WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
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Chapter 194: Spring Silkworms Spin Silk Until Death (18)
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From some point on, Yeon Sowol began hearing one name again and again.
“Thank you, Great-Grand Martial Uncle. I learned so much. Ha... It would be wonderful if Jin Hyeon could receive this teaching too.”
Jin Hyeon.
As it turned out, it was the name of one of the third-generation disciples.
Again and again.
“Cough... Ngh. Hoo... Thank you for your precious teaching, Great-Grand Martial Uncle. But have you perhaps met Jin Hyeon as well?”
And again.
“Great-Grand Martial Uncle... I humbly ask a favor. Please take a look at Jin Hyeon just once. Your teaching is certainly not easy, but we gain so much from it... It would surely help Jin Hyeon greatly as well.”
They kept mentioning that name.
Asking him to take a look at Jin Hyeon just once.
‘What is this? Is he some exceptionally gifted genius?’
But the truth was the opposite.
“Jin Hyeon? Ah... If we are talking attainment, he is very slow. He works hard, but he is the slowest.”
“He is always scolded during training. He gets discouraged. He keeps asking me how he can become good at it too... I feel sorry for him.”
“He keeps falling behind, so perhaps that has crushed his spirits. He has shut himself up in South Cliff Palace and hardly comes out. We only see him during group training. It has been a while since I last spoke with him too.”
Among the third-generation disciples, Jin Hyeon had the poorest martial arts attainment.
Feeling sorry for him, his peers had repeatedly asked Yeon Sowol.
Yeon Sowol’s teaching was painful, but there was always something to gain from it.
“Hmm.”
Yeon Sowol looked toward South Cliff, situated on the western side of Celestial Pillar Peak.
A massive rocky cliff hanging beneath South Cliff Peak, that was South Cliff.
South Cliff Palace had been precariously built along that cliff.
“I have not visited South Cliff Palace yet, have I?”
Jin Hyeon was there.
A third-generation disciple whose martial arts attainment had stagnated despite entering Wudang, one of the foremost great sects in the martial world.
‘Maybe there will be something I can teach him.’
Perhaps there would be something Yeon Sowol could learn through it as well.
With that vague expectation, he set off.
* * *
At first, he did not think much of it.
The path up South Cliff was quite steep, as paths on Wudang Mountain generally were, and the scenery was spectacular.
Sheer cliffs sliced the view apart, creating an endless kaleidoscope of blue sky, white clouds, Wudang Mountain’s peaks, and temples hidden between them.
He merely climbed while emptying his mind and enjoying the scenery.
As he always did.
But as he approached South Cliff Palace, Yeon Sowol’s steps gradually slowed.
“...This scent...?”
At first, he thought it was simply the smell of mist.
The scent of moss, pine needles, and wind striking rocks, melting into the mist and settling damply over everything.
That was what he thought it was.
It was not.
“Burning incense...?”
The closer he came to South Cliff Palace, the more he could sense the heat of flame within the scent.
It was so natural that he had not noticed immediately.
But it was unmistakably the smell of something being burned.
“Mm...”
Yeon Sowol’s steps grew slower.
The magnificent scenery of South Cliff.
The cool wind.
And a strand of fragrance naturally woven through it all.
His heart settled on its own.
The tension left his body.
Step by step, he passed along the cliff path and finally entered South Cliff Palace.
“Ah. Greetings, Grand Martial Uncle.”
“Gasp! Greetings, Great-Grand Martial Uncle.”
The Wudang disciples who spotted Yeon Sowol greeted him one after another. Yeon Sowol lightly bowed in return, but did not speak with them.
He merely followed the scent, walking deeper and deeper into South Cliff Palace.
“Huh...”
At last, his steps came to an end.
“So there was a place like this...”
South Cliff was a giant rocky precipice.
A rock extending far beyond it had been carved into the form of a dragon.
It looked as if it would soar straight into the sky from Wudang Mountain’s majestic ridges.
An incense burner sat atop the dragon’s head.
Incense rose thickly from that perilous position, somewhere a person without martial arts would not dare approach.
It was the very fragrance that had guided Yeon Sowol here.
“This incense... What is it...?”
By now, Yeon Sowol had experienced quite a lot.
He had already enjoyed rare Qinan Agarwood and Laoshan sandalwood imported from faraway India.
But the fragrance rising from the dragon’s head jutting out beyond the cliff was unlike anything he had ever experienced.
It was not merely a matter of whether it smelled good or bad.
How could he put it?
“It is natural.”
It did not cover the surrounding scents with its own.
Rather, it seemed to fill them out, making them richer and deeper, with a natural, subtle fragrance.
Like the scent that rises after rain.
‘So incense like this exists.’
Yeon Sowol stood before it for a long while.
Then a disciple approached and greeted him in a trembling voice.
“G-Greetings, Great-Grand Martial Uncle.”
When Yeon Sowol turned around, he saw a third-generation disciple who appeared not quite twenty years of age.
Yeon Sowol looked at him and asked.
“Ah, yes. Nice to meet you. What is your name?”
“M-My name is Jin Hyeon...”
“Ah.”
Jin Hyeon.
So it was him.
The disciple among the third-generation disciples who lagged furthest behind in martial arts.
The disciple everyone worried about, and who worried so much himself.
Yeon Sowol’s gaze fell on the red incense Jin Hyeon held carefully against his chest.
“What is that?”
“Ah... Th-This is Dragon-Head Incense.”
Dragon-Head Incense.
That was its name.
The incense that burned upon that dragon’s head.
“Is it time to light fresh incense?”
“Yes, yes. Dragon-Head Incense is freshly made and offered every double-hour... I just finished making it and was on my way here.”
“It is freshly made every double-hour?”
“Ah, yes. Yes.”
Yeon Sowol looked at the third-generation disciple with renewed interest.
A small, slight body.
A round face that had not yet lost all its baby fat.
Drooping eyebrows.
Eyes that trembled anxiously.
In many ways, he did not leave the impression of a Wudang disciple.
But that was not what mattered to Yeon Sowol right now.
“Is there a reason it must be freshly made every double-hour?”
Jin Hyeon’s eyes sparkled.
The disciple who had been stammering and shrinking into himself cautiously raised his head and answered with shining eyes.
“That is because we must sense the scentlessness every double-hour and adjust the fragrance accordingly.”
Scentlessness?
The absence of scent?
“Ah, yes. Scentlessness is, you see!”
Jin Hyeon’s eyes shone even brighter.
“It does not mean there truly is no fragrance. It refers to the scents people have forgotten.”
There was such a saying.
Of all human senses, the sense of smell tired first.
People reacted strongly to pleasant and unpleasant smells, but when the same smell repeated, they quickly grew dull to it and could no longer smell it.
“The scent of wind. The scent of earth. The scent of cloth. The scent of flesh. The scent of water mixed throughout all those places. All of those become scentlessness. They are scents that are always there, but which people treat as though they do not exist.”
“Ah.”
A shiver ran across the back of Yeon Sowol’s arm.
Why?
At those words, goosebumps spread over his skin.
“But not smelling them does not mean they truly are absent. Scentlessness always affects other fragrances. That is why Dragon-Head Incense is freshly made every double-hour.”
Jin Hyeon’s face was full of pride as he spoke.
There was none of the discouraged, worry-ridden appearance Yeon Sowol had heard about from his fellow disciples.
“We carefully perceive the ever-changing scentlessness, then freshly blend the incense every double-hour so that it can settle properly on top of it. Dragon-Head Incense, said to be Wudang’s most mysterious fragrance, can only bloom upon scentlessness.”
“...I see.”
So that was why it had been so natural and subtle.
It was not a fragrance that smothered other smells. It was woven atop the background scents people commonly forgot and could no longer smell.
Yeon Sowol silently looked at Jin Hyeon.
Having finished speaking, the disciple seemed to realize too late what he had done. The light in his eyes faded, and he began nervously watching Yeon Sowol’s reaction again.
His head lowered.
His eyes trembled.
“Did you make it yourself?”
“Pardon? Ah, yes... The person responsible changes depending on the time, and I am making it during this period.”
“Do third-generation disciples normally make Dragon-Head Incense?”
“Ah, no. That is not the case. Usually Martial Uncles or Grand Martial Uncles make it. Among the third-generation disciples, only I... It takes quite a long time to smell and sense the scentlessness accurately, so...”
“Is that so?”
I see.
Drawing out the end of his words, Yeon Sowol stepped aside.
It was his way of telling Jin Hyeon to attend to his task first.
Jin Hyeon hesitated while watching Yeon Sowol’s expression, then carefully moved forward. He stepped onto the dragon-carved rock that dangerously extended beyond the cliff and lit the fresh incense.
Yeon Sowol closed his eyes for a moment, sensing the fragrance grow even deeper.
“Everyone talks about you a lot.”
He spoke to Jin Hyeon after the disciple crossed back over the dragon-carved rock.
Jin Hyeon lowered his head.
“I-I am sorry.”
He apologized without warning.
Yeon Sowol smiled bitterly and asked.
“What for?”
“I... I am lacking in cultivation... My martial arts are weak... I cannot keep up in training... I only disgrace the sect, so...”
His head lowered further and further as he spoke.
Looking more closely, Yeon Sowol saw that even his knees were trembling.
“But you have a gift for sensing incense, and even making it.”
“Th-That is just a trivial skill... No one recognizes it... It makes no difference whether I have it or not... A Wudang disciple should be good at martial arts first of all... I am sorry. I am sorry...”
Jin Hyeon apologized again.
Yeon Sowol quietly looked down at him.
His face was young.
Strictly speaking, he was only one or two years younger than Yeon Sowol. But at that age, a difference of one or two years was huge.
If this were South Korea, would he be a second-year or third-year high school student?
‘Thinking of it that way makes me feel even worse for him.’
If South Korean high school students were judged by their grades, Wudang disciples seemed to be judged by their martial arts.
‘People said that even in the twenty-first century, grades were not everything.’
There were countless examples of people who succeeded without even finishing high school.
All sorts of celebrities, YouTubers, rich people on social media...
‘But that was not how it felt to us.’
That was how it had been when he thought back to his own days as a student.
When he was in school, studying had felt like the whole world.
No matter how often he heard that one could succeed through other talents, those words never truly reached his heart.
‘He probably feels the same way.’
But.
Even so.
Yeon Sowol thought Jin Hyeon needed to know.
‘This is a truly incredible level.’
Scentlessness.
The more he turned that word over in his mind, the deeper its meaning became.
The Yin-Yang Divine Art.
And Grafting Flowers onto a Tree.
How could Chungdam True Man blend his qi into endlessly changing currents of qi? How could he stand atop them? How could he read and calculate them so quickly?
A clue settled into Yeon Sowol’s heart.
‘Scentlessness.’
Things that were always beside one, things one had grown accustomed to and could no longer sense.
Perhaps qi was like that too.
The slowest, plainest currents of qi.
Yet currents of qi that were always present nearby.
They were so ordinary that one often forgot they existed, though they were truly always there.
‘If I can recognize them. If I can breathe with them and weave my qi upon them...’
Like Dragon-Head Incense.
Vwoong-
Woo-woong-
True qi stirred within his Eight Extraordinary Vessels.
His qi sense settled calmly.
The qi Yeon Sowol held, qi resembling the universe, began resonating with the qi outside him.
It mixed with and intertwined with those currents of qi that had always existed, but which he so often forgot because they were too natural and familiar.
Yeon Sowol was certain.
‘This is an enlightenment that will let me reach the next stage.’
A huge crack had just opened in the wall that had completely blocked his path.
So Yeon Sowol had to say it.
“A trivial skill? No one recognizes it?”
“I-I am sorry...”
“Jin Hyeon.”
“Yes. Yes, Great-Grand Martial Uncle.”
“Then perhaps you were scentlessness.”
“Pardon?”
“No one recognizes you. No one even knows whether you are there. But perhaps the fragrance called Wudang is actually woven upon you.”
Like Dragon-Head Incense.
“Ah...?”
Jin Hyeon raised his head.
He stared blankly at Yeon Sowol.
“Thank you. Thanks to you, I gained a great enlightenment.”
Tap.
Yeon Sowol patted Jin Hyeon’s shoulder.
Then, without saying anything further, he passed him and descended the mountain.
He headed back toward Celestial Pillar Peak.
Toward the thatched cottage of Chungdam True Man.
“T-Take care, Great-Grand Martial Uncle!”
Jin Hyeon stared blankly at Yeon Sowol’s retreating figure, then hurriedly came to his senses. He abruptly bowed and rose again.
It had only been a moment.
But when he raised his head, Yeon Sowol was gone.
“...Huh?”
He unconsciously took a few steps downhill and craned his neck over the path below the cliff, but Yeon Sowol was nowhere to be seen.
Had it been a dream?
But the sensation of that hand upon his shoulder was too clear.
“Scentlessness...”
The echo left by that one word was scorching, like a burn.
“Scentlessness...”
A smile twitched across Jin Hyeon’s lips.
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