Black Lake Beneath Thin Ice
“You were wrong from the start.”
Dozens of logs had been driven upright into the ground. Atop them I held my body perfectly horizontal, supported by a single arm, trembling violently as I endured for more than a full shichen.
My upper garments were gone. Sweat plastered my skin until I looked as though I had just climbed out of a bath. On my back, a massive wine jar filled to the brim with water swayed with every breath. It was not alone. One jar each stood balanced on the shoulder opposite the hand gripping the log, on the elbow of my outstretched arm, at the base of my spine, and behind both knees.
“Kugh!”
Every time I shifted my palm to keep from collapsing, the water in all four jars sloshed heavily.
“That one who walks the destiny of Heavenly Blood would try to chase the training methods of ordinary martial artists—that is where you first went wrong. A snake has its own way of hunting, and that is correct for the snake. But you are a tiger. Does it make any sense for a tiger to mimic a snake’s hunt?”
“Hey—”
I lifted my head to answer. The jars lurched.
“…Keugh!”
That tiny movement nearly destroyed every scrap of balance I still possessed. The middle-aged man clicked his tongue. When I had asked his name again, he had simply told me to call him Munwi—the Gatekeeper. He leaned on a staff whose tip curled into a knob the size of a child’s head.
“Until now you somehow managed to endure. Of course you did. You are no ordinary man; you walk the destiny of Heavenly Blood.”
He tapped the staff against a jar that had drifted out of place and nudged it back into position.
“But that only works against average men. The closer you come to those who truly approach the root of martial arts, the more your foundation will show its cracks. Still, you were fortunate in the one who first pointed you toward the proper signs. You have not strayed too far.”
“Wh-what am I most lacking in?”
I asked through the violent shaking of my arm.
“You are riddled with holes. Gaps that should never exist in someone who climbed the ranks step by proper step. I understand why. Your growth has been so rapid that the history of the jianghu has rarely seen its like. A bean sprout that shoots up overnight is always thin and tall compared to one that grew slowly, layer by layer.”
Munwi rocked each jar on my body with the tip of his staff.
“Your body has no overall balance, no harmony. What you need most is agility, and beyond that, a single unified sense of the whole—from the tips of your fingers to the tips of your toes. And while we are on the subject, allow me one question.”
He watched me struggle to steady my breathing.
“Do you truly believe the left arm gripping that log is planted exactly at the center of your weight?”
“What? Of course I’m centered—”
A single water-filled wine jar sat on the ground before me. My reflection floated on its surface. I had been certain my arm was dead center beneath my body. Yet the image on the water showed a man whose supporting arm was badly skewed, far from the true midline, straining with everything he had simply to stay upright.
Munwi scratched his head.
“Have you never recently felt that the central axis of your body was off? For instance, reaching for a plate and knocking it to the floor. Or intending a light grip and snapping chopsticks because far too much force came out.”
“…!!”
He had named my exact problem. Seeing my expression, he nodded as though he had expected nothing less.
“Your body is already slipping out of your control, turning into a wreck. On the surface it looks fine—harder than iron, even—but inside it is rotting, slowly and completely. That is why Mara Jin keeps clapping his hands in delight. After the peerless Heavenly Blood Demon, the most outstanding and viciously driven talent is walking straight into becoming his thrall.”
Even in the thick of desperate fights I had felt that wrongness more than once. When I broke through the Heavenly Net Formation, familiar footwork had still made me stumble several times. I had dismissed it as the chaos of battle. At the Namgung estate I had shattered plates and snapped chopsticks over and over. I told myself it was only exhaustion. When I fled the Ju household after an unexpected variable and pushed off the floor, the cloth underfoot had slid and nearly sent me sprawling. Just a momentary slip caused by haste and my own lack of skill, I had decided. And after that, and after that again—my body had begun to move less and less as I willed it, like faint aftershocks growing into a full quake.
“The monstrous strength you built while shedding tears of blood has let you drag this body along by force, the same way you are clinging to that impossible center of gravity right now. But it will only grow worse. And the thing accelerating all of it is, of course, that martial art you learned.”
“You mean the Heaven and Earth Great Shift…?”
Of every art I had copied, it was the only one that felt as though it carved away at my very lifespan with each use. Neither Hyeol-yeong-mu-hwan-sin-sul, nor Blood Demon Four-Wheel Locking Sword, nor Ssangryong-seonpung-geom had ever pushed back this hard. Every time the lightning-flame of that technique erupted through me, it felt as if the gears that made up Moyong Bi were being ground to powder.
“I guarantee you this: few arts as powerful will ever appear again. Yet the more you use it, the heavier the physical price will become. It was never a martial art meant for you. It is beyond your specifications—exactly the same as the damage your brain suffers every time you copy a technique.”
“That can’t—”
The jars stacked on my body rocked as if they would spill. I did not care. Heaven and Earth Great Shift was one of the final trump cards I still possessed.
Munwi smiled at my reaction.
“Do not worry.”
“What?”
“I will teach you the art that will replace it. Is that not why I am here—to prevent that worst outcome? I will teach you everything.”
His face turned cold as winter ice.
“Everything required to become a true Asura.”
A sharp crack of ice splitting rang out. On the far side of the lake where we had fished, deep in a shaded ravine, a sheet of ice had formed. It was not thick enough to trust. With arms still trembling from the earlier abuse, I seized a wooden practice sword. Munwi approached, adjusting his grip on the staff.
“To an ordinary martial artist the most important things are always: ‘What realm have I reached?’ ‘Which arts do I know?’ ‘What is the quality of those arts?’ You are different. For one who bears the destiny of Heavenly Blood, what arts you possess and what quality they hold are secondary matters that will resolve themselves in time. Something else is far more important.”
“What is that more important thing?”
Munwi swung the staff into a ready grip.
“Anger so narrow it borders on obsession—and fear.”
“…Anger and fear?”
“No emotions grant a person stronger motive than those two. Every action and every drive begins with emotion. Before the power of those emotions, internal arts and inner force are secondary.”
He added dryly that of course they still mattered; he was not telling me to ignore them.
“Until now you have always raged and gone mad with terror. From this moment I will teach you how to use that vast, overwhelming force of emotion—and how to use it efficiently. With that in mind…”
The spar began with a brutal crack.
I was beaten. Mercilessly beaten. On ice this thin I could never unleash the destructive, soaring techniques of my higher arts. I had to fight with pure fundamentals alone.
My lip split open. A crimson aura began to seep from both eyes.
That was when it happened.
“You bastard!”
It was the first time I had heard Munwi roar. The staff stabbed like lightning into my solar plexus. I coughed up bile.
“As long as you are here, do not show that spasmodic rage, and do not let the red light enter your eyes. That much I will not forgive.”
I wiped the drool from my mouth and stood.
“I am not telling you to suppress it. Focus. Control it. Control that rage of yours! Uncontrolled fury is nothing more than an iron club. Controlled fury becomes a sharpened blade that can tear an opponent apart.”
I rolled my wrist and reset my grip on the sword. My voice was hoarse.
“I’ll try.”
“I am not telling you to become kind for the sake of others. To possess true strength that overwhelms an opponent, you must draw true fear out of them. Raw, blazing rage cannot do that.”
We slowly measured the distance, walking across ice that continued to crack and groan.
“The rage that draws true fear is the anger of silence—black ink in the dark, a great river flowing in utter stillness.”
“…Hahp!”
It felt like a child throwing a tantrum in front of an adult. I clenched my teeth and charged. Every attack came to nothing. Munwi did not even seem to put strength into his movements; there was no lightning speed. For a moment I wondered whether I had ever truly learned martial arts at all.
“A barking dog never bites. Be silent. Hide your claws and keep your body in the shadows.”
His flowing motions never allowed my wooden sword a single solid clash. I staggered back, clutching my throat and coughing.
The spar continued without pause through day and night. The sun set. Starlight rose. Beneath the thin ice the black lake water heaved under the moonlight. Then the ice shattered. The right hand that had been braced against the surface punched straight through.
“Heuk!”
I flailed as my body began to sink. Munwi seized me by the scruff of the neck. Cold black water swallowed me to the chest. His voice was ice itself.
“Remember this. The form you must pursue is the black water under this thin ice. The flames that burn beneath that black water—those will be your rage, and the fear your enemy will feel.”
A crescent moon hung above Munwi’s face as I looked up, soaked. He yanked me free and flung me onto the ice.
My entire body shook as though I had been struck by a freezing fever. I hurriedly circulated inner force to drive out the cold, but my crude control could not even raise my body temperature with any precision. The sudden pressure of qi nearly cracked the ice again; I hastily withdrew it in alarm.
“Peak? Transcendent Peak? First-rate? Do not let yourself be inflated by such word games.”
I could only pant.
“One more thing. You are mistaken about something.”
I looked at him. He nodded.
“Your mother’s death was not your fault.”
“…What did you say?”
My breath stopped.
“The fault lies with your mother’s own foolishness and attachment—standing empty-handed in the face of crisis, endlessly waiting for others to save her, abandoning herself.”
My heart slammed once.
“It was not your fault.”
In that single instant my black pupils flooded with crimson light and I lunged at him like a maddened beast.
A fist smashed into my cheek. My body spun half a turn through the air and slammed shoulder-first into the ice. The surface exploded. The rebound flung me upward again; I tumbled across the muddy bank of the lake.
“You…!”
I spat mud and shouted.
“What the hell do you know?! You—about that time—!”
“….”
“There was no choice! The weather was freezing! There was nothing to eat! No one around to help us! Watching my mother, already wasted away, grab my wrist and freeze to death right in front of me—begging the people nearby to please help us and being turned away every single time, that same turning-away following me all the way down into the gutters of the capital where I crawled and begged for even a scrap of teaching!”
The red light in my eyes boiled over.
“Do you have any idea what that hell felt like, you son of a bitch?!”
Inner force shook my entire frame as I kicked off the ground and poured every ounce of strength into a punch aimed at Munwi’s face.
He vanished from my sight.
The single most agonizing blow I had ever felt in my life buried itself in my gut.
“…Keuk!”
I was subdued without the slightest chance to resist. Clutching my abdomen, I gasped for air while Munwi looked down at me, voice cold.
“From this moment on, cursing is also forbidden.”
White breath curled from his lips as he narrowed his eyes and murmured,
“No wonder Mara Jin took an interest. In innate nature and talent alone, you already surpass the Heavenly Blood Demon.”