal energy might make up what my spirit energy lacked.

So I made up my mind to take it there and then. I had told Namgung Hak I would borrow the training chamber, but I had no intention of going through anything so troublesome. Feeling that there was no one about, I swallowed the Azure Sky Pill, folded my legs into the lotus at once and began to circulate the qi.

I drew the spirit medicine’s energy along, with the spirit meridians at the center of it. Along the Conception Vessel lay the meridian points of the Seven Stars of the Northern Dipper: Baihui, Shuigou, Tiantu, Shanzhong, Zhongwan, Qihai, Huiyin; along the Governing Vessel, Baihui, Houding, Naohu, Dazhui, Shenzhu, Mingmen, Changqiang. I let the spirit medicine’s energy run through them again and again, and a dantian began to form at the Mingmen point.

“Truly a fine spirit elixir.”

In two hours I had formed a dantian, and I felt internal force amounting to five years banked up in it. It had gone that fast partly because the spirit elixir was so good, and partly because there was no need to run the Great Circulation or the Small Circulation through hundreds of meridians.¹ Ordinarily the work of forming a dantian was hard training that took several days at the fastest and, at its slowest, ran past ten days as often as not.

Feeling the dantian settle safely at the Mingmen point, I was suddenly put in mind of the Ghost Immortal’s internal art, the Nine Nether Dark Prison Internal Art.

The Nine Nether Dark Prison Internal Art really is a fine internal art for bringing spirit energy out.

I went back over the oral formula. It held every one of the Seven Stars meridian points, and every one of the other spirit meridians besides; only the order and the direction ran a little differently. Since it had come to mind, I moved the internal force held in the dantian by the Nine Nether Dark Prison Internal Art.

Huh?

But the moment I circulated the qi, three spirit energies began to turn without my being conscious of it at all. Ordinarily the spirit energies turned only when I was conscious of it. This time they turned of themselves.

Have the spirit energies been affected by the Nine Nether Dark Prison Internal Art?

While I was thinking it, the dantian all at once flared and burned hot.

“Ugh!”

A pain like a red-hot iron gouging into my navel spread out from the dantian through my whole body. Then the pain rising in the dantian surged higher and higher, until at last a griping came up in my belly as well.

“Uuugh!”

I could not thrash about, so I barely held the lotus and worked at bearing the pain. Conscious as I was of trying to stop the spirit energies turning, there was no sign of their stopping. The pain rose to my throat until it was as though I had swallowed a red-hot iron bead, and I spat it out before it could burn its way down again.

“Ptooey!”

And there on the floor lay a pale blue bead the size of a thumbnail.

“What in the world is this.”

I called up what the Seven Stars and Seven Primes had to say about the wheel-energies and searched it for such a phenomenon, but nowhere in the Esoteric Buddhist text was there anything of the kind.

So it was true, what they said — that the powers of the Seven Stars and Seven Primes throw up strange phenomena and cannot even be explained.

The bead squirmed, then rose into the air. I stood there dazed, and one hypothesis brushed across my mind.

“Don’t tell me!”

Startled out of my skin, I muttered it before I knew what I was doing.

“It is my dantian!”

What martial artist in the world can take his own dantian out of his body? The thing was uncanny, unheard of and unprecedented.

The bead came floating up until it was right in front of my nose. Out of curiosity I took hold of it. It gave off a warmth like a stone heated in a fire.

Without my noticing, it had grown dark all around, dark enough to want a candle. When I opened my hand to pick up the fire starter and light it, the bead slipped free of my palm and rose into the air.

Was it because of the dark? The bead gave out a soft light.

“Oh!”

Still marveling, I prodded the bead with a finger, and found one more marvel. The bead moved along after my finger.

“The powers of the Seven Primes really are strange.”

I felt as though I had turned into a child again, like a boy handed a toy he liked for the first time in his life. At the motion of my hand the bead drifted this way and that about the room.

— Whish!

In play I moved my finger fast, and the bead came chasing after it just as fast.

“Oho! Let us see whether this works too.”

I sent the bead off to the farthest corner of the room, wondering whether it would follow just the same if I pointed a finger at the other end. I used my agility as well and shifted my finger fast.

— Whoosh!

— Thock!

The sound of splitting air the bead made crossing the room I could understand, but that thock was a sound I had not looked for. The bead had traveled from one end of the room to the other, exactly where I had pointed.

“What is this!”

Starting in alarm, I looked over the scholar’s rock that put one in mind of a waterfall, which stood along the path the bead had taken. I had tested my strength on that stone a while back, when I gained my first power.

“Good heavens!”

A round hole had been bored clean through the scholar’s rock, opened exactly along the straight line the bead had traveled.

“Which is to say this bead has put a hole in a scholar’s rock.”

I could not believe it even as I looked at it.

“And it is a dantian of a mere five years. No — perhaps it is because it is a dantian.”

It meant the bead struck as hard as sword qi. Nor was that beyond understanding. A dantian with five years of internal force gathered in it would do that much, after all.

I drew the dantian back, wiped it on my sleeve, put it in my mouth and swallowed it. There was an oddness to it, like swallowing food without chewing, but it was not particularly hard.

“Let us see.”

To draw the dantian out again I set the three spirit energies turning, and when I put my mind to expelling it, it came out of my mouth more easily than before. The pain earlier, it seemed, had come of the dantian separating from my body for the first time. I felt sheepish at having been frightened for nothing.

I was playing with the dantian, moving it here and there as it floated glowing in the air, when I jerked my finger too sharply and it shot straight through the door paper and out of the room.

“Oh no!”

When I hurried outside, the dantian was buried in a stone lantern in the garden. A crook of my finger and it pulled itself free.

“Handle this wrong and I could do for a man.”

As I said it, I grasped how serviceable this dantian would be as a hidden weapon. I shook my head from side to side.

“To think the first thing I turn to with it is killing people.”

I had killed men in a few fights by now, and my mind had run that way without my noticing.

— Whoom!

All at once the dantian shot up into the air and flew off toward one spot.

“Hey! Where are you off to!”

I climbed up onto the roof in haste and chased after the dantian as it flew, glowing faintly.