Found It!
The head office of the Eunseong Merchant Group was a place of understated elegance, simple yet quietly refined. It was a space that also revealed the practical temperament of the previous group leader.
Eun Hwaran silently ran her hand across the rosewood desk that still held so many traces of her father.
"My lady, a letter has arrived from the Mangeum Money House."
A wrinkled hand slid a single letter forward. It was Steward Jin, who oversaw the group's internal affairs.
The Mangeum Money House. The biggest money-moving outfit in all of Beijing. Their main trades were moneylending and deposits—in other words, people who made money with money.
"What do you suppose it says?"
Eun Hwaran tapped the letter lightly with her fan.
"They're famous for having no sense of honor. Probably a notice that they're cutting off our credit line."
Please, anything but that. Hoping the steward's prediction would prove wrong, she broke the seal.
But an ominous premonition never misses its mark.
The letter was a formal notice that the loan maturity would no longer be extended. Eun Hwaran's red lips pressed tight.
"…You're psychic."
"You flatter me."
You have no idea how I feel right now.
"This is exactly the kind of moment when I'd prefer you were wrong."
"Heh heh…"
When times were good they came smiling first; when times turned hard they turned their backs faster than anyone. That was a moneylender for you. Not a scrap of loyalty among them.
"If the Mangeum Money House is doing this, the others will refuse extensions one after another."
Eun Hwaran crumpled the letter with a look of pure disaster.
Ordinarily the loans would have been renewed as a matter of course. The money houses collected their interest; the merchant group used the capital as leverage to generate still greater profit. Mutual benefit. But the group had staggered a few times of late, and once the malicious rumor of a liquidity crisis began to spread, every door started slamming shut. Thanks to the merchants' gossip, money drained away until a funding crunch that hadn't even existed became all too real.
When her father—known as the Spring Radiance Magnate—had still been well, such a thing would have been unimaginable.
"Even if we explain that the rumors are malicious, it will do no good. To persuade them, it would be better to solve even one more of the problems the group is facing."
Steward Jin added the wisdom of long experience. These people saw the world in numbers. Resolve the silkworm and escort issues, he was saying, and win the creditors' hearts back with results rather than words.
Eun Hwaran nodded, finding no fault in the advice.
"Even if Old Master Hwang can handle the escort side… the sericulture business is the real problem."
The silkworm industry they had fought so hard to wrest from the Imperial Court now stood on the brink of expulsion. Worry deepened her expression as she continued.
"The greatest danger is that this could cost us the Court's trust."
Silk had been a principal instrument of imperial trade since ancient times. A single bolt of well-made silk rivaled gold in value, so the Court strictly controlled who was allowed to produce it in order to prevent the technology from leaking. Every stage of production was secret; nothing connected to silkworm rearing was ever treated lightly.
That was why any new merchant group that obtained the rights had to pass the Geumgyeol—the Brocade Verification—proving they could rear the worms and produce the silk without mishap.
"Who knew raising bugs would be this hard?"
The Eunseong group's silkworms had already suffered mass die-offs several times; the business had made no real progress. And in only a few months an imperial official would arrive to conduct the verification.
"Steward Jin, still no word on that man?"
"We've hired trackers, but whether he rose into the sky or sank into the earth, there's no trace of him."
The group had its own grievances. The most important figure for silkworm rearing—the Sericulture Master—had never arrived. The Court insisted they had sent him.
"Ugh."
Eun Hwaran let out a weary sigh and leaned back against her chair. They had spared no expense planting mulberry trees and building facilities to secure those rights; now it looked as if everything would have to be written off as a total loss.
"Where on earth did he go—the man they claim they sent from above?"
She realized her sighs had grown far more frequent of late. Come to think of it, ever since her father had obtained the sericulture rights from the Court a year ago, misfortune had piled up with uncanny regularity.
So Eun Hwaran had begun to wonder: what if these events were not mere bad luck, but someone's deliberate scheme? That would explain the malicious rumors choking off their funds, the Langya Peak freak who had smashed their escort runs, and the missing Sericulture Master. Of course she had no hard evidence yet.
"The person Father approached to secure the sericulture rights was Princess Dohwa, wasn't it?"
Her father had refused to remain content with a seat among the ten great merchant groups. To climb higher, he said, one had to enter high-value industries. After much scrambling he had made contact with a certain princess and, she had heard, even sealed some secret pact in order to obtain the silk-production rights…
"Could we have been dragged into some imperial power struggle without realizing it…?"
There was an old saying: keep relations with the Imperial Court neither too distant nor too close. Drift too far and the warmth never reaches you; you freeze by degrees. Draw too near and you can be sucked into the vortex of palace intrigue until your entire house is torn apart. But what were you supposed to do when you had already, unintentionally, stepped in too deep? Eun Hwaran rubbed her throbbing temples.
"Steward Jin, send another message to our contact on the Court side."
This would be the third attempt. The Court and its officials, however, had nothing to lose if the group failed the venture, so they were in no hurry to respond.
"As you wish. But you know how unhelpful they can be, so please don't get your hopes up."
Still, they had to try. She could not allow the merchant group her father had poured his heart and soul into to collapse on her watch.
"There's nothing more we can do about the silkworms for now, so at least let's put speed into the escort preparations."
They had suffered two major failures, yet a century of accumulated strength still counted for something. There were still grateful clients who trusted them enough to entrust cargo. Even so, a sliver of unease remained. Could Old Master Hwang truly defeat that Langya Peak freak?
"I'll press the chief escort. The porters will be half-dead by the end of it, of course."
Steward Jin murmured. With both their livelihoods and the group's fate on the line, the men would simply have to endure a little more hardship.
"By the way, how is that young porter? Has he settled into the work?"
The word "porter" jogged her memory. The boy who had been drawing so many eyes around the group of late.
Steward Jin nodded.
"I was worried at first, but the lad seems born for this kind of labor. He works two or three times as hard as anyone else."
"…Impressive."
Even sturdy grown men found porter work grueling. Yet the boy Old Master Hwang had brought was adapting with remarkable ease.
"A praiseworthy young man. Perhaps a special bonus is in order?"
"I'd like to, but Old Master Hwang specifically forbade it. He's in the middle of important training, and stimulating greed would be unwise, or so he said."
Greed, he had claimed, was the "sprout" of every sin and the shortest path branching toward evil.
"He must intend to raise the boy into a pure and impoverished Daoist like himself."
A man of such martial prowess who owned neither property nor house and forever wandered the world in rags.
"Frankly, living on the streets looks more like destitution than purity… but his will is firm, so there's nothing to be done."
In the Murim, the bond between master and disciple was as close as parent and child. Outsiders had no business interfering.
"Then we'll hold off on the bonus and simply keep an eye on him."
"Yes. I'd love to give him a little extra, but it can't be helped."
A bonus that had almost reached a certain someone's hand only to slip away like smoke. If that someone ever learned of this conversation, he would weep tears of blood.
What is internal energy?
It is the refined qi of the natural world, drawn in through the breath and stored in the dantian.
And what of an internal energy heart method? It is simply a more efficient way of performing that cultivation of qi.
Seongun Simbeop—the method that trains by the moon as companion and takes the pouring starlight as one's own power.
I left the lodging expecting profound and secret training. What awaited me at the training ground was an untimely dose of guerrilla drills.
"Run, you little shit!"
"Huff… huff!"
Night running under the moon. The taste of blood rose in my mouth; sweat poured from my body like rain. Not far behind, the freak chased me with his gourd flask in hand.
"Heh heh, slower than a seventy-year-old man? Is that acceptable?"
The instant I showed the slightest lag, the bottom of the flask smacked the back of my skull without fail. Whatever profound principle he put into it, the pain felt as if my head were splitting open. And if I collapsed from lack of breath, the strength training began: push-ups with Hwang Geolgae riding my back, or endless squat-jumps until my calves turned to stone.
"…Son of a bitch!"
This was not the picture I had imagined. Where had the mystical training scenes from the wuxia novels gone? Why did I feel as though I'd re-enlisted in the army? The look in Hwang Geolgae's eyes as he glared at me from up ahead was exactly like a drill instructor screaming, "Are you here for a field trip, Owl Number Nine?!"
"Huff—forget this crap! Huff—just teach me the heart method already!"
I needed the internal energy that strengthened the body if I was going to survive this monstrous regimen. That motive force that made a martial artist a martial artist. The old man was making me pay a ridiculous price!
"This crap? Your head still isn't clear. Ten more laps around the training ground."
"Aargh, fuck!"
By day I memorized formulas while working myself senseless as a porter; by night I endured training that wrung every last ounce of fat from my body. Full-speed sprints, duck-walks, up and down the nearby hills, five hundred grateful straight punches… After days like that even the Heavenly Killing Star's body seemed driven to its limits and screaming.
A grinding sensation in every joint.
"A sound body houses a sound mind."
The flesh is the vessel that holds the spirit. Because the shape of the vessel changes the form of the spirit, this basic conditioning was vital—especially since something terrifying was coiled inside me.
Hwang Geolgae watched me gasp on the verge of collapse and drained his rice wine with a look of deep satisfaction.
"You lied to me… You said you'd teach me how to gather internal energy!"
I protested while holding a horse stance so low I might as well have been sitting on an invisible chair. In the novels everyone sat calmly in lotus position and first awakened to the existence of qi. Why was I only destroying my body like this? How was I supposed to feel any qi at all?
"Heh heh. And that's exactly what I'm teaching you right now—how to cultivate qi."
"Running myself to death in the middle of the night… how is that internal energy training?!"
Hwang Geolgae paused mid-chew of the snacks he had pilfered from the storehouse.
"You idiot. For you, this is internal energy training."
"…Why?"
"Because Seongun Simbeop works for both seated and moving cultivation."
The "moving" in moving cultivation meant exactly that—training the breath and the mind's image while in motion. In short, there was no easy path.
"Aren't you lucky? It's a peerless heart method that can be used both ways."
"…Fuck."
"Ah, such a poor attitude. Ten more laps around the parade ground!"
"Shiiiiit!"
Hwang Geolgae cackled and bellowed at me to run until the soles of my feet caught fire.
"Huff… huff!"
Even while running I was ordered to recite the formulas and the secrets he had transmitted. Apparently, if I wanted to lay hands on that internal energy which granted superhuman power, I would have to soak the training ground with sweat every single night.
Nothing in this world is easy. I had learned that back in elementary school, the day someone first called me a kid without a father or mother.
"I'm really gonna die…"
"You're not dying, you little bastard!"
And from that day on, I had decided: the world is a cold and vicious place, so I would live with a spirit every bit as vicious.
I looked down at the training ground still marked by the escorts' practice. Then I exhaled the breath that had risen all the way to my chin and sprinted across it with everything I had, shaking the night manor with my shouts as if to harden my resolve.
"Guerrilla spirit—! Overcome the limit—!"
I had no idea what I was yelling, but Hwang Geolgae seemed pleased by the murderous look on my face; he grinned and nodded.
It was autumn, and the insects in the grass cried mournfully.
"Rest for a moment!"
Night training ended and porter work began again. The head porter called a short break.
The porters who had been shouldering loads as big as themselves dropped where they stood with obvious relief. I used my own load as a mattress and sprawled in the street for a moment.
"…At this rate I'm really going to die."
The sky looked yellow. It might even have been spinning. It felt exactly like being thrown into a forced march the second guerrilla drills ended. Every muscle in my body was screaming. I was so exhausted that even in broad daylight I thought I saw stars flashing.
And the meals they shoved at us during every rest were pure garbage—some kind of shit-broth, a few scraps of greens, and a rice ball of stale grain that reeked of military rations.
"These fucking food-police bastards."
How were we supposed to work on that? If it wasn't enough or you didn't like it, buy your own with a porter's wages, right? But the Heavenly Killing Star's body had abysmal fuel efficiency. With monster-level durability and strength came a monstrous calorie requirement. Covering all of it out of pocket was simply impossible.
"A bowl of hot noodles… anywhere?"
My stomach growled. No matter how much I ate, it was never enough. Come to think of it, there had been a chance to enjoy real delicacies—meat dumplings, Dongpo pork. I'd been kidnapped on the way to buy them and never got a single bite. Leaving Ilhong and the kids still nagged at me. When I thought about it, they were the reason my head was still attached to my neck. But Hwang Geolgae had forbidden any free movement until the Heavenly Killing Star was suppressed, so there was no way to see them.
Something small and fast darted past. My hand snatched it on pure reflex. When I opened my palm I found an insect with large soft-looking wings.
"What? Not a grasshopper."
Roasted, it would have been nature's snack—the kind that always appeared when I was at my lowest. This wasn't that friend.
"A silkworm moth?"
The yellowish fuzz suggested a wild silkworm moth of some sort. I hadn't seen one in a long time; it was almost cute. Back in the day I had raised these and made decent pocket money. The pupae inside the cocoons after boiling had been a real delicacy too. Truly an insect of which nothing went to waste. The old name "Heavenly Insect" fit it perfectly.
Flutter.
Sensing mortal danger, the moth fled in panic.
"…Shame."
I watched its wingbeats recede and clicked my tongue. An excellent protein source. I should have just swallowed it whole.
"Rest over! Move out!"
The head porters clapped their hands and hauled the men back to their feet the moment anyone looked like slacking. I possessed the spirit of diligent construction worker Kim and forced my exhausted body upright.
"This load belongs to Biyeong Trading House! They gave us work again even in these hard times, so not a single scratch!"
Is this what the life of a worker ant feels like? Day after day of hauling cargo from trading house to shop and back. Loads that on Earth would have been shifted with a forklift were here moved entirely by human muscle.
"Hahh."
A sudden wave of dizziness made my previously straight spine buckle once. To think that I—who had survived cliffs and rapids—could be shaken like this. The labor intensity was murderous.
Seven-day workweeks with no holidays. They worked you without pause until the sun went down. On top of that I had fallen for the head porter's promise of bonuses for hard workers and put in two or three times the normal effort, yet so far there had been no word. Head porter bastard… did you lie to me?
"What's that kid mumbling about?"
"Leave him. First-timers always do that."
The veteran porters shrugged, treating it as a normal rite of passage. I had looked down on them a little at first. Turns out they were all lean, compressed muscle built for real work. Instantaneous power might fall short of mine, but their endurance was undeniable.
"I… want to live."
My knees were folding in time with my spirit. Night training plus nonstop labor—it was truly a living hell. It felt as if every scrap of vitality was being threshed out of my body. Whether it was a flash of life before the eyes or something else, that familiar blood-red mist seemed to cast its shadow once.
The weight of the cargo was on par with a full combat load. Masters were said to lift five-hundred-jin iron lumps without difficulty. Would things have been different if I had already laid hands on that internal energy? Even a mere third-class martial artist moved differently, didn't they?
Uniting with the stars, embracing the overflowing body… following heaven's rise and grasping the world…
Human learning multiplies in speed according to the depth of desperation. Right now I needed internal energy—not for some vague desire to grow stronger or make money, but to survive.
What pierces the eternal ages is nothing but an upright mind…
So for the sake of survival I recited the formulas. Watching my soundless, carp-like mouthing, the men around me clicked their tongues.
"That kid's finally lost it."
"I hear he trains every night without sleeping."
"While doing porter work too? Yeah, that would drive anyone crazy."
They tossed out a few pitying comments and moved on. Calling a Heavenly Killing Star who had already been crazy "about to go crazy" was pretty funny.
When the fire of greed blazes and one cannot measure the void or bind the wind…
Am I a Daoist or a martial artist? I walked and walked, desperately reciting while still carrying the load. At some point my body simply walked on its own while my head separated and chanted the formulas. Spirit and flesh peeled apart—exactly like the out-of-body sensation you get on a long march.
Star upon star, one principle… heaven and earth, the body's glory and shadow…
Was this the separation of spirit and flesh Hwang Geolgae had spoken of? He had said that to perceive the surrounding "qi" one had to forget the body and keep only the mind sharp.
"…Huh?"
As I walked, I suddenly realized my feet had grown remarkably light. The knees that had been buckling had straightened of their own accord, and an unidentifiable power was spreading through my whole body. An inexplicable phenomenon I had no words for. Goosebumps rose all over me.
"Wha—?"
Three inches below the navel, in the dantian, a tiny knot had taken root. No bigger than a grain of millet, yet as clear as a firefly. Pure, orthodox force that banished demons—utterly opposed to the vicious energy of the Heavenly Killing Star.
I leapt in place and shouted:
"Found i—! No—I found internal energy!"