The Scoundrel Seizes a Heavenly Fortune (1)

A month had passed since I launched the operation I had named a hero's pilgrimage — a campaign to plunder every fortuitous encounter I could find.

Soye and I were apart for now, and if I meant to see her again as soon ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠as I could, I had no time to spare. I traveled without missing a single day, and at last I arrived in Shaanxi.

"Excuse me, elder. If it isn't any trouble, might I ask you the way?"

"Where are you headed?"

"Do you know where Mount Hua is?"

"Mount Hua, is it..."

I lost the road more than once along the way and had to beg help, but fortunately it did not take long before I reached the mountain.

"Whoa. Are they insane? They actually meant to build houses up there?"

It looked less like a mountain than a colossal rock grown over with moss, and my mouth snapped shut before I knew it. I had fallen into a trance before the artistry the great wilderness had wrought when a man in a white Daoist robe came up and spoke to me.

"Are you headed for Mount Hua, by any chance?"

"Who...?"

"Ah, I should have introduced myself sooner. I am Guyang Un, a second-generation disciple of the Mount Hua Sect. I help outsiders who come here to climb the mountain."

"A Daoist of the Mount Hua Sect. I'm Jin Muwon, traveling the Central Plains."

"Young Hero Jin. A pleasure. If you mean to ascend Mount Hua..."

"No. I was only captivated by the overwhelming view. Mount Hua itself isn't my destination."

"Ah, I see. Forgive the presumption."

"Actually — would you happen to know of a valley near here with a crescent-shaped stone?"

I caught the Daoist as he turned to leave and asked the way. He took his chin in hand and sank into thought.

"I heard there's a crescent-shaped rock beneath that waterfall. Do you know of it?"

"If you mean beneath a waterfall, I have a place in mind."

"Truly?!"

"Yes. Do you have a map?"

"Yes. Here."

Even for a chore that might well have been a nuisance, Guyang Un took the time to show me where the rock lay. I thanked him for the help and made for the place he had marked, and sure enough a crescent-shaped boulder sat beneath the waterfall.

"Found it."

The scene was identical to the one described in the novel. Certain now, I stripped off everything but my trousers and approached the crescent stone. There was supposed to be something like a button beneath the rock...

I felt along it this way and that until something shifted with a click, and a section of the stone sank inward.

"Good. If I go this way from here..."

I moved the rock and turned toward the waterfall. A space that had not been there a moment ago now opened before me. I walked into the falling water toward that opening, and a fairly wide cave spread out beyond it.

I had found it at last.

The protagonist of the novel — no. The starting point of everything that had set the original story in motion. An uninvited extra had slipped inside.

In the middle of the rather large cave, a desk sat as if it had been dropped there at random, and two boxes rested side by side upon it. I already knew what those boxes held. When I opened the one on the right, a single manual lay inside, and atop it a small letter. I unfolded the letter. Written by the man who had made this cave, it carried his story.

"I already know what's in it. Pass."

I had read the novel. I already had a fair idea of what the letter said, so I tossed it aside just as it was.

Boomer cut.

What mattered far more to me than some tearjerker full of the usual lines was the untitled manual packed in beside it. This was the qi art created by the master of the cave — the art I had come for. The Nameless Art.

Once I had memorized every line of the Nameless Art, I settled cross-legged in a suitable spot and began to circulate my breath.

The Nameless Art.

True to its name — a martial art without a name — it was a peculiar qi method, a little different from ordinary ones. On its own, the Nameless Art might be dismissed as a mediocre technique, neither especially useful nor especially effective. Its most astonishing quality was that it fused with the martial art of whoever cultivated it.

Even a qi art written off as second-rate, or third, could ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠aim for first-rate if it combined with the Nameless Art — and with luck, for the very finest. It was that blatantly unfair. And if I joined a technique like that to the Thunder Power Body Art, already said to stand at the very tail of first-rate?

An absurdly broken qi art would be born. One I could hardly even imagine.

Worry ran ahead of me all the same. This cheating power was the reason the original protagonist had grown strong, but it was also the starting point of countless conflicts. As the many incidents of the original story flashed through my mind, I swallowed without meaning to.

I thought I'd already steeled myself.

The thought that what I was doing now would rewrite the fates laid out for dozens of people made me uneasy of its own accord. But that guilt only gave my mind a brief hesitation. It did not overturn my heart.

"I decided I'd become a man who wouldn't shame Soye. It's fine. I can do this, Jin Muwon."

I opened the other box, the one beside the box that held the book. Inside lay a small pill, no larger than a bead.

In the original, the protagonist's talent for the Mount Hua Sect had overflowed, yet the checks and interference of his senior brothers had kept him from training properly, and he had remained weak. The novel began with him growing strong in an instant through the combination of this elixir and the Nameless Art, then taking his revenge.

There are many reasons a martial artist's growth slows once a certain attainment is reached, but the greatest of them lies in internal qi itself. Without enough of it, even a sufficient enlightenment can fail to carry you past the next realm. If I took this elixir, the protagonist's revenge upon his martial brothers would be ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠delayed by a long while.

I'm sorry. Forgive me.

However pitiful you are, however much you were the protagonist who once entertained me, Soye matters more.

"Hoo... I'm ready. Here goes!"

I swallowed the elixir I had been holding in my mouth and felt the change begin inside me at once. The pill melted swiftly from the tongue, slid past my throat, and a vast, indescribable power seemed to swallow my body whole.

"Ghk—!"

At once I recited the verses of the Nameless Art and drew the elixir's internal qi into the center of my dantian. If my focus slipped even a little, the qi gathered in my body felt as if it would burst and vanish, so I could not let my concentration break for a single instant.

It was an agonizing stretch of time, but the suffering proved worthwhile. A new change had arisen in my body. Once I confirmed the energy had settled to a degree, I slowly recited the formulas of the Thunder Power Body Art and began to refine the power.

The foreign energy I was feeling for the first time lingered only a moment. The qi of the Nameless Art, which had seemed as if it would never mix, slowly seeped into the Thunder Power Body Art.

"The energy's changed."

The qi that had once shaped the image of a swift, heavy thunderbolt had become the image of a destructive storm that could shatter everything. It was not only the sensory image that had changed. The change showed plainly on the outside as well. The lightning that had always flashed blue whenever I wielded my internal qi had become a spinning wheel of violet light.

"Let's try moving—!"

I had only meant a light test, a casual kick off the floor, but with a tremendous boom I crossed an absurd distance in an instant.

"Insane..."

The output is nearly four or five times...? Maybe even more than that...?

The Thunder Power Body Art had already been a technique with a real claim to speed, and now the qi art had been strengthened so greatly that even that former speed would look slow.

"If the speed is like this, then the power?"

The question followed at once. I moved outside the cave and brought my hand down on a fairly large boulder nearby. A great crash — and the rock, the size of a house, shattered to pieces and was gone.

"..."

One astonishing sight followed another until even surprise itself grew tiring. Of course, the swell of internal qi had all but forcibly broken the wall of the second-rate realm, and that played a part. Even accounting for it, an attack of this degree made no sense.

The Thunder Power Body Art — once judged to have speed, yet to be ambiguous where it mattered most, in striking power?

Not anymore.

I hadn't tested defense the way I had just tested speed and power, but it was easy enough to tell that defense, too, had been perfected. An all-purpose martial art had been born.

"I'll have to think of a new name."

With the situation more or less sorted, I placed the book and the cave master's letter back into their boxes, one each, and returned them to where they had been. I had already devoured the elixir, but if he could at least learn the Nameless Art... It was an act born of a kind of sympathy.

"I've done every courtesy I can. I'm going."

I murmured it softly as I closed the door of the lonely cave. Someday the butterfly effect of twisting the original story might come looking for me. Even so, I could no longer stop.