Samadhi True Fire
Once he had stepped into the indoor training hall, Bihyung settled the spear across his shoulder again and sank into meditation.
"Hey."
Before long he crossed into the realm of his mindscape, and there he spoke to the spear once more.
"I was wrong."
Nothing answered him.
"This time I'll do Sinbyeong-hapi properly—Divine Weapon-Body Unity. ...Wait. Are you sulking?"
A thin hum. The shaft shivered in fine tremors, and Bihyung, watching it, scratched his cheek in embarrassment. What kind of weapon wears its feelings out in the open like that? It was making him feel guilty for no good reason.
"Hey. Hey."
He dropped onto the floor where he stood and addressed the black spear.
"I said I was sorry, all right?"
The hum that came back was smaller. The apology seemed to be landing; the tremor was finer than before. Even so, he couldn't easily shake the sense that it was still whining—that hurt... For a good while Bihyung had to break a sweat, stroking the spear and coaxing it back.
Time passed. Then, with a long bright thrum, the spear returned to its usual spirit and rang out in a pleased cry.
"Yeah, yeah."
If that was settled—
"Shall we begin in earnest?"
In the mindscape of his lower dantian, he closed his eyes again. One hand reached out, palm open toward the spear, and the black shaft—still shivering, still ringing—settled into his grip with a soft clasp, as if winding itself around his fingers.
...I can feel it.
It did not seem to have granted him unity. Not yet. But at least it no longer seemed to hold any hostility toward him. Within the realm of Intimacy, Bihyung moved with the spear as though he were blending into it.
In this state—pour in yang.
He raised his spiritual power at once and spread it evenly along the shaft. A faint hum answered. Riding the minute tremor of the wood, he felt cold yin and warm yang standing against each other.
...Not enough.
Nowhere near enough. Not the quantity of yang, and not his own level. Nothing about him was yet close to melting all the yin steeped inside this spear. Through Yin-Yang Embodiment, yang was even now mingling with his breath and entering his body; the sun in his lower dantian was gradually swelling, gradually being refined. Even so, he still lacked what it would take to melt the spear's yin. For Bihyung, who wanted to be free of the divine weapon's weight even a moment sooner, it was a bleak prospect indeed.
Is there no way?
But the realm of Sinbyeong-hapi was still a distant thing for him as he was. Only after passing beyond Intimacy and treading the stage of the Heart Mirror could one finally attain Divine Weapon-Body Unity. In other words, he would have to perform a miracle that leapt two stages past his present attainment.
It was absurd. Bihyung decided to attempt it anyway.
Somehow, it doesn't feel impossible.
The spear's will, well disposed toward him—no. Its Lore. If he could resonate with that, then perhaps it was not out of the question.
Let's try.
He drew his yang back in and faced the spear again.
"Spear."
A questioning hum.
"The yin inside you must be stifling you too. I know. So let's take the challenge as soon as we can—even a single day sooner."
He tightened his grip as he spoke, and his resolve turned onto another path. Sinbyeong-hapi is the realm in which I myself become one with this spear. But he knew his own shortcomings well enough. Refusing to be greedy, he tried to unite with it not in his whole body, but in a single hand.
"Your Lore. Show it to me."
The moment the words left him, a fierce presence welled thickly out of the spear in his fist.
A long, low roar of being. It was only a fragment of a divine weapon. Something unfinished. And yet the presence pouring from that broken piece alone was enough to stand beside his own.
What kind of existence had the original master of this spear been?
Even as he wondered, his own presence swelled—sudden, unmistakable—and began to flood the world of his mindscape.
...What?
Why was this happening? He had only meant to read the spear's Lore and take a single step closer to it.
Something's gone wrong...
It had. And in the very instant he thought so—
This is...?
Bihyung caught a subtle dissonance tangled between the presences. Lore. The stories belonging to the beings above, granted to him as a reward in Hyeopte—stories he had never been qualified to read through to the end. He felt them now, between those presences. Vividly.
What in the world is about to happen?
And then the latter passages of the Lore, the ones he had never been able to read, began little by little to show themselves.
Fwoosh.
Fire catches.
A vision that had been nothing but dark now sears hot, as if heated in flame.
"What the hell did I even do wrong, to end up in this damned mess."
A crucible of eight sides.
There a blaze rose in which neither deathlessness nor indestructibility would hold.
The Lore carried him that far.
...Wait. A crucible of eight sides? A fire where neither immortality nor indestructibility works?
This was—
Sun Wukong?
Far too famous to mistake, and yet a being he had known as nothing more than a story. In that moment the myth of a single monkey—something Bihyung had only ever taken for exactly that—rose in his mind.
You have grasped the shape of a Lore concerning someone of the Upper Grade.
A monkey's cry, bright with delight, rings out across the Celestial Realm!
Looking at the message, Bihyung thought that, whatever else was true, he seemed to have inherited the Lore of someone genuinely immense. If he didn't rise to meet it, the windfall was going to grow larger than the man who had caught it.
......
He understood, then, who the original master of the Lore he had inherited truly was. The Great Sage Equal to Heaven—Sun Wukong. A being also called the Victorious Fighting Buddha, and the Handsome Monkey King.
...Thinking back, the hints were there.
The talk the beings of the Celestial Realm had been spouting. Thunder-brat. And the voice of Sun Wukong, mocking them, had been almost leisurely—as if no matter how they thrashed, they would never so much as touch a single hair of his. Selfhood and self-belief driven to their limit. A being extraordinary from birth, and in the end an absolute who had climbed to the seat of a Buddha without ever being bound by the laws that govern yokai. Arrogant confidence like that was only to be expected.
Even so, Bihyung could only feel dumbfounded.
How was I supposed to know!?
This was the first time in his life he had seen a Sun Wukong who actually existed. How was he meant to judge the Great Sage Equal to Heaven from a manner of speech and a few gestures? Dig into myth at all, and arrogance of that caliber was hardly rare. A divine being, surely, was meant to write its story from a vantage unlike any human's.
...And above all, Sun Wukong became a Buddha in the end. Who would ever think a mouth that foul belonged to someone like him?
Even so—should he be glad that he at least knew the Lore's owner now? Bihyung looked down at the spear in his grip, the thing that had given him the greatest hint.
...A pillar. And ore. Black gold.
No. More precisely, a divine weapon far too famous to mistake, wearing the shape of a spear.
"Are you 'Ruyi,' by any chance?"
One of the items too well known for standing in for Sun Wukong himself. Ruyi.
A long, pleased thrum. As if hearing its true name after ages, the spear made no attempt to hide what it was.
"...How did I end up with a heavyweight like this."
Stranger still was the fact that the true body of such a Ruyi had been shoved away in his own storehouse.
"So that's why you took a liking to me."
He carried a portion of its master's Lore, and it had been glad of him. That must be why it had been showing him a face like that all the more. But once the thought went that far, something didn't sit right.
"...If you're this friendly, why is the main body stuck in the staff such a handful?"
The spear welcomed him like a puppy wagging its tail, while the pillar that was its true body stayed prickly to the end. A divine weapon one could know and still never understand. Perhaps it had been cast in the exact mold of its master's temper.
Or else—
he simply had not yet earned the right to be called its master.
Obvious, if you think about it. Its master is that Sun Wukong.
The weapon of a yokai who had made a myth. According to the Lore, the Supreme Venerable Lord had wielded it before that, and there was even a tale that Pangu had used it when he laid out the earth. Best to abandon any notion of winning such a weapon's acknowledgment on the spot.
"Even so, thanks to you I was able to draw a little closer to the Lore. Thank you."
A deep rumble. When Bihyung said it with a crooked grin, a strange resonance seemed—oddly—to stir from inside the staff.
He had been thanking the spear. So why was the main body the one reacting?
...Anyway.
Bihyung clenched the black spear in his grip—no, the fragment of Ruyi—and focused his senses.
I'll take one thing from this, at least.
His will seeped into the Ruyi Spear, and the sensation of his hand locked around it, stuck fast, disappeared.
Further.
At his wish, the sense that had reached only as far as his wrist spread a little more. Because he had brought a little more of the Lore to light? Or else—
Your true body's grade fills, little by little.
Proficiency in your true body's 3rd Rank climbs at a steep rate.
Congratulations! You have entered the 4th Rank!
Because, as a byproduct of coming to understand the Lore, his rank had already reached what one might call the first step of the middle ranks—the 4th Rank?
Whatever the reason, there was no mistaking that this was a boon.
Go.
With that, he extended the domain of unity from his wrist all the way to his shoulder. He had not reached Sinbyeong-hapi, but it was a realm one could at least call Arm-Weapon Unity. His right side—the hand that held the spear, shoulder and all—had become one with the Ruyi Spear.
Like this. Yang energy.
No.
Something else.
He had just seen something useful in the Lore. A crucible of eight sides. Flames gradually taking hold all around. And last, the hint of eyes heating until they burned.
The passage of Lore Sun Wukong gave me is from the time of the Eight Trigrams Furnace.
The furnace in which the Supreme Venerable Lord had refined his elixir. It was said to hold the power to purify every unclean thing, and to melt it down. From Sun Wukong's Lore, Bihyung tried to imitate, in some measure, that lord's power.
Flame leapt. Yang drawn from his dantian rode the points of his shoulder, was refined, and began to burn—fierce, and high.
The power of elixir-refinement once wielded by the Supreme Venerable Lord begins to seep into his spiritual power.