The First Success of Violet Mist Divine Art
Violet Mist Divine Art, First Success
There was only one reason I wanted to learn the Violet Mist Divine Art.
To grow stronger than I had in my past life.
—You have a natural tendency to climb higher than others. The trouble with men like that is that they live off the pleasure of being exceptional, and once they wind up in charge of some faction, they become arrogant and overbearing. None of them ever end well.
—How do you change a personality like that?
—You can’t change what comes by nature.
It was precisely because the sect leader had once personally taken up a wooden sword and made a point of drilling manners into me that he had realized long ago my nature could not be changed.
Because of that, I had come to understand myself to a certain extent as well.
If I became a merchant, I wanted to be a great magnate who could seize the reins of an entire country.
If I took an official post, I wanted to stand above all others, with ten thousand beneath me.
If I was a martial artist, then of course I wanted to become the strongest under heaven.
Fortunately, I didn’t just have vague ambitions. I had the talent to climb toward them.
Before I had even turned forty, I had already reached the Transcendence realm.
If I had kept training for another few decades, I sometimes thought, I might not have become the strongest under heaven, but I would at least have entered the ranks of the Ten Landscapes of the Martial World, like the sect leader.
But my dantian had been destroyed, and I had never been able to achieve it.
Now that I had been given a second chance, I could not be satisfied with the realm I had reached in my former life.
There wasn’t enough time.
Blood Sky Demon Emperor.
The master of the Blood Sky Demon Sect, who called himself the strongest under heaven, and the absolute master of the age.
Just as the rise of the Blood Sky Demon Sect had come out of nowhere, so too had the Blood Sky Demon Emperor himself.
That was true not only for the righteous sects, but for the demonic factions as well.
I had heard that one day, he simply appeared from nowhere and forcibly united the Demon Sect and the Blood Sect under his rule.
At any rate.
The clash between the righteous faction and the Blood Sky Demon Sect began with a sudden attack.
It was the day I had gathered with the younger prodigies in a village in Hubei, just before the Yongbongjihoe.
A commoner drenched in blood came alone to the village.
He had lived in Xiangyang County, and he brought word that the Blood Sky Demon Sect had attacked the Zhuge Clan Residence and annihilated the clan.
It did not take long for the Blood Sky Demon Sect’s reach to extend to the village where we were staying.
My comrades and I risked our lives to hold off the demonic martial artists, buying time so the villagers and nearby commoners could flee to Shaanxi.
Even as casualties mounted, we never stopped swinging our swords, and in the end we cut down and held back several hundred demonic martial artists.
And then, in that moment, when I had finally stopped them, I saw the Blood Sky Demon Emperor for the first time.
He stood in the sky, looking down at the battlefield.
The first thing he did was casually gesture, killing every last one of our comrades and subordinates who still breathed despite having lost their limbs.
If he wasn’t stopped, it went without saying that he would reach the refugees.
The survivors threw themselves at him with their lives on the line to stop him, but most of them died before they could last five exchanges.
After everyone else was dead and I was the only one left, I fought with everything I had, even drawing on my innate qi.
—So the Mount Hua Sect’s fate has already run out.
He destroyed my dantian far too easily.
—You’ve used up most of your innate qi, Plum Blossom Sword Dragon.
—If you’re going to kill me, then do it without humiliating me.
—Even if I didn’t kill you, you would die soon enough. I’ll commend you for your resolve in accepting death. Become a cripple and watch everything you tried to protect be broken to pieces.
And with that, the Blood Sky Demon Emperor left me alive.
It was meant so I could bitterly witness the collapse of righteous valor with my own eyes, and it seemed he had remembered that for two years without forgetting.
He had crushed the Mount Hua Sect and threatened the commoners of Hwaum to bring me in alive.
It was only one encounter, but...
He had gone beyond the bounds of humanity.
The Ten Landscapes of the Martial World, those so-called absolute masters of the age, had been broken helplessly before the Blood Sky Demon Emperor and vanished at last into handfuls of blood.
Among them was the Mount Hua Sect’s sect leader.
Baek Gun-won had been one of them too.
“......”
I pressed my trembling hands together and drew in a ragged breath.
Whenever I remembered that day, my body would shake like a leaf all on its own.
He often appeared in my dreams too, throwing me into convulsions, and there had been countless times I woke in a panic because of him.
Thinking back, I could say he was the reason I shut myself away in the Library and spent night after sleepless night staring at the dark.
News had come in, one after another, that the fellow disciples I had been close with were dying on the battlefield.
And all the while, I alone remained at Mount Hua, safely studying secret manuals.
Every moment I had lived was shameful.
But.
Not anymore.
When I stood on the edge of the cliff, surrounded by the residents of Hwaum County, I felt the years I had wasted meaninglessly in my life as a martial artist were unbearably precious.
If I had devoted myself to training even while those wasted years slipped by...
The thought kept multiplying, feeding on itself.
Maybe the outcome could have changed, depending on how hard I had tried. When the Blood Sky Demon Sect invaded, I might have been able to hold them back without losing my comrades.
Even so, I still would not have been able to grow into a match for the Blood Sky Demon Emperor.
There was a clear gulf between us that even drawing on innate qi could not close.
And yet I still could not stop climbing toward higher ground.
More than anything, now that I had returned with the enlightenment of my past life, this wasn’t some dreamlike tale anymore.
“This life will be different, Blood Sky Demon Emperor.”
My understanding had already reached the Transcendence realm.
If I recovered the realm of my past life and stole the fortuitous encounters the Blood Sky Demon Sect would have found, my rate of growth would become impossible to predict.
That would weaken the enemy’s power while strengthening mine. A two-birds-with-one-stone result.
This life might have time for rest, but it would not have time for idle rest.
I immediately sat down cross-legged and recited the formulas of the Violet Mist Divine Art.
The air around me was drawn in by my breathing.
Blue clouds rise to the heavens, red twilight sinks to the earth. Clouds and glow answer one another, yin and yang embrace and unite. Blue and red blend into violet...
Blue clouds ascended into the sky while red sunset clouds sank to the earth.
Cloud and glow resonated with each other, merging as yin and yang.
Red and blue harmonized and transformed into violet mist.
Purple qi at the heart of heaven, its circulation endless, light kept inward, magnificent righteousness revealed outward, stillness containing movement, movement containing stillness...
While I recited the formulas of the Violet Mist Divine Art, I circulated my breath without pause.
With each breath, the vitality of nature surged ceaselessly into my body.
The breathing was hot. It felt as though I had shoved several pounds of heated iron into my throat.
Breathing was hard, but if I stopped, the natural energy I had painstakingly drawn into my body would scatter.
My body is hot.
The Violet Mist Divine Art was a supremely yang martial art.
And since it was summer, each breath I swallowed and exhaled was unbearably scorching.
I couldn’t see my own eyes, but the heat boiling out from my body must have been rising like mirage shimmer in the air outside.
...Mind and qi in perfect unity, the limitless void, violet glow stretching ten thousand li.
If I failed to enter the Violet Mist Divine Art here, I would only grow stronger at roughly the same pace as in my past life.
Since I had to stop the Bloodshed no matter what, it was vital that I build my foundation with the Violet Mist Divine Art.
Natural energy melted into my body. It plunged into a body that knew nothing of martial arts and beat at my pressure points without mercy. It was so hot I could barely breathe.
And then, the instant I completed one full cycle of circulation...
“......!”
Like a lie, the pain disappeared.
As I drew breath and circulated the Violet Mist Divine Art, my energy moved through my blood and vessels without the slightest obstacle.
Only then did I open my eyes.
Slowly inhaling through my mouth, I felt a fresh breeze pour into my chest as though a hole had been opened straight through it.
My body feels alive.
That was the power of a supreme yang martial art.
I couldn’t hold back the surge of exhilaration and clenched my fist hard.
I have fully restored the divine art created by our ancestor!
Since I couldn’t make a sound, I kicked at the ground for no reason at all to vent my excitement.
Even if my dantian had been destroyed and I had become a cripple, I wasn’t powerless.
I had restored the heritage of my ancestors and made it succeed like this.
For now, my level wasn’t high enough for the energy of the Violet Mist Divine Art to appear as anything more than a faint bluish current.
But as I progressed in training, that blue energy would turn into a violet current.
High-level martial arts didn’t just change the user’s energy; they could transform the cultivator’s very body.
Sometimes they even changed the color of the skin, though that was exceedingly rare. More often, they altered the color of hair and eyes.
When one learned a yang art, the hair on the head or the beard might turn red, and the eyes might too.
When one learned an ice art, the hair could whiten or the eyes could turn blue.
There was such a person in Mount Hua as well.
Jeok Mu-ha, with his crimson hair and beard, was one such example.
Having trained the Fire Cloud Plum Blossom Severing Sword to the highest level, his body’s coloration had changed when he was in his forties.
The Violet Mist Divine Art was not a martial art that changed the color of the hair, but once one reached a certain level, the eyes would be tinged with violet.
A martial art whose changes were visible was not suited to secret training.
Still, I have no intention of hiding it.
I bent my knees and sprang upward with all my strength.
I landed on a tree branch above me, then moved from branch to branch until I climbed all the way to the top.
Beyond the trees bearing their blue leaves, I could see my master’s quarters far away.
My realm hadn’t changed. I hadn’t formed a dantian.
And yet everything felt different.
“One success of the Violet Mist Divine Art.”
The strength I could gather in my hand was already different.
“At this rate, instead of deliberately losing to Ha Seo-hwa tomorrow, I almost want to test myself against her...”
In the end, I was still a martial artist down to my bones.
If I thought only of the plan, it would be right to shake her off here.
But at the same time, I wanted to test a power I didn’t yet understand.
Aside from Jung Nam-jung and Seo Jin-ah, only that genius could possibly be my opponent.
My excitement only lasted a moment.
Until the sun went down, I trained by circulating energy through the Violet Mist Divine Art.
On the battlefield, a sliver of inner energy could save your life.
It had been true for me, and it had been true for the others too.
It was only an estimate, but if I built up my qi with the Violet Mist Divine Art from childhood, it seemed it might be no less effective than taking a powerful spiritual elixir.
“As expected, it’s worthy of being called a divine art.”
How had our ancestor been able to create such a martial art?
He was undoubtedly a genius beyond comparison with me.
The inner-energy accumulation speed of the Plum Blossom Qi Gong was noticeably slow.
Instead, during its circulation process, it expelled turbid energy to create a body fit to learn martial arts.
That was why Mount Hua’s martial artists could perfect the Plum Blossom Qi Gong even though its qi accumulation was slow.
But the Violet Mist Divine Art could accumulate in a single day what would have taken ten days with the Plum Blossom Qi Gong.
Its purification of turbid energy was also far superior to the Plum Blossom Qi Gong, making it impossible to ask for anything better.
The problem is that it’s maddeningly difficult.
If I hadn’t had my experience from my past life, I would have died from deviation into qi insanity during training, even if I had memorized the formulas of the Violet Mist Divine Art.
Now that I had trained it myself, I understood why it was not casually passed down to others, and why the sect leader only transmitted it to the next sect leader.
If merely circulating energy made it this difficult, then training the Violet Mist Sword Art must have been absurdly hard.
But it’s precisely that incredible a martial art.
I could also understand why losing the Violet Mist Divine Art had weakened the Mount Hua Sect.
When the sect leader was around the age when I first entered adolescence, he created martial arts to replace the Violet Mist Divine Art and the Violet Mist Sword Art.
The inner cultivation method was called the Plum Blossom Heavenly Fragrance Mind Method.
The sword art was called the White Flow Plum Blossom Sword Art.
I too trained in those two martial arts as the sect leader’s disciple.
And indeed, they were worthy of the reputation of the Ten Landscapes of the Martial World, of the Sword Sovereign.
In particular, the White Flow Plum Blossom Sword Art had even been praised by the elders as surpassing the Twenty-Four Style Plum Blossom Sword Art.
The elders and I had truly believed those two martial arts could replace the Violet Mist Divine Art.
Only the sect leader, the one who had created them, had not thought so.
We had taken that for modesty, but now that I had actually trained the Violet Mist Divine Art, I saw that the two martial arts didn’t even qualify as divine arts.
Sect leader, I’m sorry.
I silently apologized to him in my heart.
But the fact remained that the Violet Mist Divine Art was more profound and more powerful.
It was only at the very beginning of the first level, and yet I could already roughly estimate its fearsome might.
I imagined the sect leader instead of myself training in the Violet Mist Divine Art.
If a martial artist of the Profound Realm had trained the Violet Mist Divine Art to its peak, could he have defeated the Blood Sky Demon Emperor?
After thinking it over carefully, I arrived at one conclusion.
Even so, the sect leader would still lose.
That was because Taehu the Real Person, the sect leader of the Wudang Sect, had fallen to the Blood Sky Demon Emperor.
He had trained the Wudang Sect’s divine art, the Tai Chi Divine Art, to its peak, and he was a master among masters who had mastered the Tai Chi Graceful Sword.
Since ancient times, the Tai Chi Divine Art had been regarded as equal to the Violet Mist Divine Art, but if Taehu the Real Person had been defeated, then my sect leader could not have won either.
But if the sect leader learned the Violet Mist Divine Art...
And then there was me.
The Mount Hua disciples who passed through my hands would also become stronger.
Once my thoughts reached that point, I decided what to do about my spar with Ha Seo-hwa tomorrow.
I’ll lose cleanly.
I couldn’t afford to ruin a larger plan just because I wanted to test the power of a martial art.
* * *
“I lost.”
“......”
Ha Seo-hwa stared down at me lying in the center of the training ground.
After twenty exchanges, I had let my guard slip at the very moment our swords met naturally and lost my grip on my wooden sword, giving her the victory.
The instructor had also announced the result without hesitation.
“Duel over. Ha Seo-hwa wins!”
The moment the instructor finished speaking, she lowered her wooden sword and extended a hand to me where I lay.
“Ah, thank you.”
I took her hand and tried to stand, but in the next instant I was flailing helplessly at empty air.
Ha Seo-hwa wasn’t holding my hand at all.
She had grabbed me by the collar.
“You...”
Her voice trembled with suppressed anger.
“...are looking down on me?”
“What?”
“Again.”