Name
We were clearly deep in the mountains, and yet she moved as if she knew the way by heart.
Did she already have a destination in mind?
Before we set out, she had taken me to a clothing shop and bought me a few changes of clothes.
That was all.
Anyone claiming they were going into the mountains would have brought provisions, supplies, some kind of preparation. She’d left with nothing but a few sets of clothes.
Should I turn back now?
No matter how much she claimed she would teach me martial arts, this still felt alarmingly careless. As I hesitated, thinking of the alleys I’d lived in for nearly ten years, she finally spoke.
"What’s your name?"
Asking for my name after seven days of knowing me. Unfortunately, I didn’t have one to give her.
"I don’t have one."
"..."
An awkward silence fell, but we couldn’t just stand there in it forever, so I broke the quiet first.
"What’s your name, then? What should I call you?"
"Un... no, Shin Yiryeong. Just call me Yiryeong."
"Yiryeong, where exactly are we going?"
Only then did she seem to understand why I’d been so restless. She was a little clumsy, in a way that didn’t match her cold first impression at all.
"Sorry. I think I didn’t explain it well. If we keep going like this, we’ll come to a thatched house."
"A house, here in the mountains?"
"When I was young, my master and I stayed there for a little while. I was planning to live there."
Seeing that I was still on edge, she added,
"It’s old, but it shouldn’t be too hard to fix. We can get the rest when we need it, and if it comes to it, we can always stop by a village."
Once the conversation started, it kept going. Now that I understood the situation, the tension in my chest eased, and the distance between us diminished too.
"Yiryeong, can you tell me about yourself? Where you’re from, things like that. And if possible, why you saved me."
"...I’m from the Emei Sect. Have you heard of it?"
The Emei Sect. It wasn’t familiar, but I had definitely heard the name before. Yes, now and then I’d caught people mentioning it as they passed by.
It was one of the five great noble clans and one of the nine major sects, the strongest powers among the famed orthodox factions. Its defining trait was that every one of its members was a woman.
It was apparently a sect based on the mountains, which explained why she seemed so at home among them.
I nodded, and after a moment of thought she went on.
"There’s a tournament being held in Henan by the Murim Alliance in about a year. Most of the younger generation will probably attend. I’m one of them."
"Henan is pretty far from here, isn’t it?"
"I was wandering around a little early, partly because it was my first time out in the martial world, and that’s when I met you. That’s all. So..."
Slowly, she lowered her head until she was looking me straight in the eye.
"I’d be grateful if you didn’t feel burdened by it. It’s my first time out in the Jianghu too, after all, so this is the first time I’ve ever really helped someone like this..."
...
Looking into her wavering eyes, I finally understood.
Yiryeong didn’t want anything from me. The kindness she offered without expecting repayment left my stomach strangely unsettled, as if I didn’t know how to hold it.
Silence came again, but this time it was a comfortable one.
"Here we are. We’ve arrived."
After walking for quite a while, Yiryeong stopped at a place that, to someone who had lived his whole life in alleys, was nothing short of breathtaking.
She gestured to a small flat patch of land. All around it rose massive cliffs and dense forest draped in clouds, while a clear stream gurgled softly through the middle.
The shouts and chaos that usually battered my ears were nowhere to be heard. Only the sound of leaves brushing against one another drifted on the wind.
There was nothing man-made here except for Yiryeong, me, and a ramshackle thatched house by the stream. That must have been the house she’d lived in with her master.
I was still staring, marveling at a sight I had never seen in my life, when Yiryeong frowned slightly.
"It might not be so easy to fix the house after all."
Maybe I’d already grown used to her, because hearing her say something like that in front of such a view felt strangely like her. She had this oddly fitting way of undercutting beauty with practical worries.
Yiryeong went into the thatched house to check its condition, only to come back covered in dust. To make matters worse, the house itself collapsed as she stepped out.
While I was still distracted by the dust settled in her black hair, as if snow had fallen there, Yiryeong brushed it off and said,
"Let’s build a new house. I know how to make one. We built that one with my master too."
Swish.
Her sword flashed left and right, and a tree came crashing down.
Swoosh.
This time the blade quivered, and the branches were stripped away as the trunk was neatly trimmed.
I did my best to follow that unbelievable sight with my eyes, but even simply taking it in and fixing it in my mind felt overwhelming.
Even knowing it was impossible, I picked up a cut branch and took a stance.
The branch fit snugly in my hand. It felt as though I were holding a sword.
Lower the waist, turn the body quickly.
My body reproduced what I had seen, but unlike Yiryeong’s sword, there was no sharp cutting wind. At this rate, it wasn’t slicing anything; it was just me waving my arms awkwardly at empty air.
This time, faster.
Whoosh.
But my arm refused to follow my thoughts. My body couldn’t keep up, as if I were moving through water.
Is that what internal energy does...?
Trying to imitate Yiryeong’s movements without any internal energy only made my hand motions resemble hers. Nothing more.
When I poured in as much strength as I could and swung again, I couldn’t even control the force and toppled over. Without internal energy, I couldn’t even keep my center of gravity.
Face-down in the grass, I was beginning to understand how badly I needed martial arts when someone lifted me to my feet.
Before I knew it, Yiryeong had stopped cutting trees and come over to me.
"You don’t need to do that yet. Whether it’s orthodox or unorthodox, even the Demonic Sect’s arts have a sequence to them."
"..."
"It’s fine to imitate clumsily, but if you try to force it with those good eyes of yours, you’ll only wreck your body. I’ll teach you properly later, so for now just go fetch some mud. You can bring it from the stream."
Just as she said, the waist and arms I’d strained a moment ago were aching. So this was what it meant when a sparrow tried to keep up with a crane and tore its legs apart.
Still, she was going to teach me martial arts. I swallowed my trembling excitement and obediently did as Yiryeong told me.
What should have taken quite a while was finished in only a few shichen, because Yiryeong had almost completed the house in that time.
At that level of strength, is this sort of thing possible too...?
Once again, I found myself marveling at her abilities.
"You’re hungry, aren’t you? I’ll go find something to eat, so finish up the house for me."
After saying that, she vanished in a flash, looking as though she hadn’t tired at all.
Once the house was done, I lay in the grass and stared at the sinking sun, thinking about Yiryeong.
She had soft eyes, but the stiffness of her speech and the nearly unchanged expression on her face gave off a distinctly cool air.
And yet she carried herself that way as if worried I might feel uncomfortable even once. At the same time, the clumsy little cracks she showed in places somehow put me at ease.
She’s a strange person...
Some time later, I sensed movement and turned around to find Yiryeong standing there with a large stag in her hands.
She casually summoned fire to her palm, gathered some leaves, and in an instant built a campfire and roasted the meat.
I stared blankly at the unreal scene before me.
"How did you do that? No matter what, fire from your hand..."
"It’s Samadhi Fire. You know about the levels of martial artists, don’t you?"
"Third-class, second-class, first-class—roughly, yes."
"Once you go beyond those realms and can manifest qi externally, you’re called Peak. Samadhi Fire is something most Peak martial artists can do."
"Manifest qi externally..."
I imagined a sword swing that could cleave a mountain. Surely that, too, must be possible.
"What about above Peak?"
"There’s Transcendence and Hwakyung. There aren’t even a hundred martial artists at Transcendence or above in the entire Jianghu. There’s no record beyond Hwakyung."
"Then are you a Peak martial artist, Yiryeong?"
"Mm... well, you could say that."
Yiryeong answered as though trying to stay composed, but her gaze drifted away ever so slightly, and her fingers worried at the hem of her clothes.
Was she embarrassed? She was only ten years older than me, and she was already at that level? She was surely one of the most promising talents in her sect.
Lost in thought, I was startled when Yiryeong asked in a voice that wavered unlike her usual calm,
"T-then again, you said you didn’t have a name?"
"That’s right. I grew up in the alleys since I was little."
"Then... could I give you one?"
Perhaps because of the fire, her face had turned faintly red.
"I’d like that."
As if she had already thought of one, she hesitated for a moment.
"...How about Lee Hyun? It means to leave the darkness of the night behind."
Lee Hyun. It had a strange ring to it. But I didn’t dislike it. Maybe because Yiryeong had given it to me, I even liked the meaning.
"I like it. Thank you, Yiryeong."
The joy in Yiryeong’s eyes reached me clearly even here. As expected, she was very different from the first impression she gave.
"What surname do you want? If you know your parents’ family name, then..."
"Shin. I want to take Shin, like Yiryeong."
"..."
She seemed taken aback, but I liked the name.
"From today on, I’m Shin Lee Hyun, Yiryeong."
"Yes... Lee Hyun."
Shin Yiryeong quietly watched the sleeping boy, lost in thought.
Guxi, where unorthodox martial artists hid themselves to avoid the Murim Alliance’s eyes, was also her hometown.
Maybe that was why. When she closed her eyes, memories from childhood sometimes surfaced.
A young girl in ragged clothes, wandering from place to place to beg, living only because she had failed to die.
If her master hadn’t rescued her, she would likely have starved to death or been sold off to a brothel before long.
Her master had urged Yiryeong to enter the Emei Sect and stayed here with her until the day she was accepted.
Hmm.
Yiryeong gently stroked the hair of the boy shifting in his sleep, her hand trembling.
He was a child with black hair and eyes even darker than that. The wary look on his face made it obvious what sort of life he had lived.
Every time she looked at him, he seemed like her younger self, trapped in darkness, and she simply couldn’t leave him alone.
Yiryeong sincerely hoped that he, Lee Hyun, would escape the darkness just as his name said.
After Yiryeong gave me my name, the subtle distance between us disappeared.
"Lee Hyun, I can’t teach you the Emei Sect’s martial arts."
That was what she told me before my martial training began.
"If you were a woman, joining the Emei Sect wouldn’t be a problem, but as you know, you’re a man, so entering the sect itself is impossible."
"Then I can’t learn martial arts?"
"That’s not it. I can only teach you the martial arts that have already spread through the world."
I couldn’t hide my disappointment, but Yiryeong came closer and lowered herself to meet my eyes.
"If it were anyone else, I’d be worried, but not you. With your eyes, it should be enough for you to find your own path. You don’t need to follow a road someone else has already laid out."
...
"See a lot. Experience a lot. I’ll give you the framework."
From that day on, Yiryeong taught me martial arts.