Did You Think I'd Fall for Your Lie?
"Did you truly think I would fall for a lie like yours?"
The Underground Training Ground.
The disciples sat in order. No—they were set down, as if dragged into place.
"First, take your stance. Spine straight. Legs planted firm. From this moment, your body is a vessel meant to hold water. If it tilts, it all spills."
The words were kind. But the meaning coiled inside that kindness was a double-edged sword, and it called up a fear far greater than the kindness itself.
Hyeon sat first.
I raised a hand and laid it lightly over her lower abdomen.
"Imagine a vessel forming in here. I'll see to the rest. Do not open your mouth. Not once. Qi deviation will take you."
In that instant a strange vibration thrummed from my fingertips. Thud. Something small, and deep, rang beneath the heart, all around the navel.
"Ngh—hhk...!"
The moment the pain struck, Hyeon clenched her teeth. It was no ordinary ache. It ran deep and keen, as if flesh were being split and bone scraped raw, and somewhere between heart and organs the blood seemed to surge backward. That violent echo wrapped her whole body.
"Bear it. You won't die."
That isn't comforting at all...!
Even through pain fierce enough to make her vomit blood, Hyeon did not scream. At that, I smiled, quietly.
Right. You were always the sort who endured until you broke.
In truth, a dantian was never meant to be forged through agony like this. In the places men call great sects, children begin forming a dantian and training from the age of five. And how could a child of five train without crying out even once under pain like that?
The young form a dantian easily for a simple reason. The younger the body, the fewer impurities it holds, and the more readily a dantian can take shape. But my disciples had lived several times beyond five years. Impurities and waste already packed every corner of them, and in that state, forming a dantian was impossible.
And yet I was the Number One Under Heaven—peerless enough in the handling of internal energy that even the Heavenly Demon might have to concede me a move. Cleansing a body's impurities and forming a dantian was, for me, a simple thing.
There will be pain. They'll have to bear it.
For these children, the dantian could not be something made. It had to be something awakened. If a mana heart was an organ built for refinement and release, the dantian was the center of accumulation and circulation. A body crammed with impurities would not yield one easily. It had to happen by instinct, through the flesh, past conscious will—until the body itself began to gather qi.
Hyeon's body trembled, faint and fine. Her heartbeat lurched as if it might burst, and sweat poured off her like a waterfall. I laid another shock over the first.
Thud!
"Khh—!"
The instant the sound escaped her, a seed was planted somewhere deep inside her belly. Invisible to the eye, yet unmistakable to the senses: a heat like boiling water rising from within. The vessel born inside her had taken in the smallest ember.
"Done. You endured well. Seol. You're next."
"...I really thought I was going to die."
Hyeon let out a hollow laugh and drew back. Seol sat slowly in her place.
"I'm ready."
"Good. Then shall we do it the same way?"
I put Seol through the same process I had given Hyeon, and both of them succeeded in forming a dantian.
"You suffered well, all of you, enduring that."
"I thought I was dying..."
"..."
They had only just dragged their minds back together, and in truth they were at their limit. Organs twisting, every meridian tearing—it was a pain none of them ever wanted to feel again.
"Setting the pain aside for a moment. You understand it was I who guided the energy, yes?"
"Mm..."
How could they not? Every meridian was still screaming with it.
"Then you remember where that energy moved, and how. All of it."
"Uh... no?"
They had been busy simply surviving the pain. How were they meant to memorize the path of the energy on top of that?
"Fair enough. One might not. Then sit again, starting with Hyeon. This time, see that you remember exactly how the energy moves."
"What?!"
That pain, again? No. If my meridians took that agony one more time right now, I'd die of shock.
"I won't do it this very moment. But for the next two weeks, it will have to continue."
A good share of the impurities had been scoured out, and the dantian was made. Plenty still remained. Only once every last trace was burned away across those two weeks would they finally be able to accumulate internal energy.
"And if we don't...?"
"Hahaha. Why worry over that? As if you had a choice."
Right. Tremendously helpful.
"And go wash. Quickly. You stink."
I pinched my nose as I said it, and the two of them sniffed themselves and grimaced.
"Ugh... the smell."
"Shower...!"
With that, they ran straight for the dormitory.
"It hurts now. But that dantian will lead you into strength."
Even after they had all gone, I remained alone in the training ground.
"Hah..."
I walked to a small desk set beneath a ceiling of black brick, in a place filled with nothing but silence. On it lay a single sheet of paper, a rough diagram I had drawn of the dantian training method, and the names of my disciples.
"Hyeon... Seol..."
I called the names softly. Children still unsteady. But children who, if tempered well, would grow stronger than anyone—and through them, perhaps, I could prove that the path I had walked was not a mistake. I did not doubt it.
"In the end... surpass me."
I took up the sword again.
In the Underground Training Ground, where everyone else slept, I quietly began to swing. In a space with no students in it, I repeated thousands of cuts. Once. Twice. A thousand times.
"This art... too fast, and it fails. Too slow, and it means nothing."
I muttered as if explaining it to myself, and repeated the motion. My disciples could not use my techniques as they stood. They had not yet reached even the Cheon Hwi who was a mere cadet of the Academy, let alone the Heaven-Breaking Sword Saint.
Strength cannot be shared. Understanding can.
So I swung the sword tens of thousands of times, that I might explain it to them properly—and the blade split the empty air, dancing as if to prove something.
Once I had swung enough to teach them, and to make them understand, I stepped out of the training ground—and found a face I was not glad to see.
"So you're finally alone."
Hah... her again?
The one who had fixated on me from the moment I first enrolled in this Academy—no. From the moment she saw the results of the entrance exam. Platinum-blonde hair so subdued she seemed to think it would go unnoticed, and still she had tailed me without pause after the exam ended.
"Who are you, to keep following me—and to be out this late at night?"
"Isn't it obvious? I want to know about you."
What had I done to earn interest like that? At most, I had beaten some nobody whose name I no longer even remembered during the entrance exam, and persuaded a professor so I could teach my disciples apart from the rest. That was all. And no one should have seen me persuade that professor.
"You look curious as to why I've taken an interest. Allow me to explain."
"No. I'm fine."
I was curious. I also had the distinct sense that knowing would become endlessly troublesome, and I would rather not. Whether she failed to read that, or read it and ignored it, the girl went on.
"You still don't realize how much attention you drew the moment you enrolled, do you?"
"I did?"
Why? If I had beaten an Academy professor into the ground, the attention would make sense. But what I had beaten was no professor. It was one ordinary entrant. Surprising, certainly. Hardly cause for any great fuss. My own disciples could put that fellow down with ease, and the one standing in front of me now looked several times stronger than he had been. Stronger, perhaps, than my disciples were even now.
I fixed her with a guarded glare, and her mouth opened.
"You truly don't seem to know..."
"Wait. One thing, before that."
"Please, go ahead."
"What's your name?"
"Pardon?"
Pardon? What was there to pardon? I had spent every moment since enrollment finding my disciples, persuading a professor, and training them. This was the first time we had met and spoken. How was I supposed to know? When I pressed her to answer, she gathered herself and began.
"Ahem. Well, I suppose you might not know. I am Cecilia. I am called the Saintess of this age—a title far too grand for me—a believer in the goddess Arciel, of the Divine Faculty."
So that was who she was. The girl I had marked as an opponent back at the entrance exam. No wonder the face had seemed familiar.
"Cecilia, is it. So. Why am I drawing attention?"
"First. You overwhelmed Matthew, and still you applied to the Swordsmanship Faculty."
"And you?"
From what I had heard, even the one they called Saintess had gone not into the Magic Faculty, but into that Divine Faculty. And that was hardly all. This Academy, true to its name as the greatest in the world, held far more than a Magic Faculty and a Swordsmanship Faculty. There was a Divine Faculty, a Spirit Faculty, a Curse Faculty, a Spearmanship Faculty, and others besides, and even those split further within. The Magic Faculty was the largest in the first place because magic itself divided into ice, flame, illusion, and any number of other fields. Among so many faculties, the Swordsmanship Faculty might be looked down upon, but simply entering it should not have been strange.
Cecilia answered that doubt herself.
"I entered the Divine Faculty only because I am the Saintess. But you defeated Matthew, a student of the Magic Faculty, and then joined the most despised faculty of all—the Swordsmanship Faculty. That alone would be more than enough to draw attention, don't you think?"
So the Swordsmanship Faculty suffered even more contempt than I had thought.
"Hm. And next?"
Where there was a first, a second was sure to follow.
"After you transferred into the Swordsmanship Faculty—you can't even use magic—and yet you persuaded a professor, didn't you?"
How did she know? However young this body had become, I would not miss a presence like hers. Hadn't I already noticed her tailing me?
"You needn't be so wary. That professor gave confession to me—no, to a certain cleric."
"And what does that have to do with anything?"
"In that confession, the professor praised you a great deal. A mere beggar of a transfer student, he said, and yet possessed of such knowledge and such swordsmanship."
"Fine. I understand. The third?"
"There isn't one. I only came because I wondered just how extraordinary a person that professor praised so highly could—"
She never finished. I ignored the rest of it, seized her by the throat, and hauled her up.
She was meters away... how is she right in front of me...?
"What...?"
Anyone else might have swallowed those words. Think on them again, though, and something was wrong. A mere student walks off with a professor's class, and she believes it without a shred of doubt? Even if the professor had said so himself, anyone at a student's level ought at least to suspect there had been some condition. Yet this Cecilia believed my victory as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
If she truly believed it so readily, it was one of two things. First: by some means, she had witnessed the moment I persuaded the professor. Second: she had taken the exact measure of the power I held. Both were impossible. That was why I doubted her.
"Speak properly. Do that, and I won't kill you. Why did you take an interest in me?"
"The truth is... you... possess divine power... and yet you entered... the Swordsmanship Faculty..."
What the hell kind of nonsense was that?
I possessed divine power?