At dawn the next day, Gwak Do-jin genuinely turned up.
Scrape, scrape!
The way he came dragging his feet through the sand, he was plainly blind drunk!
“What the?”
Seeing it, Cha Yu-sik frowned.
“Senior Gwak. What on earth are you doing in that state......”
No, seriously.
How much has this man had to drink?
“Hrrrgh......”
Stagger.
Gwak Do-jin's wavering body pitched forward.
CRASH!
He went face-first into the sand, twitched briefly, and then lay still.
Yoon Hyeon-jong and Han Tae-ho started forward in alarm, but.
“Leave him.”
Kang Hyeon, who had been perched on the platform, came down unhurriedly.
He looked down at the collapsed Gwak Do-jin, then casually reached out and tapped a single point on his back.
“Kuheok!”
Gwak Do-jin's body arched like a bow.
And then,
“Bwuurgh!”
The liquor and stomach acid pooled inside him came pouring out all at once.
A harsh stench spread across the drill grounds, and the other cadets grimaced despite themselves.
‘His willpower passes, at least.’
Right.
If you want to climb out of the mud by your own strength, you keep your promises.
To change a life dumped in the gutter, you need at least that much bite and will, don't you?
“If you're up, wipe your mouth and stand.”
“Cough! Kuheok, hah......”
Breathing hard, Gwak Do-jin staggered to his feet.
True energy driven into the Gate of Life point had expelled the liquor's heat, so he had come round to a degree.
Neither of them said a word about the previous night.
“What are you standing there for.”
Kang Hyeon turned his back and gave the order.
“Horse stance. Begin.”
***
The horse stance continued for another week after that.
It was only training that meant holding a position on the spot, yet a clear change was settling into the bodies of the five cadets.
Boys who on the first day could not last ten minutes before their legs shook like aspen leaves and they rolled on the ground were now holding out with their backs fairly straight even past the thirty-minute mark.
And not one of them had dropped out so far.
‘This should do it.’
Their breathing had settled, and with their spines straightened their balance held.
Only now were the minimum conditions in place for qi and blood to flow.
“Stop.”
Kang Hyeon's short word fell.
“Hgk!”
“Kraaagh!”
In that instant, five cadets dropped one after another as though they had agreed on it.
To the boys sprawled out gasping, drenched in sweat and staring up at the sky, Kang Hyeon spoke.
“You've suffered enough wrestling with the dirt. From the look of you lot, you can manage a sword hilt now.”
At those words, the movement of the cadets sprawled on the ground stopped dead.
“From today I'll teach you martial arts in earnest.”
“......!”
The first to snap his eyes open was Cha Yu-sik.
‘Finally!’
The truth was that up until the previous night he had been seriously considering throwing this special course in.
He was impatient.
If he did not get strong fast he would be pushed out by his brother entirely, and he could hardly spend every day in a horse stance, could he?
‘Basic work like this I can do plenty of outside class hours.’
What Cha Yu-sik wanted from the professor was a martial art.
Not a peerless divine art, necessarily, but at minimum something far stronger than anything obtainable at the Academy.
“Pick up one of those wooden swords lying about.”
The cadets scrambled to pull the training swords from where they stood in the corner of the drill grounds.
Kang Hyeon flicked one up with the tip of his foot and caught it in his hand.
The cadets waited in anticipation.
What grand and mighty name of a sword art would it turn out to be?
“The first martial art I will pass on to you is.”
Gulp.
Just as every one of them swallowed and watched only Kang Hyeon's lips.
“The Three Powers Sword Art.”
“......?”
Silence descended.
What?
The Three Powers Sword Art?
Every one of them wore a blank expression.
There were four martial arts books that poured out underfoot from clearing any junk dungeon.
The Three Powers Sword Art, the Six Harmonies Art, the Six Harmonies Fist, the Iron Cloth Shirt.
These were things you could learn without ever coming to the Academy.
They were the martial equivalent of national calisthenics, downloadable as a PDF from the Hunter Association's website for a few tens of thousands of won.
Cha Yu-sik's face contorted.
“......I must have misheard, surely? The Three Powers Sword Art?”
“You heard correctly. Heaven, Earth, Man. The most fundamental of fundamental arts, said to contain the three principles of the universe.”
In the end Cha Yu-sik's face flushed and blanched by turns.
“Professor! Are you toying with us?”
He had endured until now.
Bending the pride of a major guild's son, he had held out in the horse stance a snot-nosed child at a neighborhood martial hall might do.
Every morning his muscles screamed, and he came out to the training ground doggedly even while drawing veiled sneers from his peers in the Martial Research Society.
Why?
Because he expected some tremendous secret art at the end of that humiliating stretch of time!
“The reward for enduring that brainless horse stance is a garbage sword art like that?”
“Garbage?”
Kang Hyeon's eyes narrowed.
“Yes! Junk techniques like the Three Powers Sword Art I finished off long before I even entered the Academy. No — not even the lowest porters under my family's guild use that thing!”
The other cadets seemed inwardly to agree with Cha Yu-sik as well.
Even Yoon Hyeon-jong wore an expression that said, say what you like, the Three Powers is a bit much.
“There's some misunderstanding here.”
In the Murim where Kang Hyeon had lived there was a saying.
- The man who makes light of the Three Powers Sword Art is not fit to hold a sword, and the man who clings to nothing but the Three Powers Sword Art will never complete his sword!
Master the Three Powers Sword Art alone and you can become the greatest under heaven?
He acknowledged that this was a swindler's nonsense.
But that there is nothing to match the Three Powers for laying a foundation is not to be denied.
Old man Sword Madman had said it too.
That no sword art, in the end, departs from the Three Powers.
And had anyone babbled in front of that old man that the Three Powers Sword Art was a junk technique for porters?
A wooden sword would likely have flown in and shattered his jaw before he heard any reply.
Along with a thundering roar about a whelp who did not know the principle of heaven and earth, he would have been hammered face-down into the dirt until his bones broke and he vomited blood.
‘But I'm different from those old men.’
Kang Hyeon laughed quietly to himself.
When a student does not know, teaching him is a professor's duty.
If he is misunderstanding, then the thing to do is resolve that misunderstanding in person.
“Cha Yu-sik, step forward.”
Kang Hyeon let the wooden sword in his hand hang loose and jerked his chin.
“The sword art you've been training in is the Wolf Fang Sword Art, was it?”
“......That's correct.”
“A good sword art.”
A martial art learned only by the elite pursuit squads even within the Green Forest Alliance.
Not as refined as the swords trained at the great houses, but a practical art honed in blood.
Naturally, it was in Kang Hyeon's head as well.
“Come at me with it. I will use nothing but the Three Powers Sword Art.”
At that, Cha Yu-sik's eyes settled.
Nothing but the Three Powers Sword Art?
Truly?
Cha Yu-sik pictured what it would be like if his father used nothing but the Three Powers Sword Art against him.
The conclusion came easily.
‘I couldn't win, but I'm confident I wouldn't be overwhelmed.’
However tremendous a man's presence, the limits a sword art imposes are clear.
That was precisely why good secret manuals commanded high prices.
‘The Wolf Fang Sword Art is the sword art that lifted Cheonrang into the three great guilds. That professor is looking down on Cheonrang.’
Cha Yu-sik pressed his anger down and gripped his wooden sword.
“Don't regret this.”
“Regret?”
“You said, in every case, that you'd use only the Three Powers Sword Art. What will you do if my wooden sword so much as grazes the hem of your coat?”
“The hem of my coat? Isn't the usual thing to say that you'll win?”
“I'm not stupid enough to bluster.”
“Rather than shameless?”
The corner of Kang Hyeon's mouth curled up.
“Well, fine. If your sword so much as brushes the hem of my coat, I'll go and serve under your Cheonrang.”
“......!”
Cha Yu-sik was startled.
An S-rank Hunter joining Cheonrang?
If it could be brought about, it was a tremendous opportunity to shore up his standing as successor again.
“You'll have to keep that promise.”
Planting his feet in the sand and lowering his stance, Cha Yu-sik's expression turned serious.
‘I'm going in with everything.’
“Come.”
Tahp!
Cha Yu-sik kicked off the ground and shot forward.
Was it the effect of training the lower body?
His leaping speed was far sharper than before.
Shhwack!
The wooden sword too drew a savage arc with a rough whistle of split air.
Even to the other cadets' eyes it was an overwhelming strike.
But.
“First, Heaven.”
The foot goes before the sword.
Kang Hyeon stepped half a pace forward.
From foot to waist, spine, arm, and on to the sword's tip.
His whole body connected into one perfect line.
The strength had gone entirely out of his shoulder, yet the weight of the sky was already riding on that sword.
“Bring it down.”
The simplest possible downward cut, drawn from above to below.
TOKAAANG!
“Kuh!”
The instant Cha Yu-sik's ferociously charging sword met Kang Hyeon's wooden blade, a horrific crack of impact burst out.
‘Insane!’
Rattled by the shock, the strength went out of Cha Yu-sik's grip and he faltered.
Anyone could see it was a simple downward cut...... and it produced pressure like this?
It felt as though a great mountain had dropped out of the sky.
“Second, Earth.”
Kang Hyeon's two feet, planted on the ground, sank into the earth like the roots of a centuries-old tree.
A sword with its feet off the ground is a dead sword.
But turn only the waist and it is slow.
The force of the planted foot rose through ankle and knee into the waist, and flowed straight on into the horizontal arc of the wooden sword.
“Hold.”
A weighty horizontal cut that grazed past below the waist.
“Guaagh!”
At that single strike, Cha Yu-sik's body swayed like a reed.
It felt as though a boulder had passed over his wooden sword, and he lost his grip on it entirely.
“Last, Man.”
Between heaven and earth, man stands.
Look only upward and rage about, and you are a drifting cloud; look only down, and you are leaden.
The state in which the human axis joining above and below has not collapsed.
Kang Hyeon's gaze was fixed not on the tip of his own sword but on Cha Yu-sik's wide-open center.
Grow greedy and it lengthens; grow afraid and it shortens.
From the most perfect distance, the most direct thrust.
“Thrust.”
FWAAAAAASH!
Kang Hyeon's wooden sword, driven forward at tremendous speed, stopped dead beneath Cha Yu-sik's chin.
His neat fringe was swept up and snapped back by the terrifying wind pressure.
“......”
Stillness.
A suffocating quiet swallowed the drill grounds.
Cha Yu-sik could not breathe.
Th-This was the Three Powers Sword Art?
Bring it down, hold, thrust.
Those dull, obvious forms were this?
‘Impossible.’
At that downward cut a moment ago he had thought the sky was collapsing, and at the horizontal cut the earth had felt as though it were heaving beneath him.
And that last thrust......
‘It was as though all of it had been condensed into one and driven forward.’
Gwak Do-jin, Yoon Hyeon-jong, Han Tae-ho and Seo Hae-in, watching from behind, were all frozen with the souls knocked out of them.
To their eyes, Kang Hyeon's Three Powers just now had looked vaster and more overwhelming than any flashy peerless divine art.
“Well?”
Tok.
Kang Hyeon withdrew the halted wooden sword and spoke languidly.
“Is this still garbage?”
He tapped his own shoulder and added.
“A sword that is all flash with no roots is a sandcastle in the end. What martial art are you going to learn without even knowing what the Three Powers are?”
Cha Yu-sik's pupils shook violently.
“Now that you know, pick up your wooden sword. Today it's the downward cut. One thousand times.”