How Brief Is Life (1)
Time in the mountains passed quickly.
Of course, if you were dumped into a martial world—moreover, into a rural mountain range in fifteenth-century China—it was only natural that you’d have nothing to do.
So there was room to doubt the claim that time flew by.
The problem was that Master knew it too.
Not a single day passed without her staying at my side and pouring into me everything she knew.
Martial arts, first of all. Then the doctrines and history of the Mo Sect, mechanism craft, and even mathematics and logic.
Who was it that said it? If you’re bored, move your body until you’re not bored anymore; if you’re depressed, move your body until you no longer feel like being depressed; if you’re tired, move your body until even the thought of being tired is gone.
Master obeyed that saying to the letter. No, more than that—she lived it.
Thanks to her, years vanished in the blink of an eye, and before I knew it, I was seventeen.
Within that hellish—no, brutal—environment, nine years had passed.
And the conclusion I reached in all that time was simple:
This life is definitely a dud.
I let out a long sigh, staring at my face reflected in the clear water of the stream instead of a mirror.
The boy in the water was, admittedly, handsome enough. Skin so pale it looked as though it had never once seen the sun, black hair like the night sky, and blue eyes that added a touch of mystery.
He looked like the kind of face that would only appear in the customization screen of the original game, Daemyeong Pungwhajeon, after you’d bought a pile of paid skins.
If only it came without a single fatal debuff, it would have been perfect.
……
I had been learning martial arts for nine years now.
And still, I had no way to produce a voice.
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t looked for a solution.
I’d searched for famous medicinal herbs and tried, however clumsily, to study medicine.
But the first route failed because there was no divine herb in Zhangjiajie that could regenerate vocal cords lost when I was still an infant, and the second because this world, absurdly faithful to medieval medicine in all the most useless ways, simply did not have a treatment like vocal cord restoration.
What a stupid game, caring about realism in the most pointless places.
Sometimes I wondered if maybe martial arts could solve it.
After all, hadn’t wuxia stories long featured a technique called transmitted voice? The kind that lets you speak to someone through inner energy without opening your mouth.
When I asked Master about it, though, her answer was as disappointing as it was final.
“Transmitted voice? What nonsense are you spouting, disciple? Even sending a voice means vibrating the vocal cords with inner energy so one may speak through the air without opening the mouth. A person without vocal cords could never use such a thing.”
To prevent even that method of communication, this insane game had gone so far as to erase the tongue and vocal cords from the beginning, cutting off even the slightest possibility.
Seriously, what a fucking pointless place to chase realism. This god-awful game.
But the frustration of being unable to speak? That was child’s play.
The real problem was Master.
“Disciple, are you spacing out again?”
At the cool voice from behind me, I startled and turned around.
There stood a woman who seemed untouched by time.
This year she was sixty, yet her appearance looked even younger than when I had first possessed this body.
Flawless skin, a straight nose, and the elegant bearing of a lofty black crane.
Who would dare call that woman a grandmother? Any man of the jianghu who saw her would likely rush at her like a starving wild dog and beg her to marry him.
Of course, anyone who knew the legend of Wol-o wouldn’t even dare come close.
With my assessment of Master finished, I lowered my head. She then pointed vaguely at the apparatus behind me and spoke.
“Have you completed today’s task?”
I nodded wordlessly and indicated the complicated mechanism laid out on the ground: the Heavenly Mechanism Lock.
Hundreds of gears and springs were interlocked within it, a vicious contraption that would explode or spit out poison needles unless inner energy was fed through it in the correct order.
That was because Master firmly believed that a disciple of the Mo Sect had to master not only martial arts but also mechanical formations.
But she would never know.
She would never know that I had solved this fiendish puzzle not through “martial enlightenment,” but through the “science-track knowledge” from my previous life.
Gear ratios and tension calculations. Once you know the vector values, it’s obvious where the inner energy needs to flow.
People in wuxia worlds always wanted to solve things through “intuition” or “energy,” but don’t underestimate the knowledge of an engineering student from the twenty-first century.
The lab my professor had run—vanished from sight the moment I heard him say, “Why don’t you go on to graduate school?” and fled before I could even say goodbye on graduation day—floated briefly through my mind.
Master examined the disassembled Heavenly Mechanism Lock carefully, then twitched her eyebrows ever so slightly.
“……Strange.”
Her gaze fixed on me.
“Your use of inner energy is as crude as can be, yet your solution is terrifyingly precise. It is as though you already knew the blueprint and walked in with it in hand. Not a single error.”
Well, that’s because the structure is visible to me.
A collaboration between Mind’s Eye and physics, if you will.
Of course I couldn’t say that aloud, so I simply smiled bashfully and scratched my head.
“Tsk. Don’t smile like that, you foolish disciple. You look stupid.”
Master gave the usual cold rebuke, but a faint smile hovered at the corners of her mouth.
That tsundere temperament. After nine years, I understood it well enough now. That was her way of showing concern.
“Come here.”
Master beckoned me over.
When I approached, she pulled an old book and a weighty bundle from her robes and handed them to me.
“You are seventeen now. You cannot go on forever wrapped in your master’s sleeves, fiddling with little mechanical toys.”
I glanced at the cover of the book.
City Defense Compendium.
It was the final section of the Mo Scripture, the passages on mechanism craft, fortification, and defense.
It hit me all at once: Master’s teachings were nearing their end.
At that realization, my chest swelled with emotion—and with it came a strange unease.
If the original game’s storyline held true, then this was about the time the player would begin to step out into the jianghu.
And soon after that, Wolyeon and Mukjeok would meet death.
Now that I’m in this world, I’m not going to let that happen.
I clenched my fist secretly behind Master’s back.
Mute or not, I knew the future. And I had eyes that could see what others could not.
Seventeen years with Master.
Over that time, the word master had become, in my heart, the same as the word mother.
In the game she might have been nothing more than an NPC confined to the setting, but the Master standing before me now was nothing like that.
I would never let things end that way.
“Your expression is grim. Anyone looking at you would think your master was sending you to your death.”
Master tapped my forehead sharply.
“!”
I clutched my forehead in a silent yelp, and Master snorted before roughly ruffling my hair.
“Don’t worry. I won’t let the world look down on you just because you cannot speak.”
Her gaze sank deep.
“The final tasks I give you are two. The first is to make a mechanism beast of your own.”
You mean a mechanism beast?
“Yes.”
As soon as she finished speaking, Master snapped her fingers—and behind her, something swift and sharp came hurtling forward.
“!”
The instant I saw the massive shadow, my hand shot to the sword at my waist.
But Master, utterly unbothered, simply—
snap.
—flicked my hand where it rested on my belt.
Ow.
I glared at my stinging hand for a moment, then looked back at Master, only to finally see the mechanism beast standing proudly behind her.
It was the wooden hawk I had once tried to activate and immediately caused to crash in a spectacular disaster.
“I don’t care what kind it is. Make a bird, like this master did; make a sparrow if you wish; or if you’re determined, make a phoenix. I care not. The important thing is that it must move and fly on its own.”
Master then pointed into the forest to lay down the second trial.
“Your second task is combat in the field. Descend Zhangjiajie’s cliffs and break through the beasts and formation traps laid throughout the woods. Return injured enough to prove you were challenged, but not dead.”
……Wasn’t this supposed to be a touching moment just now?
Not dead?
I hurriedly wrote in the air with my finger.
[Please spare my life.]
“What atrocious handwriting. Write it again.”
[Please show mercy, Master.]
“Denied.”
Master turned away coldly. But then she casually looked back over her shoulder, lifted one corner of her mouth, and jerked her chin at me.
“Why are you standing there dumbly, you foolish disciple? Worry about tomorrow tomorrow. For today, you should do what must be done.”
And with that, she began walking lightly down the mountain slope.
“Come along.”
***
Market day in Mureung County was always noisy.
The scent of human life, the smell of earth, and the stench of livestock dung mingled together in just the right proportions in this four-dimensional reality.
I was crouched down, repairing farm tools.
A scythe with all its teeth rusted away, a hoe with a broken handle, a cart wheel gone loose—all of it was piled high in front of me.
Ha. The Mo Sect’s spirit of universal love, written one way, means labor exploitation another.
Master Mozi, when you said “love without discrimination,” did you perhaps mean “free repair service with no charge attached”?
If this had been the twenty-first century, I could’ve raked in a tidy sum as after-sales service.
“Oh my, Young Sir! Please help us as always!”
As Wang, the woman from the local tavern, thrust an old grain thresher at me, I sighed inwardly.
I couldn’t answer, and it wasn’t as though I had any grounds to refuse such an act of goodwill. Besides, I had already received plenty from Mrs. Wang over the years, so I could only smile and nod.
Master had taught that this was called mutual benefit. In other words, if something comes in, something must go out.
Beside me, my noble Master sat sipping tea elegantly while offering her own commentary on her own teachings.
“Your hands are sluggish, you little maggot. Did I not tell you to use leverage to align the axle?”
Yes, yes.
I answered inwardly as I adjusted the axle.
Just then—
“Did you hear the news?”
“What news?”
“The Emperor has passed away.”
Click.
The moment the thresher’s axle clicked into place, all my attention snapped toward the two villagers talking at the tavern.
As I recalled, one of those men was someone who had only recently settled in Mureung County after fleeing the storms of the jianghu.
I sneaked a glance at Master. She, too, was raising her teacup, yet her gaze remained razor-sharp on the two men.
She was clearly interested in the conversation as well.
“Have you heard that the Emperor marched north to suppress the remaining Northern Yuan forces?”
“Well, of course. There are loads of martial folk fleeing into the jianghu to avoid conscription for the northern campaign. That much I know.”
The prologue of Daemyeong Pungwhajeon is set in the first year of Xuande—that is, one year after the Xuande Emperor ascended the throne.
Which means this was the final period of the Yongle Emperor’s rule, and the early years of the Hongxi Emperor, the father of the Xuande Emperor.
Not good.
The closer we got to the prologue, the more Master’s life would be brought to the brink.
With all sorts of worries piling up inside me, I listened more closely to the men’s conversation.
“I heard he died suddenly at Yumu River while returning from that northern campaign. And then…….”
The man drinking the cheap liquor emptied his bowl of makgeolli with trembling hands.
Fear welled in his eyes.
“The moment that iron-hearted emperor vanished, the suppressed villains of the heterodox sects and demonic cult began rampaging like madmen. Blood is already flowing in Fujian and Kunlun, and people are saying the fallout will soon spread across all of the Central Plains.”
“Oh, come now. Even so, aren’t the demonic cult bastards usually confined to the frontiers? Surely something like this wouldn’t reach all the way to a backwater in Hunan…….”
“Have you been listening to me with your ears closed? I told you the villains were wreaking havoc in Fujian, didn’t I? Those bastards from the Bane Heaven Gate slaughtered the people after raiding more than ten villages and throwing the bodies to poison insects as feed. Fujian isn’t so far from Hunan, is it?”
“Good heavens. I wonder how the world is going to turn.”
Master, who had been listening, met my eyes.
She rose from her seat, walked slowly over to me, examined the repaired thresher, and then carried it back to Mrs. Wang.
“Oh! Immortal sir, Young Sir! Thank you! Your skills are as neat as ever!”
After dealing with Mrs. Wang’s repeated thanks, Master led me back toward Zhangjiajie.
We walked and walked for what felt like an hour, until we had reached the end of the forest and the point where one had to use light-footwork to climb the peak.
“Disciple.”
At Master’s voice, I slowly turned my head.
“What do you think?”
What are you referring to?
When she saw the words finished on the ground, Master continued.
“It has been decades since the Central Plains were unified. And yet calamity never ceases beneath heaven.”
Master lifted her eyes to the sky with a look that seemed faintly melancholic.
“The imperial court is not content with the lands of the Central Plains and now points its blade toward the north, while in that opening, the demonic and heterodox paths wave their own blades to fatten their bellies.”
Her voice lost strength little by little at the end of the sentence.
“Can a world where people truly love one another without discrimination ever come to pass?”
Master simply stood there, gazing at the sky, as though waiting for an answer.
For a moment, I didn’t know what I should say, and my hand stalled.
I had heard that Master had once left the jianghu to change the world, only to be disappointed and betrayed, eventually withdrawing here into seclusion.
What right did I have to say anything to someone like that?
I don’t know much about affairs of the state. I also don’t know much about Master’s years wandering the jianghu.
In the end, all I could do was write the words I was able to say.
Master lowered her gaze and silently stared at them.
But whatever the outcome may be, the fact remains that until now, Master has believed in that one word—universal love—and practiced good deeds because of it. Isn’t that something everyone in this village remembers?
I think that alone is enough.
Master looked at my flimsy attempt at comfort for a long time.
I had no way of knowing what was passing behind that expressionless face.
“……I see.”
Seeing the faintest rise at the corner of her mouth, I felt relief that she hadn’t taken my words badly and let out a deep sigh inwardly.
“Let’s go. It will grow dark soon.”
Master said that, and until we returned to the hut, she said nothing more, as though lost in thought.