The Sword Scar
Beyond the door that Ouyang Qiangang and Heo Cho-ryeong had leapt through, there was nothing but empty air.
"Qiangang!"
"My lady!"
Helpless, their bodies plunged into a darkness without a single thread of light.
SPLASH!
What caught them as they fell into depths impossible even to estimate was cold water.
"Ahk!"
The moment she struck the surface, the impact slammed into Heo Cho-ryeong with terrible force. With a short cry she lost consciousness and went limp in Ouyang Qiangang's arms.
But the crisis had only begun.
KWAAAAAAAH—!
With a roar like some colossal dragon screaming, the entire pool twisted into a massive whirlpool and dragged the two of them, maddeningly fast, down into a deeper underground waterway.
The crushing pressure that threatened to burst his body apart, and Heo Cho-ryeong's unconscious struggling, both blurred and faded as they were swept along by the violent current.
The suction was so enormous that even Ouyang Qiangang could not steady himself.
'Akasha, status!'
> Blood oxygen concentration is dropping rapidly, Doctor. Initiating emergency protocol. Beginning electrolytic oxygen generation using the water molecules in your bloodstream. This will consume an extreme amount of internal energy — you must surface as quickly as possible.
With Akasha's help, his own breathing was solved — but the unconscious Heo Cho-ryeong was another matter.
Feeling her body go slack in his arms, Ouyang Qiangang did not hesitate. He pressed his lips to hers and desperately forced the oxygen generated in his own lungs into her mouth.
There was no room for propriety between man and woman. Hesitation meant death.
Again and again, as the whirlpool hurled them through the dark, he gave her breath after breath through kiss after kiss.
How much time had passed, he could not say. The water pressure that had been crushing them seemed to ease, and then the whirlpool violently spat the two of them up above the surface.
SWOOSH!
It was another world entirely. A vast underground plaza, more than a hundred feet tall and five hundred feet across.
Drenched to the bone, Ouyang Qiangang gently carried the unconscious Heo Cho-ryeong to the water's edge and laid her on the ground. Her face was pale as death, and her breathing so faint it seemed it might stop at any moment.
Without a moment's delay, he reached out and began the pursuit-and-opening technique — unblocking her stagnant meridians and infusing vitality into her body. His hands traced the major meridian channels along her entire form.
In the process, he had no choice but to press and knead her whole body. Her frame, tempered by martial training, was firm without a single ounce of excess flesh, tracing graceful, fluid curves. For a moment, that bewitching sight made his heart waver — but Ouyang Qiangang shook his head and cast the stray thoughts aside.
'Get a hold of yourself.'
Only after Heo Cho-ryeong's breathing had steadied and the color returned to her cheeks did Ouyang Qiangang finally breathe a sigh of relief and take proper stock of his surroundings.
Brilliant light streaming down from countless stalactites in the ceiling bathed the entire plaza in a dreamlike glow. But it was not the cavern's strange beauty that seized his gaze.
It was the carpet of self-luminous moss and mushrooms spread endlessly across the floor like a great tapestry.
'What on earth are these?'
As if drawn by an unseen force, he crouched down before the crimson moss spread across the ground like a velvet carpet. The moss, growing along the rock's surface like veins of blood, gave off a delicate, shimmering red glow all on its own. A warm, fragrant energy emanated from it. This was no ordinary moss — it was something extraordinary, laden with immense spiritual energy.
Then, like a flash of lightning, a passage from the Life-and-Death Scripture — which he had obtained from the Divine Buddha of Longevity not long ago and memorized in its entirety — flickered through his mind.
'Akasha, cross-reference the herbal atlas data from the Life-and-Death Scripture against the visual information and energy pattern of this moss. This crimson color, this fragrance, this flow of energy...'
> Understood, Doctor. Comparing data... Match found.
Along with Akasha's voice, a passage from the medical text surfaced vividly in his mind.
It grows only in the blood vessels of caverns where the utmost yin energy flows. Its light is the color of blood, and its fragrance calms the heart. Its name was Supreme Blood Moss (Extreme Blood State) — a miraculous spirit herb that replenished vital energy and blood, mended broken bones, and turned rotting flesh new again.
"Ah...!"
A gasp escaped Ouyang Qiangang before he could stop it. The spirit herb that even the Divine Buddha of Longevity had recorded in the Life-and-Death Scripture as a legend he had heard of but never found — it lay spread endlessly at his very feet.
His gaze, still reeling between shock and elation, turned next to the milky-white mushrooms nearby. Strange growths shaped like the brain of a dragon, they radiated a soft, pearly luminescence that gave the whole space an air of deep mystery.
'Then that would be...'
> Yes, Doctor. There is a 99.7% probability that it is Dragon-Brain Jade Fungus (Dragon Brain Fungus), recorded as always growing in the same places as Supreme Blood Moss. It is a rare treasure with outstanding effects for clearing the mind and purifying the quality of one's internal energy.
For a moment, Ouyang Qiangang was left speechless. He could only gaze around the vast underground plaza in wonder.
This place was a colossal treasure vault where legendary elixirs grew wild.
Dragging his exhausted body along, he plucked handfuls of Supreme Blood Moss and Dragon-Brain Jade Fungus and ate them. The spirit herbs melted softly in his mouth, and waves of pure, potent life energy spread through his entire body. He sat down at once and began circulating the Transcendent Formless Divine Art, working to claim every last trace of that energy as his own.
When he opened his eyes some time later, he felt a faint disappointment that there had been no dramatic surge in his internal energy. But the crushing fatigue was fully restored, and the flow of his internal power ran far more smoothly than before — more than enough to satisfy him.
Holding the Supreme Blood Moss and Dragon-Brain Jade Fungus in his hands, a smile rose to his lips.
'With these, developing a top-grade Dragon-Nourishing Pill to rival the Great Restoration Pill or the Purple Void Pill is only a matter of time. And I can expect revolutionary results in treating Nine Yin Severed Meridians, too.'
New inspiration had taken root in him — but for now, escaping this place came first. His energy recovered, Ouyang Qiangang rose to his feet. The first place his gaze went was the pool, where the great whirlpool that had spat them out still churned with an eerie sound.
'Going back out through there is impossible, I'd imagine.'
Escape through the pool was out of the question. He would have to fight against the crushing suction of a whirlpool that swallowed everything, force his way through it in reverse, and cross a distance of unknowable length. And beyond that lay the sheer vertical drop of several hundred feet they had fallen — climbing it with the internal energy he and Heo Cho-ryeong currently possessed was simply unthinkable.
Which meant he had to find another way out. If he failed, he and Heo Cho-ryeong were fated to grow old and die down here.
Ouyang Qiangang turned his head and looked out over the two kinds of spirit herbs that filled the plaza.
'Supreme Blood Moss and Dragon-Brain Jade Fungus. Thanks to them, we won't starve — but we can hardly spend the rest of our lives in an underground cavern...'
He clenched his teeth.
'There has to be another way out. There just has to be.'
Ouyang Qiangang refused to abandon hope. Casting one last glance at Heo Cho-ryeong, still lost in unconscious slumber, he began a systematic sweep of the vast underground plaza. There might be an exit — or perhaps some other secret hidden within this mysterious space.
As he scoured the plaza, Ouyang Qiangang noticed that the northern wall, unlike the others, formed a sheer cliff face, as if it had been cleaved by a single blow of an axe. When he drew near, he discovered a strange mark at the center of the wall.
It was a deep fissure, cut in a perfectly vertical line — three feet wide, thirty feet long.
'That's not natural. Nothing natural could be this flawlessly straight. Which means someone made it artificially... Did people live here?'
He approached the wall and ran his hand across the surface of the fissure. The surface was smooth as glass — clearly not the mark of a blade or chisel. He leaned in, trying to gauge its depth, but the darkness swallowed the bottom without a trace.
'Akasha, analyze this mark.'
> Yes, Doctor. Analyzing now. This is strange. There is no trace of any tool whatsoever on the surface of this groove. The molecular structure of the cut face appears to have been... instantaneously vaporized and erased by a single immense surge of energy.
'Vaporized by energy? No... that can't be right.'
One hypothesis surfaced in Ouyang Qiangang's mind — an impossible one, and yet the only one that could possibly explain it. Involuntarily, he took a step back in disbelief.
'What if this was made by a human hand? What if this is... the single trace left behind by one enormous sword?'
The fissure had not occurred naturally. It was a sword scar (Sword Mark) — the mark left when a martial artist whose skill had reached the realm of the divine poured his everything into a blade and split the empty air a single, solitary time.
The moment he realized what it was, the shock that struck Ouyang Qiangang was like a bolt of lightning. A sword strike capable of shearing a cliff a hundred feet high as cleanly as tofu.
Within the perfectly straight scar, he felt a will so vast and overwhelming that not even centuries of time had been able to erase it. He understood now that he was standing before a trace that belonged not to men, but to some primordial being of myth.
The instant he glimpsed even a fragment of the boundless intent held within that scar, enlightenment flashed through his mind like lightning.
In that very instant, Akasha switched all of her processes into silent mode. From the countless records and tales of the martial world that Ouyang Qiangang had read over the months, she understood with perfect clarity how sacred and crucial the moment of enlightenment was to a martial artist — and that interrupting it was a taboo tantamount to murder. For now, more than any analysis or counsel, her most important task was to let Ouyang Qiangang himself receive this miracle in full.
And in that silence, the three supreme arts of the Nine Dragons Ten-Thousand Mountains Manual that had circled in his mind for months — their scattered fragments — assembled themselves into one vast, complete picture.
Star-Web Grand Sword Art.Thunderbolt Yama Pillar.Nine Palaces Phantom Trace Footwork.
The true forms of the three arts, whose core principles he had only barely outlined before, stormed through his mind like a tempest.
A long while passed before the long lashes of Ouyang Qiangang, seated motionless as stone, gave the faintest tremble. Very, very slowly — like a man waking from a long sleep — he opened his eyes.
His gaze was deeper than before, carrying a profound light as though it held every star in the night sky. Before the single, complete truth revealed by one great sword scar, the secrets of five scattered arts had laid themselves bare, leaving nothing hidden.
It was a stroke of destiny.
But rather than revel in his joy, Ouyang Qiangang looked once more at the scar carved into the wall — because of what still eluded him.
He had grasped the original forms of all five arts, yet the source of the single sword strike that had made them all possible — the primordial archetype of that sword's edge itself — remained as hazy as mist. That was a power belonging to the domain of gods, far beyond the reach of his current level.
As if she had been waiting for him to emerge from his reverie, Akasha's voice echoed in his mind.
> Are you all right, Doctor? I detected an enormous volume of information-processing activity in your brainwaves just now.
'I'm fine, Akasha. I've unraveled every remaining secret of the Nine Dragons Ten-Thousand Mountains Manual. But that last one — the sword scar itself — I still can't understand it.'
> That is only natural. The data contained in this sword scar exhibits complexity on a quantum level. Its essence is estimated to reach not merely three-dimensional movement, but the fundamental laws of time and space — and perhaps something beyond even those.
> With my current martial arts database and computational capacity, I cannot even predict how much longer a complete interpretation would take.
Ouyang Qiangang's eyes grew heavy. Akasha's analysis had given precise, mathematical language to the vastness he had felt.
And at that very moment—