To speak plainly, the Grade 3 Disciple Puppet losing its head was hardly any great matter to Black Spider.
It was not an actual human body to begin with, and all that had been cut away was a head with no particular function at present.
Above all, repairing it was not particularly difficult either.
It was a puppet built from ordinary materials easily obtained on the open market.
Its make had been rough as well, focused only on function, so that by now he could churn out several units in a single day if he set his mind to it.
The first puppet had taken weeks to make because it had been a process of creating something out of nothing, without so much as a schematic; the situation now was entirely different.
So in truth one could say Black Spider had suffered almost no loss, while what he had gained was enormous.
So Cheon, Vice Sect Leader of the Grand Heaven Sect.
As the world knew him, he was a master of the Blade Sect who had crossed into the peak realm before he had even reached thirty, and who now, past forty, was eyeing the transcendent realm.
And such a man had agreed to teach Black Spider martial arts.
Had Black Spider been an ordinary disciple of the Grand Heaven Sect, he might have wept aloud in gratitude.
Black Spider, of course, would do no such thing.
***
The greatest power in the Grand Heaven Sect was, say what one liked, the Sword Sect. It selected and culled only those with outstanding gifts and raised them by passing down first-rate martial arts; the reason the Grand Heaven Sect was called the First Sword Sect of Gangryu lay precisely in this Sword Sect.
When it came to naming the Grand Heaven Sect's greatest master, however, the story was different.
Setting aside the group and looking only at individual skill, the Sword Sect Leader was indeed one of the highest-ranked in the whole of the Grand Heaven Sect, but he was not the strongest.
In fact, the strongest martial artist in the Grand Heaven Sect was the Sect Leader, So Heuk, who had reached the transcendent realm.
And the one counted next after him was the Sect Leader's son and direct disciple, Vice Sect Leader So Cheon.
These two belonged to none of the other martial gates within the sect, and they alone, the two of them, handled blade arts.
That is to say, there was no separate Blade Sect; the bloodline of the Grand Heaven Sect Leader was itself the Blade Sect.
A secret blade art passed down by blood.
An innate martial gift carried along that bloodline.
Outstanding insight on top of it, and a self-regard bordering on arrogance.
The genius who combined all of it was Vice Sect Leader So Cheon.
Which was why he was, in fact, poor at teaching others.
He was, from the start, the sort who had realized this and that on his own and pressed forward before anyone could teach him, borne on innate talent.
Moreover, even his direct master had been his father, So Heuk, who from childhood had been called a peerless genius for his uncommon martial gift.
So So Cheon was a genius taught by a genius, and generally, whenever he tried to teach anyone, it did not go particularly well.
Then again, where in the world is there a genius born to everything?
One may as well lack a knack for teaching.
No.
It was a misunderstanding.
So Cheon was good at teaching people too. The disciples he had experienced until now had simply been below standard.
“...Do you understand?”
[Yes. I understand.]
“...Well done.”
SNAP, SNAP! CLACK!
The puppet modeled on a human continued its movements. There was no belt of any kind at that puppet's waist; instead, part of its body was a pale blue that resembled the color of the Vice Sect Leader's robes.
Unlike the actual Vice Sect Leader, however, the puppet held a sword rather than a blade, for until now the Vice Sect Leader had been teaching Black Spider not his own blade arts but the Sword Sect's Heaven Pinnacle Sword Arts.
The Azure Heaven Blade Arts that the Vice Sect Leader had trained in were a secret transmission passed only to the Sect Leader's direct disciples, not merely withheld from outsiders but withheld even within the sect, so he could not teach them carelessly.
So he taught the Heaven Pinnacle Sword Arts in place of the blade arts, and this posed no particular problem.
For Vice Sect Leader So Cheon had reached the level of a master in sword arts as well.
Before he was designated the sect's next Sect Leader, he too had belonged to the Sword Sect and trained in the Heaven Pinnacle Sword.
The Heaven Pinnacle Sword was itself a sword art rooted in the Azure Heaven Blade, so it was orthodox practice to lay one's foundation with the Heaven Pinnacle Sword and then enter the supreme martial art, the Azure Heaven Blade.
In any case, thanks to that, Black Spider was able to learn the subtle principles of the Heaven Pinnacle Sword at truly forced speed.
It had been roughly three months since the Vice Sect Leader struck the head from Black Spider's Grade 3 Disciple Puppet.
What had begun as a plan to say a few words about martial arts by way of apology had by now become the Vice Sect Leader's chief daily occupation.
The reason was simple. Black Spider learned far too well.
Teaching someone is by nature a wearying and difficult thing. But when the one being taught improves by the day and grows in leaps, there is nothing so enjoyable and rewarding.
Black Spider was exactly that sort of student. The sort from whom the master found things to learn even as he taught.
Whatever he was taught, he understood and absorbed it faster than the Vice Sect Leader had reckoned, and at times he drove straight to the heart of a complicated structure and gave the Vice Sect Leader himself a realization.
If there was one regret, it was that despite such uncanny talent, he had still not been able to manifest sword qi.
Seen a certain way, this too was natural.
Sword qi and blade qi were not, by nature, a realm one arrived at through any theoretical reasoning.
They were rather a kind of waypoint reached naturally at last when, through arduous training, one passed beyond mastery into unity of self and object.
Weapons such as the sword, the blade, and the spear were things outside the body.
To place qi into such an object outside the self, and to place one's will into it so that it took on form — that was sword qi.
Summed up, it was a territory one inevitably reached by ‘doing it well on one's own,’ so however excellent the master, there was nothing for him to do but wait for the student to manage it himself.
The most he could offer was vague advice drawn from his own felt experience.
“It is placing your own self into the sword.”
That was the Vice Sect Leader's advice. In fact, martial artists at the first-rate realm and above generally explained sword qi in some similar phrase.
Placing oneself into what is not oneself and unfolding one's will through it. Placing oneself into the sword and cutting with it.
Black Spider, however, could not do it. There were countless conceivable reasons.
To begin with, he was not human. Nor was he a swordsman.
Black Spider was a Puppet Master. Martial arts that handled puppets did exist in the world of murim, but they were on the whole closer to the wicked arts one would find among the unorthodox sects.
The Grand Heaven Sect, in any case, was a sect that aspired to the orthodox path, so while it knew how to counter unorthodox martial arts, it did not understand their subtle principles.
In the end, a Puppet Master ought to learn from a Puppet Master. That Black Spider was floundering like this was, in the end, because he had no Puppet Master for a teacher.
In truth, the only Puppet Master Black Spider knew of was Elder Gok, and he had already become a traveler of no return several years past.
Yet if Elder Gok had not been killed by assassins, and Black Spider had therefore never obtained the old man's hunchback puppet, Black Spider would not have reached his present level either.
It was a laughable thing. Elder Gok's death had opened the Puppet Master's road to Black Spider, and by that same death the road onward had become hard to find.
That was how great an influence Elder Gok's existence had had on Black Spider.
Yet tracing it back, the human who had influenced Black Spider most in all the world was surely Yu Ran.
Thanks to that small girl who had awakened divine awareness, Black Spider had been able to set his first foot into human society, and by poring over their legacy, the puppet arts, he had come this far.
Then.
Was what Black Spider now felt, recalling Elder Gok and Yu Ran, longing — or merely a simple chewing-over of memory?
There was no telling. Black Spider did dream at times, though. The dream was of a small girl carefully stroking a spider the size of a puppy two or three times.
Longing for days gone by is called nostalgia. Black Spider's native soil was the Eight Peaks Forest, but the spiritual home of his self might well be somewhere else.
Placing oneself into the sword.
For that, he first had to know what he himself was.
So Black Spider would from time to time rewind his memories from his past up to the present, and just now, at the end of such self-analysis, he had arrived once more at his memories of Elder Gok and Yu Ran.
By Elder Do's words, a soul had to be placed within a doll. But Elder Do had been a great master of doll-making, not a great master of the puppet arts.
Even so, the Vice Sect Leader's advice to place oneself into the sword and that one line Elder Do had let fall in passing felt strangely as though they touched upon each other.
Black Spider sinks into thought. What am I?
I am a spider. I am a Puppet Master. The puppet I move is a model of a human body that handles a sword.
Then, must I place that human body into the sword? Or must I place the spider that I am into it?
Should the focus be on the sword? Or on the puppet?
The only lamp Black Spider could see by was the trail left behind by Elder Gok, who had already departed the world.
Groping along that trail, Black Spider always found himself recalling the sight of the old man spewing formless energy through a puppet shaped like himself and lopping an opponent's blade clean off.
That old man had been a hunchback, and his puppet had been a hunchback too.
Then — had Elder Gok placed himself into his puppet?
***
From one day on, Black Spider vanished from sight. He had not disappeared entirely; he had simply shut himself inside his room — more precisely, inside the one annex building that had by now become an outright puppet workshop, crammed full of every sort of tool and instrument.
The Vice Sect Leader, who had come to enjoy discussing martial arts with Black Spider, felt a private disappointment.
But the Vice Sect Leader understood as well. At times a martial artist needed to sink quietly into his own interior; even his own father, Grand Heaven Sect Leader So Heuk, was in his fifth year of isolated training.
So Black Spider the Puppet Master was in effect holding his own isolated training in his workshop.
This could not be disturbed, so the Vice Sect Leader merely sent word to the people of the annex not to interfere with Black Spider's daily life.
All the while, sounds of something being carved and hammered, of clacking, and of various other noises poured ceaselessly from the spider's workshop from before dawn until the next daybreak, so that no one could tell what on earth was happening inside.
Then, one day in the early hours.
The door of the workshop where Black Spider had shut himself away suddenly flew open.
And out of the dim interior of that workshop a small spiderling came toddling.
It was not a spider. Examined closely, it resembled a spider, but it was only a puppet imitating that shape, and its original was none other than the Wood Spider Unit 1 that Black Spider handled.
The Wood Spiders had by nature been dolls made of wood, and since no black lacquer had been applied to their outer surfaces, anyone could tell at a glance that they were puppets.
But this newly born Wood Spider — no, Ink Spider — had been modeled exactly on the original Black Spider's own appearance, down to a fuzz of hair that resembled Black Spider's own.
To an unknowing eye it looked for all the world like a living spider, and one after another such black Ink Spiders came crawling out and lined up in a row.
So five Ink Spiders in total were connected to the main body inside the workshop, each by its own thread, and along those threads Black Spider's divine awareness stretched out and settled into the Ink Spiders' bodies.
In that instant, a lucidity seemed to stir in the eyeballs of the black Ink Spiders — in those false eyeballs that would ordinarily have been dull and without a trace of presence.
As though a consciousness had truly arisen within them, the small black spiders began to quiver and move this way and that.
And soon, from the rear of these small spiders, spider silk made of cursed power and divine awareness spewed forth.
The silk took on substance, rushed into the wide-open workshop, and fastened onto the humanoid puppets sprawled here and there inside.
Each Ink Spider began to control five puppets, so that twenty-five human bodies marched out into the yard in step with the Ink Spiders' control.
People gradually gathered at this strange sight. Before the gathered onlookers, the twenty-five human puppets each took up a sword and began a sword dance.
Every one of those sword dances was the Heaven Pinnacle Sword Arts at the level of true attainment. Though no sword qi bloomed at the sword tips, the twenty-five puppets wove a combination formation and gave off a fearsome momentum — a momentum that even swordsmen of the first-rate realm who had mastered sword qi could not have dared ignore.
“Well, I never. Truly, I never.”
Watching from a distance since before dawn, the Vice Sect Leader murmured in admiration.
“A genius is a genius indeed.”