The Path of Asura (3)
In the wake of the duel's unexpected conclusion, which had ended in the blink of an eye, the arena fell into a momentary hush.
...That's nothing more than First-rate?
Cheon Yuha thought as she gazed at the man standing alone atop the training platform.
If that man was truly First-rate, then surely it was the world that had gone wrong.
Unless some trickery had been at play, how could someone that strong possibly remain stuck at First-rate?
She suddenly recalled the look in Choi Gangjun's eyes from their first meeting—that inexplicable confidence with which he had genuinely tried to beat her, a Super-Peak martial artist.
Since yesterday, she had begun to feel as though she understood the source of that confidence.
No—she was certain of it now.
...That man is strong.
Perhaps stronger than even me.
KWAAANG—!! The spear of light and the greatsword pierced through one another, each trying to tear the other apart, erupting in thunderous roars.
An angel of white wings and a warrior of steel had collided head-on.
Neither of them seemed the least bit concerned that this was merely a class exercise. They were pouring out every ounce of their strength to crush each other. It was a clash of such magnitude that, had the protective barrier not enclosed the platform, the aftermath alone would have devastated the surrounding area.
Even the students of Class 1—Deva Realm, hailed as the very best of Seondo, could only stare blankly at the spectacle.
Between them and those two stretched a chasm that could never be crossed.
"Madam President, the professor isn't being pushed back at all."
"She really isn't."
"Some people are calling this generation the Golden Cohort. Maybe they have a point."
"Perhaps they do."
"The Class 2 angel is holding up better than the rumors suggested, too. The other top-ranked students all performed respectably as well."
"That's wonderful news."
After hearing the same perfunctory response for the umpteenth time, the assistant aide turned her head. Tearing her eyes away from the fierce battle before them was a genuine regret for any martial artist, but her true duty was, after all, to assist. The vice president appeared to be observing the class with her usual smiling face, yet something about her gaze kept drifting oddly elsewhere—attending to that was the more sensible course of action.
"...Did anything happen at Sura-do while I was away?"
At his words, Vice President Lee Chung turned to the aide with her entire face blooming with smiles. For some reason, her grin seemed even more radiant than usual.
"Did anything happen? Of course something happened. I saw something absolutely delightful."
"Was the Young Cult Leader really that impressive? More impressive than the top student before us right now?"
The aide couldn't believe it.
The faculty of Seondo consisted of masters in their respective fields, each of them at minimum Transformation Realm or 7th Circle. Among them, the pinnacle was the professor of Class 1—Deva Realm, the Archangel Ariela. Could the Young Cult Leader of the Heavenly Demon Cult truly be more remarkable than the top student currently locked in an even match with that monster?
Lee Chung promptly denied it.
"You have to count that one as an exception. He might even be stronger than me. No, I simply found someone to my taste."
"...Weren't you talking about the Young Cult Leader?"
"Was I not?"
"It seems you've discovered another uncut gem, then."
"Hmm. More like a stone I want to skip across the water myself, over and over."
"What sort of person is this, exactly?"
Lee Chung laughed like a mischievous child and lifted her gaze to the ceiling. The lights that filled it made her eyes ache. Resting her chin on her hand, she gazed up at them and murmured quietly,
"Someone I want to raise myself."
[ Sura-do — Fundamentals of Applied Combat Theory ]
The sparring session had been temporarily suspended because Il-jin, the monk from Shaolin, had demolished the training platform with his head and feet.
That didn't mean the 'Combat Theory' lecture, which monopolized the entire Monday and Tuesday mornings, was simply over.
After a break of perhaps five minutes, a teaching assistant from the Sorcery Department who had been working in a nearby hall was dispatched posthaste, and the platform was repaired in no time. The class resumed.
"Rampant Horn!"
"Art of the Tiger-Flame Spear!"
KWANG!BANG! They drove their own bodies and the secret arts handed down through their families into each other with reckless abandon.
Unlike me, the other students were mostly paired against evenly matched opponents, so their bouts stretched into long, grueling battles of endurance. Fist against fist, fist against blade—a chaotic tangle of every manner of weapon and every secret technique their clans possessed.
Still, it was a duel by the rules, so situations where lethal weapons met bare knuckles were exceedingly rare. Of course, exceptions existed everywhere.
-Come on, shoot! Let those arrows fly freely!
-Y-you madwoman!
Setting aside that particular exception—the absurd sideshow of Young Cult Leader Cheon Yuha and the elf Eleanor dodging arrows—the sparring proceeded within reasonably sensible bounds.
And that level of skill was, befitting those called the 'Golden Cohort,' genuinely impressive.
Unlike me—whose techniques far outstripped a woefully inadequate body—these were properly balanced prospects. They might seem weak next to the topmost tier of students, but there was no denying they were the heroes who would one day lead the world.
And I beat Il-jin, one of the upper ranks among them.
Honestly, I'll admit it was a petty line of thinking.
I'd been eating off my fists for years. Sure, I couldn't use either arm at the time, but losing to a seventeen-year-old with his internal energy sealed would have been an embarrassing affair.
What mattered, however, was the fact that I'd won even in this sorry state of a body.
Because I was confident that as time went on, I would only grow stronger.
...Damn internal energy.
Well, that held true for everything except my currently hollowed-out dantian.
"What's that? Your classes are already over for the day?"
"That's right. This was the only one."
"...Mine doesn't end until six in the evening."
"All I can offer you is encouragement, I'm afraid."
"That's quite enough. Thank you."
After class, I shared a brief chat with Cheon Yuha, who had grown even more clingy, over lunch, then headed straight to the Training Building—the cultivation rooms.
The battle review was finished the moment it ended; there was nothing more to chew over.
What I needed right now was always the same thing: replenishing the damn internal energy that kept dragging at my heels.
I sat cross-legged atop the qi-gathering formation drawn at the center of the cultivation room.
Grand Circulation.
I sent qi coursing through my entire body in a great cycle, clearing away the impurities that had accumulated in my meridians overnight. For a First-rate, my meridians were remarkably clean and my energy remarkably pure.
Yesterday, this alone had felt like enough.
The rate at which my internal energy was building was faster than I'd initially feared, too.
But today, the narrow meridians and sluggish circulation peculiar to a First-rate martial artist, along with the thimbleful of internal energy, suddenly felt suffocating.
Of course, I knew the reason.
...It was a close call, wasn't it.
I had miscalculated the gap between the realm of my future self and the current state of my body.
Merely casting a few fundamental applied techniques had drained my internal energy to rock bottom. I'd sensed it ever since using the Great Shift of Heaven and Earth yesterday—my body, surprisingly, could keep up with the techniques, but my energy simply couldn't sustain them.
The heart, qi, and body—what's commonly called the triad—had fallen out of alignment.
...Maybe I'm just expecting too much.
It was only right not to demand much from a First-rate body in the first place.
But I was growing impatient.
I had worked myself into needless fright dwelling on my old life, where opportunity had slipped through my fingers into nothing. That greedy, almost desperate hunger—this time, I will not fall—was shaking my heart.
Peak Realm. The dividing line that separated real martial artists from frauds in the twenty-first century—and the realm that the young me of my past life never reached.
The realm I had attained in my mid-twenties now had to be reached in a mere six months.
The me of then and the me of now were clearly different, but cramming over a decade of internal energy into four months—by the end of this semester, in late June—was impossible.
Naturally impossible, at least.
Having reached a high realm in my past life didn't mean I could copy-paste my internal energy along with it.
Unless I opened my upper dantian and connected to heavenly qi right now, elixirs were an absolute necessity.
...The dungeons on the surface, relics of divine power, the demon realm Seondo itself had constructed along with its various scholarship benefits.
I dredged up every method and location for increasing internal energy I'd only half-remembered hearing about in my past life.
But they were all either far enough away to warrant skipping class, or places I couldn't possibly break through on my own.
For the record, at this hellish school, a single F on any lecture meant expulsion.
"...Damn it. This is suffocating."
Wouldn't it be nice if a free elixir just happened to fall into my lap somewhere?
Cherishing that futile hope, I fell into the routine of attending class and clocking into the cultivation room, day after day.
"If you call yourself a martial artist, you should test your body against mine! Come at me whenever you please!"
Cheon Yuha, whose entire schedule was packed with lectures, demanded a spar in the evenings after her classes ended.
But I put her off with the excuse that my arms still hadn't healed, vaguely promising that once I made a full recovery, we'd fight to our hearts' content.
Besides, I'd already heard all the theory lectures in my past life, and aside from the upcoming Monday and Tuesday 'Combat Theory' sessions, no practical classes had properly begun yet.
With so little demanding my attention, I was able to focus even harder on internal cultivation.
Before I knew it, the days flew past and Friday arrived.
It was also the day the bones in my arm had finally knit together and the cast came off.
Sitting down cross-legged with a surge of liberation—and a premonition that Cheon Yuha would soon start nagging me—I settled into my circulation.
Free elective—[ Meditation ].
Friday, 2 PM to 6 PM.
A four-hour block where, as usual, all I had to do was circulate my energy in the cultivation room.
A course wedged into the schedule purely to stack credits without cutting into a single day's training time.
I really was an idiot, doing nothing but train, back then.
I know there was no other way in my past life, but it was still a foolish way to live.
Well, the fact that I'm doing exactly the same thing right now is arguably the more lamentable part.
Exhaling a sigh, I set my energy coursing through every meridian in my body. I repeated that process over a very long time.
How many Grand Circulations had I completed like that?
When I finally opened my eyes, it was eight in the evening.
The professor and the other students had long since left the cultivation room. I staggered to my feet, loosened up the body that had stiffened from holding the same posture for hours, and stepped out.
Thanks to the circulation I'd just finished, my body felt fresh and vigorous, but my mind was in a peculiarly weary state. The moment I got home, I'd collapse straight into bed. Trailing that body along, I wandered down a path that had, at some point, turned pitch dark.
Crack—crick-crack—!
Rolling my stiff neck this way and that for no particular reason, I walked on while keeping a casual eye on my surroundings. The broad avenue was empty at this late hour, but I could still bump into someone, after all.
Blink—blink—.
And perhaps that vigilance had been well placed.
I realized that someone was standing beneath a light fixture flickering as though it might die at any moment.
"..."
The instant I registered the figure, I straightened my posture and let my breathing settle into calm. Even so, I maintained my narrow stance and unhurried pace, staring straight ahead.
Blink—... blink—...
And so, at the exact moment the light cut out—
"Hebi-goroshi. (Snake-Slaying Strike.)"
The assailant lunged with a dagger, and I reacted just in time.
"—You goddamn snake!"
Shaaak—! Even so, a few strands of my hair were sheared away.
A sudden sting flared across my cheek. When I brushed it, it was only a shallow scrape that had barely drawn blood, but there was no doubt it had been cut by a blade.
"...Well, I'll be damned. A lunatic, if I've ever seen one."
I glared at the psycho who had swung a blade on campus, my composure fraying into panic.
Crazy as Seondo was about fighting, it did not endorse skipping every step of the process. Duels were welcomed when formally requested and sanctioned—ambushes like this were never tolerated.
The penalty was immediate expulsion, no less.
So what on earth was this guy's reason for targeting me?
Had he mistaken me for one of the Demon Cult's people because I'd been walking around with Cheon Yuha lately?
Or was this an attack from some organization that had sensed something off about my martial level?
Or if not that...
My speculation didn't last long, because the figure in the darkness spoke first. I glared hard at the familiar face.
"Man, you're stronger than I figured. But don't look at me like that, y'hear? This hurts somethin' fierce right now."
My classmate from Class 3—Rank 15 of the Combat Department, Tadano Ansatsusha—shrugged with practiced nonchalance.
His left ribs were likely broken, judging by the way he clutched his side, blood dribbling steadily from his mouth. It served him right, but it didn't exactly satisfy me.
Well, yeah. The bastard swung a knife. You think a fist and a blade are the same thing? I should've knocked his teeth clean out.
No—there was still time. A mad dog has to be disciplined with fists. I was loosening my knuckles with the genuine intent to pummel him when the assassin suddenly tilted his head and asked,
"Huh? Don't tell me you ain't heard?"
"...Heard what, you lunatic?"
"Whaaat? We've been hammerin' the ads since yesterday evening, and you still don't know? Honestly, I got no idea where you've been or what you've been doin'."
Tadano Ansatsusha grinned with his snake-like slitted eyes and deathly pale face.
The man who would one day become commander of the Shogun's personal special intelligence division—the current assassin and vanguard—declared:
"It's war."
Just the usual clash of pride between your Korea and our Empire, y'see.
The Korea–Japan Match, in other words.
"...Hmm?"
I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.