WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Oblivious
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◈ Murim in my Hometown ◈
Chapter 24: Saber Techniques and Sword Techniques
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“You mean those venomous snakes from Sichuan?”
“Is there another Tang Clan in Sichuan?”
Hong Hui remained composed, but I could not.
“Do you not wish to take the job?”
“I've heard quite a lot. They say things rarely end well for those who get involved with the Tang Clan.”
Won Seogang, who had been listening, snorted.
“Are you afraid they'll kill everyone to silence them?”
Hong Hui smiled and continued.
“Don't worry. Even the Tang Clan would not dare make an enemy of the Hao clan. The Tang Clan's influence may be considerable, but all of its power is confined to Sichuan. They are venomous snakes trapped inside a jar...”
I already knew all of this.
The Sichuan Tang Clan was a martial family that had grown powerful by earning a notorious reputation for poison and hidden weapons in Sichuan, a province controlled by the Mount Qingcheng Sect and Emei Sect.
They were extremely wary of their family's secret arts leaking outside, so they had established no branches in other regions, or even elsewhere within Sichuan.
Like snakes hiding in a burrow, they had built a large clan settlement called Tanggata and shut themselves inside. They were so closed off that they did not even marry their daughters away, instead bringing men into the family as husbands.
“That is why the Tang Clan has long obtained information on the Central Plains beyond Sichuan through our organization. If they harm us and sour our relationship, the Tang Clan's eyes and ears in the Central Plains will be shut completely. If they do not know what is happening in the world, they will be helpless until their enemies are holding daggers beneath their chins. They have accumulated as much resentment as their notoriety warrants, so the Tang Clan will not make such a foolish move.”
The Hao clan's intelligence network was impressive, but the Tang Clan did have alternatives.
“What about the Beggars' Sect? They belong to the same Orthodox Faction, so they could work together.”
“The Beggars' Sect has very close ties with the Nine Great Sects. Its current sect leader is an elder of the Martial Alliance, so anything the Tang Clan asks of them will be reported straight to the Martial Alliance's leadership. Do you know about the relationship between the Martial Alliance and the Tang Clan?”
“I heard it isn't good.”
Won Seogang let out a dry laugh.
“Heh heh heh. It is worse than merely not good. Is there any sect in the world on friendly terms with the Tang Clan? They are only called one of the Five Great Families and members of the Orthodox Faction. It would not be strange if they were branded an Unorthodox Faction and declared public enemies of the martial world tomorrow.”
Won Seogang's support added force to Hong Hui's words.
“That is why the Tang Clan needs the Hao clan's eyes and ears all the more desperately. Over the past several decades, our organization has handled the Tang Clan's requests countless times. We have occasionally failed a job, but we have never been stabbed in the back.”
“How long would we be guarding them?”
“Five days for now. You can decide then whether to extend the term.”
“What is the payment?”
“Three taels of silver per day.”
“Who are we guarding for them to pay that much? Is the murderer they are pursuing some demonic master from Tianshan?”
“You will find out when you meet them.”
“Are the three of us here the ones being hired?”
“That is right. It seems Hero Won has accepted already...”
When the pavilion master turned her gaze toward him, the monk rose from his seat.
“Call me when it is time to depart. I will wait at my residence.”
The pavilion master watched the monk leave, then turned her gaze toward me.
“What about Hero Jeong?”
“...I'll think about it.”
“Please do. There is still plenty of time.”
As she had promised before, the pavilion master did not pressure me to take the job. If I refused, she would probably call another guest hire from the annexes.
Once outside, Won Seogang walked beside me and spoke.
“Why not come with me? Is this not a good opportunity to get acquainted with the Tang Clan?”
“What would I need to know them for?”
“Do you not know that connections are more frightening and useful than peerless martial arts? If you have the Hao clan behind you and know people from the Tang Clan, you will be safe even if you happen to clash with the Tang Clan later. Who knows? You might even get your hands on a useful hidden weapon.”
“Are you scared to go alone?”
“Scared? I just feel rather uneasy about going with only that bald monk.”
“Is that monk a guest hire too?”
“That is what I heard.”
“You do not seem very close.”
“I do not even know his name.”
Getting acquainted with people from the Tang Clan...
I had seen Tang Clan members a few times when I went to Chengdu, Sichuan, in the past.
They were ordinary humans with eyes, noses, and mouths like everyone else, but disputes between martial artists could erupt in an instant, so I had kept far away from them.
If the Hao clan guaranteed them, I did want to see for myself what sort of people those infamous human venomous snakes were.
Perhaps they would be less impressive in person than the rumors suggested.
Martial artists were often overrated, but rarely underestimated.
“Let us go together.”
“A wise decision.”
“On one condition.”
“What is it?”
“Let us have a spar.”
“Are you trying to kick the groin you missed last time?”
“You would evade it again anyway. Have you found the man you were looking for?”
Won Seogang shook his head with a hardened expression.
“He is hiding deep inside the Black Night Gang and will not even show his head. Tch, I was too hasty. I made a mistake by rushing in as soon as I spotted him. Have you considered the offer I made before?”
“Forget it. If you want to perish together with the Black Night Gang, do it alone.”
The annex where Won Seogang stayed stood against the end of the wall on the right.
The inside was smaller than I expected.
It had a modest two-room tiled house, a small rear garden, one side room, and a stone-paved training ground about five jang across.
That was all.
Compared with the pavilion master's elegant residence, it was not merely simple. It was almost shabby.
It looked like the home of a martial artist living in seclusion in some deep mountain valley.
While Won Seogang rummaged through a pile of odds and ends beside the house, I looked around.
Small wooden Buddha statues, each about the size of a handspan, were packed tightly along the wooden porch and windowsills.
The dozens of standing statues all wore the same kindly smile and held the same pose.
Their right palms were raised to shoulder height, while their lowered left palms faced outward as well.
They looked as though they were seeing off someone departing on a long journey. Or perhaps reassuring them that there were no weapons in their hands.
“Are these Maitreya Buddhas?”
Won Seogang turned with an odd look in his eyes.
“You know them?”
“Is there anyone who does not know Maitreya Buddha?”
I wondered whether the bald monk had made them, but then noticed a half-carved statue.
Wood chips were scattered nearby, along with several small carving knives of different sizes, neatly arranged.
“Did you make these statues yourself?”
“I carved them.”
“All of them?”
Won Seogang continued sorting through the pile as he answered evenly.
“When your mind is clouded by worries, it helps to focus on something simple. You never know where a person's talent may lie. You have to try whatever comes your way before you discover something you are good at. If I had known I had talent for woodworking before I picked up a sword, perhaps I would have gone down that path instead. Here, take this.”
What he tossed to me was a wooden sword made to closely resemble a real sword.
“I made it before because I had someone to teach, and now it will be useful again. To display your true skill, you should use a weapon you are accustomed to, but that would surely cause trouble, so let us use these.”
Once we stood facing each other in the middle of the training ground, Won Seogang wore a serious expression as he began spouting nonsense.
“You will not kick me in the groin today either, will you? Go easy on me. Am I not too old to become a eunuch and enter the palace?”
My kick last time had not gone anywhere near his groin, yet Won Seogang had been going on about it ever since.
Just as one would expect from a fussy swordsman, this man was secretly rather vindictive too.
“Let us not use fists or kicks. We will use only wooden swords.”
“Just what I wanted.”
I raised my wooden sword over my head and slowly took the opening stance of the Nameless Saber Art.
Won Seogang adjusted his grip and raised his wooden sword to eye level.
After visualizing the forms of the Nameless Saber Art in my mind, I pushed off the ground and charged him.
In a real battle, I would have unleashed the continuous slashes I had the most confidence in, the forms best suited to saber techniques.
But since I was here to learn, I chose a thrust.
Won Seogang's eyes twitched when I attacked a swordsman with a thrust.
Crack!
Won Seogang gently knocked aside the tip of my wooden sword, then counterattacked from a strange, curved angle.
I had sensed it during our brief clash in the alley, but Won Seogang's swordsmanship was truly difficult to deal with.
When I sparred Pung Gangik, saber techniques colliding with saber techniques had carried an invigorating thrill that made my blood boil.
True to his nature as a swordsman, Won Seogang's methods were incredibly treacherous. He deflected and redirected my saber strikes, then thrust viciously from blind spots.
It was a chilling sort of thrust, like cutting through dense brush with a blade only for venomous snakes to spring out from every direction.
Though we used wooden swords, every form targeted vital acupoints and weak spots. If I showed even the slightest opening, it would be all over in one strike.
This was why one could not relax for even a moment when facing a true swordsman.
The hair on my back stood on end, and my breathing gradually became rougher.
I suppressed the survival instinct urging me to throw unpredictable punches and kicks, fighting with only the wooden sword.
One nerve-racking exchange after another accumulated, and more than thirty exchanges passed with difficulty.
As though deciding that was enough, Won Seogang swung his wooden sword and opened a considerable distance between us, ending the spar.
“Let us stop here.”
Once the tightly drawn tension broke, the breath I had held back spilled out.
“I was too distracted to observe properly last time, but now that I have seen it today, your saber techniques are quite unusual.”
I wiped the sweat from my face and nodded.
Most of the masters among the people who had fought me and survived said something similar.
Even Pung Gangik, who had been driven into a corner badly enough to bring out the spearmanship he had concealed, had admired the solid foundation of my saber techniques.
But Won Seogang pointed out something entirely different.
“To incorporate the principles of swordsmanship into saber techniques, I doubt this was your own idea. Your martial school must be quite a handful.”
“Swordsmanship?”
When I blinked at the unfamiliar words, Won Seogang clicked his tongue as though he had expected it.
“Tsk, tsk. You did not know? You only imitated the sword path in that thrust. No wonder you could not bring it out properly.”
“What do you mean by the principles of swordsmanship?”
Won Seogang raised his wooden sword and lightly thrust it through the air.
It was an ordinary strike, yet everything about it differed from the thrusts in my saber techniques, from the movement of his elbow to the path of the sword tip.
“Most thrusting forms in saber techniques are simple attacks relying on strength or speed. You slash, block, and slash again, then simply thrust when you see an opening. Swordsmanship, on the other hand, contains its essence in the thrust. It concentrates on a single point, like using a judge's brush to strike an acupoint no larger than a little fingernail. I believe the saber techniques you just used must have clashed with swordsmanship for a long time, absorbing the sword path into their thrusts.”
“Can you tell which sect those saber techniques are from?”
Won Seogang gave a dry laugh.
“That is what I should be asking you... Do you not even know your martial school? Are you the successor of a sect that was destroyed?”
“He never taught me to the end.”
“Hmm.”
Won Seogang stroked his beard for a long moment before speaking.
“I have no way of knowing the circumstances, but if I were to use my imagination... I do not know what saber sect it was, but it seems it bore a deep grudge against a powerful sword sect. Perhaps it acquired this while seeking a way to break swordsmanship.”
“Could it not have developed through exchanges with a sword sect?”
It seemed unlikely, but not impossible.
“There are limits to that. The martial arts passed down by most sects are refined and developed by talented later generations. Forms may change in the process, but their fundamental categories never change. It is practically taboo. Saber techniques grow only within the category of saber techniques, and swordsmanship only within the category of swordsmanship.”
“Would it not be good to take the strengths of both?”
Won Seogang shook his head.
“Trying to overcome your weaknesses and maximizing your strengths. Which do you think would make you stronger?”
“Probably the latter.”
That was how I had survived too. I found what I was good at and did my best at it.
“Correct. A weakness is a weakness because you lack talent there. No matter how hard you try, you can only approach other people's average. In the process, it is easy to lose even the strengths you had. You become something mediocre, neither this nor that. All inborn talent lies in one's strengths. You must focus on them to achieve anything, whether in martial arts or in life.”
Won Seogang lightly swung his wooden sword, demonstrating a slash and a thrust.
“If saber techniques focus on thrusts by clumsily incorporating the principles of swordsmanship because their thrusts are weak, then their strength, slashing, becomes weaker. The reverse is also true. No sword sect incorporates the principles of saber techniques into its slashes.”
I recalled the bloody battles I had fought with countless martial artists.
Saber wielders used saber techniques, swordsmen used swordsmanship, and the riffraff used whatever they could.
As Won Seogang said, I had never seen martial arts that mixed saber techniques and swordsmanship together.
“You can forcibly combine two incompatible principles, but becoming a master through that would be difficult without extraordinary talent. It is no surprise that you cannot properly bring out the sword path contained within those saber thrusts. How should I put this... Even viewed favorably, it is a gamble. No matter how I look at it, it feels like a desperate last struggle. If it goes wrong, the saber techniques themselves could collapse.”
Why had the unknown martial school inserted the sword path into the Nameless Saber Art despite such problems?
If they had accepted even the principles of swordsmanship and developed them because they needed to win somehow, they must have been in truly desperate circumstances.
I remembered the one-armed saber wielder I had met in Zhejiang.
We had never formally become master and disciple, and I had always called him Hero. Still, he was the only master who had taught me saber techniques.
Had he been expelled from his school? Or had he lost his left arm and become one-armed when his school was destroyed?
Had he barely escaped with his life, then refused to establish a master-disciple relationship or tell me his martial school because he feared I would suffer the same disaster?
Was this it...?
That frustrating, ticklish sense that there had to be something more whenever I used the Nameless Saber Art. That unclear feeling of being blocked by a wall.
I could perform the thrusting forms of the Nameless Saber Art with my eyes closed.
I had practiced them hundreds, thousands of times, but I had never dreamed that a sword path was hidden within them.
None of the masters who had fought me had mentioned it either.
Then again, who had time to analyze, admire, or judge an opponent's forms in real combat? We had been too busy trying to kill each other.
Once again, I deeply realized just how profound Won Seogang's martial skill was.
For some reason, I also felt empty.
No matter how much I swung a blade in real combat, all I gained were tricks and a worse temperament. To properly improve my martial skill, I needed to learn even a single move from masters like this.
This must be why rising junior talents raised in prestigious martial families went around cutting down blade-for-hires who had spent decades scraping by.
I lowered my wooden sword, performed a respectful fist-and-palm salute, and bowed.
“Thank you for your instruction.”
Won Seogang nodded with a strangely pleased expression.
“Then will you come with me to crush the Black Night Gang?”
“Stop talking nonsense and let us spar some more.”
“Let us rest first. The sun is too strong.”
Won Seogang wiped his sweat and dropped onto the shaded wooden porch. With no other choice, I sat down on one side as well.
After resting briefly over cooled tea, we picked up our wooden swords again and returned to the training ground.
The afternoon sun beat down fiercely, but I did not know when I would have another chance to learn from Won Seogang.
I performed the saber techniques with all my strength. Under Won Seogang's guidance, it felt as though I could faintly grasp the true form of the sword path contained in the thrusts.
Near sunset, our sparring was regrettably interrupted by someone knocking on the door.
When we opened it, a servant employed by Geuk Hwan bowed.
“The pavilion master is looking for you. The guests have arrived.”
My clothes clung to my body, drenched in sweat as though I had been caught in the rain, but I had no spare clothes to change into.
I merely washed my face with cold water and left with Won Seogang.
The servant did not lead us to the pavilion master's residence. It was another annex, just as spacious and well-appointed as where she stayed.
Three houses stood suitably apart to the left, right, and rear, and there was even a small pond in the middle so that it could be admired from anywhere.
Unfamiliar martial artists wandered around the pond.
“So those are the people.”
At Won Seogang's words, I quietly nodded.
They wore ordinary martial robes and swords at their waists, but the atmosphere they gave off was noticeably different. As we drew closer, it became certain.
The client the pavilion master had mentioned.
They were members of the Tang Clan.
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