Pointers from the Divine Thief
Let’s spar.
The Maiden of Yue Sword Art unfolded smoothly. The sword’s trajectory, tracing a gentle arc, suddenly hooked downward like a calligrapher’s stroke before springing upward. Cheong drew her right hand close to her side, then thrust diagonally from left to right. Paeng Cho-ryo slipped away, spinning her body, and the wooden sword grazed past her waist in a hair’s breadth. Her hair fluttered softly, and in that instant Cheong’s eyes flashed. An opening!
Cheong pulled her sword back and raised her hand high. The wooden blade came crashing down toward the crown of Paeng Cho-ryo’s head, threading between her widely spread locks. Yet there was no sensation, only the empty air being sliced—
Thwack!
Cheong’s world spun. Paeng Cho-ryo had turned, sweeping her iron club low across the ground in a wide circle. The heavy iron weight, having gathered momentum, slammed into Cheong’s calf just above the ankle. Both of Cheong’s feet left the ground. She toppled sideways, shoulder hitting the dirt first.
“Augh, hiss……”
The groan was rather underwhelming for someone who had just been sent rolling. Even though the blow had knocked her body completely horizontal in midair.
She sprang up, rubbed her calf a few times, rolled her shoulder, and immediately gripped her sword again.
Another twenty exchanges passed.
This time the wooden sword struck squarely on the thigh below the hip. Cheong sucked in a sharp breath through her teeth and slowly massaged the spot.
Jegal Ihyeon watched with a horrified expression before cautiously speaking up.
“Lady Paeng? Perhaps you could go a little easier……”
“How much gentler can I be? I can’t even slow down the speed she’s forcing on purpose.”
Paeng Cho-ryo still held the blunt iron club instead of her great saber. Including the handle, it was a solid piece of iron six and a half cheok long. It weighed just under twenty geun. Such a heavy weapon could not be swung by brute force alone. One had to maintain the flow and let the weapon’s own weight crush the opponent. If it did not collide, it continued rotating; if it did collide, the rebound allowed it to draw another unbroken circle. That was the technique. Since Paeng Cho-ryo was merely gripping the great saber, there was no room for “going easier” in the first place.
“Cho-ryo is right. That’s how training works. Real training only sticks when it hurts.”
Cheong backed her up. Like master, like disciple—Cheong had been deeply impressed by Seomun Su-rin’s method of engraving lessons into the body.
Paeng Cho-ryo’s face lit up with a pleased smile she could not hide.
“Our Cheong really is improving by leaps and bounds.”
“I was missing a lot of fundamentals to begin with.”
At first, Cheong had not even been able to withstand a single exchange from Paeng Cho-ryo and had her wooden sword destroyed. Receiving an extremely heavy weapon without using internal energy with nothing but a fragile wooden sword was no easy feat. If the angle of deflection was even slightly off, the wooden sword would snap. Paeng Cho-ryo had taken that into account, starting with straightforward thrusts before gradually mixing in techniques and feints. Now, even when Paeng Cho-ryo employed every trick in a veteran martial artist’s arsenal, Cheong could last more than twenty exchanges.
Having vented her energy after a long time, Paeng Cho-ryo wiped her sweat with a refreshed expression and stepped back.
Cheong brushed the dirt from her cheap training robes and urged them on.
“Hoo. Who’s next? Sword-friend?”
“Of course! I’ve been waiting!”
“Just do it half-heartedly and get out of the way.”
Once Cheong caught fire with training, everyone else—being heavenly martial artists themselves—grew excited along with her. Namgung Sinjae was always burning anyway, and even the Paeng siblings had gradually stopped being surprised by Cheong’s absurd training methods. Thanks to that, the sound of Cheong being struck was different from when they had started the grand training ten days ago in Wuhan. What had once been light thud, tap, smack sounds had become heavy boom, crack, thud noises that made listeners wince. It was only natural that Jegal Ihyeon, who occasionally dropped by, would look serious and voice his concern.
“Lady Dang, is this training really all right? A human body shouldn’t be able to endure that kind of abuse, should it?”
Dang Nan-a, who had been diligently practicing her hidden weapons for once, tilted her head at the question. But she had also known Cheong for a long time.
“Huh? Cheong? She’s fine, though?”
“She is fine?”
“Cheong’s sturdy, and she keeps her protective qi up all the time. Just getting hit won’t even bruise her muscles, let alone break bones. Unless it’s sword qi or a blade, nothing gets through. You can’t even stick needles in her. Ah, this one won’t come out. Stop staring and help me.”
“Ah, yes.”
Jegal Ihyeon began pulling out the hidden weapons densely embedded in the wooden dummy. Dang Nan-a caught each one and tucked them into her sleeves, bosom, and the long, flowing hem of her upper garment. The loose, fluttering clothes she favored were, in truth, more of a hidden-weapon storage than anything else.
Watching her, Jegal Ihyeon thought to himself that it would be best not to earn the enmity of a Tang Clan martial artist.
“Besides, isn’t it good that she’s working hard? Watching her makes me feel like I should practice my hidden weapons too. That’s how she reached late Peak, I suppose. She’s amazing, our Cheong.”
Jegal Ihyeon nodded. In the end, he was a martial artist as well, and martial artists were a breed whose distinction between overwork and diligence was rather blurry.
Thus, when the sun set and evening approached, Cheong’s appearance became quite a sight. Her training robes, soaked through with sweat, picked up not dust but actual mud when she rolled across the training ground.
“Hoo……”
Today’s win rate was roughly ten percent. The win rate remained stagnant, but that was probably because everyone was growing more serious about the sparring and raising the intensity of their attacks. Still, she had improved a lot, hadn’t she?
Just as Cheong was dragging her heavy, languid body toward the bathhouse, feeling proud—
“Tsk, tsk. Quite the impressive display.”
Startled by the sudden voice, she turned her head to find a short middle-aged man leaning against a tree, his back to the trunk.
“Agh, you scared me. Um, who are you? I feel like I’ve seen you somewhere……”
“How about this? Still don’t remember?”
“Ah! The mister who sold fake books!”
Cheong recalled the peculiar bookseller she had met in Heuksi. Since Jegal Ihyeon had explained the Shadowless Divine Hand to her, she could roughly guess his identity. Had this man taken her Boksinjeok? But asking that outright would be admitting she knew who he was, so Cheong decided not to show it.
“Cheon Yuhak. By the way, I’ve been watching you for a few days, and that girl of yours is vicious to the extreme. Positively brutal.”
“I’m fine with it, so you shouldn’t say things like that so carelessly. If Master hears you, you’ll be smashed to pieces.”
Since the bookseller seemed like a highly suspicious character, Cheong deliberately brought up Seomun Su-rin.
“Why? Did my words just now have any part that could get smashed to pieces?”
“If I were a man instead of this body, would you still have called it brutal?”
When a man sweats all day, rolls around, and gets beaten while devoting himself to training, people say he has steeled his resolve! How admirable, what a promising figure he will become! But when a woman does the same, they click their tongues and say how vicious, how deeply poisonous her determination must be, and wonder who on earth would ever marry her. The ways of the jianghu were like that, which was why Seomun Su-rin had caused such an uproar in her youth.
“Hmm. I suppose I would have called it foolish, at least……”
Having been struck right in the mark, Cheon Yuhak changed the subject.
“Anyway, what kind of training is that supposed to be? From what I can see, it looks like you’ve simply decided to exhaust yourself. Why? Do you feel proud that you’ve worked hard just because you’re sweaty, sore, and covered in bruises?”
It was, in fact, a remark that hit the bullseye. Because he was someone who could step back and observe while also being a martial artist himself, he could see through the ideal hidden beneath the word “diligence.”
Cheong’s expression soured. Who was this man to suddenly pick a fight?
“It looks like this, but I’m improving tremendously, you know? I used to not even last a few exchanges, but now everyone’s taking me seriously.”
“Hah. Improving, my ass. Even the neighborhood mutt would learn to dodge if it got beaten that much. Is that because its skill improved? It just got used to the beatings and picked up some tricks, that’s all.”
“That’s still a kind of skill.”
“Change opponents and you’ll get beaten again. Planning to wander the world getting thrashed by every martial artist you meet?”
Look at the way this man talked. His manners were something else. Cheong’s eyebrows twitched. But she held back for now.
“Does everyone get to give unsolicited advice? So, do you know some incredibly efficient training method or something?”
“As you said, not everyone gets to give advice. But when I see someone struggling foolishly without gaining anything, should I just clap and say ‘good job, good job’?”
“Then I don’t know any other way, so I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing. I don’t know what you were doing, but go back to it. Well then.”
Cheong gave a slight bow and turned away. If he wasn’t going to help, giving advice would only sour the mood.
“No, no, wait. You’re just going to leave like that?”
“Then? Do you have something to say?”
Cheon Yuhak thought, Oh no. Without realizing it, his frustration had made his words rather sharp. He hurriedly stopped Cheong as she turned back.
“You want to learn softness, don’t you? I could tell you were trying to imbue your sword with softness.”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“Hmm. A sword is not a soft thing to begin with, so no matter how many tens of thousands of times you swing it, that won’t happen. Softness doesn’t settle in that way.”
“Then what should I do?”
“Get yourself a sharp dagger. No, wait. Here. Take this.”
Cheon Yuhak pulled a dagger the size of a forearm from his robes and tossed it in a smooth arc. Cheong caught it and drew it. The blade gleamed blue; it was no ordinary weapon.
“Oh? You’re giving this to me?”
“Just lending it. From now on, think of that as your hand and use it instead.”
“What do you mean by that? Instead of my hand?”
“Exactly what I said. Do with it what you would normally do with your hand. Eat with it, dress with it—everything your hand used to do. Don’t let go of it except when sleeping. You know not to use your left hand instead, right?”
Cheong looked at the dagger with a sour expression. Still, he was an expert, and he had even lent her an expensive dagger; it didn’t seem like he was just messing with her.
“You’re not teasing me, are you?”
“Teasing? I learned this way myself, so I’m telling you.”
“Hmm. Thank you.”
Cheong bowed her head. Cheon Yuhak nodded and continued.
“By the way, don’t you need the Boksinjeok? I wrote a letter. There should be a handkerchief inside the flute, no?”
“Ah. That. Why did you take someone else’s belongings?”
“What do you mean, ‘that’? If you read the letter, you should have come, shouldn’t you?”
Cheon Yuhak was dumbfounded. Cheong, however, remained nonchalant.
“I saw it had been switched when I checked before bed. The deadline had already passed, and you wrote there was no ill intent, so I figured you’d contact me again later.”
“No, if your precious treasure was stolen, you should have rushed over immediately. Why act like you just forgot to run an errand?”
“Who would covet such a gloomy flute? It won’t even make a sound anyway.”
“You little rascal. Do you know how much ten-thousand-year cold iron of that size is worth? If you forged a sword from it, it would be a divine sword, a treasure of the world.”
“Is there any need to melt a perfectly good flute to make a sword? Wouldn’t the flute be better than a sword that only cuts people?”
“This girl, talking like some kind of sage……”
It wasn’t because Cheong was a sage that she spoke this way; it was simply because she lacked worldly desires. This was not her original nature but a result of her circumstances. People who cannot guarantee tomorrow do not save. Once one experiences the world turning upside down overnight, their very way of thinking about the future is overturned. After all, if something has happened once, it would not be strange for it to happen again.
Cheon Yuhak cautiously brought up the main point.
“Hmm. By the way, are you perhaps interested in learning martial arts? I happen to know a few supreme divine techniques famous throughout the world.”
“Thank you.”
Cheong bowed her head. Cheon Yuhak’s face bloomed with a bright smile.
“Then, first, the ceremony of acknowledging me as your master—”
“Ah. So that’s what you meant. I’m sorry. I can’t have two masters.”
Cheong immediately changed her attitude.