On the second day of the tournament, Pung’s name was already being passed around every corner of the training grounds.
Only yesterday, even the enforcement officer checking participation tokens had asked his name twice; now, whenever Pung passed beneath the spectator stands, the whispering came first. The claim that he had broken Cheongseong’s swift sword bare-handed was at least close to the truth, but there were also stories that he had deliberately retreated to the very edge of the platform to toy with his opponent, or that he could name the path of a blade before it reached him. Someone said he was the disciple of a recluse who lived hidden deep in the mountains, and a rumor even went around that he was the son of a great house who kept his name concealed.
None of it sounded to Pung like a story about himself, and the day before he had been driven to the brink of falling off the platform, and he had caught on to the Cheongseong disciple’s baiting only too late. Yet after a single night the mouth of the martial world had erased that perilous stretch of time entirely and left only the last exchange standing.
“Brother, at the inn over by the north gate they’re saying the Cheongseong swordsman swung twelve times and couldn’t so much as touch his lapel.”
When Makdong unpacked the rumor he’d picked up since morning, A-yeong shot him a sidelong glare.
“And someone counted, did they?”
“Nobody counted. That’s why I’m telling you first, before twelve turns into eighteen.”
“If you carry it, it’ll be twenty.”
Makdong shut his mouth as though wronged, but his eyes were full of laughter as he looked at Pung, and Pung nearly let out a snort of a laugh before his gaze met that of several people studying him from the upper rows of the stands. The emblems on their martial robes all differed, but every one of them was watching Pung longer than the platform.
Hyeonheo’s warning came back to him — that once a name spreads, even what you wish to hide draws notice — and Pung let the hand that had started toward his left collar drop naturally. The copied fragment of the ledger had been sewn shut again by A-yeong before dawn, so not even a stitch showed on the outside, and the problem was not the object but his own body’s habit of guarding it.
Hyeonheo spoke without turning his head.
“Today’s opponent will come up having watched yesterday’s match.”
“He’ll have seen the path I retreated along, too?”
“If he saw it, he’ll use it; if he didn’t, he’ll believe the rumors. Either way, it will not be like yesterday.”
A technique shown once was no longer Pung’s alone. How he had evaded the Cheongseong disciple’s sword, and at what moment he had bored inside — the sharp-eyed would have traced it over all night.
When the second day’s pairings were posted, the front of the training grounds stirred loudly, and across from Pung’s name was written Yu Sangbaek, a first-generation disciple of the Jeomchang Sect. A swordsman who in three bouts the day before had never once allowed an opponent close range, and the note followed that he excelled at layering sword-shadows to blur the paths of retreat.
Makdong looked up at the bracket and smacked his lips.
“Jeomchang’s Sail sword arts, is it. That side won’t be leaving you at ease either, brother.”
Even before the bracket, Yu Sangbaek showed no sign of surprise. He measured the width of the platform with hand gestures alongside a junior disciple, glancing now and then at Pung’s feet, and the lines the junior drew on the ground held, exactly as they had been, the direction Pung had retreated the day before and the spot where he had finally driven inside.
A-yeong said in a low voice.
“He didn’t just hear the rumors. Looks like he memorized the whole match.”
A chill ran down Pung’s spine. Just as the same slope and the same rock in the mountains opened different paths with the seasons, the martial artists of this world did not stop at remembering what they had seen once; they were reshaping it to fit the next fight.
Pung’s turn came around a little past noon.
When the two of them stepped onto the platform, the noise from the stands climbed a notch. Yu Sangbaek was lean-built with long arms, and even after raising his sword in salute his gaze settled not on Pung’s face but between his two feet.
“I saw your match against my Cheongseong senior.”
“I watched your bouts as well.”
“Then it will be hard for either of us to deceive the other, knowing what we know.”
There was neither hostility nor bluster in his tone, and it was that composure that made Pung tense instead. Yu Sangbaek did not hide what he had seen, and seemed to believe he could stop it even so.
The referee’s hand came down.
Yu Sangbaek’s first stroke was slower than expected. While the point aimed at Pung’s throat, he shifted half a step to the left and left the center of the platform open, and when Pung slipped to the right he did not follow, reeling the sword back instead. The second stroke was not deep either, and on the third the sword-shadow split in two, though neither carried its full weight.
Only after evading three passes did Pung realize his opponent was measuring distance rather than attacking, and Yu Sangbaek was confirming how far from the point Pung moved, and which foot he withdrew first against a thrust versus a cut.
From the fourth stroke, the spacing changed.
The sword-shadows scattered into three before his face, and the instant Pung moved to slip left, Yu Sangbaek’s foot had already trod on that very spot. Where he might have dropped his shoulder and bored inside lay the sword’s hilt, and where he might have withdrawn came a point trailing half a beat behind. No single one of them was a fatal stroke, but every road narrowed a little.
Pung did not force his way inside, and there was a strong chance his opponent was waiting for the last technique of the day before. In fact, when he dropped his body once, Yu Sangbaek’s elbow closed in at once and the butt of the hilt aimed at his collarbone; had he gone in even slightly deeper, that blow would have stopped him before any blade.
Twisting his body to avoid the hilt, Pung fell back two steps, and when the coarse stone grit of the platform crunched under his heels, sighs and cheers burst from the stands at once. They must have thought he was being driven to the edge like yesterday.
But Yu Sangbaek did not herd Pung down a single road that looked safe; he opened the right and closed it, blocked the left and then yielded half a step, never letting Pung hold a familiar interval. The reason one sword looked like many was not merely the speed of its point, and while the preceding stroke held the eye, the next change had already begun at another distance.
Pung suppressed the urge to draw energy up into his eyes. If he opened his meridian sight deeply he could find the flow within the sword-shadows faster, but he could not reveal it in a place where countless gazes were gathered. Above all, seeing did not mean winning, and yesterday he had grasped his opponent’s intent too late; today his opponent was reading Pung’s reactions first.
The continuous variations of the Sail sword arts pressed in again and again. When he slipped sideways from a sword falling from above, a horizontal cut at his waist followed, and when he opened the distance, the point curled round to bar the ground before his ankles. Yu Sangbaek had no greed to overwhelm him in one stroke and gave him no room to rest, and it was that calm that made the sword all the more persistent.
Pung did not reach out even when a chance to counter appeared, and he could not judge whether it was a distance left open on purpose, and there was also the risk that in grabbing at it rashly his left collar would catch on the sword’s path. Instead he held the four corners of the platform and his opponent’s stride in his head, moving only as much as would not break his breathing.
Five times.
Each time Yu Sangbaek layered sword-shadows to press him, a very brief gap appeared after the fifth change, only in the first gap the sword returned low, and in the second the hilt aimed at the back of Pung’s hand. Even the same fifth stroke ended differently.
Pung waited through the third run of continuous variations.
His arms ached and his breath had grown rougher than before, but Yu Sangbaek was not the same as at the start either, and though the number of sword-shadows had not lessened, at each moment of passing from the fourth to the fifth his sleeve followed a very little late. Whether it was the wrist, or the shoulder, or the lengthening of his breath, Pung could not tell, and only the faint sense remained that somewhere outside the brilliant point there was a trace that set the speed of the next change.
He could not bore in on a guess alone.
Rather than reading Yu Sangbaek’s changes in advance, Pung decided to hold out until the last stroke had fully ended, and for that he had to leave enough distance not to be driven to the edge of the platform, and not let the sword-shadows before his eyes pull his stride wider.
The fourth run of continuous variations began.
The first stroke grazed above his temple and the second split the air before his chest, and Pung tilted only his upper body to let the point slide past, shifting his foot half a hand’s breadth. On the third stroke his sleeve billowed wide, but he did not chase the illusion, and only when the fourth thrust came did he at last draw his right foot back at an angle.
The fifth.
Yu Sangbaek’s sword curled low and cut off the retreat, and it was a stroke that had been waiting for exactly the shape in which Pung had bored inside the day before. The hilt closed in and the elbow shut, prepared even to shove away an opponent coming near.
Pung did not go in.
Instead he rose onto the balls of his feet and withdrew by exactly the distance the sword was returning through. Yu Sangbaek’s point halted before the hem of his robe, but the sword, having already divided its strength across five changes, could not produce a sixth at once.
It was a very brief stillness.
In that instant Pung circled not the inside of the sword but the outside and closed to Yu Sangbaek’s flank, and though his opponent tried hurriedly to reel the sword back, Pung did not seize the blade — he pushed the arm lightly with his shoulder and hooked the man’s foot. The weight of Yu Sangbaek, mid-withdrawal, pitched to the side.
Yu Sangbaek twisted at the waist and held on just short of falling off the platform, but to recover his balance he would have to drop the sword or turn his back to Pung. Before that back could come around, Pung stopped with his palm laid near the shoulder blade.
A brief silence settled.
Yu Sangbaek looked between the boundary line beneath his toes and Pung’s hand, then slowly lowered his sword.
“I’ve lost.”
When the referee declared Pung’s victory, the training grounds boiled over belatedly, and though it was not a dramatic subjugation like the day before, it was a match no one could easily call chance. Pung had endured Jeomchang’s sword-shadows without yielding distance, and had avoided the trap his opponent prepared and picked out the moment the continuous variations ended.
Pung checked his own breathing before the cheers, and his arms and calves were heavy and cold sweat ran down his back, but he had no wounds, and his left collar was intact as well.
Yu Sangbaek said as he sheathed his sword.
“I thought you would come in along the same road as yesterday.”
“I nearly did.”
“So you hadn’t read my sword entirely.”
Pung shook his head honestly.
“Several times I had no idea where it was going, right to the end. So I waited until it was over.”
A thin smile spread at the corner of Yu Sangbaek’s mouth.
“That’s the nastier of the two. A man who doesn’t pretend to know what he doesn’t know is hard to lure out.”
The two exchanged a fist-and-palm salute. Even as he stepped down from the platform, Pung turned over that fifth change, but the minute lateness he had felt outside the sword’s point grew hazier the harder he tried to hold it.
A-yeong handed him a water flask.
“Anywhere hurt?”
“No. Just a bit worn out.”
Makdong cut in with an admiring face.
“Even I nearly shouted at you to go in. How on earth did you hold back, brother?”
“It felt like I shouldn’t go in.”
“That’s the whole reason?”
“Mm.”
When Makdong laughed in deflated disbelief, Hyeonheo studied Pung’s breathing and said,
“Because you could not see it to the end, the judgment to wait for the end was right. Only, do not force what you felt today into being an answer.”
Pung nodded shortly, and just then a folded fan came into his sight.
Jegal Soso stood a few steps away, and when her eyes met Pung’s she pointed with the tip of the fan toward a corridor where fewer people passed.
“May we speak a moment?”
A-yeong asked before Pung could.
“About what?”
“It isn’t an inquiry by the tournament’s enforcement officers. There is something I wish to tell Young Master Dan.”
When Pung nodded, A-yeong came along to the corridor as well, and Jegal Soso did not make an issue of it; she glanced once around them and lowered her voice.
“When belongings came up during registration screening, Young Master Dan drew his left side back half a step. Yesterday, every time the Cheongseong disciple’s sword went toward that left collar, his stride widened, and today he gave up counterattacks whenever a blade might have reached that side.”
A chill went through Pung’s chest, and it was not to say she knew of the ledger’s existence, but she had come as far as knowing there was something he was guarding.
A-yeong asked coldly.
“So what do you think Pung is hiding?”
“I haven’t confirmed anything. Nothing shows on the outside, and Young Master Dan has never checked it with his hand.”
Jegal Soso did not speak conjecture as if it were fact. That was precisely why Pung had to be all the more wary, and a person who distinguishes what they know from what they don’t would not cling easily to the wrong clue.
“Why are you telling us this?”
“Because if I noticed, others may have noticed too.”
Folding her fan, Jegal Soso turned her gaze toward the elders’ seating.
“After Young Master Dan’s match ended yesterday, there were three gazes that followed you rather than the platform. One from the eastern sect seating, another near the enforcement officers’ passage, and the last from behind the elders’ seats. For the first two I can check the assigned seats, but for the one behind the elders’ seats I have not yet learned who owns the seat.”
The places Songjin had been scanning the day before came to mind. They might merely have been watching a contestant who had become famous by chance, but if all three had followed only Pung even after the match ended, it could not be brushed aside.
“Could you look into those people?”
“I’ll tell you only what is confirmed. In exchange, Young Master Dan, pass anything suspicious you notice during the tournament to me. You needn’t say what you are looking for.”
A-yeong asked.
“And what guarantee is there that you won’t hand our words to someone else?”
“I can’t give you one right now. I don’t trust the two of you yet either.”
It was an unexpectedly candid answer, and A-yeong pressed her lips together as if she didn’t like it, but she did not push further.
After a moment’s thought, Pung nodded.
“We’ll exchange only confirmed facts. And state conjecture as conjecture.”
“Agreed.”
Jegal Soso pressed no further, and just before turning away her gaze touched Pung’s left collar once and fell away. That brief movement alone seemed to make the weight of the ledger fragment several times heavier all at once.
Once Jegal Soso had gone, A-yeong said in a low voice.
“If it’s behind the elders’ seats, we have to check whether it overlaps with the spot Songjin looked into.”
“Mm. And whether the three are on the same side.”
The moment the two turned to go back to Makdong, Namgung Hwi came toward them from ahead in white martial robes, and the two scions of great houses following behind him stopped at a single gesture, and Namgung Hwi stood alone before Pung.
“I saw today’s match.”
Pung saluted, but Namgung Hwi came to the point before any formal greeting.
“You held out until Jeomchang’s sword had finished. I can see what it is you wait for, too.”
He pushed the scabbard with his thumb and let it fall back, and a short clack cut through the murmuring of the corridor.
“When we next meet, I’ll erase the distance you think is safe, first of all.”
Pung’s gaze went to the scabbard.
“Retreat far and the sword still reaches; come in close and you still can’t catch its start. So that your eyes cannot tell where the sword begins and where it ends.”
There was no bluster in Namgung Hwi’s voice. Only the clear certainty that he could break Pung even after Pung had time to prepare, and because of that the threat landed all the heavier.
“Then I’ll have to look at something else as well.”
“And what do you intend to look at?”
Pung thought a moment, but he had no fabricated answer.
“I don’t know yet.”
Namgung Hwi’s eyebrow moved faintly, and Pung expected a sneer, but instead he looked at Pung for a while and then turned away.
“Good. Come up not knowing. I’ll see whether there’s time to find an answer on the platform.”
By the time all of the afternoon’s bouts had ended, the remaining contestants were down to eight. Among the Hwasan Sect’s plum-blossom swordsman, a martial artist of the Sacheon Dang house, Jegal Soso, and other renowned rising talents, Pung’s name hung as well, and his was the only name without so much as a decent sect’s mark.
When the new bracket went up, people’s voices rang off the walls.
Danpung and Namgung Hwi.
Makdong traced the two names with a finger and swallowed a whistle.
“Seems the tournament side has no intention of delaying the match people want, either.”
Pung looked at those gathered before the bracket, and within the interest swollen by two victories there was not simple curiosity alone. When he recalled Jegal Soso studying his left collar, the three gazes said to have trailed him even after the match ended, and the seat behind the elders’ section whose owner was still unknown, it felt as though an unseen contest had begun off the platform as well.
But the opponent whose sword he would meet tomorrow was clear.
After returning to the inn, Pung could not fall asleep for some time. When he closed his eyes, the retreat the Cheongseong disciple had left open and the layered sword-shadows of the Jeomchang disciple passed by, and at the last came the sword with which Namgung Hwi had shown almost nothing across three exchanges.
It was a superb sword. Only, there had been a trace, outside the point, of something that seemed for an instant out of alignment, and whether that was an opening or a clue to the reaction choosing the next change, he could not tell.
Eyes closed, Pung traced that brief trace over and over, and the answer would not be caught, but what he had to look at more closely on tomorrow’s platform was growing clear.
Join the discussion