Reflection
“Enough!”
The bellowing voice rang through the open training yard like a gong. I jerked back to my senses as if doused with cold water, stopped in my tracks, and took a step backward. Pung Hoedoo also kept his eyes on me as he slowly lowered his practice blade.
I steadied my breathing and quickly ran through the exchange we had just had in my head.
If we’d kept going, one of us would have ended up flat on the ground.
He’d watched long enough to catch the flow of the fight and stepped in at exactly the right moment. That interviewer wasn’t ordinary.
Pung Hoedoo let out a sigh, held his wooden sword upside down, and cupped his fist in salute.
“I’m Pung Gang-ik, escort leader at Yongcheon Escort Agency.”
His manner was completely different from the arrogant one he’d shown a moment ago. It looked like I’d passed the test, so I returned the salute with a lighter feeling.
“I’m Jeong Dae-cheon.”
“Your saber work has real structure to it. I learned a thing or two. May I ask which sect you were trained in?”
“I just picked it up here and there on the road, so I’m not really sure. They never taught me the whole thing.”
“I see?”
Pung Gang-ik nodded without much reaction. He didn’t seem particularly suspicious.
There were plenty of disciples from martial families that had been ruined or wiped out for one grievance or another who truly didn’t know their origins, or didn’t want to speak of them.
The interviewer who had stopped the test by shouting rose from his seat.
He was a middle-aged man with a slender build and escort uniform, but he looked more like a Daoist than a martial artist.
With deep-set eyes and sharp pupils, he stared at me closely.
“I’m Du Ja-ryeom, chief escort. That was a rare treat. You sparred with Pung Hoedoo for more than thirty exchanges? You’re no ordinary man. How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-one this year.”
“Hm? Younger than you look. I thought you were at least twenty-six.”
It happened all the time. When a household was poor, children grew up fast, and among the wanderers who lived by the edge of a blade, I’d never seen anyone who got to live according to his actual age.
The other interviewer standing nearby frowned and shook his head.
“Twenty-one is a little too hot-blooded, isn’t it? He might lose his head over the smell of perfume and end up staining the agency’s name.”
“Hmm.”
The chief escort narrowed his eyes and stroked his beard.
“What do you think, Pung Hoedoo?”
“He’ll be fine.”
When Pung Gang-ik gave a positive answer, the chief escort smiled in satisfaction.
“I’ll trust your eye. You’re in, for now.”
“Thank you.”
I cupped my fist again and bowed my head in thanks.
“How much is the monthly wage?”
“Day shift pays twenty coins a day. If you don’t miss a single day and keep perfect attendance, that’s another hundred coins added on, for seven hundred coins a month. Night shift pays forty coins a day. If you work the full month, that comes to one and a half taels of silver. You might think that’s stingy, but guards are always like that. Besides, there’s not a single fool in Seochon with enough guts to poke at Yongcheon Escort Agency, so it isn’t exactly dangerous. If you want to make real silver, you have to go out on escort runs.”
“I have to go on escort runs too?”
“Interested?”
“No. If I have to do escort work, I’ll quit.”
The interviewer who had not given his name snorted with a crooked smile.
“Did you apply because you were taken with Simhyangru too?”
“I don’t care where I work. I just don’t want to leave my hometown.”
The chief escort tilted his head.
“Hometown? You’re from here?”
“I left when I was little and came back not long ago.”
“So it’s the heart returning to its old home, is it...”
With a face gone oddly wistful, the chief escort nodded.
“You must have had it rough. Fine. This time we’re hiring guards, so you won’t be going out on escort runs. The two of you can continue testing the remaining applicants. You, come with me.”
I strapped the willow-leaf saber to my waist and followed the chief escort out of the training yard.
“Am I the only one who passed?”
“No. There were a number of wanderers with decent skills, but they looked exactly like men who’d bring trouble. If you recruit carelessly, cleaning up afterward becomes a job of its own. Finding useful people is like looking for a needle in a field of sand. Snatching one up blindly usually means getting pricked.”
There was an understated but firm warning in the chief escort’s calm tone. If you caused trouble while wearing an escort uniform, it would not end well for you.
From experience, people who threatened you flat-out were often less serious than the ones who pressed down on you indirectly like this.
If I didn’t follow the rules I was supposed to follow, this wouldn’t end with a few blows.
“There’ll be an escort run to Sichuan in a month. It’s been a while since we’ve had one this large, so we need to draw in as many escorts as possible, even the guards. That’s why we’re increasing the numbers. How long do you plan to work?”
“Probably until the end of this year.”
“Good. Can you start tomorrow evening?”
“Yes.”
“If more people pass, things may change, so I’ll tell you your post tomorrow.”
I received a navy escort uniform with the two characters for Yongcheon embroidered clearly over the left breast, along with a temporary identity token, then left the office.
By then, the line hadn’t gotten any shorter; if anything, it had grown, and the escorts were still busy keeping order.
Once I stepped out through the main gate, the idle martial artists who’d crowded around hoping to get in line and take a beating started talking to me.
“How’d you do, brother?”
“You pass?”
“What are they doing in there?”
“That’s an escort uniform, isn’t it? Damn, so somebody really did get in.”
“Hell, they’re not only hiring one person, are they?”
The envy, the resentment, the twisted malice that came pouring at me from all directions were like invisible thorns, irritating in ways that were hard to ignore.
If I answered, it would only turn into a fight, so I kept my mouth shut and passed them at a respectful distance.
As soon as I got home, I tossed the escort uniform onto the porch, then drew my willow-leaf saber.
The excitement of the spar had already faded, but the memory of the exchange was still vivid.
I recreated the first move, the one where I’d charged at Pung Gang-ik with my blade in hand.
I hadn’t noticed it while we were fighting, but when I reviewed it carefully, the flaws stood out.
Here, I should have just knocked upward instead of following with a second strike... and if I’d moved to the right instead of the left, maybe I could have fooled him...
Imagining Pung Gang-ik’s counters, I pushed beyond the fixed forms and the techniques I usually relied on, trying all sorts of variations and irregular changes.
Then I hit a wall at the infamous Rannachal.
I’d managed to break it by parrying with both hands on the wooden blade, but I wasn’t satisfied at all.
If it hadn’t been a practice sword but a real blade, could I have shaken it off? If it had been a spear instead of a sword...
I repeated the same form several times, twisting it this way and that, then put the blade away.
I went into the bamboo grove and cut a few stalks of suitable thickness.
I was trimming the branches with a small knife to make a bamboo staff when Gu-sam came over with dinner.
“Hero, you should eat. Hehe.”
Already? I looked up at the sky. It was early summer, and there was still plenty of daylight left.
“What’s this?”
Gu-sam ran up to me in a hurry and blinked at the bamboo with curious eyes.
“What do you think?”
“A staff?”
“Used like this, it’s a staff. Put a blade on the end, and it becomes a spear. Where’s your right arm? Why did you come alone?”
“Ho-jin’s busy helping at the fabric shop today. The escort agency made a large order.”
I took the finished bamboo staff in hand and stood in the middle of the yard.
I stepped forward with my left foot and twisted my body slightly to the right.
Holding the middle of the staff with my left hand and the end with my right, I leveled it toward the front and took a deep breath.
Drawing on the memory of how I’d practiced before, I unfolded Rannachal.
I spun the staff outward to deflect, pulled it in to press down, then thrust straight forward.
It had been a while, and my posture was sloppy.
No matter how much force I drove into it, the tip trembled and lost power, and it lacked the precision of the Rannachal Pung Gang-ik had used with his wooden sword.
After repeating it dozens of times without stopping, I grabbed the middle of the staff with both hands and spun it left and right.
Stepping through Eight Directions Steps while sweeping the air around me like a pinwheel kicked dust up from the ground.
That was the extent of the spear art I knew.
It was no better than a sideshow trick from a wandering strongman, but it was enough to satisfy Gu-sam.
“Whoa, Hero, you know how to use a spear too?”
“I’m just imitating it. Here, try it.”
“Me too?”
Gu-sam lit up and quickly took the bamboo staff from me.
Rannachal was so simple that he picked it up right away. But naturally, he still couldn’t produce any real power with it.
Once he’d learned the basics, he swung the staff around happily.
“Evil hound breaking the road! Turning the top of the staff to smash! Internal organs! Facial paralysis!”
He went on blurting out absurd move names from who knew where.
I was shaking my head at the nonsense, thinking the old sickness had flared up again, when something felt off and I flinched.
“Hold on!”
“What is it?”
“What was that just now? Unless I heard wrong, the first two sounded like names from the Dog-Beating Staff Technique.”
“Ohhh, Hero, you know that too? The Dog-Beating Staff Technique.”
Gu-sam grinned brightly, as if impressed.
“Do you even know what the Dog-Beating Staff Technique is?”
“Of course. It’s the Beggars’ Sect’s unique martial art, isn’t it?”
“Then watch your mouth. If one of the Beggars’ Sect hears you talking like that, you’ll get cut down for impersonating them. There’s no blade in this world that doesn’t hurt when it hits you, but getting beaten by beggars is a special kind of pathetic.”
You might think it was ridiculous to make a fuss over kids playing around, but the Beggars’ Sect people would absolutely do it.
“How do you know so much? Hero, don’t tell me you got beaten by beggars...”
Gu-sam stopped midsentence and stared at me with wide eyes, as if he were imagining something terrible.
“Quit the nonsense and keep working through Rannachal.”
“Yes, sir!”
Gu-sam clamped his mouth shut and focused on Rannachal again. At first he was all enthusiasm, but soon his breathing turned rough and his face was slick with sweat.
Maybe he was getting bored of repeating the same motion, because suddenly he gripped the staff with both hands and spun it around. The more he spun it, the more the staff seemed to stretch off to one side, until it slipped from his hands and flew toward the wall.
“Huh? Why’d it slip out?”
Gu-sam ran over, picked up the bamboo staff, and scratched his head with a puzzled look.
“Your left and right hands have to hold the same point. If you keep shifting it to one side like that, it’ll get pushed out.”
Watching him practice, I cut the remaining bamboo into a suitable length and made a wooden sword.
It was much lighter than a practice blade and hollow inside, so even if it hit you, it probably wouldn’t hurt much.
Gu-sam stopped his spear work, wiped the sweat from his face, and asked,
“But if a spear and a blade fight, who wins?”
“The stronger one.”
“What if they’re equally skilled?”
“Then the spear has the advantage. It’s longer than a blade, and it’s easier to use both hands and put force into it. It’s not hard to learn, either.”
“So that’s why it’s said one hundred days to learn spear, one thousand days to learn saber, and ten thousand days to learn sword. But then why don’t martial artists use spears and instead all use blades or swords?”
“Because they’re a pain in the ass to carry around.”
“Even if they’re a pain, isn’t it better to live longer?”
I drew the willow-leaf saber from where it lay on the porch and gestured to Gu-sam.
“Stab at me.”
The bamboo staff had no blade, so Gu-sam took his stance without hesitation.
Maybe because he trusted absolutely that I wouldn’t hurt him, he didn’t even flinch in front of a weapon.
The bamboo staff came in with a long thrust, tracing a passable path for the strike in Rannachal.
I didn’t dodge or block. I simply flicked my wooden sword lightly.
The tip of the staff was cleanly severed as if it had been cut through paper.
It wasn’t just that the new blade was sharp. I’d honed the entire edge with the same density of care, so it could cut cleanly at once.
Even when I rotated the blade to recover after the cut, the balance was so good that it put no strain at all on my wrist or shoulder.
I found myself looking forward to the new longsaber I’d receive from Dojeong Ironworks a month from now.
I wiped the blade on my clothes, slid it back into its scabbard, and Gu-sam, who seemed genuinely startled, was staring at the damp cross-section of the bamboo as sap dripped from it.
“A spear user is done the moment the spear shaft is cut.”
“Ah.”
Not every spear shaft was this easy to cut. Since lives were on the line, spear users in the martial world made their shafts out of wood that was as tough and elastic as possible.
But no matter how strong it was, wood was still wood. It couldn’t beat metal. Sooner or later, after enough strain, it would break.
Blades and swords could still be used even if they got wet and rusted, but if a spear shaft got soaked by rain, the wood could warp or lose its spring.
And in the cramped, tangled confines of indoor rooms or alleyways, the length of a spear became a fatal weakness that restricted movement.
It couldn’t be hidden, either. It stood out anywhere you went, and because it was a weapon mainly used by the military, it often drew the annoying attention of government men.
In one way or another, the spear was a weapon ill-suited to martial artists.
After making Gu-sam practice a little more, I stood opposite him with the wooden sword.
“I’m coming.”
“Come on.”
“Hyah!”
Gu-sam shouted and drove the bamboo staff forward with the spear form of Rannachal.
At a glance, he’d put a great deal of force into it.
Standing where I was, I swung the wooden sword and knocked the staff’s head aside.
The bamboo staff, which had been moving with such momentum, flew off in the opposite direction as if someone had yanked it away.
Gu-sam stared at his empty hands, dumbfounded.
“Don’t grip the shaft too tightly. If you use too much force, you’ll have nothing left when you actually need it.”
We clashed again, but this time Gu-sam lost the staff at the Ranna part of the form as well.
There was too much of a gap in brute strength, control, and technique for us to match each other evenly.
So I had no choice but to ease up.
I held the wooden sword as lightly as a feather with the bare minimum of force, and even when I had to apply power, I let as much of it go as possible. This time, the feel of the clash changed completely.
He barely managed to block the lan of the form, but when he couldn’t shake off the na that pressed down from the opposite side, the wooden sword twisted around him and his wrist wrenched.
Then, in the middle of trying to block the za thrusting straight in, instead of taking it apart with the grain, he tried to stop it any way he could. The wooden sword curled inward and slipped from his grip.
When I looked at the wooden sword fallen on the ground, I was at a loss.
Even though I’d eased up and was clearly going easy on him, getting beaten by a child was embarrassing beyond belief. I could see why the military only taught spear work to soldiers.
If Pung Gang-ik had taken a spear and used Rannachal, it probably would have ended exactly like this.
For no good reason, I found myself thinking too much.
Gu-sam, who had just wiped the floor with the fundamentals of spear work he’d learned in barely half a period, stared at me with round eyes.
“H-Hero. This means what I think it means, right? It does, doesn’t it?”
He was so worked up that he clutched the bamboo staff and trembled all over.
At first I thought he was about to spout more nonsense, but then it occurred to me.
That this kid had some real talent.
He was already decent at fists and kicks, so maybe he’d grasped something from spear work too.
If he showed talent for the spear, he might become a useful sparring partner.
“What are you talking about?”
I looked at him with expectation, and Gu-sam wore a strangely embarrassed expression as he checked my reaction.
I had no idea what he was getting at, so I tilted my head. Then Gu-sam, his face lit with excitement, spoke carefully.
“I mean, this is that thing, right... the younger surpasses the elder. Am I right?”
“...”