The Immortal of Zhangjiajie (4)
'Master, you're latee.'
At this rate, won't I end up an old man?
It had already been a full shichen since his master told him to go up ahead.
If she had been her usual self, she would have circled Zhangjiajie and still had time to spare. So why was she running so late?
It wasn't as if there was much to discuss with the village head of Mureung County, either.
Master usually keeps things brief when speaking to the villagers.
But this had its own advantages.
With his master gone, he had time to revisit what she'd taught him in the gaps between chores.
Of course, having her there to guide him was far superior in terms of progress.
But every time she gave him instruction, she also handed him homework, and that was the problem.
Does that look like a circle to you? Go kneel under the waterfall and meditate for half a day. Maybe then your mind will clear enough to focus.
Look properly, disciple. See that tiny angle here? While your master prepares dinner, draw a hundred sheets of this 128-sided figure along with the circle.
It wasn't for him, as a disciple, to judge, but his master really didn't seem to have much talent for teaching.
Still, lessons mattered; and so did going over them alone like this.
"Hoo."
He had brought all the bundles of gifts to the kitchen at last.
In any case, most of what the villagers offered were ingredients, and half of those were things he'd never seen in his life, even after living through the civilization of the twenty-first century.
Frogs, snake eggs, lizard tails, something that looked like a cousin of chili peppers, root vegetables whose names he didn't know....
So this was the world of wuxia—always familiar, and yet always strange.
Once he had stuffed all the gifted ingredients into the kitchen, the already cramped space looked even more shabby and cluttered than before.
If I don't get to this soon, it'll all go bad.
Maybe he'd have to show off a little later.
After all, back when he lived alone, he'd been praised by friends for his cooking.
There had even been a guy who slept over just to eat what he'd made.
Memories drifted through his head—those hazy, miserable, liquor-soaked nights in his cramped rental room, cooking while his idiot friends splattered scallion pancakes all over the floor.
Of course, that cooking skill hadn't done him any favors when it came to getting a girlfriend.
Just thinking that far made him feel oddly sad, and with a strangely calm heart, he replayed his master's martial art from a moment ago.
The most efficient path.
Static movement, striking at an enemy's vital points in one clean burst.
Break through the opponent's defenses, sever the dantian, and halt the flow of inner energy, temporarily rendering their martial arts useless.
And at the root of it all was....
Circle.
Keeping that in mind, he slowly drew a circle with a twig, and, sure enough, a perfect one appeared on the ground.
A circle.
Now that he thought about it, the formation his master had spread with her belt had also been a perfect circle.
And her movements had contained repeated rotations as well.
Maybe his master's insistence that he draw circles until he practically developed a fixation on them wasn't such a strange lesson after all.
In a way, this feels less like martial arts and more like practical combat.
Just as his master had said, and just as it had been written in the scripture—or rather, the manual—she'd given him, the Mo Sect's martial arts were ultimately about something anyone could learn easily, stripped of all flowery nonsense and focused purely on usefulness.
....
He closed his eyes.
At once, the scene from a moment ago rose vividly behind his eyelids.
Not the blue-white blades of the Green Forest bandits, nor the rain of arrows.
What his Mind's Eye had seen was not those outer shells.
It was flow.
Yes, a flow as vast and dark as ink.
The path along which the pitch-black energy that had risen from his master's dantian coursed through her body.
The belt had merely been a prop.
As the black inner energy in his master's body writhed and stretched outward, it traced a line through empty space, and the belt followed that line into a perfect circle.
Here, like this.
He adjusted his grip on the twig.
His master had used her belt, but this twig was his belt.
He planted his feet firmly in the ground, just as she had.
He still didn't understand the feeling of drawing up the earth's energy through the soles of his feet. But he could mimic the form of it—the way his master's feet seemed to fuse with the ground itself.
Hah.
He drew in a breath.
There was no deep inner energy in him like there was in his master. He was closer to an empty jar.
But maybe that was exactly why there was room to fill it.
He imagined it. Imagined the same black energy his master had shown him flowing through his empty body.
A tiny point below his navel, in the place called the dantian, unraveled like a thread and began to move, running down his arm.
Rotate, using the right foot as the axis.
Whoosh.
He swung the twig.
Of course, there was no piercing crack of air the way his master had made when she sliced through empty space. Only the faint sound of wind, like a child's plaything, brushing past him.
But his eyes were following something else entirely.
It's a little different.
His master's flow was not a straight line that came and went in jerks. Like ink spreading through water, it flowed softly, then suddenly hardened into steel.
As if she had pulled one section of a circle taut and sharpened it into a needle.
A circle is complete, without gaps, and can change into anything. That is why all Mo Sect martial arts begin from the circle.
Just as his master had said.
But even if he could see it perfectly with his eyes, embodying it with his body was another matter altogether.
It was like knowing, with eyes and mind, what move came after a dance step, while the body itself refused to follow.
He could understand it with his eyes. He could remember it with his head.
But the martial art wielded by these frail little hands was nothing more than a child's tantrum.
"Ghk!"
The twig scraped across his hand, drawing a little blood.
Fortunately, it was only a graze, nothing serious, so he roughly wiped the blood onto his clothes and kept going.
Soft like a circle, and perfectly complete.
He drew the line, aimed at the vital point, then turned defense into offense and stabbed straight for the opponent's weakness.
Hwoom!
"Huh?"
Just then, very faintly, he felt a heavy vibration at the tip of his fist.
An illusion, as though the dantian itself had gone warm. No—was it not an illusion?
Wobble.
But perhaps it had been too much.
His legs gave way, and he toppled onto his backside. The cut on his palm from earlier was scraped raw by the gritty earth, and it burned.
If he had been his old self, he would have forced out a shout just to endure the pain. But with this body, he couldn't do even that—he could only make weak little whimpering noises like a puppy.
So it is too much, after all.
For a child who had never trained inner energy or external technique, using proper martial arts was probably impossible.
Still, if he were to say there had been no result at all, that wouldn't be quite true.
He brushed the dirt from his hands and stood up.
The sun had already sunk low, and dusk was beginning to settle, but his master still hadn't returned.
Could something have happened?
He was worried, yes, but even thinking back on the game's settings—and on the atmosphere in Mureung County lately—nothing especially dangerous seemed likely.
He set the twig down and went into the kitchen.
I should at least get dinner ready before Master comes back.
He usually made the tea, but all other cooking had been his master's domain.
He wasn't sure why, but it seemed she had no intention of letting him handle the kitchen.
But even if his body had become younger, his mind was the same.
How many years had he spent cooking for himself? How many times had he cooked entirely alone? Surely he could manage a single dinner table.
Determined to show what he could do for the first time in a long while—and for the first time in this world—he headed straight into the kitchen.
***
Quite a strain.
Even after swallowing the Zasodan Baekhyeon had given her to stabilize her inner energy, climbing Zhangjiajie after the coughing of blood had taken a fair bit out of her.
But still....
Though her body was heavy and her legs felt like lead, her heart was strangely light and at ease.
Baekhyeon, that old Daoist, might have a few screws loose, but he wasn't the kind of man to be cold or heartless.
He would surely take care of his disciple, whether for the sake of old ties or simply because the principles of the Dao demanded it.
Just hearing that answer had been enough for Mukjeok.
Then, almost without meaning to, she lifted her head toward the sky, and her eyes fell on the heavens dyed red by sunset.
The sun is going down.
Sunset came quickly in Zhangjiajie.
At this rate, it would be dark before half a shichen passed.
And just as she expected, beyond the crimson sky, dusk was already seeping in, deep and blue.
I should hurry.
Her young disciple might be waiting for his master, stomach empty, worrying and hungry.
At that thought, Mukjeok found the corners of her mouth lifting of their own accord.
As they always did whenever she thought of her disciple.
Mukjeok gathered the last of her strength and used lightness skill.
It was tiring, but with the help of the Zasodan Baekhyeon had given her, she could endure it.
Before even a single seok of grain had passed, she had returned to her little hut.
Then she paused, listening to the sound that drifted to her ears.
Whirl.
Hwoom.
A dull sound slicing through the wind.
But the force behind it was thin and clumsy, like a child waving a twig for amusement.
And the sight before her wasn't much different.
Standing in front of the courtyard, her disciple held a wooden stick as though it were a sword and was moving his feet slowly as he swung it through the air.
He seemed so absorbed in the motion that he hadn't noticed his master's return yet.
Hmph.
His master had come back and he hadn't even bowed—what an unfilial disciple.
But Mukjeok simply folded her arms and watched a little longer, quietly, as he played.
The boy has some semblance of form, at least.
His lower body was still weak, and he wobbled as he moved. His grip was poor, so the end of the twig trembled constantly.
Nothing more than a child's game.
And yet the smile at the corner of Mukjeok's mouth did not fade.
Perhaps he was pretending to be a hero to chase away boredom in her absence. The sight of his master fighting the bandits today must have looked rather impressive to him.
She was just thinking she'd see how long he kept it up, and was about to grow a little mischievous, when—
Hoo, inhale.
Wolyeon's breathing changed. It was no longer the rough panting of an excited child, but the breathing of sediment sinking deep to the bottom.
...?
Mukjeok's brows twitched.
It must be a coincidence. Yes, a coincidence.
Even if a child without inner energy tried to imitate regulated breathing, there was no way he could match the grain of it.
Shhhk.
Wolyeon's right foot swept half a circle across the ground. At the same time, the twig at his waist shot upward in a diagonal line.
It was not merely a lifting motion. His wrist twisted inward, and he used the twig's own elasticity to coil through the air in a strange, rotating motion.
That was....
...!
Mukjeok's pupils shook as if struck by an earthquake.
The fingers of the arm she had been folding across her chest clenched hard into her sleeve without her even realizing it.
That movement was the first form of Subduing Strike—the technique she herself had used to suppress the bandits just moments ago.
A fist technique that crushed an attacker's momentum entirely, breaking their will to fight.
Don't tell me he really learned it just by watching?
From a child who had yet to properly train any inner-energy method or external martial conditioning?
Even if third-rate fighters trained hard, they usually didn't grasp a single form until after a month; to master it would normally take three full years.
Hoo.
As Wolyeon exhaled, he wiped the sweat from his face and turned his head.
Then his blue eyes caught sight of his master's dark figure.
For a moment, he seemed startled, his body jerking awkwardly, before he slowly walked over to her, performed the proper salute, and wrote on the ground with the stick.
[Did you see all of it?]
"....Yes."
When Mukjeok nodded, Wolyeon wrote again.
[How was it?]
How was it, indeed.
Mukjeok thought for a moment, choosing her words.
"It was the level of a third-rate martial artist. In other words, it was dreadful."
The moment he heard that, it looked as if lightning had struck above Wolyeon's head.
Seeing the shock on her disciple's face, Mukjeok let out a soft, deflated laugh and ruffled his hair.
"Why are you so shocked? Your master said it as praise."
Wolyeon tilted his head after hearing her words. Mukjeok withdrew her hand and continued.
"You have not even properly learned a single martial art, let alone undergone any training as a martial artist. You are merely an eight-year-old child. And yet you displayed movements at the level of a third-rate martial artist."
Speaking with deliberate seriousness, Mukjeok softened her tone for the next part.
"Do you understand what your master means by that?"
Only then did her disciple brighten and nod.
Then he tugged at his master's sleeve and pointed toward the hut.
"Has something happened?"
At Mukjeok's question, asked with a blink of confusion, Wolyeon pointed more specifically to a place.
The kitchen.
When Mukjeok realized that, her eyes widened.
No way.
"You cooked? You did?"
Nod.
Mukjeok stared at her disciple with a face full of awe and shock.
He had no tongue, couldn't properly taste anything, and had never even held a kitchen knife before—yet he had cooked?
With a mixture of pride and suspicion, Mukjeok followed after Wolyeon to the kitchen, and the disciple quickly moved his short legs, setting the table before his master and bringing out the dishes one by one.
"I-Is this truly.... the food you made?"
Mukjeok looked at the dinner table with even wider eyes than when she'd seen Wolyeon's martial arts.
To her eyes, the meal her disciple had set out looked quite presentable.
No—it was more than presentable. It looked genuinely excellent. Fragrant, savory scents wafted upward, whetting the appetite, and the colors and arrangement of the dishes were beautiful as well.
There was a fresh vegetable dish, meat marinated in seasoning, and a bowl of rice cooked fluffy and glossy.
On top of that, he'd even made palate cleansers using the fruits and vegetables offered by the villagers.
That kind of presentation was the sort of thing one might expect only in Luoyang, Peking, Anhui, or Kaifeng.
At a loss for words, Mukjeok stared at the food for a long moment before clearing her throat and speaking.
"Y-you worked hard, disciple. I shall eat well."
With expectation in her heart, Mukjeok moved her chopsticks. They went first to a piece of meat, soft and brown, glistening with what seemed to be soy sauce in both color and flavor.
She took a bite.
The instant she put the meat in her mouth, Mukjeok's expression twisted.
Seeing her lips draw in tight as if water had been sucked into a great hole, her disciple tilted his head.
Too salty!
It was far, far too salty.
Only then did Mukjeok think again about what it meant that her disciple had no tongue.
He seasoned it to suit his own taste—of course it wouldn't taste right!
When the villagers of Mureung County gave Wolyeon things like medicinal sweets, licorice, or candies, they hadn't just been handing him overly sweet treats for no reason.
He had no tongue.
His sense of taste was practically nonexistent, so food seasoned according to his far duller palate wouldn't be fit for a normal person at all.
Clack.
Setting down her chopsticks, Mukjeok spoke to Wolyeon with grim determination.
"Disciple."
[Yes.]
"From this day forward, I shall take full responsibility for the cooking."
[Huh?]
With her disciple still tilting his head in incomprehension, Mukjeok couldn't bear to throw away the food he'd worked so hard to make, and so she was forced to stuff it into her mouth anyway.
The food Wolyeon had made assaulted all five senses in the worst possible way.