Youthful Reversion
Youthful Reversion—banrohwandong, the old made young again. A tale handed down through the murim of the Jianghu like legend itself: the story of an aged grandmaster who had ascended to the very summit reclaiming the flesh of his prime.
What kept it from being dismissed as pure legend was that, like the Vermilion Fruit, it was exceedingly rare—yet proven to exist.
Many people confuse it with hwangoltaltae, the wholesale rebirth of the body, but the two are not the same thing. Where Youthful Reversion parts ways with that total metamorphosis is here: a rebirth only raises the quality of the flesh; it cannot give time back. Forced to put it into words, it is the difference between becoming an old man as hale as any youth and actually becoming a youth again—and that, one must admit, is no small difference.
I had called Youthful Reversion a thing of legend. Not because it had failed to prove itself, time and again, across the long ages—but because the number of specimens was vanishingly small.
With records and testimony so scarce, there had never been enough to build any true accumulation of information. And scarcity of information is, at its root, mystery—and is mystery not the very essence of legend?
Put another way, I did not know very much about Youthful Reversion.
But had it not been said that inference drawn from the torn edges of information is the very qualification of a capable information broker? And so I held my guesses as to several truths of Youthful Reversion.
The most important of them was this: Youthful Reversion could never serve as a watershed that divides realms, the way Samhwa Chwijeong or the Five Energies Converged at the Origin did.
The reason was plain to see. Bodhidharma of Shaolin, wanting for nothing to be called a Grand Patriarch; Jang Sambong of Wudang; Yakseon; the Sovereign of Destruction, Yeom Gi-ha—not one of them had ever achieved Youthful Reversion.
And yet, among warriors walking realms beneath theirs, masters who had achieved it surfaced now and again. There was no crack in my inference.
In any case...
"This humble daoist is called Mugeuk. I bear the same generational character—'Mu'—as the Mudam you just faced, so there is nothing improper in it."
Watching this Mugeuk Jinin unfold the art of the Formless Sword at the Sinjin Gyoryuhoe while insisting he belonged to that very 'Mu' generation, I understood this much beyond argument: this daoist, having achieved Youthful Reversion, was a shameless man through and through.
The Beggars' Gang had never known rank, and so the famed beggar Myeong-gae had been a man without rank. People, after all, come to resemble the company they keep.
And even before he became a beggar, Dancheon Myeong—for all that he was direct blood of a great clan, a world where precedence is everything—had never been a man of rigid ranks.
"I ask for your instruction."
And so my manner of speech toward the Sword Emperor was no different. I used that same plain courtesy even with Pahwang Yeom Gi-ha; there was no reason the Sword Emperor should be an exception.
A few of the Nine Sects daoists were pulling sour faces, but this was no time to mind them. The man concerned—the Sword Emperor himself—did not seem to mind much either.
To be a little more honest: I did not much care for the 'immortals' of the Nine Sects.
Not because I was born to a prestigious house. It was because of the conduct they had displayed during the Great War of Righteousness and Evil.
Of course, worthy of their place as the pillars of the righteous path, they were indeed the ones who had ranged without rest across that war's front lines.
Only, to put it precisely, that credit belonged to the backbone of their elder ranks and to the masters of the Nine Sects' first three generations.
Shff— I settled into the opening stance of the Fist-and-Foot Art.
The Sword Emperor had bidden me show him everything, but what reason had I to obey his every command?
Given the circumstances I could hardly turn back his challenge—yet neither was I obliged to lay my whole hand on the table.
Then—
"Can you hear me?"
The Sword Emperor's voice reached me, faint and yet vivid.
Faint, and vivid. A voice bearing two contradictory qualities at once—it, too, could rightly be called a marvel.
It was yugijeonseong—voice carried upon the qi itself.
Jeoneum-ipmil, the art of threading whispered words into another's ear, could never have slipped past the ears of the many masters gathered here; carried upon qi, mingled into the pressure he was already spreading toward me, it could.
Perhaps the Sword Emperor had something he wished to pass to me in secret.
I met his gaze.
My days had been too full of training the martial arts to learn such an exquisitely lofty art as yugijeonseong. And to answer in kind with jeoneum-ipmil would hardly suit the occasion—better, frankly, to hold my tongue.
"I can see that your realm is far from ordinary. And yet it seems you have no thought of showing me all of it, hm?"
Truly, the Sword Emperor's name was no empty reputation.
He seemed to have seen straight through my workings.
Behind that impish expression, surely, lay the cunning of a man who had survived the murim for an age measured not in years but in sixty-year cycles.
"Face me now at your full strength, and I should like to grant you one small lesson. What say you?"
With that, the Sword Emperor raised his Formless Sword, smiling bright and clear.
The common wisdom held that the Formless Sword differed from a sword-gang only in that it borrowed strength from no physical vessel; yet I could not shake the feeling that his Formless Sword carried a force beyond any sword-gang.
"Mm..."
"Isn't the Formless Sword a bit much?"
"...I am sure the Sword Emperor has considered it all."
"Perhaps he means to spare Wudang's face. Their most treasured inheritance, the Taiji Wisdom Sword, was broken so pitifully, after all..."
Undisturbed by the bystanders' chatter, my mind was weighing profit against loss.
'A lesson from the Sword Emperor, then.'
I was Yakseon's successor. And I had learned from Pahwang Yeom Gi-ha as well.
In truth, the essence of martial learning lies in honing oneself—and to seek instruction from many masters does not necessarily mean one's realm will rise.
And yet...
The torn edge of Spiritual Perception the Sword Emperor had shown me kept surfacing, again and again. I could not leash my curiosity about that art—the art I had, naming it with my own mouth, come to think of as the Simgeom, the Heart Sword.
"Here I come."
VWOOOM— In my hand, before I knew it, a Formless Sword stood complete, its full shape assembled.
"Good."
The Sword Emperor smiled, and the Nine Sects daoists, who had been airing their assorted worries, all shut their mouths.
KWAAANG—! The Formless Swords met in a violent collision.
PWAH—! The aftermath turned to shockwaves that shredded the very air.
It was a struggle between monsters such as the Sinjin Gyoryuhoe had never once witnessed.
Even masters of the Harmony Realm could not have withstood a spectacle like this. The Nine Sects elders, who had long since put a wide margin between themselves and the dueling platform, stood idle-handed, doing no more than keeping their own movement arts honed and ready.
Their role as safety stewards had ended long before.
"Haah..."
A single elder's sigh stitched briefly across the space, then faded.
The other elders gathered here were, at heart, no different.
For youths who boasted skin of milky fairness were unfolding realms of the martial path that a lifetime of pursuit and refinement had never let them touch.
One of the two, granted, was the previous era's aged grandmaster Sword Emperor, made young again by Youthful Reversion—but the man holding him dead even was nothing more than a youth on the cusp of twenty. And so their admiration was shot through with wonder and, in the same breath, a quiet desolation.
TZEENG—!
The supreme art of the Formless Sword.
Tat—!
A rising light-body art that yielded not an inch even to the Jewunjong.
TZEENG—!
And above all—the sheer tenacity with which he chased down the Songmun Ancient Sword, the Sword Emperor's blade unmistakably unfolding the true subtleties of the physical sword, until he forced it into collision.
Only then could they all understand, perfectly. That Wudang's prodigy, the Flowing Dragon Mudam who had faced the Dancheon Divine Dragon, had never once been lacking. That the truth was that his Taiji Wisdom Sword had never been lacking.
If anything, to have exchanged two full bouts with a master ascending like this—perhaps it would be right to say that Mudam had been granted a great fortune.
As if to prove that very fact, Mudam was watching the duel between the Sword Emperor and the Dancheon Divine Dragon with steady, upright eyes.
No—to speak precisely, it was hardly fair to call it watching. The afterimages their struggle left behind were burden enough merely to chase.
The Nine Sects elders, who had entered the Harmony Realm long ago and set off down the road to immortality, could not fully read those subtleties; it stood to reason that a third-generation disciple barely twenty could not take them in entire.
Even a genius for the ages cannot close so vast a chasm in a single bound.
But Mudam never blinked.
Tenacity, and effort. Perhaps Mudam's truest talent lay there.
"So the martial arts of the mortal world have advanced this far?" one elder murmured, as though in lament...
"Rather than the greatness of those arts, it is that child's talent that..." The other elder, who had taken up the thread, soon let his own words trail into nothing.
For he had just remembered that when Dancheon Hak—not the Dancheon Divine Dragon—had proven he, too, had entered the Harmony Realm by his own strength, he had spoken those exact words.
"...Was it mere obstinacy?"
With that, the elder opened his mouth no further. He simply watched the duel between the Sword Emperor and the Dancheon Divine Dragon in silence.
He had come to the realization himself. When Dancheon Hak had unveiled his presence, he remembered, he had said what he had just said—as though a victor were stooping to grant magnanimity.
But this time was different.
It was hard to deny that, even to his own ears, the words now sounded like the grumblings of a loser swept aside by the next wave rolling up the Long River.
"Alas... woe is me..."
There had been no Dao in his own conduct. The moment he returned to his sect, he would have to set himself right.
The Nine Great Sects. They who had reigned from the very summit of the murim were gazing upon the dawn of a new epoch.
"Not bad at all."
"Only because you temper your hand with me, Sword Emperor."
My words were not wrong. It embarrassed me somewhat to say so of myself, but the exchanges between the Sword Emperor and me were now no different from an instructional bout.
It was a fact I grasped only after dozens of exchanges had passed: my sword was, at this moment, not traveling where my will sent it.
What do I mean? That every one of my sword-paths was being shaped precisely in the direction the Sword Emperor wished.
The Sword Emperor's gaze, his breathing, his posture. The way he planted his footwork, the direction in which he shifted his frame, the roll of his weight. And beyond that, the power, speed, and angle of every strike he loosed, and the length of those instants when his blade and mine stayed locked. All of it was governing my sword-paths.
It was an hour in which I came to see my own deficiency—that I had believed the subtlety of the physical sword to be nothing more than yielding softness deflecting an opponent's hard assault.
"Once more, then. I'll g—"
TZEENG—!
"—o."
Before the words had even finished, the Formless Sword lifted in my hand had struck the Sword Emperor's own. The strike had simply been so fast that it outran its own sound; no one could call it an ambush in the middle of a duel.
"Oho. So you have grasped something?"
The Sword Emperor asked the question as though he had caught the markedly changed course of my sword.
"Not yet. I have merely imitated what you showed me."
To be remade by an insight that arrives unbidden—that is a martial artist. And to steadily hone what one has seized—that, too, is a martial artist. So it was right to judge my realization still wanting.
"Well done. Well done indeed."
A smile settled into the Sword Emperor's impish expression.
"Had a rascal like you entered the mountains, perhaps the Nine Sects would have turned out a little different."
But I could not agree.
"I don't believe so."
For one who had achieved the union of all five elixir stages, the maturity to look back upon himself had long since arrived.
I had grown. It would be right to say that I brooked no comparison with the Dancheon Myeong of my previous life; and I was a man quite apart, too, from Myeong-gae the famed beggar, who might be called seasoned in his own way.
But I knew that this growth had not come because I was, in myself, some extraordinary man. I knew now that it had been built by regression and the Yakseon Heart Decision, by the life I had lived as a beggar, by the family of the Dancheon Clan, by a new teacher in Pahwang Yeom Gi-ha, by my brother Chun-baek, by Ma Sok, by friends like Yeo Wol.
Even if, on some timeline other than this one, there existed a Dancheon Myeong who entered the mountains and became a daoist before ever coming of age, that man would not be the man I am.
"You are probably right."
The Sword Emperor, seeming to grasp the meaning beneath my words, gave a nod.
"Now then—let us truly match blades."
With those words, the Sword Emperor's presence transformed utterly.
In truth, to call what came next a spar would already be a stretch. Strip away only the absence of any intent to kill between us, and our struggle had already touched the ferocity of real battle.
GOOONG—
As if the words had been no idle boast, a monstrous force began to churn about the Sword Emperor.
A pressure truly beyond comparison with the Formless Sword—which draws in the qi of heaven, earth, and the ten thousand things to give itself substance—encroached upon the space.
"Mm."
The grandmaster of a bygone era, known to have reached the very limit of the sword, at last let his intent loose in full.