The Measure of a Blade
The Dancheon Clan Head has two sons.
The elder is Dancheon Hak, born of his lawful wife, Baek Yeo-hae. The second is Dancheon Myeong — myself, born of another mother yet entered into Baek Yeo-hae's registry all the same.
Two years my senior, Dancheon Hak turns twenty this year, making him the great hope of the Dancheon Clan. With his mother Baek Yeo-hae backing him in every material and immaterial way, he had cemented his standing from an early age, and my memory remains vivid of the self-assured smile that never once left his face.
"Brother, it's been a while."
"Has it, now."
The first time I faced him since my regression, he still wore that same confident smile.
"Why did you call for me?"
"Must brothers have business to call on one another?"
"That's how it's always been, hasn't it?"
He only called when there was. It had always been so. I cannot recall a single time I stood before him without business at hand — even as a joke, it would be hard to call us affectionate brothers.
I understand it. His wariness of me is as natural as the order of heaven. To the woman Baek Yeo-hae, my existence is a past she longs to erase; to Dancheon Hak, I am merely an unsettled future.
But having lived Myeong-gae's life as well and returned, I know now. The fault was never mine. I am a man entitled to stand tall.
So I squared my shoulders and said, "Call quietly and I will still come to see you, Brother. So don't do that again."
With those words, I let my gaze drift to the retainer standing behind Dancheon Hak. The man's cheek was swollen red — it had been perfectly fine when he came to fetch me. It took no great effort to guess what had happened in the short while it took me to walk here.
"And do mind your retainers a little as well."
With that, I flashed him a smile.
"I will."
Dancheon Hak smiled back at me. With features as handsome as his, the smile was fresh and pleasant. He always looks at me with a dissatisfied eye, but his mother Baek Yeo-hae was a woman of remarkable beauty in her youth — he must take after her. I bear no resentment toward the mother who gave me life, yet there were times I envied Dancheon Hak's looks. When I was a child, that is.
"So you're learning martial arts from Uncle Yeo-baek?"
"It came about somehow."
It was the first I learned that my brother took such an interest in me. That I was training under Uncle Yeo-baek was no great secret, but neither was it common knowledge within the clan.
"The Third Elder seemed terribly displeased, I heard."
"Was he? What a pity."
The Third Elder was the man who trained me from the age of eight to seventeen. Under his guidance I reached the First-Rate realm, so he ought rightly to be called my master — yet he is a man I could never bring myself to call that. In truth, I owe my early arrival at First-Rate to my natural bones and gift, not to him. He was that indifferent to teaching me.
Just look at the present moment. Dancheon Hak, who studies under the First Elder, reads the Third Elder's mind better than I ever did.
Not that I mind. I know all too well that the Council of Elders, composed of the Dancheon Clan's elders, stands wholly at my brother's side.
"Don't tell me you've taken an interest in the Clan Head's seat?"
My brother asked, probing me. I shook my head.
"Wrong."
Before he could misunderstand, I pressed on. "It's not that I've taken an interest — I've had one from the very beginning. Back then I was merely the little brother who couldn't measure up to you, so I kept it to myself."
"Am I not also qualified for that seat? Illegitimate though I may be."
"Ha! Hahahaha!"
As though he had heard the funniest joke in the world, Dancheon Hak burst into laughter. With tears even welling at the corners of his eyes, it was clearly no act. And the instant that laughter cut off—
"You? Of all people?"
—he asked. I know that expression and that question are his true nature. He had never been a good man, not even as a child.
I understand why he sneers. In my past life, I had not touched the Peak even by twenty; it was a realm I only reached in my days as Myeong-gae. But that was no failing of mine — it was the fault of the Third Elder's teaching. Dancheon Hak, by contrast, ascended to the Peak before he was even twenty, and by the succession contest had attained the fully matured Peak at twenty-two. With the First Elder as his master and effectively every elder in the clan pouring instruction into him, it is little wonder he finds me laughable. I cannot even fault that confidence of his.
Indeed, back then, my defeating Dancheon Hak and seizing the succession would have been a mantis trying to stop a chariot.
But.
"Long or short — don't you only know once you've measured them against each other?"
What about now? Now that I, too, have already set foot in the Peak Realm?
"Must you measure to know?"
"We don't seem all that different, you see. Then measuring is the only way."
I shrugged. The sneer steeped into his face curdled into open displeasure. If he has our mother Baek Yeo-hae and the Council of Elders at his back, then I will have Uncle Yeo-baek and the Escort Corps at mine.
"Do you still see me as that sniveling Dancheon Myeong?"
If he has attained Peak martial attainment, then I will attain something beyond it. At the sight of me, so unlike the brother he remembered, Dancheon Hak's expression hardened.
"Come to think of it, Brother — the Dragon and Phoenix Assembly is before long, isn't it?"
The Dragon and Phoenix Assembly is a gathering for the rising talents of the orthodox sects — young masters who entered the Peak Realm before their thirtieth year. Held once every three years, this year it convenes in Henan. I remember how Dancheon Hak returned from it like a triumphant general, laureled in recognition, chest puffed with pride. Back then, I had not yet entered the Peak, so I never so much as set foot on that event's threshold.
"Why would the likes of you care about that?"
My brother asked, forcing a crooked smile.
"Well, I qualify too — wouldn't that make me interested?"
This year will be different.
"I've entered the Peak as well, you see."
The star of the Dragon and Phoenix Assembly will not be you. It will be me.
"You crossed blades with Young Master Hak?"
"Nothing of the sort happened."
I flatly played innocent in answer to Uncle Yeo-baek.
"The rumor is rampant all over the clan, though? They say Young Master Myeong declared war on Young Master Hak."
It seems the clan is amply stocked with loose tongues. Still, the false part deserved correcting.
"Not a declaration of war — merely a foretold event, wouldn't you say?"
"Hm."
The Dancheon Clan has upheld its family tradition of legitimate succession for far longer than a day or two, so a contest for the successor's seat is a future already foreseen.
"Do you have confidence?"
he asked, as though gauging me.
"I do."
I answered without a flicker. I had returned after laying countless arrangements in place. Had I not already gathered too much to be snuffed out in a mere contest over the young patriarch's seat? But if one could become Clan Head simply by being ahead in the martial arts, who would bother with all this toil? The leader of the Murim Alliance is so, and so is the Dancheon Clan Head — in the end, a man needs a base of support. That much I know.
"And what will you do, Uncle?"
I threw the question back at Uncle Yeo-baek. This time it was my turn to take his measure.
"If Young Master Myeong can stop three of my strikes, I'll think on it then."
That meant he held more than enough goodwill toward me.
"Then you had best think on it today."
With that, I gripped my sword. At my audacity, he broke into a broad grin.
"Well, that's not a bad thing."
Uncle Yeo-baek flowed into his opening stance as though answering my challenge.
"I never did like that Hak fellow much, to begin with."
And that is precisely why I came to you.
The Dancheon Sword Clan, which holds sway over Anhui Province, rests upon three pillars.
The first is the absolute being who governs all things in the clan — the Clan Head. The Dancheon Clan Head is the clan's center of gravity, a pillar upon which the family stands.
The second is the Council of Elders, composed of the Dancheon Sword Clan's elders. A saying drifts about the jianghu half in jest: to have grown old is to have grown strong. The Council of Elders is the living proof of it. To survive to old age in the blade-ridden world of murim means a man holds a trump card up his sleeve — and more than that, most orthodox martial arts only deepen their fire with the passing years.
And the third is the Escort Corps — the very Dancheon Escort Corps over which Bang Yeo-baek presides as captain. The Escort Corps is the organization that gathers the largest number of warriors in the clan, a field of discipline where hot-blooded young swordsmen congregate — above all, those who cannot stomach the stiff-necked elders of the Council.
The reason Bang Yeo-baek is judged the de facto second man of the Dancheon Clan is not simply that he enjoys the Clan Head's deepest trust. It owes more to his captaincy of the Escort Corps, one of the clan's three pillars, and to his lofty martial arts, which have reached the Harmony Realm.
The three pillars that bear up the Dancheon Clan check one another and sustain one another, and through that tension the clan advances. In a martial family, the Clan Head's seat is sacred and inviolable, and none dare challenge its authority — but below it, the arithmetic is a little different. The Council of Elders and the Escort Corps are fated to hold each other in check at all times.
Yet an organization inevitably takes after the temperament of its head. The First Elder — leader of the Council and master to the eldest son Dancheon Hak — is an ambitious man. He threw himself actively into clan politics, and hand in glove with the clan's mistress Baek Yeo-hae, he is diligently pushing Dancheon Hak toward the seat of Clan Head. His aim is to seat Dancheon Hak as the next patriarch one day and win back the Clan Head's trust that the Escort Corps has stolen away.
Bang Yeo-baek, by contrast, spares clan politics not a shred of interest. He is a man who believes a warrior's true duty is self-cultivation — tempering one's martial arts with a clear and upright heart.
"If you need my help, have Young Master Hak come to me himself."
"What?"
A conversation with Baek Yeo-hae.
"Help us, Uncle."
"Young Master Hak already lacks for nothing. Why would he need my help?"
"Well, that is..."
"Since you have nothing to say, I'll take my leave."
And then the conversation with the eldest son, Dancheon Hak.
Those two anecdotes remain one of the legends still told and retold within the clan. Perhaps it is precisely this temperament of his that keeps my father Dancheon Gang keeping Uncle Yeo-baek at his side.
But even so. No — all the more because of it, I must make Uncle Yeo-baek mine. If I dream of the Dancheon Clan Head's seat, that is. For he is the one and only card that can stand against a Council of Elders already tilted wholly toward my brother Dancheon Hak.
The easiest path, of course, would be to catch the Clan Head's eye — but Father will never intervene in the succession contest. I know his temperament through and through.
"You look confident enough. Let's begin right away."
Said the most stubborn swordsman in the Dancheon Clan.
"Come at me."
Unlike usual, I provoked him. Only by showing this much audacity would he even bother to take me seriously. Audacity alone, of course, would never do — I would have to show skill to match it.
Today was that day.
Tat!
Uncle Yeo-baek moved with a liveliness of footwork beyond his usual. Perhaps because he no longer underestimated me, he did not try to slip past my eyes with movement arts as in our last session. His martial arts were given over wholly to the motion of his sword.
"This is what is called Heart-Becomes-Action."
A voice I had never heard before — Yakseon's — echoed at my ear. Will became, in that instant, the circulation of inner energy, and that circulation sculpted movement.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
In the blink of an eye, three exchanges had passed between us. I knew Uncle Yeo-baek was not giving his all, yet I shivered at the thrill of unraveling the exquisite techniques blossoming from his fingertips.
"Chah!"
For the first time, I loosed my sword at him.
Tap.
As though answering, my uncle's blade slapped onto mine and stuck fast. Pear Blossom Grafting. There was no time to be rattled. I knew that left alone, I would lose my sword, and answered at once.
Whuum!
Even swinging my blade in a great arc, his sword still clung to mine.
Tat!
Driving inner energy into the Yongcheon points, I sprang into the empty air. I thought I had shaken him loose — yet my uncle rose before my very eyes, sword still married to mine.
"Lifting both feet off the ground against a superior opponent is dangerous. Bear it in mind."
No sooner had his words ended—
Crash!
—than my feet, landing back on the earth, caught on his withdrawing step and I went down. I was spared the sorry sight of a swordsman dropping his blade, but I rolled across the ground all the same — hardly any better.
The moment I scrambled upright, his sword was already leveled at the space between my brows.
"That's enough."
"...Thank you."
Satisfaction and dissatisfaction — feeling an emotion caught somewhere between the two, I bowed my head to my uncle.
"Splendid."
With that, Uncle Yeo-baek let his own sword sink.
"Once you return from the Dragon and Phoenix Assembly, we can begin the latter half of the Dancheon Sword Formula."
Even so — today was a day to be satisfied.