Our Young Master Doesn't Have the Brains to Wield a Sword (2)
Our family had money.
That much was plain enough. An Aura Circulation Method not worth half a coin was still an Aura Circulation Method, and the mere fact that even my bodyguard, Duna, was training in one stood as proof of the house's wealth. You could not lay hands on such a thing unless you seized a fortune like admission to Cheonryong Academy. Even holding a shoddy one was already remarkable.
Bak Cheol-son's slouched posture snapped straight. I shut the case and sat down in front of him.
His eyes flicked fast. Behind them, the calculations would be turning. I could not let him find his footing.
"Should I take this to another smith?"
My weapon was a longblade the other smiths of the Cheonryong Sword Family had already refused, but Bak Cheol-son had no way of knowing that.
"Just say the word, sir!"
Yeah. This was the power of money.
Bak Cheol-son was the finest craftsman among the smiths of the Cheonryong Sword Family, true enough, but the gap between him and the other swordsmiths was not some gulf no one could cross. If his skill sat at a hundred, the rest averaged somewhere around ninety. Dig his heels in, and he was replaceable. I could simply go find another smith. Depending on the purpose or the materials, one of them might even edge him, if only slightly. All the more reason the threat would land.
Even so, I had come to Bak Cheol-son for two reasons.
The first was that his sense of belonging to the Cheonryong Sword Family had hit the floor. The family's smiths were famous for staying where they were even when other houses offered higher pay. Simply bearing the name of the Cheonryong Sword Family, the greatest sword house in the world, was reward enough for them. Bak Cheol-son was different. A certain incident in his past had driven both his loyalty and his affection for the family straight to the bottom.
The second was money. A blacksmith of the Cheonryong Sword Family could have lived well enough, but ever since he had been crushed outright in the political infighting, the commissions had dried up. A base salary still came in. The trouble was that the family paid its real incentives when a smith forged weapons and distinguished himself with them, so no work meant a thinner wage. He was not a man for luxury, and he could have endured well enough on his own. But given what he was pouring himself into now, no amount of money would ever be enough.
"......Damn it."
In the end he held out his hand, and Duna, beaming, passed him the case together with the longblade design Hana had drawn.
And there was another reason it had to be Bak Cheol-son.
From the design, he seemed to guess why I had come to him instead of the other swordsmiths of the Cheonryong Sword Family. He was not, however, a man who said one thing and did another, and he did not refuse the commission. He did not even appear to mind that what he was being asked to forge was a longblade rather than a sword.
"The Aura Circulation Method. What level?"
"You wouldn't know it yet, but our young master will pick it up in no time. So please pack the aura resonance in extra thick, okay?"
"Then the method he'll be learning?"
"It's the Khalid-style Aura Circulation Method. The basic pattern goes like this..."
Duna launched into an explanation of the Khalid-style method as she knew it. It was a method with a name to it, and Bak Cheol-son skipped the finer points with the air of a man who already understood.
Cloth shifted. For a moment his eyes met mine, and he raised a hand, cutting off Duna where she was still fussing through one detail after another.
"I know the Khalid-style Aura Circulation Method better than you do. No more explanation."
"It's a little different, though..."
"Forge it into a weapon and there's hardly a difference."
"Yes, yes. I understand."
Only half convinced, Duna handed over the case, and with that the commission for the longblade was settled. For the moment.
"Young Master, shall we go look around the museum? We'll have to leave soon..."
"Leave the customer and go."
"Why?"
"The customer's got a simple test to get through. I need a look at how his muscles sit. Starting from the legs..."
That meant stripping me down, so Duna could not very well say she would stay.
"It isn't a dangerous test, is it?"
"Danger? Inside the Cheonryong Sword Family? You might burn yourself on the forge fire, but as you can see, it isn't even running."
"Go see it before we leave."
"But... will you be all right? If you get lost again..."
"I'll stay right here."
Even with my permission she hesitated. Then the temptation won, and she set off for the sword museum of the Cheonryong Sword Family.
While she was gone to admire the other famed blades, Bak Cheol-son turned to me.
"It isn't the Khalid-style Aura Circulation Method."
"How did you know?"
"How many swordsmen do you think I've watched in this family? You think I can't tell that much? Can you show the pattern? What house is it built on?"
In a great house, when a sword was commissioned, the client handed the smith the pattern of the Aura Circulation Method they had learned, and the smith forged the blade to match. Bak Cheol-son seemed to think I had paid him so handsomely, and come to him in secret, because I had stolen some great house's method and meant to keep the theft from being discovered. The choice of a longblade over an ordinary sword, he appeared to guess, came from the same instinct. Run another house's aura through a proper sword and you risked being caught, so hide it behind a different weapon.
"I'm curious how you got your hands on it. Put a foot in something like this and a life tends to end in ruin. Doesn't matter to me. I just need to be paid."
As if it were none of his concern, he demanded the blueprint.
A method like the Khalid style would already have a pattern blueprint fitted to the Cheonryong Sword Family. Mine was a separate Aura Circulation Method entirely. It needed a new design.
Slowly, I drew up my Aura Heart.
"You bastard... so that's why you came to me."
This was why I had been left with no choice but to seek Bak Cheol-son. Why I could not have gone to the other smiths, even if their skill stood close to his. It was the same reason I, who could just as well have used a sword, had chosen the workaround of a longblade—a weapon the smiths of the Cheonryong Sword Family were certain to refuse on sight.
Bak Cheol-son could watch how a person ran their aura and forge, on the spot, a weapon carrying a pattern fitted to it. Great houses whose weapon patterns were already famous, and already designed, had no particular need to seek him out. The other smiths might fall a little short of him, but they could still produce blades worthy of the Cheonryong name. This, though, was a thing only he could do. There was no one else with the skill to look upon the Dragon Scale Heart Sutra that Cheon So-hyeong used and forge a pattern fitted even to that.
So I showed him. The flame Aura Heart I carried.
A crackling hiss. The sound of skin searing rose, and lines like red scales began to score themselves across my body. Not quite on the skin—just above it, a manifested aura was settling over me as if I had drawn on a garment of thin scales. Bak Cheol-son watched, and what left him was a sound of pure admiration.
"Extremely simple, and extremely efficient. This isn't a path someone cut on purpose. It's aura run like a trail in the wild, worn open of its own accord because hundreds of thousands of feet walked the same ground."
Well, of course. I had beaten this method of running aura into shape by drilling breath control to the death, ever since I was a child.
"How far has your realm gone?"
"Do I have to say?"
"An ordinary Aura Circulation Method, I could guess. An Aura Heart I've never seen in my life? Then of course you tell me."
"Mm..."
"Otherwise the weapon snaps because it can't bear your strength, or you pour in every drop of aura and nothing comes out. If that's what you want, I won't stop you."
To make a weapon's pattern was to plant an aura pattern that would stay optimal as the wielder grew. Fit it only to the aura I had now, and later it might refuse to release aura at all, or burst because it could not endure what I became. To prevent that, he needed my realm exactly. Even Cheon So-hyeong, who kept his secrets far more tightly than I did, had laid everything bare when he commissioned the Ink-Iron Dragon Scale Sword.
"Haa..."
I pointed a finger at my chest.
"You've had a taste of the Aura Heart, have you? At your age, that's something..."
"......"
I shook my head and kept the Aura Heart running. Bak Cheol-son's eyes flew wide, as if he could not believe what he was seeing.
"Impossible. I don't believe it. Even in the Cheonryong Sword Family, at your age..."
"I'll vouch for him."
It was a voice that should not have been able to reach this place. Bak Cheol-son turned toward the figure who had appeared at my back.
"So will you believe it now?"
"Yu-rin. How did you get here..."
Cheon Yu-rin had appeared without warning. Bak Cheol-son startled hard and hid the case in his hands.
"I came to request a sword made to fit me."
It was a request she should never, under any circumstances, have made of him. At those words, a bolt from a clear sky, Bak Cheol-son's face twisted as if he might break into tears at any moment.
Cheon Dae-seong, fourth son of the Cheonryong Sword Family and newly enrolled at Cheonryong Academy, already possessed a family sword fitted to his hand and to his Aura Circulation Method. Cheon Yu-rin did not. Aside from the ordinary blades the family issued for general use, she had no sword of her own.
So when she arrived, Elder Bak, the representative who governed the swordsmiths of the Cheonryong Sword Family, was declaring at full volume that he himself would forge her sword.
He told her that the realm known to the outside world was only the point of barely forming an Aura Heart before it came undone again. Even that much was the mark of a genius, and the rest of the Cheonryong bloodline stood at the same height. But if she was hiding her true skill, she was to tell him, and him alone. He pressed her for it.
Cheon Yu-rin had two choices.
Hide her power, as she always had. Or reveal her skill, and accept that her older siblings would move to keep her in check.
Hide it, and she would show only a realm on the level her older sisters and brothers had reached, and receive a sword that did not fit her perfectly, though it would not be a bad one. Reveal it, and she could take a blade truly made for her, while the skill she had agonized so long to conceal would be laid bare before all the world.
The girl she used to be would have obeyed her mother's request without a moment's pause. She would have hidden her skill, set herself just a little ahead of Cheon Dae-seong, and used the sword she was given. That alone would have been enough to beat him, and she was confident she could still keep the name of the greatest genius the Cheonryong Sword Family had ever produced.
And that was, in fact, how she had lived before Seo Hoon changed—back when he was nothing more than the ordinary foolish older brother. Hiding herself. Wielding a sword that fit neither her hand nor her aura, and living hidden all the same.
Now was different.
There was someone who had caught in her sight and would not leave it. A new student who had awakened an Aura Heart at the same age as she. From the moment she looked at him, her heart began to pound—the Aura Heart she kept covered beneath Cheonryong Simju—and a fierce hunger to cross blades with him spilled over until she could not hold it back.
In the end she gave up on hiding her realm completely, and made a choice that came close to a gamble.
One wrong step, and her realm might reach the ears of her siblings in the Cheonryong Sword Family. Even so, she had decided. She would have a sword forged worthy of what she truly was.
She did not want to. Not in her heart. But she wanted a sword that fit her exactly, enough to step past what she felt and have it anyway.