In that earth where there was neither light nor time, Pung silently carried on the training the rings led him through. That training did not merely make a boy strong. From the very first, the rings had remade Pung’s body into a vessel that would not collapse even when it held the power of the Hyeon-gyeong (玄境), and day after day they poured monstrous inner force and sensitivity into it. Pung simply did not know it, but by the standards of the outside martial world, a calamity of a master — the sort that might appear once in a generation, if at all — was growing up in the dark.
How long had passed like that? One day, Pung suddenly realized something strange. With his eyes closed, circulating his energy, the path of that force flowing through his own body — like a faint river — shimmered into view before him.
‘This… I can see it? With my eyes shut?’
At first he wondered if he were imagining it. But as the days went on, that flow grew clearer. Where it was blocked, and where he had to let the energy run — Pung could now know it by seeing it.
From the moment that flow became visible, Pung’s circulation grew far easier. Knowing the blockages beforehand and opening the way for them, even that dreadful agony became gradually bearable. A quality that no master under heaven could obtain though they craved it all their lives was settling into Pung like an utterly natural sense.
There was something more wondrous still. Once that flow was visible, the principles of the martial arts the rings taught entered his head far more quickly. Since he could see with his own eyes what energy was carried into a single movement and how, he could pierce through to the subtlety at once, without needing to repeat it tens of thousands of times. A path once seen was not forgotten; a principle once grasped was engraved into his body straightaway. To call it talent was almost embarrassing. It was closer, rather, to the act of spreading out the written characters of martial arts before one’s eyes and reading them.
One day, Pung felt that the energy in his dantian had grown deeper and heavier still. The frail boy who had first fallen into this cave was nowhere to be found. Merely closing his fingers lightly crumbled stone into powder, and when he evened his breath the dust of the cavern rolled away like a gentle wave. Rather than fearing that change, Pung only found it wondrous.
When he went out to hunt, Pung felt all the more clearly that his body had changed. When he had first stepped outside the cave, catching even a single rabbit had been too much for him. But from some moment on, the movements of fleeing mountain beasts looked to Pung’s eyes as slow as if they had stopped. If he stretched out a hand, he caught them; if he set down a foot, he overtook them. Putting out force even slightly wrong hollowed a dent into boulders, and a light leap sent his body vaulting to the middle of a cliff. Before learning how to grow stronger, Pung had first to learn how to kill his strength and hide it.
On some days he climbed a sheer cliff in a single rush and snatched a hawk from its nest with his bare hands. On some days he caught a falling boulder without thinking, then stood blankly for a long while at the sight of the boulder crumbling before his own palm did. Sometimes that self of his frightened Pung.
‘Will I… at this rate, stop being a person?’
But even that fear could not last long before the exquisite refinement of the martial arts the rings revealed. Each time he grasped the principle contained in a single movement, Pung’s heart leapt in spite of himself. It was an entirely different kind of joy, one he had never known in the days of digging up herbs.
The time beneath the earth was lonely and hard, but within it Pung found a peace of his own. Days of learning, realizing, and learning again. The outside world and the lost village grew ever more distant — but in their place, something solid was piling up inside Pung, layer upon layer.
And so, little by little, Pung came to accept his situation. The rings were not trying to harm him. Rather, they were trying to hand down to Pung, whole and entire, everything their old master had left behind.
Pung assented to the rings’ will, understood that will, and in the end followed it. He grasped the principles of the martial arts the rings showed him and made their subtleties his own. And so Pung, without knowing it himself, mastered martial arts. By the standards of the outside martial world, Pung had already left the categories of peak and transcendent peak far behind. He simply did not know the names of the stages, had never matched strength against a person, and had no measure by which to gauge how great the power inside him was.
Sometimes, after finishing his circulation, Pung would think of the lines written in the book he kept tucked in his robes. That one line: ‘Become a man freer than anyone.’ Who in the world was it who left all this behind, and what kind of life had they lived before vanishing deep beneath this earth, leaving only a single set of clothes?
Then one day, Pung remembered a passage he had read on the very last page of the book, one he had forgotten all this while. The line seemed never to have been fully written, breaking off faintly.
…This is not all of it; when you are truly ready — the rest will come seeking you of its own accord….
Pung had no way of knowing its meaning. He only gazed quietly at the two rings on his hands, holding a dim premonition that somehow this might not be the end. But that question too was gradually buried in the endless training.
One day, Pung at last unfolded a single form from beginning to end without a hitch. In that moment when energy and movement linked as one from fingertip to toe, Pung felt an indescribable fullness.
It was not something he had wished for himself, but he was certain that that one form, at least, was wholly his own. ‘Become a man freer than anyone.’ Pung kept murmuring that phrase and calling it to mind. Freedom, for one who could not even command his own body — Pung found the words cruel at times. And yet somehow, it seemed that those very words were what had led him this far.
Beneath the earth where not a handful of light entered, Pung realized that his height had grown by a hand’s span without his noticing. His voice had thickened as well. And so, without his knowing it flowed, the years flowed on.
Thus five years passed.
One day, when he had accepted everything and made it wholly his own, the rings no longer bound Pung’s body. Pung realized for the first time that his hands and feet moved according to his own will.
Pung rose slowly. Strength settled of itself into each movement, and will was carried in it. The herb-gathering boy who had fallen screaming five years before was no longer there.
Pung’s eyes suddenly turned to that clean set of clothing still lying at one side of the cavern. The garment that would have hung loose on him five years ago now seemed, somehow, as if it would fit him exactly. Pung took off his worn-out herb-gatherer’s clothes and changed into it. Sure enough, it fit his body perfectly, as if it had been his from the start.
Pung tucked the book lying beside it into his robes once more as well. Who in the world had left all this behind? He was curious, but there was no way to ask. Pung looked around the empty cavern one last time, then slowly turned his body.
Pung unfolded a movement art and lightly kicked off the ground. At that, his body shot up like a bird and swept out of the narrow tunnel in a single rush. Dazzling sunlight poured down.
In that time he had gone in and out of this tunnel countless times for hunting. But those had always been steps drawn along by the rings. To stand beneath this light by his own will, on his own two feet — that was the first time in five years.
The smell of grass, the smell of earth, the wind carried from far away. Pung’s eyes grew hot in spite of himself. Only then did the fact that he faced the world with a body at last wholly his own sink deep into his chest.
Pung suddenly threw a light punch at a large boulder standing beside him. Kwajik— with a dull, heavy sound, a boulder as tall as a man crumbled down like sand. Pung looked back and forth between his fist and the shattered rock, unable to speak for a long while.
Pung put force into his toes again and shot up into the sky. The instant he thought he had leapt toward the mountain peak, he was already clearing that peak with ease.
Pung flew higher than the mountains, and farther. It was more refreshing than anything, and freer than anything. Beneath his feet, ridge folded upon ridge spread out, and beyond them a world he had never once seen stretched on endlessly.
“This… is the power I have?”
They had been five years spent against his own will, but now that he cut through the sky like this, he did not begrudge those years in the slightest.
Suddenly his mother came to mind. Those words of hers, that good fortune settles on a smiling face. If she saw him flying through the sky like this, what would his mother have said? Cutting through the wind, Pung laughed aloud for the first time in a very long while. Then he flew on a good while more before alighting lightly on some unfamiliar ridge.
Pung gazed quietly at his own palms. They were the same hands as five years ago, yet somehow they seemed entirely different hands.
Until now, Pung’s world had been herbs and mountains and one small village, and nothing more. But now that he had gained this power and learned these martial arts, Pung dimly knew that he could not live as he had before.
He considered going back to the village. Was Hwang-u still keeping that shop? And how would the villagers regard him, who had vanished without word for five whole years? For a moment, Pung’s heart leaned that way.
But Pung’s heart was already turned elsewhere. He wanted to see a wider world, to experience more things. That endless landscape he had looked down on from the sky a moment ago kept calling to him. Someday he would return in a form he could be proud of — once he resolved that, his steps grew lighter instead.
Yet before racing straight off into that wider world, Pung had one debt left that he absolutely had to repay.
Pung felt inside his robes and drew out a single flower. It was that very costly flower that had led him to the Bottomless Abyss five years before. Strangely, that flower, though it had spent five years beneath the earth where not a handful of light entered, showed not the slightest sign of wilting and shone prettily, exactly as it had at first.
Now that his eye for herbs had grown incomparably deep, Pung at last recognized that flower for what it was. It was a spirit medicine (靈藥), the sort scarcely found in this world. That spiritual energy (靈氣), unwithered even through five years, was the very proof. A single bloom alone was a treasure beyond price — enough to buy a small village and still have more left over.
Looking back, it was because this flower had led him deep beneath that earth that Pung had been able to gain all this power. In a way, this flower was the very first bond that opened Pung’s new life. But Pung had no thought of keeping this precious thing for himself. There was someone else who deserved to receive it.
◇
That night, Pung turned his steps, after five years, toward the small village where he had been born and raised. Racing with his newly learned movement art, even the long, long road was soon beneath his feet. The village asleep under the moonlight was exactly as it had been five years before. The old zelkova at the village entrance, and the little herb shop of Hwang-u at the end of the alley. At that familiar scene, Pung’s chest ached, a dull tug.
Pung stood quietly in the darkness before the shop. Though it was late at night, a faint lamp flame was lit inside. Beneath that light, old Hwang-u was alone, poring over a ledger. In those five years, the wrinkles on that kindly face had deepened a good deal.
Suddenly Hwang-u lifted his eyes from the ledger and gazed long out the window, toward that mountain where Pung had disappeared. Then, softly, he let out a sigh.
“…That boy Pung. If he’s alive at all, then wherever he is — he’d better be doing well, please.”
At those words, Pung nearly kicked open the shop door and walked in. Uncle, I’m alive, right here. But in the end, Pung could not. To vanish without a word for five years and then appear abruptly now might, rather, only trouble this old benefactor’s heart. And the Pung of now was no longer a person who could stay in that small village.
Instead of going in, Pung decided to convey his heart another way. Presently the shop’s lamp went out, and in the deep night after Hwang-u had gone to bed, Pung approached the shop door without a sound.
Pung laid that precious spirit-medicine flower quietly on the stone step before the door, where Hwang-u would see it first thing in the morning. And beside it he set down a small sheet of paper as well. It was a short note to stand in for his heart before he left.
To Uncle Hwang-u. It is Pung, who lost his way on the mountain five years ago. Thanks to you, I am alive and well. Not for a single moment have I forgotten the kindness you showed me. May this flower be a small repayment. Please, always be well. Someday I will come to see you again in a form I can be proud of.
Pung withdrew back into the darkness. And then he took in that little shop with his eyes for a long time. The person who had readily reached out a hand to a young boy who had lost his mother. The person who had taught him how to read herbs and so let him keep food on his table. Without that warm kindness, Pung would never have climbed that mountain, nor gained this power.
‘…Thank you, Uncle. And, farewell.’ In his heart, Pung bowed his head deeply. That parting greeting he could not bring himself to speak aloud seeped quietly into the still night air.
And then Pung turned, without lingering regret. He never looked back at the village receding behind him. He had quietly bid farewell to the small world of one season of his life. Now a wider world was waiting for Pung.
◇
Five years’ time had turned the herb-gathering boy Pung into an entirely different person.
Pung first set his direction one way and ran on without restraint. Whether a mountain lay ahead or a river, it gave him no pause at all. In Pung’s own mind he was running slowly, enjoying the scenery, but to an ordinary person’s eyes it was a speed hard even to follow.
“Still… without a single coin on me, I’ll need money if I’m to buy anything to eat or any clothes.”
Having strength was all well and good, but he could hardly turn to banditry. Fortunately, Pung had an eye for herbs. As he traveled, Pung dug up valuable herbs in the spare moments and so provided himself traveling money.
Then one day, Pung was digging up a rare herb at the foot of a cliff. Suddenly he sensed an unfamiliar presence approaching from far off.
Pung slowly raised his head, the herb still in his grip. It was the presence of a person — the first he had faced in five years.
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