Against the Flow of Time
A blade of killing intent cut through the courtyard. Even the lone twisted tree left standing in the small yard shuddered at it, and two of its remaining leaves drifted to the ground.
That damn dog. Its killing intent is no joke.
Yeop Pung felt it in his bones. For now, it would be wiser not to set foot in that courtyard at all.
He would have no shortage of time on Nagun Peak anyway. The fellow in the inner room seemed a few screws short as well. Through the long confinement ahead, Yeop Pung doubted the man would bind him with any real restrictions. So long as he did not stray from Nagun Peak's territory to wander the other summits, the man and the dog inside would simply stop paying him any mind.
Then I might as well look around.
He started by taking a rough measure of the terrain. As he had expected, the summit of Nagun Peak was not particularly large. A full circuit of it took less than an hour.
He examined the narrow path that wound down the mountain first. At his present strength, reaching the foothills would take about two hours. From there he could follow the valley trails toward the other peaks of Mount Tianyun, or push deeper into the vast Cheonun Mountain Range. The place where he had last, so "miraculously," found Spirit Cloud Herbs and those trees would take another four to six hours beyond that.
He came back up, passed the buildings, and made for the broad cliff at the far edge of the summit.
From a distance he had not grasped its true scale. Up close, the cliff was far larger than he had imagined — a good ten meters high at the least, stretching in a long arc that wrapped around half of Nagun Peak's crown.
The blue-gray face was scored with a thousand years of weather. Pits large and small pocked the stone in every direction, forming a strange pattern, as if scattered raindrops had struck a still sheet of water. Stranger still, the upper edge looked as though someone had sliced it clean with a blade, unnaturally smooth. Beyond that, nothing else stood out.
Yeop Pung paced before the cliff for a long while, studying it with care. He came away with nothing and shook his head, then folded his legs and sat upon a bluestone nearby.
"All right. Time to properly study the complete Thunder Roaring Palm."
He had finally decided to accept Han Un's goodwill.
Thunder Roaring Palm was a lower-grade art even among Profound Arts — the most basic martial transmission Cheonun Sect possessed. To Yeop Pung, even that foundation was a gift beyond price.
Once a martial artist stepped onto the Profound Path, he drew Profound Qi to open his Profound Meridians, driving himself toward the realm of Six Meridians Unblocked as swiftly as he could. The work itself fell into three parts. First, guide qi into the dantian and open the meridians. Second, temper the body with that qi and harden the flesh. Last, train in techniques and learn to wield Profound Arts.
Of the three, guiding qi was the root. Only by mastering an efficient Qi Guiding Chant could a man absorb Profound Qi faster and lay the groundwork for everything else. Once that qi gathered in the dantian, a portion of it went to strengthening the body, pushing physical power toward its limit; the rest was spent opening meridians. Each new Profound Meridian that opened multiplied the body's limits several times over. In the end a man pierced all six, opened the Spirit Sea, and stepped into higher realms.
Techniques were the methods by which Profound Qi was moved. Some of them even contained body arts meant to aid their execution. To reach the peak of the martial path, then, all three pillars were indispensable — the Qi Guiding Chant, Body Refining, and Martial Techniques. Neglect any one of them, and the rest would fail.
The Thunder Roaring Palm Yeop Pung meant to train now was a comprehensive Profound Art, Body Refining and Martial Technique bound together. In the little time he had been given before, he had only managed to grasp the most basic methods of circulating Profound Qi among the twelve forms — enough to generate thunder-light, sharpen his speed, and thicken his palm force. Only after he had gone through the complete art with care did the truth of it settle in.
"To bring out the full power of Thunder Roaring Palm, you need a Profound Path realm behind it. Only after opening the second meridian can you, with a strengthened body and enough Profound Qi, execute the movement art hidden inside it — Thunder Shadow Steps. And the strongest form of all, Thunder Roaring Sweep of Heaven, demands at least the Third Meridian realm. Everything, in the end, comes down to vast amounts of Profound Qi."
He looked inward at the golden Profound Qi in his body. It was the wellspring of a fate he both cherished and despised. Because of it, he could wield a combat power that crushed others of the same realm. Because of it, he had also been exiled to this deserted Nagun Peak.
He remembered the killing-soaked sensation that had seized him in the final instant at the sparring grounds that day, and a chill ran down his spine. In that moment it had been as if reason had been stripped from him, his whole body flooded with nothing but an arrogant, world-looking-down hegemony — the madness of a single thought: I am invincible, and anyone who stands in my way will die.
What had that been? Where had the golden Profound Qi come from? Why did it wake a nature so terrible, so overbearing? And that strange dream he had had before — what was it? What thread bound all of this together behind the veil?
He still had not a single clue. He turned the questions over from every angle and found no answer. In the end he set the mystery aside for now and began to train the way he had in the Outer Sect — with the most ordinary method of guiding qi.
That most basic Outer Sect art of Cheonun Sect was painfully inefficient. If it had not been, he would never have gone hunting Spirit Cloud Herbs with such desperate hunger, trying to pile up Profound Qi as fast as he could.
He trained like that for nearly half a day. Night came. The moon rose. The Profound Qi in his dantian had barely grown at all. Opening a second meridian felt like a dream — distant, shapeless, and far away.
At this rate, even a year from now I won't reach the Second Meridian...
Yeop Pung opened his eyes slowly, his face dark.
Without a Profound-grade Qi Guiding Chant, I'll truly waste a whole year. But where am I supposed to find a proper qi-guiding method now?
Cold moonlight lay along the lonely line of his back. His mind held nothing but the thought of a Qi Guiding Chant. He never noticed that a golden disc was rising in silence inside his dantian.
The faintly outlined disc seemed as though it had always been a part of him. Outside a central circular ring, eight more rings spread at even intervals. The second ring — the innermost of those eight — was trisected by three markings into equal parts. One of those sections was already filled with gold light that had flowed out from the inner ring. The remaining two sections, and the rest of the disc besides, held only a faint golden glow; no light was actually flowing from them.
He turned his gaze and glanced at the outer rings. More markings were carved there. Each ring was cut into a greater number of sections — the second into three, the third into six, the fourth into nine — the divisions multiplying as the rings went out.
Then, all at once, Yeop Pung was hurtling through somewhere at a speed beyond comprehension. He had time only to grasp the golden disc's rough structure before he was swallowed whole, pulled into the endless, star-strewn heaven that lay behind the central ring.
"Aaaagh!"
He could not help the scream. What had just happened was so bizarre that anyone would have cried out. Flailing both arms on instinct, he tried to guess what enormous change he was about to undergo.
His vision went dark for an instant, then brightened, and before he knew it he found himself in another world. His feet were on the ground again.
Yeop Pung stared around him, eyes wide and dazed. In that brief span, far too much information had poured into his mind. He had not even had a moment to sort his thoughts.
He managed, barely, to turn his stiffened neck left and then right, taking in the scene. A pitch-black night sky. Familiar mountain peaks. Luminous moonlight. Amazingly, he was still on the summit of Nagun Peak. Even the spot where he stood had not changed. But everything else...
Everything else had been utterly transformed.
