Three Roots of Hope
The clear, ringing voice of a woman in blue robes carried across the training grounds.
“The qualification granted upon passing the promotion exam is this: within one month, you must achieve a total internal energy of half a gapja or more. Every corner of this training ground is steeped in spiritual energy—an ideal place to build your reserves quickly.”
But the crowd could only swallow dryly, at a complete loss.
One gapja was the equivalent of sixty years of achievement for an ordinary martial artist. She was telling them to amass half of that—in a single month.
Even if the land of Chunmu Hall favored the accumulation of internal energy, it was a height no one dared imagine scaling.
“Even so, how are we supposed to build up something as enormous as half a gapja in a month? There may be places where you can cultivate faster, but that doesn’t make this reasonable!”
“An exam has to set realistic standards if anyone’s going to accept it!”
Someone raised their voice in protest. Another person’s face had gone so red it looked ready to burst, fury over a failure already written in stone.
The woman in blue offered no reply. She simply stood there, smiling.
“….”
Those who had been shouting soon realized the atmosphere around them was strangely calm, and their voices gradually dropped. Surprisingly, most of the people present had not joined the wave of anger. They sat in silence, chins propped on their hands, lost in thought. A few even wore expressions of genuine confusion, as if to ask, That’s all we need to pass?
Ah.
I understood it late.
This exam had never been fair to begin with.
If everyone here had been told to accumulate half a gapja starting from whatever internal energy they currently possessed, all of them would have felt the weight of it and poured out their complaints. But the condition for this promotion exam didn’t care how much internal energy you already held. In the end, you only needed to have half a gapja.
So it’s the rich getting richer after all.
I understood. Cheonsubaekryeonsa’s resources were limited; of course they wanted to pour them as efficiently as possible into people with real potential. And those people would inevitably be the ones who had trained systematically and developed their bodies from childhood. Those born into good backgrounds would have practiced energy circulation as naturally as learning to walk, stacking internal energy year after year.
They’re openly saying they only want to pick talent raised through proper systems.
Even the children of minor sects would be like that—never mind the disciples of great sects like the Nine Sects and One Gang, drowning in spiritual medicines and high-grade internal energy arts.
It left a bitter taste.
I was angry at the cold, merciless reality of it, but there was nothing I could grab onto and pick apart. This was life. I’d thought it was a chance—and even that chance was no real chance at all.
“In the old days, the seniors of the martial world fought bloody battles to monopolize this land, so perfectly suited to building internal energy,” the woman continued. “But in the end, they joined hands and agreed to use it as a training ground for all. That was the beginning of Cheonsubaekryeonsa. The higher your skill, the less efficient the terrain becomes for you—but for those of you still at a low level, it is more than enough to achieve great things.”
The proctors set up a massive hourglass nearly twice the height of a grown man. At the same time, they moved through the ranks of disciples, pressing a heavy bundle into each person’s hands.
“What you have just received is called a Jade Stream Bracelet. The denser the spiritual energy in an area, the stronger the light and vibration it emits. When the wearer accumulates internal energy of half a gapja or more, it will begin to shine silver. Bring that as your proof.”
Inside the bundle was a jade bracelet etched with intaglio carvings.
“Damage or loss of the Jade Stream Bracelet is also grounds for disqualification, so treat it with care. We begin now.”
On the platform, the hourglass was turned. Sand began to fall. Anyone could see it was a clock measured for thirty days.
With a heavy rumble, the great gates leading out of the training grounds swung wide open.
“…!”
Every eye in the place changed. As one, they broke into a run.
Damn it.
I was practically the only person taking this exam with an amount of internal energy close to nothing.
Rustle. Rustle-rustle.
I crossed the highlands and pushed through the forest. At some point, the Jade Stream Bracelet on my arm—which had been silent as the dead—began to vibrate with a faint blue light.
This is it?!
I stopped.
A waterfall was crashing down. The closer I drew to a particular stretch of ground, the more the bracelet’s faint light and vibration swelled and faded in turns. Nearby, others were tilting their heads, weighing their options the same way.
No. This isn’t enough.
Those who had only a little internal energy left to reach the mark, and those who had mastered internal energy arts of extreme efficiency, were already dropping into seated meditation and circulating their energy. But I was worst off on both counts. The art I practiced was among the least efficient for accumulating internal energy, and the amount I still needed to reach was almost the full half a gapja. Sitting here without sleep for a month, circulating energy nonstop, would mean nothing.
I had to find the densest spiritual energy I could.
Tch!
Cold sweat broke out over my whole body. I sprinted at full power.
Half a gapja isn’t some neighborhood dog’s name—and in a month…!
Despair seeped up through my chest, sticky and slow. The road ahead felt blank. The world in front of my eyes went dark. From the start, I had assumed they would never set a condition that made no sense at all. They had said that some places held spiritual energy beyond any comparison, depending on the terrain. That offhand remark was my only hope.
The farther I ran, the deeper I pushed into the mountains, the people who had packed the area around me scattered in every direction and thinned out. The spiritual energy I felt now was twice as strong as before.
“…!”
This vibration was on a different level from the last one.
“Where?!”
I ran like a madman toward wherever the tremor grew stronger. Branches tore at my face; I tripped over roots and stones and still kept running. After a stretch of that, the thicket blocking my path suddenly ended, and my field of view opened wide.
At the edge of a cliff zone sat a small clearing. Three pine trees stood tall and solitary against an endless sky. A cool, sharp wind blew through.
“….”
Disciples packed that scrap of blessed ground shoulder to shoulder, already seated in lotus position, circulating their energy.
There’ll be other places.
I took the downhill path and ran again. Like a lunatic, I swept the Jade Stream Bracelet left and right as I went. From what I could tell, the bracelet could detect spiritual energy out to about thirty feet. The moment I felt a vibration, I charged toward it.
“…Again!”
Packed solid with people who had already claimed it. Less crowded than the last spot, but still not a single empty seat. I bit my lip, turned, and ran once more, shoving down the despair coloring everything inside me.
“Please—please!”
Time was endlessly short, and the places were endlessly hard to find. In a bamboo grove I felt another powerful tremor. Full. Below a cliff, a vast cave sent out a strong vibration. Full as well. In a valley below I found a massive plum-tree stump. No people. But compared to the cliff zone where I had felt the strong vibration, this one was only half as intense. Just in case, I sat in lotus position and tried circulating my energy.
“No. At this rate it’s completely impossible.”
I hadn’t even lasted a full hour before I shoved myself up and left.
The sun was setting. I must have spent at least half the day running around like a man possessed, and the certainty that there was no hope this way was hardening by the minute. I considered tearing into some remote corner no one else’s feet had ever reached—but if I found nothing out there, I would have wasted far too much time. Wandering the wilds with no certainty, hunting for a hidden place, would leave me with neither fish nor fowl.
“What the hell am I supposed to do?”
Only after the sun had set and the moon had risen did I stop walking for the first time. There was no one around. Everyone who had already claimed a spot would be circulating their energy without even sparing time to eat. And I, who had the farthest road to travel of anyone—I hadn’t even started.
I had to build half a gapja from almost nothing.
“No. There’ll be other places. There will. Of course there will.”
I started walking again. I told myself that if I just searched a little more, I would find somewhere so thick with spiritual energy it could overturn this whole situation. But the reality was that the farther I got from the main hall, the number of zones with strong spiritual energy dropped off exponentially—and even the ones that remained were growing weaker.
I knew the truth, deep down. Sacred mountains and terrain that held spiritual energy were connected, clustered together like veins of gold. Going farther ahead was meaningless. The answers the examiners had already accounted for lay in the places I had already passed through. And those places were already packed full of people.
“Hah… hah…”
I sank weakly to the ground. I could wait for them to fill their quotas and leave, opening up seats. But then I would run out of time. I turned the problem over from every angle I could think of, and still no answer came.
“So in the end, people at the bottom can thrash as hard as they want and still never climb out.”
Tears welled up without a sound and slid down my chin. In that blank daze, Mumyeong’s voice drifted in.
“If I line up and compare the spiritual energy of every candidate site you’ve surveyed so far, the pines on the cliff by the waterfall are clearly first, the cave second. Hmm… feeling them again now, the cave edges it out by a slight margin.”
I muttered with my head still hanging.
“Damn it, even if I go there are no seats left. What’s the point of knowing a difference that small—”
My breath stopped.
“What?”
From the pines on the cliff zone, this place was at least half a day’s travel away.
“You’re sensing and comparing all of those from right here?”
“Of course. Compared to sensing a human’s qi—constantly moving, vanishingly faint—detecting the spiritual energy of immobile solid matter that has accumulated for hundreds of years is far easier. Naturally, detection at this distance is something only I can—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
I shot to my feet. Was there any idiot in the world like me? I was already wondering whether I could even survive by throwing everything I had at the problem—and I had forgotten what I actually possessed.
“Mumyeong! Can you expand your sensing beyond the places I’ve already been and detect zones thick with spiritual energy?”
“Of course.”
“Aaaah—!!”
I clenched my fists and screamed. A miraculous return from the edge of the executioner’s blade. I could live. I could still go further.
“Right now—using ground I haven’t set foot on as the baseline—find me places overflowing with spiritual energy. Minimum standard: higher than the pines on the cliff zone!”
“Understood.”
Please.
The heartbeat of silence before Mumyeong’s next words felt like an eternity.
“I found one. Just one.”
“What now?!”
“To be precise, it is not what the Host is looking for.”
“What?”
My insides went bone-dry. One wrong step and I would fall a thousand fathoms straight off a cliff.
“By the standard of spiritual energy alone, its magnitude is beyond any comparison with the cliff zone or the cave you found before. There are three of them, in fact. The problem is—”
Mumyeong let the end of the sentence trail off.
“They are not in the form of ‘terrain’ suited for qi meditation, which is what the Host has been seeking. Judging by this size and shape… I would guess they are ginseng, or something in the medicinal-herb line. Unfortunate.”
“….”
I closed my eyes. I opened them. I forgot even to breathe. Insects flitted past. Dark clouds began to gather overhead. It looked ready to pour at any moment. A bleak wind filled the air.
In the middle of it, in a trembling voice, I whispered to the remnant of the Heavenly Demon inside my head.
“So what you’re saying is… you’re telling me there’s spiritual medicine right ahead of me. Right?”