001. I Taught Myself Qi-Breathing on the Internet

"Hah! Hahk! Hahk!"

I ran barefoot through the dark mountains at night.

"After him!"

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

"Find him! He can't have gotten far!"

"Damn it, how did he slip away in that window of time?"

"Was the bar on the locked room's window loose or something?"

Flashlight beams swayed behind me, and the curses of furious men echoed through the dark.

"Hah! Hah! Agh, I'm such a dumbass, dumbass, absolute dumbass!"

Gasping for air, my lungs burning all the way to my throat, I cursed my own stupidity.

Where I was running now was somewhere in the mountains of Gangwon Province.

I say "somewhere" vaguely for a simple reason: I'd been kidnapped and dragged here, so I had no idea exactly where I was.

The miracle of breathing — a universal cure for all ailments!

A qi-breathing organization. Lured in by that slogan.

Its true nature was, of course, a cult.

When I came to after downing a sealed bottle of Welch's, I was inside some building in a mountain valley in Gangwon Province — location unknown.

I had just escaped that facility.

Feel free to laugh at me for falling for a slogan that reeked of cult from a mile away.

But people, by nature, fall for the most obvious traps when they're desperate.

And I was desperate.

"Hahk! Hahk, hahk!"

There's a saying: a dull mind makes the body suffer.

Twisting that around, there's a joke that a strong body spares the mind.

Personally, I support the latter.

Because even with a bad head, a good body can cover for it — but if the body fails, no amount of brains can compensate.

I'd been sickly and fragile since childhood.

Summer colds that even dogs don't catch were a given for me. I'd collapse from anemia at the drop of a hat, and a little fatigue would send nosebleeds gushing.

How bad was it? Bad enough that I studied until 1 a.m. the night before the CSAT, fainted from anemia, and was forced to retake the exam the following year.

If I'd been a frail, sickly girl, I might at least have earned some sympathy. Unfortunately, I was a man — and a decently built one at that.

How do people treat a tall, big-framed guy who whines and mopes about constant minor ailments?

As for the miserable sagas I've lived through on that account, I won't bother recounting them piece by piece.

Telling them would only make me more pathetic.

But if I absolutely had to pick the single most miserable moment — well, since I never had any serious illness, I'd say it was getting dragged off to active duty all the same.

Then, after aching and wheezing my way through military life, on the very day of my discharge — my heart stopped.

"Kh-hahk! Ngh, ughk! H-hospital! H-heart! My—"

"Y-yah, Kim Yi-yeon, is that true? Heart!? Your heart hurts!? Hey, damn it, lie down! Now!"

Acute heart failure.

Thankfully, the company executive seeing me off performed emergency first aid, and I survived.

For the first time in my life, I regretted calling the thieving rat that stole the soldiers' rations a piece of sh*t.

"It must have been hard on such a young man."

"So what was the problem in the end? Something genetic?"

"Tch, no, it's nothing like that... The structure of his heart is fine. No deformities, no valve abnormalities. It's just..."

"Just?"

"The patient was congenitally very frail, so the only explanation we can give is that heart failure struck at a young age by rare chance..."

"Excuse me? No, what kind of—"

I looked it up later. The probability of heart failure in a man in his twenties is less than 0.1%.

By some statistics, it didn't even reach 0.01%.

If something had been physically wrong somewhere in my body, there would have been a solution — surgery, medication, something.

But if it was simply that my body was weak, and the 0.01% roulette of heart failure had come up anyway? Then there was no answer.

The incident shook me to my core.

It could happen again at any time.

In the worst case, I might not wake up tomorrow morning.

I was terrified.

Terrified enough to tremble all over.

I didn't want to die.

I absolutely, desperately did not want to die.

So I made up my mind.

I would fix this weak body of mine.

I tried everything under the sun.

I emptied my military savings running to famous hospitals in every direction.

Useless.

If modern medicine could have fixed it, I wouldn't have suffered until now in the first place.

With no answer from modern medicine, my eyes naturally turned to folk remedies.

But most of those were just marketing scams fanning health anxiety to fleece people.

I tried exercising too.

But with my body in this state to begin with, no amount of effort built any stamina or muscle.

Instead, I got laid up with muscle soreness and only racked up more hospital bills.

After repeated failures like that, I drifted and drifted until I arrived at a suspicious-as-hell organization peddling qi-breathing and qi-exercise.

And the result of that was... the mess I was in right now.

"Hoo! Hooo! Hoo!"

I ran through the night mountains, and kept running.

I could see the lights of a small village below.

But I didn't go.

If the cult bastards chasing me weren't idiots, they'd have staked people out down there.

Worst case, that whole village might be in league with them.

I had to go farther.

Running like that, day and night, I finally reached a decently large town.

I later heard I'd covered more than 20 kilometers over the mountains.

What happened after that, I barely remember.

I applied to the police for protective custody and dropped into sleep like a faint.

A month of various things followed, and in the end the cult that had kidnapped me was rounded up in one sweep.

According to what the police told me later, the group wasn't merely a cult.

They were a vicious criminal organization wearing the mask of religion — dealing in illegal organ sales, human trafficking, and narcotics on top of everything else.

After all that ordeal, I was able to return to daily life.

A daily life where my heart could stop at any moment.

It was a near-death experience that had nearly wrecked my life — and not a single soul worried about me.

My mother had passed away long ago.

My father, while I was in the army, got drunk, missed his step, cracked his skull on the corner of a table, and died.

What a remarkable life, truly, in every possible way.

But I had no time to savor my own misery.

Because I had a far more pressing question on my mind.

A question that had been with me since the day I fled the cult.

How the hell did I run 20 kilometers through the mountains that day?

I was the guy who got hit with heart failure in ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠his twenties by sheer fluke — no genetic predisposition, no heart valve deformity, nothing but pure frailty.

Obviously, I didn't have the stamina to sprint 20 kilometers through night mountains.

But that day was different.

I tore down the midnight mountains like a paratrooper on a sprint drill.

How was that possible?

Was it just the human potential that awakens in a moment of crisis?

No. It wasn't something that simple.

I have a guess.

Early on, before I entered the cult, they'd posed as a legitimate organization and taught me dantian breathing.

Later I learned it was a very simple technique you could find with five minutes of internet searching.

But while doing that simple dantian breathing, I felt something hard to explain.

A heat blooming in my lower belly — a feeling of something filling me from within.

Because of that experience, I let my guard down even more, and ended up chugging that lidded Welch's in one go.

So I got kidnapped by the cult and locked alone in a room with steel window bars.

How did I escape, you ask?

I ripped the window bars off by raw strength and climbed out.

Come to think of it, that was even more impossible than running 20 kilometers over a mountain.

An absurd, monstrous strength and stamina that I couldn't believe came out ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of this frail body.

And the common thread? In both moments, I'd felt the warmth born from dantian breathing flowing along my body.

"Is qi-breathing right for my body?"

I didn't know.

But this was the first time in my life I'd ever felt my body change like this.

Worth trying.

With nothing to lose and nothing to postpone, I laid out a spot on the floor of my room, sat down, and tried dantian breathing.

"Ssss — hoo."

Clench the belly on the inhale, release it on the exhale.

A truly simple breathing method.

But the more I repeated that simple technique, the more I felt that faint warmth filling my insides.

I breathed for a long while.

Yet all I got was the sensation of that mild warmth pooling below my navel — nothing beyond it.

"...Is it because this method's too basic?"

Maybe long-term practice would be different.

But if I was going to commit to something long-term anyway, wouldn't it be more efficient to learn something a little more proper?

"Not that I have the guts to go visit an organization in person..."

Wasn't it just one time ago that a cult nearly traded my organs for their own profit?

Surviving ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠once might have been dumb luck, but there was no guarantee a second time would go the same way.

"...Maybe I'll try searching online once."

Gambling on a small possibility, I typed qi-breathing into a search engine. And, as expected.

Every result was either absurd nonsense, vague abstraction, or cult recruitment posts exactly like the one I'd fallen for.

"Figures."

Too scared to meet anyone in person, and the internet offered nothing but empty calories.

But I couldn't bring myself to let go of qi-breathing entirely.

Half out of stubbornness, I kept digging through the internet — and by chance, I stumbled onto a spectacularly old website.

A suspiciously fishy site introduction.

[The Basics of Qi-Breathing: Easy, Simple, and Learnable on Your Own]

But contrary to the intro, the actual writing was considerably professional and concrete.

Best of all, there were none of those manipulative, cult-flavored phrases designed to wind people around their finger.

When I read that Hua Tuo had created qi-breathing, my first reaction was: what kind of crap is this now?

Hua Tuo. Wasn't that the guy?

When Cao Cao complained of headaches in Romance of the Three Kingdoms—

'The cause of the headache is the head! Therefore, we de-stroy the head!'

—the fellow who tried to split it open with an axe.

He was also called a divine physician, a leading figure among the great doctors of the East.

"That guy created qi-breathing?"

Curious, I searched it up — and amazingly, it was real.

And the name of his disciple Fan A was right there alongside it.

With a famous historical figure's name attached, my trust in the writing shot skyward.

...The problem is that appealing to authority like this is a classic con artist's tactic...

The very bastards who'd tried to harvest my organs bragged endlessly that their group was created by a disciple of the Mount Hua Sect.

"...Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Even if I follow along with this, it's not like anything bad happens to me."

The breathing method was a bit difficult, but the movements numbered only seven, so it was easier than I expected.

"Ssss, haaa."

Having memorized the movements, I stood up.

And standing in the middle of my narrow one-room apartment, I slowly tried following the Seven Animal Frolics.

Honestly, the exercise movements and breathing method were all technical explanations, so they seemed plausible enough — but this part was too abstract, and I almost ignored it.

But whether I understood it or not, once I'd seen it, I couldn't help dwelling on it.

According to the text, Essence dwells below the navel, Qi at the solar plexus, and Spirit in the head.

As I performed the movements and breathing of the Seven Animal Frolics, I focused on those three regions.

And then, strangely, something began to squirm in all three places.

At first, the sensation was simply fascinating.

Then, little by little, I realized that this squirming was moving according to my will.

What is this?

The text said that with a year of constant practice, day and night without fail, one could expect modest results.

So was this squirming sensation just my imagination?

Perplexed, I moved the squirming sensations toward my dantian bit by bit.

And the moment all three sensations gathered in one place—

FWOOOOOOOOSH

An enormous surge of heat erupted below my navel.

"Ack — what the hell is this!?"

Startled, I ripped off my pants and underwear in one motion.

But below my navel there was no wound, nothing wrong at all.

And the searing heat, too, had vanished like a lie before I knew it.

It was then that I saw, reflected in my computer monitor, the sight of myself — woken from half-sleep, hurling my underwear to the floor.

My King Cobra, dangling loose by force of inertia, waved up at me. 'Bye, Dad!'

"What kind of lunatic stunt is this..."

As a monk-like clarity crashed over me in waves, I hastily retrieved my underwear and pants, put them back on, and flopped onto the bed.

I nearly got my organs harvested falling for qi-breathing once, and here I was pulling this stunt again...

I really am a pathetic bastard.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

I dragged myself up to the alarm I'd set for my part-time shift.

A job I'd landed almost simultaneously with escaping the cult.

The money from my military savings — about half — was gone from running around to hospitals.

Falling for the cult ate up the other half.

My late father left me nothing but debt.

"So this is why they say never co-sign a loan for family, no matter who they are..."

To survive, I had no time to lie in bed recovering from the shock.

"Dying here."

With the morning greeting that had long since worn itself into my mouth, I got out of bed.

But...

"Huh?"

Something was off.

"Why didn't I get orthostatic hypotension?"

My usual routine was to collapse back onto the bed two or three times from low blood pressure every time I stood up.

But today, strangely, no dizziness came.

And that wasn't all.

I'd clearly slept less than usual, yet my body felt lighter.

"What is this?"

A refreshingly clear physical state I'd never once experienced in my life.

There was only one suspect.

Qi-breathing. The Seven Animal Frolics.

"...It actually worked, didn't it."