The Reason He Looks Splendid

She had watched her Brother teach the three escorts a sword technique, so she had taken it for granted that he knew sword techniques well enough. That he might take up a blade himself and fight had never once occurred to her. Fighting did not suit him in the least, and she had never imagined he could kill a man.

And yet she had just seen a man’s head burst apart at a motion of her Brother’s hand, and it left her shaken. Not the sight of a man dying. The fact that her Brother could kill one.

That Brother of hers was neither frightening nor strange to her. He looked more splendid than ever.

Most of all she marveled at the working of the moves, which went past anything she could have thought up herself.

He can work that one like that? Whoaa! My Brother really is a genius.

Even the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique, the same one she knew, came out different in his hands. Watching him use martial arts he had never taught her, she even felt a pang of envy.

Eh? He has never once mentioned that one to me. Why did he never teach it? Nothing but Ice Palace martial arts, piles of them.

Those he had not taught her looked better to her than the Ice Palace’s own.

I’ll ask him to teach me next time.

At the last a warrior who looked outrageously strong rushed at her Brother, and the man’s head burst and he went down. Her Brother’s face was screwed up hard, as though something did not sit well with him, and to her he seemed to shine brighter than he ever had.

Then her Brother threw a glance toward the carriage, and she carefully lowered her head.

I set the spirit energy turning and checked the water qi around me. No human blood flow registered any longer.

So there are no attackers left.

When the five escorts made to search the surrounding ground, I stopped them.

“There is no one else in this forest.”

At that one of the Emperor’s Escort Corps men frowned, as though skeptical that anyone could be so certain with the forest as wide as it was. But presently the most senior of the five nodded.

“Understood.”

I said to him.

“Could you deal with the corpses here in our stead? There are more than twenty of them, and it is no easy thing to see to.”

“Leave it to us.”

“I am sorry to have to ask it of you.”

“Not at all. It is our business as well.”

“Once we are down off this mountain we will be putting up at an inn.”

I told them where we were bound next, for the sake of any who might come looking for us.

I gave the word to Namgung Cheol-ung and the other two and went down the mountain. I did not want to keep Yeo-seol and the women any longer in a place where the smell of blood hung so thick.

Once the scholar’s party had gone down the mountain, one of the Emperor’s Escort Corps men asked.

“Elder brother, is it all right simply to let them go? Should not two of us follow after them?”

The eldest of the five escorts shook his head.

“Didn’t you see the way he fought back there?”

“I was busy fighting myself… What is it you mean to say?”

“He didn’t work a scrap of internal force, and he still brought the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique out at its proper power. I can’t tell you how a thing like that is done. If it’s possible at all, wouldn’t that be the realm of Returning to Simplicity?¹”

“So what you are saying, elder brother, is that at a level like that he can sense every presence within a thousand feet around him?”

He brought it up remembering how the man had stopped them from scouting the forest a little while before.

“Just so. It’s because that much is within his reach that he speaks with such certainty. And didn’t you see the foreheads of those Blood Cult dogs bored through at a single motion of his hand?”

“Well, a master who has made a specialty of a finger-flicking art could manage that much, could he not?”

“He could. But do you think it’s possible when the man on the other side is Mok Jin?”

He looked at Mok Jin’s corpse lying on the ground and spoke.

“How many men alive could kill a master past the peak with a finger-flicking art?”

“Could you not do it either, elder brother?”

He shook his head.

“Honestly? I’ve no confidence in it.”

“Hmm.”

The four men took hold of their chins and nodded.

“I could never believe the story that he turned the youngest young master from a hellion into a human being, but with a man of that ability I find myself thinking there is nothing he could not do.”

“And this time he is off to the Hyeoncheon Sect to school a hellion too, they say. That utter hellion.”

“I have a feeling he may well be able to mend that one as well.”

“It will be hard. I heard it said that fellow is worse than our own youngest young master.”

“That we shall know by watching.”

They stood gazing after the two carriages going down the mountain.

When we reached the mountain’s midslope the carriages halted partway up. The coachman had called the stop again, to ease the burden on the horses.

While we rested I took the dantian out of my pocket, poured water from the leather flask over it and washed it clean. I could not readily bring myself to swallow it. However firm the mental strength the Heavenly Martial Sacred Body gave me, there was no helping a turned stomach.

I shall have to put the dantian to use like this from now on — am I to get used to it, then?

I took a deep breath and swallowed it. Had it not been for the dantian I could never have held off their ambush properly. More than half of the ten-odd Blood Cult warriors I killed, I killed with it. Without it I would have had to fight a good long while, and against men of that ability I would have taken no small number of wounds; once that happened, there was no telling what complications might have arisen.

Cheong Yo and Song-ran were gazing blankly at the mountain, so I went over to them.

“I am sorry that you should have had to see so rough a business, and on my account.”

Both of them shook their heads.

“It was the Blood Cult, of all people. It is myself I resent, for being no help to you when you were fighting men like that, Master Scholar Cheon.”

I was grateful for the thought Cheong Yo had shown. Startled as she must have been, she thought of me first.

“Might it not be better for you to travel apart from us? If there is another attack, it could frighten you, Miss Cheong.”

“Do not worry about us. And with such dependable escorts about, I find I am not afraid.”

Knowing there were escorts guarding them in secret besides the three seemed to have set her mind at ease.

As the carriages rested a while, the escorts were loosening their bodies again. Namgung Cheol-ung and the other two certainly had the feel of men who had broken through a wall in this fight, and watching them train, the working of their moves was not what it had been before. But partway through a move they would show signs of struggling. I pointed it out and gave them advice, but they did not easily take it in.

Ah — if I look at their blood flow I should be able to see exactly where the trouble lies.

With the Great Expansion Sword Technique they followed well enough whenever I pointed a thing out, but with the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique they could not understand however carefully I explained, and while I was casting about for a way to put it my thoughts reached as far as the blood flow.

“Just as I thought. That is the trouble.”

Once I read the blood flow I thought I saw why they were floundering.

“Now that I see it — when one of you three lacked something, it seems the three of you talked it over among yourselves and settled it.”

“Eh? How did you know that?”

“Because the movement of the internal qi in the three of you is alike. Even men who have learned the same internal art cannot be as identical as this, and being nearly the same means the three of you talked it out and solved it together.”

“There is no deceiving our teacher’s eye after all.”

Namgung Pyo threw the jest out lightly.

“What is the cause of this move not unfolding properly?”

Namgung Cheol-ung wanted to know what his own trouble was.

“There is a great deal of hidden meaning in the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique that its oral formula does not set down, and by that meaning the internal qi must all be run into the principal meridians of the upper and lower body. The Great Expansion Sword Technique, for instance, divides upper body from lower and lets the qi flow through them separately, but the Boundless Azure Sky must have the qi flowing through upper and lower body at the same time, which is why it is handed down only to masters who have reached transcendent-first-rate and above. Where the internal force is wanting, a man cannot so much as approach the Boundless Azure Sky.”

“Ah — so it was not simply because we are of the collateral branch that the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique was never handed down to us.”

“Search and you would find men of the collateral branch who have reached transcendent-first-rate and beyond, but it is true enough that they are rare.”

The support given the collateral branch and the support given the direct line were plainly not the same, so for a collateral-branch man to pass transcendent-first-rate and reach the peak was a hard thing. In any great clan, once the collateral branch’s ability came to surpass the direct line’s, a revolt of the suppressed branch inevitably came with it, and so the great clans hold to a policy of keeping the collateral branch down so that it cannot grow past a certain level. But it was also true that a clan that means to advance must actively take up the talent in its collateral branch.

The Dang Sect of Sichuan divided collateral from direct too strictly and discriminated too harshly between them, and so its power waned as the years went on. It had held the first seat among the Five Great Clans originally, and it is already more than a hundred years since it gave that place up to the Namgung Clan for just that reason.

When I explained in a little more detail how I guide the true qi into upper and lower body in balance and unfold from there, they went on to unfold the moves with ease.

These men will rise to important places in the Namgung Clan before long.

In their own way they had grasped the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique as well as Namgung Mu-baek had.

“In an hour we shall all take our meal on the inn’s second floor. Come in time for it.”

“Understood.”

I went into the inn, bathed in hot water, and came back to my room feeling clean and easy.

“Brother. Are you all right?”

“Mm? I’m all right.”

Yeo-seol was looking at me with worry in her eyes. Most likely my having fought a dozen or so Blood Cult martial artists was weighing on her.

“What is it? Are you worried?”

“Of course. I know about it too. They say even killing one animal gives you a terrible shock in the mind. So wouldn’t killing people shake you worse? And Brother wasn’t a martial artist swinging a blade to begin with.”

“You rascal. Haven’t you heard the rumors?”

“Ah, the one about the Murim Alliance’s secret weapon? Or the joint successor?”

“If Brother really were that sort of person, then there’s no problem, is there.”

Yeo-seol turned the subject.

“People have been asking me. Whether that rumor is true.”

“And what did you tell them?”

Yeo-seol looked at me with her eyes full of mischief.

“I said that as far as I knew he was a secret scholar of the imperial palace, and told them to think it over. Why a genius who had risen as far as Provincial Principal Graduate never became a metropolitan graduate. It was all because the imperial palace had seen Brother’s learning and his martial talent and raised him in secret.”

Provincial Principal Graduate is the term for a scholar who has taken first place in the provincial examination.

I let out a snort of a laugh at the absurdity of it, and then grew curious about how the people who heard it had taken it.

“And what did they say to that?”

“They asked whether he had gone to the Murim Alliance as a secret envoy of the imperial palace. So I said, would it not be a matter of bringing the imperial palace and the Murim Alliance into accord?”

It was growing more outlandish by the moment.

“The ones listening were full of admiration. No wonder Brother has mastered every martial art, they said, and that too must all be from studying in the imperial palace’s martial repository.”

“Who said that?”

“Namgung Mu-baek.”

“Haa. Really. But why’d you go saying such a thing, Yeo-seol?”

“Why do you think? It’s splendid. The Murim Alliance’s secret weapon, the joint successor, the imperial palace’s secret scholar. Like a hero with some story behind him out of the storybooks.”

“From now on, when people ask, tell them you don’t know.”

“…”

Yeo-seol gave no answer, and I shook my head.

What worried me, rather, was whether Yeo-seol’s own heart had been hurt. On a battlefield such as the one just now, with the screams of dying men and the smell of blood, an ordinary person’s mind cannot bear up. And yet in her, young girl as she still was, I could feel no aftermath of it at all. Nor did she seem to be feigning her composure. However many times I looked, Yeo-seol’s blood flow was perfectly steady.

Perhaps it is because she is the Ice Sacred Body.

Inwardly I let out a breath of relief.

Everyone gathered and sat down at the table.

“It may be that this meal is the last one we all take together.”

Three days more on the road and it would be the Hyeoncheon Sect, so there might be no more gathering like this.

“Once we reach the Hyeoncheon Sect I shall be busy, and even seeing one another’s faces will not come easily. But I will make the time somehow and look in on you, so do not worry overmuch.”

The words were for Cheong Yo.

“Thank you.”

I ordered the dishes and, setting the three spirit energies turning, swept the inside of the inn. I was looking for anyone whose blood flow moved abnormally. Those would be the ones who might attack us before long.

But almost every blood flow was normal. When I widened my sense for qi I felt the qi of the five escorts outside the inn, and it came to me that there was no one about who could threaten us. I was easy in my mind.

“Your dishes are here.”

The steamed fish, the roast duck, the fried vegetables, the dumplings, the plain noodles, the fried pork and the soup with beef in it that we had ordered came up onto the table.

“Let us eat.”

At my word they all took up the little spoons shaped like paddles. They meant to take the soup first and wet their mouths.

In that instant I felt something alien in the food.

What is this? This feeling, as though ink had been stirred into water?

A sense of qi that was in none of the other dishes went on registering from the soup. One thought went flickering across my mind.

“Wait! Do not eat it.”

The party, spooning up the broth and carrying it to their mouths, stopped all at once and looked at me.

Yeo-seol’s spoon had even reached her lips.