Stealing Internal Energy

At some point the dantian stopped, and then vanished inside one of the halls.

“What is this! It moves exactly as though it were alive.”

The dantian was my own, but since it had come to me by the second power of the Seven Stars, I did not know the whole of what it could do. I looked at the name plaque of the hall it had gone into.

“The Yongmu Hall.”

The Namgung Clan’s first-rate masters lodged and trained there.

I unfolded the Nine Nether Ghost-Spirit Footwork to its utmost and settled myself on a roof beam inside the hall. Several dozen Namgung Clan martial artists lay asleep on their beds, and my dantian drifted back and forth about the hall, looking for all the world as though it were searching for something.

What a marvelous thing.

When the martial artist on watch came through, the dantian slipped away into a corner of the ceiling, and the guard passed straight beneath without sensing what hung right over his head.

This is maddening.

Presently the dantian slipped neatly into the open mouth of one of the sleeping martial artists.

Ugh!

Watching my own dantian go into another man’s mouth struck me as filthy for a moment, and I very nearly cried out.

And yet, asleep or not, a man ought to wake when an object of that size goes into his mouth. When mine came up, and when I swallowed it, I certainly felt it there as something foreign.

If he felt nothing at all, then perhaps a dantian that goes into a man’s mouth shrinks, or turns into something too faint to notice.

Anyway — you wretched dantian. Come back! Come back to me!

For all my willing it, the dantian showed no sign of coming back to me, so I left the hall at once.

“Whoaa! This is maddening. My own dantian goes into another man’s mouth with no regard for my will at all?”

Nowhere in the Esoteric Buddhist texts was there anything of the kind. I slipped out of the hall ahead of it and made my way back to my quarters unseen; if I were caught prowling about another hall at that hour of the night I should have nothing to say for myself. Then I waited for my dantian to come back, and dropped off into sleep before I knew it.

In the small hours, with a dim daybreak coming on, a familiar feeling made me open my eyes. My dantian was floating in the air above my head. With my mouth shut it could not get in, evidently, and so it had hung there waiting. The moment I parted my lips a little it burrowed swiftly inside.

“Ugh!”

Knowing where it had been, inside another man’s mouth, turned my stomach. But it had already gone down my throat and settled itself at the Mingmen point.

“This little bastard, honestly.”

I swore at it in sheer disbelief, then broke off and laughed.

“Huh?”

But the energy I felt from the dantian was different. It had certainly been a dantian of five years, and in a single night it had grown by something like a year.

“Don’t tell me the thing has gone and stolen another man’s internal power?”

I called to mind the dantian going into the mouth of the martial artist sleeping in the Yongmu Hall the night before.

“In the space of a night I have become a thief of internal energy. I feel wretched about it — what am I to do?”

It came to me that I must not let the dantian out carelessly, since it would be a serious matter if it went stealing sleeping men’s internal energy night after night. To a martial artist internal energy is as good as life itself, and stealing it was nothing short of a sin.

“Haah, really.”

Outwardly I was elated. A dantian that moved at the motion of my hand would be useful in all sorts of ways. But the moment it came to me that this was an inner elixir that stole other men’s internal power, the guilt came with it.

“Let us be careful. Careful.”

I turned over how I might make it up to the martial artist my dantian had robbed of a year’s internal energy.

“Brother.”

Yeo-seol came up to me as I was about to set out.

“Yeah. Yeo-seol.”

“You’ve been impossible to catch lately.”

“I’ve been a bit busy.”

“Too busy to study with me?”

She said it with her eyes wide and bright and a scolding in her voice, and watching her I realized how much sharper her tongue had gotten.

Come to think of it, she has grown a little taller too.

I stroked Yeo-seol’s head and measured the height of it.

She has certainly grown.

By the feel of her, she was growing faster than children of that age do.

“Who do you play with these days?”

I was curious about who was keeping her company. The workers about the quarters kept out of Yeo-seol’s way now, so she had to be playing with somebody else.

“Sometimes I play with the landlords here.”

“The landlords?”

“The clan head and the clan matron.”

“You rascal.”

“And I play with Du-sik’s crowd too.”

“With Du-sik?”

“Mm.”

I wondered how she had come to have any dealings with Du-sik.

“How did you come to know Du-sik?”

“I went out for a bit, and when he found out I was Brother’s little sister he bought me all sorts of good things to eat.”

A good many people had seen me eating with Yeo-seol at the noodle stall, so word had evidently got about.

“Du-sik’s my underling now.”

“You rascal. You mustn’t do that. Du-sik’s a great deal older than you. You ought to be calling him sir.”

“No. Once a boss, always a boss.”

“Where do you pick up nothing but strange things like that?”

“Huh? But Brother’s all I’ve learned anything from.”

By now she would not lose an argument even to me.

“Elder brother.”

Namgung Mu-baek came out of the quarters, caught sight of me, and made his way over. Being called elder brother by him was a thing I could not get used to at all.

“Hey, hellion young master. Who said you could go calling my Brother ‘elder brother’ as you please?”

“Hellion? Why, you brat—!”

“Well, would you look at that — you’d hit me? Look at this. I’m young and pure and beautiful, a little fairy of a thing, and he’d still raise a hand to me. If that’s not a hellion, what is?”

Namgung Mu-baek, who had been about to rap her on the head with his knuckles, quietly lowered his hand.

“I call him elder brother because I want to. Who are you to tell me what to do?”

“Hellion young master. You know the one and not the two. If the hellion young master calls my Brother ‘elder brother,’ the family register gets all tangled up. And then there’s no proper form left for me to call the hellion young master by.”

“Then naturally I become your Brother too. Properly, you’d have to say Brother Mu-baek. Go on, say it. Brother Mu-baek.”

“What kind of dog-shit talk is that?”

“Haa. This brat, honestly.”

“You’re making a mistake. Calling me a brat — me, a beauty who could grow up to be the greatest in the world.”

“Whoaa. What is this brat going to grow into, carrying on like this? I made a name for myself as a hellion too, but I don’t think I was ever quite this bad.”

“And what nonsense might you be talking? From what I hear, the hellion young master has quite a glittering record behind him.”

“Elder brother, when did this brat get so good with her tongue?”

I could not answer Namgung Mu-baek’s question. Between her speech and everything else, her capacity to take things in was uncanny.

“From now on, don’t go saying ‘elder brother’ to my Brother.”

“It’s as I please, you little rascal. Elder brother, elder brother. Elder brother. Elder brother. Elder brother.”

Namgung Mu-baek kept up the elder-brother business at me to needle Yeo-seol, and she kicked him hard in the shin for it. The pair of them.

“Ow! Why, you brat—!”

— Bonk!

In the end Namgung Mu-baek rapped Yeo-seol on the head with his knuckles, and Yeo-seol huffed and snorted.

“You. I’m telling our landlord on you. You stay right here. You hellion.”

“Hahaha. I’m the landlord here — who exactly are you going to tell?”

Yeo-seol, who had been teasing Namgung Mu-baek, suddenly vanished off somewhere. I judged it best not to be standing there, and left.

A little later, when Yeo-seol came in through the moon gate leading somebody by the hand, Namgung Mu-baek shouted out.

“So you really have brought somebody. A brat is a brat after all. Takes one knock and off she goes to fetch another person. That means I’ve won. Borrowing another man’s strength is against the rules in the murim. Bwahahaha!”

“You there, wretch! Was it you who struck our Yeo-seol!”

“Eh? Father.”

“You wretched whelp! I had not taken you for that, and now you strike even little children!”

Namgung Hak, led in by Yeo-seol’s hand, gave Namgung Mu-baek a scolding.

“Old gentleman landlord, that hellion young master hit me. Please give him a scolding.”

Namgung Mu-baek blinked, at a loss.

Namgung Hak sent his son a voice transmission.

— When I make as if to strike you, cry out that it hurts.
— Even so…
— Come now. The child is like a daughter to me.
— …

Namgung Hak put internal force into his palm and struck the empty air. It made a sound like a drum being beaten.

Having no choice, Namgung Mu-baek screwed up his face and pretended it hurt.

“Ouch. How that hurts. Please strike more gently.”

“Old gentleman landlord. Harder than that. Strike him hard enough to make him vomit blood. While you have the chance you must break him of the habit altogether.”

“Very well, Yeo-seol. I shall strike him hard enough to lay him out cold.”

Yeo-seol planted both hands on her hips and loosed a great laugh at the sky.

“Bwahahaha! This, precisely, is the law of the murim. Let the weak dare to fly at the strong and this is the state they come to!”

I watched the whole business from the roof and shook my head.

I shall have to drill her rather harder in her manners.

Left as she was, Yeo-seol looked more than capable of turning into a female demonic fiend.

Namgung Cheol-ung was hard at his martial arts again that day, in the Yongmu Hall’s training ground.

When the Namgung Clan’s martial artists finish the Azure Sky Sword Technique and the Lightning Flash Sword Technique they enter the level of the first-rate, and from that point they take up the Great Expansion Sword Technique.¹ Every warrior of the Yongmu Hall had reached that level, so all of them were training in it.

Among them Namgung Cheol-ung was the slowest to make progress, so he always stayed behind and went on training after the session had ended. The morning training hour was long over, and he was still there alone, swinging his sword in the effort to understand the technique’s strokes.

I watched him at it for a while, and then went closer. I had already looked into him through other people, so I knew his name and his history well enough.

Of collateral-branch stock, but with martial talent in him, and a man who worked hard enough to climb as far as the Yongmu Hall. But with no faction behind him to give him backing, he is slow in his attainments.

That was the substance of what I had found out about the man called Namgung Cheol-ung.

However good a man’s martial talent, without a good master or good teaching he will find it hard to make any progress. From the Great Expansion Sword Technique onward it was the higher martial arts, and a man with nothing but his own enlightenment to go on was bound to run up against a wall.

Unless he had the genius to leap that wall.

Namgung Cheol-ung does not properly understand what Great Expansion means.

I wanted to give him an enlightenment into the Great Expansion Sword Technique, and so make him amends for the year of internal power I had taken from him.

The Namgung Clan’s three great sword arts.

The Great Expansion Sword Technique, the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique, the Emperor’s Sword Form.

Some name the Heavenly Thunder Divine Sword among the Namgung Clan’s three great sword arts, but the truth of it was only the sort of swift swordsmanship any martial house might have, dressed up in fine words.

Namgung Cheol-ung trained on without knowing that I was watching, and wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve. From the grime already running on that sleeve one could tell how long he had been at it.

“Young Hero Namgung Cheol-ung.”

He gave a start at my voice, then turned and made me a cupped-hands salute.

“Ah, it is Master Scholar Cheon.”

I had not expected it. Here was a man who did nothing but train, shut away inside the Yongmu Hall, and yet he knew me by sight.

“You know me?”

“I beg your pardon? Of course I do. Is Master Scholar Cheon not an honored guest of our house, and a famous man besides? I have seen you several times from a distance.”

The face of a man being asked something obvious.

“I am? Famous, you say?”

He looked like a man weighing whether to speak, so I spoke first.

“Ah, you mean the rumors.”

“Yes.”

“Those are all idle rumors.”

“Is that so?”

So he said, but his eyes had the look of a man who took my words for a lie.

What on earth do these people think there is in me, to get such notions?

The harder I worked to explain myself, the higher the misunderstandings piled up. So of late, when I heard some absurd rumor, I did nothing but laugh emptily.

There is even a rumor going about that I am Namgung Hak’s hidden son. Honestly — if Mother heard it she would be horrified.

Then Namgung Cheol-ung asked me a question.

“But if you waited until my training was done, does that mean you have something you would deign to ask of me?”

“Have you by any chance felt your vigor weakening, or your internal power grown less?”

“Hm, this morning I did have a feeling that my internal force had lessened a little.”

He answered evenly.

Just as I thought.

Wanting to be rid of the sense of debt that had built up toward him, I analyzed his training.

“I hope you will not take this amiss. I happened to pass by a while ago and saw the Young Hero at his training, and it seemed to me you were blocked by some wall. Would you permit me to offer you a word of advice?”

He looked at me with astonishment on his face.

“I only hope I have not put you out of temper by meddling where I had no business.”

To offer a martial artist advice on the art he has trained in is to touch his pride, so I went carefully.

Namgung Cheol-ung shook his head hard enough to snap his neck.

“What are you saying! Is Master Scholar Cheon not the very man who made Young Master Namgung Mu-baek the Namgung Azure Dragon Sword? To have advice from such a man would be an honor.”

Namgung Cheol-ung, who had always longed desperately for an enlightenment into martial learning, could not refuse Scholar Cheon’s kindness.

“It is shameless of me… but I beg you will enlighten this dull man.”

Had he refused it would have been another matter, but if he wished to learn there was no harm in telling him what he had run up against.

“First — do you know the meaning of the Expansion in the Great Expansion Sword Technique?”

The question was a very basic one, but he did not presume to treat it carelessly, and answered.

“Of course. It carries several senses — to overflow, to flow, to move on in its due course.”

“So you do know. Knowing it, I cannot think why you do as you do.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“All through the unfolding of a sword stroke, what mental image does the Young Hero hold?”

“I try to hold the feeling of water flowing, as the oral formula says.”

“Simply the one feeling of flowing?”

“Why — is there more to it?”

There I understood that he was short of any scholarly grounding.

“Do you know the Seven Virtues of Water?²”

The Seven Virtues of Water. Which is to say, the seven virtues that water holds within it.

“What is that?”

“Know the Seven Virtues of Water and you can win your enlightenment into the Great Expansion Sword Technique.”

At my words Namgung Cheol-ung inclined his ear with a reverent heart.