Tempering
The Room of Experience.
There was far more to cultivate here than in the other two rooms. I split what I had to learn into three broad fields and spent my days accordingly.
The first was the culture and history of this world, learned in rough outline. The second was the original story as I remembered it—set down in a notebook in as much detail as I could manage, along with a rough plan for what I would do once I left the cave. The third was a spread of disciplines: spellcraft, mechanisms and formations, acting, rhetoric, and every kind of weapon.
Of those, I gave the most time to the weapons. Modern arms I might have known my way around. These were the arms of the murim, and too many of them I had never so much as held. I needed the fundamentals, at least.
"...The most useful of the lot is the flying dagger, I suppose."
After years of training in this place, I had come to see it. I already had the Peerless Sword and the Goksan Sword Art. There was no great need to master anything else.
Even so, I had taken up one weapon after another against the day I might need them, and of all those the flying dagger proved the most worth keeping. It was small enough to vanish into a pocket or a sleeve, and it could strike a distant mark without any great waste of strength. In a pinch it would serve as a short blade besides. After the sword, it was the weapon I expected to reach for most.
"And my hand isn't bad with it."
I looked over the targets scattered through the room—or rather, at the daggers buried in them. They were the result of the drill I had just run, and the improvement showed. I could put a blade into several moving marks at once, and put it where I meant to.
"Then it's the Room of Combat."
Four years remained to me here.
Six years.
That was how long I had lived inside this cave. In that time I had cast off the shell of an ordinary man and been remade as something beyond human. It would not have been an exaggeration to say so. I had grown that strong. As I was now, I was confident I could cut down or smash apart anything set in front of me.
But it was still not enough.
Six years since I had begun in the Room of Combat, and the wooden dolls had started to use qi.
BOOM—!!!
I took the doll's heavy blow and let my sword flow off it. The Peerless Sword traced a soft arc and went for the throat.
SHWIIIIK—!
A swift thread of sword-qi ambushed me in answer. I caught it and snapped my body back, slipping clear. The first ambush, though, was only the beginning.
KUUUUUUM—!!
From the sword of the doll in front of me, a massive sword-force erupted. The pressure clamping the space around me thickened. I felt it, and reset my grip.
THUD—!
I stamped a rooted step, pitched my weight forward, and drew the tension tight. Heels lifting—
CRACK—!
I launched myself like a sprung coil. In the same instant, countless threads of sword-qi poured in from every side. I spun like a top and swung.
CHAK-CHAK-CHAK-CHAK—!
The swarm of sword-qi broke apart and lost its shape. I was on the wooden doll in a blink, and I unleashed it—the first form of the Goksan Sword Art.
A straight, unbending line blooms from the Peerless Sword and shears a green-tinged sword-force clean through.
SLASH—!
The line carried on and took the doll's neck with it. I stopped where I stood. I had cut down the lead doll, and the rest ought to freeze at any moment.
That was my mistake.
The wooden dolls erupted as one. A vast wave of qi—too immense even for one who could cut qi itself.
KUUUUUUU——!!
I swung like a madman, fast and faster and faster still, until not a hair of gap remained in the space my sword was allowed to hold. It was not enough. My reason was nowhere near calm enough, and my technique fell short. Muscle that felt as if it could do anything refused to follow my thoughts.
...And in the end—
BURST—!
My body exploded in the empty air.
Once the wooden dolls began to use qi, my life in the Room of Combat changed sharply. Their styles grew wildly varied, and the training grew that much harder with them. Sword against sword, spear against spear, bow against bow—they had already tormented me with every kind of weapon. Lay qi over that, and the number of cases I had to account for more than doubled. A doll with a sword struck from a distance. A doll with a bow came in the other way, sheathing its arrows in sword-qi and crashing over me. The more I had to think, the more my reason blurred and my movements slowed. In the end there was nothing for it but to grow used to them all over again.
And now they would use any means at all to kill me. Poison and hidden weapons. Formations, when they needed them. To blunt my one advantage—the ability to cut qi—they leaned on sword-wind and fist-wind.
Worse, the dolls had no concept of a life to lose. Cut them, stab them, they still came on to the last breath of the attempt. Facing that was more than an irritation. It was frightening. It was terror.
This won't do.
I could not keep struggling against mere wooden dolls. To kill the absolute masters of the murim—the ones who split the sky and shattered mountains—I had to grow stronger. Stronger still.
"Huff... huff..."
Six years since I had begun building my body in the Room of Tempering. I had nearly reached completion, and the growth was stalling, but I did not stop. As I had already told myself, this would not do. Strength and speed were lacking. My body would not follow my thoughts. The reason was plain enough. The tempering was not enough.
"Haah...! Haah...!"
In truth, my body's growth had slowed to a crawl nearly two years ago. For the first three, muscle had piled on day by day until I could become something past human. After that it slowed so badly that I had even considered giving more of my hours to the Room of Combat.
But—
No. This is right.
There are no shortcuts to growing strong. Trying to pack a gap in the flesh with technique is arrogance, pure and simple, and it ruins you. Technique and strength have to be kept in balance. The mind has to be cooled past freezing, and the speed of thought has to be pushed further still. To kill an absolute master of the murim—to live—there was no choice but to do it.
I kept at the iron eight hours a day without a break. Time passed. A month later, something in my body began to go wrong.
It happened on a day when I was still training.
CRACK—!
"...Huh?"
A sound came out of my body without warning.
CRRRACK—!!
"Ghk...!!"
Every bone in me, and every muscle, began to tear and break.
CRRRRRACK—!!!
"Ghhhhk.....!!!"
By now I could have laughed off the pain of a broken bone. This was a kind of agony I had never met in my life—every bone in my body not merely breaking, but splitting fine as splinters and punching out through torn muscle. Put it that way, and perhaps it can be understood. It did not end there.
"...Th-this is insane...!!"
Pain like my hair being ripped out by the roots crashed over me. The hair really was coming away in clumps, and then it began to grow back. Strands shot straight up out of the pores. It was like someone boring a needle-sized hole into my scalp, one after another, and the pain hammered my skull. In the midst of it, the shattered bone and torn muscle began to regenerate. A wholly different pain from the breaking and the tearing traveled the nerves into my brain.
"AAAAAAAGH!!!!"
I chewed through my lip and bit down on my tongue, jolting myself awake. I could not lose consciousness here. I could not have said why. Only that if I slept now, something irreversible would happen.
"Huff...!! Huff...!!"
I fought to steady my ragged breathing and blunt the pain. Without the tolerance I had built over six years, I could never have endured it. This was a body that had already died thousands of times. Being broken and crushed was nothing I hadn't—
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!"
I could not hold.
How many hours passed after that, I could not have said. I wandered the border of death again and again, and in the end I outlasted the pain that had been scouring my mind blank. The price was a tongue bitten nearly in half and bleeding hard, but whether from the body's extraordinary recovery or not, the bleeding soon stopped.
"......"
I looked at myself in the stream. It was nothing like the body from before it had broken. Above and below, left and right, it held a perfect balance, and the muscle wrapping me like fitted armor was, on looks alone, no less than a sculpture. Flawless flesh, as if I had passed through a rebirth of bone and body. No—a step beyond even that. This flesh looked as though it could not take so much as a scratch.
"...Can I still grow stronger."
Rising into that realm, I understood. Even this body, which looked like perfection and completion itself, still had room to develop. Ordinary methods would not reach it. Piling on muscle with the equipment in the Room of Tempering—there seemed to be no possibility left in that.
That doesn't mean there's no way.
If the ordinary method was impossible, then I would temper the body by one that was not. There is never only one way to refine a body.
But before that...
The body was complete enough. Now I had to polish technique. In slightly high spirits, I stepped into the Room of Combat.
...Even then, I did not foresee it. What this damned cave's system was about to do to me.