TL/ED – Miso
Yeon So-wol repeated the breathing method and the Willow Haze Art.
So that he could keep them going like breathing itself, whether asleep or awake.
Even when exhaustion that felt like dying crashed over him, even when his muscles knotted and he shuddered with pain as though his whole body were being torn to pieces, Yeon So-wol kept breathing and kept moving.
Ten days passed like that.
Yi Yu-baek's voice came from outside the door.
"Ten days have passed. Still alive?"
"......Yes."
Yeon So-wol swallowed down the anger and bitterness surging up in him and answered quietly.
"What got you through it?""I gave it my whole heart, obviously."
"And what made your heart whole?"
Yeon So-wol gritted his teeth.
The words shaped themselves and forced their way up out of his throat.
"Hate. I hated myself for not being able to control something as simple as my own breath, and I loathed this body of mine that feels like it's shattering over one lousy movement. But what I loathed most of all was this world, and you, for making me like this."
"......."
The voice outside the door said nothing for a while.
Just as Yeon So-wol was about to snap something more at it, the voice came back.
"Your heart is not yet whole."
"What?"
It was absurd.
Yeon So-wol stomped over to the door.
"Don't get worked up."
"And how am I supposed not to get worked......!"
Clatter!
He shoved the door hard. It was barred and chained shut, but it was still only a crude wooden door, so when he pushed with all his strength a sliver of the outside showed through the gap.
"......."
Yeon So-wol froze.
Through the crack in the door, there was no one to be seen outside.
He searched the ground too, and there wasn't a single footprint on it.
Another hallucination.
Yi Yu-baek had lost his own master to martial brothers driven mad by a heart demon. There was no way he would have come here.
"Ah."
Yeon So-wol slid down against the door and sank to the floor.
"Aaah."
He clutched his forehead.
"This can't go on."
He sprang up and pulled out the meridian chart Yi Yu-baek had handed him.
"He said the Closed-door seclusion lasts until I work out the Twelve Primary Meridians and the Eight Extraordinary Meridians for myself."
Yeon So-wol made up his mind to end this horrific training even a little sooner.
His body was a wreck.
Lately, as the breathing method had settled into him a bit, he had at least been catching brief snatches of sleep, but he still woke every 10 minutes.
"There's never going to be a perfect moment anyway."
Yeon So-wol ground his teeth.
"Let's do this."
With bloodshot eyes he glared at the meridian chart Yi Yu-baek had given him as though he meant to bore holes through it.
Not blood vessels, not lymph vessels, not a nerve network, and yet the things ran densely along the body of the figure in the drawing.
Yeon So-wol looked at it again and again, but he could not get the faintest sense of what it was.
"He could at least explain it......."
Read a single book a hundred times and its meaning reveals to you on its own, apparently.
Repeat the Willow Haze Art and work it out for yourself, apparently.
"What is this, some Joseon-era study method......."
Exam students in the 21st century did not study in such a brainless way.
Because nobody had time to burn.
When a proper lecture, a firm grip on the key points, and focused study made for far faster and far more precise understanding, why would anyone use a method that stupid?
Musty old willpower doctrine.
'It's just how lazy, useless teachers gaslight their students.'
But complaints like that were meaningless right now.
Complaining only meant something when there was an alternative, or room to breathe.
Yeon So-wol shoved the rising discontent down into his gut and concentrated.
Training demanded his whole heart. Let his guard slip even a little and there was no telling when a heart demon or qi deviation would seize him.
"First things first, memorize this cold."
It wasn't just memorizing the picture.
"Memorize it while carving in exactly where each of these sits on my actual body."
He had to be able to feel it in his flesh.
To the point that if someone jabbed him anywhere while he was asleep, it would come out at once, ah, that's the Quchi acupoint on the Hand Yangming Large Intestine Meridian, ah, that's the Dazhui acupoint on the Governing Vessel, and that's the Qihai acupoint on the Conception Vessel.
By Yeon So-wol's standard, that was what memorizing meant.
Learning incomparably more active and enterprising than mindlessly reading something 100 times.
"Huff. Hooo......."
Keeping the breathing method going all the while, he pinched his thigh every time his eyes started to close and memorized the meridian chart.
Three Hand Yang Meridians and three Hand Yin Meridians running through the arms
Three Foot Yang Meridians and three Foot Yin Meridians running through the legs
All of them together made up the Twelve Primary Meridians.
The Conception Vessel, running the front line of the body through the belly and chest to the tip of the chin.
The Governing Vessel, running the back line of the body, up the waist and spine, over the back of the head and the crown, all the way to the philtrum.
The Thrusting Vessel, piercing the center of the body, rising from the anus to the very top of the head.
Two Linking Vessels. Two Heel Vessels. And the Belt Vessel.
Those together made up the Eight Extraordinary Meridians.
"......What on earth is this? Not blood vessels, not a nerve network."
'Back on Earth this was all pseudoscience.......'
Catching himself at the irreverent thought, Yeon So-wol quickly shook his head.
This was not Earth.
He had to assume there was definitely something to it and investigate it in earnest.
Once he had checked himself over and over and was certain he had memorized every meridian and every acupoint drawn on the chart, Yeon So-wol sprang to his feet.
"Hooooo....... Hssssss. Hoo."
Carrying on the breathing that had by now become utterly second nature, he slowly began the movements of the Willow Haze Art.
"Hoooooo!"
Qi gathering.
A small ember could be fanned into a larger fire by breathing on it.
In the same way, breath blown into the body could grow a fire within.
'But how is that even possible? It's not as if there's literally an ember inside my body.'
Yeon So-wol brought the curiosity peculiar to a 21st-century man to bear and observed the process in every detail.
The keen Qi sense that had impressed even Yi Yu-baek began to show its worth.
'Ah. Breath isn't just air. There's some unknown energy mixed into it. Something like the essence, qi, and spirit inside my body.'
Air came into the lungs and went back out of them, but that energy was drawn into the lungs, passed through them, and sank deeper into the body.
Yeon So-wol watched its flow and its movement with still greater care.
'Ah. It flows here and there through the breathing and the movements.'
The energy that had sunk into his body rose again like sparks along the breathing and movements of the Willow Haze Art and scattered to every corner of him. And wherever it touched, a small ember was born.
'It's getting warm. Little by little.'
More and more deliberately, Yeon So-wol tried guiding the energy that came in with his breath.
And then he realized.
'Ah. So this is fire.'
The energy mixed into the air was hot, like flying sparks. When he gathered them into a single place, they soon became fire and blazed.
A faint awe took hold of Yeon So-wol.
'This world is full of fire.'
Thin in density, but hot, like sparks, they filled the air. Draw them in with the breath and condense them, and a fire could be kindled inside the body.
'But why is the world full of sparks like this?'
Something he had learned in earth science class came back to him.
「Cosmic background radiation. The heat that burst out at the moment of the Big Bang, spread through the whole universe.」
"Ah."
Something like intuition flashed through Yeon So-wol's mind.
"Are these sparks residual heat left over from when this world was made?"
Come to think of it, Yi Yu-baek had said something similar.
'A person's essence and qi and spirit are borrowed from heaven and earth, and at the outset they are utterly pure and brimming with life. But from the moment of birth they cool little by little and turbid qi collects in them, until at last they can no longer be used. Only when essence and qi and spirit have gone completely cold and turbid and stopped does a person finally arrive at death.'
Seen that way, what people called 'life' was much like the 'residual heat' left over from the warmth of the moment of a person's making.
"If that's true of people. Couldn't it be true of the universe too?"
Perhaps this universe, too, was still brimming with the residual heat of its own making, and that was what kept it alive.
Yeon So-wol did not know it yet, but that was precisely what people called the 'Primordial Qi'.
Primordial, meaning the single energy that existed before the birth of the universe
"And we use that to bring the essence, qi, and spirit cooling inside us back to life."
He had been tired and hurting and frightened the whole time....... but all at once Yeon So-wol felt a rush of excitement.
The feeling of uncovering, little by little, the secrets of a world he had understood nothing of.
The feeling of the fear that had filled his heart sinking a little the more he came to know.
"See? Knowledge is power. Right. You'd better have something like this if you're going to be a martial artist."
Yeon So-wol focused his mind harder still and watched the movement of the energy.
Fwoosh-
He grew the flame he had condensed as tightly as he could, and moved it carefully.
"It can't stop, not even for a moment."
If he left the heated flame in one place, only the essence and qi in that place would grow hot. Leave that unchecked, and the next star of those grotesque stories Yi Yu-baek had told him would be Yeon So-wol himself.
"Hoooo. Hsssssp!"
Using the breathing and movements of the Willow Haze Art, Yeon So-wol kept the flame he had kindled inside him moving.
Just as hot steam ran through boiler pipes and warmed a room, he sent the flame his breath had gathered flowing through every part of his body and drew it back again, warming himself through to a steady lukewarm heat.
And then it struck him.
"Ah. So this. This is the Twelve Primary Meridians!"
Sending the flame through, he had felt that its route was more or less fixed.
The passages the fire traveled.
Those were precisely the channels of the Twelve Primary Meridians that Yeon So-wol had memorized cold.
"But why is the flow so poor?"
Yeon So-wol frowned.
The flame he had spent so long breathing together would scatter after a couple of circuits of his body, until it was hard to find any trace of it at all.
And then Yeon So-wol had to gather the flame all over again.
He focused his mind once more and contemplated his own interior.
This time, to follow the roads of the Twelve Primary Meridians and see just how the flame made its way along them.
"......Ah."
It did not take long for Yeon So-wol to see the problem.
"The roads are a total mess."
The twelve primary channels were roads that hot fire was supposed to travel.
But right now those roads were frozen cold, gummy waste had dried onto them and obstructed the way, and impurities that had bored their way in were even letting the heat vent off elsewhere.
And in some spots, particularly sticky waste had all but sealed the road shut.
The flame seeped even through gaps like those and managed to get past somehow, but each time it did, its heat dropped noticeably.
Heat was stolen by the cold passages, heat scattered as it forced through the clogged ones, heat even spilled out of the punctured ones, so naturally the flame could not last long.
"This is awful."
Yeon So-wol looked down at his own body in dismay.
"Was my body always this much of a wreck?"
The words of that old man, the one called the Killing Demon he had seen on his first day in this place, suddenly came back to him.
"So that's why he called it filthy constitution."
Yeon So-wol contemplated the inside of his own body with a queasy gaze.
'I want this gone.......'
While he had been unaware of it, it hadn't mattered, but the moment he became aware, it was hard to bear.
'It's really bugging me.'
So filthy.
So broken.
The waste even squirmed, as if it were alive.
'I really hate this!'
Yeon So-wol contemplated the waste inside his body, full of revulsion.
Thinking how he wanted to squeeze every last bit of waste and impurity out of himself like popping a pimple.
Just then, his Qi sense brushed against a piece of waste that was unusually large.
"Hm?"
It occurred to Yeon So-wol that this piece of waste seemed flat.
It was as if a 'thread' fluttered off the flattened waste.
"What is this......?"
It was inside his body anyway, so there was no need to actually touch it.
Reflexively, Yeon So-wol snapped the thread.
Sssssss-
In that instant, white smoke rose from Yeon So-wol's mouth and nose. A savory, nutty smell.
"It's gone."
One clot of waste that had been gumming up the passage was gone. The passage was still cold and still studded with impurities, but along that stretch, at least, the flame passed more smoothly.
"That works too?"
He quickly focused his mind again.
Contemplated his interior.
Waste. Impurities.
Looking for another one that felt flat, with a thread fluttering off it.
"There's one."
A smile spread across Yeon So-wol's face.
It was, perhaps, the first happy smile he had worn since falling into this place.
Author's Note:
< Someone drew fan art for me >
Thank you.