Pay‑to‑Win King of Martial Arts (Novel) - Chapter 139 - Karmic Ties (3)

Chapter 139 – Karmic Ties (3)

===================

Translated by Heavenly Cat

Read it only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net

===================

Hyeon-wol sat atop the roof of the hermitage, looking down at Muk Hui-yeong. The moment he vanished, Muk Hui-yeong’s eyes became sharp.

That meant the obedient and gentle face he had shown until now had all been an act. Funny little thing.

At first, Hyeon-wol had only wanted to startle him because a disciple had appeared after so long. But the disciple had come carrying a child on his back, his face so serious it bordered on anxiety, and after setting the child down in the hermitage, he had left.

His expression had been so grave that even Hyeon-wol had felt no urge to speak to him.

Naturally, Hyeon-wol’s interest had turned to the child Cheong-hwa had brought. Who might this fellow be?

Even though Hyeon-wol lived on Wudang Mountain minimizing all contact with people while devoting himself to cultivation, he at least knew the disciples of his disciple. They were children bearing the Daoist names Myeong-seong, Myeong-gyeong, and Myeong-jin.

But the fellow lying in that hermitage looked well past twenty. Even if Hyeon-wol’s sense of time had dulled, that made no sense.

So Hyeon-wol sat quietly atop the hermitage and waited for the boy lying there to wake up. “Hey!”

“You crazy bastard of a Master!”

And the moment the boy woke, he started shouting at the top of his lungs. Is he truly a disciple of Wudang?

For an instant, Hyeon-wol was genuinely mistaken. Not all disciples of Wudang were the same, of course, but this one was too far outside the nature of Wudang.

Still, since he called someone a crazy Master, he had to be Cheong-hwa’s disciple. Hyeon-wol found himself intrigued.

Then again, his own disciple Cheong-hwa had also been a child who did not quite fit Wudang’s nature. And yet even that same Cheong-hwa had never uttered madness like crazy Master to him.

Of course, who knew what he might have said behind his back, but Hyeon-wol thought Cheong-hwa was not that sort of person.

So Hyeon-wol began to follow Muk Hui-yeong around. Muk Hui-yeong had no way to catch the figure of Hyeon-wol, who through obsessive cultivation had reached the Realm of Creation.

That realm was truly a state of becoming one with nature. For an ordinary person, distinguishing such a presence was nearly impossible.

And yet the child called Muk Hui-yeong certainly was no ordinary person. He ran at the formation and swung his sword, and his skill was not merely uncommon but exceptional.

Oh.

Of course, he was still far too lacking to break the formation. The formation surrounding Nambam had been designed for the purpose of stopping masters who had fallen into qi deviation.

Even so, Muk Hui-yeong kept swinging his sword. What was astonishing was not only that he had already reached the realm of the sword pellet, but that there was intent contained in his sword.

Wilder still, the boy himself seemed unaware that his sword carried intent at all. And yet he only looks about twenty at most.

The realm at which one can put intent into a sword differed from person to person, but generally speaking, people only began to do so clumsily from the transcendent peak realm onward. The reason those below peak could not contain intent was that their stature as martial artists, and as human beings, was not yet complete.

One could not contain what one did not yet possess.

Only Hyeon-wol, who had reached the Realm of Creation, could discern this clearly. At best, someone with sharp instincts or a high master who had reached transcendent peak would merely sense that Muk Hui-yeong’s sword carried his thoughts, that is, thought.

That was because his sword path was freer than what he had simply learned. But the fact that it carried spiritual completion, that is, intent, was something only Hyeon-wol saw.

To form intent to that degree, wouldn’t one have to be at least fifty? The fragments of thought inside that freedom might differ in size, but structurally they bore self-similarity, and in the end those structures became identical with the whole structure.

It was, in effect, a fractal. And yet it doesn’t seem to be experience accumulated as a martial artist.

Compared to the level of intent, the sword itself was relatively crude.

There was no royal road in cultivation. If he had honed the sword until the point where that intent formed, then at minimum he should already have reached transcendent peak.

But as matters stood, Muk Hui-yeong’s sword looked only first-rate. Which meant that Muk Hui-yeong’s intent had been formed while doing something else.

Ordinarily, thoughts gathered, layered, and sedimented until intent was formed. And so Hyeon-wol saw through the fact that Muk Hui-yeong had accumulated an enormous number of thoughts and experiences, and unintentionally ended up reading both Muk Hui-yeong’s past and even the age he had been before his regression.

To a martial artist, the sword was that truthful a window into the self. Hyeon-wol clicked his tongue in amazement.

Even his own disciple Cheong-hwa still had difficulty placing intent into his sword.

At best, it only occasionally revealed itself when he entered a state of selflessness. That was how impossible it was to create a self solid enough to be wielded outward without extraordinary refinement.

What sort of monster did you bring me, Disciple? If such a complete intent already existed in him, then even if he were given the same time and experience as everyone else, he would achieve results vastly superior to theirs.

After all, the very field of vision through which he experienced things was different. If Muk Hui-yeong continued honing his martial arts and reached the realm of transcendent peak, then his transcendent peak would clearly be unlike anyone else’s.

Even in the same realm, the difference in depth would be as far apart as heaven and earth.

Hyeon-wol could feel his heart beating faster. This was the first kind of person he had seen since he secluded himself in order to cultivate the Dao.

This too must be karmic fate. In the end, Hyeon-wol decided to think of it that way.

Normally, since he was Cheong-hwa’s disciple, it would be right to leave him wholly to Cheong-hwa. But Hyeon-wol too found himself wanting to meddle, just a little.

That boy was not the sort of genius Wudang already had in abundance. He was a heavenly being who had descended already completed.

A truly mysterious existence.

No one could call himself human if that did not rouse his curiosity. Even so, before directly giving him instruction, Hyeon-wol needed to understand what kind of person Muk Hui-yeong was.

Only by understanding the person could one give teachings suited to him. Having reached that conclusion, Hyeon-wol slowly began to reveal himself.

“Cough, cough. Who are you?” And thus began Hyeon-wol’s exploration of Muk Hui-yeong.

* * * The space inside the formation was very small.

Seen from atop the roof of the hermitage, it all came into view at once.

Playing hide-and-seek in a place like this made no sense to begin with. And yet it was hide-and-seek where the one hiding couldn’t be seen.

That too made no sense. When a nonsensical situation overlapped with another nonsensical situation, it somehow became a perfectly sensible game of hide-and-seek.

Whoosh. But Hyeon-wol had not suggested hide-and-seek for nothing.

Neither in my sight nor in my qi-sense was there anything at all to catch.

Since we were stuck halfway up a cliff, only the wind blew hollowly. “Grandfather! If you appear just for a moment, I’ll buy you a candied haw skewer! It’s sweet and delicious!”

In my experience as a merchant, old people liked sweet things. Candied haw skewers, fruit coated in hardened sugar, were a fine drinking snack for the middle-aged and a nourishing treat for the old.

Whether they were truly nourishing or not, who knew. Whoosh.

Again the wind blew coldly. There was no response.

Perhaps because he was a cultivator, he seemed strong against this sort of temptation.

“If not that, then perhaps a beautiful grandmother who takes excellent care of herself…” “Stop talking nonsense and find me instead. Time is passing even now.”

The voice rang out within the formation. Naturally, because it was voice projection through the six directions, there was no way to track its source.

“Haa.” A deep sigh escaped me.

It seemed petty tricks would not work at all. I closed my eyes first.

My calculation was that to catch an old man, it would be faster to feel him through qi-sense than to look for him with my eyes.

Certainly, qi-sense let me see more than my eyes did. The grass shaking in the wind, the spring water that looked still and yet flowed.

But I sensed no human shape whatsoever. In the end, I began turning everything over at random.

I used qinggong and rolled through the brush, waded into the spring, and even struck at the walls of the formation once more. Sooner or later, I reasoned, I would get close to wherever Hyeon-wol was, and since Hyeon-wol was also moving while hiding within nature, some sort of mistake would appear.

But that was a naive thought. Until the sun overhead sank and the moon rose, then the moon sank and the sun rose once more, I failed to brush even the hem of Hyeon-wol’s robes.

My clothes were soaked, and caked in dirt and fallen leaves besides, so I looked an utter mess.

“Half a shichen remains.” The voice came again.

Naturally, because it was voice projection through the six directions, I still could not trace it. “It seems rather hopeless.”

“I always find the answer.” “Confidence looks good on you. Even if it only proves your mouth alone is alive.”

The cackling laugh was infuriating.

I went up onto the hermitage roof and sat in lotus posture. “Trying to catch me with qi-sense has already failed, has it not?”

“Please be quiet.” “Tsk tsk. You truly have no manners toward your grandmaster.”

“Respect is something divided between both sides. If I find you before the half shichen is up, I am curious to see the look on your face.” “Enough. Catching me in my current state is no different from trying to seize a wave in the sea.”

At those words, my mind flashed clear. To catch a wave in the sea.

All streams and waves born and raised on the earth went to the sea in the end.

And yet the sea did not sort those streams and waves into ranks. The streams that came from different lands all became a single wave once they reached the sea.

Was that not precisely all streams return to the source? And that ability to let all streams return to the source was one of my talents.

I had used that talent only to combine demonic qi and spiritual qi. But perhaps I had been using that talent far too narrowly.

“Elder. I’ve figured out how to catch a wave in the sea.” “What?”

“Wouldn’t it simply be enough for me to become the sea?”

“…!” The only thing to do was try it.

I had never attempted such a thing before. To become one with nature?

I wasn’t some cultivator, so why would I ever have thought of that. And then I had an astonishing experience at once.

From above, as if viewing the inside of the formation from a bird’s-eye perspective, I could see the place where I sat.

The flow of nature was extremely gentle, and yet there was one and only one place where it struck and curved around. That was my own body, seated atop the hermitage roof.

It was an object far too dense for nature, like a wave, to simply flow through. If nature was to pass through, then I had to empty my body.

I had to let everything flow without resisting me. The natural energies that had been bending around me as though climbing over a mountain began to pass through my body little by little.

Then, like a dike collapsing, my body, which until now had permitted only a few streams through, became something that poured out nature’s energy in torrents. I too had become one with the nature inside this formation.

Of course, that was only possible because the natural space inside this formation was so narrow.

The formation itself was the wall that stopped nature from flowing on. Even holding the nature of a space only about the size of five rooms felt as though it overloaded my body.

I could not even begin to imagine what it would feel like to hold the entire world, or beyond that, the universe. “Remarkable.”

That voice rang by my ear. It was Hyeon-wol’s voice, genuinely full of admiration.

Only after surrendering my whole body to nature could I feel qi-sense anew. Now my body was no longer confined within flesh.

I could become the spring, or a blade of grass, and not only the trees but even the hermitage itself.

Since I held mastery over everything here, Hyeon-wol naturally came into view as well. The difference was minute, but where Hyeon-wol stood, the flow of nature bent slightly.

It seemed that even he had not yet reached the level where he could achieve complete assimilation with nature. When I opened my eyes, Hyeon-wol stood right before me with his arms folded, looking down at me.

“You have won the wager.” The sun stood directly over our heads.

On a go board, it was the position of the heavenly center. I had found Hyeon-wol just before the wager expired.