WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: BerageeBomb
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◈ I Obtained the Martial God’s Book ◈
Chapter 20: Ghost Sword Art
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I stood before the skeleton for a long time, holding the burning pine torch.
I felt I ought to pay my respects and pray for his soul to rest in peace.
But I had no idea what sort of gesture would be proper.
A full bow on the ground seemed too much for someone I’d never met in life.
Yet simply walking past would be wrong for someone who had come to obtain his martial arts.
No, it would be wrong for any decent person.
I held the pine torch off to one side, bent at the waist, and bowed my head deeply toward the skeleton.
In the cult’s ranks, he had been a senior so far above me that I could hardly have looked up at him.
But before the bones left after flesh and blood had rotted away, titles and ranks meant nothing.
Just then, the pine torch in my hand flickered in a faint draft.
At last, my eyes settled on the wall that the Ghost Sword Demon Venerable’s empty skull seemed to gaze at with such longing.
* * *
It covered an entire wall of the cavern.
Sword marks filled it from the floor to the very top of the ceiling.
There were hundreds of lines.
No, there seemed to be over a thousand.
I tried counting them but gave up at a hundred.
The first line at the far left was shallow.
It was a weak, crooked line that trembled.
It resembled the final sword marks I had seen deep in the valley.
Yet it felt less like a sword at the end of its strength and more like one just beginning to sprout.
As my eyes moved right, the lines changed noticeably.
They became fiercely straight.
The trembling at the sword’s tip disappeared.
And at the far right were the final nine lines.
Before those nine lines lay a handspan of blank space, without a single mark.
It seemed like a place where he had taken a long, deep breath before pouring out everything he had.
Beyond that space, the rock had been sliced as smoothly as tofu.
Each line was deep enough to fit three fingers inside.
This was the legacy of a dying man who had wrung out his soul and pressed it into the rock.
The far left was his beginning, and the far right was his end.
One person’s entire life with the sword lay across this single wall.
This was the Ghost Sword Art.
I had known its name for some time.
The explanation that appeared in the corner of the screen had told me.
But standing before the stone wall was different.
Behind that name, insight I had never known came pouring in like a waterfall.
How far the Ghost Sword Demon Venerable had reached in martial arts with this art, and where he had finally struck his limit and stopped, flooded into me as living knowledge rather than words on a page.
It was on an entirely different level from when I had seen the swords of the Azure Cloud Sword Sect or the Qingcheng Sect.
Back then, only a name and a brief history had come to mind.
Where else in the world could there be a record that revealed the form of a martial art so clearly?
Had he carved it so that even an illiterate fool could read the principles of his sword?
No, perhaps he had carved it into rock because his realm could not be contained in words.
As if bewitched, I staggered closer and fixed my eyes on that faint first line to the left.
It happened at that moment.
The Book of the Martial God pulsed inside my chest as if it were exploding.
Thump.
It wasn’t my heart beating.
It felt as though a blazing furnace had overturned inside my chest.
My vision turned white in a flash.
Time did not merely slow down.
All time stopped in an instant.
The flickering flame of the pine torch in my hand froze in the air like a fossil.
In a world where even sound had vanished, only one sound struck my eardrums.
It was the Book of the Martial God, coiled beside my heart, beating against my ribs from within like a drum.
Then the wall moved.
The dead strokes pressed into the rock rose vividly to life, as though time were rewinding.
They followed the exact order in which the Ghost Sword Demon Venerable had carved them.
Before the first line stood a shadow as faint as gray mist.
It wore the black robes of the Demonic Cult.
Its features were erased, leaving no face to see.
But the hand gripping the sword and the path its blade followed were clear.
With a trembling hand, the shadow struggled to raise its heavy sword and drew a shallow, crooked path across the blank wall.
The moment the first line was carved came alive before my eyes, crossing decades of time.
Was it an illusion?
Or a remnant of memory that had seeped into the rock?
I could not tell.
What had been carved into the rock was not a sword mark.
It was the sword itself.
My eyes were so dry that they stung as though they might split, but I could not close them.
I felt that if I blinked even once, this sight would vanish forever.
The strength drained from my knees.
Still holding the pine torch, I sank heavily onto the dirt floor.
After carving one line, the shadow staggered half a step to the side and drew the next, then the one after that.
The farther right it went, the less the strokes trembled.
The grooves gradually grew deeper and heavier.
Using the stone wall as a canvas, one person was growing into a martial artist.
* * *
The shadow in the vision carved the wall in pain.
There was none of the presence of a martial artist who had once commanded the world.
The sword did not roar like thunder.
Nor did dust from the split rock gleam as it rode currents of internal energy.
His ruined body had not a scrap of strength left for such things.
After drawing a stroke, the shadow rested his forehead against the cold stone wall.
Then he spent a long time gasping for breath.
I could not tell whether he was coughing up blood or suffering a cough that threatened to tear him apart.
Then he gritted his teeth and raised the heavy sword again.
Some strokes he could not even draw while standing.
He crawled forward on his knees, sat down, and swung his arm to carve them.
Yet whenever one of those powerless strokes touched the wall, an entirely different vision burst forth.
One straight downward line became hundreds of thrusts that poured down like heavy rain.
At the end of each path, the throat of an enemy facing him was pierced and burst open.
As a diagonal line was drawn, a fortress gate split vertically down the middle.
The iron-plated gate collapsed like dry firewood.
Three short, sharply broken strokes revealed three overlapping, blood-soaked battlefields.
A figure in black walked through the middle of hundreds of spears, holding only a broken sword.
Wherever he passed, the upright spear shafts fell like bundles of harvested rice.
A smooth slash through the air opened onto a battle to the death in the rain.
Raindrops fell clear of the path the sword traveled.
On that uncanny night, only the sword’s path remained untouched by rain.
A stroke that swept around his body revealed a desperate battle against encircling enemies.
A spearhead stabbed from a blind spot behind him.
Without even turning, the man in black let it slide past as though he were dancing.
Even behind his back, beyond his sight, his sword already controlled the enemy’s approach.
Then there was a deep, heavily pressed stroke.
It showed the man in black standing alone on a high platform inside a grand hall, with hundreds kneeling at his feet.
It was a stroke from his prime, when the whole world had feared him as the Ghost Sword Demon Venerable.
The stroke he seemed to have carved while recalling those days held the coldest edge of all.
The old man’s strokes against the wall had no strength.
Yet what they held was heavy enough to crush Mount Tai.
It was sword intent pushed to its limit, and a deep killing intent.
The shadow sometimes dropped his sword.
He dropped it, felt around to pick it up, then dropped it again.
Toward the end, he wrapped both hands around the hilt and scraped the rock with what remained of his body weight.
Blood flowed between his split fingers and seeped along the strokes.
Only then did I understand why some marks on the stone wall were so dark.
It was not grime built up over the years.
It was blood shed by a martial artist as he wrung out his soul.
Seated on the ground, I watched the glory and shame of one person’s entire life unfold from the left end of the wall to the right.
The strokes in the first section were shallow and hasty, the sword of a novice sometimes gripped by the fear of death.
The visions they revealed were young and fragile too.
An old wooden sword broke in two, and blood burst from a nose.
A scrawny boy fell and crashed into the dirt of a training ground countless times.
Those were days of brutal training.
Past the middle section, the force of the strokes began to change.
This was the sword of the battlefield.
Bloody struggles in which he cut down enemies, suffered wounds himself, then rose to cut them down again.
In the visions, the bodies piling at his feet grew beyond counting.
More and more of those who fell wore the Demonic Cult’s black robes.
The white martial uniforms of the Orthodox Faction formed mountains as well.
His sword did not judge friend or foe by the color of their clothes.
As the strokes entered the final section, their weight reached an entirely different level.
Each light stroke sent a ringing vibration beyond the wall and into the very bones of the mountain.
This was the sword of the Ghost Sword Demon Venerable.
It was the farthest edge a person could reach through a lifetime of devotion.
And at last, he reached the final place.
He stood before the handspan of blank space.
The shadow came to a heavy halt.
He rested the trembling sword tip on the ground, using it as a cane.
His shoulders rose and fell once in a great movement.
It was a final breath drawn by squeezing out what remained of his life.
Then he drew nine lines.
With every stroke he carved, the entire cavern resounded as though the earth were shaking.
The moment the ninth stroke ended, the shadow turned his head slightly toward the stone wall, seeming to gaze at it with affection, and sat cross-legged with perfect composure.
He laid the sword neatly across both knees.
After that, he never moved again.
The carving was complete.
Now it was my turn.
In the vision, the thousand or so sword marks each unraveled into dozens, even hundreds of paths and poured into my mind.
They swirled like a typhoon.
Then something strange happened.
Strokes born from the same seed began to recognize one another and cling together.
A hundred paths gathered into ten.
Strokes whose movements overlapped merged smoothly.
Anything useless in actual combat was erased without mercy.
I did not even need to think through how to sort them.
When the swirling stopped, my mind was as clear and quiet as a morning after snow.
Within that stillness, only five principles stood tall and shone.
The first principle was Soul Pursuit.
It was a single-point thrust that chased straight after an enemy’s soul and ended their life.
It was the straight line that formed the foundation and beginning of every stroke.
A vision unfolded.
A single dry leaf circled in the air ten steps away.
The sword tip drove forward without wavering and pierced only one vein in the leaf.
Not a breath of wind leaked wastefully past the point it pierced.
Speed was only the beginning.
It was a killing sword that reached through blind spots with a straightness that knew no bend.
The second principle was Spirit Seizure.
It was a chain of slashes that tore away an enemy’s spirit.
One martial form called forth a second, and the second snapped into a third, biting as relentlessly as a snake.
In the vision, the man’s three slashes flowed together like a single swing.
While an opponent’s hand still tingled from deflecting the first strike, the second blade was already at their throat.
Anyone who dodged the second found themselves standing before the third, already resigned to their fate.
Every direction was blocked.
It was a relentless sword that allowed no time even to catch a breath.
The third principle was Ghost Wail.
It was an illusion sword that tore through the air with the cries of hell, wailing along nine paths.
There was clearly only one sword in the vision.
Yet to the person facing it, nine cold blue blades rushed in from different directions, each crying out.
That wail was not a sound heard with the ears, but one that froze the soul.
While the opponent tried to choose which sword was real, their severed head was already rolling across the ground.
It was an uncanny sword that shook and paralyzed both spirit and fighting will.
The fourth principle was Heartbreak.
It was a single horizontal flash of heart-rending cold.
As the vision unfolded, my breath caught.
The man made one light horizontal stroke.
An entire wall of rock split, and its upper half slid down.
I could not even see the path the sword had taken.
All that remained was a surface as smooth as a mirror and the sound of wind arriving a moment late.
The fifth principle was Ghost Gate.
It was the final realm, where nine strokes opened the gate to hell.
These were the final nine lines at the far right of the stone wall.
In the vision, the man’s sword drew nine heavy strokes in the air.
The strokes intertwined to form a gate, and then the tightly closed gate slid open.
Beyond it lay only darkness with no visible end.
The instant the gate opened, people, iron weapons, and rocks had all been split without exception.
The gate did not open after the sword cut them.
When the gate opened, they had already been cut.
It was a sword with no moment of cutting at all.
The five principles settled into the deepest part of me.
Then the blank spaces between the strokes seeped into the places that remained and filled them.
Those spaces were not empty.
They were the breathing that formed the foundation of martial arts.
Where to draw in a breath, where to lower it, and along which bones and paths to circulate inner qi were written like a code in the silence between the strokes.
If the strokes were the sword techniques that cut down enemies, the spaces were the cultivation method that supplied their power.
How to swing the sword and how to breathe had been one inseparable whole from the beginning.
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