WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Dionysus

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◈ Cultivating Underground ◈

Chapter 25

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"I'll come and see you again."

After saying goodbye to Mun Seong-hak, Yi Hyeon left Earthfire Cave. His six months of training in pill refining had been more enjoyable than he had expected.

All that remained now was the formula for the Barrier-Breaking Pill.

'Five hundred merit points...'

Yi Hyeon took out his court retainer token again.

His work for the foreseeable future was decided.

* * *

One year later.

Underground Hideout No. 1.

Yi Hyeon had returned to his old life as a battlefield court retainer. Whenever he took occasional leave, he visited Underground Hideout No. 1 like this.

After checking the spirit fields as usual, he finished by harvesting ripe Yinwater Lotus seed heads and Stone-Honey Peaches.

Crunch.

As he bit into a ripe Stone-Honey Peach, a sweet, refreshing sensation swept through his entire body.

"Ah..."

Whenever he found spirit insect eggs, larvae, or dead spirit insects, he tossed them into the rearing box he had built in the training hall as though throwing away rubbish.

Today, too, Yi Hyeon approached the box to dispose of a few small spirit insects and eggs he had found in Spirit Field No. 1-6. He lifted the thick lid.

Scrape.

"...Huh?"

His hand stopped.

Something inside the rearing box was looking up at him.

"What are you?"

Yi Hyeon cast the Glimmer Spell.

A ball of light the size of a fist floated above the rearing box, brightly lighting its interior.

Five small, round insects were huddled together on a piece of stone. Their plump bodies had short legs, and translucent wings that seemed too small for their bodies grew from their backs.

Their most striking feature was their fur. Soft bands of pale gold and black covered their entire bodies in a fluffy coat. The jet-black eyes on either side of their round heads were unusually large and glossy.

'What... Bumblebees? Are there bumblebees in this world too? Even if there are, surely they couldn't survive somewhere like this...'

They looked like slightly rounder bumblebees.

When the lid opened, they rested their short front legs on the wall of the box and raised their antennae together. They looked like baby birds waiting for their mother to bring food.

Spiritual qi was clearly flowing through their bodies. However, it was so faint that the energy of the soil and other spirit insects had apparently hidden it whenever he used the Qi-Observing Spell from outside the box.

'Did I ever put anything like this in here?'

No matter how hard he thought, he could not remember.

'Were their eggs mixed in with something?'

Yi Hyeon dropped a dead spirit insect into the box.

Plop.

All five pairs of antennae immediately turned toward it.

A clear liquid shot like a bullet from the mouth of the nearest insect.

Spit!

The moment the liquid touched the dead spirit insect, it stretched into sticky threads.

Psh! Psh!

The others joined in. Within just a few breaths, the dead spirit insect was tightly wrapped in translucent slime. The fluffy insects climbed onto it and began gnawing at its shell with their tiny mouths.

Crunch. Crunch.

"So you eat bugs?"

Now that he thought about it, most of what he had thrown into that box had been spirit insects and eggs. That explained how they had survived in such a poor environment. They had endured by eating the other insects.

After a moment's thought, Yi Hyeon picked up the smallest one between his fingers. Startled, it buzzed its wings, but it neither bit him nor shot slime. Instead, it moved its short legs and crawled onto the back of his hand.

"You're not afraid of anything, are you?"

On closer inspection, it was rather cute. Its round body made its rear sway slightly from side to side whenever it walked. Perhaps because its wings were small for its body, even when it tried to take flight, it only rose a chi or two before settling back down.

'I don't know what kind of spirit insect it is. I'll call it a Fuzzbee for now. More importantly, does it only eat spirit insects and leave spirit plants alone?'

Yi Hyeon took it to Spirit Field No. 1-7 and set it on a branch of a Stone-Honey Peach tree. The ripe spirit fruit gave off a sweet, refreshing scent.

The Fuzzbee moved its antennae for a moment.

They twitched.

Then it simply walked past.

This time, he cut open a Stone-Honey Peach and held the flesh in front of it. The insect touched the flesh once with its antennae, then turned away.

The same thing happened at the reservoir where the Yinwater Lotuses grew. Even when he split open a seed head and placed an immature seed right in front of it, it showed no interest.

Instead, after wandering among the lotus leaves for some time, its antennae suddenly sprang upright.

Psh!

Slime shot toward the underside of a lotus leaf. A spirit insect the size of a grain of rice, hidden beneath the leaf, was caught in the sticky liquid. The Fuzzbee hurried over and gnawed it up.

"Huh."

This time, he headed to Spirit Field No. 1-1.

When he opened the stone door, poisonous miasma flowed out with a strong medicinal fragrance. Poisonous powder released by the old Bone-Rotting Flowers and Purple Poison Orchids hung in the air like a faint mist.

Yi Hyeon set the Fuzzbee on the soil near the entrance.

'Could it possibly withstand this poisonous miasma too?'

The insect huddled up for a moment. A little poisonous powder from the Bone-Rotting Flowers settled on its golden fur.

Yi Hyeon examined its body with the Qi-Observing Spell.

'There's no change in its energy.'

Enough time to eat a meal passed.

The insect was perfectly fine. In fact, it seemed bored as it wandered farther into the field, passing under the long leaves of the Purple Poison Orchids and circling the roots of the Yin Soul Grass. It briefly rubbed its body against the soil around an Earth Vein Flower, but never put its mouth to the leaves or stems of the spirit plants.

'Could it be...?'

Yi Hyeon followed behind it in a crouch.

A little later, the Fuzzbee stopped. Its antennae pointed toward the soil.

Psh!

Slime shot into the earth. The insect quickly scraped away the soil with its front legs.

Beneath it lay three translucent spirit insect eggs stuck together.

Crunch. Crunch.

One egg vanished in an instant.

Yi Hyeon's eyes lit up.

'This little thing... Couldn't I use it to guard the spirit fields?'

Of course, drawing a conclusion from a single test was dangerous. Perhaps it was leaving the spirit plants alone because it was not hungry yet. Its diet might also change once it reached a certain stage of growth.

Yi Hyeon moved just that one insect to Spirit Field No. 1-5.

"Try living here for now."

The Fuzzbee waved its antennae as though it understood.

Yi Hyeon closed the stone door.

...

Over the next few years, Yi Hyeon steadily observed the insects whenever he visited Underground Hideout No. 1.

The results exceeded his expectations. They especially liked living spirit insects and eggs, and even when he tried starving them, they never touched the spirit plants. They also remained active in the poisonous miasma of the Bone-Rotting Flowers and Purple Poison Orchids without any apparent problems.

Another interesting thing was that the Fuzzbees were quite friendly toward him.

Whenever he opened the rearing box, they crowded toward its edges even if he had no food. When he held out his hand, some would readily climb onto his fingers or sleeve. Perhaps, after he had spent so long tossing food into the box, they had learned to associate his scent or spiritual power with food.

Of course, not every one of them was docile. Some occasionally bit his fingers or shot slime at him as they tried to escape.

He killed those and kept only the ones that quietly hunted bugs.

As time passed, an interesting change appeared. Their numbers repeatedly rose and fell, but at some point, most of the newly appearing young insects were gentler than the ones he had first discovered.

More and more of them would climb onto his hand of their own accord when he held it out.

'Could this be because I've kept leaving only the well-behaved ones alive?'

He recalled a silver fox domestication experiment he had heard about in his past life. By selecting only the least aggressive individuals for breeding, the researchers had produced foxes with a clear tendency to be friendly toward humans in just a few generations.

Without intending to, he seemed to be doing something similar.

However, he could not determine their breeding cycle, growth process, or even their lifespan. His duties as a battlefield court retainer prevented him from watching them constantly, and he had no knowledge of spirit insects to begin with.

Still, one thing was certain. They were very useful in the spirit fields.

Before long, Yi Hyeon had released them into every spirit field, from Spirit Field No. 1-1 to No. 1-7. Previously, he had needed to inspect each leaf and root for damage from spirit insects. Once the Fuzzbees settled in, however, the number of pests fell noticeably.

Sometimes, when he entered a spirit field, several fluffy little balls of fur would buzz over and land on his shoulders or head.

Plip.

"...Don't poop on me."

* * *

In this way, fifteen years passed with him serving as a battlefield court retainer and traveling back and forth to Underground Hideout No. 1.

During that time, Yi Hyeon traveled not only to Hoean Fort, but also to various other fortresses in the south. Powerful Profound realm martial artists like Jo Byeong-ak appeared on several occasions, and clashes large and small never ceased along the border between the Geonyang Kingdom and the Untaek Kingdom.

He captured scouts, dealt with experts who had infiltrated their territory, reinforced positions in danger, and stopped martial artists targeting military grain supplies.

After realizing that his fighting strength was somewhat excessive, Yi Hyeon actually began holding back to avoid having too great an effect on the course of the war between the two kingdoms. He feared that influencing a mortal war too heavily might draw the attention of the Gon Kingdom's cultivation world.

Even so, as the years passed, his merit points rose past six hundred before he knew it. He would have more than a hundred left even after buying the Barrier-Breaking Pill formula he had originally set his sights on.

Merit points were not the only things he accumulated.

Countless martial arts manuals passed through his hands as he traveled around the south. Some were secret manuals taken from fallen martial artists. Others contained insights that captured experts offered in exchange for their lives. There were also martial artists who showed him part of their own arts out of gratitude for his help.

At first, he studied any martial art that caught his attention. As time passed and his judgment improved, however, he naturally learned to separate the valuable from the worthless. By now, he would not spare an art a glance unless it was a supreme art belonging to a Profound realm expert.

...

In the mountains a little over a hundred li north of Hoean Fort lay a broad clearing that had been abandoned long ago.

Thud!

The moment Yi Hyeon's right foot struck the ground, his body shot half a jang forward.

But no second step followed.

As his toes scraped the ground at an angle, his forward-moving body stopped as though it had never been moving at all. In the next instant, he slid about a chi to the left. He advanced another half step, lowered his body, then twisted at the waist and darted diagonally to the right.

Short, rapid movements followed without pause.

The greatest distance he covered in a single movement was one or two jang. Most movements were shorter than a single step. Even so, Yi Hyeon's position changed several times within a single breath.

《Square-Inch Step (方寸步)》

Of all the footwork techniques Yi Hyeon had encountered, he considered this supreme art the best for close combat.

Its creator was Yu Baek-cheon, a Profound realm martial artist who had made a name in the Geonyang Kingdom sixty years earlier. Having taken part in invasions of the Untaek Kingdom since youth, Yu had spent decades fighting aboard rocking ships and on cramped decks. It was said that Yu placed little value on lightness skills that only showed their true worth on broad, level ground.

The heart of the Square-Inch Step lay in brief bursts of acceleration and sudden stops, tiny movements of one or two chi, constant changes of direction, and quickly recovering from an unstable stance.

Thud!

Yi Hyeon shot forward, then...

Whoosh!

An instant later, he had already slid to the side and was straightening his upper body. Had an opponent been standing before him, he would have dodged an attack while moving within sword range.

"Not bad."

The Square-Inch Step was especially well suited to Yi Hyeon's Primordial Unity Body.

Martial artists had to draw internal energy from their dantian and send it to their legs along fixed meridian routes. Yi Hyeon, however, could draw directly on the primordial unity true qi already spread throughout his body, wherever he needed it.

Moreover, his physical abilities were beyond comparison with those of ordinary people.

His understanding of the Square-Inch Step still fell short of that of its creator, Yu Baek-cheon. Yet judging by the movements visible from the outside, he had already far surpassed Yu.

Swish, swish, swish.

Yi Hyeon suddenly stopped moving across the clearing.

Shing!

He drew an ordinary iron sword of the kind used by Untaek Kingdom soldiers from his waist.

Alongside the Square-Inch Step, the art Yi Hyeon had devoted the most effort to learning was 《Single-Pole Six Swords (一極六劍)》.

He had chosen this sword art after comparing the supreme arts of numerous Profound realm experts.

Its creator was Jin Baek-san, a Profound realm swordsman known in the Geonyang Kingdom thirty years earlier as the Old Man of the Iron Sword (鐵劍翁).

Jin Baek-san had not possessed particularly deep internal energy compared with the other Profound realm experts of his time. Instead, he had spent his life studying the principle of concentrating the same amount of internal energy into a single point to produce greater power and break through a surface.

The result was the Single-Pole Six Swords. There was even an account of how, in his later years, he had shattered a late Qi Refining cultivator's defensive spell with a single strike and gravely wounded the cultivator.

"Whew."

Light flowed across the blade of Yi Hyeon's iron sword.

On the surface, it resembled the sword force used by martial artists, but its nature was entirely different. What Yi Hyeon had wrapped around his sword was spiritual power.

Drawing on several supreme arts, Yi Hyeon had succeeded in creating something similar to sword force using spiritual power. For convenience, he called it spirit force (靈罡).

Following the principles of the Single-Pole Six Swords, he compressed that spirit force to an extreme degree along the blade.

Light flashed!

The sword cut through the air.

A finger-thick strand of spirit force shot from its edge and bored a smooth hole into the center of a rock face a little over ten jang away. The end of the hole was nowhere to be seen.

"Hmm."

Yi Hyeon lowered his sword.

'Martial arts really do suit me. Is it because of the Primordial Unity Body...? Now that my whole body has been trained, I'm in a similar position to a body cultivator.'

Body cultivators were cultivators who strengthened their flesh through body-tempering methods. They were naturally strong in close combat, and in that respect, they had much in common with the martial artists of the mortal world.

'I'll take my time studying the remaining martial arts.'

The supreme arts possessed by Profound realm experts were genuinely profound, so he could not learn all of them in a short time.

He had only achieved this much because, as a cultivator, his concentration, memory, and physical abilities surpassed those of ordinary people.

...

Yi Hyeon slowly looked around at the surrounding scenery.

He had gained most of what he had wanted from the Untaek Kingdom. He had learned pill refining, studied countless martial arts, and gained experience in actual combat. He had also accumulated enough merit points to obtain the Barrier-Breaking Pill formula.

"It's time to leave."

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