Grasping The Oral Formula

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps?”

“In the course of the investigation, it struck me that he may be the person you have been looking for, Young Palace Lord.”

The words were not the ones she had expected, and the Young Palace Lord nearly choked on her tea.

“Are you serious?”

“It is not yet confirmed, but I judge the possibility to be there.”

“The Third Protector would never bring me a bare possibility. You have evidence?”

“They say that although he has no internal energy, he feels the cold little in winter and hardly sweats in summer. And that from childhood he was called a prodigy for it.”

“That could simply be his constitution. It is rare, but there are people like that.”

“So this time I looked into the illness of Scholar Cheon Tae-san’s mother, and I found a possibility that she suffers from the Severed Meridians.¹ Several of the herbs are ones used for the Severed Meridians.”

“Oh! Then the odds have risen. That he is a Solar Meridian.”

“Yes. There is a possibility that he is the very person you have spent years searching for.”

“Five years now I have wandered the continent playing physician in search of a Solar Meridian. It has won me a name — the Divine Doctor, the Saintess — but they are all empty names. If I cannot find a Solar Meridian, I have a year of life left, no more. I shall have to examine Scholar Cheon’s mother myself. Whether it truly is the Severed Meridians.”

“Young Palace Lord, that you should go so far as that…”

“My life hangs on it. Will the Third Protector answer for it?”

“N-no. This one spoke out of turn.”

“When is the scholar’s mother said to be coming?”

“The scholar is lodged at the Namgung Clan, so she will come before long.”

“Keep a close watch on their movements. So that I can examine her the moment the scholar’s mother arrives.”

“Understood.”

Life came flooding into the eyes of the woman they called the Young Palace Lord. Then a sight caught those eyes.

“By the way, why are those men in such a bustle lately?”

“Lowlifes called the Du-sik Gang, the ones with this street under their thumb.”

“Ah — the ones who lost their stall fees to Namgung Mu-baek and that scholar?”

“The same.”

That the Young Palace Lord should remember so trifling a matter was strange. She was not, by nature, a woman who gave such small things any mind at all.

“Why are they checking the face of every scholar and Confucian student who goes past?”

“They have worked out that they lost their stall fees to that scholar’s trickery, and this is how they mean to come at it.”

“Hm. Handled badly, that will end in an incident.”

“But they say Scholar Cheon rarely comes out of the Namgung Clan. There is nothing to be concerned about.”

“Concerned? The things you say.”

“This one spoke out of turn.”

The Young Palace Lord went on watching the Du-sik Gang examine the faces of the scholars.

For days now Namgung Mu-baek had done nothing but glare at me whenever he saw me, appearing only when it was time for his lessons, and yet today, for whatever reason, he was there waiting before I arrived. The bastard had kept the promise he staked on the wager.

But I was his master of letters in name only. Namgung Mu-baek studied his letters when the mood took him and not otherwise, and I was in no position to force him. For my own part more free time was welcome, so it did me no harm if he did not study. If anything, I would rather he poured himself into martial learning than into books.

Because there was something I stood to gain from him.

Namgung Mu-baek plunked a hand-copied book down on the tea table.

“What is this?”

“Read it, scholar, and interpret it for me.”

“What kind of book?”

“It’s an oral formula that’s been handed down in the main house from a long way back. Nobody’s ever interpreted its meaning properly, and this time I mean to have a try at it myself. Only my learning isn’t up to it, so I’m asking Scholar Cheon.”

So there was a reason his tone was, for once, gentle.

“Is it a martial arts formula?”

“Whether it’s a martial arts formula or a text setting down the principles of martial learning, I don’t know myself.”

Inwardly, I laughed. In all likelihood this was the martial art the bastard had been drilling lately. The higher the martial learning, the more intricate its principles grow, until they turn metaphysical, and without scholarship a thing like that was difficult even to approach. No doubt he meant to have me read it for him.

“I shall give it a try.”

“Ahem. Thanks. I’m counting on you. And this book must not leave this house. Lose it, or leak it deliberately, and Scholar Cheon will not come through it whole — keep that in mind.”

Having delivered his threat, Namgung Mu-baek rose. A threat with nothing behind it drew nothing out of me but a snort.

I opened the book and began committing the formula to memory. Two or three readings aloud and I could not have forgotten it if I wanted to.

Just as I thought. The formula is so thick with metaphor and symbol that it is not easily interpreted. This looks like one of the Namgung Clan’s higher martial arts.

Once I had the formula by heart, I began to sink into the swamp of contemplation.

Namgung Mu-baek came out of Scholar Cheon Tae-san’s quarters wearing a satisfied smirk.

Go on and die, then! You damned scholar. Do you imagine the formula I brought you is an ordinary formula?

The formula of this martial learning was famous besides for the number of geniuses it had driven into qi deviation across the Namgung Clan’s history. The family held it taboo for that reason, and approached the training of the art with great care. A few interpretations existed that had been rendered safe, but those alone did not draw out its true power, and a proper reading was still being sought even now.

“Interpret that formula long enough and a meridian will block somewhere, and you’ll fall into qi deviation.”

The truth was that long ago Namgung Mu-baek had crippled a master of letters assigned to him in just this way. His father had savaged him for it at the time, so he had kept the method back as his last resort, and he had not thought he would be bringing it out this early.

“That fine head of yours can keep you a cripple the rest of your life. I wasn’t going to go this far, but you ground my pride into the dirt once too often.”

He knew that any scholar with a little ink in him would be dragged under the moment he read this formula.

Namgung Mu-baek sniggered as he watched Cheon Tae-san, sunk in thought over the formula.

I was certain of it. I had read the formula, and it was beyond question the formula of one of the Namgung Clan’s higher martial arts.

In truth, the Twenty-Four Plum Blossoms Sword Technique was about the highest grade of the higher martial arts among the formulas I had seen. I had never seen a formula above it.

The more of the higher martial arts’ principles a text carried, the more immediately the meridians in my body answered, and this time was no different. Each time I read a passage of the formula and understood it, the meridians answering to that passage gave a sharp twinge.

“Is there a wooden sword in our quarters?”

I had come outside and gone looking for Eun-bi.

Once Eun-bi’s aged mother and the other families had taken their medicine and begun to mend, I had grown a great deal closer to the people who worked in Namgung Mu-baek’s quarters, and after that I dropped the formal speech with them. Everything was falling out just as I wanted. That one round of treatment had bought me their goodwill.

When I asked, Eun-bi went and fetched one of the wooden swords Namgung Mu-baek used. As a rule he trained with wooden swords rather than live blades, so dozens of them stood ready.

“What will you be using it for?”

The scholar had never asked for a wooden sword before, and Eun-bi put the question as though she found it puzzling.

“I thought I’d swing it about for exercise when I get bored with my reading.”

“Oh — have you studied swordsmanship as well, Scholar? A murim scholar really is a different breed.”

Now that Eun-bi and I were on easy terms, we could have small exchanges of this kind. She thought nothing of it, handed the sword over, and withdrew.

And before that same Eun-bi, Namgung Mu-baek appeared.

“Did you just take my wooden sword to Scholar Cheon?”

Namgung Mu-baek, who had been watching Cheon Tae-san for two days, decided the time had finally come.

“I am sorry, young master. The Scholar asked for a wooden sword, so I gave him one of yours.”

Braced for a slap across the face, she set her teeth. Instead, he patted her on the shoulder.

“Well done. Well done. Wooden sword, live blade, whatever he asks for, take it to him. Even mine. Understood?”

“A live blade?”

“That’s right. He may ask for a live blade. Take it to him when he does.”

Never in her life had Eun-bi seen the young master so open-handed. Which only made it more frightening.

“Yes, young master.”

“In fact I’ll bring you a wooden sword and a live blade myself, so keep them by you and hand them over. No need to come looking for me.”

“Yes, young master.”

The kinder he grew, the more Eun-bi’s fear swelled.

I took the wooden sword in hand and stood in the middle of the room. The room was large enough to swing a sword in, and with hardly any furniture in it there was nothing to get in the way either.

To move as I had understood the formula was itself the sword art. A move was nothing more than the motion that would carry the internal force through the meridians to its utmost.

The wooden sword swung up and down, left and right, and turned. Seen from outside it might have looked like a madman’s dance, but every one of those motions came of shifting hand and foot to the places where the qi ran along the meridians. It was all my own theory of martial learning, arrived at while I took the postures as I had understood the formula.

I swung the sword for something close to an hour and then stopped. My whole body was soaked in sweat, and I looked like a drowned rat. The floor of the room was slick where it had run off me.

“So I went into a trance.”

It had been a long time. Not since the Twenty-Four Plum Blossoms Sword Technique. That one had put me into a trance as well, but only for a quarter of an hour or so, and this time I had been sunk in samadhi for a full hour², which meant this formula could be called the deeper of the two.

Well, naturally — its metaphors and symbols and similes were far more complex and far more varied.

Only after swinging the sword did I grasp how dangerous this formula was.

“Handle this wrong and qi deviation is all but guaranteed.”

And I grasped what Namgung Mu-baek had meant by throwing this formula at me.

“That hellion bastard was steering me into qi deviation. Though — is there a martial artist in the Namgung Clan who could interpret this formula properly?”

I did not know the name of this martial learning, but if you failed to make out its symbols properly it would lead you badly astray.

Astonishing — this formula has Esoteric Buddhist thought mixed into it. Which would make it easier still to fall into qi deviation.

In the Central Plains, Esoteric Buddhist thought was rejected and written off as black arts, so nobody studied it.³ With no one trained in it and no materials to be had, qi deviation was the only possible outcome.

To put it precisely, the formula took the Esoteric Buddhist doctrine of the Seven Stars and Seven Primes as its root and built internal qi on top of it. Daoist thought has its own Seven Stars and Seven Primes, but the ones Esoteric Buddhism spoke of carried a different meaning.

Its doctrine held that if, out of all the meridian points, you gathered qi chiefly at the points standing in the positions of the Seven Stars of the Northern Dipper, seven wheel-energies would be generated in the body. The formula carried the somewhat preposterous theory that these, one by one, bring a new power into being. The doctrine of the chakra, which in Sanskrit means a wheel, or a cycle, was dissolved into it.

“Gather spirit energy in the meridian points of the Seven Stars and Seven Primes and you may reach the ultimate truth of this sword art.”

That was the interpretation left when every last symbol had been dug out, and without the doctrine behind it the words were so much empty talk. I knew the positions of those meridian points myself, having long ago read a text on the Esoteric Buddhist Seven Stars and Seven Primes in the Murim Alliance’s archive.

In Daoism the Seven Stars of the Northern Dipper are Tanlang, Wenqu, Jumen, Lucun, Lianzhen, Wuqu and Pojun; in Esoteric Buddhism the Northern Dipper points were taken to be, on the Conception Vessel side, Baihui, Shuigou, Tiantu, Shanzhong, Zhongwan, Qihai and Huiyin.⁴ On the Governing Vessel side, Baihui was the same, and then Houding, Naohu, Dazhui, Shenzhu, Mingmen and Changqiang. Thirteen in all, taking the Conception and Governing Vessels together. And Esoteric Buddhism’s theory was that these meridian points are spirit meridians.

I would be the only man in the Murim Alliance to have read that book, for the simple reason that it was written in Sanskrit.

These spirit meridians were not vessels that make use of internal qi but vessels that make use of vibration. The soul raises a vibration, and by it wields a force like internal power.

The man who devised this martial learning must have wanted to use the power of these spirit meridians. But by working through internal force he cut its potency to a quarter and lost its value. The road onward was closed off, since a spirit meridian is, by nature, a power that expands without end.

That is why this formula is dangerous.

Even knowing the seven spirit meridians of the Seven Stars and Seven Primes, anyone who tried to pour internal qi into all of them at once would fall into qi deviation. The more of a genius a man was, the more surely he fell. A pity, that.

Tell them all this, then?

I shook my head. Had I not already been through it at the Murim Alliance?

They’ll brand you a thief who stole that school’s martial learning. Because a martial artist’s pride has to be protected. They cannot allow a mere scholar to interpret a formula they failed for years to interpret. And now I have understood and worked out one of the Namgung Clan’s higher martial arts?

Nine times out of ten I would be silenced with a blade, or tortured until I had brought up everything I knew and then killed. In the end it would come to one of two things: dying without pain, or dying after a great deal of it.

A martial artist’s pride made no distinction between black and white, ethics and morals.

I changed my clothes and went outside.

“Eun-bi.”

“Yes, Scholar.”

“Give the room a clean, would you? I worked up a sweat exercising and the floor’s wet.”

I took out a silver coin and handed it to Eun-bi.

“There’s no need. You are our family’s benefactor, Scholar — how could I take money from you?”

“It’s pocket money. Take it.”

Eun-bi thanked me and tucked the silver coin away.

A man’s goodwill is one thing in the morning and another by evening.

“I am going out, so if anyone comes looking for me, tell them to come this evening.”

“Yes, Scholar.”

Whether it was the silver coin’s doing or not, Eun-bi’s speech had turned soft and pliant. As though I were the master of these quarters.

I had to buy herbs, so that my mother’s illness would not deepen. They were rare ones, and for those only the largest apothecary in the city would do. So I set out for the largest apothecary in Hefei, the city where the Namgung Clan sits.

But in the alley on the way there, when big men blocked the road before me and behind me, I could not hide my dismay.