WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: HidingTurtle

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◈ Raised by a Ruthless Swordsman ◈

Chapter 1: Entering the Mountain

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Scrape, scrape.

A hunk of steel slid roughly across the whetstone. The vibration of metal being ground away traveled up my wrist.

I shifted my weight evenly from shoulder to elbow. The blade brushed the whetstone with steady force.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw dawn breaking beyond the distant ridge.

The red morning glow settled on the blade. My face was reflected in the blue-honed edge.

Sunken cheeks. Hollow eyes streaked with red. Long hair grown out in every direction.

Rough stubble lined my jaw over skin darkened by the sun.

When I stopped and raised my head, a sight in one corner of the yard came into view.

An elder sat cross-legged atop a large flat rock in the yard, his eyes gently closed.

The elder's gaunt body did not move in the slightest as it received the morning dew, as though he had become part of the stone.

A hollow chuckle escaped my lips as I stared at that incongruous calm.

Why the hell was I here, doing this?

* * *

The distant past always came back to me in hazy fragments.

I must have been ten that year.

The place where I lived was a small fishing village just outside a rather large port city.

The smell of the sea always clung to our clothes. Gray plank roofs, weathered by the salty sea wind, pressed shoulder to shoulder, while narrow, winding dirt paths ran between them toward the fish market.

At dawn, seagull cries tore through the mist. In the evening, the lights cast by great merchant ships in the distant harbor scattered across the horizon.

Our home was a small mud-walled house at the village entrance. The wind slipping through the kitchen door always seemed to carry a fishy smell.

That was the sort of village it was.

I remembered that year as one of particular abundance at sea. Even my blunt father, hardened by the rough ocean wind, always seemed to have a smile on his face.

One evening, precious meat appeared on the table. I still could not forget the warmth of the brazier and the scent of sizzling fat.

The memory of our family of four huddling around the table and filling our bellies remained vivid.

It was such a hazy, warm, ordinary evening.

Then, not long afterward, came that day. As usual, Father had gone out on the fishing boat, and Mother had gone to sell fish.

That damned day when I knew nothing and rolled around on the dirt, playing with my seven-year-old little sister.

My memory of that morning began with a thick stench of blood.

An elder drenched in blood crawled into our yard and fell to his knees at my feet. He gasped harshly for breath and begged for water, looking exactly like a dying person.

He wore clothes I had never seen anyone in the village wear.

He had on something like a wide robe that fell to the tops of his feet. It appeared to have originally been bluish, but it was stained dark red in places.

I thought there had been some sort of round pattern embroidered over his chest. It had been too long ago for me to remember clearly.

His long white hair was coiled in a knot atop his head, with a wooden hairpin through it. Even that had come loose on one side, and white strands, matted with blood and dust, stuck to his cheeks.

Back then, I was not such a bad child that I could drive away a bleeding elder.

Even now, I sometimes regretted it. What if I had ignored him? What if I had run into the room and bolted the door?

I remembered helping the elder onto the raised wooden platform, then fetching water from the well and pouring it between his cracked lips.

After drinking, the elder did not move for a long while. As my sister clutched my trouser leg and watched with curious eyes, the elder's harsh, metallic breathing gradually grew steady.

Thank goodness.

My relief lasted only a moment.

The elder slowly opened his eyes. His clouded pupils sharpened with life, then rolled toward me.

I stepped back at the incomprehensible chill that ran through me, but it was useless.

Without a trace of the weakness that had made him cough blood, the elder smoothly rose from the platform. Looking back, it was a strange form of footwork in which his upper body did not move at all.

Only then did I notice the scabbard hidden at his waist.

Before I could even turn to run, a pressure as immense as Mount Tai fell on my shoulder. My ten-year-old collarbone creaked beneath a grip that felt as though it would crush it.

“Come with me,” or something like that. The elder said it so suddenly. For a moment, I wondered whether he was some elderly relative.

But there was something in the air around him. A deep madness that no blood relative could ever show.

My startled little sister gripped my hand tightly and hiccupped. The elder's eyes rolled toward her.

That was all.

Yet instinctively, I understood.

The moment my sister burst into tears, the elder would calmly snap her neck.

“Yeona, don't cry. I'll come back after a hundred nights.”

I remembered those words clearly. Thinking about it now, I wondered why I had said something so strange.

But it had come from instinct.

Ah, and at that age, one hundred was the largest number I knew.

Anyway, after blurting out that clumsy lie, I looked up at the elder.

The elder silently looked down at me before speaking in a low voice.

“After a hundred nights have passed, I will send you back.”

Perhaps the elder decided it would be better if my sister did not cry. The elder must have understood my intent and played along.

Even if it was a lie, there was nothing a child like me could do. I could only stroke my sister once to keep her from crying, then follow him.

Once I crossed the familiar threshold of my home, I could see the tents of the fish market in the distance, where my mother would be.

I considered screaming, but forced myself not to. If I screamed, Mother would come running, and the elder would kill her too.

With my head lowered, I took heavy steps in the opposite direction. The sight of those familiar alleys gradually growing distant continued to haunt my nightmares until only a few years ago.

We traveled along the main roads, sleeping outdoors night after night.

Sometimes, the elder disappeared at night. Whenever that happened, faint sounds of metal came from far away. They must have been the sounds of swords striking each other.

Each time, I wished the elder would die. I hoped whoever that unknown opponent was would kill him and save me.

But this damned world had no intention of granting my wish. The elder was always the one who returned.

Once, the elder came back covered in blood from head to toe, and I let myself hope. But when I saw that he was not injured, I finally gave up hope.

Perhaps a little over a month had passed when, as the wind began to turn cold, we left the road for the first time and started up a mountain.

We climbed for a long time. Could climbing a mountain have been easy for a child? Only when I was on the verge of collapsing, with my breath caught in my throat, did we finally stop.

To my surprise, there was a small cabin halfway up that unfamiliar mountain. As if he had known it was there all along, the elder entered it as comfortably as if it were his own home.

For the first few days, all I thought about was escaping. I even tried it once.

But the mountain was too deep. I had no idea where to go.

Before half a day had passed, the elder stood in my path. I had no idea how he had known where to find me.

The elder did not beat or scold me. He merely said one thing.

“Each time you run away, I will cut off one part of your sister's body and bring it back.”

After that, I gave up the thought of escaping. He would not actually travel all that way while leaving me alone, but I had no desire to gamble with my sister's life.

Several more days passed.

The elder threw something at me. It was a crude but carefully carved wooden sword.

Only then did I finally understand why he had brought me there.

It was for damned martial arts.

There was only one reason an elder who went about drenched in blood would put a sword in a child's hand.

From that day, daily training began.

I woke at dawn and swung the sword. Just as the elder ordered. The same movement hundreds of times. The same breathing thousands of times.

My palms split and bled. After a few days, calluses formed. The calluses cracked, and I bled again.

When the sun stood high in the sky, the elder came and crossed swords with me. Every day, I nearly died in that single exchange.

The elder's wooden sword struck my shoulder, ribs, and shins. My bruises never had time to fade.

When the sun set, I swung the sword again. Just as the elder ordered. The same movements, the same breathing.

Each day passed like the one before it. Sword at dawn, an exchange at noon, sword in the evening.

There was nothing else to do in the mountains, and the elder gave me nothing else to do. He did not even tell me his name.

There was only one reason I could endure those terrible days.

The hope that if I learned the sword, I might be able to kill the elder.

If I killed him, I could return. To the fish market tents. To Father and Mother. To Yeona.

The hundred nights he had promised had long since passed, but if I could only return.

Every time I received the elder's sword during our daily exchange, I thought of nothing else. One day, this sword would turn from me toward him. One day, I would cut this person's flesh.

But considering the elder's martial prowess, it would surely not be easy. I could never forget what I saw when I secretly followed him one day.

There were five opponents, all dressed in dark indigo robes. Each held a sword. Their scabbards were neat, and there was no disorder in their stances. Yet since all five wore the same color, I could not tell who was who from where I hid in the distance.

The elder stood at their center.

The man in front shouted something at him. He was too far away for me to hear the words. As I remembered it, the elder did not answer.

When the man drew his sword, the other four followed. Five swords pointed at the elder at once.

They faced each other for a moment.

Then all five rushed in at the same time. One stabbed at his chest from the front, two slashed at his sides, and the others aimed for his back. Swords poured toward him from every direction.

I clenched my fists, thinking the elder would finally die.

But the damned elder did not retreat.

Instead, he stepped forward. He moved directly toward the sword stabbing at his chest.

The sword in front barely grazed the elder's shoulder. Because he stepped in, the blade failed to cut him and missed, extending behind his back. Beyond it stood the companion who had been aiming for the elder's back.

The five-man joint attack became tangled by that single step. Looking back, it seemed the elder had read their combined assault from the beginning.

The two men in the rear hesitated as they tried to withdraw their swords. Only then did the elder's sword leave its scabbard.

I did not see the drawing motion.

But in the next moment, the elder's sword had deeply sliced open the side of the man in front. The man staggered another step forward, but before he could take two more, his knees buckled.

He must have died immediately. I saw something spill out of his body in a heap.

At once, another man pulled back his sword and slashed again. The blade came down from above. The elder raised his sword to meet it.

Clang!

But it was not the sound of blades rebounding from each other. The elder took the blade at an angle and guided its force to the side. The man's sword slid along the elder's blade.

At the end of that motion, the man's balance collapsed.

The elder thrust into the opening. His sword shot forward and buried itself in the man's chest. The man fell without even being able to scream.

In the blink of an eye, two men lay on the ground.

The remaining three repositioned themselves, surrounded the elder again, and formed a battle formation.

This time, the elder charged directly at one of them. The man seemed to bring his sword down to block, but the elder again guided it aside at an angle.

It looked like the same move as before.

But this time, the elder stepped on the deflected sword with the tip of his foot.

Then, in the next exchange, that man's head fell.

The last two attacked together from behind the elder.

With his back turned, the elder swung his sword behind him. His body blocked my view, so I could not see what happened. But when the swing ended, one man's sword had cut into his companion's shoulder.

The man who had cut his own companion froze. In that opening, the elder turned and split his chest open.

The last man, bleeding from the shoulder, shouted at the elder. I could not hear him clearly. But from the urgency in his voice, it seemed they had known each other.

The elder did not answer. He merely drove his sword indifferently into the man's chest.

The moment I saw it, I hurried back to the cabin. As I sat in my room with my eyes closed, steadying my breathing, the elder soon opened the door.

The room filled with the fishy stench of blood.

Without sleeping, the elder sat cross-legged and sank into meditation. Even so, I could not sleep that night from fear.

Thinking back now, perhaps the elder had known I was following him and had let me.

As soon as the sun rose the next day, we traveled again for several days.

My resolve nearly broke while we traveled, but I stood back up once more. This was the only path open to me.

That damned elder had taken me because I had talent for martial arts. That belief sustained me.

Whether the elder knew my thoughts or not, he cared for me with surprising devotion.

The elder never let me skip meals. In terms of food alone, I often ate better than I had back home.

On cold nights, the elder sometimes took off his own clothes and covered me with them. When I woke, he was already gone.

The elder's gaze only became mad when he taught me the sword.

Our daily sparring at noon. The moment an exchange began, his eyes seemed to deepen and lose their focus. Even as a child, I could see that change.

No one would look at his own disciple that way while raising a sword against him.

With those eyes, he pushed me to my limits.

During the first month I held a sword, I had to endure several exchanges every day. My child's body could not last even two hours beneath the midday sun before collapsing.

Whenever I collapsed, the elder carried me to the platform and gave me water. He carefully wiped my head.

Then, two hours later, he put the sword back in my hand.

There were no rest days.

One day, I was certain that a rib had broken. Every breath sent pain stabbing into my side as though it were being pierced with an awl. I once told the elder.

The elder examined my side for a long time. He found the exact spot where it had broken. He boiled medicinal herbs and applied them, then bound my ribs tightly with cloth.

The next day, the elder put a sword in my hand again. The elder insisted that I had to learn how to wield a sword even with broken bones.

There was no way for a child like me to understand what he meant. I only knew that the elder's eyes held the same mad light they did when he taught the sword.

What else could I do? I could only obey.

I wielded a sword for a month with broken ribs. I did not know how I endured it. Once that time had passed, my ribs mended.

And strangely, from then on, no matter where I was struck, a sword I had already extended never stopped. My body learned how to wield a sword while enduring pain.

Looking back now, I thought the elder had known that would happen.

Every day, I was driven to the edge of death. Every day, I surpassed yesterday's limit.

At some point, I began learning to read as well. I was surprised to find that the elder was more well-read than he appeared.

I did not know where he had found them, but I learned various characters, beginning with the Thousand Character Classic.

That did not mean I stopped swinging the sword. I simply slept less.

One year passed, then two.

On some days, I could not distinguish yesterday from today. Some months did not differ from the last.

Still, I never forgot to count each day.

My body grew steadily. Before I knew it, I had far surpassed the elder in height, and muscle covered every part of me.

At some point, the sword in my hand began to feel light.

That was the only sign that I was growing.

I could not even count how many times we changed mountains. Perhaps five times. Perhaps seven.

One day, the elder would suddenly return soaked in blood. Each time, we packed our things and left for another mountain.

At some point, the fact that I was getting farther and farther from home became dull to me. It no longer mattered. I could not return unless I killed this elder anyway.

Whether we were near or far made no difference.

The faces of my family gradually blurred. Father's face faded first. Then Mother's.

But Yeona's last image never faded. The image of her crying as she clutched my clothes. At the end of every daily exchange, that image came back to me.

And so time passed painfully, until more than nine years had gone by.

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