Where Pung raised his head, an old man already stood, gazing straight at him. A very brief astonishment flickered at the corners of the old man’s eyes. From the body of this boy, only just come out into the world, there flowed a quiet, deep energy that even a master of long years would find hard to measure. Outwardly he was a guileless child, yet the power pooled within him had already made a joke of the wall of the Transformation Realm.
Pung had not even properly caught the presence, could not say when the man had drawn near. He had certainly felt something approaching from far off — and then, all at once, it was right before his nose. Inwardly, Pung was startled. For five years he had not missed the movement of a single mountain beast.
Yet this old man was different. Like an ancient tree that had always stood in that very spot, he stood without letting slip the faintest presence. Instinctively, Pung understood that this was no ordinary person.
Pung stopped his herb-digging hands and slowly rose to his feet. From that still gaze alone, he could tell this was not a man to be treated lightly.
Where had the old man come from? Anyone who could appear so suddenly deep in these mountains — and beneath a cliff untouched by human feet, no less — was no common figure. Pung quietly set his herb basket down behind his back and, in case of need, gathered strength into his legs.
It was the first person he had faced in five years. Perhaps for that reason, tension came before gladness. How he ought to offer a greeting, what words to speak first — it all swam vaguely out of reach. It seemed Pung had, somewhere along the way, forgotten how to deal with people.
The old man’s white hair was neatly combed back, and he wore a robe that was worn but immaculate. His eyes were deep and piercing.
“Oho, what a curious child. His movement art was clearly that of a considerable master — so how is his bearing so ordinary?”
The old man muttered, looking Pung up and down. Pung could not tell what the words meant, and simply stood there blankly, the herb still in his grip.
“…Do you mean me, sir?”
But the old man seemed to half-hear Pung’s answer at best, sunk in some deep thought. Somehow, Pung could not let his guard down.
It was in that moment. The old man’s eyes suddenly flashed, and he stretched out a hand toward Pung. Soft it seemed, and yet something unseen and heavy came pressing toward him.
And then a strange thing happened. The old man’s hand — and a certain energy flowing along that hand — appeared vividly to Pung’s eyes, like a river winding slowly along.
It was that very flow he had seen when looking into his own body beneath the earth. This time it was in another’s body, and seen so clearly at that.
Pung swallowed his breath without meaning to. That the flow of energy could be seen in another’s body and not only his own — he had never once imagined it. The eye that had looked only inward for five years had, somewhere along the way, begun to see straight through the outer world as well.
But there was no time to chew over his amazement; the old man’s palm had already pressed up to his very nose.
‘That energy… so it flows there.’
Without any need to think, Pung twisted his body slightly aside, slipping past the end of that flow. The old man’s palm swept heavily through the place Pung had occupied a moment before. The rock behind him crumbled away in a shower. Had it struck him directly — the mere thought was dizzying.
That was the treasure beyond all exchange that five years of training beneath the earth had placed in Pung’s hands. An eye that saw in advance where an opponent’s energy would flow. With that alone, Pung was by no means easy prey, even against a master far above him.
The old man’s eyes widened slightly. At once his hand bent at a strange angle, changed direction, and sought Pung again. It was a shifting stroke swifter and fiercer than the first. An ordinary person would have been struck before his eyes could follow it.
Yet this time too, Pung’s eyes saw the flow first. Since he could plainly see where it would reach, there was nothing to fear. Instead of evading, Pung bored inside the flow. He lightly knocked the old man’s arm upward, then set his fist against that chest three times. He had no wish to injure, and so held the force far back.
Even so, the old man clutched his chest and was driven sliding backward, steadying himself only once his back met a tree. A single thread of red blood ran down from the corner of his mouth.
Clutching his chest, the old man could not find words for a while. His was a body that had reached the Transformation Realm. At such a height, a blow from any passable peak master would not so much as brush his collar — and yet three punches from a mere boy had driven him back so helplessly. In the old man’s eyes, astonishment and interest wavered together.
“Cough… heh heh. Not a curious child at all — rather, one above me? Well now, it seems I’m to taste a lifetime’s worth of surprises all in a single day.”
“Sixty years, near enough, since I took up martial arts. I’ve crossed hands with peak masters times beyond counting. Yet one who moves ‘knowing my techniques in advance,’ as you do… truly, this is the first. Just how did you do it?”
Pung did not know how to answer. That he had simply seen the path along which energy flowed — how on earth was he to explain that? Pung could only hold his tongue.
Only then did Pung come to himself and hurry over to the old man.
“A-are you all right, sir? You struck first, and before I knew it I—”
“Enough, enough. This old man brought it on himself. …But child, may I ask you just one more thing?”
The old man wiped the blood from his mouth with his sleeve and looked up at Pung. There was more curiosity than anger in those eyes.
Pung dimly sensed that the old man had not truly meant to harm him. Had he really meant to kill, that last palm would have carried something fiercer and more turbid. Pung’s flow-reading eye faintly reflected even the ‘heart’ held within an opponent’s stroke.
“Who are you, sir, that you lay hands on me without a word and then say you have questions?”
“Heh heh, my apologies. I sent that palm at you not to harm you, but to see what martial art you had learned. From afar I saw your movement art and thought some tremendous master had appeared — then up close, here stood such a young boy… I doubted my own eyes.”
“What’s more, that footwork and movement art you unfolded belong to no school I know. Which makes me all the more curious. Just whose disciple are you — of what school?”
Pung was at a loss for a moment. A school? There could be no such thing. Besides, he had no way of knowing whether this old man was good or ill. Facing a situation he had never once met since birth, Pung could not easily open his mouth.
“Child, if you’re wary of me, there’s no need. Old as I am now, in my youth I made something of a name in the martial world for righteousness and chivalry. Speak the name Hyeonheo anywhere, and you’ll soon learn I’m no idle fellow.”
The name Hyeonheo brought nothing to Pung’s mind. And more than that, the very word the old man had just spoken was stranger to him still.
“But sir, this ‘the martial world’ you keep speaking of… what exactly is it?”
At Pung’s careful question, Hyeonheo’s eyes went round once more. The old man stared blankly at him for a moment, then burst into an incredulous laugh.
“Ha — you ask what the martial world is? A child who laid this old man low with martial arts doesn’t know what the martial world is? …You grow less and less knowable.”
Hyeonheo laughed loudly for a good while, then sobered and looked at Pung again. With the laughter gone from them, those eyes held something beyond mere curiosity now. A child possessed of such gifts who did not even know what the martial world was. Perhaps this boy was a vessel unlike anyone he had met in all his life.
“The martial world, you see.” Hyeonheo opened his mouth slowly. “It is another world, where those who have learned martial arts live among one another. There are orthodox sects that pursue righteousness and heterodox sects that pursue power for its own sake, and between them all manner of stories and debts of kindness and grudge twine and flow like a river. With the martial art you possess, like it or not, before long you will set foot in that world.” Pung did not understand half of it, yet somehow a corner of his chest was thudding for reasons he could not name.
“That I’ll teach you in time. First, though, I must hear about this master of yours, who seems to come with quite a story.”
“…About my master, it is hard for me to say anything. Truly.”
Pung was stopped once more. His master was… that ring. But how was he to speak of such a thing?
‘Say a ring is my teacher, and I’d be taken for a madman, sure enough.’
The old man stared at Pung for a moment, then pressed him no further. He seemed to have sensed there were deep circumstances behind it.
“Heh heh, so that’s how it is. Then what is your name? Is that hard to say as well?”
“Pung, sir. Dan is my surname. You may call me Danpung.”
“Danpung… a fine name.”
Hyeonheo looked Pung over again from head to foot, as if for the first time. His gaze carried his curiosity about the boy quite openly. His face said he could not begin to guess who the master was that had raised such a child.
In truth, Hyeonheo felt something beyond simple curiosity. He was an old man who had given his whole life to the martial way. To his eye, the gifts this boy possessed looked like a vessel that might appear once in a hundred years. To let him go just like this would be far too great a waste.
“Danpung. Where are you headed now? Is your road an urgent one?”
“No, sir. I have no particular place in mind.”
“In that case. Won’t you take a meal at this old man’s dwelling before you go? I meant you no injury, but I laid hands on you all the same, and I’d like to offer a meal by way of apology. What do you say?”
Pung hesitated a moment. Yet there was something oddly drawing in the old man’s manner, and above all, Pung did not dislike this ‘person’ he had met after five years. Besides, perhaps this old man might know the nature of that flow he had just seen.
Most of all, the words ‘a warm meal’ stirred Pung’s heart. Five years he had endured on nothing but raw meat. At the thought of a steaming bowl of rice, Pung swallowed without meaning to.
A person’s food after five years — and a person’s warmth. More than anything, that was what tugged his steps along.
“…Then, shameless as it is, I’ll trouble you.”
As Pung bowed his head, Hyeonheo let out a hearty, satisfied laugh.
“Yes, yes. Well decided. Let’s be off. This old man’s dwelling isn’t far from here.”
And so Pung followed the first bond he had formed since coming out into the martial world, and moved his steps. Beneath the sunlight he had first touched after passing through five years of darkness, the power sleeping within the boy quietly caught its breath.
Behind the two of them, the slowly sinking sun cast long shadows. The long, long martial-world journey of Danpung, the herb-gathering boy, was at last taking its very first step.
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