Flowing Water Never Freezes
"N… now? You mean right now?"
"There's no reason to delay. Venerable Saeng Sa, I ask that you observe as well. You must be prepared in case something goes wrong."
Even the Life and Death Venerable found himself nodding as if entranced by Yun Cheon's unstoppable command of the moment.
The momentum had already passed entirely to Yun Cheon.
"Fine. I'll watch over you. Begin."
Seol Yeong carefully sat cross-legged before Yun Cheon.
Between the two of them, a chill of cold energy and a faint trace of warmth crossed in the air.
Yun Cheon's low voice split the silence of the Demonic Physician Hall.
"Forgive the intrusion. I must examine your meridians directly, so I will place my hands on your back."
Setting aside the divide between men and women, it was near taboo for one martial artist to probe another's interior with his qi. Done carelessly, it could send the recipient spiraling into qi deviation or cripple her internal power entirely — a dangerous act by any measure.
"Quite right. Better to take every precaution."
Yet Saeng Sa Jon consented, and Seol Yeong, without a moment's hesitation, offered him her back.
"Please."
Yun Cheon's palm came to rest against Seol Yeong's back.
It's warm….
To the girl who had suffered all her life beneath the bone-carving pain of her cold affliction, the True Origin True Qi flowing from Yun Cheon's hand felt as gentle as spring sunlight.
But Yun Cheon's expression grew grave.
"It's worse than I expected. Have you trained in a cold-attribute internal art?"
"…Yes. My mother's family, the Ice Soul Seol Family, passed down their internal cultivation method to me. It's called the Ice Soul Divine Art."
Yun Cheon's eyes narrowed.
The Ice Soul Divine Art — the supreme technique of the North Sea, a power from beyond the borders. An Peerless martial art that all the world coveted, yet to the present Seol Yeong, it was nothing short of a lethal poison.
"That is the root of your suffering."
"I'm sorry? The root?"
"An ordinary internal art gathers qi and seals it inside a vessel called the dantian. But for those born with blocked meridians like you and me, that method is nothing less than suicide."
Yun Cheon turned his gaze to Saeng Sa Jon as he continued.
"If the young lady was born with pure Yin blocked meridians, then her progress in internal cultivation must have been astonishingly swift as a child. What took others ten years, she would have achieved in one or two. They must have called her a prodigy."
"…!"
Seol Yeong's eyes wavered.
He was exactly right.
As a child, she had been called a genius. The miracle of accumulating internal power with every breath she took. Her family had rejoiced, and she too had believed herself blessed.
Until the pain began.
"But it was never a blessing. It was like pouring water into a cracked poison vessel."
Yun Cheon's diagnosis was merciless.
"Your Yin energy was overflowing from birth, and with nowhere to escape, it only ever accumulated. In the end, your weakest blood vessels froze over and burst, one after another. Right now, young lady, you are trapped inside an ice prison of your own making."
A strangled groan escaped Saeng Sa Jon's lips.
He had suspected as much in a vague way, but unable to bring himself to cripple her Ice Soul Divine Art, he had been wringing his hands in torment all this while. The moment that internal power was severed, the suppressed Yin energy would spiral beyond anyone's control. Caught between ruin and ruin — a classic dead end.
"Then… what are we supposed to do? At this point, we can't just scatter her internal power, can we?!"
"We are not scattering it."
Yun Cheon looked Seol Yeong squarely in the eyes.
"We are making it flow."
"Making it… flow?"
"Do not try to imprison your qi in the dantian. Instead, tear down the levee and open the waterway."
Yun Cheon explained it through the lens of his own experience.
"From this moment on, I will carve a path inside your body. Not the great acupoints — I will circulate the energy through the countless fine secondary vessels that have not yet frozen over."
"The secondary vessels… carrying energy that vast?"
"If the great acupoints are a river's main current, the secondary vessels are its countless branches and tributaries. Standing water rots, but flowing water does not easily freeze."
At his explanation, Seol Yeong nodded.
…He doesn't seem to have ever properly studied medicine at his age. But his insight into the body itself is remarkable.
Even Saeng Sa Jon was inwardly startled by it.
"Forget the circulation formulas of the Ice Soul Divine Art for now. All you need to do is follow the path my energy draws — nothing more."
Yun Cheon closed his eyes.
Through the palm pressed against her back, he began to pour in the qi of the Life-Prolonging Breathing Technique, the method he himself had devised.
Wuuuung—.
An energy faint but stubborn, carrying the vitality of life itself, slipped down Seol Yeong's frozen spine.
Even in deep winter, fish live on beneath the surface of a frozen river.
The qi Yun Cheon sent into her was like water running beneath the ice.
This is the path.
His energy skirted the hopelessly jammed great acupoints and burrowed into the spiderweb tangle of secondary vessels. The route Yun Cheon laid out was a narrow, precarious passage that no trained martial artist would ever have dared to imagine — not the great highways of the extraordinary meridians or the twelve primary channels, but the hidden crevices between flesh and muscle and bone. Along those thread-thin paths, the energy Yun Cheon released began to move.
Seol Yeong instinctively recoiled.
It was a flow of qi that violated every rule she had trained into her body since childhood. But then Yun Cheon's voice slipped into her ear.
Do not fear. The secondary vessels are a part of your body too.
At that single, resolute declaration, Seol Yeong let go of the control she had been clutching with white knuckles.
And then, a miracle occurred.
Kugugung.
The Yin energy that had lain frozen stiff in her dantian, never so much as twitching, began to flow — slowly, but unmistakably — along the thread-fine channels Yun Cheon had opened.
It should have hurt. The pain of vessels tearing open was supposed to follow.
But.
"Ah…?"
A shiver ran through her.
What burst from between Seol Yeong's lips was not a scream but a gasp of wonder.
It felt clear.
A cool rush, like a chest that had been sealed shut finally bursting open. It was as if the massive boulder of ice that had crushed her heart for years had shattered into fragments and scattered warm through her whole body.
I can… breathe.
Without the knife-cold pain raking at her lungs, the air reached deep into her chest and left again. She had never known that the simple act of breathing could taste so sweet.
"Hooooo…."
A long plume of dull gray turbid breath poured from Seol Yeong's mouth. The stagnant energy trapped in her frozen body was being expelled at last. And in the same moment, a faint but unmistakable flush of color returned to cheeks that had been pale to the point of blue.
"Heo…!"
Saeng Sa Jon's jaw dropped as he watched.
With trembling hands, he snatched up his granddaughter's wrist and took her pulse.
"This— this can't be! The meridians — some of them… they're open?"
It was not a cure. The blocked meridians that lay at the root of it all remained untouched. But where her blood vessels had been jammed to the point of bursting, a small channel now existed.
"Her qi and blood… they're circulating. Bypassing the dantian entirely, winding through her whole body, sustaining her life on its own!"
Saeng Sa Jon stared at Yun Cheon as if looking at a monster.
This went beyond the bounds of medicine. This was a new horizon in the martial sciences themselves. A martial art without a dantian. The hidden principle of flowing qi instead of storing it. This boy had, in order to survive, overturned the fundamental common sense of martial learning.
Yun Cheon slowly withdrew his hand and drew a breath. Beads of sweat clung to his forehead. Guiding another person's energy was several times harder than commanding his own.
"The immediate fire is out. Once the young lady masters this breathing technique and can breathe on her own… she will at least never lose her life to the cold again."
The moment his words ended, Seol Yeong tried to rise and staggered. The strength had drained from her legs. But her face was wet with joy.
"Your kindness…."
Tears burst from Seol Yeong's eyes. They were not tears of sorrow, but of relief — the tears of someone who had, at last, survived.
"The pain… it's gone. When I breathe, it doesn't hurt anymore."
She clutched a trembling hand to her own chest.
Her heart was beating. Not cold and agonizing, but warm and strong.
"Thank you… thank you, truly…."
As Seol Yeong wept, looking for all the world as if she would prostrate herself on the floor, Yun Cheon shook his head flatly.
"She is not cured. We have merely pushed her back half a step from death's door."
His gaze shifted to Saeng Sa Jon.
"I kept my promise, Venerable Saeng Sa."
Saeng Sa Jon stared blankly back and forth between his granddaughter and the boy.
In a single act of healing, this boy had demonstrated what he himself had failed to accomplish in a lifetime. Shame, gratitude, and a cold thrill of awe crashed over him all at once.
"…So you did. You've done it."
Saeng Sa Jon drew an old book from his robes, along with a scroll that looked weighty in his hand, and set them on the table.
"As promised — the secret manual of my life's masterwork, the Demonic Bone Metamorphosis Art. And this…."
He hesitated a moment, then pushed the scroll forward.
"It's a secret art from the Western Regions that Yeong-ah staked her life researching — the Two Extremes Merging Art. She wrote her own commentary in it."
Seol Yeong looked at her grandfather in astonishment, but he shook his head.
"The two of us could never complete it anyway. But if anyone can… perhaps this boy can find the answer you never could."
Saeng Sa Jon's eyes turned serious.
"Yun Cheon. If the three of us join forces, then even the so-called incurable blocked meridian affliction may be conquered. Let us begin in earnest… a joint research effort."
Yun Cheon picked up the book and the scroll, and the corner of his mouth lifted.
Exactly what he had wanted.
"Gladly. Then starting today — let the struggle to live begin."
From that day on, the lights of the Demonic Physician Hall never went out.
By day they pored over ancient texts in the Inner Library; by night they gathered in the hall to study the human body and debate the flow of qi and blood. It was a strange cohabitation — and a ferociously demanding one.
For his granddaughter's sake, Saeng Sa Jon poured out the entirety of the medical knowledge he had built over a lifetime without holding anything back.
"Look here. This vessel is no mere passageway. It is a pool where energy gathers, and a gate that governs its flow. Force it open, and you'll burst the levee — the whole meridian system will collapse."
Saeng Sa Jabon held forth eloquently, tracing the anatomical chart with his finger.
"Grandfather, then what if we bypassed this gate? Here — using the branching vessel beside the Foot Taiyang Bladder Meridian…."
Seol Yeong, sharp-minded by nature and desperate besides, absorbed knowledge like parched earth drinking rain and turned it instantly to new applications.
"Ho? A branch, you say… The idea is sound, but that path is far too narrow and treacherous. Stray from it, and qi deviation is certain."
Just as the two healers' debate ground into a dead end, Yun Cheon — who had been listening in silence — spoke up.
"If the path is narrow, why not simply move through it quickly?"
Having watched their heated debate in quiet, Yun Cheon now offered a startling opinion — one made possible precisely because he knew nothing of medicine.
Saeng Sa Jon and Seol Yeong turned their heads at the same instant.
"Move through it quickly?"
"Rather than widening the vessel physically."
Yun Cheon lifted a brush and drew a spiral across the anatomical chart.
"Flowing water speeds up when it passes through a narrow channel. Add rotation to the qi, increase its velocity and compress its density — then even a narrow path can be threaded through without disturbing the banks."
Saeng Sa Jon's eyes flashed wide open.
"Rotation… of qi? Ha! Fusing the principles of the martial arts into medicine… What in the world is stuffed inside that head of yours?"
"That's brilliant! With that, it just might work!"
Saeng Sa Jon laid down the distilled essence of Central Plains medicine as the framework; Seol Yeong wove in knowledge from the Western Regions and beyond the borders, filling in variables no one had anticipated. And then Yun Cheon shattered the walls with his martial intuition and unorthodox thinking — his innovation opening the road where the others saw only limits.
As the wisdom of the three interlocked and turned like gears, the impossible problems came undone one by one.
The old dust of the Inner Library was swept away, and a new horizon of medicine opened before them.
And then, a fortnight later.
In the deep recesses of the Inner Library's stone chamber.
A faint sound of something splitting echoed from within Yun Cheon's body.
Dududuk.
It was not the sound of joints cracking.
Deep in his dantian, it was the sound of one of the two great serpents coiled there at last raising its head.
…I've done it.
Yun Cheon wrapped a hand around his lower abdomen. The Yin-Yang Great Spirit Blocked Meridians. A constitution of heavenly punishment, where Yin and Yang energies bit each other's tails in a knot of death — a puzzle that could never be solved unless both energies were released at once.
But Yun Cheon had chosen a circuitous route: the subtle principle of the Ice Soul Divine Art, mastered while helping Seol Yeong. Borrowing its logic, he had succeeded in soothing the Yin energy alone and loosening the tangled knot by a fraction.
It's only half a success, but….
The Yang energy still sat jammed shut in silence, yet at least the Yin energy he had freed now flowed at his command.
When Yun Cheon opened his hand, a cool frost crystallized across his palm.
So I've ended up mastering Yin first, of all things.
He clenched his fist, intent on confirming the sensation of the cold internal power —
BANG—!
The heavy iron door of the Inner Library burst open with a violent crash, shattering the stillness.
An intrusion so insolent that under any other circumstances it would have been unthinkable. But the moment Yun Cheon saw the face of the man who had thrown the door open and come rushing in, his eyes wavered.
"Yun Cheon! Come with me at once!"
It was Saeng Sa Jon. The face of the man renowned as the Demonic Physician of the age had gone deathly white. All his usual arrogance and ease were gone, replaced by nothing but urgency.
"Venerable Saeng Sa? What's happened?"
"Yeong-ah… Yeong-ah has collapsed!"
Yun Cheon's heart plummeted.
The joint research had been going smoothly. He had been certain they had found a breakthrough.
"It's different from her earlier seizures! She fainted while circulating your Life-Prolonging Breathing Technique — her qi and blood reversed their flow! Even my arts can't control it!"
Saeng Sa Jon seized Yun Cheon's arm. His hand was trembling, ever so slightly.
"Hurry! If we don't move now… she won't last the night!"
Return of the Cloud Dragon
Author | Chu Sang (Autumn Frost)
Publisher | Samyang C&C Co., Ltd.
Managing Editor | Editorial Department
Published by | Samyang C&C Co., Ltd. — Dream Books
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