Handle Spiritual Elixirs with Care! (2)
The Demon-Subduing Pill Baek Seong-hwa had forced into him, and the Great Restoration Pill Yang Jeonghyeon had fed him, would each have been enough on their own to be called treasures of the world.
What Yuun had swallowed did not stop there.
Gyeon So-ryeong, chosen to be the next commander of the Embroidered Uniform Guard, had given him the Heaven-Preserving Pill — a spiritual medicine prepared by the imperial physicians and granted only to guardsmen who had rendered extraordinary merit. Made by the imperial physicians themselves, its potency fell not a whit short of the Great Restoration Pill.
Then Woo Cheonghwi, daughter of the lord of Mugang Fortress, the greatest man of the Unorthodox Faction, had produced a Human-Form Snow Ginseng with all the casual air of someone meaning to split a fine bottle of liquor among friends. That Human-Form Snow Ginseng went straight down into Yuun's stomach.
Last of all, Ma Gyo-bin — the greatest divine thief under heaven, and disciple of the Assassin — fed him the Azure Void Stone Oil her master had treasured and kept back. The Traceless Divine Thief, the Death God of the Dark Night, had spent an entire lifetime gathering no more than seven drops, and every last one of them vanished into Yuun's belly. They had meant to share it out a drop apiece, but the moment it touched his lips the elixirs already inside him ran wild, and by accident the whole of it went down.
"Hey — Yuun isn't one of you, you know? If something felt wrong, you should have stopped! And before any of that, what kind of sense is it to stuff him full of elixirs and then just leave him lying there? What about True Qi Guidance?!"
The other childhood friends, Jain among them, could take in an elixir like the ones Yuun had swallowed as easily as a sweet after a meal. Yuun could not. A single glance at his complexion was enough to tell that he had never trained in martial arts — and into that complete outsider they had crammed spiritual medicines without a second thought.
"Uh... if someone who hasn't learned martial arts takes an elixir, they just get healthier, don't they? That's what they taught us in the Demonic Cult."
"If you don't perform True Qi Guidance, one or two pills is the limit! That's common sense!!!"
The moment she heard that one or two pills was the limit, Seong-hwa — the one who had asked — went white. Knowing now that it was Yuun, she remembered what she had done: she had fed him every Demon-Subduing Pill she had. She had never even thought of True Qi Guidance. Worried he might be thirsty, she had simply gone off to draw water.
This is all the Demonic Cult's fault for never teaching me common sense! When I get back, I'm half-killing every last one of them.
Crack! Crunch!
While Seong-hwa burned with a fury that had nowhere useful to go, the sound of Yuun's body twisting rose as the energy burst through him, and every gaze snapped to the change.
"Oh — don't tell me all that immense energy is reacting together, and he's undergoing a rebirth of flesh and bone?"
"It's qi deviation! Did the Murim Alliance Leader not even teach you that? Leave him like this and even if Yuun lives, he'll be a paralyzed cripple from head to toe!"
Jain's face twisted at Jeonghyeon's talk of rebirth, as if the mere creak of muscle and bone meant any such thing. Childhood friend reunited after ten years or not, she wanted to beat these martial-arts idiots senseless — but saving Yuun came first.
"You really did feed him an absurd amount. It's almost too much to even get close."
She started toward the swirling energy, grimacing as she drew up her internal energy. It erupted from her in a violent surge and bore down on the directionless qi raging around him.
"How are you going to save him? Is there anything we should do?"
"I'm going in to perform True Qi Guidance. If I vent most of the energy, Yuun ought to be all right, so just watch."
Driving energy out through True Qi Guidance was not a notion she would ever have entertained under ordinary circumstances, but an overwhelming mass of internal energy was the thing doing the harm, and she judged it the only remedy. Jain stepped up to Yuun and laid a hand over his dantian, then poured her own internal energy in, trying to lead the force.
Boom!
"Kgh!!!"
The tremendous recoil caught her before she could answer it. Jain was flung backward with a short scream. Physician though she was, she was still an expert who bore martial arts worthy of awe across the world — the one they called the Divine Physician of Life and Death. Even she could not withstand the rampage of the elixirs, and was thrown clear.
The others were stunned. They had been stamping their feet in dread that something might happen to Yuun, yet the internal energy pouring off him had not felt the least bit threatening to them. That Jain, an expert on a level with their own, had been blasted away was a shock they could not ignore.
"Yuun, that bastard learned martial arts!!!"
The shout from the flung-back Jain shocked them harder still. To their eyes Yuun was an ordinary drifter who had never learned a single art. And he had learned martial arts?
"Reversion to Primal Truth?"
Could he be an expert who had entered a realm so profound that even they could barely perceive it? While the rest reeled at the thought, only Ma Gyo-bin — the greatest divine thief under heaven, and disciple of the Assassin — tilted her head.
Yuun had learned martial arts. Not some simple Tuna Method anyone might pick up on a market street.
Gyo-bin had noticed from the very start. Her childhood friends were a lineup of monstrous experts — so why had she alone been able to tell? Because her own art was an assassin's art. The technique had been hidden with exquisite care beneath a Tuna Method, and only someone trained in an assassin's ways could sense it.
Should I have said he'd learned martial arts after all?
Watching Jain get thrown, Gyo-bin hesitated a moment, then shook her head. Her friends did not know what art she practiced, nor who her master was. They believed she had learned from some hermit in seclusion, because that was how she herself had introduced it. And how could she have done otherwise? Childhood friends as close as family or not, could she really announce that her master was a public enemy of the murim, more dangerous than the Heavenly Demon? Among those friends was an officer of the Embroidered Uniform Guard who would light up with zeal and try to arrest that master on the spot.
So she had kept quiet. But once Jain pronounced that Yuun had learned martial arts, it seemed safe enough to step forward.
"I knew it, right? It isn't even half a martial art — a method that can't gather internal energy at all — but it keeps the energy circulating, develops the dantian, and grows the vessel itself. That's the one, isn't it?"
Having read the rhythm of his Tuna breathing and laid out the nature of the art Yuun had learned, Gyo-bin felt their eyes gather on her.
"How do you know that? Did you already know?"
She had misjudged. She had assumed the others would have analyzed at least this much. They had only realized Yuun had learned martial arts after hearing Jain, while Gyo-bin spoke as if she had known all along and finished the analysis besides.
"Uh, well... a trait of the art I learned is figuring out what art someone else has trained in."
"Oh, is that so? Assassin arts really are unusual from the foundation up."
"What???"
She had never once said she practiced an assassin's art, yet when Jeonghyeon spoke as if it were common knowledge, the others all nodded.
"What are you so shocked for? Is there anyone here who doesn't know an assassin? An art that specialized in erasing your presence — if that isn't an assassin's art, what is it? A thief's art, maybe?"
Struck by the cold analysis that followed, Gyo-bin was left with nothing to say. He looked like a fool, but Jeonghyeon, as expected of the Murim Alliance Leader's disciple, had a sharp edge to him.
"But what do we do about Yuun? Even if we want to perform True Qi Guidance, it's difficult without his martial art, isn't it?"
When Seong-hwa, the very one who had caused all this, spoke up in worry over the revelation that Yuun had learned martial arts, Jain shook her head. If he had an art of his own, a hasty True Qi Guidance was no different from a gamble. Do it wrong, and he would fall into qi deviation.
"We'll have to trust what Gyo-bin said about the nature of his art, and hope."
Still, if Yuun's martial art did not store internal energy and instead grew the vessel itself, then a belief took root that he might come through unharmed even if they left him be.
Yuun, who had already decided he was dead and let go of every will to live, felt pain as a tremendous energy suddenly began to pour into his body. He had no idea what was happening, but for the first time in a very long while the texture of something actually edible sliding down his throat had sent him into ecstasy.
The ecstasy lasted only a moment. Mass after mass of immense energy followed, and it felt as though his whole body were being torn apart. Then came a sensation he had never once felt, no matter how he worked the Tuna Method — something unknown. He began to feel internal energy, and with it he became aware that a dantian existed at all.
His dantian was like a vast tract of parched earth, and each time a mass of energy swept through, it was forced into the richness of fertile soil. But the energy would not remain there. It only raged on, circulating through his entire body.
Crunch! Crack!
As the internal energy stormed through him, it was driven by force along his acupoints at a mad pace, like a carriage hauled by dozens of fine horses stampeding down the channels of his body. Raging like that, it shoved out the wastes that had piled up in his blood vessels.
Riiip!
This was not proper circulation, only the side effect of a mindless rampage, and he felt with perfect clarity the blood vessels tearing beneath a pain like being ripped open. The damage lasted only a moment. From the dantian, now grown sturdy, an unknown energy rose and healed the ruined vessels.
……?
While the cycle repeated — rampaging internal energy tearing the vessels, the dantian mending them — an unknown energy suddenly entered the dantian. For an instant he thought he had swallowed yet another power, but that was not it.
Gyaaah!!!
The moment that energy entered, the force racing through every vessel in his body wheeled toward the dantian as if to meet an enemy's attack. Dizzied by the pain, Yuun felt the surging energy gather there and brace itself, wary, as though preparing for battle.
Huh?
The energy that had been guarding against an intrusion from outside searched the dantian and found a blocked acupoint. Some expert of tremendous attainment had sealed it by force, and it was the path to the middle dantian. Toward that path the energy began to rage. As if expanding a fortress against an invasion from outside, it started boring through the point by sheer force. The energy that had sealed the acupoint resisted, and the two forces tangled and fought.
Yuun wanted to lose consciousness in the war erupting inside his body. He could not. It was not a matter of will. This war was happening in his blood vessels, and it was happening in the landscape of his mind. He was already unconscious, perceiving it from the deepest layer of his spirit — how was he supposed to faint any further than that?
And as the energy of the lower dantian at last began to climb toward the middle dantian, a sealed memory surfaced.
An old man who taught letters to the children he had met in the market streets of the city where he had come to live under his uncle's care. The memory of meeting his master.
His master was an old man who made his living teaching children to read for nothing, reading aloud for those who could not, and writing in their stead. He was also the very man who had taught Yuun a worthless art that did not even amount to half a martial art, under the name of the Tuna Method — and sealed the memory away.