Because It Was Mount Hua (1)
"Grrrrrrrgh!"
A dark cave.
A bandaged hand pushed into the empty cavern, where not a single thread of light reached.
"Grrrrrrrrrgh……."
And then, a face so twisted it seemed incapable of contorting any further suddenly appeared.
"Aaaaaaaah!"
Thud! Thud!
Chung Myung spread both hands and clawed at the ground, crawling his way into the cave.
"Huff! Huff! Huff! You crazy bastard, Plum Blossom Sword Saint!"
What kind of lunatic built a hideout in a place like this and then lived in it? Had he gone mad from spending all his time in the mountains mastering martial arts?
Ah. The Plum Blossom Sword Saint was me.
"Damn it, I’m dead."
Chung Myung flopped onto his back on the floor. It only felt real now, the fact that he had somehow made it all the way to the cave, and for some reason, tears almost came to his eyes.
I really nearly died.
Climbing a cliff he couldn’t have scaled with a healthy body, while both his hands were broken, had been anything but easy. Any person with the faintest shred of common sense, anyone who actually possessed a brain and knew how to think, would have recognized their limits and waited for another day.
Unfortunately, Chung Myung was a person who possessed a brain, but not thought.
"I said if I can’t get up now, it’ll take even longer!"
As if he were making excuses to himself, he shouted wildly before collapsing again with a groan.
"Ugh. This old man’s gonna die."
No, wait. He was a child now. He still kept getting that mixed up sometimes.
Still, he had somehow managed to make a rope sturdy enough to get here. If that rope had snapped too, he really would have gone to meet Yama.
And if that had happened, Yama himself would probably have struggled not to laugh.
At least it was a relief he wouldn’t have to see that spectacle.
"Ugh."
Forcing his creaking back straight, Chung Myung pushed himself upright and looked around.
He couldn’t see a damn thing.
Not because of the pain—because it was dark as a tomb.
"Tch. Around here, I think…."
He reached out blindly, and something snagged at his fingertips.
"There we go."
He gave it a sharp tug, and a cloth covering shifted aside, flooding the interior with light. Looking at the object that glowed softly, Chung Myung snorted.
"I really had no plan at all, huh?"
The light of the night pearl was clear and luminous.
He couldn’t make a fire inside the cave. The entrance opened downward, so if he lit one, the whole place would fill with smoke in no time.
Even Chung Myung couldn’t drink in that acrid haze. To be precise, he could, but why would he? It wasn’t like he was trying to suffer for fun.
And yet I went and stuck a night pearl in here.
Do you know how much that thing cost?
I sneaked it out of the offerings brought into Mount Hua.
Back then, so many things came and went that stealing something like that barely made a ripple. Of course, later on the sect leader and the Treasury Pavilion probably coughed blood trying to balance the ledgers, but whatever.
"What’s done is done."
Once again, he found himself realizing just how utterly reckless the Plum Blossom Sword Saint of the past had been.
Ah. That’s me.
He kept forgetting that part.
Chung Myung calmly surveyed the now-bright cave interior.
"Hmm."
Inside the space, which was neither large nor small, there was only a bed for resting, a small tea table, and a chest.
And yet it somehow felt dignified. Perhaps time had weathered everything here, because even the plainest things had a certain presence to them.
"Wow. So this is how it works?"
A new realization washed over him.
If Chung Myung had died without being reborn, and someone from Mount Hua had discovered this place a hundred years later, wouldn’t they have gone crazy thinking it was the seclusion chamber of some senior master? What if they had stumbled in by chance after falling off the cliff?
"That’s cliff divine art for you. Cliff divine art."
In truth, it had just been a place for hiding out and getting drunk, but there was no way future generations would have seen it that way.
They’d probably have assumed there was some hidden secret in the cave and done all sorts of things to uncover it.
"Come to think of it, maybe all those cliff divine arts were made up that way."
Chung Myung chuckled and walked over to the chest. With an utterly unceremonious motion, he lifted the lid. Dust that had gathered for nearly a hundred years billowed upward, thick and choking.
"Cough! Ugh! Cough!"
He waved the dust away and peered inside.
The first thing that caught his eye was a row of liquor bottles. Seeing all those bottles in every shape and size made his mouth water on the spot….
No, wait. The liquor wasn’t important right now.
He forced the bottles out of his sight and turned to a small box sitting beside them.
This is it!
Chung Myung snatched up the box. It was a little larger and heavier than he remembered.
"Huuuu."
Taking a deep breath, he lifted the lid carefully. At once, a rich plum fragrance spread through the cave.
It felt as though a grove of plum blossoms had burst into bloom all around him.
Click.
When the lid finally opened fully, round pills filled the box. A layer of something small had been laid across the bottom, and above it sat five pure-white pills, white as snow.
"Krrr!"
Emotion surged over him like a tide. Tears pooled at the corners of his eyes.
The things spread across the bottom weren’t mere padding to protect the pills.
They were Plum Blossom Pills.
"You’re really insane."
Plum Blossom Pills might have been common, but to pile them up and stash them away like that? Just how greedy did a person have to be to do something like this? If the sect leader had seen this mess, he would have clutched the back of his neck and fallen over.
"Still, you didn’t hoard the Purple Heaven Pills, did you, senior brother?"
Chung Myung offered a pointless excuse to ease his embarrassment.
Of course, he hadn’t exactly left them alone. More accurately, he hadn’t been able to touch the Purple Heaven Pills. Like the Great Rejuvenation Pills of Shaolin, the Purple Heaven Pills were treated as top-grade elixirs even within Mount Hua. That was why, no matter how high a Mount Hua elder’s status was, they couldn’t just take them at will.
The Purple Heaven Pills could only be taken out with the approval of both the Medicine Hall and the sect leader.
As for the Plum Blossom Pills and the like, an elder could take as many as they wanted. Of course, to mess with the Snow Plum Pills, even among elders you’d need one with immense influence—but who was Chung Myung? He was Mount Hua’s greatest master, the Plum Blossom Sword Saint.
More like Mount Hua’s greatest disaster, right!
It felt as if some hallucinated voice was barking at him from nowhere.
"Whatever."
For now, the important thing was that he had gotten his hands on the elixir. With this, he would be able to heal his body.
Chung Myung took one Snow Plum Pill from the box and carefully closed the lid. It had once been something he’d used like candy for hangovers, but when your position changed, so did the value of things. Right now, these elixirs were no different from priceless treasures.
"Ah, this is making my skin crawl."
He gently placed the box back into the chest and looked tenderly at the Snow Plum Pill in his hand.
A pure, cleansing fragrance kept rising from the snow-white pill. Just breathing it in made him feel as though his body was already recovering.
"They say people never know what they have until it’s gone."
Back when Mount Hua had still been vying for the title of the world’s greatest sect, nobody had even glanced at Snow Plum Pills. The only thing they had treasured was the Purple Heaven Pill.
That was why Chung Myung had been able to squirrel away so many Plum Blossom Pills.
It wasn’t just Chung Myung. That kind of atmosphere had been everywhere within Mount Hua. Which, come to think of it, made perfect sense. If you already had enough better pills to go around, who would pay attention to the lesser ones?
But now that things had come to this, the elixirs that had once seemed insignificant felt incredibly precious.
"Damn it. How did I end up in a state like this?"
He’d rather die than groan about it.
Chung Myung immediately sat down cross-legged where he was. He could gripe about his lot in life later. For now, he needed to fully recover his body. And if he could build a little more internal energy in the process, that would be even better.
Settling into meditation, Chung Myung tossed the Snow Plum Pill into his mouth. Once it entered, it melted before he even had a chance to chew, sliding down his throat on its own.
The fresh scent bloomed across his mouth.
But Chung Myung had no time to savor it before he began circulating his energy.
Just because you ate an elixir didn’t mean your internal energy would increase on its own. You had to fully make the elixir’s power your own before its energy could truly enhance you.
This was where a subtle problem arose.
When your internal energy was still lacking and you were young, you couldn’t fully absorb an elixir even if you ate one. Your ability to control its energy was too weak.
On the other hand, once you were old enough to handle your power skillfully?
Even then, the effect wasn’t complete. By then, you already had a great deal of internal energy built up. Elixirs were made to fill what was missing. They couldn’t raise something that was already full any higher.
If eating elixirs instantly filled your internal energy, then those Shaolin bastards would’ve chomped down ten Great Rejuvenation Pills each and become the number one bald monk in the world.
That was what spiritual medicines did—they filled in the gaps in one’s qi. They were most effective when you were young and weak, but the downside was that young children couldn’t fully absorb their power.
But Chung Myung?
I can suck it down to the marrow.
Here was the one and only child in all the world with perfect control over energy.
He was the stuff of legend—a veteran newbie. No, a newbie with outrageously veteran-level experience.
"Hoo."
The Snow Plum Pill that entered his stomach began surging along his blood vessels.
Wooooooong.
Energy stirred within his body. The enormous force he hadn’t felt in so long made him feel absurdly proud.
Focus.
Sealing the energy so it didn’t burst out through his meridians and filling his dantian with it? That was nothing to Chung Myung now. But what he needed to do wasn’t so simple.
He had to replenish the incomplete innate qi within him.
His thick, dull consciousness sharpened like a blade. But Chung Myung didn’t stop there. He ground his awareness finer and finer, honing it until it became as sharp as a needle before perfectly controlling the Snow Plum Pill’s energy and driving it into his dantian.
Careful. Careful.
Gentle and delicate, as if handling a newborn infant.
As his consciousness sank inward, his dantian rose vividly in his mind’s eye, so clear it seemed he could reach out and touch it.
But Chung Myung’s target wasn’t the dantian. Deeper than that—deep in the very center of it, at the root that human beings carried from the moment of birth.
No!
Just as he was about to guide the energy into his dantian, Chung Myung suddenly pulled the surging force back.
It’s impure.
By nature, elixirs were created to extract and consume only the good qi found in the world. In other words, they refined medicines down to their purest essence.
But even Mount Hua’s proud Snow Plum Pill contained too many impure elements to enter Chung Myung’s dantian. If the energy in his dantian was like crystal-clear mountain spring water, then the Snow Plum Pill’s energy felt more like stagnant, rotten water.
Chung Myung made a decisive choice.
Filter it out!
If he filtered the Snow Plum Pill’s energy this way, he would lose most of its medicinal effect. It wasn’t an easy decision.
But there was no point in accepting all of it. Hadn’t he come all this way precisely to create the most complete, most perfect foundation possible? He couldn’t ruin everything because he was impatient for quick results.
Leave only the purest energy and discard the rest!
The energy circulated through Chung Myung’s body. As it did, it was gradually worn down. The impurities mixed into the Snow Plum Pill interwove with the impurities already inside his flesh and were expelled from his body.
Before long, thick, black sweat began seeping out of Chung Myung’s skin.