Amazing He Can Even Write His Name (03)
When I got back to the room, the triplets were glancing around, looking for me. They had been hovering near the entrance, about to dial the missing-persons line, and I arrived at so precise a moment that we were spared the disaster of an actual report going through.
"Young Master. Where have you been?"
"The bathroom..."
It had been about fifteen minutes. A bathroom excuse ought to hold.
"In an unfamiliar place, you must take one of us with you even to the restroom. Young Master."
Come on—the original Seo Hoon wasn't that hopeless! He went to the bathroom by himself, at least.
"You all worked hard with the cleaning. Go in and rest."
Only students were permitted to stay in the dormitory. The three of them were to commute from the attendants' lodging nearby.
"One of us must look after you, Young Master."
"I want to be alone in the room."
"Then I will wait outside."
Hana had brought her personal chair all the way from home. There was no dismissing her. If anyone interrupted me, I might take an internal injury in the middle of forming an Aura Heart, so I had to ask her.
"Until I come out, no matter what happens, don't come in. Got it?"
Hana heard me out, gazed steadily at my face, and raised her right hand.
"I promise."
We hooked pinkies, the two of us, fully grown. My face heated a little. Still—that was her way of saying she would keep a promise made to me, wasn't it?
Using the Black Dragon Yeouiju was simple enough. Set it on the palm and run an aura cultivation method.
The Cheonryong Sword Family believed the only way to draw any effect from it was their own peculiar method—the Heavenly Dragon Heart Sutra, granted solely to the family head and his direct children. Reality was not so tidy. It had helped when I learned the Dragon Scale Heart Sutra that Cheon So-hyeong used, and it helped just the same when I trained with an ordinary method.
They had mistaken the Heavenly Dragon Heart Sutra for a requirement because the Black Dragon Yeouiju multiplied the aura a cultivation method produced. Where an ordinary method yielded ten, holding the Yeouiju while you cultivated brought that to about fifteen. The Heavenly Dragon Heart Sutra was an optimized method the family had built for their own constitution, so its base yield was twenty—thirty, with the orb in hand.
If it multiplies the gain, then the better method ought to be the right one. Except an aura cultivation method has to suit the body that uses it. The Heavenly Dragon Heart Sutra was called the strongest of them all, but outside the Cheon bloodline its power never fully manifested. Better to hold the Black Dragon Yeouiju and use a method that fit me.
I drew a breath in. My throat froze cold, and the air entering heated until it began to pool in my chest, just as before—heat that appeared only while a cultivation method was running. The Black Dragon Yeouiju in my hand moved like a new organ grown into my palm, amplifying the aura flowing through my body.
An incredible feeling... It didn't compare to cultivating alone. I didn't imagine, of course, that I could forge an Aura Heart in a single day. Remember this sensation. Still, if I grew used to it—to the feeling of banking heat in the heart—I could awaken an Aura Heart before long.
Fire seemed ready to spill from my mouth. I exhaled that scorching breath and was carefully releasing the method when something clunked.
?!
All at once my heart cinched tight. The Black Dragon Yeouiju stuck to my palm had been amplifying my aura—then, as if something had snagged, it forcibly bound the flow headed for my heart.
A... side effect? This had never happened. No—there had been nothing like this when an Aura Heart was formed through the Dragon Scale Heart Sutra.
Did I have it backward? If you aren't of the Cheonryong blood, does the thing give you nothing even when you use it?
However much the protagonist was scorned as a bastard son, he was still of the Cheonryong Sword Family's blood. I had no blood tie to them at all, and in trying to poach their Yeouiju on the sly I had walked straight into this. It felt as if someone had cinched an invisible cord around my heart and jammed it there. My mind went distant.
Was it Cheon Gyu-seong who had it wrong...?
He had been the heir from the moment he was born, so he must have assumed anyone could use the Black Dragon Yeouiju without trouble. What if that was false? What if this was a heaven-sent fortune only the Cheonryong Sword Family could touch, and he had left it there without knowing a thing?
"Ghk—!"
I pounded my chest, trying to force the heart to beat, but striking it from the outside was never going to fix this. It felt so choked, as if it had stopped entirely, that urgency and shock stole even my breath.
"Hhk... hhhk..."
My mind began to slip. The heart had not truly stopped, but the force was squeezing it shut and driving it toward a halt, and consciousness was going with it. What was keeping me alive was the breathing I had done on instinct all this time—the Seo Hoon-style aura cultivation method.
This is... bad...
I tried to search the Daily Quests I had hoarded unclaimed, looking for one that restored the body or made me healthy, but my vision was already blurring. I couldn't claim a reward properly. I couldn't even move a finger to sign. Finding the right quest would have changed nothing. I was just as helpless either way.
This was not like before, when failing to breathe properly was still something the body could endure. The more I ran the cultivation method, the harder the pressure on my heart became.
"Huuup..."
Even as I lost consciousness, my body breathed the breath it remembered. I gathered the method once more to push back against the force cinching my heart—and a searing sensation flared, as if the cord itself had caught fire.
This is it...!
I drew the breath in slowly, drinking mana from the air until my throat went cold, and turned it to aura in my heart. In that process I understood: the pressure was bearing down in a precise ring. I answered it by forcing heat into my heart.
How long did I breathe? Only when my heart burned as if it had caught fully ablaze did the pain in my chest stop, and my body ease. At the same time, fierce heat ran the length of me, the same heat I felt when the cultivation method was running in the moment—hot enough that I half believed any blood I drew would come out on fire.
"Puhah—!!"
The heat did not ride out on my breath the way it had before. No matter how hard I gasped, the heat that had clumped together refused to burst free. It only sat gathered near my heart. In its place, that heat became a faint warmth—aura—and stirred back to life the body that had been dying of suffocation a moment ago.
A realm where aura flowed from the body on its own, without forcing the cultivation method every time I needed to draw it out. An Aura Heart had taken form.
Incredible.
Aura generated and poured out of me as naturally as if a thermal plant were burning inside my body. Before an Aura Heart, I had to steady my breath and run the method with every swing of the sword just to scrape together enough aura to use. Once the Heart was formed, you entered a realm where aura accumulated even while you stood still. From that realm onward an insurmountable wall rose between a person and ordinary civilians, and with it came a faint regeneration of mind and body.
When the whole process ended, the Black Dragon Yeouiju stopped clinging to my palm and squeezing my heart. It dropped free and rolled across the bed.
"Huuuuk...!"
Now I understood. When a cultivation method stopped, the aura gathered in the heart would scatter. The Black Dragon Yeouiju forcibly held that aura in place. That was why it kept aura from dispersing while an Aura Heart formed—and why, in exchange, it compressed the heart with aura until the pain felt like dying.
"So unless you have a special method like the Dragon Scale Heart Sutra, the one that protects Cheon So-hyeong's heart, you could actually die?"
Absurd. It had helped all the same. I had an Aura Heart because of it.
And a soaring feeling, as if I could do anything...
I was banking heat, learning the feel of the Aura Heart, when a strange noise reached me from outside.
"I told you there was a weird presence in there!"
"It's the Young Master's order. I'm not going in."
"You frustrating auntie! What if something happens to Young Master!"
Similar voices, and unmistakably not the same—Duna's, bright with agitation, and Hana's, cold as stone—rang through from beyond the door.
Wondering what the fuss was about, I turned toward the window. I had shut myself in at the start of yesterday evening to form an Aura Heart. Now the sun was up, and then some. For nearly ten hours I had been making an Aura Heart in a trance. Worry on one side, my order on the other. Of course a commotion had broken out.
I should tell them it's over.
Cloth rustled.
"Uh."
The moment I pushed myself up, my clothes crumbled off me like burnt paper. The heat I had poured out while forming the Aura Heart must have burned everything I was wearing to ash.
While I hunted for something to cover myself, Sena—trying to stop the uproar outside—cracked the door and started to call me, and saw.
"Um... Young Master... the sisters are fighting, so... eek!"
"Young Master! Just now, the aura in here—!"
"I told you not to come in!"
Hana snapped and seized Duna and Sena by the hair, and for one brief moment all three sisters were inside my room. They took in the state of my clothes, clamped their mouths shut, and dropped their eyes.
"I saw nothing."
"I didn't look above the thighs!"
"I'm sorry..."
So Sena saw, then.