Chapter 33: Defeating the Assassin (3)
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 33: Defeating the Assassin (3)
Having finally developed a taste for lightness skills, my body was itching so much I couldn't sit still.
Once my heart, which had been racing from the assassin’s ambush, calmed down to some extent, the desire to practice my movement arts flared up again. It was a craving even stronger than the lust I felt when fooling around with Chun Mi or Wol Hwa.
I recalled a bit of wisdom I’d heard from the Failed Scholar. He said it came from the Yongya chapter of Confucius's Analects.
“He who knows it is not as good as he who likes it, and he who likes it is not as good as he who enjoys it.”
It means that knowing something isn't as good as liking it, and liking it isn't as good as truly enjoying it. Since I didn't even like swordplay and only struggled to "know" it, there was no way I could have achieved anything.
But lightness skills were fun. Since I liked and enjoyed them this much, how could my skills not improve? I realized the words of the ancient sages were absolutely right.
As darkness fell, I left my guest room and headed to the backyard.
The place I had moved to after the assassination attempt was quite secluded, with only two pavilions standing there. The pavilion across from mine was larger than the one I was staying in. More importantly, there was very little foot traffic, making it the perfect spot to practice my lightness skills.
Chik, chik, chik!
I scraped the ground with my right foot. It was a habit I’d formed before unfolding a lightness skill; when I gathered internal energy into the Yongcheon acupoint of my right foot, the sole would get itchy. Rubbing it against the ground felt refreshing.
At a glance, it looked a bit like an ox rubbing its hoof against the dirt, so I took the liberty of naming it the "Ox Step Flight."
Don't blame me for the tacky name. I had to name it using the few characters I actually knew. It might be unrefined, but it certainly didn't sound like the technique of a mere amateur. After all, who else would dare name their movement art after an ox's gait? Only someone who had reached the pinnacle of the Dao would be so bold, right?
"Hup!"
I gave a short shout and channeled internal energy into my right foot.
Whoosh!
My body shot forward. I had already laid out ten large stones in front of me. The goal was to master my sense of balance by stepping accurately on each stone while moving at high speeds.
The idea that one can suddenly master lightness skills in an instant is a total lie. Unless a martial art is thoroughly ingrained in your body, the movements won't come out just by thinking about them. How much training is required to make a movement happen before you even think? It’s not something that happens in a year or two; because your life depends on it, you train for decades.
Still, lightness skills are largely dependent on having a good sense of feel, so my efforts over the past few days seemed to be paying off. I was becoming quite accustomed to the speed, and my sense of balance was settling into my body.
If this had been any other martial art, I would have quit long ago out of sheer exhaustion. But since mastering lightness skills significantly increased my chances of surviving a fight, I was giving it my all. Plus, the fact that it was actually fun was the icing on the cake.
The stones were spaced about one jang apart. I had placed them irregularly; at first, I had practiced with them in a straight line. Everything else was fine, but a side effect of the technique was that almost all the internal energy was blasted through the Yongcheon point of my right foot, while only a tiny trickle reached the left. This left my left foot feeling stiff and awkward.
Despite the inconvenience of having to rely so heavily on my right foot, the considerable time I spent training allowed me to adjust to the imbalance. I had made enough progress to maintain my equilibrium quite well.
If I had trained my Ten Severing Soul Sword with this much dedication, things might be different now. However, the difference between the joy of learning lightness skills and the "joy" of learning swordplay was like the difference between working in a field and gambling.
Furthermore, since I had to study the Ten Severing Soul Sword from a book, I couldn't feel any sense of improvement. Lightness skills, on the other hand, provided immediate visual feedback, making it easy to stay immersed.
Living in this world, I’ve realized that only two types of people can master martial arts just by looking at a manual. The first is a martial genius that appears once in a hundred thousand years, and the second is the protagonist of a martial arts novel.
Naturally, I am neither a once-in-a-century genius nor a novel's protagonist, so mastering martial arts from a book was an impossible task. Even now, I look back at the three months I spent in the mountains, crazily practicing that Nine-Section Soul-Severing Sword, and judge my own perseverance to be far beyond that of an ordinary human.
I became so absorbed in my practice that I lost track of time. Once I mastered the sense of balance, I could step accurately on the stones no matter how randomly they were arranged.
I leaped off an irregularly placed stone and soared. As I reached a height of nearly two jang, I felt as if I had become a bird.
"Kaaa! This is why people do lightness skills."
After landing on the ground, I was bathed in a sense of ecstasy.
"I'm still lacking, but let's try using the surrounding terrain."
Don't you see it in martial arts novels all the time? The protagonist kicks off a stone wall to reach a roof, flies from rooftop to rooftop, or runs along a wall as if standing upright. I’d heard that true masters actually move like that, and I desperately wanted to try it.
Riding this momentum, I decided to try climbing and descending the nearby trees, walls, and roofs. It was my first time, but since I’d gotten the hang of the balance, I figured it was worth a shot.
The scenery blurred past me. I kicked off a stone wall and landed on the edge of a eave.
"Oh! This is great! This is it! Why should I envy the protagonist of Legend of the Master?"
Legend of the Master was one of the most popular martial arts novels at the moment. The fact that even Mok Seon-hwa read it told you everything you needed to know. I was genuinely impressed by my own skill.
Then, looking down from the height, a sudden urge struck me. I wondered what it would be like to take a piss from up here.
How magnificent would that be!
Honestly, I bet even the great masters have gone up to high places using their lightness skills and taken a leak at least once. You might think it's crude, but most people, upon reaching a high vantage point, probably feel an instinctive urge to mark their territory.
I looked around, and seeing no one, I aimed toward a dark corner and let loose a stream. Ah, the taste of pissing from a rooftop eave.
"Huh? Is it going to rain? But why is the rain so hot?"
At the sound of a maid's voice from below the roof, I cut the stream off instantly.
"Yikes! Time to go!"
I quickly fled the spot and took to the air. I traversed the roofs and stone walls again, wandering around the garden.
Whoosh!
My body used a tree branch as a springboard and soared into the sky. It's actually working!
Just as my body reached nearly five jang into the air, the True Qi in my body suddenly cut out. I could clearly feel a heavy mass of internal energy gathered near the Yongcheon point of my left foot, but when the flow snapped, I screamed internally.
In my desperation, I scrambled to pull the energy gathered in my left foot. Normally, the fastest way would be to send the energy from the left Yongcheon point through the Lower Dantian to the right Yongcheon point. However, my Lower Dantian was as pathetic as a scorched field, so the energy bypassed it entirely, flowed up to my Baekhui acupoint, and then surged down to the right Yongcheon point.
As the energy flowed from the Baekhui to the Yongcheon, I felt my body become light again. Suddenly, an idea struck me, and I put it into action.
Whirl!
I performed a mid-air somersault.
Thud!
I landed lightly on the ground.
"Phew!"
Having escaped danger while successfully executing a cool move, a wave of joy washed over my entire body. In that moment, I even felt a sense of affection for my enemy Mok Seon-hwa, as well as Mok Yi-gun, Mok Gal-jin, and even the faceless assassin who had ambushed me in the meditation room.
Then, it occurred to me that combining lightness skills with a drawing sword technique would look quite impressive. To create a target, I went into my room, grabbed a wooden sword, and plucked a handful of stuffing from a cotton quilt.
I tied the cotton to a tree branch and practiced drawing and slashing with the wooden sword while using my lightness skills. It wasn't easy at first. The timing between my movement speed and the sword draw didn't match, so I kept missing the cotton ball. It was a flaw caused by my sword draw not being able to keep up with my movement.
However, after dozens of attempts, I gradually got used to it.
"At this rate, don't I actually have some decent martial talent?"
To a true genius, succeeding after only one or two tries would be the norm, so my boasting might seem ridiculous. But for a talentless hack like me—someone who struggled to follow even one form after swinging the Ten Severing Soul Sword hundreds of times—this level of progress was something to be moved to tears over.
Now that I was accustomed to the speed of my movement, I could match my drawing speed to it. It might look simple, but cutting a target while moving at high speeds is much harder than it seems. I noticed that doing both simultaneously drained my internal energy much faster than just using lightness skills.
The physical exhaustion was significant. I sat down for a moment to catch my breath and regulate my breathing, and my internal energy gathered again quickly.
At that moment, a secret regarding the Upper Dantian flashed through my mind like a bolt of lightning.
‘I finally understand what it means for the Upper Dantian to be a Circulating Dantian. It’s not just a Dantian where energy circulates; it means the energy itself circulates endlessly.’
But as my thoughts reached that point, I became confused again.
‘Then why does energy keep gathering even though so much True Qi is being blasted out through my Yongcheon points? The idea that natural energy from the surroundings gathers in my Baekhui point is just a lie from martial arts novels.’
Then, a hypothesis formed.
‘What if... just what if...’
I shook my head, thinking it was an impossible fantasy. To test it, I unfolded my lightness skill again and completely exhausted every drop of internal energy in my body through my Yongcheon points.
A moment later, when I operated the energy through my Upper Dantian, I felt True Qi beginning to flow through my body again, bit by bit. However, the amount of True Qi was only about the size of half a soybean in my Lower Dantian.
The important thing was the unbelievable fact that I could perform lightness skills with just that much energy.
‘Could I actually be a peerless genius like the protagonists in novels?’
My thoughts were so outrageous that I even entertained such an idea.
‘Strangely, my Lower and Middle Dantians are no different from any other acupoint. I thought I had no talent because my Dantian remained the size of a soybean despite long periods of cultivation, but then my Upper Dantian—which is only supposed to open after achieving sixty years of internal energy—is wide open. And if there’s no energy in the Lower or Middle Dantians, where is it coming from? I don't want to believe it, but it means I'm accumulating energy in hundreds of different acupoints throughout my body. Even if they don't store as much as the Lower or Middle Dantians, the energy gathered from hundreds of small points is not something to be ignored. If not, there’s no way to explain the energy currently in my body.’
With this thought, I took the manual given to me by the Phoenix King and spread it out under the torchlight. There was a passage I had skimmed over that seemed to hold the answer.
“To realize that the Upper Dantian is a Circulating Dantian, the Lower and Middle Dantians must be nearly closed. When the Lower and Middle Dantians are almost entirely lost, the Upper Dantian transforms into a Circulating Dantian and begins to accumulate internal energy bit by bit from other acupoints. Because these points do not expand like the Lower or Middle Dantians, they cannot store a vast amount of energy, but the energy gathered from hundreds of acupoints is not to be underestimated. This does not even need to be called a mental cultivation method. The body possesses a mysterious power; when the Lower and Middle Dantians are lost, the body naturally begins to accumulate small amounts of energy in other acupoints to compensate.”
After reading this section, I understood the true meaning of the Phoenix King's words. It was true that this manual would be useless to others, but for someone with a Dantian like mine, it was a peerless secret treasure.
The Phoenix King had also lost his Lower and Middle Dantians at one point, spending days in despair and being forgotten by the world. But one day, he suddenly reappeared as an even greater master, shocking the martial world. Furthermore, mastering this very mental cultivation method likely played a role in his youthful appearance, as if he had undergone a rebirth.
Crucially, I realized that the Upper Dantian could only be turned into a Circulating Dantian if the Lower and Middle Dantians were lost after all three Dantians had been opened.
But what martial artist would ever willingly close the Lower and Middle Dantians they had spent their entire life building? It was easier said than done.
"Am I... am I really going to have enough internal power to stop being a bottom-tier hack from now on?"
I muttered, feeling dazed. Even in the midst of this, another question popped up.
"But how did my Upper Dantian, which supposedly takes sixty years of energy to open, get opened without me even knowing? It's too weird. It's not like I'm some once-in-an-eternity genius. My Lower Dantian hasn't progressed past the size of a bean no matter how hard I try."
It was truly a mystery. However, I didn't have the mental energy to waste on things I couldn't understand. Right now, I was in a situation where I had to do my best with what I had. Since worrying wouldn't solve the mystery anyway, I just pushed it aside.
"Worrying about things I don't know won't solve anything. I'd rather spend that time practicing my lightness skills."
In hindsight, I really should have stopped my training there for the day. When you try to do things you don't normally do, accidents are bound to happen. Why is it that we only realize our foolishness—that excess is as bad as deficiency—after we've already suffered for it?