Training

“Hah! Hah! Hah! Hah!”

I was running laps of the manor courtyard, breath heaving out of me. My arms and legs hung as heavy as if lead weights were strapped to them, and my heart was being wrung out like laundry. But I did not stop running.

Growth comes at the price of pain.

I kept a body already past its limit moving on willpower alone, and after a long stretch of it, the voice I had been waiting for came.

Good. I clenched my fist.

Every time the voice sounds, my muscles grow.

I stripped off my sweat-soaked top and ran my hands over my body. There was muscle on my flat frame now. Not much, but it was there. That a man’s muscles could grow this way was hard to believe, even with my own body as the proof. In my past life it had taken a solid month of steady training before muscle came on even a little.

Something I could not explain had happened to me. And for the better, at that.

The growth is far faster than I expected.

Not bad. I might have to pay the price of that growth later on, but that was something to settle when the time came. For now I had to concentrate on raising my skill. Even with my memories of my past life, becoming first-rate before two years were out would be no easy thing.

I’m in no position to be picky about the means.

I got my legs moving again, and I did not stop until I had collapsed in the yard, unable to shift a muscle.

If the morning’s training was conditioning, the afternoon’s was for building strength. I hauled a cart up the nearby mountain and stopped in front of a tree it would take a full armspan to encircle. I took the axe I had brought in both hands and swung it down with everything I had.

— THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!

The axe bit into the base of the trunk. The recoil felt as though it would split my grip open, and the worse it got, the harder I clamped down on the haft and swung.

— THUNK! KRRRRRK—!

In the end the tree came down.

“Hooo—”

I went to wipe the sweat off my forehead and found my hand shaking. My grip strength wasn’t enough to take the shock of the axe biting in. I turned up the palm that had held the haft; the skin was scraped raw and stinging.

This takes me back.

The day I first set foot in Blood Sand Plain, under the name Number Forty-Eight. I had cut trees that day too, to clear a line of sight. Not long after, the enemy appeared and the fighting began; I swung my weapon at whatever came at me to stay alive, and when I came back to myself the battle was over. That was the day I killed a man for the first time, too.

Well. Some fond memory that is.

I rolled my shoulders loose and dropped the reminiscing. What mattered now was filling the cart with timber. I gripped the haft tight so it wouldn’t slip and swung into a fresh tree.

— THUNK!

Every strike of the axe against the wood made the pain in my palms worse. My grip must have torn open; blood ran down my arm. I did not stop swinging. Pain on this scale was familiar, and if anything it was welcome. Once it healed over, the skin would be tougher.

— CRAAACK!

The axe never let up, and the tree went over with a sound of splitting. At the same moment the voice rang in my head again.

Good.

Just as I had expected, the training was paying off handsomely. For building muscle there was nothing like swinging an axe; it used the whole body, so everything developed evenly. And that was why the voice had sounded again.

Handling the axe becomes easier… hm.

Now that I thought about it, the haft did sit more snugly in my hand. And it wasn’t just my imagination. Instinct said so, the instinct of a man who had gone out to battle as regularly as he ate his meals, a weapon never out of his hand. It was definitely different from the first time I had held it.

Then I ought to check exactly how it changed.

I went to a fresh tree and swung the axe.

— THUNK!

Nothing much had changed from a moment ago. The sound was the same, the force about the same. But I could tell. The swing had become natural.

I kept swinging to make sure.

— THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!

The longer the axe work went on, the clearer it became that I was right.

Remarkable.

The axe had become familiar in my hands. This was the first time I had swung one since coming back to the past, and I had had no chance to grow used to it; when I first took it up it had certainly felt awkward. But after I heard the voice, it was different.

— THUNK!

The feel of striking the tree had changed. From the tips of my toes up through my waist and torso, the whole force of my body went into the axe, and none of it leaked away.

— THUNK! KRRRACK!

Feeling the change in my body, I brought down one more tree, and I nodded.

So this is what an axe being easier to handle means.

It meant picking up the knack of the thing. Of course it was still rough, and nothing had changed noticeably. But this was enough; I had no intention of filling my belly on the first spoonful. Nobody knew better than I did that strength is not something you get from a day or two of effort.

I shouldered the axe and headed for the next tree.

When the axe work was done, I ran the yard the same as in the morning. A full day of hard training from morning through to evening had left my body weighing a ton, and with every step it sagged like cotton soaked through with water.

“Hah, hah, hah.”

I hadn’t finished a single lap before my chest was heaving and every breath came hard. I bore down and kept my legs moving. Stopping over a little hardship was out of the question, not when someone was cheering me on.

Hearing the voice ring in my head put strength back into my heavy body. Not real strength; it only felt that way.

Being told I’m growing lifts a weight clean off my chest.

In my past life this stretch had been hard on me. However hard I clung to the heart method, my internal energy never grew, and it wore me down. But now the voice was telling me. That I was doing well. That the road I was walking was the right one.

I had never heard words like that from anyone. And to think it took a voice of unknown origin to comfort me.

I’ve stumbled into a tremendous fortuitous encounter¹.

One that would help my growth along and lay the road out so I could make the right choices. I felt certain I could live a life plainly different from the one before, and a smile came to my lips on its own.

While I was still steeped in the satisfaction, I felt someone behind me. My brother Ugyeom was standing there in loose martial robes, and he spoke.

“Brother, may I run with you?”

He watched my face for a reaction. It was only running the yard; why so careful about it? He had always been like this, always careful not to hurt his older brother’s feelings. In my past life, and in this one. Having this fellow for a brother made me feel steady, and grateful.

I nodded.

“…Sure.”
“Thank you.”

I turned and ran, and my brother matched his stride to mine.

Tsk.

I clicked my tongue at myself. Too blunt. I could have laughed and answered him openly, or clapped him warmly on the shoulder. That damned Blood Sand Plain was to blame. Too long rolling around on a battlefield, where there was never any call to string words together.

“…”
“…”

We ran without a word until we dropped from exhaustion.

Lately there had been one subject on everyone’s lips at the Yang manor.

That subject was Yang Mujin.

That the shut-in eldest son had ended his seclusion and come outside was startling enough. What he did afterward was more startling still. Morning and evening he ran the yard, and at midday he climbed the mountain and brought back felled timber. For a full week, no less. It could not help but draw every eye.

This morning too, without fail, Yang Mujin was running the yard. Watching him, House Yang’s servants spoke up.

“Would you look at that. He’s running again.”
“A week of it already.”
“Hard as nails, that one. Hard as nails.”
“Anyway, did you hear the story? They say the eldest — the one running over there — tore those swindlers apart.”
“Wasn’t that the second son? They say the eldest has no martial talent to speak of.”
“It was the eldest, all right. Ju was telling us about it yesterday. Says he watched him drive a wooden splinter into a man with his own eyes, and couldn’t believe what he was looking at.”
“A strange business, and no mistake.”

The servants went out past the manor walls, still muttering.

They were not the only ones watching. Flying Serpent Spear Ju Cheolsan, the Yang manor’s guest retainer² and a first-rate martial artist, stood off to one side with his arms folded, following every lap Yang Mujin ran.

Has he come to some enlightenment? Or is it only a boy’s bravado?

He did not know the reason for Yang Mujin’s change either. At that age boys make choices no one can account for.

To Ju Cheolsan’s eye, the training was simple to the point of ignorance. By day the boy felled trees on the mountain; morning and evening he ran until he was spent. No one conditioned a body properly that way.

Still, he did not step in rashly. After the business of clearing out the cargo swindlers, some great change of heart had plainly come over Yang Mujin, and he worried that interfering for no good reason might snuff out an ember that had only just caught.

A few more days and he’ll wear himself out and drop of his own accord. It won’t be too late to offer advice then.

Ju Cheolsan settled on that and turned away.

But his prediction missed.

More than a month went by and Yang Mujin’s training did not stop. If anything it grew harder by the day. At first he had run unencumbered; now he ran with heavy sandbags strapped to his arms and legs. He had gotten hold of a bigger cart, too, and brought it back packed with timber, until the storehouse could no longer hold it all and the surplus began piling up outside.

Stranger still was what came next.

“Hah— hah— hah—”

Yang Ugyeom had stopped mid-run and gone flat in the yard. Granted, he was recuperating from an internal injury taken in a sparring match not long ago. But that the second son, a core disciple of the Diancang Sect³, should go down before Yang Mujin did was something Ju Cheolsan could not believe, even watching it happen.

Yang Mujin asked.

“You all right?”
“I’m— hah— fine. Hah, hah.”
“Good work.”

Yang Mujin started running again.

“Hmm.”

Ju Cheolsan made a low sound in his throat and moved his head up and down, his gaze fixed on Yang Mujin. Sweat poured off the boy like rain and his arms and legs shook, and still he kept them moving; in that there was a will nothing would break.

Formidable grit.

That he would break a core disciple of the Diancang Sect by sheer willpower was something even Ju Cheolsan had not foreseen. He had taken him for a greenhorn moaning about his lack of talent; there was a man’s mettle in him after all.

The corner of his mouth lifted faintly. He would keep watching Yang Mujin a while longer, he thought. It promised to be anything but dull.

“Hah, hah, hah.”

I dragged air into my lungs in heavy gulps. My heart clenched as if it would burst, and my whole body sagged. But a smile leaked out at the corner of my mouth, because the voice had sounded in my head again.

Good.

I was building my body faster than I had expected. If I kept growing straight on like this, internal energy and external arts would soon come into harmony. Of course, there was something to do before that.

Money first.

The Yang manor scraped by on the escort bureau my father ran. The day after I came back to the past, Father set out from the bureau, and there was time yet before he came back. I meant to take some of the weight off his shoulders.

As it happened, there was one job within the next few days that would bring in serious money. Dangerous, naturally. With my abilities as they were now, one slip could cost me my life.

But it’s fine.

I have a way for all of it.