The Price of a Sister's Love
"It's not that I'm doing this because I hate you. It's all for your own good—every word is blood and flesh for you to grow on, so you'd better listen closely...."
"Ah... I'm losing my mind."
After Dang Mulin left, I sat alone, slowly working my way through the secret manual, and promptly ran face-first into a wall.
"The hanja here is just slightly off from what I learned... I can follow the part about the snake and whatever else, but I honestly can't tell what it's actually trying to say."
The world-building was so meticulously authentic that the characters differed in subtle ways from the ones I'd studied in my previous life, which made simply reading the manual an ordeal in itself.
"So... I'm supposed to draw qi from my lower dantian and circulate it down through my legs? I don't have a lower dantian?"
According to the manual, using the footwork required doing something or other with your lower dantian—except mine had apparently packed up and left, with the middle dantian now covering its shift. That was problem number two.
"And what in the world does 'press your feet down upon the heavens as if trampling them' even mean?"
It wasn't a riddle, but the instructions were so abstract that I couldn't make heads or tails of them. That was problem number three.
"Aghh... I'm seriously going to lose it."
My brain, working overtime for the first time in ages, promptly overheated and ground to a halt. I collapsed onto the dirt floor, clawing at my hair and thrashing around in frustration.
I'd been mid-seizure, kicking up clouds of dust, when Dang Mulin returned.
"What's wrong? Stuck on something?"
At the sound of her voice I stopped flailing and looked up at her.
What met my eyes was Dang Mulin, something still in her mouth, her lips glistening as she spoke.
"Sis... was it tasty?"
She blinked at the look I gave her, flustered.
"Wh...what are you talking about? Ate what? Do I look like someone who'd go off eating while her little brother's training his heart out?"
I stared at her scrambling excuse with eyes gone cold and stale.
"You could've at least wiped your mouth before coming back. Your lips are so shiny I could squeeze oil out of them."
Dang Mulin hastily scrubbed her mouth with her sleeve.
A deep sense of betrayal settled over me as I muttered,
"Wow... feeding your own brother food you wouldn't give a prisoner, while you stuff yourself full of delicacies. Nice."
"Ahem... well, I just couldn't resist the mapo tofu..."
When her sheer shamelessness left me speechless, she scrambled to change the subject.
"Anyway! Where exactly are you stuck?"
I clicked my tongue at her.
"Tsk... well, for starters, the writing in this manual is so abstract I can barely parse it..."
"Mm-hmm!"
"....."
Her half-hearted response earned her a distinctly unimpressed look as I pressed on.
"And... I don't have a lower dantian, but the manual insists I use one. So?"
"Ah... yeah, that is a problem."
"Bottom line, it doesn't look like I can learn the footwork anytime soon..."
I clutched my aching head and vented everything I'd been wrestling with, and she fell into a thoughtful silence.
Sensing an opening, I slipped in a suggestion.
"Honestly, it's not just the footwork. Every other martial art in here is probably going to be the same story, so maybe we should just take a break for now and—"
"I guess there's no helping it."
She'd cut off my desperate, scheming plea to escape this hellish training, and the words that followed wrenched nothing out of me but a broken, mechanical laugh.
"I'll bring it up with Father. For now, let's switch the afternoon sessions to conditioning drills."
"What? Ha... haha..."
The face I made was that of a man who'd just been told the King of Hell was serving the full tour of every circle in his domain. She gave me a reassuring look.
"Of course, we won't just do mindless running all afternoon."
"Th...then what?"
"We'll do sparring drills. Dodging hidden weapons, dodging swords, dodging blades, breaking acupoint seals—things like that."
At those words, I forced down the expression curdling on my face, pointed a trembling finger at the shackles clamped around my limbs like some cursed sealing array, and asked,
"We're doing all that with these off... right?"
Dang Mulin answered with the expression of someone being asked an idiotically obvious question.
"What are you even saying? Obviously you keep them on."
Watching her say it with a perfectly straight face, I froze in cognitive dissonance for a long moment before finally bullying my brain into acceptance. Then, in a voice that wouldn't stop shaking, I said,
"Getting hit by hidden weapons or blades would hurt. A lot. And before that—is dodging projectiles while your arms and legs are bound even supposed to make sense? Is this actually real?"
Despite my heartfelt protest, Dang Mulin clicked her tongue with the stern face of a crotchety old bureaucrat.
"Tsk tsk... kids these days, always deciding they can't do something before they've even tried..."
Either she couldn't see my face collapsing into the likeness of an enraged toad, or she simply didn't care, because she kept right on going.
"All of it can be overcome with grit. What's with the defeatist attitude over a few lumps of iron? Every drop of sweat you shed now comes back to you later. In my entire life, I have never once heard of someone dying from training too hard—short of qi deviating, anyway. And besides, blades hurt less if you take them at an angle. Look, if you want to get strong, you push through this much and more. You keep saying you want to protect someone—did you think that kind of strength just rains down from the sky for free? You should be grateful. People are literally gambling their lives just to acquire basic martial arts, never mind advanced techniques. Kids these days have no idea how lucky they are."
Apparently I'd fumbled onto some kind of lecture trigger, because she launched into a sermon with the fervor of elderly relatives unloading on their nephews at a holiday gathering. I had no choice but to slap a hand against my forehead.
By the time the storm of her nagging was dying down, my ears were ringing and I was filtering out roughly half of what she said—which made it all the stranger that her final sentence came through with perfect clarity.
"Anyway, shall we begin?"
Having tuned out everything before it, I could only blink and echo,
"What? Begin what?"
Dang Mulin answered by hurling a hidden weapon straight at me.
Whoosh—
A dagger split the air and raked past my right cheek.
Only when its honed edge left a thin red line across my skin did I snap back to my senses and stare at her.
"Focus!"
Dang Mulin bellowed at me for standing there like an idiot and bleeding for it, then loosed another dagger in my direction.
This one came screaming in toward my nether regions, and even under the blazing afternoon sun I felt a chill run down my spine. I scrambled to brace for whatever came next and shouted,
"Sis! This is going too far!"
"Too far? Nothing of the sort."
I addressed my complaint to Dang Mulin, who kept producing daggers from her chest like some bottomless magician's pouch.
"My shoulder got skewered not that long ago, remember? And you're doing this?"
She sneered at me with the expression of someone catching a child in a lazy lie.
"I heard from the Medicine Hall Master that your shoulder's nearly fully healed. If it actually still hurt, you wouldn't have been able to run laps with an iron ball chained to it this morning."
With that final pronouncement, Dang Mulin said nothing more until evening—she simply rained down hidden weapons on me, from daggers to poisoned needles, without pause.
Caw— caw—
At the cry of crows echoing from somewhere in the distance, she finally halted the quasi-Sky-Filling Flower Rain she'd been unleashing for well over two full hours.
Unlike the Dang Clan's ultimate technique, which unleashed everything in a single breath, her drawn-out barrage had left the training ground floor in a state that came disturbingly close to the real thing.
At the center of the field, where countless hidden weapons lay scattered and rolling, stood Dang Muyeong—limbs bound in iron balls and chains, hair wild and disheveled, clothes shredded in every conceivable place, gasping for breath on his feet.
Dang Mulin regarded the wreck that could scarcely be called the young master of the Dang Clan and said, perfectly composed,
"So? Not as bad as you thought, right?"
Her breezy, as-if-it-were-nothing attitude made my blood boil, but I was too utterly spent to manage so much as a word. All I could do was wheeze.
"Haah... haah... haah..."
Dang Mulin walked over to my heaving form, undid my shackles just as she had that afternoon, and pointed toward a tree.
"I don't need to spell it out, do I?"
I turned my head slightly to look, and there on a table—placed there by someone, somehow—sat the same spread I'd seen earlier that day, arranged with immaculate care.
As I stared at it in hollow disbelief—
"Eat up. I need to go somewhere."
She patted my shoulder, and I wrung out what little strength I had left to answer.
"...Off to eat something delicious by yourself again, I bet..."
She shook her head.
"No. I'm heading to the Clan Leader's Hall to ask Father what we should do about you not being able to use your lower dantian—since it's clearly making it hard for you to learn anything else."
I gave her uncharacteristically considerate words a suspicious look, but quickly concluded I had no grounds to object, and dragged myself toward the tree.
Leaving her staggering brother behind, Dang Mulin set off for the Clan Leader's Hall, thinking to herself.
'Dang Giyeong did say Muyeong's realms are badly misaligned...'
The truth was that Dang Mulin's insane training regimen was nothing less than essential for Dang Muyeong.
For a martial artist, even the slightest gap between body, mind, and cultivation realm could prove fatal—and her younger brother's misalignment was severe. She had no other choice.
Setting aside his martial progress entirely, Muyeong's current state—his middle dantian held wide open—could arguably be called the Transcendent Realm. But his body lagged far behind that standard, and she'd concluded he needed to be dragged up to match, by force if necessary. That was why she drove him so ruthlessly.
'It breaks my heart watching him suffer... but if he resents me now, so be it.'
She had shed more than one silent tear inside at the sight of her brother in agony throughout the day. Now she steeled herself and murmured,
"It's all for Muyeong's sake. He'll understand someday..."
At the very moment Dang Mulin was making her way to the Clan Leader's Hall—
I sat under the tree, chewing through sky-blue stir-fried vegetables, and thought:
'Damn it... You swore you'd protect your beloved little brother... isn't this going a bit too far?'