The Fruits of Seclusion
From that day on, Ouyang Qiangang barred his door and shut himself away from the world. He had never been much for going out even before—his frail health had always been excuse enough—but ever since stepping down from his seat as young clan head, his seclusion had deepened until even his shadow was a rare sight.
Ouyang Qiangang devoted himself to only two things. One was training the Transcendent Peerless Divine Art he had newly created, using it to govern his body and slowly, if meagerly, build his internal energy; the other was working with Akasha to decode the secrets of the Nine Dragons and Ten Thousand Mountains.
Nine Yin Severed Meridians was a terrifying disease. Extreme yin energy of the deepest cold accumulated at nine critical acupoints until, at last, the entire meridian network filled with icy blockage and carried its victim to death. Yet for all its horror, the meridians had not been completely sealed from the very beginning. A sliver of a passage, fine as a strand of silk, still remained—had that been closed as well, no human being could have stayed alive.
For the past three months, his days had been consumed with prying apart the secrets of the painting, while his nights went to pioneering new depths of the Transcendent Peerless Divine Art—the art on which his very survival hung.
In training the divine art he himself had devised, he fixed on two clear goals. The first was to refine the true qi purified by the art until it was as thin and keen as a needle, then thread it, ever so carefully, through those gossamer-narrow passages at the nine great acupoints. Widening each opening by forcing qi through it continuously was work that demanded extraordinary concentration and exquisitely precise control.
The second was to draw the dank, frigid yin energy condensed thickly at the first great acupoint—the one closest to his dantian—into the art's core principle, the Cold Energy Conversion System, and transform it into internal power. Not merely driving the cold out or suppressing it, but making it his own strength. This was the keystone of his early accumulation of internal energy, and the surest means available to him, in his present circumstances, of bringing the Nine Yin Severed Meridians to heel.
On the first day, Akasha spoke to him just as he opened his eyes from his breathing exercise.
"Doctor, the precision analysis of the data accumulated so far, together with your physiological changes, is complete. It contains some disappointing news—shall I share it?"
"Go ahead."
"To fully purify the cold energy condensed at the nine great acupoints and restore your meridians to their normal state, I project a minimum expenditure of thirty years' worth of pure, potent internal energy."
"Ugh… thirty years?"
"Yes."
Akasha let a beat pass, then continued in a brighter voice.
"There is good news as well."
"What is it?"
"Each time one of the great acupoints is healed, there is a high probability that my own systems will activate in stages alongside it."
"So the functions I haven't been able to use would unlock?"
"Correct. I have confirmed the possibility of a system evolution spanning nine stages in all."
"Tell me more."
Akasha laid before him the sweeping vision of a system evolution unfolding across nine stages in all. By the time her explanation ended, Ouyang Qiangang's mouth had fallen open.
"Astonishing. From around stage seven onward, 'human' hardly seems like the right word for it anymore."
"…I hesitated to say it, since it might sound as if I were showing off, but……"
"You were going to say it anyway."
"Well… yes, I suppose I was……"
"Then talk."
"Because the nine-stage evolution and the treatment of your Nine Yin Severed Meridians exist in mutual complement, every single stage of evolution requires an additional thirty years' worth of internal energy."
"So we'd need internal energy equal to the arithmetic sum of all those numbers?"
"Yes."
"Which means… breaking through all nine stages would take two hundred and seventy years' worth of……?"
"That is correct."
"Ugh……"
A jolt of dizziness wrung a groan unbidden from Ouyang Qiangang's lips. Thirty years' worth of internal energy, at minimum, for every single stage. The figures were enough to make one reel. Even by the most generous estimate, the internal energy piled in his dantian at this very moment came to less than a single year's worth.
"Thirty years' worth of internal energy… how on earth am I supposed to amass that in any short span of time? However innovative the Transcendent Peerless Divine Art may be, however far it defies all convention, that's a staggering quantity—ordinary training alone would take years, even at the very fastest."
"I didn't want to tell you, knowing you would take it like this……"
For a moment the future seemed to blot out the light before his eyes, but he soon steadied himself. Despairing over a problem that could not be solved today was, in truth, a foolish thing to do.
"Akasha."
"Yes, Doctor."
"Treating the first great acupoint can wait. Right now we need to find a way to build internal energy as much as possible."
"I share that thought. And as it happens, I have already conceived of a method."
"What is it?"
"Maintaining the circulation of the Transcendent Peerless Divine Art without pause, even as you go about your daily life—as naturally as breathing."
"Hmm……"
"You currently devote one sijin—a two-hour period—each day to training the art. But if you could sustain the circulation and breath regulation through all twelve periods of the day……"
"Then the rate of internal energy gain would multiply twelvefold."
"In theory, yes. The actual gains will have to be verified once it becomes possible."
"Is there any chance the art could be improved to allow it?"
"It would be difficult, but not impossible. The Holographic Pupils you have already acquired are, at their foundation, built around circulating qi while in motion."
A smile tugged at the corner of Ouyang Qiangang's mouth.
"If there's a possibility, then obviously we improve it."
By the common sense of the murim, the method of circulating internal energy the two of them(?) had conceived was a realm attainable only upon reaching the Transformation Realm. But neither Akasha, that consummate crystallization of modern science, nor Ouyang Qiangang, who had built his half-baked knowledge of the martial world entirely from wuxia films, could even imagine how extraordinary a feat it was. It was, in the truest sense, a day-old pup that had never learned to fear the tiger.
But ignorance(?), after all, sometimes gives birth to reckless courage. To achieve their goal of "a mind-method system that circulates qi of its own accord at all times," the two of them put their heads together once more, repeating research and experiment after experiment.
And at last, when nearly three months of seclusion had run their course, they turned that seemingly impossible realm into reality. Ouyang Qiangang had arrived at a state in which the true qi of the Transcendent Peerless Divine Art circulated through his body as naturally as breathing, without any conscious direction. It was the sort of feat that should have shaken the whole world—and yet the two of them had not the faintest awareness of what they had accomplished.
Even as they improved the art, they did not neglect the decoding of the painting. The Nine Dragons and Ten Thousand Mountains was the secret legacy with which the Ouyang Clan had begun—and perhaps its final hope—one whose arts even the founding clan head had spent an entire lifetime managing to interpret only two of, and those barely.
Over the past three months, Ouyang Qiangang had marshaled his genius of a mind together with the transcendent computational power Akasha wielded, limited though her present state was. Like a man untangling a labyrinthine cipher, he analyzed with relentless persistence the symbols and patterns hidden within the painting, and the flow of energy woven through them.
And as summer burned itself out and autumn strode close, wondrous results came to light. Ouyang Qiangang and Akasha succeeded in perfectly deciphering two of the five secret arts concealed in the Nine Dragons and Ten Thousand Mountains. They were the Limitless Return Heart Method and the Gale Chain Palms—arts that the founding clan head Ouyang Dam had discovered, only to lose them amid the chaos of the Great Orthodox-Demonic War.
More than that, they claimed another victory: of the remaining three martial arts, which no one in a hundred and fifty years had managed even a thread of a clue, they grasped a rough outline and the core principles of each. It was a truly dazzling achievement, one that no one in the Ouyang Clan's century and a half of history had ever matched. The perfectly restored Limitless Return Heart Method in particular proved an immense aid in improving the Transcendent Peerless Divine Art, alongside the Holographic Pupils.
The stifling heat of summer ebbed away, and the leaves in the front courtyard began to turn red and gold one by one as the season settled fully into autumn. Ouyang Qiangang carefully set down the final characters of the two martial arts recovered from the painting into the volumes he was compiling, then laid his brush aside.
Thock—
Then he exhaled a long breath and stretched himself wide.
"Whew… finally finished."
The long, grueling first phase of work, which had stretched across three months, was complete. The old him—forever bloodless, sickliness written across his face—was nowhere to be found; now a faint flush of color and a quiet vitality glowed beneath his skin. All of it was thanks to the perpetual qi circulation system of the Transcendent Peerless Divine Art, completed at last three days before.
"Twenty days past the projected time, though……"
Unearthing the five ultimate arts hidden in the Nine Dragons and Ten Thousand Mountains, and refining the Transcendent Peerless Divine Art, had proven a far more painstaking process than expected.
Akasha spoke in a downcast tone.
"I'm sorry, Doctor."
"For what?"
"My current level of system activation is so low that I am exercising barely one percent of my capabilities. That is why every analysis and simulation has taken longer than projected."
"How is that your fault? It's my lack of internal energy that's to blame."
Smacking his lips, Ouyang Qiangang went on.
"If you were at full capacity, how long would it have taken to complete everything?"
"Had I been able to use every function without restriction, both of those tasks—deciphering every secret of the Nine Dragons and Ten Thousand Mountains, and perfecting your Transcendent Peerless Divine Art to its optimal state—would have been finished in a single day."
"A day……?"
"Yes."
Ouyang Qiangang was struck speechless for a moment, then burst into a hollow, disbelieving laugh.
"Hahahaha……"
A single day. It was, frankly, staggering.
But Akasha's next words offered his heart a measure of comfort.
"But Doctor, even within these limited resources and these harsh conditions, what the two of us have achieved is truly remarkable."
"Is that flattery?"
"Not at all—I mean it sincerely. Without your extraordinary insight and your unyielding will that refuses to give up, it would have been absolutely impossible. Even by my analysis… I would call this something close to a miracle."
Ouyang Qiangang gave a wry smile and tilted his head.
"No matter how I look at it, that's flattery."
"I told you it is not."
"Heh……"
Laughing lightly, Ouyang Qiangang continued.
"There's no such thing as a miracle in this world. Without your support, I never could have achieved this on my own. It's because the two of us did it together that we've come this far."
His words were sincere. Slow as their progress might be, he and Akasha were steadily moving forward together, one solid step at a time.
The sky beyond the window was still blue, but before he knew it the sun had begun to lean toward the west.
"Akasha, what time is it?"
"Just past three in the afternoon."
Akasha's soft voice echoed through his mind.
"That's late enough. Time to go see Father."
Over the past three months, without his even realizing it, Ouyang Baek had taken root in his heart as a true 'father,' and no longer a stranger. Perhaps the assassination attempt, and the honest conversation that had followed, had loosened, little by little, the heart that had been bolted shut when he fell into this world.
"You're delivering the manuals to him today, then?"
"Yes. They're written out and finished, so it's time I brought them to him. There's no reason to delay."
"I'm certain the Clan Head will be overjoyed!"
Matching the change in how Ouyang Qiangang addressed his father, Akasha too had taken to calling Ouyang Baek 'the Clan Head.' The Limitless Return Heart Method and the Gale Chain Palms—the life's masterwork of the founding clan head. As he carefully wrapped the two manuals, laden with three months of toil, in a sheath of silk, a faint smile surfaced on Ouyang Qiangang's face.
Bundle in hand, he rose briskly from his seat.