Good Things Come to Those Who Endure
"Teach him nothing but the forms."
Dang Jihwan tossed off the answer carelessly, in response to Dang Mulin, who had barged in unannounced to ask how exactly she was supposed to teach Muyeong martial arts. He barely gave her a proper look, too busy pushing through the documents in his hand, and at the sight of him she asked in a voice tinged with doubt.
"You want me to teach him only the forms of the martial arts?"
"That's right."
He offered her nothing more than that. When Mulin simply stood there without a word, dumbstruck, he soon set the papers down on his desk and pressed at the corners of his eyes with his palm as he went on.
"The heart method is something he'll have to forge for himself anyway. And the other martial arts that suit that heart method — he'll have no choice but to go seeking those out on his own as well."
"But isn't that far too dangerous?"
Hearing that her little brother would have to absorb every trial and error with his own flesh and carve out a path no one had ever walked, Dang Mulin's face clouded with worry. Dang Jihwan seemed to weigh something for a moment, then spoke again.
"Even so, what would you have me do? Short of forbidding him to learn martial arts at all, all we can do is cheer him on down whatever road he picks, no?"
"Still, even so—"
"Tell me, what do you think martial arts are, in the first place?"
When she suddenly found herself asked something so fundamental and sat there unable to answer, he began to speak, unhurried.
"Forms and techniques — all of it is nothing more than what one learns along the road to the Transcendent Realm. That realm is a height you can only reach by fully establishing who you are, but along the way, there's no harm in referring to what those who climbed it before you left behind."
Having said his piece to his daughter — who was still only knocking on her wall, not yet stepping over it — Dang Jihwan took on the look of a man struck by a realization, then turned away from her vacant stare, faced the window, and murmured to himself.
"Well... normally, one learns martial arts, builds internal energy, gains enlightenment, and reaches the Transcendent Realm — and only then does the Middle Dantian open. Bizarrely enough, Muyeong seems to be walking the whole thing in reverse. But as long as the result is good, what does it matter..."
"Aha... now I understand everything."
The moment his daughter — who had, until that point, plainly been standing there with her eyes glazed over — suddenly spoke up behind him, Dang Jihwan jolted and whirled around.
Finding her father gaping at her with eyes blown wide as lanterns, Dang Mulin could only ask, bewildered, "What? What is it?"
His face crumpled into the very picture of incredulity.
"Did you not just grasp some insight and fall into enlightenment?"
"I'm sorry? What are you talking about all of a sudden...?"
"...Huh?"
Confronted with his bizarre behavior, Dang Mulin pulled a face of complete incomprehension and explained herself.
"Hearing what you said, Father, I realized that Muyeong needs physical training at an even higher intensity, and I was thinking about whether there was any way to raise the difficulty."
Smack—
He had assumed his daughter had picked up a clue for breaking through her own wall; as it turned out, she had been racking her brain for ways to ram her brother headfirst into one. Dang Jihwan smacked his forehead and said,
"Fine. If there's nothing else you need, off you go."
"Yes, Father. Have a good night."
Back at the training grounds, Dang Mulin walked up beside Dang Muyeong, who was dry-heaving even as he crammed those things that only vaguely resembled food into his mouth, forcing them down in gagging swallows.
I glanced at Dang Mulin, who had at some point crept up next to me to watch, and thought:
'Wow... she is absolutely ruthless. Ruthless, I say. Did she really already make a round trip to the Clan Leader's Hall just to check whether I'd finish eating all of this or not? Unbelievable...'
Hrk—
I forced everything still in my mouth down into my stomach, let out one long burp, and struck up a conversation.
"What did Father say?"
Dang Mulin broke into a smile at my question.
"He said to teach you just the forms and techniques for now, so you can build martial arts that fit you yourself?"
"Build them myself? Is that even a thing?"
"Mm... honestly, I only went because I haven't opened my Middle Dantian yet either, and I wanted to ask Father what to do about it. But he said that was all meaningless anyway, and that I should just help you make your own."
I had gagged and sweated my way through running, eating, and dodging — all of it in hopes of learning even one halfway impressive martial art — and at my teacher's sudden declaration of surrender, I couldn't hide how hollowed out I felt.
"Haah....."
Then... a thought popped into my head, and I looked up at Dang Mulin.
"Sis... so what I'm learning from you is basically just the forms and techniques of things like footwork — and that's it?"
She nodded.
"Well... I suppose?"
"Then this'll all be over in a few days—"
I was still talking, face glowing with hope, when she continued:
"Well, the physical training and the poison accumulation, though — those you'll need to keep up for a good while yet."
At her follow-up, a despair washed over me like sinking into a swamp.
"I have to keep doing this.....?"
As I grumbled with a soul-departed expression, scraping my chopsticks — the tips faintly discolored — around the inside of my empty bowl, a rope came lowering down to me, like a lifeline of hope.
"Anyway, we're better off leaving you to try the heart method and everything else however you please — so once you finish dinner, we'll wrap up the training you do with me."
At her words, happiness bloomed in me like a man lost in the desert stumbling onto an oasis, and I threw my arms around her without a moment's warning.
"Sis! Thank you! You're the only one I've got!"
"Urk!!!!!"
Dang Mulin shoved me off without an ounce of ceremony.
"S... sorry about this, but poison is literally streaming out of your mouth right now."
She said it while pinching her nose shut. I was a little wounded — but the giddiness won out fast.
"Ah... sorry. But anyway... I can go back to my quarters now, right? Today's training is all wrapped up, isn't it?"
Watching me shimmy my shoulders with a grin stretched from ear to ear, Dang Mulin chuckled and nodded.
"Go on. Finish all that, then head back and rest."
"Okay!"
"Ah — and give the heart method some serious thought, yeah?"
"Yep!"
With that brief exchange behind me, I hastily polished off my bowls and wobbled my way back under my blanket.
"The old sayings really are never wrong... Outside the blanket lies danger..."
Curled up and burrowed in like a bear settling into winter hibernation, I completely forgot Dang Mulin's parting instruction to ponder the heart method and drifted sweetly off to sleep.
And so — how much time had passed since I began training myself into a limp rag day after day?
Meeeh— meeeh—
Even in the dead of summer, when the cicadas wailed 'Give birth to my child!' at the top of their lungs day after day.....
"Sis... please. I'm begging you. Water."
"Alright, alright... here, drink this."
"Sis... anything but this black stuff — don't you have plain water?"
"Nope."
Shaaaaaaah— rrrumble... CRACK!
Even in the deluge, when rain hammered down so hard I couldn't tell front from back—
"Ah... water... tastes so sweet."
"Muyeong! Stop drinking the rain! Keep gulping it down like that and you'll bloat up and won't be able to eat!"
"Drinking it... drinking it anyway!"
Fwish—
"O... okay! I'll stop! But it's raining so hard I can't see two feet ahead of me, and you're just flinging daggers out of nowhere — isn't that seriously going too far?!"
Fwish—
"Argh!"
"Oh... your body has come a long way, young master."
"Something about... your eyes looks awfully murderous right now..."
"Haha... misundelstanding... a misunderstanding."
Then there was the day I crossed paths with the leader of the Red Heaven Squad on the way back to my quarters — shirtless, because training had shredded my clothes to ribbons — and caught that strange look in his eyes.
"Hyah!"
"Muyeong... what on earth are you doing?"
"Hm? Practicing so I can use the Finger Flick Technique?"
"Ha..."
And the day Dang Mulin raked me with a look of pure pity — as I spun my finger round and round through the empty air, belting out one theatrical battle cry after another — before simply shaking her head...
Through all of it, day after day, half of my own will and half of someone else's, I rolled this body of mine until it threatened to come apart.
And then, one winter's day, white snow came pouring from the heavens until it buried the whole world.
In a training ground tucked into one corner of the Dang Clan estate sat a hulking mountain of muscle — a man whose aura alone seemed to flatten everything around him — cross-legged and bare-chested in the falling snow.
By the time the snow had begun to gather, little by little, on the man's shoulders and head...
At the sound of someone entering the training ground, he spoke without twitching so much as a finger from his seated position.
"You've come."
"That thing we talked about the other day — can you do it now?"
At the question, the man rose slowly, twisting and loosening his long-stiffened frame, then asked:
"Shall I begin at once?"
Standing, he was a head or two taller than anyone else, and his body was densely mapped with scars, as though every blade in existence had at some point taken its turn on him.
"Hssaaah..... hoo."
He drew in an enormous breath, pushed it out in a plume of white, and said:
"Then here I come."
The words had barely left his mouth before the man came charging in, fist driving straight for me.
WHAM!!!
Dragging both arms up in front of my chest, I barely caught the fist Dang Yun had loosed at me, soaring backward through the air all the while, and muttered:
"Ease up a little, would you..."
Hearing my mutter, Dang Yun, leader of the Red Heaven Squad, flashed the blinding white grin he had worn the day we first met and smiled.
"I am holding back as it is, young master. That was me sparring."
Tap—
Fluttering backward through the air like a garment tossed to the wind, I touched down softly on the snow-covered ground and said:
"Go even easier than that... a man dies when he gets trampled by a bison."
Dang Yun had eased off, in his own way — and yet there I was, blocking him with maddening composure while milking the complaint for all it was worth. He answered with a smiling face.
"'A bison,' he says. You toss around words that could wound the listener far too easily, young master."
Looking at him, I grinned as well, scratching the back of my head.
"Hehe... anyway, I'm going to grit my teeth and come at you with everything I've got, so you'd better dodge on your own. I can't really control it yet..."
With those words, head bowed, I staggered toward Dang Yun — and deep in my eyes, a faint crimson light was beginning to smolder.