Everything I Do Is for Your Own Good (1)
Day thirty-one.
Polished.
Shining.
“……”
Baek Cheon and Yoon Jong looked at Hyun Jong with unmistakable suspicion rising in their eyes.
“Sasuk, I… I might be imagining things, but…”
“……No, I don’t think it’s my imagination.”
He was glowing.
He still hadn’t fully put on any flesh, but there was no mistaking it—Hyun Jong’s face had a radiance it had never possessed before.
This wasn’t merely a matter of recovering his original color. His skin was as pale and lustrous as a newborn’s, smooth enough to catch the light.
“Ah! It’s blinding.”
Just then, the sun slipped out from behind the clouds, and Hyun Jong’s face, bathed in sunlight, burst with brilliance. To anyone who didn’t know better, he might have looked less like a Taoist priest and more like a Buddha.
“……Can a person even change that drastically?”
Ten days ago, he had looked so gaunt he might as well have been a mummified corpse. Yet in a little over a week, he had gained a baby’s complexion. It was enough to make the heavens and earth turn upside down.
And it wasn’t just Hyun Jong.
Hyun Sang and Hyun Young, standing beside him, looked completely different as well.
“……Are they using some kind of face wash?”
“How could they be?”
“It’s because it makes no sense.”
It wasn’t merely that their faces had become pale and glossy. The exhaustion and pain that had clung to them until recently had vanished, replaced by a strange, easy composure.
What in the world is going on?
It almost sounded like Chung Myung was cackling in his ear.
Day thirty-five.
“Grrrgh! Damn it, this thing!”
“Hold it right there!”
“Haah… I’m losing my mind!”
Watching the disciples cling to a pillar and struggle like their lives depended on it, Unam frowned.
“Can’t you move it?”
“……Sasuk, this thing won’t budge at all.”
“Haaah……”
Unam let out a deep, frustrated sigh. Near the top of the pillar in the hall where the disciples were hanging, a huge crack had formed.
“……This is troublesome. At this rate, we’ll have no choice but to take it apart.”
“What’s going on?”
“Ah, Elder.”
At the voice that had approached at just the right time, Unam quickly bowed his head. Hyun Young waved a hand irritably.
“Skip the formalities. Why are they all plastered to that thing like that?”
“Well, that is…”
Unam scratched his head and explained.
“When we held the event before, didn’t we expand the front of that hall?”
“We did.”
When the people from the Sichuan Dang Family repaired the buildings for the Heavenly Alliance inauguration, they had said that this hall was too low to look proper, so they had simply added a new section to the front and raised it.
“But it seems it can’t bear the weight.”
“Hm? That can’t be right. There’s no way the Dang Family wouldn’t have accounted for that.”
“Normally, there wouldn’t be any problem, but the pillar seems to have shifted a little.”
“Ah.”
Hyun Young nodded as if he understood. If the pillars stood straight, the structure could bear the added weight without issue. But because the old building had begun to twist and the pillars had gradually drifted out of place, cracks had apparently appeared.
“So we tried to push the pillar back into place, but that seems difficult. In that case, we’d have no choice but to dismantle the hall and rebuild it…”
“Wait. What? Dismantle what?”
“The hall…”
At that moment, sparks seemed to fly from Hyun Young’s eyes.
“What nonsense are you talking? Do you even know what that hall is?”
Unable to bear the pressure any longer, Unam sighed again.
“Of course, that hall contains the traces of our ancestors…”
“It was built by the Dang Family, wasn’t it, the Dang Family! Do you have any idea how much money it would take to hire craftsmen from the Sichuan Dang Family? And you want to dismantle a hall they built? Have you lost your mind?”
“……”
Ah. So that was the problem.
“Th-that… Well, I’d also prefer to preserve it if possible, but if we leave it like this, it’ll collapse soon. I was worried the disciples might get hurt…”
“Collapse? What are you talking about? You just need to straighten the pillar! Step aside!”
Hyun Young pushed Unam out of the way and strode over to the disciples clinging to the pillar.
“Of course it won’t move if you just try to shove it in! You need to lift it a little first and then push.”
“Huh?”
“It’s stuck against the floor, so naturally it won’t slide!”
At his words, the color drained from the disciples’ faces.
Lift it?
This?
This pillar was carrying the weight of the hall. In the end, asking them to lift it was no different from asking them to lift the entire building.
Easy to say, but how were they supposed to lift something they couldn’t even move?
“Uh, I don’t think that’s possible…”
“It is.”
“E-Elder. Really, I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Tsk tsk. Everything is possible. Everything! Now, get back on it!”
“But realistically…”
“Reality, my ass. I’m telling you, it can be done! There’s nothing in this world that can’t be done! Stop dawdling and get on it!”
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can be reasoned with, and those who can’t.
And anyone could see that Hyun Young was firmly the latter.
“Grrr.”
“Heuk.”
The disciples swallowed their tears and clung to the pillar again. Watching them, Hyun Young shouted the count with enthusiasm.
“Now! One, two! Lift!”
“Aaaaaaagh!”
“Rrrraaaaah!”
“More! More! Put more strength into it! Properly!”
“Aaaaaaaagh!”
The disciples screamed until veins stood out on their foreheads. They drew on every ounce of strength they had, and yet the pillar remained as unmoving as ever.
“More! More! Have you never eaten in your life? What good are martial artists if they’re this weak? Lift it more! More!”
“Aaaagh!”
“Enough!”
Thud. Thud.
After straining so hard, the disciples let go of the pillar and collapsed where they stood, crumpling to the ground.
“Oh, I’m dying……”
“My arms… my arms feel like they’ve fallen off…”
But Hyun Young, as if he had barely exerted himself at all, stood with his hands behind his back, checked whether the pillar was set properly, and clicked his tongue.
“Tsk tsk. Young men, and this weak? That’s all from neglecting training!”
The disciples, speechless, stared blankly up at him. Hyun Young brushed the dust from his sleeves and asked Unam,
“Is it done?”
“Huh? Ah… yes! Elder, it’s done.”
“See? This is all it took. Why would anyone dismantle a perfectly good hall? Tsk tsk.”
With a dry cough, Hyun Young wandered off as if nothing had happened. One of the disciples, still dazed, murmured to himself as he watched the elder’s imposing back.
“……What the hell just happened?”
Unam tilted his head. “Why are you all like that?”
“N-no. It’s just that we were definitely using all our strength before, and it didn’t budge at all.”
“Well, that’s because Elder Hyun Young has skill, isn’t it?”
“……Is there really technique involved in lifting something?”
“……”
“And this wasn’t something skill alone should have fixed.”
“Exactly. I was trying my best to put in strength too, and then the moment Elder Hyun Young went ‘heup!’ beside me, the pillar suddenly shot upward……”
“It’s like some kind of ghost story……”
Unam turned again, staring at Hyun Young’s back with a shocked expression.
He was walking with his hands behind him, his stride as ordinary as always.
“……What on earth……”
Day forty-one.
Throb.
Twitch.
Bunch.
The three men standing side by side cracked their necks lightly.
Riiip!
But then came the sound of something tearing. Hyun Jong frowned and tugged at the front of his clothes. The underlayer had ripped and was hanging in tatters.
“Grr. This robe is too small.”
“That’s why I changed into a bigger one long ago.”
“I did the same, Sasuk.”
Hyun Jong laughed heartily.
“At this age, no less.”
As he chuckled, the muscles across his chest flexed and shifted.
He had thought that at his age, recovering the body of his youth would be impossible. Yet in just a little over a month, the old frame had vanished, replaced by a body that would have drawn applause from younger men. His body below the neck was so robust it hardly seemed to belong to the face above it.
“……So it really could be done.”
“Indeed.”
It wasn’t just that their bodies had improved.
Compared to the surging inner force in their dantian, like a great river in flood, the visible physical changes were nothing more than a small part of the whole.
What’s more, the altered body and inner force had given rise to confidence, and that confidence had changed Hyun Jong’s expression first.
“Chung Myung.”
“Yes?”
“Then how strong are we now?”
“Roughly… about thirty percent?”
Chung Myung seemed to think for a moment before answering.
“You’re basically just at the beginning now.”
“At the beginning…”
If this was merely the beginning, then just how much stronger would they become once they reached the major realms?
“……Now I understand why Pure Purple Divine Skill was a martial art reserved only for Mount Hua’s sect leaders.”
“Hey, this is just the start. And not everyone gets the same effect. Sect Leader and the elders had already spent a long time honing their inner force, so the amount of it was already substantial. The problem was that it wasn’t being used properly. This time, with Pure Purple Divine Skill, we’ve gathered up all the existing inner force and even the inner force that had pooled in the meridians and unified it all. Now training will be a whole lot easier.”
“Yes, yes!”
Hyun Jong’s eyes, when they rested on Chung Myung, were full of affection.
When Chung Myung first said he would pass on Pure Purple Divine Skill, Hyun Jong had assumed it would be a mere formality—that he would teach them a bit of it for appearances’ sake and then focus on the other disciples. But to think he had devoted an entire month to the three of them.
During that time, he knew it would have been more efficient to teach the other disciples instead, and that had always bothered him. And yet Hyun Jong could not bring himself to say, enough, stop.
Even if they had stepped back from the front lines now, he and the elders were still martial artists. They could not possibly have no desire to become stronger. They had only endured their longing because the circumstances had not allowed otherwise.
And now this brat Chung Myung had finally released all that tightly suppressed desire.
“Thank you.”
“Huh? What’s this all of a sudden?”
Chung Myung tilted his head. At that, Hyun Jong could only smile gently.
“Nothing.”
If it were Chung Myung, he would probably just say he’d done what he was supposed to do.
“Don’t think you’ve accomplished everything already. You still need to keep training steadily and reach at least fifty percent. That’s when my real power will start coming out.”
“……”
He already felt like he could split a mountain in half with his bare hands, and Chung Myung was saying they needed to reach fifty percent before they’d see his real power?
Just what level of power was that?
“And you need to keep practicing Plum Blossom Sword Manual as well. Every inner force needs the proper vessel. Twenty-Four Plum Blossom Sword Art can’t fully contain this level of inner force.”
“Of course. How could I be negligent?”
“Also…”
Chung Myung grinned.
“This is the most important part.”
“Hm?”
The smile grew steadily more sinister.
“Looks to me like the older brothers and uncles have put on a little fat around the waist lately.”
“……”
“And it seems like even when Sasuk Ungeom gives direct instruction these days, you’re all still half-hearted about it.”
“How dare you!”
“What the—”
“Ahem! That won’t do!”
Replies as obvious as stage lines came back in a rush, eager and immediate. Chung Myung snickered and got to the point.
“So here’s what I’m saying… since we have this opportunity, how about the disciples who’ll be learning Pure Purple Divine Skill get direct instruction from the elders and the Sect Leader? What do you think?”
At once, all three of them broke into pleased smiles.
“If you put it that way, then… ahem!”
“We really ought to make some time for that. Khm!”
“As the Martial Hall Leader, I can hardly refuse such a request. Ahem!”
They flexed and unflexed their fists a little.
Anyone who had watched Chung Myung train the disciples would have thought about it at least once.
Honestly, I’d like to try that myself.
So this day has finally come!
I’ll grind them into the dirt.
These were three people who earned the disciples of Mount Hua’s respect with every breath they took.
Hyun Jong, Hyun Sang, and Hyun Young.
And now, at last, the time had come for them to plant a new emotion in the disciples’ eyes.
Reverence.