WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Asakusa
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◈ A Wandering Warrior's Survival Guide ◈
Chapter 54: Refining Essence with Heartfire (1)
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Darkness surrounded him the entire way. It was so dark that it reminded him of the moment just before his regression activated after death, yet Cheon Hwi’s steps never faltered as he found his way forward.
The deeper he went into the cave, the stronger the stench of corpses and blood became.
Cheon Hwi’s thoughts were complicated.
‘What is a demonic art?’
He immersed himself in that question.
Cheon Hwi had died from qi deviation while trying to learn demonic arts and regressed more than a dozen times. Each time, he had asked Yu So-myeong many questions. The answers had always been no more than a single sentence, but by changing his questions little by little and gathering the different answers, he had accumulated fifty sentences.
Fifty sentences were enough to give him a vague introductory understanding of what demonic arts were.
But there was a vast difference between having a basic understanding of demonic arts and understanding these verses, supposedly left behind by the Demon Venerable, whether they were genuine or not.
Yu So-myeong’s words crossed his mind.
─ According to a man who came to his senses after falling to an inner demon midway through, there are only two lines. But those two lines alone are more than enough to drive someone mad.
At first, Cheon Hwi had wondered how two lines could possibly drive a person insane. He had doubted it was even possible.
But on his very first attempt, he had accepted that it was true.
‘They tried to learn and teach this garbage.’
Madmen. Had they truly abandoned their humanity for martial arts? Demonic arts were not called demonic for nothing. It was almost impressive that anyone had managed to do this.
At first, Cheon Hwi had thought the Demon Venerable might have played a cruel joke out of rage toward the world. Perhaps the Demon Venerable had wanted to throw anyone who followed these verses into the same suffering.
It was a plausible guess. The more Cheon Hwi learned, the more he understood why no one obsessed with demonic arts could be normal.
As he stepped farther into the cave and infused his eyes with inner qi, the darkness around him gradually became visible.
Though he had not even reached the entrance yet, corpses lay everywhere. They must have shoved countless people inside. It seemed Yu So-myeong had been telling the truth when he said they never bothered retrieving the bodies.
Why had they left them here? To accumulate demonic qi?
Cheon Hwi considered it briefly, then stopped.
They had already been shoving in people who seemed talented just to see whether these were genuine verses. What reason could there possibly be? This place deserved to be called a demonic den.
As though familiar with the process, Cheon Hwi took a firestarter from the robes of a corpse in the corner whose fingernails were all missing. He found a discarded torch shaft farther inside and pine resin in another corpse’s robes. He coated the shaft with resin and pulled the firestarter to light it.
Fwoosh!
The cave brightened, revealing the full sight of Black Flame Cave.
Cheon Hwi grabbed the legs of the corpse seated in the center of the cavern and threw it aside.
“Could you move over, Senior?”
Thud.
Cheon Hwi called the skeleton Senior as he moved it aside.
Then he saw the inscription carved into the wall before him.
The mnemonic formula was incomplete. There were only two lines, but part of the second had been erased.
[Black fire does not burn fuel. It first burns the heart.]
[If the heart is ____, then the flame shall ____.]
Black fire does not burn fuel. It first burns the heart.
If the heart is ____, then the flame shall ____.
Dark red blood had caked thickly around the strokes carved into the rock wall. It was easy to imagine how many gifted talents had coughed up blood and died here.
This was a demonic den where simply sitting among the bodies without doing anything was enough to drive someone mad.
More than anything, the blank spaces in the second verse bothered Cheon Hwi.
They did not look scratched away or gouged out. He could tell that no characters had been carved there from the very beginning.
Cheon Hwi sat cross-legged.
First, he needed to learn how to circulate demonic qi in a way that would let him reach the meaning of the first carved line.
The dense stench of decay and blood pierced his nose and filled his lungs, but his breathing did not waver as he inhaled and exhaled.
There was only one sentence to guide him in circulating demonic qi.
Black fire does not burn fuel. It first burns the heart.
Black fire does not burn fuel. It first burns the heart.
It burns the heart? Black fire? What did it burn?
Cheon Hwi focused on those questions.
Until now, circulating inner power had felt like boiling water or filling a vessel with water. But this sensation had nothing to do with that. Inner power was not something that could be burned in the first place, just as there was no concept of setting water on fire.
The concept behind demonic arts differed from the common sense of the Martial World.
Those who practiced orthodox martial arts compared the dantian to a lake and the qi channels to rivers. When water filled the lake, it naturally overflowed and broke through blocked qi channels.
But fire was different. Fire did not wait patiently for empty space like water did.
Once flames rose and found something to burn, they would continue melting through the blood vessels and forging their own path.
Cheon Hwi slowly closed his eyes.
Demonic arts.
Yu So-myeong’s words echoed in his ears. It was not a method of handling water, but of handling fire itself.
‘What does it mean to burn?’
And he could not think of it as accumulating inner power as he had until now. Whenever he had tried to invoke demonic arts through something related to his existing inner power, his dantian had burst without fail.
A Drop of Water Illuminates through a Breath Drop.
That was the core of the inner power circulation method he had used until now, where inner power accumulated drop by drop. Pure energy drawn into the body through qi circulation and breath regulation was condensed into a single droplet, then dropped into the dantian.
The ripples of that droplet spread and illuminated his insides, gradually expanding his understanding. It was the process of understanding his own body and limits.
For that reason, the whole method of circulating inner power could be called Ripple Pathfinding.
‘But what if the concept of burning in demonic arts starts from an entirely different approach?’
The martial arts of the orthodox sects accumulated pure dew one drop at a time. The martial arts of the unorthodox sects piled up water whether it was clean or muddy. But demonic arts did not wait for such droplets to gather. No, they had nothing to do with water in the first place.
While the martial arts of the orthodox and unorthodox sects sent ripples outward to cautiously feel their way through the darkness, demonic arts simply burned something and lit up everything with overwhelming intensity.
In other words,
‘Their foundations are entirely different.’
Two problems arose from that realization.
One was what he should burn.
The other was where he should kindle the fire.
A pool of inner power already occupied his lower dantian. It was difficult to imagine kindling a fire deep beneath that water.
Starting a fire in empty space also sounded like nonsense.
‘Is that why they said the martial arts of the orthodox and unorthodox sects cannot mix with demonic arts? But Han So-gyeom said I would have no trouble learning demonic arts.’
How was that possible?
Cheon Hwi’s thoughts grew increasingly tangled.
More than that, Yu So-myeong had thrown him into this cave without any preparation. If Yu So-myeong wanted Cheon Hwi to survive and prove useful, he would have at least taught him a basic demonic inner cultivation method. But he had not. There had to be a reason.
Han So-gyeom’s claim that it was possible, the concept of burning in demonic arts, and Yu So-myeong’s attitude all connected in an instant of realization.
‘It is not the lower dantian!’
The place where fire was kindled had nothing to do with the lower dantian, the starting point of inner power and martial arts.
He had naturally assumed that flames needed to spread from a central point.
But that was not the case.
Demonic arts could be seen as burning whatever was needed at any given moment.
Once he completely turned his attention away from the lower dantian, he began to sense something.
The stage of sensing invisible, formless embers within his heart.
Before using demonic arts, it was the stage of perceiving demonic qi and awakening the spark. The stage of Ignition.
‘I can feel it.’
It was the stage of facing anger, fear, killing intent, and desire without suppressing them, and recognizing them as powers lying dormant within him.
Through that persistent scrutiny, he could gradually sense demonic qi.
Only now did Cheon Hwi begin to understand what the demonic qi accumulating within his body was.
‘This is demonic qi.’
He felt things like sparks from a bonfire, scattered and flowing throughout his body.
He could not distinguish precisely what they were, but he knew they were energy that had sprouted from emotions such as irritation, rage, regret, and killing intent, emotions said to be the fuel needed to kindle heartfire from demonic qi.
Perhaps because this space was thick with demonic qi, it was easy to ignore his lower dantian and instead catch those sensations.
Cheon Hwi immediately incorporated that realization.
Within his mental image, there was the well of his lower dantian. Beyond the edge of that well’s field of view lay a dark region. He fixed his mental image on invisible flames rising in that region.
But nothing happened.
‘...Hm?’
Simply imagining fire did not make fire rise. Fire inevitably needed something to burn.
‘Did they say it was the sensation of burning emotions? How do I do that?’
It was a stage called heartfire.
Burning emotions and releasing energy.
Cheon Hwi had unconsciously done it several times when facing Gwak Do-mun, so he found the sensation surprisingly quickly. Once again, he abandoned the idea that he needed a lower dantian or a central point and focused on the scattered demonic qi within his body, those tiny bits of energy.
Then, with the feeling of awakening each one, he gave them a light tap.
Pop! Pop-pop-pop-pop!
With the sound of something bursting, demonic qi expanded, and he felt the strength in those parts of his body increase.
The problem was the emotions within him that exploded along with it.
The moment he burst the still-unidentifiable red specks, sudden fury welled up, followed by explosive strength.
It was different from circulating inner qi. He had tried to burst only one piece of demonic qi selectively, but nearby demonic qi, linked together like a cluster of grapes, exploded all at once. He could not control the force.
“Ghk!”
Heat surged through him. It might have been closer to bursting something, but it could only be described as a sensation of burning.
‘This is... heartfire.’
If he used this as power, it clearly would not harmonize in the slightest with the martial arts he had learned until now, which used inner power.
Cheon Hwi slowly opened his eyes again. As he calmed the burning heat inside him, he read the inscription before him once more.
[Black fire does not burn fuel. It first burns the heart.]
[If the heart is ____, then the flame shall ____.]
Black fire does not burn fuel. It first burns the heart.
If the heart is ____, then the flame shall ____.
Had something changed now that he had begun handling demonic qi?
The spark was about to go out. Cheon Hwi inhaled the cave’s stench of corpses and blood. It felt as though the madness left by the dead was seeping into his lungs.
─ Save me...
─ Let me out...
─ Hot... the fire... the fire...
Hallucinated voices scraped at his ears. Cheon Hwi did not so much as twitch.
“Quiet down, Seniors.”
A fragment of fear from someone who died clawing at the wall. A fragment of resentment from someone who had coughed up blood and thrashed about. A fragment of obsession from someone who had clung to the mnemonic formula and gone mad until their final breath.
They had all ended up that way only because they had stared directly at the demonic qi within themselves. The many words that seemed to overlap with the blanks in the second verse were like smoke and mirages created by flames rising from their own hearts.
If he had been learning the martial arts of the orthodox sects, they would have told him to cast away the poison in his heart. If he had been learning unorthodox martial arts, they would have told him to swallow that poison and endure by force.
Demonic arts were different.
They did not discard such things. They did not deny that they were their own senses, power born from within them.
But neither did they swallow them into their body.
‘You simply... burn them away and empty yourself.’
Cheon Hwi did not know it, but a formation array the Demon Venerable had designed long ago was activating around where he sat.
The blood and souls of the dead maintained that formation array, along with the demonic qi hanging throughout the cave like dew.
The ghostly formation array seeped in as it coveted Cheon Hwi’s mind. It was a test from the Demon Venerable that had crossed hundreds of years.
In Cheon Hwi’s vision, the word kill appeared where the word had been erased.
Sitting cross-legged, Cheon Hwi burned it without the slightest wavering.
The character scattered like ash.
Then the word greed appeared, but Cheon Hwi burned that as well.
Afterward, more words passed by one after another.
Resentment. Rage. Fear. Desire. Joy.
The words kept rising.
But as if none of them was the answer, Cheon Hwi emptied every last one in succession.
Cough!
Cheon Hwi vomited black blood. Ash-like particles were mixed into the blood that fell to the floor. His right arm burned, and for some reason, his fingertips had briefly gone numb.
As though that place should have been empty from the beginning.
As though this was how handling demonic qi and practicing demonic arts were meant to be.
The blanks could no longer deceive Cheon Hwi.
Instead, four characters that had been hidden beneath soot and bloodstains slowly emerged below them.
Heartfire Refining Essence.
A moment later,
Rumble...
The formation array broke apart, and the cave shook briefly.
Then the two carved verses split apart to either side, slowly revealing a new space.
Cheon Hwi picked up his torch. Its light seeped into the newly opened passage.
There was no end in sight.
Cheon Hwi glanced at the skeleton he had pushed aside.
“Seniors, I will go on ahead.”
Without the sacrifices of those who came before him, the formation array would not have activated. Perhaps that was why the martial artists of the orthodox sects who had searched and torn through this area had found nothing wrong here. It truly was a formation array worthy of the Demon Cult and the Demon Venerable.
With that, Cheon Hwi stepped beyond the first threshold that no one had crossed before.
A voice that made his whole body tremble rang in his ears as he walked.
[Young one who has opened the gate of Black Flame.]
A voice laden with demonic qi, so terrifying that hearing it alone inspired fear, asked him:
[After burning everything away, what remains for you to burn?]
Cheon Hwi’s answer as he walked through the darkness held no hesitation.
“My weakness.”
The opening behind him closed. The carvings and the surrounding corpses were swallowed by black flames and melted into the darkness.
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