Tempering

The Room of Tempering closed.

It happened after I finished a bout with the wooden puppets in the Room of Combat. And it was from that moment that my mind began to come apart at a terrifying ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠speed.

A few days after the Room of Tempering shut, the Room of Experience closed as well.

Now only the Room of Combat remained open, and I had no choice but to spend most of every day inside it. Several more days passed like that.

"......"

I swung my sword with blood streaming from the places where my eyes and ears had been. That psychotic bastard of a System had burst my eyeballs and my eardrums.

I could see nothing. I could hear nothing, and so I had no sense of what was coming at me, or from where.

"AAAAAAAH!!!!"

I screamed, for the who-knows-how-many-th time. I couldn't hear the sound, but I felt my throat tear raw and hacked out a cough, and then the iron of blood flooded it.

"Ghk...!!"

I felt my heart run through. In the same instant my throat was cut, and I woke once more in the center of the cave.

After something like a few hundred deaths, I developed a way of fighting that depended on smell.

"Huff...! Huff...!"

I gasped for air and sniffed like a goddamn dog. I tracked the weapons glazed with my own blood, caught the birch-wood scent peculiar to the wooden puppets, and swung.

"AAAAAAAH!!"

Burst eyes and burst eardrums had only been the beginning. It didn't take long to understand that. The wooden puppets began to torment me in ways I never could have imagined.

The next day came.

"What the fuck is this now..."

The moment I stepped into the room, I felt snow and wind. I still couldn't see, still couldn't hear, but the sensory points left intact in my body registered a merciless cold. A winter wind that brought absolute zero to mind, and the snow heaped all around me, dragged at every movement.

I felt my body stiffening and forced it to move, trying to kindle heat. It might as well have been wasted effort. My whole body began to freeze at a frightening speed. Toes and fingers went first. Frostbite climbed after them into my wrists and ankles. With no feeling left in my hands I dropped the sword, and the wooden puppets hacked me to pieces until I died.

After roughly another thousand deaths, I learned that if I accelerated my blood flow and raised my body temperature, frostbite couldn't take me. Merely conceiving a way to speed the blood cost hundreds of deaths. Making it mine cost hundreds more.

Once the frost no longer claimed me, I could finally fight properly. The moment I could, the cave stole my breath. Some unknowable force sealed my nose shut. I could breathe through my mouth, but there was a limit to that, and without air reaching my body as it should, I couldn't accelerate my blood either. The fighting style I had built on smell collapsed, and now I had no choice but to fight on instinct alone.

Thunk—! A throwing knife from god-knows-where punched through my shoulder. It wouldn't move after that; some vital muscle and bone had clearly given way. Crack—! A wooden puppet swinging a hammer crushed my skull, and I died.

After yet another few hundred deaths, my body gained a complete immunity to the cold, with no need to hurry the blood at all. Now I could fight the wooden puppets intact even in an environment of absolute zero.

It was around then that the Room of Combat began to change again.

"......Ha. Nothing surprises me anymore."

Only yesterday the room had been swallowed by a cold that could have put Siberia to shame. Now it was a jungle under a blazing sun. In heat that had to be well past a hundred degrees, without a breath of wind, sweat began to pour off me like rain.

"...So I'm meant to finish this before dehydration kills me."

Even so, this was better than before. The wooden puppets had a very generous gift for the man who thought so. Mid-fight, they loosed snakes—vipers, every one of them, carrying extreme venom. And all the while they flung Rain-Hair Needles at me, thinner than a strand of hair. My resistance to poison was still incomplete, and I died of it again and again.

I grew used to heat past a hundred degrees, and to the scorching sun. A dagger smeared with extreme venom could strike me, a lethal viper's fangs could sink in, and my body had reached the point of simply taking it. Destroyed and regenerated without end, that body no longer improved. It meant I had reached the limit of what human flesh could attain.

My swordsmanship, too, was nothing like what it had been when I first learned it. My Goksan Sword Art was no longer bound by its forms. Having fully grasped both the Sword Principle and the Sword Intent latent in the art, I could, when I needed to, recast every form until it functioned like an entirely different sword style.

Days of adapting to every harsh environment while I honed the sword. Then another trial came to meet me.

"......."

By now I was so far past disbelief that I couldn't even get a word out. I simply took up my sword and faced the dragon whose enormous maw gaped toward me.

The dragon was strong. So much so that comparing it to the wooden puppets' host felt like an insult. It killed me more than anything else ever had. The wind raised when that colossal body lifted shattered my movement. Every graze of its claws tore me apart. Its cry burst my eardrums and my brain. Its scales made my sword strikes meaningless.

But what had no answer at all was the power it possessed. The dragon could command the weather. When it needed to, it called rain and raised storms. It brought lightning down, and from that vast maw it poured out its breath and melted the earth.

Yet after deaths numbering in the thousands, I could finally kill it. I lost an arm and a leg doing so, but I couldn't deny the fact of success itself. And I repeated the process until I could succeed with every limb intact. Only after about another thousand fights could I kill the dragon safely.

I cannot sleep in this place. I had tried many times and failed every one, and after about three years I gave up and threw myself into training. But that day was one on which, for reasons I couldn't name, a scene unfolded inside my consciousness as if I were dreaming.

I woke from an unconsciousness that had felt like a dream. Had I just fallen asleep? No. That couldn't be. I had only been swinging my sword, and then I'd dropped into a pitch-black unconsciousness. ...Ha. Listen to me. If that wasn't sleep, then what was it?

Ordinarily I would have said as much. But the man I was now knew what happened when the mind reached the edge of a dizzying cliff. He knew what it felt like to be asleep, and yet not asleep.

For a moment I recalled the past. Sudden. Out of nowhere. If this were a story, it was the kind of turn with not a scrap of logic to it, the sort people would curse as trash. I recalled it anyway, without that worry.

"......"

And then I understood. The memories of my past life were being forgotten, little by little, as time went on.

Choi Dae-gun. Seo Jun-hyeok. Jeon Seok-hwan. Nam Do-hyeong. And... and...

Crack—!

"Damn it..."

I stopped the hand that had been writing name after name and broke the brush. The names of my comrades-in-arms, names that only a few years ago had been branded clear into my brain... I couldn't remember them.

The System probably hadn't erased them by force. It would know. It would know how unstable my mind was right now. I could see it myself; there was no way the System couldn't. Artificially wiping memory on top of a mind already coming apart? Its goal was to make me an assassin, not to ruin me. ...I couldn't be certain, in truth. But I had a groundless faith that the System, at least, would not do that to me.

So I thought, and I worried at it. Why were the memories disappearing?

If I reasoned it out the proper way, the answer was simple. Has it just been too long...? Nearly ten years had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠passed. Of course they would vanish from the brain. That would be the correct conclusion.

But this... The speed of the forgetting was far too fast. The names of comrades I ought to have remembered easily for ten years at least, and it wasn't as if twenty or thirty years had gone by......

Wait.

Twenty years? Thirty? It struck me all at once. Now that I thought about it, hadn't I spent nearly ten years with a waking mind? A person ordinarily gives about a third of each day to sleep. I had spent those ten years without sleeping at all. No deep sleep meant the mental wear could only be severe, and severe mental wear meant memories could only wear away faster. So if I said that, by feel, my body had lived twenty or thirty years... it wouldn't even be an exaggeration.

"Ha......."

I let out a long breath. The body finally had room to spare, and now the mind was the problem. Before it's too late... I have to recover. It wouldn't be too late yet. The very fact that I could still think this rationally was proof of that.

But... how? I kept turning it over. This place, with no one in it. What was I supposed to do to restore a heart worn ragged and collapsed? Nothing came to mind. A cave with nobody in it doesn't offer many options.

In the end, there was only one thing I could do. Right. Meditate. Govern the mind, and walk back through the memories of the past. And think of something happy. Picture in advance what I would do once I left this place, and run the whole happiness circuit in my head.

Sleep would help the most, but... Would this cave even allow it? It wasn't as if I hadn't tried to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠sleep here. I had closed my eyes and sent my consciousness far away, trying to fall under, and not just once or twice. Every attempt failed. As if it had laid down a rule, the cave would not permit me to sleep.

And then—

A window rose before my eyes with those words written on it.

"...Huh."

A small sound of wonder escaped me. Sleep was possible. The System was the very one who had imprisoned me here, and yet, for this instant alone, something like gratitude rose up and faded.

I didn't even have time for another breath of wonder. I folded where I stood and slept. Mental fatigue had piled up to the point of fainting, and sleep had at last been permitted; I didn't wake until a week had passed.

Once I could sleep, and once I spent my days in meditation, my mind recovered a fair amount. In truth I couldn't tell whether it had truly recovered. One thing, though, I knew clearly.

Not much left.

The day I would leave this cave was now less than a month away. I was a man who had endured more than nine years without sleep. A month was nothing more than the span of a single blink. I leaned on a vast anticipation and endured, day by day. I reviewed the knowledge I had stacked while the Room of Experience was open, and when I was tired, I slept. Simply being able to sleep deeply could clear my mind a great deal.

...Of course, the unconscious of the man who had brainwashed himself over and over knew well enough that this was his own delusion.

A massive boulder sealed the cave. Ten years of tempering my body, and I had been able neither to cut it nor to push it aside.

But now—

The boulder that had confined me in a single cave for ten years moved that enormous body of its own accord and opened my path.

Rrrrrumble—!!!

Not light made by a formation or a night-shining pearl, but the sunlight of the world itself poured into the cave. I had been waiting in front of the boulder since hours before, and a breath of awe left me.

"Ah..."

Ten years. A full ten years. I had built my body, stacked knowledge, and raised my martial prowess. If it had been hard, it was hard. If it had been agony, it was agony. I had been afraid of myself growing numb to pain, and I had replayed the past over and over, trying to hold on to the memories that were slipping away.

I reached out and took the sunlight in my hand. I lifted my head and looked into the dazzling sun.

"......"

It blinded me, but I didn't close my eyes. Even if my retinas were damaged, that was fine. I wanted to enjoy this light, wholly, in this moment.

Step. Step. A few paces on, there were clothes and a cloth bundle that seemed to have been prepared for me. There was an identity plaque as well, and a single name was written on it.

This, it seemed, was the name I would use in this world.

I changed into the clothes and lifted the bundle. I hung a Peerless Sword at each hip and tucked the identity plaque into my robes.

The end of a vicious ten-year life of training. And the beginning of new hardship and adversity.