The Turning Point at Twenty
"Many indeed are the elixirs that have cradled ten thousand years. Even common grass, once it drinks in a myriad of years, comes to drink in spirit — is that not so?"
"And yet, for that very reason, one must choose with great care the myriad-year elixir by which the amplification of Step Four is achieved."
Yakseon had taught that among all the things bearing the name 'ten-thousand-year,' the plainer the specimen, the better.
If one meant to claim both the inner power and the spirituality an elixir had banked over eons, the more even-tempered its nature, the smoother the taking — so ran his reasoning.
"If one considers only the efficacy of amplifying Step Four, the Ten-Thousand-Year Starform Ginseng King would be the finest of them all."
"But the Starform Ginseng King is precious and rare to begin with, and to seek one steeped in a myriad of years is no easy matter — not even for this Dao."
"Of the myriad-year elixirs this Dao recommends, the foremost is the Ten-Thousand-Year Fleeceflower Root. Precisely because it is an ordinary thing, it is, in truth, noble."
A fleeceflower root — common as dirt — had turned priceless simply by cradling ten thousand years, and for Step Four, he explained, there was simply nothing better.
So I had settled it long ago: I would open the gates of Step Four with the Ten-Thousand-Year Fleeceflower Root.
Those who walk the road of immortals — or who pursue the end of the martial way in what some call the Absolute Realm — set great store by a single concept: Essence, Qi, and Spirit.
Having never lost myself in the immortals' Dao, my knowledge runs shallow, but to put it as best I can: Essence is the body, Qi is inner power, and Spirit is the mind — the will itself.
Step Three had tempered my Essence; the amplification of Step Four, then, was the stage of fitting Qi and Spirit to that newly firmed foundation.
Fill to the brim a dantian whose ground had been tamped firm by the root's inner power, and Qi comes to fullness; take in its myriad-year spirituality through the Yakseon Heart Decision, and the Spirit swings wide open. Only at Step Four is the union of the three finally achieved — and that union is called Three Flowers Gather at the Crown.
Anyone with a trained eye for the martial arts will know it at once: Three Flowers Gather at the Crown is only another name for the Harmony Realm.
That's right.
Achieve Step Four, and one steps naturally into the Harmony Realm — the plane of what are truly called supreme masters. I would stand shoulder to shoulder with my father, Dancheon Gang, and my uncle Bang Yeo-baek.
Ordinary warriors unify Essence, Qi, and Spirit through enlightenment and thereby ascend to the Harmony Realm; the Yakseon Heart Decision runs the opposite way about — because the three are already one, enlightenment arrives of its own accord. Only the order differs. In the end, it is the same road.
The Harmony Realm, reached by way of the Gathering of Three Flowers at the Crown.
In Yakseon's phrasing, it was the stage at which a man could at last manage to keep his own single body intact. That was why only at Step Four did one earn the right to the old scholars' phrase — 'putting one's own house in order.'
Thwack!
Uncle Bang Yeo-baek's wooden sword cracked against my shoulder.
"Kgh."
Training under my uncle had taught me something new: even a body that no blade could touch still knew pain. Which is to say, a wooden sword carrying a Harmony Realm master's inner power hurt a great deal more than any well-honed edge.
"Can't you focus?"
"I'm sorry. My mind drifted."
His gaze went razor-sharp.
"Hm? Are you telling me my training is easy enough to leave you room for daydreams?"
"...No. Never."
There was no room for the word 'easy' in my uncle's training — not even as a joke. My chest, still heaving for breath despite Step Three, and my clothes, beaten into rags fit for a one-knot beggar, were proof enough of that.
I should have read it the moment he granted my request: Uncle Bang Yeo-baek's training was built, root and branch, around live combat.
I fixed my eyes on my infuriating uncle. He looked delighted — never more so, in fact, than when he landed a blow on me. A thoroughly vicious man, I would call him.
Call it time spent learning with what values the monsters who had climbed to the Harmony Realm under their own power pursued their training — for there was a reason I trained this fiercely even though Step Four would carry me into that realm of its own accord.
The first reason: though I had achieved Step Three, I could not yet claim to have made it wholly mine.
Even in my days as Myeong-gae, I had scarcely ever crossed paths with a supreme master. Training under my uncle now would be an immense boon to a man who meant, one day, to aim for Number One Under Heaven.
And the second reason: I did not know where the Ten-Thousand-Year Fleeceflower Root lay.
It was no catastrophe. Fortunately, in two years' time I would know exactly where it was.
In my Myeong-gae days I had never managed to trace the root to the place it grew wild — but I had obtained word of who found it, and who came to hold it after.
Two years from now, I would take the Ten-Thousand-Year Fleeceflower Root and arrive at Step Four.
And I would rise to become Young Patriarch.
'Putting one's house in order' — achieved then in its truest sense.
Thwack!
This time the wooden sword cracked against my skull. My head rang.
"Hey, you rascal! Are you focusing or not?"
"I'm sorr—"
Thwack!
"Ow!"
First things first, then: get a little stronger.
The season I had yearned for through it all arrived at last. The years ran swift, and my age finally touched twenty.
Twenty years old.
The age at which the Jianghu recognizes a man as grown — and the age at which the greatest turning point of my life was forged.
The year the succession contest would be held; the year I, having lost it, turned my back on the clan and walked out alone; the year I learned that I would regress; and the year the beggar Myeong-gae of the Beggars' Gang came into the world.
I wonder if that old man Chwipung-gae is living well.
In this life I would make sure Myeong-gae never exists — but Chwipung-gae's kindness is not something I have forgotten. If ever our paths cross again, I mean to repay it in full.
Even if he never learns why.
Two years.
To some, a short span; to others, an age. But to a rising star not yet twenty, it was more than long enough — and for one who had lived that time with everything he had rather than letting a single day of it rot, it was time enough to carve out a transformation of tremendous size.
"Hoo—"
Shrreek — chak.
I brought every form of the Dancheon Sword Formula, the secret art of the Dancheon Clan, to its close and slid the blade home.
Dancheon Myeong, at twenty.
The callowness of eighteen was gone, and in its place stood the unmistakable figure of a young man. Perhaps thanks to the enduring virtue of the Vermilion Fruit I had swallowed for Step Three, my features had sharpened into a handsomeness that wanted for nothing.
Looks. Martial arts. Standing in the world's eyes.
The Dancheon Myeong who turned twenty in my last life and the one turning twenty now were different men to the bone — so much so that the old phrase about mulberry fields turning to sea hardly did it justice.
Under Uncle Bang Yeo-baek's regimen, my body had grown and grown again; the faintly bookish air I once carried had vanished, replaced by the presence of a true swordsman.
Which was, honestly, a rather funny thing. A Peak Realm martial artist, growing his body through training? Though I myself had climbed past First-rate to the Peak, I suppose the fact proved just how wretched the Third Elder's instruction had been.
Looked at another way: my uncle, who had forced a body to keep growing even after it touched the Peak Realm, was a madm— no, a magnificent teacher. My respects to him.
Though of course, my respects to the man who endured that training — myself — run considerably deeper.
Damn it all, this life.
Truly, it had been hell on earth — in a different sense than my days as Myeong-gae.
A great deal had happened in the meantime.
"When are you going to choose? It's time you took a wife, no?"
Her pointed use of the homely 'take a wife' over any formal talk of marriage — I would call Baek Yeo-hae a remarkably transparent woman.
"I have no thoughts of it yet."
A rising star who had wrested away the epithet of Dancheon Dragon, his future reckoned bright. The respectable name of second son to the Dancheon Clan, one of Anhui's great houses. And looks that now deserved the word 'handsome' without the slightest qualification.
Despite my unbroken refusals, letters from illustrious families came winging into the Dancheon Clan through the matchmakers without pause. And as though it were no trouble at all, Baek Yeo-hae winnowed the field of prospects and laid the best of them before me every month or so.
Even I had never imagined the day would come when I'd see that woman so often.
"A boy ought to have his own household standing before he turns twenty. How else would he ever grow into a proper head of one?"
"And is my brother not also putting off his marriage, Mother?"
"That is — Hak has the clan to answer for, you see..."
"That, Mother, remains to be seen."
I believe it was around then — the season when Baek Yeo-hae began giving me the cold shoulder, quite openly.
And this year the age of the succession contest had finally dawned, so perhaps she had given up on shunting me off to some other family; she stopped coming to me with letters in hand.
Fortune and misfortune trade places all through a life. After toil of that kind, good things were only due.
"You're coming along rather nicely now."
That. That was the stuff.
"You've taken the Dancheon Sword Formula perfectly through its latter half. You'll not be dying to some blade you never saw coming — not anywhere, not anymore."
This, from Bang Yeo-baek — a master of the Harmony Realm. Not one ounce of my effort to date, then, had been wasted.
"Thank you."
At last, I had become a true swordsman of the Dancheon Clan.
I studied my uncle's face for a moment, then ventured, carefully:
"So, um... are we finished for today?"
Uncle Bang Yeo-baek burst into a rolling laugh, quite unlike himself.
"Well of course, you rascal. Just how long did you mean to wring the sweat out of this old uncle?"
My uncle, whose words had never once been wrong, had for once said something wrong. How was a man barely past his fortieth year to be called old? Forty, and arrived at the Harmony Realm — if that was not the very prime of a warrior's life, what would be?
"Then, if you'll allow it — a lifetime, please."
"You rascal!"
We could trade jests easily now, he and I. Sincerity, I'd say — the kind only time can brew.
I knew why he reached for that excuse. It was the same reason one of the elders of the council had stood down last year from his place as my brother Dancheon Hak's teacher.
With the succession contest at the door, the clan's factions had to take a step back from its heirs. It was the Clan Head's stern decree, and there were no exceptions to it.
In truth, I knew that his sparing my training all this while had only been possible because he dug his heels in and refused.
"...Thank you. For everything."
I bowed my head low, with the full courtesy owed a teacher.
"Aye. You've borne your share of it too, Young Master Myeong."
Regret ran under Uncle Bang Yeo-baek's voice.
I caught myself thinking that I might come to miss this training I had always taken for hell.
It would be all right.
If I became Young Patriarch, I could always come back to him.
With my training under Uncle Bang Yeo-baek at its end, there was no longer any reason I had to remain within the Dancheon Clan.
For the first time in a long while, I sought out the Clan Head's hall.
"I wish to journey the Jianghu."
That was what I had come to ask leave for.
Grown or not, I was still one of the clan's household, and the Clan Head's blessing was indispensable. One cannot very well run away from home every single time.
"Rather sudden, this talk."
My father, Dancheon Gang, asked it of me.
"Yes."
These days I was learning the true weight of the old saying: know yourself and know your enemy, and you will not be beaten in a hundred battles. Sitting there in a languid slouch, Dancheon Gang still gave off the aura of a warrior no one dared approach.
Even this man had never set his name among the Ten Great Masters Under Heaven. It impressed upon me, anew, the true weight of Number One Under Heaven.
"What wind blows, that you speak of journeying the Jianghu?"
His wonder was only natural. Since my flight from home on the day I returned to the past and my showing at the Dragon and Phoenix Assembly, I had scarcely set foot outside the clan in two years.
"Did my brother not leave on his own journey just last year?"
Last year. Dancheon Hak, the Sword Dragon, twenty-one years of age, had gone out into the Jianghu.
And he had not come back yet. That, I'd say, was one reason my father greeted the thought of my own departure so coldly. The Jianghu was, after all, a place where incidents and disasters bred like flies.
If a clan sent both of its only two heirs out beyond its walls and some unforeseen calamity found them, it would be more than any family could bear.
"I believe a journey is needed to prepare for the succession contest as well."
"Hm."
He looked to be turning it over — though it would not be terribly hard to bring him round.
"Would it not be only fair that I go and broaden my experience, too?"
"Well said."
At the word 'fair,' Dancheon Gang nodded, slow and deliberate. Whether he was a good father, I still could not say — but that he was an excellent Clan Head I knew well. A man scrupulously just; he would wish to give me my chance as well.