A Blessing in Disguise
"Hnngh……."
In a small, old house that was nonetheless more comfortable to Samryong than anywhere else in the world, a modest training ground had been set up inside.
Samryong sat cross-legged on it, fidgeting for a long while with an expression that suggested he badly needed to relieve himself.
"Haaah……."
Letting out a deep sigh, he dipped a ladle into the water jar Aeng-hwa had filled and took a drink.
"Koff! Kek! Kek! Aargh……."
It was water mixed with his own special blend of poison powder, so naturally the taste was abominable.
"Brr~ it's cold."
Only after he finished his meditation did the chill finally creep in. No matter how deeply one cultivated internal energy, freedom from heat and cold was impossible unless one reached the Profound Realm and achieved the state of imperviousness to cold and heat.
"The year's already at its end."
Ever since the Sichuan Hidden Dragon Society incident, Samryong had not once left the Tang Clan compound, repeating nothing but eating, sleeping, and training. With Class Seven of the Tang Youth Training Unit dissolved, his days had become essentially one long solo regimen—and before he knew it, December, the final month of the year, had arrived.
"Damn it… if things were like before, I wouldn't be so impatient."
In a marathon, when the finish line is nowhere in sight, a runner paces himself, conserving his strength at his own rhythm and grinding along steadily. But the moment the finish line appears right in front of him? He squeezes out strength he doesn't have and sprints at full power.
The problem is that I can see the finish line, but I can't touch it.
So close! Yet so far!
The Peak Realm beckoned to Samryong from just ahead, teasing him with every step. Reach for it, and—ping! Gotcha, didn't I?—it would slip backward. Chase it again, and it fled once more, fraying his nerves until he could finally understand why martial artists fell into obsession, into qi deviation. If this cycle repeated for a lifetime, he really might go mad and lose himself completely.
To force open the barrier between realms, I'd need an elixir! Damn it! I ate the venom of a hundred-year Blood Viper and a millennium-ginseng inner core, and now my standards are too high!
A mediocre talent like Samryong was never meant for this kind of explosive growth. Truth be told, every bit of his progress to the very edge of First-Rate had come from medicine. By any reasonable measure, he was climbing fast—yet because that climb had been so precipitous, the wall he now faced felt crushing.
All right. No rushing.
The Peak Realm was not a place one arrived at easily. It demanded enlightenment, and enlightenment demanded internal power to match.
Though oddly, enlightenment is the least of my worries.
Samryong's real anxiety lay with his internal power rather than his understanding.
Geniuses stumble into the Peak Realm in the middle of casual sparring matches. Damn it all.
A fresh wave of despair washed over him at how pathetic his talent looked beside the true prodigies—but he had tasted that bitterness to the bone in his previous life, and so he accepted it quickly.
No need to guard against geniuses, no need to envy them! To someone average like me, they're precious beings who offer inspiration.
Had it not been for Wi So-gun, he never would have worked out how to properly employ his hidden weapon. The completion rate of Silver Dispersion, his hidden-weapon art built around it, still left something to be desired—but thanks to the clue she'd given him, progress was coming along smoothly.
It's just… there's something nagging at me. A little something missing.
Looking at it, he couldn't shake the feeling that it would be perfect if someone would only take a look and polish off the rough edges.
"Samryong, sir!"
Just then, someone called out to him with boundless energy and came striding into the house.
"Oh, it's you."
Gi Chaeyun approached, cheeks and nose flushed red from the cold, sniffling as he came.
"It's finished!"
"Already?"
"Making it turned out to be so much fun! Ehehehe!"
He laughed in a distinctly sinister way for someone with such a cute face.
"What's more, while I was working on it, I happened to run into Master Tang Cheolgi, the Master of the Blacksmith Hall, and he lent me a hand!"
"Tang Cheolgi?"
"Yes! After this Hornless Dragon Battle is over, I'll be called Tang Chaeyun! And I'll be joining the Blacksmith Hall!"
It felt like only yesterday that Samryong had handed him the wafer of iron from Mount Emei and asked him to blend it with ogum steel to forge his hidden weapon, and yet so much time had already slipped by.
Tang Cheolgi—the man who never took disciples—accepted Chaeyun?
Gi Chaeyun's martial arts were nothing remarkable, but his skill as a craftsman was such that he could rightly be called the finest mechanic in the Tang Clan. The old master had no disciples yet, and the clan kept urging him to seek one out, but he was stubborn as a boulder—immovable. And true to that stubbornness, his temper was volcanic; he was equally famous for having hardly anyone around him. For this boy to become his disciple of all things—what on earth had happened?
"How in the world did you manage it?"
At the question, asked with pure, unfeigned curiosity, Gi Chaeyun lit up.
"I had my reference books spread out and was concentrating on crafting the weapon, when Master noticed what I was reading and took an interest—he started asking me about this and that!"
Gi Chaeyun excitedly recounted his encounter with Tang Cheolgi, and Samryong arrived at his conclusion in short order.
Two like-minded science nerds. Of course they clicked.
"From now on, Master and I plan to research my dream together—the Cannon of Ten Thousand Flowers!"
"Good for you."
For Gi Chaeyun, orphaned young and left alone in the world with no one to lean on, Tang Cheolgi would become a pillar of a teacher—a patron, and family. And from here on, the people of the Tang Clan would all be scrambling to curry favor with him. To have forged such a deep bond with him in advance—if that counted as a stroke of fortune, then fortune it was.
They do say the old man of the frontier lost his horse—blessing and misfortune trade places when you least expect it.
Most of the bullies who had tormented Gi Chaeyun so viciously were now dead at the hand of the Ghost Blade Sam Sal, while the boy who had endured that torment alone, unbowed, had nothing but a bright future ahead.
"Congratulations. I suppose I won't be seeing you as often?"
"What are you saying, Samryong, sir? You're the one who inspires me—I'll be coming by more often than ever!"
"Right… well, thanks……."
Being someone's source of inspiration wasn't a bad feeling at all.
"Master says he'd like to meet you too, Samryong, sir! When I told him about your poison-discharge launcher, you should have seen how excited he got!"
"Uh… yeah… sure……."
Still, Gi Chaeyun remained as overwhelming as ever.
After chattering on alone for a good while, he suddenly clapped his hands as if remembering something.
"Oh, right! I came here to give you this, and I got so worked up I've been rambling on! Hahaha!"
Gi Chaeyun held out the hidden weapon.
Fused from the Emei iron and ogum steel, it had a clouded but faintly luminous silver sheen.
"Ohh……."
Marveling at its strange luster, Samryong launched into every performance test he could devise. He pulled at it, slashed at it with a blade, held it to fire, buried it in snow, dunked it in water, and more—an entire gauntlet of examinations.
Outstanding!
A hidden weapon with thoroughly satisfying performance. Just thinking about improving and refining it further from here made his heart race.
"You did fine work."
"Master helped."
It was far too polished to credit entirely to Gi Chaeyun—so there was a reason for it.
"Oh, right. You're competing in this Hornless Dragon Battle, aren't you?"
"It's mandatory, isn't it? And it's the last one anyway."
"I believe with my whole heart that you'll take first place! Well then, I'll be off!"
"All right. Thanks."
Watching Gi Chaeyun's figure shrink into the distance, Samryong looked down at the weapon in his hand.
A year full of trials and tribulations, and it's finally drawing to a close.
He would finish the Hornless Dragon Battle without incident, then decide his path after the coming-of-age ceremony. That seemed like the sensible order of things.
Chaeyun is joining the Blacksmith Hall. Tang Chiyeol is being floated as the candidate for the new Human Dragon Squad Commander. Mother has made small progress with the Five Venoms Divine Art, and her health has improved a little…….
It felt as though everyone around him was finally loosening up, untying their knots one by one, and Samryong was in a good mood because of it.
Now all that's left is me.
But heaven, it seemed, had no intention of granting Samryong his wish.
The end of a year that should have passed without incident. For Samryong, however, it did not.
"Waaaah!"
Watching his mother, Yu Yanghui, weep so piteously that he feared she might collapse from exhaustion, Samryong had no idea what to do.
"Mother……."
"Sob… hic… sob……."
"I'm so sorry, my son……."
Sitting before Yu Yanghui like a guilty criminal was a middle-aged man. One look at his face told you he was kin to her—the resemblance was unmistakable.
"I'm sorry, Yanghui……."
"Get your hands off me! Is that what you wanted—to sell off even your nephew on your way up? Well?! Was it?!"
"Yanghui! It's not—that's not what it is!"
"Then ask me for money! Money! Why are you trying to take my son, my everything?! Why!"
Had Yu Yanghui ever raged like this before? Her older brother, Yu Yangcheol, was completely at a loss. All he could do was glance at Samryong, silently begging him to do something, anything.
"Mother……."
"Hic… sob… hic……."
She hadn't been this bad even when he told her he was going to Guya Forest. Samryong decided, for the moment, to focus solely on calming her down.
"Please have some water. You'll collapse at this rate……."
"I never dreamed it would come to this……."
"After all that! After everything, you're going back into the Imperial Court to draw a salary?! Of all the countless households of the Yu clan, ours alone survived! Ours alone!"
The Yu family had been framed. Only thanks to the merits her father, Yu Mundeok, had earned during the reign of the previous emperor had the direct line barely managed to survive. The false accusations were eventually lifted, but by then the Yu household had been scattered to the winds, its lineage hanging on by a thread. When Tang Munseong took Yu Yanghui as his wife, their circumstances had improved somewhat—but they were still struggling.
Samryong understood his mother's heart, but Yu Yangcheol had his own reasons too.
"And what, then—am I to just sit here and starve?! Look at my hands! Do these look like the hands of a scholar?!"
Palms thick with calluses—living proof of how brutally hard he had worked to survive.
"I didn't want to either! I didn't! No matter how I broke my back earning money, it wouldn't even cover Mother's medicine! On days we paid for medicine, my wife and children ate nothing! Father went out to the timber yards himself and did brutal work!"
Yu Yangcheol shouted with bloodshot eyes, and Yu Yanghui looked ready to crumble where she sat. This was the first she had ever heard of it.
"You should have told me!"
"And suck the blood out of the little sister I'd already sold once?! I couldn't do it—so against Father's protests, I entered official service anyway! And… and is that a crime worth dying for?!"
Yu Yangcheol spoke as if coughing up blood with every word, but Yu Yanghui, who had never known any of it, could only weep.
"After Mother recovered, I thought things were finally getting livable, and now……."
"Haaah……."
Looking at his sister, Yu Yangcheol went on.
"Two years. Two years is all it will take. I've begged and pleaded—I'll be posted to a rear-line front. Serve two years there, and it's done."
"Even the rear is a battlefield! Samryong is only seventeen!"
"He'll be a man in a few days……."
"Then resign your post! Just resign!"
"…If it were that easy, would I have come all this way? Yanghui……."
The reason Yu Yangcheol had come here was to take Samryong with him to the northern front. Every year, officials were assigned to the northern front to deal with the remnants of the Yuan and other forces along the border. This time, it was Yu Yangcheol who had been dispatched.
Ordinarily he would have gone alone—but because the imperial princes themselves would be joining this campaign, an order had come down: any dispatched official with an adult son was to bring him along. It was called an instruction, but it was an order, and it amounted to conscription.
"Who could have known everything would tangle up like this……."
With his family ruined and his every waking hour consumed by earning money, Yu Yangcheol had worked and worked and married late, leaving him with only a young daughter. Among the young men of the Yu clan today, Samryong was the only one.
"Samryong is not a man of the Yu clan. He belongs to the Tang Clan."
"You think the throne will bother with such distinctions? The Court and the Martial World don't interfere with one another? Martial artists are still subjects of the Emperor. Refusing an imperial command is simply not possible. And we live in an age when even that old concept is fading by the day."
Just as Mae Gukhyeong, son of the Provincial Military Commissioner, had held sway over the Sichuan Hidden Dragon Society, the boundary between officialdom and the martial world was indeed growing blurrier by the year.
"The only reason this balance has held until now is that the Emperor has never cared to trouble himself with it. But provoke his temper, and the Emperor will build his own army of formidable warriors and seek to dominate even the martial world. He has the strength, the money, and the power to do it."
In the end, it meant that no scheme or evasion could escape an imperial command.
"This is a war the princes themselves will join. For the children of those who eat the Emperor's salt to hold back would be treason. And if we defy the order… I'm too afraid of what calamity might befall us next to even imagine it……."
Yu Yangcheol had watched, still a boy, as his own relatives were purged on fabricated charges. Even now that day burned vivid in his memory—his hands trembled so badly it was painful to watch.
"Brother……."
"I will protect Samryong no matter what it takes. On that, you have my word. And Samryong and I won't be combat soldiers—we'll be staff officers. Mostly work for the head, not the blade."
Was there truly no escape, then? Samryong, the man in question, simply stared blankly at the floor, and the sight tore at Yu Yanghui's heart.
"Samryong… my son……."
Even at his mother's desperate cry, Samryong showed little reaction.
Why? Because, honestly speaking, Samryong wasn't all that afraid of a battlefield.
After all, in his previous life he had walked in and out of a battlefield called the Gate every single day.
The real problem lay somewhere else entirely.
Damn it! Reborn into a new life, and I get re-enlisted?! RE-ENLISTED?!
Re-enlistment!
Any man of the Republic of Korea would understand exactly how Samryong felt.