The Heavenly Demon Copies Martial Arts
“We’ll train here for eight weeks.”
Before the training began, he summoned me to the outer forest of Cheonsubaekryeonsa, where a waterfall thundered down.
Pahwanggun never asked how I had watched and copied the Hwan-yeong-dae-sin-bo. He didn’t inquire about the origins or paths of the two forms I had unleashed either. For someone whose head was about to explode trying to invent excuses, it was both baffling and a profound relief.
Instead, he said this:
“In the past I’ve seen two geniuses with eyes as sharp as yours. They could copy just about anything after one or two looks. That trait of yours isn’t so unfamiliar to me.”
On the surface it might look similar, but the people Pahwanggun had seen before and I were completely different. They were true geniuses who grasped the essence of a form, saw through it, and then imitated it. I simply stole the root whole. Still, I kept quiet and didn’t argue.
“What do you think your greatest strength is?”
My strength?
I stammered.
“Sharp eyes…?”
“No.”
Pahwanggun cut my answer short with a single stroke.
“Sharp eyes? That’s part of it, sure. But it’s secondary. From what I’ve observed, the innate strengths that set you completely apart from ordinary people are two.”
He raised one finger.
“First: when it comes to putting action into motion, you have none of that ‘momentary hesitation’ every human being possesses. That puzzled me at first. You usually only see that in assassins worn smooth by real combat, or else…”
His voice trailed off.
“…in old soldiers who have already tasted hell on the battlefield. For now I’ll just call it something you were born with. Not a bad strength. Especially in this Jianghu.”
I knew the words he had just thrown out were nothing more than a pebble cast without meaning. Even so, they stabbed coldly into my heart.
“Second is your body. Your physique is so perfectly developed in bone and muscle, so optimized for learning martial arts, that I’d believe it if someone told me you’d undergone a complete remolding of bone and flesh. Any ordinary master who took you as a disciple would be drooling, itching to cram every technique they knew into you.”
I liked to think I had a decent head for reading situations, yet I couldn’t begin to guess what was going through his mind.
“Pahwanggun-nim, of the strengths you just listed, one is about my personality and actions. The only one that can actually be developed is the second.”
“You understand well.”
“…What?”
A creeping unease rose in me.
“Only eight weeks remain until the Chunmu Hall promotion exam—time is tight. And the Chunmu Hall promotion exam has never once, without exception, been a relative evaluation that simply compares people against each other. It always sets a specific standard and measures each individual’s ability against that standard to decide pass or fail.”
He rattled off past exam contents I could barely follow—racing over Geummu Peak, holding a boulder aloft for as long as possible, swimming upstream against the Great River’s current, and more.
“So the answer to what we must do from now on is simple. We forge a body strong enough to pass no matter what standard they throw at us. The problem is you don’t have a single thread of internal energy to support your strength. That means you’ll have to bleed twice as hard as anyone else. Understood?”
“Yes!”
Pahwanggun slapped his knee and roared.
“Therefore the code name for our eight-week operation is this: ‘Give bones and take flesh!’”
I blinked.
“That sounds backwards. Usually it’s give flesh and take bones…”
“No, this is right. You’re the one who’s mistaken.”
I should have noticed then.
No—I should have stopped him.
“Just kill me already!”
—Splash.
I hadn’t even climbed twelve times before the waterfall’s force flung me off. I had to cling to moss-slick stones and claw my way upstream against the cascade. The falling water made breathing nearly impossible. Every massive surge of water crushed down on me like a thousand-catty weight. Climbing bare-handed was already hard enough; fighting the current itself was pure hell.
“Is this even real training?!”
“Huh? Can’t hear you—you’re third-rate. Mealtime’s here, so shut the nonsense and get up here.”
Pahwanggun held out a green porridge that Physician Haseo had boiled in a pot and handed over.
“There’s plenty of porridge—eat as much as you want. Five times a day, between training sessions, on an empty stomach, this is all you get. That’s the key.”
I had no idea what ingredients went into it, but the taste was horrific. Eating it on an empty stomach felt like my stomach was being scraped raw; it was death by porridge.
Steam rose in white plumes from my back as the water evaporated against my body heat after I climbed out. My heart pounded so hard and fast that I could see the pulse jumping in my wrist; when I lay down to sleep, the thundering of my own heartbeat kept me awake.
“What you’re eating is Pahwan Poison Lotus Stew, made by mixing seventeen medicinal herbs. It maxes out blood circulation while pushing muscle and physical development to the absolute limit.”
Pahwanggun crossed his legs and continued.
“Kids with ordinary bodies would be writhing on the ground the second they swallowed it, feeling like their hearts were about to explode. A medicine this vicious—borderline poison that the body can barely endure—guarantees incredible effects if you can just survive it.”
“That sounds like pure sophistry.”
For all the grand words, it basically meant he was feeding me poison. Or was I misunderstanding?
“I don’t know what the promotion exam in eight weeks will be either. The content changes randomly every time for fairness. But if your most basic physical abilities are solid, I believe you’ll at least be able to endure whatever type of test it is.”
—Drip, drip-drip.
Muscles writhed along my forearms as I clawed up the waterfall. My fingertips split open; blood welled out and was instantly washed away by the cascade. My pulse hammered so violently that with every heartbeat more blood pulsed from my fingertips only to be swept clean again.
It was hell.
Pahwanggun’s voice kept going.
“Including the waterfall climb, there are three kinds of training you have to do. You hang on and do only these until you drop. Want to pass the coming promotion exam? Then cling.”
I lost count of how many times I climbed and fell. Floating limply in the water, I asked him,
“How long do I have to keep doing this?”
“See this?”
What Pahwanggun waved in front of me was a book of erotic paintings.
“The day I can take my eyes off you and look at this as much as I want—that’s graduation day.”
He divided the day into three parts.
I had thought the morning waterfall climb was hell. The next stage was the true hell.
“Uweeeek!”
The green pig-slop porridge—the Pahwan Poison Lotus Stew—I had eaten for breakfast and lunch came back up mixed with stomach acid, splattering everywhere. My mind swam. Sweat dripped from my chin. Compared to this, climbing the waterfall was a joke. The hellish agony packed into this simple motion defied imagination.
“Dropped it on the sixteenth. From the start again! I told you to drop it only after twenty if you want a rest. Don’t rest. I said don’t rest.”
With trembling hands I wrapped my arms around a round boulder the size of a torso. I didn’t hoist it onto my back. Like a father lifting a baby with his hands, I embraced the rock with my upper body, bent at the waist, and supported it with my fingers so it wouldn’t roll free while I sat and stood. The final rise onto tiptoes completed one repetition.
“Haaah… haaah…”
My legs felt ready to burst. Sweat poured off me like rain. My upper-body strength was already completely spent from the waterfall climb before this training even began.
Thud!
I vomited and rolled across the ground.
“Again.”
“P-Pahwanggun-nim.”
I crawled on the dirt, shaking.
The calves that had been rising onto tiptoes every time cramped so hard they locked stiff.
“My lower body is hard enough, but my upper body just can’t hold out. All my strength is gone from the waterfall climb. Can’t I at least carry it on my back? Sitting and standing is the same either way.”
Pahwanggun glared.
“No! Every single motion in this training method has meaning. You add nothing and subtract nothing! Endure it.”
When the crimson twilight faded, the third training began. Because the first two had been so brutal, this stage actually felt easier by comparison. Relatively easier, of course—not easy.
“Roll it! I said don’t lean on it! Don’t use your legs!”
I rolled a massive log. Using almost no lower-body strength, I turned the log one full rotation with pure upper-body power—that counted as one repetition. I had to do it dozens of times.
By the time I finished, the moon always hung on the mountain ridge. Then I circulated the single internal energy method Pahwanggun had taught me.
One Wheel Three Seals Heart Method.
It was such a simple mental formula that I could master it without needing the Heavenly Demon’s techniques. According to Pahwanggun, it focused more on recovery and circulation of the body than on rapid internal energy growth.
In the end, every living training method was aimed at extreme physical development.
When it was over I collapsed on the ground and blacked out into sleep, only to wake every morning to the pain of my entire body being torn to shreds. I fainted dozens of times even during training. Whenever I did, Physician Haseo treated me, and in those brief windows Pahwanggun vanished to personally drill the other two disciples of the Hui group as well.
Even so, he poured the vast majority of his time into me. He watched me without rest, barked at me, and drove me mercilessly.
It’s because I’m third-rate. My skill is so rock-bottom he can’t go easy on me.
I believed there were no shortcuts. It was hard. It was agony. Yet I endured.
Every time I vomited I felt like I was dying; the approach of morning made me tremble with dread and misery. But still—
I’m definitely getting better.
It was the first time. The first time I had ever received teaching from someone and actually felt myself improving. How desperately I had longed for instruction like this. And I could feel it clearly: even in this hellish pain, the time I could endure grew longer with each passing day. The boulder was growing lighter. That gave me the strength to keep going.
I was growing. That was something that had never existed in my hopeless past.
“Hoo… Even with that natural frame of his, I keep wondering every day if this is really something a person can survive.”
It was Physician Haseo’s mutter, overheard while I groaned in the pre-dawn hours.
“Both of you are out of your minds—you for enduring it, and Pahwanggun-nim for ordering it. What exactly are you trying so hard to prove, kid? What kind of rage is piled up in a young chest like yours?”
He placed warm moxibustion on my sleeping body and clicked his tongue.
Prove…?
In my dazed state I felt the pleasantly acrid scent of the moxa tickling my nose.
What I want to prove is—
I tried to think of something, but that night I was simply too exhausted and blacked out again.
Humans are creatures of adaptation. I still vomited and rolled on the ground, yet my body seemed to have chosen rapid growth over necrosis at the crossroads of life and death. Of course the nauseating smell that came with every belch was still miserable, and everything remained a struggle—but I began mechanically grinding through the training regimen that had become familiar to my body.
One day, as the seventh week ended and the eighth week began—
“Eheheh.”
“…?”
A strange sound made me look back. Pahwanggun was sitting slanted against a tree stump, making an odd laughing noise while looking at his erotic picture book.
While pouring finely chopped medicinal herbs into the pot, Physician Haseo spoke.
“About those so-called geniuses Pahwanggun-nim saw in the past.”
“Ah, the ones with the sharp eyes?”
Pahwanggun licked a finger and turned a page of the erotic book.
“Yes. I’ve been with you since the old days, so I had a pretty good idea who you meant. It’s true they were geniuses who never forgot a form once they saw it and could copy it. But you know…”
Haseo fanned the flames under the pot.
“Their eyes never turned red like Moyong Bi’s. You should speak more carefully.”
“….”
Pahwanggun stared at the erotic book with an expressionless face.
“Talk like that and you’ll die.”
“Ah, of course I know. People like me in the Jianghu…”
Pahwanggun turned another page and answered.
“…have short lifespans.”
“Exactly. Playing the fool is best. Always has been. Acting like I have no thoughts, like my head is empty. That’s why I’m just quietly fanning the fire like this.”
—Whoosh.
Haseo fanned the flames under the pot once more.
Pahwanggun’s hands held the erotic book. But his eyes were not looking at it at all. His gaze never left the back of Moyong Bi, who had been clinging desperately to the waterfall without rest for four full hours.
“Soon a silent hell of killing and being killed will unfold beneath the surface of Cheonsubaekryeonsa. Power struggles of the Moyong Family, Guardians of the Nine Sects and One Gang all flooding into this tiny martial hall—it’ll be chaos like no other.”
He tucked the erotic book into his waist sash.
“At the very least we have to hide that fact until the boy grows a little more. Now I understand why the Alliance Leader forced a former unorthodox man like me into Cheonsubaekryeonsa against everyone’s opposition.”
—Whoosh, whoosh.
Following Haseo’s fanning, the fire under the cauldron flared and grew.
“Well, I’ve been in the same boat since the old days, so I won’t spit on it. But Pahwanggun-nim.”
Haseo’s face turned serious.
“If you’ve finished looking at the erotic book, please return it. That’s mine—why are you trying to sneak off with it?”
“…Damn, your instincts have been filthy sharp ever since the Orthodox-Unorthodox War.”
Pahwanggun clicked his tongue, pulled the erotic book from his waist, and tossed it over.