You Must Trust Me Completely

“Haah! Haah!”

As his daughter gasped for breath, Yu Baegun carefully wiped her brow with a cloth. The sweat soaked it through in moments.

Haaa…

He swallowed the sigh where she could not see it. Three years ago the child had been perfectly well; now she did nothing but lie there like a doll. Had that been all, he could have counted it a mercy. But the disease grew rapidly worse by the day, and as time went on the muscles all through her body withered like dry firewood and a high fever wracked her.

Once the symptoms showed themselves plainly, he knew what his daughter’s illness was.

The Soul-Returning Severed Meridians.

Under that strange affliction the flesh slowly lost its vitality until at last even consciousness clouded over. The name came from the way a person’s soul seemed to leave the body a little at a time, and true to it, the disease was taking his daughter’s body from her a little at a time.

A year after the Severed Meridians set in, she could no longer walk on her own. Half a year more and she lost the use of both legs; the year after that even her right arm would not move; three months after that she could not so much as twitch her left arm.

Now, three years on, she could move nothing below her neck by herself. The fever kept her senseless for most of the day, and her mind came clear only a few minutes at a time. She was, quite literally, no different from a living corpse.

Damn it all.

Watching from her bedside, Yu Baegun would rather have died himself. Every time he saw her in pain, something inside him gave way. He had given his whole life to medicine and pulled countless people back from death, and yet the one life he could not save was his own daughter’s.

All of it for nothing.

What earthly use was medicine like that? More nights than not, deep self-loathing and worry kept him awake until morning.

And then it happened.

“Hurk… Cough, cough!”

Dark red blood poured from his daughter’s mouth where she lay.

“Yeohui!”

Yu Baegun cried out and gathered her into his arms. She had gone unconscious and did nothing but wheeze out ragged breaths.

Heaven above!

His eyes went bloodshot. He had become a physician and thrown himself into saving lives ahead of any other man, believing that was the duty of anyone who had learned the healing art. He had never turned away a patient who could not pay, and he had treated every one of them with all the heart and effort in him. His whole life had been spent giving.

Then why do you visit such a trial upon me!

He wanted the illness in his own body instead of hers. He hated himself for standing by and watching while his only daughter died of a disease no one could cure.

He resented Heaven.

“Uwaaaaaah!”

Yu Baegun screamed. That he, a physician, could do nothing at all for his own daughter gouged at his chest. He howled as he wept, because if he did not do at least that much, it felt as though his heart would burst.

Only after he had held her and wept a long while did he come back to himself. He wiped the blood from her face and got to his feet. All he could do for her now was make up a batch of numbing powder¹, so that she could forget the pain, if only a little.

— Thud. Thud.

Yu Baegun stepped into the apothecary’s shop with a heavy tread. The shopkeeper saw his face, the face of a man with the soul gone out of him, and asked carefully.

“Physician Yu. Is your daughter doing very badly?”
“…This, and this. That one too.”

Instead of answering, he picked out his herbs. The shopkeeper asked nothing further and set them out, then seemed to remember something and spoke up.

“That… there’s a rumor going round the streets lately. Have you heard it, by any chance?”
“…I will be going.”
“They say someone has found a cure for the Soul-Returning Severed Meridians.”

Yu Baegun was halfway out of the shop when he whipped around. His eyes, bloodshot a vivid red, bored into the shopkeeper, urging him to hurry up and say it. The stare seemed to unnerve the man, who gave a dry cough before he went on.

“I don’t know the cure, but I know where the man is. Qingzhou, in Shandong, they say. Most likely it’s just idle talk — but you never know, do you?”
“…Thank you.”

Yu Baegun snatched up the herbs and went home. The next day he put his daughter in a carriage and set out for Qingzhou without a moment’s hesitation. Every jolt of the wheels churned doubt and hope together in his head.

Can it really be true?

He had tried every method there was, and her illness had not improved in the slightest. He had sought out the great physicians of renown, and every one of them had shaken his head. Now some man whose name he did not even know was supposed to have the cure for the Soul-Returning Severed Meridians? Might the fellow not be a swindler? One doubt led into the next.

But there was only one conclusion.

Even so, I have to go.

He could not simply stand by and watch his daughter die like this. He had to clutch at any straw there was, and for now the man said to be in Qingzhou was his only hope.

But if all of this is a lie…

Then he would make him pay in full for the deception, and for the time it had cost his daughter.

Half believing, half doubting, Yu Baegun drove the carriage on toward Qingzhou, in Shandong.

A month had passed since I began swinging my spear in the market street.

In all that time I had not rested a single day. I trained and trained again, and today, as ever, I took up the spear.

— Swish! Whirl! Swish!

Three changes came and went in an instant: Lan, Na, Zha. Beat outward from the inside, press inward from the outside, thrust straight ahead.

As I repeated nothing but those three motions day after day, snatches of the onlookers’ muttering reached me.

“How long has he been at that?”
“A month, I’d guess.”
“A whole month? Well now, that’s something. Doing that every single day can’t be easy.”

One of the onlookers said it with admiration, but the man beside him spoke up.

“That’s as may be — but take a look at that.”
“At what?”
“The board in front of him. Look at it.”
“‘Severed Meridians Treated’? What is he, some quack peddling cures…”
“That’s what I said!”

The onlooker nodded and went on.

“You know the Yang house’s eldest is a bit off, don’t you? Shutting himself up in his room all that time, and then that business with the lightning-struck jujube wood.”
“Ah — is he trying to land himself another sucker, like with the jujube wood? He got lucky and sold that stuff for gold, remember. A desperate man might well come running with money in hand at the words ‘Severed Meridians Treated.’”
“Then he’s truly beyond help. With Great Hero Yang away, the boy does nothing but pull stunts.”
“Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

I heard the jeering and the sneers around me but paid them no mind.

Time will settle all of it.

However loudly I shouted with my own mouth that I was no such man, it would come to nothing, because what is lodged in people’s minds does not shift so easily.

Hearing a hundred times is not the equal of seeing once. Better for people to see a thing once with their own eyes than to hear of it a hundred times, so I only had to prove it with results, and my reputation would change on its own.

What mattered now was building real skill.

Fundamentals first.

The root of spearmanship is Lan, Na, Zha. Build a house with its cornerstones laid untrue and sooner or later it leans and comes down. Spearmanship is no different. If those three motions are wanting, gaps open in whatever fine spear art you have learned on top of them.

At Blood Sand Plain I saw more times than I could count what became of men who threw the basics away, and after that I was not fool enough to neglect them.

I had repeated the three motions some hundreds of times when a welcome voice rang out inside my head.

Took a while this time.

At the start the voice had come once a day, but the more the spear became second nature, the rarer it grew. Now it arrived about once every three days, which was proof enough of how well the weapon had settled into my hand.

I set my stance again and drove the spear forward.

— Swish! Whirl! Swish!

The spear moved through empty air without a check, and the curving track it drew looked at times like a butterfly fluttering and felt at others like a pear blossom petal drifting from the branch. It flowed, its silver blade glinting in the sunlight, a pleasure to the eye.

It’s been a long time since I felt like this.

On the battlefield, taking pleasure in anything was a luxury. With no telling where an enemy’s weapon would come flying from, who could afford to let his eyes wander? There was nothing but thrusting, and thrusting again, without feeling, because only that way could I live.

Satisfied, I lowered my spear.

This is fun.

I had not known training could make me feel anything like this. For me it had been a thrashing struggle to survive, a way of keeping myself alive and nothing more. Since coming back to the past, though, it had been different. Drilling, growing stronger: it was interesting, and it was fun.

It occurred to me that swinging a spear and piling up martial arts without a care in the world might not be so bad a life. After I had raised my family and my house back up, that is.

I was standing there smiling contentedly over that happy little daydream when it happened.

— Thud, thud.

A man came striding toward me. His body was wasted to nothing, his cheeks sunk deep, his eyes red as though every vessel in them had burst, and he was staring straight at me.

The man I had been waiting for had come.

It’s good to see you.

It was Doctor Yu.

His eyes still on me, he spoke.

“Are you the one who claims to know the cure for the Soul-Returning Severed Meridians?”

The words were courteous, but his bearing and the pressure rolling off him were nothing like the Doctor Yu I had known.

I’d heard he had quite a temper back in the day. So it was true.

I pressed down the corners of my mouth, which kept wanting to rise, and nodded.

“That’s right. You’ve come to the right place.”
“The cure — how…”
“One moment.”

I cut him off.

“This will take some telling. Let’s move somewhere else.”

I took Doctor Yu to a teahouse nearby. We had barely sat down before he was pressing me.

“Well, then? What is the cure for the Soul-Returning Severed Meridians?”
“These.”

Without a word I drew two things from inside my robes and set them on the table.

Black lightning-struck jujube wood, and dark red Soul-Returning Grass.

“Process these two ingredients along with medicinal herbs and compound them, and you can make the cure.”

At that, Doctor Yu’s brow creased into something dangerous. But I had nothing further to say either.

Because I don’t remember.

No. To be precise, I had heard the cure. Exactly once. I was no once-in-an-age genius, and my head was not good enough to hold everything it heard a single time. If I remembered the ingredients at all, it was only because there were so few of them and every one was peculiar.

The physician asked again, with the look of a man forcing his anger back down.

“How did you come to know these were medicines?”

It was the question I had expected. I had thought about how to answer it, but there was only one conclusion.

Push straight through it, brazen as you like.

I could hardly tell him a future Doctor Yu had taught me, after all.

“I fell off a cliff, and as luck would have it I found a cave. There I happened to learn that these two ingredients are used against the Soul-Returning Severed Meridi—”

— Slam!

Before I could finish, Doctor Yu brought his fist down on the table. His teacup tipped over and hot tea spread across the wood.

“You damned little wretch! You call that an answer! Even now, this very moment, my daughter is dying!”

He glared at me as though he would kill me where I sat.

My own cup had not gone over, since I was holding it, so I raised it and took a mouthful of tea.

This is mild, all things considered.

In his place I would have put that fist into my face, not the table. His daughter had a fatal illness, he had come looking for the cure, and what he got was a cure ‘found by chance in a cave.’ Of course he was angry.

I set my cup down on the table and looked him straight in the eye.

“This is the only way to cure the Soul-Returning Severed Meridians. Will you do it, or will you not?”
“…Nngh!”

Doctor Yu was shaking. Rage must have surged up in him, because his face flushed red and his clenched fist trembled.

But in the end he unclenched it and accepted my offer, swallowing his anger for his child’s sake.

“A wise decision. You must trust me completely.”

That’s all you have to do.