Almost No One Lives Out Their Allotted Lifespan, So Feel Free to Burn True Origin Qi Freely (2)
A martial artist's internal power is divided into three kinds: True Origin Qi, Innate Qi, and Acquired Qi. True Origin Qi is life force itself; Innate Qi is the energy one is born with; and Acquired Qi is the power accumulated through internal cultivation arts or medicinal elixirs.
Of the three, True Origin Qi and Innate Qi are, in practice, impossible to use. True Origin Qi is bound directly to one's lifespan and cannot be spent carelessly, while Innate Qi vanishes entirely before a child turns three.
Even the Hair-Plucking, Marrow-Cleansing technique that transforms one's constitution exists as part of the effort to preserve Innate Qi.
Both True Origin Qi and Innate Qi are vastly more potent than Acquired Qi — True Origin Qi is said to deliver five times the effect, and Innate Qi twice. In other words, thirty years of True Origin Qi unleashes the same force as a warrior with a hundred and fifty years of cultivated power, while thirty years of Innate Qi rivals one bearing a full sixty-year cycle's worth.
The Mad Soul Beast Pill Jin I-gang had swallowed not only allowed him to draw on True Origin Qi as internal power — it amplified it. Ordinarily, once True Origin Qi was drawn out, there was no stopping it midway; the user became a slave to the rampaging true qi, lost all reason, and burned it down to the last dreg before death finally came.
That was why no martial artist ever touched their True Origin Qi unless they were truly, absolutely out of options.
The pill that made it possible to spend a controlled amount of that True Origin Qi was precisely the Mad Soul Beast Pill. Better still, the qi did not run wild even when drawn.
What made me a man on borrowed time was the tumor, not the end of my natural span. Burning a few decades of True Origin Qi changes nothing. The problem is...
...that there's no telling how many years of life a single Mad Soul Beast Pill devours.
I'm on borrowed time anyway — who gives a damn. It won't swallow the whole year I've got left. And if it comes to that...
Jin I-gang swallowed another pill.
Whoosh!
Jin I-gang shot forward.
"Fucking fantastic."
He broke into a wide grin. Power was surging up from every inch of his body — a raw, crushing strength that made him feel like he could smash through anything. Confidence welled up along with the strength. So this was what it felt like to be strong.
"Come out, you bastards."
Jin I-gang roared.
Shaaah!
The moment they spotted him, blades came out and figures came flying at him from cover. Jin I-gang slowed his charge and curled his fingers into fists.
"A real man..."
Shk!
A sword drove straight for Jin I-gang's face. At the last instant, he tilted his head slightly to the left.
Wham!
The man's jaw shattered a heartbeat later.
He had let the blade slide past over his right shoulder and driven his right fist into the man's chin in the same breath. Jin I-gang immediately ducked low and pressed forward. The blade, thick with killing intent, hissed over his head as he rose, and his left fist crashed into the man's lower jaw.
CRUNCH!
Jaw and mouth obliterated, the man froze where he stood. Jin I-gang dipped his torso again, pivoted backward, and drove out his right fist — a round, sweeping arc that buried itself in the solar plexus of the man behind him.
CRUNCH!
The man's body folded in half.
Straightening, Jin I-gang swung his left arm. A sword slipped harmlessly through the gap beneath his armpit, and his left fist slammed into the attacker's temple.
CRUNCH!
"Fists. That's what a man needs."
Having dropped four men, Jin I-gang said it quietly.
"Funny, though... not one of them screamed?"
It had just struck him that not a single one of the dead had let out so much as a cry.
"So my fists aren't worth a damn, is that it? You're all treating these stone knuckles like a joke?"
Jin I-gang's eyes narrowed dangerously, and power flooded into his fists. The surfaces of both fists paled to a ghostly white, sheened over with an eerie gray light.
He charged at the enemies rushing in again.
CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH!
Every time his fists landed, blood and brain matter sprayed. The men who had lunged at Jin I-gang stopped dead in their tracks, then crumpled where they stood.
Their jaws, crowns, and temples had been crushed past all recognition.
"Scream, damn it! Just once!"
Jin I-gang's movements were no different from before. They had merely grown a little craftier.
He slipped past their attacks, burrowed into their blind spots, and drove his fists home.
His fists were spears.
His dodging and footwork weren't especially fast, but the speed of his fists was monstrous. They crossed space in a blink, detonating against a jaw, a temple, the heart, the solar plexus, the dantian. Even in death, the men he struck made no sound, and Jin I-gang grew angrier by the moment.
Wham! Wham-wham! CRUNCH! Wham!
As time passed, the sounds of impact grew crisper. His technique was refining itself with every strike.
"What in the world are you?"
Yu Bong-ji, having finally located him, drifted alongside and asked. She was still veiled by the Phantom Body.
"What about me?"
"Your internal power..."
"I took a pill, didn't I?"
"So thanks to the pill's effects, your martial arts..."
"Limited. Once the pill wears off, I have to take Nourishing Pills and Calming Pills."
"Nourishing Pills?"
"It's a kind of..."
Jin I-gang's hand shot out mid-sentence and snatched at empty air. What he grabbed was Yu Bong-ji, hidden in that empty air.
"Eep!"
Yu Bong-ji let out a low yelp.
Jin I-gang wrapped an arm around her back and pulled her in — and his right hand happened to land squarely on her breast.
Shaaah!
A sword plunged into the spot where she had just been standing.
Stepping forward, Jin I-gang lashed out with his left fist.
CRUNCH!
The man's face was pulped.
"This one doesn't scream either, huh."
Jin I-gang burst forward.
Wham! Wham!
Two more heads burst apart.
"That's...?"
Yu Bong-ji's eyes went wide. The spots where Jin I-gang's fists had burrowed in were precisely his enemies' fatal openings — openings that were hard enough to find, and harder still to strike even when found. Yet Jin I-gang bored straight into them and killed with a single blow, every time.
And then there was the faint gray light that flickered each time he threw a punch. That was unmistakably the Demon Hand of legend.
Demon Hand was another name for the Shadowless Demon Hand, the art ranked first among the Ten Supreme Arts of Past and Present — the ten mightiest martial arts in the entire history of the murim.
But very few people knew that the Shadowless Demon Hand and the Demon Hand were one and the same art.
Wham! Wham-wham-wham!
"Scream a little, you bastards! Let me enjoy the fight too!"
Wham! Wham-wham! Wham!
But the enemies falling before Jin I-gang still made not a sound.
"At this rate there won't be any left for me."
Yu Bong-ji's figure shot off to the side.
Shaaah! Shk! Shaaah! Shwk!
Each time the transparent cord in her hand sliced through the air, a Demon Shadow's head went tumbling. The invisible line was the Phantom Demonic Cord, Yu Bong-ji's signature hidden weapon.
Before long, every last ambusher hidden across the field lay dead.
"Aigoo, here it comes."
Jin I-gang quickly fished out two pills, tossed them into his mouth, and chewed.
"So those are the Nourishing Pills?"
"Yep. And this one's a Calming Pill."
He nodded and tossed one more pill into his mouth.
"What do they do, exactly?"
"Think of the Nourishing Pill as shorthand for a nourishing-strengthening tonic. The Calming Pill settles qi that's about to boil over."
"And why do you need to take them?"
"The Mad Soul Beast Pill works a lot like an Amplification Pill. When its effects run out, the strength drains right out of your body and you crash into exhaustion. So you take Nourishing Pills before that crash hits."
The two of them walked over behind the boulder where Yu Bong-ji had left her clothes.
"Then what does the Calming Pill do?"
"It settles the internal energy that's boiling — or might boil over."
"Why would your energy boil over?"
"Because I'm burning True Origin Qi. Why else would it boil?"
"So you're telling me the power you just used to fight was True Origin Qi?"
Yu Bong-ji asked, aghast.
She was so startled that the Phantom Body dissolved, leaving her body exposed — and at the moment she was wearing nothing but her trousers.
Jin I-gang stared openly at her bare upper half.
"Let me ask you again. Are you really a granny?"
"Hahk!"
Yu Bong-ji let out a strangled squawk and threw the Phantom Body back up. Her figure vanished as if it had never been there. She dressed herself while still cloaked in the technique.
Then she released it.
"I'm a granny."
"Going by everything in the medical texts I've read, there's no way that's true... Well, it's your business if you want to live as a granny, but with skin that elastic you'd pass for thirty, maybe early forties at most..."
Jin I-gang eyed her with unconvinced suspicion.
"Eat a Face-Preserving Fruit and you can manage it easily enough, brat. More importantly..."
"You want me to keep the fact that you've got a body like that a secret from the old folks?"
"That's right."
Yu Bong-ji nodded.
"Don't tell me you've actually turned back your age — rejuvenation and all that?"
"I'll tell you some other time. Anyway — did you really draw on True Origin Qi back there?"
"It's power I have no use for, so don't worry about it."
"Have you forgotten that True Origin Qi, unlike ordinary internal power, can't be spent in portions?"
"Normally, no. The Mad Soul Beast Pill makes it possible."
"I don't care how miraculous that pill of yours is — that is flatly impossible."
"The proof is standing right here. I don't have a single drop of internal power. And I just wiped out every last one of those bastards who wouldn't even scream when they died. Thinking about it again is pissing me off."
Jin I-gang jogged back out onto the field and kicked a corpse.
"Demon Shadows don't scream, brat. It's how they're made."
"So they're mutes?"
"Not mutes. They're trained that way."
"What kind of training makes a man die without a single scream?"
"Assassin training."
"And those ones are called Demon Shadows?"
"That's right."
"What organization do they belong to?"
"The Thousand-Year Demon Cult."
"...Hm! I see."
Jin I-gang nodded.
"Aren't you curious how I know about the Demon Shadows?"
"If I said I was curious, would you tell me?"
"Nope."
"That's why I'm not asking."
"Setting that aside — even if drawing on True Origin Qi were possible, how can you squander your life force like that?"
"I'd be careful with it if I had any guarantee of dying of old age. But that's not how life works, is it? You can be walking along just fine, trip, and crack your skull on a rock. You can eat a good dinner, climb into bed, and never wake up the next morning. You can get dragged into somebody else's fight and die in broad daylight. The one thing that's certain is that the odds of me dying well before my allotted span are overwhelmingly higher. I'm going to die without ever spending it all anyway — so just think of it as spending it early."
"You ignorant little brat..."
Yu Bong-ji heaved a deep sigh.
"What are you two doing out here?"
Mu Dae-bo asked as he came up beside them. He'd waited so long that he'd finally come to check.
"We were just about to come get you. Tell everyone to come over."
Jin I-gang said.
A short while later, the rest of the party arrived.
"Who are they?"
Na Hu-jeok asked Yu Bong-ji through transmitted voice.
"Demon Shadows."
"Truly?"
Na Hu-jeok's eyes widened.
"That's right. And that boy there just wiped out half of the fifty Demon Shadows."
"How...?"
"That's hard to explain. By his own account, he drew out his True Origin Qi and used it..."
"You mean the pill he took earlier lets him draw out and use his True Origin Qi?"
"That's what he says."
"Does that make any sense to you?"
"He says it's a pill developed by the Jecheon Medical Sage Family."
"...Even if that were true, wiping out Demon Shadows shouldn't be possible. Am I wrong?"
"I doubted my own eyes. He doesn't look particularly fast, but the Demon Shadows can't dodge his fists. Can't block them, either."
"Did you confirm the Demon Hand?"
"That part seems certain."
"Watching that fellow should be entertaining, then."
"I imagine so."
"What will those bastards do?"
"Send exorcists?"
"Probably."
"They're not the bunch from fifty years ago."
"So we just sit back and watch for now?"
"Aye."
Yu Bong-ji nodded.
Before long, the Jecheon Medical Sage Family party crossed the plain.