The next morning, Pung woke to the chirping of mountain birds beneath the eaves. In the Abyss, the darkness before sleep and the darkness after waking had not differed in the slightest, but here, even the light bleeding through the paper window was enough to tell him it was morning. After gazing a while at the unfamiliar ceiling and the neatly spread quilt, Pung checked his fingers first.
The golden ring was quiet, and the silver ring was still sending a faint pulse toward the north.
When he opened the window, the warning threads Hyeonheo had strung through the night came into view. Not one was broken, and no suspicious presence could be felt from the forest, but beyond the northern ridge a gray mist lay low. Whether the ring pointed to a person out past it, or to poison, or to the traces of death, he could not tell.
“If you’re awake, go wash your face. The porridge will go cold.”
A-yeong’s voice came from outside the door, and before Pung could answer, her footsteps were already fading toward the kitchen.
He washed his face with the cold water in the yard, and when he went into the room, white rice porridge and pickled vegetables sat on a small table. A-yeong sat with her own bowl before her, and Hyeonheo was examining last night’s black thorn on a spread-out scrap of cloth. Ground medicinal powder had been sprinkled in a ring around the thorn.
“Sit. Poison won’t run off just because you eat first.”
When Pung took his place, A-yeong held out a bowl of porridge, and for all her curt expression, only his bowl had an extra spoonful of pine-nut powder heaped on top.
“May I eat this?”
“Did you think I set it out for you to look at?”
Pung scooped up the porridge with a wooden spoon and put it in his mouth, and the rich scent of pine nuts spread through the softly dissolved grains of rice, followed by a quiet saltiness that lingered on the tip of his tongue. He had eaten a warm meal the night before as well, but receiving food someone had boiled the moment he opened his eyes was another feeling entirely. It was as though the hands that had drawn the water and lit the fire remained whole in that single bowl of porridge, and the back of his throat tightened for no reason he could name.
“Why are you eating so slowly? Does it taste bad?”
“No. It’s that it feels too precious.”
A-yeong blinked.
“What’s precious about porridge?”
“It’s warm.”
She asked nothing further. Instead she pushed the dish of pickles toward Pung and stirred her own porridge round and round. Hyeonheo, too, covered the black thorn with the cloth without a word.
When the meal was over, the three of them went out into the yard. Hyeonheo lifted the black thorn with tongs and held it up to the sunlight, then scraped off the smallest trace of the poison onto a sheet of white paper dampened with water. The yellowish paper turned dark red in an instant.
“A poison that congeals the blood vessels. The amount is small, but more than enough to kill a man.”
“Where is a poison like that used?”
“Going by the ingredients alone, it could be had even in the borderlands. But blending so many toxins so that they don’t devour one another takes considerable skill. Which is to say, it is not the sort of thing a common bandit or hunter carries.”
Hyeonheo wrapped the poison needle up again and set it in a small wooden case, then told Pung to hold out his hand and brought the case close to the silver ring.
The ring trembled faintly.
When Pung curled his fingers in, the weak pull that had been aimed north twisted toward the poison needle, and when the wooden case was taken away, the direction turned back to the north.
“It seems to follow poison.”
“Too early to conclude that.”
Hyeonheo had A-yeong carry the wooden case and walk east. Pung’s finger followed the case for a moment, but as A-yeong passed the edge of the yard, the pull coming from the north grew stronger. It was as if two different threads were tugging at the inside of his finger, and Pung narrowed his brow.
“I feel both. The poison needle nearby and something in the north are separate.”
“Then that something may be the same poison.”
“Or it may be a person struck by the poison.”
At Pung’s words A-yeong’s steps stopped. She looked down at the wooden case in her hands, then spoke carefully.
“Those people who went missing near Yangga Village. Surely they didn’t use this poison on them?”
Hyeonheo did not answer at once. He took the wooden case, tapped the lid once with his fingers, and spoke in a low, settled voice.
“Move on unconfirmed guesses and you will lose the very people you mean to find, and fall easily into a waiting trap. First let us learn what Pung’s ring responds to.”
Before examining the two rings, Hyeonheo set several conditions: they would not force them off, they would not pour internal energy into them, and Pung would take his hand away at once if he felt anything strange. Since the ring had repelled outside energy on the mountain the day before, even a small test could not be done carelessly.
When he touched the surface of the silver ring with a slender twig, nothing changed. It was the same when he let fall a drop of decocted herb water and a drop of antidote powder, but when he brought the case with the poison needle near, a thin current ran between the silver patterns.
“I will not put my energy inside your body. I will only let it flow near your wrist, so tell me what you see.”
When Hyeonheo raised two fingers, a thin, blue-tinged current gathered at their tips, and to Pung’s eyes the flow was as vivid as a clear stream of water. As the energy drew a circle an inch from his wrist, Pung drew up the smallest bit of his own energy to read its grain in return.
“Stop.”
Hyeonheo pulling back his hand and the force Pung had drawn up overflowing beyond all restraint were very nearly the same instant.
A golden ripple struck the empty air.
The dust pushed outward in a ring swept once around the yard, and though Hyeonheo swung his sleeve to let the momentum slide away, he could not protect the water jar behind him. Cracks ran across the jar’s surface and water seeped out in a thin stream.
A-yeong’s eyes went wide.
“It ended up like that without him even touching it?”
“I couldn’t stop it either.”
Pung went to the broken water jar and pressed his palm over the crack. In the Abyss he had learned to push boulders aside without splitting them, and to bring down charging mountain beasts without harming their bones. But what he had to control then was, in the end, only his own strength.
The power he had to govern now was greater and rougher than that beyond any comparison. Even trying to let out no more than a single thread of it, it overflowed enough that not one water jar in the yard could be left whole.
“My strength still won’t thin down as far as I want it to.”
“Then you had best begin by learning how to handle that strength as fine as a thread.”
Hyeonheo studied the broken water jar and stroked his beard.
“If you match hands with a living opponent, you will be able to draw your strength back far more delicately than against objects. Setting things in front of you alone will make it hard to learn.”
“Do you mean I must try it against a person?”
“I am not saying you have to be struck to understand. I am saying we should gauge, step by step, how fine you can draw your strength down.”
A-yeong, standing by the gate, looked back and forth between the two of them and set her hands on her hips.
“Then just spar.”
When Pung looked at her, her eyebrows shot straight up.
“What? Do I look weak?”
“That isn’t it. You could be hurt.”
“Now who was it that snatched my wrist yesterday and hauled a person around like a sack?”
Pung could not answer. It had been to make her avoid the poison thorn, but that did not undo the fact that he had dropped A-yeong onto the ground.
Hyeonheo thought for a moment, then drew a circle in the middle of the yard with a twig.
“Very well. But I will set the rules. A-yeong, do not aim for the throat, the eyes, or the solar plexus, and use no more than three parts in ten of your internal energy. Pung, you may not counterattack. I permit only pushing her out of the circle or catching her wrist.”
When Pung stepped into the circle, A-yeong pulled off her outer robe and hung it on the veranda railing, and as she bound her sleeves tight, the morning’s playfulness was gone from her face. Her stance was squarely set, and the way she guarded her face with her lead hand while hiding the movement of her rear hand looked well practiced.
When Pung put strength into his eyes, the energy rising from A-yeong’s dantian ran through her chest and shoulder and out along her arm. A faint flow had gathered at her toes as well, so it was plain which side would move first. But seeing did not end the problem. The energy gathered in her arm could be a lure, and she might throw a punch and stop it halfway.
Above all, A-yeong must not be hurt.
“Begin.”
At Hyeonheo’s word A-yeong kicked off the ground, and her lead hand came straight for Pung’s jaw. Pung caught her wrist before the fist could land. He believed he had used almost no strength, yet A-yeong’s body stopped short and her shoulder shook hard, and in the instant he was startled into letting go by the sight of her biting her lip as if enduring pain, her heel kicked into his shin.
Thwack!
It did not hurt, but as he moved to turn her foot aside, the force loaded into his fingertips was absurdly large for a spar, and Pung, catching it in time, hid his fist behind his back and cried out.
“Wait!”
A-yeong stepped back twice. The golden energy had not burst outward, but the earth beneath Pung’s feet had split like a spider’s web.
A brief silence settled over the yard.
“Can you go on?”
At Hyeonheo’s question, Pung, rather than answering, first looked at A-yeong’s right shoulder. She had hidden the caught wrist behind her, and the energy channels around it were faintly twisted.
“Never mind that. Is your wrist all right?”
“It’s fine. Don’t make a fuss over something this small.”
“Your energy is blocked. It will hurt if you raise your right arm.”
A-yeong lifted her arm as if to test it and grimaced.
“You knew that and still gripped me that hard?”
“I thought I hadn’t gripped hard.”
“That thought is what’s wrong in the first place.”
She was right. Pung knew how tough the bodies of mountain beasts were, and which joint to push so that they lost their balance unharmed. People were different. They deceived, they hesitated, and out of pride they came at you again even while hurting. If he read only the flow of strength and missed the movements of the heart, the hand meant to spare could make a wound instead.
When Pung made to step out of the circle, A-yeong asked,
“Where are you going?”
“It would be better to stop for today. I’m not ready yet to contend with a person.”
“You got frightened over holding one wrist of mine?”
“I’m stopping because it was only one wrist. Next time it may not end at one.”
A-yeong closed her mouth. Pung thought Hyeonheo would hold him back, but Hyeonheo only stroked the end of his beard.
“To stop is also a choice. Only, if you withdraw now, you will know what went wrong, but you will not get the chance to mend it.”
Pung’s feet halted.
“Do not look at A-yeong’s attacks as fists and feet alone. The moment her breathing changes, where her gaze rests, even the gesture of hiding her injured arm are all part of the movement. If your eyes can see the energy channels you will want to lean on that, but a person is not a being who moves only as the energy flows.”
Pung recalled A-yeong driving out her foot even with her wrist in pain. He had seen the path of the energy, but he had not read the choice she made.
“I’ll do it once more.”
A-yeong came back into the circle, rubbing her wrist as she went.
“If you blow something away again, you’re making a new water jar yourself.”
“It was already cracked.”
“Don’t talk back.”
Only when he saw the corner of her mouth lift, just slightly, did Pung let the tension out of his shoulders.
In the second bout A-yeong held her injured right hand out in front and closed the distance slowly. To Pung’s eyes the energy was gathering in her left foot, but her gaze was fixed on the golden ring. When Pung stepped back, A-yeong came in deeper than he expected and caught his sleeve with her right hand, and the instant she pulled his elbow, she kicked the dirt up with her left foot.
Dust covered his sight.
Through the gap where the light of the channels blurred, A-yeong dropped low and cut in from the side. Instead of chasing her with his eyes, Pung felt the tremor of the hand holding his sleeve and the weight carried up through the ground beneath his feet. The instant she was about to slip past to the right, he turned in the same direction, and A-yeong’s force flowed off into empty air.
Pung laid his palm at the small of her back but did not push. He blocked only her direction, and A-yeong, losing any place to stop herself, staggered. Just before she fell outside the circle, he caught her collar lightly and stood her up.
“Why catch me and stand me up? You only win if you send me out.”
A-yeong complained as she caught her breath, but her face was far softer than before.
“It looked as if you’d be hurt again if you fell.”
“I told you not to go easy on me.”
“Master Hyeonheo said winning was not the purpose.”
When Pung looked at Hyeonheo, Hyeonheo laughed low in his throat.
“You put my words to good use.”
A-yeong turned away primly, but she did not avoid the hand Pung offered. When Pung set his fingertips lightly near the blocked channel, her shoulder flinched, though his fingertips were still and unwavering. Having long since read that there was nothing in A-yeong to threaten him, he accepted, before the flow of her channels, the fact that she had allowed the touch.
Hyeonheo came over and examined Pung’s wrist.
“You draw your strength back far more finely than before. It seems some part of it has begun to yield to your heart.”
“I still can’t draw it back as finely as I wish.”
“If it could be tamed in a single day, it would never have been called a relic of the ancients.”
This time Hyeonheo stood opposite Pung. His energy was calm yet broad, and with no force massed in any arm or leg, his whole body was linked like a single flow. It was the first opponent whose opening move Pung could not gauge even while seeing the channels.
Pung advanced first, carefully. He meant to stop before his fist landed, but Hyeonheo slipped half a step aside and brushed the back of his arm with a sleeve, letting the force slide away sideways and leaving no opening. He was not fast, and yet each time, nothing remained where Pung meant to reach.
The moment he stretched out his hand a third time, Hyeonheo’s palm came toward Pung’s chest. There was neither killing intent nor pressure, but the energy was heavy and finely made, and Pung read its grain whole through his fingertips.
Leaving no more than a thread of the force that wanted to load into his fingertips, Pung bored in along the inside of Hyeonheo’s arm. Without twisting the wrist, he set his fingertips against the elbow alone and pushed the flow upward, and Hyeonheo’s palm force went off into empty air while Pung’s other hand stopped an inch from the old man’s chest.
In that moment Hyeonheo’s two fingers were already at Pung’s throat.
The two withdrew their hands at once.
“Have I lost?”
“If we had meant to kill each other, neither of us would have come away easily.”
Hyeonheo brushed off his sleeves and stepped back, the laughter gone from his face.
“Did you see my movements?”
“I saw the paths the energy flowed along. At first I couldn’t tell where you would move, but while sparring with A-yeong I learned that I have to watch the breath, the eyes, and the way the feet press the ground as well.”
“And with that alone you read my change of technique?”
Pung hesitated a moment, then shook his head.
“I didn’t read all of it. At the end, I think you opened the path for me on purpose.”
Hyeonheo’s eyes narrowed. He looked in turn at the two rings on Pung’s fingers and at the footprints left in the yard, then said quietly,
“Do not speak carelessly to others of what your eyes see.”
“Why not?”
“Because in the martial world there are as many who would seize or destroy a rare gift as there are who would prize it. If it becomes known that you read an opponent’s energy channels, sects will arise that covet you, and there will be those who fear having their martial arts seen through.”
Pung looked down at the silver ring beating thinly toward the north. If he set out alone now, there was every chance he would fail to tell who was following him, or whether the one he met was asking for help or leading him into a trap.
It was not that he lacked strength.
He did not know people.
“I will search for records of the rings a few days more. In the meantime, if you go back over what you learned today—”
“May I stay longer than a few days?”
Hyeonheo’s steps halted, and A-yeong, pressing a cloth soaked in cold water to her wrist, stopped and looked at Pung.
“I want to see the wide world. I came out of the Abyss because I never wanted to be shut up in one place again, and until yesterday I meant to leave as soon as I learned about the rings.”
Pung looked in turn at the split ground of the yard, the cracked water jar, and A-yeong’s reddened wrist.
“But being able to go anywhere and knowing where to go seem to be different things. Today I couldn’t control my strength and I hurt A-yeong, and in trying to protect her I failed to trust her choice. If I had been alone, I wouldn’t even have known what I did wrong.”
A-yeong’s lips parted, but she did not cut in.
“I want to learn not only how to govern the rings, but how to contend with people, and whom to trust and what to guard against in the martial world. I don’t want to turn away from the matter in the north either. I don’t want to leave it to others to decide when I go. I want to learn until I judge for myself that I am ready.”
Hyeonheo looked at Pung for a long while, and many feelings crossed the deepened lines of his eyes, though Pung could not read their meaning. After a moment Hyeonheo stroked his beard and nodded.
“This house is not so narrow that it must turn away one who wishes to learn. Only, my teaching will be duller and harder than you imagine.”
“I endured five years in the Abyss.”
“Heh. My nagging may run deeper than the Abyss.”
A-yeong, listening beside them, sprang to her feet.
“Whaat? He’s staying on?”
For all the startled voice, a faint smile hung at the corner of her mouth, and when her eyes met Pung’s, A-yeong hurriedly set her face straight and thrust out her injured wrist.
“Then fix the water jar first. And you’re going to heal my wrist, too.”
“It was my strength that broke the jar, though.”
“And that strength came out of your hand, didn’t it?”
Pung thought a moment, then nodded. She was not wrong.
As the sun tilted past the ridge of the mountain, Pung wrapped A-yeong’s wrist in cloth spread with medicine, then crouched down in front of the cracked water jar. He had emptied out the leaking water, but the split was longer than he had thought, and each time his fingers traced the surface he felt vividly the track where the golden energy had torn through that afternoon. A-yeong steadied the jar with one hand while adding her complaints, that the knot was too tight, that the clay was too thin.
“Pung. Come inside a moment.”
At Hyeonheo’s voice from within the room, Pung brushed the dirt from his hands and rose. When he crossed the threshold, an oil lamp was lighting a small table, and in the very center of it lay a single needle, its point ground blunt.
Join the discussion