Improving The Constitution

Doctor Yu began preparing for the work on my constitution at once. On one side stood the decoctions he had boiled down from the herbs; on the other, long needles lay in a neat row. I watched the preparations in silence, and Doctor Yu spoke.

“Benefactor, the preparations are complete. Take off your clothes and get up onto the bed.”

I stripped bare, not a thread left on me, and sat down on the bed. Doctor Yu’s face turned grave.

“This procedure forcibly destroys the meridians and the muscle, then regenerates them with the strength of the medicine and with needlework; repeating that cycle is what improves the constitution. There will be considerable pain.”
“I don’t mind.”

I was used to pain. A spear had run me through the body; blades had cut me to pieces. Burns were routine, and bleeding that had to be stopped in a hurry was seared shut with fire. In the ten years of my past life I had been through just about every pain there was, and there was not one of them I had failed to endure.

Doctor Yu brought the decoctions over and set them down in front of me.

“Once you drink these, your mind will stay clear but your body will not move. The pain, on the other hand, will come through all the more sharply, so you must not lose consciousness under any circumstances. If you faint, you gain nothing at all.”

I knew that too. In my past life I had taken this same procedure from him.

I drained the decoctions in one go and lay down on the bed.

“Let’s begin.”
“Very well, Benefactor.”

His face still grim, Doctor Yu drove a needle into my body.

— Shunk. Shunk. Shunk. Shunk.

The needles sank deep into the major acupoints, starting at the Qihai acupoint at the dantian and working on through Guanyuan, Zhongji, and the rest. More and more of them went into me, and by the time half my body bristled with them, my acupoints and muscles began to heave violently.

— Krrk! Crrrack! Crunch!

Sounds no body should ever make came from inside me. It was the sound of blood vessels bursting, of muscle twisting and tearing itself apart. At the same instant a fierce pain slammed through my head.

Hgh!

The searing sting of it snapped my eyes wide open before I knew what I was doing, and my breath caught in my throat. Every muscle in my body was twisting, my organs along with them, and the pain of it made my head swim. I could half believe that someone had taken my body in their hands and was tearing it and crumpling it up.

Hurts like hell.

It really was murder. Having my sinews split and my bones wrenched out of their joints would have felt much the same. If anything, the medicine leaving me unable to move was a mercy. Used to pain as I was, at this much of it I would have driven my head into the floor and groaned.

— Heave. Heave.

The muscles all over my body did as they pleased, and I writhed with no say from my will. Each time, a still worse wave of pain came rolling in. I was lying on a bed, and yet it felt as though I had been set down inside a raging fire. The heat was maddening, and a pale haze shimmered in and out in front of my eyes.

Aaah…

The heat climbed to the crown of my head until my mind went hazy, as though I were drunk.

It felt like this that time, too…

The procedure Doctor Yu had performed on me in my past life came back to me. How had I come out of it then?

“Benefactor! Stay with me!”

At his voice my blurred sight cleared, a little at a time. His face was there in front of me, and whatever had him so grave had drawn his brow into a deep knot.

Right. It was like this in my past life, too.

There had been a battle ahead of me that day, one I stood every chance of dying in, and Doctor Yu had come to me with that same grim face and worked the constitution procedure on me. It had been just as it was now.

Wake up! If you want to live, grit your teeth and hold on!

Every time I was about to slip away, he had bellowed at me. Thanks to him I never lost consciousness, the procedure came through safely, and I lived through that battle.

Then and now. Doctor Yu really never changed.

“It is nearly done. Just bear it a little longer!”

His hands moved faster, driving the needles in, and he kept talking to me without a pause, in case I lost consciousness.

I’ll see it through.

Once this procedure was finished, I could be stronger. If I broke over no more pain than this, I could never protect my family out in the gangho. So I held them in my mind and bore the pain in silence.

How long had it been?

“It is done.”

Drenched in sweat, Doctor Yu sank down onto the floor.

I put a little strength into my limbs. The medicine had worn off; my body moved properly. When I pushed myself up, something clung to my skin in thick clots, and I looked down to find a blackish fluid pooled over the bed and over me. The stench crawling up off it mixed decoction, stale sweat, and every kind of waste the body could put out.

Feels like years of grime have been scraped off me.

The reek coming off me was foul, but I felt light enough to fly, with more vigor in me than before. Impatient to use my body, I got up and loosened myself with a few easy movements. My joints and muscles ran smooth, as though what I had just been through had been a dream.

Then what about the inside?

I settled into a cross-legged seat.

Improving the constitution does not end at simply making the body lighter. The heart of it was this: the flaw in my Blood-Chain Meridians, the very thing by which my own meridians had been stealing my internal energy away, would be gone.

I closed my eyes and set the Azure Dragon Art, my house’s heart method, in motion.

— WHOOOOSH!

The qi flowed without a check. Normally, moving it at all took enormous patience. Unless I put every nerve on edge to keep hold of it, the energy I drew up out of my dantian vanished in no time, like water poured onto sand.

Not anymore.

The energy surged up from my dantian and ran along my meridians, and not one handful of it leaked away. Like a blocked dam bursting, the internal energy raced through my acupoints and out through the whole of my body.

Fast.

A full circulation was over in an instant. I liked the speed of it, so far beyond what it had been. And for all that I was driving the internal energy this hard, there was no pain at all in my meridians.

While I was at it, I turned the internal energy through once more.

— Thrummm.

The second full circulation was over just as quickly. My dantian grew heavy, and I could feel plainly that my internal energy had swelled. A smile spread across my mouth before I knew it.

The voice rang inside my head.

Can’t stop here.

In anything at all, momentum was what mattered. Ride it and a losing fight could turn around; a winning fight could end in a rout. And right now I had the momentum properly under me.

I moved the internal energy once again.

— WHOOOOOSH!

I drove it faster and harder than before, and it tore through my meridians like a horse with its reins cut. Ordinarily that was more than fast enough to leave me with an internal injury, but I had no worries. My meridians now were hard as steel and tougher than iron sinew.

There it is.

A shiver ran through my whole body, and a laugh escaped me at the true face of the Azure Dragon Art.

A dragon does not stay crouched. Only when it tears open the sky and soars is it truly a dragon.

That was a passage from the verses of the Azure Dragon Art.

Azure Dragon.

Just as the name said, it was a heart method that showed its true worth only when it was driven with the momentum of a dragon ascending, surging up through a storm. The harder I drove it, the more the turbid qi was filtered out and the more pure internal energy gathered. That was one of the essentials of the art I had grasped in my past life.

— RRRRUMBLE!

The internal energy finished its circulation and gathered back into my dantian, and energy purer than anything I had known before filled it to the brim.

I opened my eyes as I listened to the voice. I could feel the strength reaching out from my dantian into every part of me.

Second-rate.

Third-rate and second-rate. A single character apart¹, and the gulf between them was heaven and earth.

It was not simply that I was stronger. My senses had sharpened too. When I gathered the internal energy in my ears, the sounds outside the room came through clearly.

I clenched my fist and opened it again.

Now I can finally fight a proper fight.

Every fight until now had been like walking on thin ice. Short of internal energy, I had had no choice but to aim at an opponent’s lapses, and if things had gone wrong I might have had to give up bone to take flesh.² There was no need for that anymore. I could meet a man head-on and crush him with force.

I got to my feet. First of all, I had to wash the filth off my body.

Doctor Yu, recovered by now, spoke up.

“Congratulations on improving your constitution, Benefactor!”
“It is all thanks to you, Doctor. You have worked hard.”
“Not at all. Even without me, your body was on the very verge of its constitution changing. All I did was shorten the wait a little.”
“That time matters to me more than anything.”

I answered with a smile.

Long after Yang Mujin had gone, Yu Baegun stood rooted to the spot. On the empty bed only the dark traces of waste remained, telling of what had happened there a moment ago.

“Haaah…”

A sigh mixed with admiration escaped his lips.

The procedure he had performed on Yang Mujin was the Secret Canon of Broken Meridians and Restored Sinews, a method that destroyed the meridians and the muscle and restored them, over and over. It amounted to taking a body apart while it still lived and putting it back together again.

Everyone who ever tried it failed.

Masters of great name had gone under the needles. Eminent monks who had trained long years had submitted to it as well. Every one of them had failed, not one lasting half a quarter-hour before losing consciousness, and so Yu Baegun had come to regard the procedure as possible in theory alone. Even when he first proposed it to Yang Mujin, he had had no confidence that it would succeed.

And yet he did it.

A boy not yet twenty had succeeded. And without so much as a single scream.

The sight of him gritting his teeth and holding on through the whole procedure had been astonishing, truly. No, astonishing was not a strong enough word. What he felt came closer to awe.

— Shudder.

Remembering it, his body shook again. How anyone could hold that kind of will at that age was beyond him, and respect rose in him of its own accord. No ordinary yardstick could take the measure of the lord he had come to serve. That he could stand at such a man’s side and serve him filled his chest to bursting.

Yu Baegun looked at the door Yang Mujin had gone out through.

At first he had meant to follow him to repay the kindness of his daughter Yeohui’s life. But it was different now. The superhuman endurance and spirit the boy had shown had captivated him completely. A hunger had risen in him to see how far that boy would climb, and to watch that journey through to the end.

The road you walk, Benefactor, this Yu will help you along with all his heart.

A faint smile spread across Yu Baegun’s lips.