TL/ED – Miso
Blazing, meaning hot.
Cauldron, meaning a pot for boiling.
Blazing Cauldron means a scorching cauldron.
The "Blazing" refers to the heat of the Innate true qi received from heaven and earth,
and the "Cauldron" refers to the body of a child who has turned six years old that year.
A six-year-old child has not yet been exposed to turbid qi for long, and so still holds hot, pure Innate true qi.
Therefore, if the proper elixirs are fed at the proper times and the child is made to train in a special Internal cultivation method, the child's dantian takes on the role of a cauldron, and the Innate true qi within the body can be boiled down.
Nine cycles of elixir refinement, carried out through nine stages over nine months, bring the work to completion.
When the cauldron is opened at that point, one obtains a viscous golden liquid the size of a thumbnail that gives off a thick floral fragrance, and this is the peerless elixir into which Innate true qi has been melted.Taking it lengthens one's lifespan and deepens one's inner energy cultivation, and so it is called the Flower Life Balm.
"......What? What did you just say?"
Yeon So-wol's head snapped up.
But Yi Yu-baek did not answer him.
With sorrowful eyes he groped through a memory long distant, yet impossible to forget.
Five years ago.
Back then, Yi Yu-baek was not yet called the Foremost Expert of Xinxing, and the Hall of Refined Arts was not yet the Foremost Gate of Xinxing County.
In those days the Blazing Cauldron Gate was the Foremost Gate of Xinxing County, and its Sect Master, Gi Baek-seon, was reckoned the greatest master in Xinxing.
Gi Baek-seon was already past seventy at the time, yet strangely, his martial arts showed no sign whatsoever of decline.
Strange things were said to be common in the Jianghu, but short of a master of the Five Qi Converging at the Origin, the kind handed down in legend, it was hard to believe that a man of seventy could keep the skill of his prime wholly intact.
And yet, astonishingly, Sect Master Gi Baek-seon of the Blazing Cauldron Gate kept both his vigor and his martial arts exactly as they had been in his youth, and the gate's prosperity never faded.
He had simply assumed that was how it was.
Yi Yu-baek, back then.
He had only thought it a marvelous thing.
Then one day.
Yi Yu-baek saw a child crying in the street.
A six-year-old girl dressed in silk.
"Hey there. Are you lost?"
Yi Yu-baek knelt down and wiped the child's tears away.
When his fingers touched her cheek, he thought that the cheek was strangely hot.
Then the child spoke.
"Mister. It's so hot. My tummy hurts so much. Grandpa and Grandma keep saying it's fine. But Hye-a hurts so much and Hye-a's so hot, and they still just keep saying it's fine. So I snuck out, okay? It hurts so much, mister."
"Huh?"
Yi Yu-baek was thrown off as the child sank down and wailed even louder, as though she had been waiting for someone to ask.
"Your stomach hurts?"
Yi Yu-baek laid the back of his hand lightly against the child's lower belly.
His face went stiff and hard.
That was not simply a high temperature.
"......Qi deviation?"
Not mere heat, but the uncanny heat given off by the flame of the innate.
The kind of burning felt only when something went wrong while training an Internal cultivation method and a person fell into qi deviation.
"Over here! I've found her!"
"Damn it....... This is why. Why can't we just tie the little brats up, the whole lot of them."
Yi Yu-baek's ears pricked up.
The voices were low and far off, but to the ears of Yi Yu-baek, who had kindled his True Fire several years earlier, every word came through clearly.
"That's, if we push them too hard the spirit shrinks and turbid qi builds up in the cauldron......."
"I know. I know, you idiot. I'm only saying it because this keeps happening. Ugh. Look at that. Someone's already latched onto her."
"I'll deal with him right away."
"Right, let's keep this quiet. Quiet."
Yi Yu-baek's face sank into a chill, as though ice water had been poured over it.
Spirit, turbid qi, cauldron.
From those three words alone, he guessed the whole of what lay behind it.
Something he could not begin to believe. The work of beasts and devils.
Footsteps approached from behind.
"Oh my. So there she is. That's our household's young mistress. You've been looking after her? Thank you. Our master insists that a kindness like this be repaid properly. If you don't mind, I'd like to invite you back to the master's house for a moment."
Yi Yu-baek turned around.
An ordinary man with an easygoing face, smiling. Dressed like the servant of a wealthy house.
Then he flinched, recognizing Yi Yu-baek's face.
"The Wind Flow Sword?"
Yi Yu-baek answered.
"That's right. It's me. You motherfuckers."
FWOOOOSH!
He raised his True Fire and drew up his qi and blood.
Scalding Innate true qi churned in the Eight Extraordinary Meridians, and the blazing True Fire spread along the Twelve Primary Meridians and the Twelve Divergent Collaterals.
Under that searing pressure, veins bulged up across his skin, his sleeves whipped, and a shimmer of heat rose off him.
CRUNCH!
The head of the man who had been smiling so amiably leapt into the air.
The street around them was still quiet.
Before anyone could take in the blood flung through the air and the head sailing across the sky and scream,
BOOM!
Yi Yu-baek crushed the ground beneath him and shot forward. The back of his hand, veins standing out, trembled faintly on the hilt of his sword.
"That's how it went. I fought until the sun rose the next day. If your uncle Hang In-u, the Gang Leader of the White Dragon Gang, hadn't come to help me, I'd have been the one to die."
Victory.
A war story that might, in a way, be something to boast of.
But there was not the slightest trace of joy on Yi Yu-baek's face, and Yeon So-wol could not begin to guess at what was in his heart.
"That child. I couldn't save her. When the fighting was over and I went looking. She'd already breathed her last. I....... I couldn't even be there at the end for that poor little thing."
"......Father."
Yi Yu-baek shook his head, as if to say it was all right, there was no need to speak.
He gazed numbly at the sky for a moment, then shifted the mood.
"Anyway. You can cross out item two now. From the look of things, plenty of merchants came to harm without ever knowing why. A sad business."
Flip. Flip.
"And let's see....... I noticed that one earlier too."
He turned the pages of the <Xinxing Peril-Avoidance Manual> and pointed to a passage.
If, on the road past Cheonro Mountain, you spot a person sitting blankly among the grass and doing nothing at all, turn back the way you came at once.
However great the loss, do not cling to it; run.
If you do not, the next one sitting in that spot may be you.
"This. This one hasn't been settled yet."
Yeon So-wol felt, somehow, as if his throat were being squeezed.
"Is that....... also the work of people?"
"It's the work of people. The bandits of the Cheonro Mountain Stronghold."
The bandits of Cheonro Mountain had come up with an ingenious method for keeping close watch over the whole vast expanse of the mountain.
It was simple.
First, they caught people. As many as they could.
They dragged off unlucky travelers passing along the mountain paths, or, bold as they were, came all the way down into Xinxing County to snatch people away in the night.
Little by little, in that fashion, they gathered more than a hundred people, then fed them Daze Powder until they were addicted.
The people they had addicted this way were called 'Lure Ghosts'.
They scattered the Lure Ghosts all across Cheonro Mountain and bound them with heavy rope so they could not flee.
Beside each one they left a little food and water.
And a single thin cord running far off into the distance.
There was no Daze Powder.
Abandoned in the undergrowth, the Lure Ghosts grew thin and gaunt as they slowly died.
The food was nowhere near enough, but the thought of hunger never came to them.
The only thing they craved was Daze Powder.
A Lure Ghost sitting in the grass, dying in agony for days on end, would suddenly catch sight of a group coming over the mountain path far away, and be filled with elation.
He would twist his bound body and pull desperately at the cord.
Jingle- jingle-
Far off a bell rang, and the bandits in the stronghold learned that guests had come.
Now the Lure Ghost would receive a day's ration of Daze Powder.
"......."
Yeon So-wol's mouth opened and closed.
For a while he could hardly speak at all, and then he barely managed to force out a sound.
"That....... that hasn't been settled?"
"That's right."
"Then. Even now, on Cheonro Mountain......."
"They're there. Those poor people."
"......."
Yeon So-wol simply could not understand it.
"What about the government troops?"
Yi Yu-baek's lips tightened for an instant, then loosened.
"Cheonro Mountain is wide. Wide enough that even if every soldier in Xinxing County were mustered to search it, the bandits could hide themselves with room to spare. That wide."
Yeon So-wol still could not understand.
'Isn't that just an excuse?'
People were dying wretched deaths.
'If there aren't enough soldiers they can ask a higher command for support, and if Cheonro Mountain is too wide they can get the cooperation of the herb gatherers who know its paths.'
No matter how he thought about it, there were plenty of ways.......
"And haven't I always told you? For a martial artist, how one conducts oneself is what matters. Bandits conduct themselves in a bandit's own way."
Yeon So-wol looked at Yi Yu-baek with unsteady eyes.
Yi Yu-baek said.
"Astonishing as it is, the harm the Cheonro Mountain bandits do to the common people is small compared to other bandits. Which means it doesn't amount to a problem big enough to move a larger army. Out in the coastal towns, after all, villages are vanishing one by one to raids by Japanese pirates."
"That's......."
"What's more, those bandits scatter gold among the countless officials serving under the County Magistrate. Even if the magistrate set his mind on rooting them out, information would leak straight out from below him."
"......."
Yeon So-wol's insides boiled.
'What the hell kind of.......'
At such preposterous injustice.
At the bitterness of being unable to do a thing about it even so.
He was angry.
He wanted to scream.
But,
'Hold it in.'
He tensed his body and held it in.
'What good is getting angry in front of Father?'
Yeon So-wol knew.
He knew that pouring out complaints about the world in front of adults never earned much of a good response.
Through middle school, through high school, through his teens, Yeon So-wol had felt no shortage of grievances himself.
Why was the world such a mess? Why was it so irrational? How could it be so unfair?
He had let those complaints burst out in front of adults more than once, and every time, the adults had not taken such talk well at all.
Yeon So-wol had thought those adults cold-hearted and cowardly.
But then one day. He saw his dad come home from work, slumped and silent, drink exactly one glass of soju, and sit there without moving for a long while.
That was when his thinking changed.
'Getting angry at adults and blaming them for nothing. Isn't that just as cowardly?'
Looking back, at the root of the feeling he had been carrying was 'Do it for me'.
At least that was how it had been for him.
You're the adults. So get it right for us. That was what it came down to.
But looking at his father's small, worn shoulders, he had suddenly realized it.
'What can a dad like that even do?'
That adults, too, were always fighting against their own limits.
Do better. Change things. Everyone was far too worn out for that.
That was when he understood.
Why the reactions had always been so lukewarm whenever he poured out his complaints in front of adults.
Saying that was simply how the world was.
Saying it wasn't easy.
Saying he was young yet.
Why they had said such things. He understood.
That adults, too, were merely frail people, overwhelmed and struggling.
Yes.
He understood.
He knew it well.
If that was true even in the 21st century,
then how much worse must it be in this savage land called the Jianghu.
But.
Yeon So-wol.
Even knowing all of it.
This time he could not hold it in.
The anger surging up in his chest.
He spat it out in front of Yi Yu-baek.
"Then. Isn't that....... isn't that wrong?"
For a person to do that to another person.
"Men who hold office. If they're that incompetent and irresponsible. Isn't that wrong?"
It's not right.
The people who sit in those posts to look after the common folk. If they act like that.
"A little child dies that way. Innocent people are taken by bandits and left in a state like that. And they make one excuse after another, warming their backsides in comfortable seats and saying it can't be done....... "
It's not right.
It's simply not right.
It's just.
Not right.
A world like that.
It's just such a shitty world.
Yeon So-wol hung his head low.
'Damn it.'
Self-loathing welled up in him.
Why on earth was he whining at Yi Yu-baek like this.
'It isn't as if Father did anything wrong.......'
Yi Yu-baek watched him with an utterly composed gaze.
"So-wol."
"......Yes."
Yi Yu-baek said.
"That is why I took up the sword."
Yeon So-wol's head snapped up as if he had been run through with a spear.
Yi Yu-baek was not smiling.
"So-wol."
He said.
"You become strong. If you don't, the bastards will."
Pat.
"Movement art training starts tomorrow. Rest well today."
Yi Yu-baek clapped Yeon So-wol on the shoulder once and walked out of the training ground.
The hand had touched him and lifted away.
And yet somehow it weighed on him.
For a long time, Yeon So-wol stood nailed to that spot.