Recognition Ascends to Heaven (3)
A month had passed since Cheonhwa left the Medicine Hall.
He still could not fully accept his changed standing.
Once he recognized that status, he belatedly realized how much attention had gathered around him. The fact that he had failed to notice until Myeonghwa pointed it out came as a considerable shock.
Barely a year since I entered the Zhongnan Sect… Have my senses grown dull?
Cheonhwa analyzed the reasons.
First, he had grown accustomed to drawing stares through his conspicuously outstanding actions. The complete absence of malice or hostility in those gazes played its part as well. Indifference he could have understood—but the unfamiliar warmth of favorable regard still felt strange.
Above all, life within the Zhongnan Sect had simply become familiar. At some point the vigilance he once held toward his surroundings had vanished, which meant he now regarded the main mountain as a home he could trust.
Home, is it…
It was not only the environment around him that had changed. He himself was changing in step with it. Uncertain how to accept that transformation, his mind grew tangled and his heart restless.
As the days passed the confusion did not ease; it only deepened. In the end Cheonhwa decided to empty both mind and heart by throwing himself into training.
The timing was perfect—he had just reached the fifth star of the second stage of the art, making it an ideal moment to raise the intensity of his drills.
In only a month of restoring a body weakened by illness, his achievement in the Gyunchon Chukgi-gong had already risen. The efficacy of the Chukgi-dan was truly formidable.
The pill’s effects will last another five months. In that time I will push my accomplishments as far as they can go.
Excessive training normally wrecked the flesh. That was why one had to gauge one’s limits with precision and regulate the load. Yet the Chukgi-dan rapidly restored a body driven to exhaustion, allowing him to digest harsh regimens he would never have dared attempt under ordinary circumstances.
Drawing on every external-arts manual he had studied so far, Cheonhwa devised new training methods. He began by strapping on sandbags. Simply increasing the weight raised the burden on his body and thus the intensity of practice. The method was crude, yet the results were unmistakable. Even the basic drills of running and horse stance produced markedly greater gains than before.
He did not stop there. He tried every variation he could invent: holding a low push-up position with elbows bent halfway while heavy weights rested on his back; lifting and lowering massive rocks in every conceivable manner; and finally, free-climbing sheer cliffs with bare hands and no tools whatsoever.
Of them all, cliff climbing pleased him most.
Brings back old memories. I used to scramble up cliffs gathering medicinal herbs.
Having lived in the mountains, Cheonhwa was thoroughly familiar with climbing. That same experience also taught him its dangers. Even with a body strengthened by martial arts, one could not simply charge up a precipice.
Today, therefore, he intended to survey the nearby cliffs as preparation. He had already marked several candidates during the mountain marches of basic training.
Start with the easy ones and raise the difficulty step by step.
His ultimate goal was the tallest, least-featured cliff in the vicinity—one whose slope ran almost perfectly vertical. An ordinary man would have had no means of ascent save a rope. A martial artist, however, could manage the climb.
Cheonhwa scaled the candidates in turn, testing the true measure of his current ability. The results far exceeded his expectations. Every cliff short of the final target he conquered with ease.
I knew martial arts would make it easier than before, but this much?
The cause lay in the fifth star of the second stage of the Gyunchon Chukgi-gong and in the Gugung-bo. A body tempered to that level could handle a sheer rock face without difficulty, while the free center-of-gravity shifts of the Nine Palaces Footwork let him ascend and descend any surface that offered even the slightest foothold.
At this rate I might even manage the final cliff.
For confirmation he challenged the most forbidding of the candidates. It proved harder than the others, yet still within reach.
Unlike the rest, I can actually feel myself being tempered here.
In a single day he had climbed and descended more than five cliffs. Without realizing it he had depleted his stamina. The constant threat of a fatal fall the moment his concentration slipped only accelerated that exhaustion. For an ordinary man the regimen would already have ruined sinew and bone. Here the restorative power of the Gyunchon Chukgi-gong and the lingering potency of the Chukgi-dan shone brightest—erasing damage, revitalizing the weary flesh, and forging it even stronger.
Cheonhwa climbed steadily toward the summit. Halfway up, his hands registered a sensation different from anything before.
Why is the rock around here hollowed out?
Curious, he climbed higher and discovered a small cave whose entrance had been so cunningly concealed that it was invisible from below.
This mouth… it feels wrong for something formed by nature alone.
Faint traces of human hands remained. If so, more traces might linger inside.
Cheonhwa carefully entered. Softly glowing stones set into the ceiling lit the interior. In that pale blue radiance the full panorama of the cave revealed itself, and he could not suppress a gasp of wonder.
“This is…?!”
Marks covered the walls—dozens of lines etched in every direction. One glance was enough to know they were no natural formation.
How in the world does one carve something like this?
The rock was the same hard stone as the cliff face outside. Leaving such traces would have been impossible by ordinary means.
Too smooth to have been chipped with a chisel.
Human hands had clearly been at work, yet the method remained a mystery. He stepped closer for a better look—
“To think a person would find this place.”
A voice sounded behind him. Cheonhwa turned. There stood an elderly Taoist of immortal bearing. The moment he recognized the face he was struck with awe and immediately offered a formal salute.
“This disciple greets the Sect Leader.”
The old master was none other than the present leader of the Zhongnan Sect—Okwon Jinin.
Okwon Jinin accepted the greeting with a gentle smile.
“Well met, third-generation disciple Cheonhwa.”
“You know of me, sir?”
“Did you not display a splendid struggle in the sparring of the recent promotion examination?”
Cheonhwa’s expression went blank. He had never imagined the Sect Leader himself would know his name.
“How did you come to be here?”
“Well…”
He related the truth without concealment.
“You were climbing cliffs for external training and simply discovered this place?”
Perhaps the answer was unexpected; Okwon Jinin burst into laughter.
“Hahaha! I have seen disciples find it while practicing lightness arts, but never one who stumbled upon it during external drills. Quite unforeseen.”
“I am humbled, Sect Leader.”
“Then you also have no idea what this cave is.”
“No, sir. Only that something has been preserved here.”
“You are correct. This is the place where the founding master of our sect left his sword marks.”
Cheonhwa’s eyes widened. That the carvings on the walls were sword scars was already astonishing; that they had been left by the founding master of Zhongnan meant they were centuries old at the least.
They look as fresh as if they were carved yesterday. How is that even possible?
Traces were supposed to weather with the passage of years. Yet these sword marks defied time itself and remained vivid.
“What kind of peerless divine art could leave sword scars like these?”
“Do they appear to be the work of some divine art?”
“Are they not, sir?”
“No. These marks were carved with the Thirty-Six Swords Under Heaven.”
“But the Thirty-Six Swords Under Heaven is one of the four introductory arts, is it not?”
The Thirty-Six Swords Under Heaven—Zhongnan’s foundational sword method composed of thirty-six stances, the last of the four entry-level arts a disciple learned.
The question of how such a thing was possible quickly resolved itself into a single conjecture.
“Could it be that the Thirty-Six Swords Under Heaven, like the Gugung-bo and the Ohaeng-kwon, is an art whose power depends entirely upon the practitioner’s own capacity?”
“Ho. You saw through it well.”
Okwon Jinin nodded, confirming the guess. If the conjecture was true, the implication was even more absurd: the sword marks that defied the ages were nothing more than a pure expression of the founding master’s own strength.
“What do you consider the representative martial art of the Zhongnan Sect?”
“The Thirty-Six Swords Under Heaven, sir.”
“Why do you think so?”
“My insight is still shallow and I know little of other arts. But I believed there must have been a reason the founding master chose to leave his sword marks here.”
“You have struck the heart of the matter.”
Pleased with the answer, Okwon Jinin smiled.
“The Thirty-Six Swords Under Heaven is a basic art, yet at the same time it is the sword method that symbolizes the Zhongnan Sect.”
Every great sect possessed a representative art that served as its public face—the Plum Blossom Sword of Huashan, the Taiji Sword of Wudang. For Zhongnan that place belonged to the Thirty-Six Swords Under Heaven.
“The founding master declared that the supreme sword art of Zhongnan—past, present, and future—would always be the Thirty-Six Swords Under Heaven.”
“So he left the marks on these walls for the sake of later generations?”
Cheonhwa gazed again at the scars covering the cave. He felt awe, yet nothing deeper stirred within him. Perhaps a genius of true talent might have gleaned enlightenment from those very lines.
“It might have been better if Senior Sister Yeonhwa had found this place rather than I.”
“I do not think so. On the contrary, few would be more suited to visit this cave than you.”
“What do you mean by that, sir?”
Instead of answering directly, Okwon Jinin posed another question.
“While studying the formulas of the Gyunchon Chukgi-gong, did you never find them unusually easy to understand?”
“Yes, sir. I felt the same recently while reading the manuals for the Gugung-bo and the Ohaeng-kwon.”
When learning those two arts the instructors had broken everything down into simple explanations, so the material had been easy. The formulas written in the secret manuals themselves, however, proved far more difficult than expected. The sections describing the forms of the stances were content he already knew. The problem lay in the abundance of metaphors and allusions that sought to convey the principles the arts were meant to embody.
By contrast the Gyunchon Chukgi-gong was written with far greater clarity.
Finding it odd, he had once asked an instructor. The reply had been that most martial formulas were never explained as plainly as those of the Gyunchon Chukgi-gong.
Why, then, were the majority of martial formulas written so obscurely?
Because of intent.
To perform a martial art one required either the form of the stance, the circulation of true qi, or both. And before either could move, the intent that drove body and energy had to come first. In other words, a martial formula was essentially a cipher recording the precise intent suited to that art. Intent, however, was nothing like arithmetic that could be neatly calculated. It was closer to an abstract notion—thought, emotion, will.
No wonder the formulas are so thick with metaphor.
To capture not only form and qi circulation but also the mental image the creator had experienced while forging the art, such language was unavoidable.
“I have come to appreciate anew how carefully the formulas of the Gyunchon Chukgi-gong were written for the learner’s sake.”
At Cheonhwa’s words Okwon Jinin at last unfolded the answer he had been holding back.
“The founding master wished to create martial arts for ordinary people—people like you.”
The four introductory arts were the proof. The Gugung-bo and the Ohaeng-kwon, for all the difficulty of their formulas, consisted of simple movements anyone could begin. With the Gyunchon Chukgi-gong the master had gone further still, dividing the formulas stage by stage so that even the dullest could learn. If the other three arts had been crafted with such care, how could the Thirty-Six Swords Under Heaven be any different?
“The reason he deliberately left his sword marks here with that very art is bound up with the same wish.”
If one thoroughly mastered this sword method, anyone could become as he had been.
That was the earnest hope he had wished to leave behind—even to the point of carving his sword marks into the living rock of this cave.