Wouldn’t It Be Better Than Dying of Frustration? (5)
The next day.
Yoon Jong opened his eyes halfway.
Why am I sleeping here?
His memory—
Ah!
Yesterday, after getting thoroughly beaten up by Chung Myung one more time, he had collapsed and fallen asleep as if he’d been knocked out. Wait. Was that even the right word? Knocked out? In any case…
I don’t want to get up.
If he opened his eyes, that hell would start all over again. It wasn’t that he planned to avoid training, but honestly, this was really…
“Ugh…”
Yoon Jong snapped his head up.
Someone was crying near his ear.
Crying?
He pushed himself up and turned his head, searching for the source of the sound. Not far away, Jo Gul was sprawled face-down on the ground. Yoon Jong hurried to his feet and ran over to him.
“Gul! Gul! Are you all right?”
“S-sahyung… Waaaaaah! Sahyung!”
“Did you get injured?”
Jo Gul lifted his head with a face like the sky had fallen in. Yoon Jong looked at him with a deeply grave expression.
The Jo Gul he knew was a manly man through and through, someone who never despaired no matter what situation he faced. If that Jo Gul was sniffling and bawling like this, then whatever had happened must be serious indeed.
“Sahyung… my internal energy… my internal energy.”
“Internal energy? Don’t tell me you suffered an internal injury?”
“Hic—sniff. My internal energy increased… That damn internal energy increased!”
“…”
What the hell are you saying?
“…Then why are you crying?”
“Sahyung! I said my internal energy increased!”
“Then why are you crying, you lunatic!”
Jo Gul thrashed about as if he were about to die of frustration.
“If that damned internal energy increased, doesn’t that mean I have to keep doing this crap!”
Ah.
Come to think of it, that made sense.
“If only my body had been wrecked, maybe I wouldn’t have to get beaten up from today on! Why did I get hit only to end up with even more strength in my body? Why! Does that make any kind of sense?”
“…”
Without realizing it, Yoon Jong circulated his energy.
…It’s true.
He could clearly feel that his internal energy had increased.
It was truly astonishing.
What was internal energy, after all?
It was something one spent a lifetime building up, layer upon layer. Only after circulating one’s inner force all year long would one finally go, Oh? It’s increased compared to a year ago.
And yet here he was, able to feel the increase in his body after a single day.
Such an absurd thing…
“...It does. It really is being absorbed.”
Yoon Jong unconsciously clutched the area around his dantian. It was obvious now that the energy of the Honwon Dan packed into his dantian had been absorbed into his body.
In other words…
“I don’t know whether to call that vile thing point-seeking and blood-circulating, or just outright total-body assault.”
Baek Cheon had come over at some point, his expression bitter beyond words.
“...Looks like it,” Yoon Jong said, still somewhat bewildered by the strange situation.
How was he supposed to feel about this? Glad? Or horrified?
“Tch…”
Baek Cheon bit down on his lip as if he had no words left.
That ridiculous, impossible method actually works.
To think energy could be absorbed by beating someone up—if that was truly possible, every sect in the world would have been a violent gang… Wait. Weren’t they already violent gangs?
At that moment, the source of all this misery strolled lazily toward them.
“What are you all whispering about?”
“Ughhh…”
Baek Cheon groaned.
“Because my internal energy increased.”
“Obviously. We went through all that hell because of it yesterday!”
Oh, is that so?
And yet the person who went through all that hell looks remarkably refreshed, doesn’t he?
“It’s not obvious, it’s—”
Baek Cheon let out a long sigh.
“I can’t argue with the result, but I still cannot understand it. Isn’t point-seeking and blood-circulating supposed to be about unblocking clogged meridians?”
“Pretty much. And what I did is a little different from that.”
“...Then?”
“I just beat it up, plain and simple.”
“…”
Baek Cheon’s fingers twitched over the hilt of his sword.
Would the world perhaps become a peaceful place if he just cut this bastard down right here?
If he could, that is.
“How the hell is that supposed to work?”
“Tch.”
Chung Myung clicked his tongue irritably.
If this had been before, he would’ve yanked them around by the hair and dragged them off, telling them to stop making things complicated and just do as he said. But now, he had no choice but to explain.
Chung Myung reached out and tapped Baek Cheon on the chest.
“How was this built?”
“Huh?”
“This muscle.”
Baek Cheon lowered his gaze and looked at his own chest. Sure enough, solid muscle sat there, hard and well-defined. Before training under Chung Myung, it had not been nearly so firm.
As a result of tormenting his body by lifting iron weights alongside the third-generation disciples, his body had become like this.
“I trained.”
“Then why does training make muscle appear?”
“Well…”
Baek Cheon closed his mouth.
It was such a natural thing that he had never really questioned it. There were countless ways to answer, yet none of them felt exact.
“Simple. Because you get injured.”
“...What do you mean?”
“Your muscles tear.”
Chung Myung twisted his hand slightly.
Yoon Jong, listening from the side, tilted his head and asked, “Are you saying that when the muscles are hurt, they grow bigger?”
“Not just muscles. Everything grows stronger when it’s damaged. The place that gets hurt swells, and broken bones heal thicker than before. It differs a little depending on the situation, but that’s usually how it works.”
Chung Myung grinned.
“So, put it the other way around—what’s the best way to train the body?”
“...Get injured.”
“It sounds stupid, but it’s true. In fact, in external training, this is practically a standard method. Everyone’s heard the stories, haven’t they? Shaolin whipping their bodies or stuffing their hands into scalding sand to harden their external art.”
Baek Cheon nodded vaguely.
As a sword user, it was hard to fully sympathize, but he had indeed heard of such training methods among sects that practiced external arts, including Shaolin.
“But that’s for external arts, isn’t it?”
“Mount Hua does something similar too.”
“Huh? Us?”
“When we first used wooden swords, didn’t our hands split open countless times?”
Baek Cheon lowered his eyes to his hands. The hard calluses a swordsman ought to have were visible there.
“...They did.”
“And now? They don’t split, do they?”
“No.”
“The human body gets tougher the more it’s hurt. Too much is poison, but the right kind of injury actually makes the body stronger.”
“Wow…”
Baek Cheon looked at Chung Myung with eyes full of admiration.
“What?”
“No, um…”
Then, looking at Chung Myung with a strangely complicated expression, he said, “I never imagined something like this would be rattling around in your head.”
“…”
And from the side, the others chimed in one by one.
“Now that is surprising.”
“I thought you were just the kind of creature that ate when hungry and fought when angry.”
“So he did have a brain.”
“…”
No. These bastards?
Chung Myung’s cheeks twitched.
“Want me to show you what happens when I really don’t have a brain?”
“Khhm, khhhm.”
“Is it going to rain? The weather’s getting weird…”
When they all abruptly looked away, Chung Myung shot each of them a dagger-like glare before continuing.
“Basically, it’s the same idea.”
“...What is?”
“Internal energy, too.”
“…”
Baek Cheon looked incredulous.
So what Chung Myung was saying now was…
“You’re saying if someone suffers internal injuries, their internal energy increases?”
“That’s right.”
“What kind of nonsense is that? How can internal injury be the same as external injury? Internal injuries can kill a person if they’re severe.”
“Severe external injuries can kill people too.”
“W-well, yes, but…”
Chung Myung sighed.
“Internal energy isn’t any different. An internal injury just means your energy has been damaged. In the process of healing damaged energy, it inevitably becomes stronger than it was before.”
“But I’ve almost never seen that happen.”
“Of course not. The amount of energy you can gather through circulation is limited. But right now, inside Sahyung’s body, there’s energy you can absorb without even circulating it, isn’t there?”
“Uh…”
Baek Cheon nodded before he knew it.
Inside his body now, there was the energy of the Honwon Dan. He could not absorb it all in a short time with his own abilities, but it undoubtedly existed.
“So the body absorbs it on its own?”
“The results speak for themselves, don’t they?”
Chung Myung shrugged.
“It’s not really complicated. If you beat the areas with the meridians hard enough and give the body the right kind of internal injury, it’ll start craving energy in order to recover. Then it naturally searches for other energy within the body and draws it in. In the process, the energy becomes stronger than it was before.”
Chung Myung waggled a finger.
“Energy. Flesh. Either way, it’s a simple principle that works across the board.”
“…”
At the sight of their sahyungs and sajils just staring at him with faces that said they understood nothing at all, Chung Myung snorted.
Yeah, this would be hard to get.
This wasn’t knowledge taught inside a sect.
It was something he had learned by wandering battlefields over and over again.
It was only because he had adapted it in a much gentler way to suit the level and safety of his martial siblings. In truth, this theory had been perfected at the knife’s edge where life and death met.
It was only natural that those who hadn’t learned it with their own bodies would struggle to understand.
“Well, there’s no need to understand it so deeply.”
Crack, crack!
The knuckles of Chung Myung’s fists popped.
“If your head can’t understand, your body will!”
“…”
Ugh. Ugh.
Rolling his neck from side to side, Chung Myung swung both hands and approached them.
“Just think of it as sparring, Sahyung. You’re going to get hit anyway if you spar, so you might as well relax about it, right?”
No.
That was not relaxing at all.
Chung Myung, you seem to have made a terribly wrong assumption. There is no such thing in this world as feeling relaxed while getting beaten.
Do you understand what Sahyung is trying to say?
“What training could be better than this? I give you real combat experience. I make you use every last bit of strength you’ve got. And while I’m at it, I increase your internal energy. Hah, if I’d had a master like this, I’d have gotten twice as strong.”
“You would’ve run away before that, you lunatic!”
“Heh-heh-heh.”
Chung Myung burst out laughing.
“It’s fine. It’s fine. You won’t die. You won’t die. Have you ever heard of someone dying from training?”
No, they hadn’t.
Of course they hadn’t. If I die like this, I won’t be around to hear about it, will I?
We can’t hear it anyway, you idiot!
Baek Cheon let out a deep sigh.
The fire inside him was boiling up, but for now, he forced his complaints back down.
Then, all of a sudden, with a far more solemn face, he tightened his grip on his sword and shouted at Chung Myung, who was still running his mouth in front of him.
“Enough!”
“Hmm?”
“So what you’re saying is that if we endure this so-called training—which is really just assault—we’ll get a lot stronger in a short time, right?”
“Of course.”
Chung Myung nodded without the slightest hesitation.
“Now that’s something I like hearing.”
Come to think of it, there really was no better opportunity than this.
Setting internal energy aside, to have a duel with that monster twice a day? For any martial artist, that was no different from a dream opportunity.
“However.”
Baek Cheon gritted his teeth.
“You’d better be careful. If a sword mark ends up on that face of yours, your already terrible looks will get even uglier.”
“Oh-ho.”
Chung Myung grinned.
That’s more like it.
This was why he liked Baek Cheon.
No matter how much you beat him, insult him, or smack him around, he never gave up.
“If you can, then try it!”
“Gladly, you brat!”
Baek Cheon drew his sword and charged at Chung Myung.
“Dieeeee!”
“That won’t be enough!”
Watching the two of them begin to tangle together, Jo Gul sighed mournfully.
“When did that man get so in sync with that bastard?”
“...How should I know?”
Yoon Jong also let out a heavy sigh.
“Do you think we’ll still be alive by the time we reach Yunnan?”
“…”
The two of them suddenly felt that the road to Yunnan was far, far too long.