Kindred Awareness
In the murim, masters who reached a certain height of attainment left their insights behind as secret manuals for the world to find. They did so in the hope that disciples and descendants might follow their footprints and arrive at the same enlightenment.
But every person carries a different measure of comprehension, so even those who read the same manual walked away with wildly different results. And even if the mind understood the principle, without the martial talent to match, putting that truth into practice remained all but impossible.
The Peak Realm was the domain of those rare souls who possessed both that comprehension and that talent in a single body. Ordinary folk could sweat through a lifetime of training and still stop at First-class Realm, held back by the gifts they were born with—or the lack of them.
Whoosh—!
Yet the woman swinging the greatsaber before my eyes carried a presence that was anything but ordinary. A massive slab of iron came crashing down with force enough to split a mountain, the blade shredding the air and howling like a tiger’s roar. In a true clash of edges, lesser steel would have shattered on contact. Facing that much weight hurtling straight at your face would leave anyone’s mind blank for a beat, wondering how on earth to break it.
She knew it too. Most of her forms led with the broad face of the blade, sealing off the opponent’s vision as she pressed in. It was a clear display of her sharp comprehension.
And far from being crushed under the saber’s weight, Jo Harang used that very mass to make her movements sharper, more elastic, more alive.
Whoosh!
Every wasted motion had been cut away; the springy footwork and the monstrous strength that spun the heavy saber like a windmill spoke of no ordinary talent. On top of that, she poured her inner energy into the oversized blade with free, unhindered circulation of qi.
Watching all of it, one question rose unbidden.
With talent that full, why had she still failed to reach Peak Realm?
I studied her saber work carefully—and then I noticed something strange.
Why is there not a single scrap of killing intent in her blade work?
What is martial arts, really? People dress it up with talk of walking the Dao or reflecting on the self, but at its core it is a craft for cutting people down and ending lives. When you hold a real blade and picture an enemy, no matter how tightly you rein it in, a faint killing intent seeps through simply because you are human.
Yet in her overbearing, sky-rending saber forms, that killing intent had been bleached out completely—nothing of it remained.
No… looking closer, something is there.
A clotted, blood-red mass. It simply could not leave her body; it was trapped inside, as though she were compulsively sealing it away.
She had never hesitated to cut down the wicked. She seemed to believe, with complete sincerity, that doing so was righteous work, an accumulation of good karma. Or perhaps she refused, on some instinctive level, to acknowledge the simple human urge to hate and harm another person—one of the five desires and seven emotions every living soul carries.
Body and mind must stand upright if a person is to advance. When you deliberately blur something inside your own heart, how can you ever shatter your limits and awaken into Peak Realm?
If I just fix that one thing, it might all fall into place. Right, Killing Star?
Kill!
Seemed like agreement.
A little self-awareness ought to do the trick. I pushed my stiff body upright.
Whoosh!
She must have slipped into a trance; even though I walked up with clear footsteps, the greatsaber still skimmed past right in front of my nose. The fierce wind pressure turned my hair into the same wild mess I had worn as a beggar.
“Whoa—when did you get here? You scared me.”
“……I was just as startled as you.”
She had sworn to crush the Heavenly Killing Star and protect the world, yet here she was trying to finish the job ahead of schedule.
I pressed a hand over my startled heart and smoothed it down.
“So what’s the occasion?”
Under the round moon, Jo Harang wiped the sweat from her pale neck with a cloth and looked at me.
“Nothing big. You helped me out last time, remember? Figured I’d pay it back.”
She had declared that good people needed to be stronger than the wicked, and she had poured out every scrap of insight she possessed without holding back. I was the type who settled debts—if only for the sake of the good karma I planned to bank later.
“Come on, you don’t have to sweat the small stuff. We’re comrades. We look out for each other.”
She scratched her cheek, looking sheepish.
Since when had vagabonds been such a tight-knit band of brothers-in-arms? I had been playing the vagabond for a while now, and she was the first one I had ever met who actually carried a real sense of camaraderie.
“But Mujin, how exactly are you planning to pay me back?”
I rested the iron-shod staff—already humming with inner energy—across my shoulder.
“Let’s spar.”
Anger. Malice. The feelings a human being was born to carry. I had no idea why she kept stuffing them down, but as the Heavenly Killing Star I would clash staff against blade and drag them out into the open.
A little pressure and the dam would burst. Somehow I already knew, by instinct, exactly how to do it.
“Fine by me. I was getting bored training alone anyway.”
Jo Harang flashed a grin and spun toward me. The massive saber loomed between us.
Clang! Claaang!
Weapons met and sprang apart with ringing noise. Under the hazy moonlight two figures—a man and a woman—exchanged vicious forms, both breathing hard.
“Hey, Jo Harang. What is martial arts to you?”
After a long stretch of continuous exchanges, breath had climbed all the way to my throat. I swallowed the ragged air and asked.
“A tool for doing good.”
The answer shot out so fast it was clear she had been repeating it to herself like a mantra for years.
“How do you do that good, exactly?”
“By thrashing the bastards who deserve it!”
The greatsaber came down with the answer, sharp enough to split my skull.
Clang!
My energy-laden staff rode the broad face of the blade and twisted the attack’s path askew. The strike skimmed past my shoulder by a hair.
Still no crimson trail of killing intent. My brow twitched.
“Then why, even while you’re thrashing people, do you refuse to admit that killing intent even exists?”
Cutting people down yet carrying no killing intent? Mechanically, emotionlessly, slicing only the wicked? It was unnatural to the core—and that unnaturalness was exactly what blocked the union of body and mind.
“Because… it’s a useless emotion, isn’t it?”
Like hell it was.
Just as people eat, shit, and sleep, these feelings were perfectly natural phenomena. Try skipping the shitting part because it feels dirty or unpleasant and you will die with your body stuffed full of waste. You cannot treat one of a human’s natural emotions as if it simply does not exist.
“The anger that boils up, the killing intent that wants to harm another person—both are natural. Accept them.”
Shadows exist so that sunlight can stand out. Only because wicked thoughts exist can the good deeds that rise above them shine all the brighter.
“How is any of that natural?!”
Jo Harang answered through clenched teeth. She swung the greatsaber even harder, as if trying to fling the confusion out of her head.
A memory still vivid as yesterday.
Beneath a burning hall, her mother and father had coughed blood and screamed for her to run. The wet sound of blades punching into flesh. Those were the hours when she had felt human malice and killing intent with perfect clarity—the most horrific hours of her life.
Luckily a man who had followed the twinkling of a star arrived in time and saved her life. The price was that she was left alone in the world.
And so, standing in the rain, Jo Harang had sworn she would cut down every evil under heaven. Vengeance became her declaration.
“……I’m not like those people!”
Whether it counted as fortune or not, she possessed the strength and talent to carry out that vow, and a master willing to teach her. So she became a vagabond who cut down the wicked—a martial artist who carried out revenge while stacking good karma and earning coin.
And the words she now held in her heart like golden scripture:
When you face evil, do not let evil swallow you.
Her master had seen her heart drifting and given her that counsel to help her find her center. After that day the saying became a landmark that guided her path; calling it anything less would have been an understatement.
“Hey. Accepting those feelings doesn’t make you a villain. It just makes you someone who admits what she feels.”
Jo Harang shook her head as if denying it. Those things were the root of all evil, impure dregs of emotion. They brought nothing but harm, so they had to be sliced away with the same ruthlessness she used on her enemies.
Claaang! Clack!
And yet—why?
Every time her staff met Dan Mujin’s, every time their weapons locked, something inside her was being touched. Something that felt both repulsive and intimately familiar, something that carried a deep sense of kinship.
“You told me yourself, remember? Qi has a nature that wants to flow. Don’t try to store it up like an idiot—let it move.”
Human emotion, Dan Mujin said, was exactly the same. Do not force the current to a stop.
That was how he had stepped beyond Second-class Realm; if she did the same, she could step beyond First-class as well.
“But still……”
“And you also said this: a person isn’t proven by the feelings of any single moment. They’re proven by the actions they’ve stacked up and the road they’ve walked.”
“…….”
Those were the very words she had used when she chose to acknowledge Dan Mujin’s character.
Jo Harang froze mid-motion and stared at him. Her lips kept twitching; her mind was clearly a storm.
“So you accept it too. Let it flow.”
Clang.
Neither fast nor slow, the staff struck her greatsaber with a clear, ringing note. In that instant Jo Harang felt an inexplicable resonance travel up through her fingertips. The tip of her blade wavered helplessly.
……!
At the same moment the dam burst. Emotions came pouring out in a flood. The killing intent that had surged every time she looked at the wicked, the thirst for revenge that had disguised itself as justice—both tore straight through her.
“Don’t break. Bend. People were never meant to be perfect.”
Even the mind method she had learned from her master contained a similar formula:
Soft yet unbreakable; accept your own incompleteness and grow stronger.
The more flexible you remain, the less you shatter. The more you accept an imperfect self, the stronger you become.
“……So that was it.”
A reunion with long-suppressed emotions. And a sudden flash of enlightenment.
The words Dan Mujin had spoken struck deep into her chest.
Jo Harang slowly closed her eyes. She released every scrap of inner energy she had stored in her dantian and meridians.
Shhhhk—!
Invisible waves of qi exploded outward in every direction. Emotions that had been sealed away thrashed like mad things. The inner energy that had always been locked inside the blade, never allowed to reach outward, finally began to pour into the world together with her feelings.
As the wind goes, as the current rolls.
She stopped controlling it and simply let it flow.
Jo Harang pictured the enemies she longed to cut down and danced with her saber. She abandoned herself to instinct and swung the great blade this way and that.
Shhhk—!
Trees split. Rocks and earth cracked open. A single stroke bisected a massive boulder; the two halves thundered apart with a heavy boom.
When she opened her eyes amid ragged breathing, white blade qi rose a full three inches from the edge of her saber—savage, ready to sever anything it touched.
Exactly the manifestation of blade qi she had longed for.
“Congratulations. Peak Realm martial artist.”
Under a night sky glittering with stars, a rather handsome young man smiled and offered his congratulations right in front of her. Looking at that face, Jo Harang finally understood that she had truly reached Peak Realm.
“I… I……”
“I, what?”
Emotions that had slept for so long refused to settle. She had become completely honest with her instincts. And the ticklish thought that rose the moment she saw his face left her unable to stay still.
“I want to swing more.”
So she decided to work her body to exhaustion—until she was too tired for any thought at all.
Boom! Craaack!
A Peak Realm martial artist’s dazzling blade-qi show tore the forest apart. The racket was more than enough to jolt everyone who had trusted the night watch and fallen into deep sleep.
“Hey! Calm the hell down, you crazy woman!”
Her rampage continued until Dan Mujin’s screaming order to stop finally reached her ears.
The next morning.
Standing before a forest that had been reduced to a wasteland, Young Hero Ma Jungcheon muttered beside me.
“……Young Hero Dan, did a meteor fall overnight?”
All of that destruction had been wrought by a single human being. Once the heavy mass of the greatsaber was joined by true blade qi, trees had been ripped out without leaving even roots behind. The cracked earth and shattered boulders looked as if some natural disaster had passed through.
“Hah… I suppose we can no longer call her the Minor Tiger Blade. From now on it will have to be the Great Tiger Blade. I never saw it with my own eyes, yet I can still feel that tiger-like presence.”
When I told him that Jo Harang had stepped into Peak Realm overnight, Ma Jungcheon let out a hollow laugh and mumbled to himself.
“But I heard Young Lady Jo Harang had remained at First-class for quite a long time. Was there some special catalyst?”
“Eh, we just sparred a bit and I tossed her a few words of advice. She figured the rest out on her own.”
“……!”
I scratched the side of my head as I answered.
With this, I had reached First-class and she had reached Peak. Both of our odds of placing high in the martial contest had just gone up. If she somehow took the championship, maybe I could ask for a cut—talk shares, you know.
“Young Hero Dan.”
While I was busy daydreaming, Ma Jungcheon turned to me with a serious face.
“What is it?”
“I, too, have been stuck at First-class for some time now…… Might you have a few words of advice for me as well?”
“Nope.”
His expression crumpled into pure dejection in a single heartbeat. The change was so fast it almost made me laugh.
“You’ve got a sect, don’t you? Go ask your master to teach you.”
“……The great senior who would teach me such things is currently in a state of having run away from home.”
Ah. Right.
Nothing I could say to that. I was trying to send the old man back, sure, but was that guy ever the type to listen to other people? Even when I told him to quit drowning himself in booze or his liver would give out, he still lived with a wine jar glued to his side.
“Still, these days it feels as though we have found a substitute hope, so that at least is fortunate.”
“…….”
There it was again—that look. The gaze of expectation so heavy it made my skin crawl just to meet it.
“Ah… right.”
It felt like I was about to be grabbed and dragged off somewhere, so I bolted from the spot as fast as my legs would carry me.