An Affinity for the Axe
Flick.
Yeon-woo flicked the wooden sword lightly with her index finger, trying to copy exactly what Woon-hyun had just done. But before the blade could even brush against the thread—
“Not a chance, you little rascal.”
Woon-hyun brought his knuckles down on the crown of her head with a crisp thump!
“Ouch!”
Yeon-woo rubbed her tingling scalp, pouting as she looked up at him. “Why can’t I do it?”
“Did I not already tell you? It is a difference in experience.” Woon-hyun lifted the wooden sword resting in his hand. “It has been over one jia since I first took up the blade. How could you possibly compare yourself to me when you only picked up a sword today?”
Watching Yeon-woo thrust her lower lip out in a dramatic pout, Woon-hyun chuckled softly. “Perhaps my demonstration was poor. Very well, look here.”
He gripped the hilt with both hands. Wrapping his fingers tightly around the wood just as he had in his earliest days of learning the blade, he drew it overhead and brought it slicing down in a broad, fluid arc.
“Strike downward like this,” he instructed. “Fast or slow, pouring your weight into it or striking lightly—none of that matters, so long as you can sever the thread.”
Yeon-woo mimicked his grip, squaring her stance and swinging the practice sword with a sharp whoosh. “Like this?”
“Precisely. But remember one thing: a sword swung without meaning can cut nothing. Even if you swing it only once, you must pour your clear will into that strike.”
“I’m gonna cut that thread no matter what.”
“Good. Keep that mindset.” Woon-hyun patted her head encouragingly before taking a step back. “Now, try again.”
“Okay!”
With an intensely solemn expression, Yeon-woo stepped in front of the taut string. Raising the wooden sword high with both hands, she yelled a fierce “Hah!” and brought the edge slashing down.
Twaaang!
The thread was pulled so incredibly tight that the wooden blade bounced right off. The rebound sent the sword flying back over her head, leaving Yeon-woo frozen mid-swing.
A brief, heavy silence hung in the air.
Then came a flurry of frantic shouts. “Hah! Hah! Haaah!”
She hacked and slashed at the air, raining blow after blow upon the target. Yet the thread proved far more stubborn than expected, refusing to yield so much as a frayed fiber.
After swinging the wooden sword relentlessly for quite some time, an thoroughly dejected Yeon-woo shuffled over to the edge of the undergrowth. She sank into a squat, hugged her knees to her chest, and mumbled miserably to the dirt.
“Yeon-woo has no talent…”
The wooden sword lay abandoned several paces away.
Watching her wallow in despair, Woon-hyun chuckled under his breath. “If this were something easily accomplished, I would never have set it as your goal to begin with. If you succeed before the day is out, I will roast that wild fowl you’ve been begging for as your dinner.”
Her ears practically twitched.
Yeon-woo whipped her head around, her eyes gleaming with sudden, predatory intensity. “…Really?”
“Indeed.”
“Alright!”
She sprang to her feet and snatched up the wooden sword from the ground. A blazing inferno had reignited within her round eyes.
One two-hour shijin later.
With mealtime approaching, Woon-hyun was busy dressing a freshly plucked pheasant according to his promise when he sensed a presence approaching. He looked up from his work to see Yeon-woo marching toward him, her chest puffed out with unbridled confidence.
‘It seems she succeeded.’
Woon-hyun glanced toward the sky, gauging the sun’s angle. ‘Did it take roughly a shijin?’
It had taken longer than he anticipated. Knowing how deceptively strong she was, he had assumed she would manage it in short order, so the delay came as a surprise.
‘Could it be…’ he wondered, a faint worry stirring in his chest. ‘Does she truly lack talent for the blade?’
Secretly, he had hoped she might succeed on her very first try.
“Grandpaaa!” Yeon-woo crowed, striding forward with triumphant swagger. “Ta-daaa!”
Dangling proudly between her small fingers were two pieces of thread, cleanly severed in two.
“Well done. Splendidly achieved,” Woon-hyun said, nodding in genuine approval. “In that case, give me a hand preparing lunch. We’ve run out of firewood, so go split some for the hearth.”
“Okay! I’m on it!”
Tossing the wooden sword aside, Yeon-woo scampered off toward the back of the house, her little feet pattering against the earth.
Left alone, Woon-hyun inspected the pieces of thread she had handed him. Running along the severed strands were countless faint, microscopic abrasions—evidence of the sheer, relentless volume of strikes the child had poured into her training.
‘She didn’t cut any corners.’
Left unsupervised, many children would have grown lazy, or perhaps resorted to cheating with some other tool simply to secure the promised meat. But Yeon-woo had done no such thing. She had always been like this. Whether someone watched her or not, she might grumble and whine, but she never shirked her duties—even if severing a single thread cost her an entire shijin of hard labor.
‘Hmm.’
Thwack! Thwack!
The rhythmic, echoing sound of firewood splitting drifted from behind the house.
A sudden thought crossed Woon-hyun’s mind. ‘Come to think of it… she already knew how to chop wood?’
Long before he had ever arrived at this secluded valley, the woodpile beside the dwelling had always been stacked high. Back when his body was still broken and he relied on Yeon-woo’s nursing, he had realized that she gathered and prepared all that firewood entirely by herself. She hadn’t kept a fire burning constantly the way they did now, so she hadn’t needed to chop logs every single day, but he clearly recalled the occasional dull thuds echoing from the yard.
Ever since his health improved and he took over the cooking, he had handled the chopping as well, meaning he had never actually seen her at work.
Pondering it now, an itch of curiosity arose within him. ‘Cleaving a log relies on a very similar application of force to what I taught her today.’
And yet, it had taken her an entire shijin just to sever a thread.
“Mmm…”
Had he assigned her a chore that was far too demanding? Setting his work aside, Woon-hyun slipped around toward the backyard, intending to tell her she could leave the heavy chopping to him if it proved too difficult.
When he rounded the corner, however, his feet froze in place.
What met his eyes was utterly unbelievable.
Yeon-woo hoisted a small hatchet over her shoulder. Without an ounce of hesitation, she brought it snapping down.
Craaack!
With a deafening split, a thick wooden log nearly the size of her own torso parted cleanly in two. Woon-hyun’s jaw dropped slack.
A fluke? Had to be, right?
Yet before that thought could fully take shape, she proved him wrong. With an air of absolute nonchalance, Yeon-woo propped one of the halved logs upright and swung again. Crack! Craaack!
She cleaved each half straight down the middle in rapid succession. She had grunted and strained just to heave the heavy log into place, but the moment she struck, it was pure, decisive slaughter. There was even a strange, rugged elegance to the way she kicked the split billets aside with the toe of her shoe, casually herding them into a tidy stack.
“Phew.”
Wiping the beads of sweat gathering on her forehead with the back of her forearm, Yeon-woo surveyed the growing pile. “This should be plenty, right?”
Woon-hyun didn’t even have time to register his own shock. Terrified she might catch him gawking like a fool, he hastily retreated toward the front yard.
Patter, patter, patter!
“Grandpaaa!”
Hearing the joyful cadence of the girl’s approaching steps, Woon-hyun fell into deep contemplation. ‘Could it be…?’
A profound, calculating stillness settled over his gaze.
The following morning.
“Take this.”
Yeon-woo stared down at the object placed into her open palms, tilting her head in confusion. “What is this…?”
Her brow furrowed. “A wooden axe?”
“It is called a wooden hatchet.”
“A wood… hatchet…?”
Woon-hyun nodded. Axes relied primarily on concussive chopping power rather than keen cutting edges, making wooden variants impractical for standard training. As a rule, almost no one practiced axe arts with wooden replicas. Even so, there was something he felt compelled to test.
“Come along over here.”
He led Yeon-woo toward the same spot as yesterday, where a fresh strand of thread hung taut between two wooden stakes. “Use that to sever the thread.”
“Yesterday it was a sword, and today it’s an axe?”
“That is correct.”
This was no ordinary hunk of whittled timber. Woon-hyun had spent the evening carefully carving this wooden hatchet, shaping its edge to the exact blunt thickness of the wooden sword she had struggled with the day before.
“Give it a try.”
Yeon-woo stepped up before the thread. Shifting her stance, she raised the hatchet and gave a casual grunt. “Hup.”
She brought the wooden blade downward in an easy chop.
Snap.
The thread parted cleanly on the very first strike.
‘Just as I thought.’
Every martial artist had a weapon that resonated naturally with their innate constitution. Some favored the sword, others the spear, the bow, the dagger, or the raw impact of bare fists. Among the myriad weapons under heaven, the sword and the fist reigned supreme as the two undisputed sovereigns of the martial world. Vast swathes of practitioners studied them, and countless illustrious predecessors had poured centuries into refining their principles, deepening their arts beyond measure.
Yet that did not mean martial arts outside the realm of the sword and fist were inherently inferior.
‘In fact, an unfamiliar weapon often rattles an opponent far more effectively.’
It was precisely why the ranks of the Ten Great Masters of the Realm and the Five Great Successors featured numerous experts whose martial foundations lay far beyond traditional swordsmanship or fist arts.
‘True mastery is not dictated by which martial discipline one studies, but by how rigorously one tempers oneself within it.’
In other words, the art Yeon-woo needed to master did not have to be the sword. Naturally, Woon-hyun had harbored a quiet desire to pass down his own swordsmanship to her, but he promptly suppressed the sentiment.
‘Now is not the time for my personal greed.’
What truly mattered was Yeon-woo’s growth and competence—maximizing her chances of surviving in a brutal world. To achieve that, she needed to hold whatever weapon fit her hands best right now.
“Yeon-woo. Go fetch your real hatchet.”
“My hatchet? Why?”
“There is somewhere we must go.”
Once Yeon-woo returned with her iron hatchet secured at her waist, Woon-hyun guided her toward the nearby mountain stream. The current ran briskly, its depth reaching just beneath the girl’s waistline.
“Step into the water.”
“…? Okay.”
Yeon-woo obediently waded into the icy stream without fuss. Drawing his steel blade, Woon-hyun directed a single, effortless flick toward a thick tree standing along the bank. With a flurry of rustling leaves, a massive trunk the girth of Yeon-woo’s entire torso fell away, cleaving neatly into uniform rounds perfectly sized for firewood.
“Whoaa…”
Gathering two of the freshly severed logs under his arms, Woon-hyun stepped into the rushing water beside her. He dropped one of the heavy rounds directly before her with a heavy splash!, then planted the tip of his scabbard atop the wood, firmly pressing it down to keep the buoyant timber submerged beneath the surface.
Yeon-woo blinked away the stray droplets that had splattered across her cheeks.
“Split it,” Woon-hyun commanded.
“……?”
She tilted her head back, staring up at him as if he had lost his mind.
“I said, split the firewood.”
Her eyebrows knotted into incredulous squiggles as she pointed a small finger down at the submerged log. Woon-hyun merely nodded.
“From what I witnessed yesterday, splitting firewood appears to be your greatest forte.”
“Well… yeah, that’s true.”
It was undeniably true, but still.
“Then show me,” Woon-hyun said, his tone steady and firm. Watching the log sway against the water’s current beneath her feet, Yeon-woo’s brow furrowed even deeper. “Show me what you are truly capable of.”