Academy Number One
When the door opened, I found myself looking straight into the face of a girl with a creamy, curving body that looked almost carved from milk.
She stared up at me with the features of a cat.
“……”
“……”
She looked good.
“Ah—”
I’d never imagined I’d walk in on someone training naked.
“Kyaaaaaaaaaaa!!”
As if she were the one caught off guard, the black-haired girl let out a shrill scream.
And yet she was the one who’d been inside. Why was she the one screaming?
I said nothing, only looking at her in silence as I calmly thought it over.
“……”
“T-Turn around!”
Her pale fingers pointed at me, and her face flushed red like the evening sky.
I couldn’t bring myself to look away.
To say I had no interest in taking in the sight in front of me would be a lie.
But that wasn’t all.
Something was wrong.
Something was strange.
My first thought was a question.
A faint, almost tangible sense of unease prickled at my senses.
“You shameless devil… I can’t believe this…!!”
She shouted, hurriedly trying to hide her large chest and narrow waist behind long black hair that fell all the way to her hips.
“……”
Her bright, vivid eyes stood out all the more against her milky skin, stealing my attention.
I rested my chin on my hand and watched her quietly.
Super Peak? No… at this level, she’s at the threshold of Transcendent.
She was hiding her internal energy as best she could while steadying her breathing, but the black-haired girl’s level was far beyond what I could believe belonged to a student.
And yet—
What bothered me wasn’t surprise, but a faint sense of wrongness.
“Can you not hear me?”
When I still didn’t react, she seemed to lose the last shred of embarrassment and placed both hands on her hips, looking up at me with half-lidded eyes.
Almost as if she were trying to draw my attention.
“……”
I realized the source of that strange unease.
The faint residual trace of internal energy wasn’t coming from the black-haired girl standing in front of me, but from the empty space several steps behind her.
Was this a formation? She doesn’t seem to have any killing intent toward me, so why bother doing this?
It was such a cunning illusion that if I hadn’t opened my middle dantian, or if I hadn’t reached the Ten Blossoms, I might not have noticed it.
“Are you mute? Say something, at least.”
I clenched my fist, and the meridians inside my body stirred as Sun and Moon qi gathered instantly into my hand.
Before I knew it, a faint smile tugged at my lips.
If this were a real fight, distinguishing the false from the real might have been difficult.
I drew the Sun and Moon qi up near my Baihui point and slowly set it circulating.
“……”
“Are you laughing right now?”
Unlike the countless ordinary first-rate or expert fighters scattered all over the world, Transcendent was not a realm one could easily encounter.
It was the kind of realm that even a gifted martial artist might spend a lifetime pursuing and still never reach.
A black-haired girl, was it?
Who on earth is she? She’s stronger than most masters I know.
If she possessed this level of skill, she should have made a name for herself at least once, so my curiosity stirred a little.
Otherwise… was she the supervising master of the second hall? Or the representative student?
Various possibilities flashed through my mind, but none of them were certain.
“……”
Guess I’d find out soon enough.
As the Sun and Moon qi circulated through my blood vessels and spread through my entire body—
“Do you really think I’ll just let this slide? I’ll report you to the Martial Alliance at once—”
Swish—
The chatterbox naked girl dissolved like mist, and some ten paces behind me, she slowly began to reappear as though a moonflower were blooming in the dark.
Whether she realized what was happening or not, she wore a playful expression, covering her mouth with one hand as she giggled while looking at me.
“……”
This is a Transcendent master?
To have reached the early Transcendent realm at such a young age meant she was one of the most exceptional prodigies in the entire Central Plains.
And she must have been blessed by heaven as well.
After all, even the famed geniuses Wei Shiyun and Ju Yeonhwa were only at the late Super Peak realm.
That was how much Transcendent differed in meaning.
The first threshold on the road to becoming a true absolute master.
It was a realm only someone at the level of a sect leader could hope to reach…
“You startled me by barging in so rudely. Now then… hmm. Yes. You’ll have to stay like that for about three days.”
The illusion had long since broken, but apparently she still hadn’t realized it, because the black-haired girl took a sip of tea and murmured with a satisfied smile.
No matter how you looked at it, this was practically a preemptive strike.
Judging from her behavior, she definitely wasn’t some geriatrically rejuvenated old monster.
At this point, it’d be weird if I didn’t know who she was.
No matter how many times I thought about it, I couldn’t place her.
What was I supposed to do with this girl?
According to Master, I was the only one in the outer quarters… so her presence was suspicious, but still.
I still had to spend the next thirty days and nights in this Jade Hall. If I wasted time bickering, it would be my loss and mine alone.
In a place where every minute and second mattered, I couldn’t afford to do this.
There were plenty of rooms anyway. I’d apologize properly and leave.
“Are you perhaps having a pleasant dream? Since you barged in without permission, I suppose it’s time I showed you a nightmare.”
With a sharp clink, she set down her teacup and shook her delicate hair before walking slowly toward me.
This was going to be discovered.
The moment those slender jade-like fingers were about to touch me—
“I was going to make it as terrifying an illusion as possible… huh?”
The black-haired girl gasped, her eyes flying wide open in shock.
Because I had seized her right wrist.
“Young lady, you’ve gone a bit too far with the joke.”
“That’s impossible… How can you be doing this at nothing more than first-rate level?”
That was because I had tuned my qi to look like first-rate.
As long as the gap in strength wasn’t overwhelming, it would be hard to notice.
“Young lady, unintentionally—”
“Let go! Right now! Let go!”
“You burst into my room without permission…”
“No. I don’t want to hear it! If you have no intention of letting go… then I won’t be responsible if you get hurt, all right?”
“……”
Wooong—
Internal energy began to gather in her right hand.
So she had no intention of accepting an apology.
Given that she was even going this far, she wasn’t the type to understand reason through words.
“This should be enough, right?”
She looked straight at me and smiled like a little devil, her tone smug.
Indeed, with this much internal energy, most martial artists would have gone down already.
I had no intention whatsoever of getting into a contest of inner strength with her.
I’d purified my qi so much that I didn’t have much internal energy to spare anyway, and her realm was higher than mine.
If this were an ordinary martial artist, they’d probably call it foolish to resist her at all.
Unfortunately for her—
She had picked the wrong opponent.
I can do this at least three more times.
I used the Ilwol Eumyang Singong to scatter her internal energy in an instant, then smiled back at her with open contempt.
It was a kind of trick.
“Are you done?”
“Huh?! Th-that’s impossible, why…?”
She looked thoroughly flustered and tried once more to draw up her power, but—
“Is that all?”
“……”
The result was exactly the same.
The smug expression from a moment ago was gone without a trace, and she had shrunk in on herself like a frightened animal.
She was already shorter than me by nearly a whole head, and now she looked even smaller.
The black-haired girl grabbed my arm with her other hand and strained to pry it off.
“Let’s stop here.”
Right when it looked like she was about to lose the clash of internal force, I shoved her back and shook out my hand.
“Eek!”
Angry at being driven back, she rubbed her wrist and stared at me with guarded eyes full of suspicion.
Still, she was at least ready to talk now.
“My name is Cheon Sojin. Young lady, I apologize for interrupting your rest without meaning to.”
Such a perfectly orthodox fist salute—
“I know…! Ah! No, I mean, that’s… you can’t help it. I think I may have gone a little too far too.”
The black-haired girl, who had been all bristling like a hungry cat, finally relaxed her expression and nodded.
She knew?
Did that mean she knew me?
At any rate, we should probably end this here. I still had plenty of techniques and secret arts to practice.
I had more than a few things to do in the days ahead—training, Master Raeji’s tasks, the Hall Lord’s orders, recovering the Heavenly Sword—and the thing I needed most right now was my own strength.
“I’ll use another room, so don’t worry about it, young lady. Excuse me.”
“W-wait! Young Master Cheon!”
Did she still have something to say?
I didn’t want to linger any longer, but I also didn’t want to cause unnecessary trouble.
“What is it?”
“My name is Baek Hwa-ryeon. At the very least, I wanted to tell you my name…”
The girl who introduced herself as Hwa-ryeon lowered her head, her pale cheeks turning red like the sunset in embarrassment.
“……”
This girl is the Sword Blossom?
The only martial artist officially ranked above Wei Shiyun. The one who enjoyed overwhelming popularity as the academy’s number one.
Beautiful, absurdly skilled, and born to a family comparable to the Eight Great Clans.
Baek Hwa-ryeon.
And that wasn’t all.
After making her debut in the martial world, she rose to fame as the Crimson Scale Flower Sword and survived all the way to the end of the great war with her elegant swordsmanship and a strange, distinctive shifting-step technique.
I had wondered what that peculiar shifting step was supposed to look like, and now I finally knew.
So she was using illusion and movement arts together.
Combining illusion into footwork wasn’t all that unusual, but the fact that she had momentarily deceived even me was enough to make me marvel at the technique’s power.
Other than the fact that she wasn’t a blazing red-haired extrovert or a cold, icy personality, she was exactly the same as the Hwa-ryeon I knew.
“So you’re Baek Hwa-ryeon, then. Thank you for telling me. I’ll be going now.”
I had been curious about a few things, but so what?
I turned on my heel without hesitation.
If the chance came up, I’d learn more then. I had no desire to get tangled with her any further…
Thud—
Just as I was about to open the door and leave, Baek Hwa-ryeon spread her arms and blocked the way.
This was starting to feel like a nuisance.
“Um… Young Master Cheon?”
Baek Hwa-ryeon looked up at me with the pitiful expression of a fledgling caught in the rain.
“Young lady, I’m sorry, but I’m busy, so I should go. Let’s talk next time.”
I hopped over her and sprinted toward the west gate without even looking back.
“Huh? But please, at least listen to me! Wait!”
Her voice gradually faded behind me.
There was no way she could catch Wind God Step.
She was tugging at her thighs and staring after me with damp eyes?
That was a hundred percent the look of someone about to make a troublesome request.
I’d done enough to make the point by now.
From here on out, it was all about training the techniques for real.
*
*
*
By the time I realized it, twenty days had already passed since I entered the Jade Hall.
“Hah!!”
The energies of yin and yang shifted from moment to moment, surging violently as if they meant to swallow everything around me whole.
This isn’t going as smoothly as I hoped. Should I have formed a Small Taiji first?
Learning the Ilwol Jang within three days was a good thing, but my control over the Ilwol Gwangryongin still left much to be desired.
Of course, it was usable in actual combat, but I still couldn’t wield it with the delicacy I wanted, and that bothered me.
Was it because I lacked focus?
Or was it because…
“Cheer up, cheer up! Cheer up, cheer up! Dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum.”
The black-haired girl circled around me in a loop, humming to herself.
She wasn’t mocking me. She was genuinely doing it.
Thanks to her help, I could use the technique without expending internal energy, which was a good thing, but…
“……”
“Brother Cheon, I’m here for you!”
Baek Hwa-ryeon was waving both fists up and down to cheer me on.