TL/ED – Miso
The meridians were both vessel and root.
The essence, qi, and spirit granted by heaven and earth pooled and flowed along the meridians,
so the meridians were the vessel that held energy,
and the root from which life sprouted.
Qi guidance meant to draw energy and lead it along.
An elixir was Nature qi condensed into a single mass.
The essence of fire, so to speak.
Dragon Scale Fungus was lukewarm in its nature, but in exchange its flame was large and it carried less turbid qi, which made it perfectly suited for the Body Refinement of a beginner's body.
Yi Yu-baek personally led the fire of the Dragon Scale Fungus with his own flame and scoured Yeon So-wol's body clean.A flame like that, great and magnificent yet not fiercely hot, filled Yeon So-wol's Twelve Primary Meridians.
Unlike the lightfoot technique training that had tempered bone and flesh, what was being touched this time was the meridians.
And that was why Body Refinement through qi guidance was terribly dangerous.
Not dangerous because it was qi guidance.
Not dangerous because it was Body Refinement, either.
It was dangerous because Body Refinement was being done through qi guidance, and the thing it worked upon happened to be the meridians.
The meridians were a person's root and vessel, so the instant they were stirred by a stranger's energy, the spirit sprang upright like a man slapped awake out of sleep and fixed its gaze on the world.
The spirit was the very ground from which a person's will and consciousness were shaped,
and once the spirit awakened, the world a person perceived became something wholly different from what it had been.
A person's consciousness might be called a record written down by an author named spirit, and that author had just taken a ringing slap to a cheek that had never once been struck in all its life.
Writing that had come at 1,000 characters a minute suddenly began pouring out at 1,000 characters a second.
Watching the whole world, setting down everything that existed and everything that did not.
And so everything feared became real.
A quarter-hour stretched into three years.
A person could taste hell while still in the world of the living.
Fwoooosh!
The fire of the Dragon Scale Fungus warmed Yeon So-wol's Twelve Primary Meridians.
It did not simply pass through as it had the last time; it clung to the walls and drove the blaze higher.
Fwooooosh!
!!!!
At first, Yeon So-wol felt an unfamiliar pain.
'What is this?'
As if his own roots were burning.
'I'm not a plant, though......?'
But there was no other way to describe it, that strange pain, that fear.
Fright seized him. Doubt crept in.
'Is this okay? This. Is this really okay?'
!!!!
The moment doubt arrived, pain beyond description came crashing in.
!!!!
It did not stop there; the pain kept swelling. Yeon So-wol's terror shot up in height.
And the pain broadened its shoulders to match.
The more he feared, the more the fear became real.
'This! This! No. No, no!'
Just as Yeon So-wol was about to convulse,
「It is all right」
'Father?'
Had he heard it?
Or had he merely called up the voice he had heard over and over earlier?
Yeon So-wol did not know.
He knew only that the meaning had suddenly been carved into his heart.
In truth it was neither heard with the ears nor heard through energy, but Heart Word, that touching and passing through between an awakened spirit and a heart of utter sincerity.
Ordinarily it would be possible only at a supreme realm no one could hope to reach,
but coincidence layered upon coincidence, and in this moment the hearts of Yi Yu-baek and Yeon So-wol met and ran deep into one another.
Neither of them had realized it yet.
Fwoooosh!
The flame of the Dragon Scale Fungus blazed magnificently.
What led it was Yi Yu-baek's True Fire.
And within it.
Yeon So-wol kept hearing his voice.
「It is all right」
Strangely enough.
His heart eased.
Even the pain of roots being torn out of his body became a little more bearable.
「That is it」
Fwoooosh!
Only then did Yeon So-wol find a little room to breathe.
He observed, slowly and carefully, what was happening inside his Twelve Primary Meridians.
The essences that made up the Twelve Primary Meridians, being tempered in that vast heat.
'Wow.......'
A narrow path that had looked like sand and rubble and dirt, grass, trees, and broad flagstones all heaped up any which way.
Over it, flame brimming like a sunset ran its hands.
The sand burned into fine black soil.
The rubble glowed, melted, split, and became broad flagstones.
The grass drank the fire in and shot up into trees.
The narrow path of the Twelve Primary Meridians, thrown together out of every kind of mess, became in an instant a respectable walking road covered in fine soil and flagstones and trees.
And then,
Fwoooosh!
When the blaze, hotter by another degree, swept over the trees, the trees grew thin and long until at last they became green bamboo.
Fwoosh!
And not just any bamboo, but bamboo straight and clean, as though each stalk had been picked out one by one.
Rustle-rustle-rustle-rustle-rustle-
Flagstones were set here and there along the earthen road, and the trees and bamboo shook their leaves on either side.
'......Nice.'
The scenery within the Twelve Primary Meridians turned so beautiful and so peaceful that the pain and the doubt of a moment ago were forgotten entirely.
Yeon So-wol was lost in it.
Fwoosh-
Then, suddenly,
as one more tree turned into bamboo,
Yeon So-wol heard a whisper.
It felt a little different from everything before it.
「Seo-ryeon. If only you could have seen this.......」
'Seo-ryeon?'
As the Heart Word mixed into the True Fire and was carved into his meridians, his heightened spirit took it down word for word.
Yi Yu-baek's old memories seeped into Yeon So-wol's heart like something out of a dream.
In a coincidence close to a miracle,
Yeon So-wol read Yi Yu-baek.
Severed Meridian meant the severing of the channels.
More precisely, it referred to the condition of the Eight Extraordinary Meridians being broken.
There were several varieties within it, Nine Yin Severed Meridian, Nine Yang Severed Meridian and the rest, but in every case Severed Meridian was a congenital illness in which one was born with the Eight Extraordinary Meridians already broken.
From the broken eight meridians, Innate true qi leaked slowly away.
Those who spilled out the hottest, purest energy granted them by heaven shone with brilliance.
Precocious
When she was born, they said she laughed more clearly than any baby in all the world.
By the time she began to walk, she could already dance,
when she first spoke, it was like jade beads rolling,
and when she began to study, she made the adults humble.
When Seo-ryeon first laid eyes on Yi Yu-baek, she changed his life.
"The Book of Rites says a father is loving and a child is dutiful. That's what being a person means. So it's wrong. You getting beaten that badly by your father. It isn't your fault. You're not supposed to hit a kid like that."
Yi Yu-baek asked her back.
Small, filthy, his whole body covered in bruises.
"Why is that how it's supposed to be? I get hit every single day, that's how it is. I'm stupid and I'm like some rat and I'm useless and all I ever do is eat, so I get hit. That's how it's supposed to be. How is not getting hit the way it's supposed to be? That's the special thing."
Seo-ryeon answered with a bright smile.
"Hey, you can actually talk."
He flinched.
"Relax. That's a compliment."
"......But when I talk a lot they hit me every time."
"Right. That's what I'm saying, they're not supposed to."
"Right, but why is that supposed to......."
"Because it's sad."
Yi Yu-baek's body gave a small shudder.
For a different reason than before.
Because a small hand had passed over his grimy, scab-crusted ear and cheek and gone all the way around to the back of his head, pulling him into a deep embrace.
A scent he had never once smelled in his life.
"It's sad, I said. Look at the state of you."
"......."
"It hurts you too, doesn't it."
"......."
"That's what people are like. This kind of thing hurts, and it's sad, and you hate it. That's what a person is."
"......My dad isn't."
"Then he isn't a person."
"Huh?"
"Don't ask it back. Just memorize it. He isn't a person."
"......But the house next door and the one across the way are all the same. ......Not as bad as ours, though."
"Then they're only half-made people."
"......What's a person, then?"
"Someone who doesn't hit little kids."
"Who decides that?"
"Confucius. And me."
Snatch.
Seo-ryeon grabbed Yi Yu-baek by the wrist.
"Come on."
And she dragged him straight to his house.
Yi Yu-baek's father, drinking at home, was dumbfounded.
His seven-year-old freeloader of a son.
And a girl of about the same age, showing up holding that son's hand.
The girl stared straight up at him and shrieked, and that jade voice rang out so clearly that every soul in the neighborhood came out to peer over.
And the words coming out of that little girl's mouth were vicious beyond belief.
"Even beasts lick their young and cherish them! What kind of beast are you, to make your own child look like this?"
"What......?!"
The first reason he could not raise a hand was that the girl was dressed in silk. If he so much as cuffed her, there might be trouble.
"Mencius said it! Between father and son there must be affection! You have no love and no affection in you, so you are not a father!"
"Wh, what?!"
The next reason he could not raise a hand was the muttering of the neighbors, every one of whom had come running out by now.
"She's got a point, though. Own kid or not, he beats him way too hard."
"At first the boy would scream his lungs out, then later he'd just be going urk, urk, like they'd made it so he couldn't even scream. Even I felt bad about that."
"Sure, you raise a child with a smack now and then, but that's going too far. It's his own flesh and blood, doesn't he feel anything?"
"That one's been like this for years. Never thought he'd do it to his own kid, though."
Under the villagers' stares, turning uglier by the moment, Yi Yu-baek's father froze.
It was a world where a man who fell out of favor with his village could be rolled up in a straw mat in the night, beaten, and buried in the hills.
"So. I'll be taking him, then?"
"What?"
"Huh?"
The father asked, and the son asked too.
"What, you want to keep living with that man? Forget it, come with me. My house is nice."
The small hand, holding a warm strength, pulled Yi Yu-baek along.
That day Yi Yu-baek gained a master, gained a friend for life, and gained a home.
Fwoooosh-!
One more tree drank in the flame and turned to bamboo.
A new memory was carved into that bamboo.
Yeon So-wol watched it blankly.
No. He lived it.
"Yu-baek. Yu-baek. Let's have a drink."
"Seo-ryeon. If Master finds out......."
"Listen. I found one. A person who's actually a person. A merchant, Jo Man-seok. How long has it been since I met a real grown-up? Ah, this wine's good."
Seo-ryeon, now fifteen, stole wine every chance she got, and that was how Yi Yu-baek learned to drink.
Slipping away from the senior brother whose name he had forgotten, always just the two of them.
Sixteen.
Seventeen.
The happiness that had seemed like it would go on forever was cut off the year she turned eighteen.
The first collapse.
From that day on, Seo-ryeon lost her light.
She wasted away, weaker each day.
Only after the monk invited from Guo'en Temple had come and gone did Yi Yu-baek learn that an illness called Severed Meridian existed in this world.
And that his master and Seo-ryeon had known her fate long before.
"The Innate true qi in her eight meridians has already drained away entirely. There is nothing more to be done."
Everyone wept.
The master, who had known all along.
Seo-ryeon.
The senior brother whose name he had forgotten.
But Yi Yu-baek could not weep.
The ground beneath his feet was giving way.
Aged eighteen at her death.
She had burned more brilliantly than anyone in the world, and cooled that much faster.
Like a cloudburst that pours as if it would melt the planet, then abruptly vanishes.
Yi Yu-baek picked up the fruit that had ripened early and fallen.
He buried it in his chest.
In truth, he did not bury it.
He swallowed it instead.
In truth, he could neither bury it nor swallow it.
He simply held it.
He only held it.
Fwoosh.
The memory ended.
Somehow, Yeon So-wol could not bear it.
Quietly, he raised qi gathering.
「Stop」
Yi Yu-baek warned him through Heart Word.
Stay still, he meant.
But Yeon So-wol did not stop.
His heart was already soaked through with Yi Yu-baek's memories, more than he could hold.
His blaze moved along with Yi Yu-baek's True Fire.
When Yi Yu-baek drove the flame of the Dragon Scale Fungus to shape bamboo, Yeon So-wol gathered the leftover heat and baked the sand and rubble into soil and paving stones.
「This?」
Yi Yu-baek tried to push him away at first, but he seemed to accept it soon enough and took Yeon So-wol's help.
With Yeon So-wol's keen Qi sense, and their hearts joined besides through Heart Word, father and son carried the Body Refinement onward as though they were one body.
Scouring and scouring.
And then laughing.
"Haaah......."
"Haah......."
It was well past 5 shichen (10 hours) later that the two of them let out their breath and opened their eyes at the same moment.
"Good work. Don't use any internal power today. You'll start feeling the effects tomorrow morning. I doubt anyone in the world has ever gotten this much out of a Dragon Scale Fungus. I don't think you'll be getting beaten up anywhere from here on."
"Thank you."
"And, listen."
Yi Yu-baek looked at Yeon So-wol with troubled eyes.
He had not known at first, but as the Body Refinement went on, things had brushed against his heart in flashes.
What kind of thoughts Yeon So-wol had been steeped in while helping him.
"......You saw?"
Yeon So-wol did not bother lying.
"If you mean Aunt Seo-ryeon. Yes. I saw."
"......Good grief. Even Mu-hyeok doesn't know about that."
"I'm your son. The only one."
"Peeked into my heart once and now the brat's getting cheeky."
"I was glad to see it."
"That made you glad, did it."
"She's someone worth remembering. My aunt. I was glad to learn that a person like that existed in this world."
"......Is that so."
Yi Yu-baek let out a long sigh.
"All I meant to do was help with your training. I didn't expect my own heart to get found out like this."
"Was she your first love?"
"Why, you."
Flick!
Yi Yu-baek snapped a finger against Yeon So-wol's forehead.
It did not hurt much.
"Anyway, it seems this happened because of that ridiculous Qi sense of yours and a heart grown utterly sincere. And it's true. There can't be many under heaven who made their hearts that sincere the very moment they stepped into martial arts. Maybe there's no one at all."
"Is that so?"
"It is. Qi sense and heart. These are your weapons. Knowing your own strengths matters for a martial artist, so keep that firmly in mind."
"Yes, father."
"Cough. Cough."
Yi Yu-baek coughed.
His face was pale.
"Father?"
"It's nothing. This qi guidance business....... it's dangerous for a martial artist who hasn't even reached Peak-rate to attempt lightly. I simply spent a little essence blood, that's all."
"Essence blood? That's not supposed to be spent, is it?"
Essence blood was Innate true qi. Something to be guarded.
"It's fine. Nothing severe, it's just cooled and twisted a bit. A mild internal injury. Rest properly and it'll heal clean."
"But."
"Enough. This much is a stroke of luck. I gave the other boys qi guidance while they were still Third-rate, but you're already at Exhaled Smoke and Cloud......."
"Does that make it different?"
"Of course it does. Your Innate true qi is already active, and I can't suppress it. If your spirit had taken fright and convulsed even slightly, that Innate true qi would have burst out and flowed backward. And then you and I would have melted down together."
"......?"
"There was a monk once who was giving a disciple qi guidance when the Innate true qi burst, and he became a candle sitting right where he was. Not blazing, mind you, just burning on and on, soft and steady. Anyone who laid a hand on it wrong might have been dragged in, so they simply watched for three months, until it had all burned down and nothing was left but ash. Master and disciple burning side by side like candles."
"Why are you telling me this only now......."
"If I'd told you beforehand, your heart would have been stained with terror and it might truly have happened. When the spirit is stirred, it blows everything out of proportion and makes it real. So I hid it. Don't hold it against me."
"......."
Yeon So-wol pressed his lips tight until his nose stung.
This was of a different grain from any training up to now.
Until now, there had at least been some corner where skill or effort could keep him alive.
But the heart did not bend to a person's will.
Telling a frightened man don't be scared! was never going to work.
'And he just went and did that anyway?'
If Yeon So-wol had heard Yi Yu-baek's Heart Word and still failed to settle his heart,
then that day would have been the day the two of them became candles side by side.
"Why would you do something this dangerous!"
"I know you carry a purpose more important to you than your own life. That's why you crossed all the way here from Annam to find me. Knowing that, how could I be the only one saving his own skin?"
"......."
It was a misunderstanding.
A very large misunderstanding.
But not one he could explain away.
Yeon So-wol broke out in a cold sweat.
"Still, look at your channels. See how much you gained from a single elixir. And you'll have mastered our Refined Arts Sect's method of Body Refinement completely."
Yeon So-wol wavered, then protested.
"But one slip and you'd have gone too, Father!"
"So-wol. I had something to fall back on, that's why."
"......Is that the truth?"
"It is. I've staked my life about twenty times in my life. Not once have I died yet. Today makes twenty-one."
"......."
"Heaven takes cruelly whoever it means to take, and turns its back just as hard on whoever it doesn't. This is all your fate and mine. The fate to see our purpose through."
"......."
Barely fighting past the words jammed in his throat, Yeon So-wol spoke again.
"Even so, there's no need for you to stake your life too......."
"Now, now. If a man can't even die for his son, what kind of father is that?"
Yeon So-wol was torn.
Whether to be angry or to be moved.
'......Insane Murim.'
Once again today, Elder Jo Man-seok had been right.
"Cough. Cough. Anyway, off you go. On your way out, tell Mu-hyeok to come in."
Yeon So-wol wanted to say something more.
But looking at Yi Yu-baek, pale and drained with his shoulders sunk a little, he could not bring himself to.
"......Yes, sir."
Yeon So-wol straightened himself and rose.
"Today. Thank you."
"All right, all right."
Yeon So-wol left.
"Haaah......."
Only then did Yi Yu-baek curl his shoulders in, hunch himself down, and let out a long groan.
"......."
He groped for the wine bottle, poured a cup, and tossed it back.
A line of song slipped out between his lips.
Chou dao duan shui shui geng liu [TL: two lines from Li Bai, recited in their classical reading; the meaning follows in the lines below.]
Ju bei xiao chou chou geng chou
Draw a blade and cut the water, and the water flowed on again,
raise a cup and wipe away the sorrow,
and what I long for is longed for only the more.
"......If Seo-ryeon were here, she'd have taught that boy poetry properly too."
With a grunt of nngh! he shifted his seat and thumped his shoulder.
"You're out. How's Master?"
"Phew. Thank goodness."
"So-wol. You okay? Did it go well?"
When he stepped outside, the three disciples greeted Yeon So-wol.
Yeon So-wol's eyes went to the footprints scattered all around them and to the fur and feathers stuck all over them.
All of them gaunt and worn-looking.
"How on earth did you end up......."
Mo Cheong answered.
"Not even the tiniest sound could be allowed in there. An awakened spirit hears it with those sharpened senses and spins up every kind of fear and lie."
"Ah......?"
"Yeah! So birds, cats, rats, even the wind. We chased off the lot of them!"
Mo Cheong grinned wide.
Kang Mu-hyeok and Seon Je-hun smiled awkwardly.
'For five shichen?'
Yeon So-wol felt a heat he could not name.
'This is.......'
Was it because he had read Yi Yu-baek's memories?
A thought came to him.
'In this world. Actually. Maybe not one single thing was ever a given.'
Not the friendship of friends.
Not the warmth between fellow disciples.
Not even a parent's love.
Everything he had taken for granted might never have been a given at all.
Just as the scent he had taken for granted turned out to be nothing of the sort in this land.
Perhaps someone, at great cost, had made all those things that were never a given into givens.
Thinking of it that way, there was nothing he was not grateful for, nothing that did not burn.
The hearts of the three disciples who had toiled five whole shichen for his sake,
and the heart of Yi Yu-baek, who, questionable as the whole thing was, had staked his own life to give him qi guidance.
"......Thank you, all of you."
"Oh, come on, Young master. Don't be like that."
"Think nothing of it. Someone did the same for each of us in our time."
"It is a bit rough, though. That was my first time standing guard watch."
Warm laughter spread among them.
"So-wol! Are you building Mu-hyeok from scratch out there?! Cough!"
Until Yi Yu-baek's shout came from inside the quarters.
"Ah. Blast."
Kang Mu-hyeok rushed inside in a hurry.
Yeon So-wol watched his back with worried eyes.
Was it because the Heart Word had gotten through?
It had been so before, too.
But now Yi Yu-baek felt closer.
At first he had thought the man was nothing but a lunatic Jianghu practitioner.
Later he had come to know him as a dependable master and a father.
And now, simply as Yi Yu-baek.
The road he walked and the thoughts he carried drew Yeon So-wol's heart, little by little.
"Jianghu......."
What in the world was this.
Yeon So-wol murmured it under his breath and quietly looked up at the sky.