The Starting Line
Yakseon had said it. Only when the third stage, No Fatigue, was complete — only then, he said, would it count as the beginning.
The beginning. It meant I had reached the starting line, and that my body could finally hold its own. In Yakseon's words, self-cultivation.
And he called this a beginning — a body that had taken ten drops of Empty Blue Stone Milk, been steeped in highly refined Blue Phosphor Liquid, and eaten the Vermilion Fruit, a fruit of the immortals themselves. Yakseon was, beyond any doubt, a man not right in the head.
And yet I understood him.
He was the one who had devised the Yakseon Heart Decision, a formula without precedent, and contended for supremacy under heaven in his own era. A man like that was never going to measure the world with the same eyes as an ordinary mediocrity like me.
In any case, what mattered to me was that he was a strict man.
Which meant the starting line he had drawn lay far beyond where someone's journey ended — no, far beyond the final destination most martial artists would ever reach.
Half of the Dragons and Phoenixes, prodigies hailed as the marvels of the jianghu, would never touch the point Yakseon called the beginning.
That was the truth of it.
But to be cast down by a single remark from Yakseon and belittle what I had already built — I had seen and learned far too much in my days as Myeong-gae for that.
As I stood now, I had mastered the first half of the Dancheon Sword Formula and risen to the Peak Realm, and I had entered the third stage of the Yakseon Heart Decision.
All of it to reach Number One Under Heaven. To become the Murim Alliance Leader. And in the end, to stop the Great War of Righteousness and Evil that loomed in the future.
But what sort of man runs with his eyes fixed only on the finish? The one who savors the road itself is the true first-rate master, no?
And savoring the road calls for small pleasures along the way. So today, in this place, I intended to find one of those small pleasures.
I would sweep the Dragon and Phoenix Assembly.
I would drink deep of the acclaim that named me the finest young prodigy in all the jianghu. Call it the third stage put to good use.
Of course, the result would serve me as well — that much went without saying.
Most of the Murim Alliance Leaders of ages past had first made their names at this very assembly, and I knew it well.
Hadn't they always said you can tell a promising tree by its sprout?
So in the end, this too was another stepping-stone on the road to the Alliance Leader's seat.
The main hall that had churned with Dragons and Phoenixes had already gone quiet. Every last one of them had bolted for the mountain gate of Mount Song.
As if we had planned it, Yi Chunbaek and I did not stir until the hall stood empty.
"Brother Chunbaek. Well run."
"You as well."
In his days as the King of Vagabonds, Yi Chunbaek's movement art had been hailed as a marvel of the jianghu. It took no great insight to predict he would post a fine result in this trial.
The ease he allowed himself now was, if one had to put a name to it, the privilege of the haves.
And the same held true for me — thanks to the particular character of the Dancheon Sword Clan.
We were swordsmen first and foremost, so like the Namgung we were called a clan of the sword, but the two families differed in more than a few ways.
The Namgung, who pursued the King's Sword, sought the way of the fierce, crushing strike over swift and fleeting footwork.
Their weighty movement art could press down Mount Tai itself, but it rode the wind a touch too heavily for that.
The Dancheon sword, true to its name, was the way of severing the heavens — a clan that had placed its dao in cutting down the sky itself.
And to cut down the heavens, one must first reach them. So the Dancheon clan had long made light, fleeting footwork its signature.
The Cloud-Treading Steps.
The clan's secret movement art, said to walk upon the clouds. In truth, I knew that even my uncle Yeobaek's famed swiftness had branched from these very steps.
Cloud-treading in service of heaven-severing — the will of our ancestors, carried forward through the generations.
That I had survived so long as a member of the Flying Branch was also owed, in no small part, to these steps.
A peerless movement art that could stand beside the famed Cloud Dragon Great Eight Forms of Kunlun or the Beggars' Gang's Drunk Eight Immortal Steps — for facing the first trial, I could hardly have asked for a better card.
I circulated the Dancheon Heart Art.
This was no moment for absorbing elixirs, so there was no need to layer the Yakseon Heart Decision over it.
Even so, the residue of the Empty Blue Stone Milk dissolved through every meridian in my body amplified the circulation on its own.
Internal energy surged through my opened Ren, Du, and Yang vessels in a steep, rushing cycle.
Though I had completed the third stage of the Yakseon Heart Decision, my realm was still Peak.
By the current system of the murim — Peak expressed as Sword Qi, Transcendent Peak as Sword Silk, the Harmony Realm as Sword Gang — that was no inaccurate way to put it.
But the realms of martial arts are not a radish, to be sliced off clean at a knife's edge.
At least when it came to movement arts for covering great distance, I judged that what I had attained had already passed the Transcendent Peak masters and could stand comparison with masters of the Harmony Realm itself.
Call it the combined virtue of the Empty Blue Stone Milk and the Yakseon Heart Decision.
Vmmm.
As if answering my will, internal power gathered at the Yongcheon points in the soles of my feet.
"Until later!"
Whoosh—
My body shot forth like an arrow.
I doubted it looked much different from what Uncle Yeobaek had once shown me.
As my lightness art carried me out of the hall, my eyes met Abbot Beomgak's. He broke into a broad smile, looking thoroughly pleased by the sight of me.
The minds of masters who had touched the transcendent remained as hard to fathom as ever.
"Until later."
Yi Chunbaek's voice drifted faintly after me.
And a moment later, his figure too vanished in a blur of speed.
In the days when Myeong-gae had been a member of the Flying Branch, covering vast distances at a run had simply been daily life.
An intelligence unit also served as the relay courier, so crossing from one battlefield to the next on lightness arts alone was closer to destiny than duty.
On a battlefield where the difference of a quarter hour swung hundreds of lives, pausing to rest mid-run was pure luxury. In that desperation and urgency, my Cloud-Treading Steps had been whittled down and tempered.
What I learned along the way, quite naturally, was the rationing of internal energy and stamina. And that experience, that memory, still lived on intact in me — in Dancheon Myeong.
These Dragons and Phoenixes were not like me.
However venerable the lineage they inherited, the ones actually wielding those arts were green young prodigies, nothing more.
Among all of them, how many had ever pushed their lightness arts at full power for longer than a quarter hour?
In truth, I was certain the answer was none.
For the prodigies of great clans raised in an age of peace, there had hardly been hours enough to cultivate their heart arts and drill their forms — let alone run themselves to the edge of collapse.
And sure enough.
After roughly a quarter hour, the backs of the Dragons and Phoenixes began to appear one by one. A quarter hour was the ceiling of what they could sustain at full tilt.
They flailed along, still forcing their lightness arts, but their speed had visibly sagged, their breath came ragged, and their legs looked heavy as lead. A sorry sight for arts with "light" in their very name.
Not even a quarter of the hour Abbot Beomgak of Shaolin had allotted had yet passed.
If they meant to reach the turning point and make it back within that hour, what awaited them now was the taste of blood in their throats and lungs that felt ready to burst.
Just as expected.
I had predicted it from the moment two hundred li and one hour were named.
This trial had never been about raw speed.
It was a test of how one paced body and energy alike — and of grit and endurance besides.
It was also why, when the trial began, I had seen no need to bury myself in their scrum and bolt with the rest.
Even while husbanding my strength and holding short of my fastest pace, the gap between us had been glaring.
Shwip.
One young prodigy after another fell away behind my back.
Even without seeing the hollow stares of the prodigies watching my body still knife through the air past the quarter-hour mark, I could feel them on my neck.
I seemed to have already overtaken more than half of the prodigies gathered at the assembly.
Put another way, half still ran on at their own pace, steady and unbroken. The future of the jianghu, then, was not entirely dark.
For a man who knew how the Great War of Righteousness and Evil would end, that was something I could receive with genuine gratitude.
The scenery churned past without pause. The Dragons and Phoenixes who had led, scattered thin, fell behind one after another.
Some tried to cling to my pace and lost their breathing for it; others ignored me outright and doggedly kept to their own rhythm.
The important fact was that not one of them was catching me.
The very Dragons and Phoenixes my former self had envied and resented were now looking at me with those same eyes.
And a little while later, I discovered a misjudgment of my own.
Hm.
A problem, if you wanted to call it one — the fact that not a shred of fatigue was accumulating. I had paced my stamina and energy as I would have in my Flying Branch days, and that was what created the discrepancy.
The credit belonged to the third stage of the Yakseon Heart Decision.
If the Empty Blue Stone Milk in my meridians smoothed the flow of internal energy, then the Vermilion Fruit's virtue was dissolving my fatigue the instant it formed. I could feel it happening.
Now I understood exactly why Yakseon had named the stage simply No Fatigue rather than Unwearied Through Ten Thousand Poisons.
No Fatigue meant, quite literally, a wall against everything that stood between my body and its best condition.
"I can afford to run faster, it seems."
I had been throttling my pace for a one-hour sprint, but I realized now that the throttle was unnecessary.
I took stock of my situation.
I had been running for over a quarter hour and covered roughly eighty li.
Judging by how I felt, I could flat-out sprint the rest and still clear two hundred li without strain.
No sign of him yet.
Despite passing most of the prodigies, Dancheon Hak was still nowhere in sight. Which meant he still held the lead.
He had seized the title of Dragon in my previous life, so perhaps that was only natural.
But I was certain the distance between us would not hold much longer.
Shweee—
I opened my lightness art at full speed. The landscape, already smearing past, warped until my eyes could barely hold it.
Before the turning point, the lead would be mine.
A little past the quarter-hour mark of the trial Abbot Beomgak had set, Dancheon Hak and Namgung Tan were running with the lead pack.
They were, in truth, living proof that not all who reached the Peak Realm were cut from the same cloth.
The Cloud Dragon Great Eight Forms — Taeha of Kunlun.
The Drunk Eight Immortal Steps — Guho-gae of the Beggars' Gang.
The Drifting Dark Fragrance — Cheonggang of Mount Hua.
The Nine-Revolution Returning Shadow Steps — Nun Yeo-ha of Emei, and others besides.
Every one of them was a prodigy of a great sect whose movement arts were hailed as marvels of the jianghu.
All of them masked their weariness and ran with practiced composure — and all of them knew.
Dancheon Hak, running his Peak-realm Cloud-Treading Steps, was deliberately refusing to stand out, trailing the pack and husbanding his strength.
Another dozen li on, the mountain gate of Shaolin on Mount Song rose in the distance. The turning point had finally come into view.
Dancheon Hak turned his head, and Namgung Tan entered his gaze.
Namgung Tan no longer had the strength to hold his face together; he was clinging to his breath through a badly twisted expression.
"You all right there?"
The Namgung were not a clan that made swift footwork its specialty; keeping pace with the lead pack this long was already a feat in itself.
"No... problem at all."
Namgung Tan forced the words out with borrowed calm, but he could not hide the raggedness of his breathing.
Then it happened.
"So this is where you were?"
Startled by the voice, they whipped their heads around — and found a familiar face.
Dancheon Myeong.
The man they had assumed was still gasping somewhere far behind had appeared before them — before they had even rounded the turning point.
Worse, that same Dancheon Myeong was smiling, fresh as a spring morning. It was a portrait in contrast to Namgung Tan's exhaustion.
"My, my. Don't tell me you're worn out already?"
So Dancheon Myeong asked Namgung Tan.
Namgung Tan's face crumpled at once. His pride had taken the blow.
"Hah! I am not tired!"
Namgung Tan shouted it with all the composure he could muster, but even in Dancheon Hak's eyes, it would not pass muster.
Dancheon Hak's gaze settled on his half-brother.
That calm. That utter, unshaken calm.
Dancheon Hak had the sudden feeling that something was going very wrong.