Sword Formation (2)
"Have you lost your mind?"
Gakhyeon shouted.
He was angry, but the faint tremor in his voice betrayed the turmoil beneath.
Jinhyun, by contrast, answered with a calm that never once wavered.
"I am entirely in my right mind. If I weren't, I could hardly be speaking this steadily."
"If you were in your right mind, you wouldn't talk about your own death so flatly, without a shred of fear!"
"Heh. Even this humble priest fears death. I simply choose not to show it."
He claimed to fear death, yet nothing in his manner suggested it. To Gakhyeon, Jinhyun's composure was only stifling and galling.
It was not unheard of for a master capable of reading Heaven's will to foresee the day of his own death. But to discuss that death this calmly left Gakhyeon's head spinning.
Suppressing his irritation, Gakhyeon began to press him with questions.
"A Super Expert who ranks among the foremost of the sect, showing signs of death—is this also because of that boy you took in?"
"It is not. That child's fate and my death run on separate currents."
"Can you tell exactly when you will die?"
"That I cannot know. I only sense, faintly, that it will be within a year or so."
"Then you don't know how you will die, either."
"Even if I did, I could not speak of it. That I can declare my death at all is only because the day has drawn near enough for the prohibition against leaking Heaven's secrets to loosen."
"Have you no thought of avoiding death?"
At Gakhyeon's question, Jinhyun gave a bitter smile.
"Have I not told you time and again? Knowing the future by reading Heaven's will is no panacea. My cultivation is still lacking—I can only dimly perceive a future whose hour I cannot name."
"I know. You said that to know the future is to lose the chance to change it, and that the moment one tries to alter a known future, Heaven's punishment falls. You have said it often enough."
"Yes. My death is fixed. This death must not be fled, and I have no intention of fleeing it."
If one who read Heaven's will sought to escape death, only a more terrible end awaited. The sole right left to Jinhyun was how he would die.
Displeased with his friend's choice, Gakhyeon frowned and asked,
"Why are you so composed about it?"
"Because at last I can drag into the light the shadow that has been hiding behind the curtain."
Gakhyeon did not ask what the shadow was. One look at Jinhyun's face told him there would be no answer.
He drank the cooled tea, trying to settle himself—but talk this bitter could hardly be soothed by a single cup.
So Jinhyun offered something that might catch Gakhyeon's interest.
"By the way, Cheonhwa found the Chimjungsu Training Ground."
"The boy you brought discovered that place? Isn't it concealed by a formation?"
"He says he found it while looking for somewhere to train. Doesn't it remind you of the old days? You yourself wandered all over and stumbled on it long ago."
"Hmph. Finding a training ground means nothing if you can't use it. A pearl necklace on a pig's neck."
"That won't be the case. From the look of things, he goes there nearly every day."
Gakhyeon made no reply, only sipped the fresh tea he had poured. Outwardly he kept an unconcerned calm, but inwardly he was startled.
I never imagined the boy Jinhyun brought would find the Chimjungsu Training Ground.
Until now the child had left no particularly good impression. Finding that training ground changed the picture. Discovery meant he was born with either luck or keen sense—or, vanishingly unlikely, that he had climbed the mountain so often he had learned to notice its disharmony. Gakhyeon discarded that last possibility at once.
And he didn't merely find it—he's actually training there.
The Chimjungsu Training Ground had been prepared for the tempering of external and dynamic power. Train properly there, and one's martial arts advanced by leaps. Gakhyeon himself had built the strength to become a senior disciple through that ground, and had ultimately taken his seat as a disciple of the Sect Leader.
I will need to keep an eye on him.
While Gakhyeon sank into thought, Jinhyun looked down into his teacup. The still surface mirrored his face like glass. Shallow ripples, spreading almost unnoticed, warped the reflection within—as if giving voice to the feelings he would not speak.
Still, with this, I have finished everything I can do.
The path ahead had been laid by the founding master. A new guiding star would light the way. What remained was only the will of the one who must walk it.
I need not worry about the end.
Cheonhwa, true to the moniker Ox Step, would never halt those stubborn, plodding strides. That was the boy's greatest strength. Only death could stop those steps.
But that child has an exceptional instinct for avoiding death.
Heaven had not granted Cheonhwa talent in martial arts. In its place it had given him an unyielding spirit and a gift for survival. How else could a parentless orphan have lived alone until Jinhyun found him?
There is so little I can do for a child whose life is destined to be so hard.
Once Jinhyun could read Heaven's will, many constraints bound his movements—yet he gained something as well. That something was Divination of Choice.
In any situation before him, he could dimly perceive several possible decisions and the futures each would bring. In one future, interference led straight to Heaven's punishment; yet when multiple futures appeared, he earned the right to choose among them. Any action outside those fixed options brought a matching retribution from Heaven.
Strangely, Divination of Choice—which almost never came—has appeared again and again where Cheonhwa is concerned.
Bringing Cheonhwa in had been one of those choices. Waiting for the boy to come to him rather than summoning him directly had been another. And when he had happened to meet Cheonhwa at the Chimjungsu Training Ground, Divination of Choice had appeared once more.
That time, Jinhyun had acted outside the options given him. Wanting to offer the boy even a little help, he had passed on the martial art he was still in the midst of creating.
And for that, Heaven's punishment fell.
That was why he had left the training ground in such haste. He had meant to teach the boy, using their chance meeting as a pretext—but his insides had twisted violently. Had he stayed any longer, he might well have collapsed, blood spraying from the seven orifices.
I still don't understand why Divination of Choice blocks any direct aid to Cheonhwa.
From the moment of their first meeting, when he had been shown the choices of Accepting Fate and Defying Heaven, he had sensed something extraordinary. But never before had the guidance steered him so carefully away from giving direct help—as if the boy were meant to overcome every hardship alone. There was surely some subtle principle of Heaven's will that Jinhyun did not yet grasp. Even so, he could not simply stand by and do nothing.
If I cannot help him directly, I can at least hope to pass on the completed martial art before it is too late.
The Taoist could only pray fervently to Heaven that he would be granted time, before he died, to leave the boy a parting gift.
"Again!"
Inwol's roar rolled across the training yard—a rebuke for the flaws in their formation. That made ten times already.
Cheonhwa caught his breath and returned to his place.
Harder than I expected.
Sword formation training was of a completely different grain from practicing alone. It was not enough simply to fight; one had to match breath and rhythm with others. The strength of a formation lay in numbers, and if one person pushed too far ahead, that strength collapsed. Mishandle it, and they risked being broken one by one.
It looks like the others are in much the same state.
The overall rise in skill from the sparring tournament was ironically holding them back. Accustomed to fighting alone, they found fighting together awkward and unnatural.
At least I have the Six Harmony Sensory Path that Uncle-Master Jinhyun taught me. Without it, I would have been hard-pressed to keep up with the training at all.
The foundation of the Six Harmony Sensory Path was the heightening of the senses through internal energy. Those broadened senses let him track the movements of the other entry disciples as they executed the formation. Even with that help, the formation work remained just as difficult.
Part of it is that fighting together still feels unfamiliar—but there's also this odd sense that something doesn't quite mesh.
He could not yet tell where that sense of disharmony came from. He only felt a strong premonition that until he resolved it, no amount of trial and error would let them use the formation properly.
I have no clever way to pin the disharmony down. For now, all I can do is keep training and keep watching.
Cheonhwa set his thoughts aside and focused on the formation. He took the front; a sect brother stood to either side. Behind him, Daehwa and the remaining two took their places. A roughly hexagonal array locked into shape.
"Begin!"
At Inwol's signal, Cheonhwa and the brothers on either side charged together. From three directions at once, they drove in with the Heaven-Severing downward slash of the Heavenly Sword. The instructor met every incoming cut with the Heaven-Crossing horizontal slash, batting them all aside.
The gap in sword power drove Cheonhwa and the two beside him backward. The moment it happened, Daehwa and the other two who had been waiting behind surged out and attacked.
"Yes—that's it! Match your breathing and keep the pressure unbroken. Make use of your numbers!"
Inwol praised their movement. Cheonhwa and his two brothers quickly restored their stance and threw themselves back into the exchange.
Always attack in threes. That was the precept of the Heavenly Sword Formation. Even a master, unless the disparity was extreme, had limits to what he could handle at once. Strike those limits with several attackers at every opportunity.
At first the three-man assaults went well enough. Past the tenth exchange, however, they grew so busy reacting that the lines broke and each man moved on his own. Inwol promptly picked them apart one by one and punched straight through the formation.
This part—right here is where the disharmony hits.
Just when things seemed to be going smoothly, the lines would suddenly collapse. This time he was certain. When the front trio and the rear trio switched places, there was a stretch where the pieces simply failed to mesh.
Why does it keep happening?
The formation itself could not be at fault. When the second-generation disciples had demonstrated it, nothing had gone wrong.
I'll need to look into this properly.
From that day on, Cheonhwa went over the secret manual of the Heavenly Sword Formation again and again, comparing it against their actual practice. For ten days he read until the pages were soft and ragged, digging deeper and deeper—until at last he understood the true nature of the disharmony.
There's nothing wrong with the formation itself. Nothing wrong with me or my sect brothers in the training, either.
The problem was a premise so obvious that the manual never even stated it: the spacing of the formation had been designed on the assumption that its participants would be of a certain age. When children barely ten years old tried to execute it, spacing errors were inevitable.
It's a simple problem, but not noticing it isn't strange either. Formation training is normally taught only after one becomes a formal disciple—at fifteen at the earliest.
It was their generation of entry disciples who were the odd ones out, learning it this early.
Cheonhwa reported his discovery to Inwol at once.
"I never imagined that was the issue."
Caught off guard, Inwol stroked his chin and sank into thought.
"To fix this, we'd have to tear the structure of the formation apart and rebuild it to match the spacing. That isn't something one finishes in a day or two."
"Isn't there someone who could help with that problem?"
"Who?"
At Inwol's question, Cheonhwa looked toward Daehwa. The one who had devised counters for Cheonhwa's techniques and taught them to others—surely adjusting a formation's structure to suit entry disciples would come easily to him.
Sure enough, once the situation was explained, Daehwa agreed without hesitation.
"Understood. I was already sick to death of the constant failures myself. I'll cooperate."
Using the Six Harmony Sensory Path during training, Cheonhwa pointed out every place where the disharmony surfaced. Working from what Cheonhwa told him, Daehwa revised the spacing of the Heavenly Sword Formation to fit the entry disciples. Inwol then taught the revised formation to the class.
The result was immediate. A formation that had never held for long began to lock together with clean precision. Not only did they attack in threes with ease—they also managed the next stage, swiftly filling any empty place when someone dropped out.
All their earlier struggles now seemed almost unreal.
"Was the formation always this easy?"
"Then what in the world was all that suffering for?"
"Without Junior Brother Cheonhwa and Senior Brother Daehwa, we'd still be grinding ourselves to pieces the old way."
"Ugh, just imagining it makes me nauseous."
As the long-blocked formation training finally flowed, the entry disciples training alongside them marveled and heaped praise on Cheonhwa and Daehwa.
"You've both worked hard. I'll report this achievement to Senior Brother Muwol."
There would likely be no direct reward, but the evaluation would carry a heavy bonus. That bonus alone might be enough to place them in the top ten of the next promotion exam.
Unaware of any such scoring, Cheonhwa only rubbed the back of his neck in shy embarrassment at the praise.
"Then the formation classes should be fine from here on, right?"
"What are you talking about? The hard part starts now."
"Pardon? What do you mean by that?"
"We've solved the Six-Man Heavenly Sword Formation, but the spacing for the Twelve-Man, Twenty-Four-Man, and Thirty-Six-Man Heavenly Sword Formations will all need adjusting as well."
"…"
"It's about time we changed the group assignments anyway. We'll increase the numbers then."
It was a bolt from a clear sky. Fixing the six-man formation training alone had taken a full month. How long would it take to train with new members and revise the spacing at the same time?
And to revise the spacing, I'll have to stick with Senior Brother Daehwa until it's finished.
The Heavenly Sword Formation could be fielded by as many as thirty-six people at once. As numbers grew and groups reshuffled, Daehwa and the members of the pro-Daehwa faction might well end up in the same place. Picturing Daehwa and his faction gathered together, Cheonhwa looked at the dark road ahead and could not help letting out a sigh.