Online Lectures Come Standard with the Manual
"A scar on the back is a swordsman’s shame.
A student left behind is a teacher’s shame."
Gong Ryun and Un-rang rode the elevator upstairs. Floors two through seven were nothing but reading rooms. The building’s footprint was generous enough that the combined space of those six floors felt immense, and on weekends the place was often packed solid. Nearly everyone from the city’s southern districts made their way here.
The reading rooms came in three varieties: study halls, training chambers, and hologram rooms.
For now, the two of them headed for a study hall.
Study halls were where you read the contents of a secret manual—spaces for theory. A manual was, at its core, still a book, so reading was required. Even the burliest, most rough-hewn martial artists had to sit quietly and start with the text. That was simply how martial arts worked.
The layout was almost identical to an ordinary library’s reading room—the kind where you borrowed actual books, not manuals—except that a computer sat on every desk. With a manual card, you could open the corresponding text right there.
Gong Ryun registered a seat at the kiosk by the entrance and sat down. Un-rang took the place beside him.
“Heh heh heh. Shall we sample this piping-hot manual, then?”
Un-rang rubbed his hands together, brimming with anticipation, and drew out his card. Gong Ryun produced his own and powered on the computer.
The machine on the desk was an all-in-one unit, monitor and body fused into a single piece. The screen itself was thinner than a finger and transparent as glass. The moment it woke, a holographic display rose and hovered above it. The monitor, it seemed, was little more than a projector for the hologram. They could have made even that slim panel far smaller, but durability had to account for a martial artist’s strength, so the size stayed deliberately robust.
Gong Ryun casually leaned his face away from the screen. As the distance grew, anti-peeping tech blurred the hologram into an unreadable haze. No one else would be stealing a look.
It was a perfectly ordinary computer by Galaxy Era standards—public issue, with extra toughness built in. He was used to them now, but the first time Gong Ryun had seen one he had been stunned. Back when he was a slave there had been no computer in the house. Slaves rarely laid eyes on one in an entire lifetime. They had kept a scrap-metal television hidden in the basement at risk of their lives, but it had none of this high-end holographic function. That set had been thick, ran hot, and used an LED screen. No cable either—just dramas played off a black-market USB. The memory rose unbidden.
These days, though, Gong Ryun was an urban man who handled cutting-edge tech without a second thought. A quiet pride settled over him as he touched the manual cards to the scan sensor at the base of the computer.
Beep.
> Authentication complete. Haenam Sect — Parangjang — Intermediate Form
Beep.
> Authentication complete. Haenam Sect — Parangjang — Advanced Form
Once the security check finished, the holographic window filled with the files for the Haenam Sect’s Parangjang.
The computer was linked to the planetary central mainframe and downloaded the manual data on demand. Card authentication prompted the desk unit to request the relevant files; the central computer then pulled the contents from its database and sent them over. In other words, the machine on the desk held no manuals of its own—it was a blank slate. Steal the whole thing home and you still could not browse every secret art in existence. Unorthodox types had actually tried. That was why the point was worth making.
The planetary central computer, for its part, ran security of the highest order. Even the infamous open-net hackers could not crack it.
“Let’s start with the theory section.”
Gong Ryun clicked into the theoretical portion of the manual. It resembled the primer he had studied when learning the basic form, only deeper.
In brief: Parangjang was a palm art that projected shockwaves.
The Haenam Sect that created it sat on an island south of the Central Plains. Born and raised by the sea, forever roaming in boats, they had lived close to the ocean. The art distilled the principle of waves, an insight drawn from watching the water’s motion.
Far out at sea a wave was only a gentle swell—
—something like that. Closer to shore, as the water grew shallow, it began to rear up—
人人人人人人人人人人人人人人人人人
—growing fiercer, until near the beach it became the towering, surfable crest everyone recognized, slamming into the coast with real force. Impact.
The principle of the art, then, was the transformation of a gentle swell into a violent breaker. Internal energy radiated from the palm in the shape of a ripple; at a chosen instant that ripple became a crashing wave and delivered a crushing shock. Timing was everything. A ripple alone was only a weak current.
That was the short version of Parangjang—the background needed to form the mental image. What followed was a meticulous account of how the internal energy had to flow: import Hunyuan Gong, implement the third form of the Eighteen Dragon Subduing Palms, inheritance, and so on…
And somehow physics and mathematics had been packed in as well. Wavelength and amplitude… sine… cosine functions… a = H/2, k = 2π/λ, ω = 2π/T… Ah—his head…
Gong Ryun gently closed the theory window of text and formulas.
He was simply not built for learning from pure writing. The skill of “interpreting” such material was something regular schooling drilled into children from the earliest years, and Gong Ryun had never received that schooling. In those hours he had been driving a tractor.
Fortunately a second path existed: media that was not text.
He slipped in a pair of earbuds and clicked one of the video files inside the manual package.
A video lecture—an online class. Having lecture videos bundled as a free appendix to a secret manual was simply common sense.
Galaxy Era educational technology was nothing to scoff at. Millennia of hard-earned expertise backed it, and a matching pride. These people refused to accept a student’s failure to learn.
What? Still don’t get it? Heh. You dull creature. For the sake of a dullard like you we’ve rolled out an entirely new method! Let’s see if you still can’t understand.
That was the stubborn streak at work. A lagging student was the teacher’s shame—not the student’s. The shortfall lay in educational technique. That was how they thought.
The video laid out the martial forms in exacting detail and used 3D modeling to show the flow of internal energy inside the body with microscopic precision: basic stances, every derived technique, the way body and energy shifted according to circumstance—all of it rendered clear. Even the math and science he had skated past earlier became graspable once animated in three dimensions.
The scientific and mathematical material was there in the first place to help form the mental image. Grasping the scientific principle made it far easier to picture the art’s inner logic. Memorizing and solving the formulas mattered, but the main work was still understanding the principle inside one’s own head. In short, you did not have to recite the equations by heart—which, for Gong Ryun, was a profound mercy.
He kept watching, absorbing the material.
Even so, after a stretch of time the method hit its ceiling. No matter how clearly the 3D models showed the energy’s path, watching it only inside a video left certain points of feel incomplete. Learning stalled.
Galaxy Era educational technology, however, would not tolerate that. A lagging student was a teacher’s shame.
Still don’t understand? Even after all this? Heh. Stubborn one. For the likes of you, we prepared something extra.
One last trump card of technique remained.
“Un-rang. I’m going to step over to the hologram room for a bit.”
“Ah. By all means. See you later.”
The hologram room—the absolute top-tier evolution of the online lecture.
Gong Ryun took the elevator to another floor and entered the space labeled Hologram Room. Private booths lined the corridor like coin karaoke rooms. He registered a unit at the kiosk and stepped inside.
The hologram chamber measured roughly three meters by three—just barely large enough to run through martial forms in person. Of course you were not supposed to wrap yourself in heavy internal energy; you could punch a hole through the wall. Soft and careful was the proper manners.
The moment Gong Ryun entered, the room’s sensors registered a human presence and floated a holographic prompt into the air.
He touched the manual card to the sensor set into one wall.
At once, wave-shaped holograms flooded the chamber until it felt as though he had stepped beneath the sea itself.