When it comes to replaying memories, humanity divides into two camps.
The optimists who think back on *the good old days*, and the realists who chew over *what a miserable time that was*.
In the cold, brutal history of survival, the latter had the clear advantage.
Because remembering the screams of the neighbor’s uncle who got eaten alive by a man-eating bear while trying to pick those tempting mountain berries guaranteed a higher survival rate than remembering where the berries were in the first place.
Sure, in civilized society this magnificent survival instinct had been downgraded—mostly into a function that forced you to kick off your blankets at three in the morning and replay your most embarrassing moments on loop—but the fact remained that it was the dominant survival strategy humanity had equipped.
Sirin, however, had gone with the minority option.
Sirin was the type to snicker to herself while replaying what she’d call her *greatest hits*.
Put more delicately: Sirin was something of a narcissist.
This self-love occasionally caused catastrophic problems for her survival strategy.
The prime example being the moment she’d arrived in this other world and, locked in an endless loop of *this is a dream, this is definitely a dream*, had cheerfully flung herself off a cliff.
But even shattering her body on the rocks below hadn’t changed her fundamental nature.
Sirin was the kind of person who, whenever boredom struck, would put her memory’s highlight reel on infinite repeat and marvel at herself.
Right now, she was hiding in the church, replaying the events of the past few days and quietly gloating.
*Perfect.*
Proposing the trial by combat, systematically dismantling Heres’s remaining men one by one, breaking the mercenary company’s morale—every step of it had unfolded under Sirin’s cold, flawless, and meticulously calculated design.
Not that she’d maintained one hundred percent composure throughout.
Ripping out Gordo’s hair had been pure improvisation, a burst of hot-blooded impulse.
And slashing the dual-blade fighter’s other wrist had been down to a slightly unhinged streak in Sirin’s personality.
But that was fine.
Because the climax—the final line she’d delivered as she collapsed with a sword through her heart during her desperate struggle with Bjorn—had been perfect.
*”Dad…”*
The look on Bjorn’s face as his world crumbled.
It had all been Sirin’s calculated performance!
A bit of a tired cliché, perhaps, but in a primitive fantasy land like this, the classics always landed best.
Even now, thinking back on it gave her chills.
What method acting.
*The Oscar’s mine.
That big lug doesn’t stand a chance.*
Sirin smiled with deep satisfaction, convinced that everything had flowed exactly according to her design and arrangement.
Of course, that wasn’t true.
What Sirin had actually said was *”it hurts,”* and the pain had simply scrambled the wiring between her brain and her tongue again, garbling the pronunciation.
Sirin had a tendency to distort the past however suited her best.
Anyway.
She couldn’t stay drunk on past glory forever.
Sirin got to her feet.
To achieve Body Rebirth, she had a great deal to examine.
Just as she’d expected, Bjorn’s spinning, shrieking flourish had given her something remarkable.
[ Through pain and damage, you comprehend the principles of martial arts with your body! ]
[ Through Body Enlightenment, you grasp the foundations of a new martial art! ]
[ Twenty-Four Plum Blossom Sword Art — Flow acquired! ]
[ Twenty-Four Plum Blossom Sword Art ]
[ Upon barren stone mountains, ten thousand snow-plum blossoms bloom in full. The supreme art of Huashan. Where the sword flows, the fragrance of plum blossoms forms a current (梅香成流). ]
“…”
But a technique was a technique, and Sirin had absolutely no idea what any of that meant.
*What exactly is supposed to be flowing?*
The system had apparently decided to write poetry now.
*The fragrance of plum blossoms forms a current.* What on earth was that supposed to mean?
Bjorn’s bizarre swordsmanship surfaced in her mind.
That hologram show where one sword seemed to split into dozens.
She’d struggled desperately to pick out the real blade from that dizzying tangle of afterimages.
*Flow.
Flowing.
To let flow.
To let pass.*
But what did getting hit by a hologram sword have to do with letting anything flow?
Sirin set aside Bjorn’s absurd technique and thought only about the martial art itself.
“To let flow…”
Letting the sword’s trajectory flow to conceal the real attack?
Or receiving the opponent’s attack by flowing with it?
“Hmm…”
Something hovered just at the edge of understanding, tickling the inside of her skull.
She felt like she could grasp it, if she reached now.
Sirin stood up, swung her arms loosely—then stopped.
She had no sword.
To properly practice a martial art, she needed the right tool.
Using the wrong implement—her fists, for instance—to demonstrate a sword technique could lead to the same disaster as when she’d snapped Heres’s neck and shattered her own wrist in the process.
But she had no blade.
That bastard Roderick had confiscated both Heres’s and Bjorn’s swords as evidence.
*Damn bureaucrat.
Not a single flexible bone in his body.*
She muttered a curse under her breath and was about to storm out—then stopped.
It was the middle of the night.
Showing up at the garrison to bang on the door demanding a sword was not appropriate.
That cowardly security chief might foam at the mouth and faint again.
She could always ask old Peter to bring her one later, but her body was itching right now.
This sensation of hovering at the threshold of enlightenment.
Sirin didn’t want to let this moment slip away.
She stepped outside the church without a plan.
The hour was deep night, moonlight spilling down like liquid silver.
Since rumors of the Witch’s resurrection from death might reach the mercenary company’s ears, Sirin had mostly operated at night.
Even after the mercenaries had left, she kept the same schedule.
A true creature of the modern age—her sleep cycle had collapsed in an instant.
Not that she minded; at least she didn’t have to run into the villagers.
Anyway, Sirin slipped into the forest near the church.
“That’ll do.”
She found a suitable tree and tore off a branch whole.
With stats pumped up by 500% EXP, she had strength to spare.
She stripped off the leaves and smaller twigs and was about to start swinging—then changed her mind.
If she was going to do this, she might as well do it properly.
“…”
Sirin sat down and stared quietly at the branch in the moonlight.
Just a rough branch.
This is not a sword.
But it could become one.
“…”
Honestly, this kind of philosophical question wasn’t her style.
Sirin had very little interest in defining abstract concepts.
She decided to just go at it hands-first and see what happened.
She rolled her shoulders, pulled out the small pocket knife she carried, and began working the wood.
“…Damn it.”
What came out wasn’t even close to a sword—more like a club, or maybe a walking stick.
She kept losing control of the blade; it kept sliding off in the wrong direction.
Of course it wouldn’t work from the start.
The only experience Sirin had ever had putting a knife to wood was sharpening pencils.
She snapped off more branches and tried again.
Same result.
The blade kept going off course, or biting too deep and ruining the grain.
“For crying out loud.”
She irritably flung the latest failure aside.
Three or four ugly chunks of wood tumbled across the moonlit ground.
“…”
Sirin glared at the scraps, then closed her eyes.
“…It’s fine.”
It was fine.
So what if she failed a few times?
The forest was full of trees, she had more than enough strength, and nothing was chasing her.
And more than anything, Sirin had something: a will forged from experience.
She murmured with her eyes closed.
“One thing at a time. Slowly. Don’t rush.”
Like when she’d reclaimed her voice.
Sirin picked up a fresh branch and set her hands to work again.
—Scrape, scrape.
The bark peeled away, and the rough branch began, however clumsily, to take on the shape of a sword.
“Hmm…”
Strange.
She was moving her hands the same way as before, and yet the motion felt a little smoother than it had.
The sensation of a slightly cleaner connection between brain and hand.
— Ding!
[ Dexterity EXP increases! ]
[ Crafting proficiency rises slightly! ]
The system chimed as if answering her.
“…”
A stray thought drifted through Sirin’s mind.
With system buffs, it felt like she could become anything.
Carve wood and become a carpenter.
Hammer iron and become a blacksmith.
Pick up a chisel and become a stonemason.
Pick one thing and settle into it, and making a living wouldn’t be a problem.
Not that Sirin had any intention of settling.
She needed to achieve Body Rebirth.
She tuned out the system and kept her hands moving.
—Scrape, scrape.
Sirin’s movements didn’t look particularly careful.
Like an overeager child ruining their materials, with no apparent concern for controlling her strength—large chunks of wood fell away with each stroke.
But however careless and indifferent her manner appeared, the result told a different story.
Moonlight filtered down through the leaves, illuminating Sirin’s pale hands and the branch slowly baring its inner wood.
The branch was gradually taking on the shape of a sword.
“…”
Sirin felt as though she was beginning to understand something.
There’s a saying.
A sculptor doesn’t carve stone—they draw out something buried inside it.
Not just sculptors, either.
Painters and others in what people call the arts all say something similar.
The form already exists within the material.
Sirin felt she could dimly grasp what that meant.
It wasn’t some lofty expression of narcissism or self-congratulation.
It was a plain statement of fact.
To put it crudely: it’s the same as an ordinary person looking at clouds and finding the shapes of dogs and cats.
Is a cloud a dog?
Is a cloud a cat?
A cloud is just a cloud.
But ordinary people can still see dogs and cats in clouds.
Because they’re familiar with them.
Because they can recognize those patterns in the cloud’s shape.
And artists are those who have pushed that pattern-recognition ability to its absolute limit.
A painter draws tens of millions of lines.
A sculptor shatters hundreds of thousands of stones.
It’s less a creative act than it resembles the stereotyped behavior of a maddened animal pacing the same spot over and over.
And at the end of that obsessive, almost pathological repetition, the artist’s brain forcibly constructs pattern-recognition circuits of a different order entirely from ordinary people.
They torture themselves until they can find form even in lumps of rock and chunks of wood.
And they say:
The form already exists within the material.
The sculptor sees the fury of a guardian deity in a block of stone.
The painter sees a dragon painted in a single sweeping stroke on a blank canvas.
They see what they see, surrender to the flow of the unconscious, and let their hands move.
So what was Sirin seeing right now?
“…”
Sirin’s hands changed.
There was no need to force a shape into existence.
Just follow where the wood leads—let the knife move as the hidden sword within it desires.
The blade tip flowed along the grain of the wood like water.
What is flow?
Sirin didn’t bother trying to answer the question.
She simply carved the wood the way water flows—letting her hands go where they went.
—Scrape, scrape.
The twist of the branch, the knots, the scars carved into it over long years.
No need to force them straight, to gouge them out, to scrape them away.
So what if it’s a little crooked?
As long as it doesn’t lose its balance.
So what if the path curves?
As long as the destination isn’t forgotten.
Sirin finally stilled her hands and lifted the finished wooden sword.
In the moonlight, it seemed to give off a faint glow.
“Hmm.”
She gave it a swing.
The way it settled into her grip was surprisingly good.
“Not bad.”
Satisfied, Sirin closed her eyes and recalled Bjorn’s swordsmanship.
A sword with dozens of afterimages.
Phantom Sword.
How had he produced dozens of phantoms from a single blade?
The martial arts from Heres and Gordo had been intuitive.
A blade thrusting fast had become Pierce, inscribed in her body under that name.
A fist smashing down without finesse had been carved into her as Unyielding Force.
But Bjorn’s sword was different.
How should she define the essence of those disorienting phantom blades?
Flow.
How was she supposed to reproduce that flow?
A vague concept, impossible to pin down.
“Hah…”
Sirin let out a small sigh.
But she had to do it.
For Body Rebirth.
She opened her eyes and swung the wooden sword through the air.
The sword caught the moonlight and drew a single line.
The white-gleaming arc lingered on her retina for a moment, then faded.
Sirin swung the sword the way she’d let it flow—just letting her hand go where it went, thrusting, slashing, flowing, blocking.
Clumsy, but she didn’t stop.
One arc became two, two became four.
The wooden sword’s afterimages layered chaotically across the air.
Like ink-wash paintings drawn in water on a stone slab, they bloomed and dissolved against the curtain of night, over and over.
When she closed her eyes, the countless afterimages of the moonlit sword seemed to float up on her retina.
But Sirin knew.
All of it was illusion.
The real sword was only one.
This single wooden sword in her hand.
Then where did all those afterimages come from?
How had Bjorn produced dozens of phantoms from a single blade?
“…”
Sirin recalled the words of a great sculptor she’d heard back home.
He had seen an angel in the marble, he’d said, and had merely set it free from the stone.
But…
“…He was wrong.”
They were wrong.
The form isn’t inside the material.
The form is inside the sculptor.
Sirin looked at the failures scattered around her.
A lumpy club.
A stick gnawed nearly through at the middle.
A length of wood twisted like a snake.
And the smooth, balanced wooden sword in her hand.
The material had been identical.
All of them were ordinary branches snapped from the same forest.
But the results were different.
What had made that difference?
It wasn’t that the branches themselves had refused or desired to become swords.
It was because the one who held them—Sirin herself—had changed.
When clumsy hands were refined by the system’s correction and became skilled, a sword was born instead of a club.
It was the same.
A block of stone could become the form of a guardian deity—or it could become worthless rubble.
Depending on who held the chisel.
[ All things arise solely from the mind. ]
Depending on who held the sword.
[ 一切唯心造 — All is created by the mind alone. ]
“….Oh.”
Now she understood.
Phantoms weren’t the point.
What mattered was the infinite possibilities (千變萬化) that bloomed according to the will of the one who held the sword.
And the only thing that could draw out those infinite possibilities was oneself.
Sirin smiled.
Right.
So that’s why it’s the Plum Blossom Sword Art.
Countless blossoms blooming from a single branch—it wasn’t so different from the dozens of afterimages that swept out every time Bjorn swung his sword.
The system hadn’t given her a completely random martial art after all.
Sirin let out a small laugh and swung the sword.
The wooden sword in her hand traced a soft arc in the moonlight.
A sword path like the flow of plum blossoms scattering on the wind—countless, beyond counting.
The wooden sword in her hand moved faster than thought.
No—thought (利) was no longer even necessary.
The sword cleaved the curtain of night wherever the heart flowed.
A single swing.
But the arc didn’t end at one.
Before the first sword’s afterimage had faded, a second, a third bloom of sword-light layered itself across the air.
Using the sword as a brush and moonlight as ink, she painted a single scroll of plum blossoms across the void.
When she closed her eyes, the afterimages of the sword lingering on her retina formed the shape of a single plum blossom.
Sirin felt something brush the tip of her nose.
It wasn’t a fragrance.
Swinging a sword couldn’t produce a scent.
But Sirin could feel it clearly.
The image of a single plum blossom (雪中梅) that had finally bloomed through the bitter cold of a snow-covered mountain.
The impression was so vivid that her brain seemed to conjure a sensation that didn’t exist.
Cold and crystalline, and somehow achingly distant—the fragrance of plum blossoms.
[ Where the sword flows, the fragrance of plum blossoms forms a current (梅香成流). ]
Sirin swung the sword.
Plum blossoms of moonlight bloomed in full, riotous bloom.