Great Harvest
“Then I’ll go first.”
With that, Cho-yeong drew the sword at her waist. Compared to Ju Yu-ryeon’s blade, hers was thicker and longer—yet still slender and light by ordinary standards. It looked as if it might flex with a casual swing, yet straighten and drive true the moment real force was put behind it.
“I hope you don’t die too quickly.”
The moment the words left her lips, Cho-yeong’s aura transformed. The pressure that had been crushing the air sharpened in an instant, then bloomed into a dense, choking killing intent that sank into everything around her. As if the gentle woman of moments before had never existed, the air itself turned cold.
That aura alone was enough to tell the truth of her. The calm that let her pour out such killing intent without the slightest tremor marked Cho-yeong as a master a full step—no, at least two steps—above Ho Won-jik.
Ju Yu-ryeon felt it too. She called a warning to Yoo Eunhyeon.
“Eunhyeon! Be careful! Looking at that weapon, she’s almost certainly going to use a soft sword!”
Yoo Eunhyeon already knew. He swallowed dryly and drew up his internal energy. He didn’t force it; he gathered it slowly from deep in his dantian, matching the rhythm of his breath. Softly rising power flowed along his meridians and settled quietly into the tips of his limbs.
Before he knew it, Cho-yeong’s sword tip was pointed at him. The point trembled—minute, but unmistakable. Whether from the wind or from the pressure of her qi, that tiny quiver carried the tension of something that might explode at any moment.
Now it was only a question of who moved first.
Shwaek!
As expected, Cho-yeong struck first.
The sword light that cut the empty air spread at first like a broad plane, then contracted into a slender line. And in the instant that line condensed further into a single sharp point—the blade vanished.
“……!”
Yoo Eunhyeon twisted his head on pure instinct. The empty space seemed to have been cut clean through—and a heartbeat later, Cho-yeong’s sword reappeared.
Suk.
Only then did the sound of wind brushing past his ear arrive, late. It was a speed already a full beat beyond the eye’s ability to follow. Only the sound of air being torn proved the path the blade had taken.
“You dodged?”
“Even if I can’t see it, I can still get out of the way.”
“Interesting. So you’ve already passed the stage of relying on sight.”
Yoo Eunhyeon gave no answer. There was no need to deny it, and no need to admit it. The habit of sensing without depending on his eyes alone had been in his body long before he ever learned martial arts—from years of farming.
“At the very least, you seem qualified to exchange blows with me. Would you care to come at me first this time, young hero?”
“All right.”
The faintly trembling tip of Cho-yeong’s sword went still. The force that had been cutting the air settled, and the blade stood upright in perfect quiet. She was yielding the initiative.
Yoo Eunhyeon steadied his breath for a moment, then reached to his waist and slowly drew his own weapon—a hammer. Watching him, Ju Yu-ryeon heaved a long sigh.
“Why does he always have to pick something like that for a weapon?”
“Because it’s what his hands know best. That hammer’s been in Eunhyeon’s grip for more than ten years.”
“That’s not what I meant… Hah. Never mind. It doesn’t matter what weapon Eunhyeon uses anyway.”
Ju Yu-ryeon knew the truth of it. The art Yoo Eunhyeon had learned was Mudong Hwanmu—the Dance of the Silent Illusion—the supreme technique of the Twin Blades of Formlessness. At that level, the shape of a weapon barely mattered. Sword or spear, or anything else he happened to hold—the essence was to ride the flow and unfold it.
Hwoong!
Hammer clenched tight, Yoo Eunhyeon sprang lightly toward Cho-yeong and began to swing. The weapon was a weapon; every blow carried weight and threat. Cho-yeong only shifted lightly this way and that, slipping past each attack.
After a few easy swings to find his measure, Yoo Eunhyeon’s movements suddenly sharpened. The arcs he carved through the air crossed once—and then cut across each other in a perfect cross.
“Hmm…”
Seong Jung-hyeok made a soft sound under his breath. The cross-shaped trajectories Yoo Eunhyeon was drawing grew denser and denser, crushing the space itself as they drove her back.
That deceptively simple assault was only possible if the swings were delivered almost simultaneously. The slightest shortfall of internal energy, the slightest break in rhythm, and the speed itself would collapse. Crude on the surface—anything but light underneath.
“His internal energy level is nothing to dismiss.”
He murmured it quietly.
When Pokjonghoe passed five, then six, and at last reached the tenth—
Taat.
Yoo Eunhyeon’s toes slammed into the ground. He rose lightly, then drove the crossed hammers straight down as if he were driving a stake into the earth. Cho-yeong moved to step aside as before—and her face went rigid.
“……!?”
The layered cross-trajectories compressed into one and came down as if to stamp the space itself flat. Feeling the crushing pressure, Cho-yeong snapped her hanging sword up to meet it.
The single blade scattered into ten, then more—silver afterimages weaving a dense wall of light before her eyes.
Kwaang!
The impact rang out like a thunderbolt before a cloudburst. Everyone present stood frozen, too stunned to make a sound.
“To force me into the Phantom Wave Sword Curtain from the very first exchange… What kind of form is that?”
Explosive Vertical & Horizontal — Great Harvest. Not one, but ten currents of energy tilled and detonated as one.
“An unusual name for a form.”
“It’s exactly what it sounds like. A technique that tills ten separate currents of energy and detonates them all at once.”
Yoo Eunhyeon explained it calmly, but the people around him all sucked in a breath at once.
Internal energy, by nature, was the power of drawing natural qi into the body and commanding it. Once it left the flesh, it sought to return to its original place and scattered with ruthless speed. That was the law. Yet in the technique Yoo Eunhyeon had just unfolded, energy that should already have vanished still hung there in layered residue.
“How is that even possible?!”
Ju Yu-ryeon’s mouth fell open. She turned her head toward Su Hwa-seon.
“Auntie—just how much internal energy does Eunhyeon even have…?”
But Su Hwa-seon did not so much as stir. She simply followed Yoo Eunhyeon’s movements with quiet eyes. Her gaze was steady; her breathing never broke.
“A full year of training wasn’t wasted, I see.”
The soft murmur made Ju Yu-ryeon’s eyes flicker. At the same time, memories of training with Yoo Eunhyeon at the Uiseon Suga rose unbidden in her mind.
About three months after he had begun serious training at the Uiseon Suga. Deep in the mountain night, long after every other soul had gone, Yoo Eunhyeon sat cross-legged in a clearing lit only by faint moonlight.
Mahon Cheongong…
When he first learned it, and later when he trained alone in the mountains, he had not truly understood. But in the last three months, Yoo Eunhyeon had begun to grasp even a little of the nature of the method he carried.
Mahon Cheongong—said to be able to swallow and absorb every martial art under heaven. Depending on how the practitioner handled it, the possibilities were endless. Precisely because of that nature, however, there was no fixed method of cultivation. Even how one was supposed to accumulate internal energy was unclear—which made the art extremely difficult to build power with at all.
Without a master at his side to take him by the hand, Yoo Eunhyeon had to stack his energy in the way he knew best.
“There’s no other way but this.”
For him, that way was farming. Once he thought of the dantian as soil and internal energy as a crop, an internal energy method was no different from drawing in the qi of nature, sowing seed in the earth, and raising it. He had felt that dimly even when training alone in the mountains. This was still the most natural path.
Turning over the soil that was his body, taking in natural qi to grow the crop called internal energy—and layering atop that everything he had learned in a lifetime of farming—Yoo Eunhyeon slowly refined Mahon Cheongong to his own use. But the progress did not last long before another question rose.
If only I could hold the energy longer…
In the meantime he picked up a fallen branch nearby, swung it lightly, and unfolded Pokjonghoe. This time a clear bursting sound rang from the crossing point. Now that he understood the nature of his internal energy properly, Mahon Cheongong let him perform Mudong Hwanmu without strain. Even so, for someone who had only learned the basic forms, something still felt lacking.
“This isn’t enough.”
Muttering, he sat again and sank into meditation.
If internal energy is a crop, then what I’m being asked for is a way to store the harvest for a long time…
There were many ways to keep crops from spoiling. Bury them underground. Seal them in a closed space. Most methods cut them off from the outside. But how was he supposed to apply that to internal energy? Farming he knew better than anyone. Martial arts, he was still a complete outsider.
“It scatters because it’s the qi of nature…”
Yoo Eunhyeon rose, gathered his energy, and sent it to his fingertips. While it still remained within the body, the energy rested quietly. The moment he released it outward, it seeped into nature and scattered before long. Even when he deliberately worked it with the long-lingering quality needed for Mudong Hwanmu, the result was much the same.
“Hmm…”
Again and again he gathered energy and let it go, watching the flow with care. No clear clue appeared.
“Of course the answer won’t come that easily. That’s enough for today.”
He was just rising when a sudden wind blew. Almost without thinking, Yoo Eunhyeon let the gathered energy ride the wind and flow out with it.
Hwiing.
In that instant the wind spun into a whirl, and for a moment the released energy hung in place. Pure chance—but Yoo Eunhyeon did not miss it.
“Huh?”
It was not chance alone that let him catch it. Years of farming by following natural qi, and the concentration sharpened by deep meditation, made the moment possible.
“Don’t tell me…”
He felt for the natural qi again and worked his energy once more. After several tries, Yoo Eunhyeon’s eyes went wide.
“It doesn’t just scatter at random. It moves along the natural qi as it scatters…?”
He had realized that internal energy did not vanish without pattern, but flowed along a certain grain. It took many more trials before he was sure, but in the end he reached the conclusion: it scattered by following the natural qi.
Reading that flow was not easy. Honestly, if it had not been Yoo Eunhyeon, even attempting it would have been difficult. But a satisfied smile spread across his face.
“It’s still just farming. Think of it as farming, not martial arts. Then it gets simple.”
Once he had the clue, all that remained was application. Yoo Eunhyeon went on training to read the flow of energy that scattered along the natural qi—and to make use of it without fighting against it.