WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: HidingTurtle

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◈ Raised by a Ruthless Swordsman ◈

Chapter 2: Murder Sword

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One day, just after nine years had passed, the elder returned during the night, covered in blood for the first time in a while. Once again, we moved to another mountain.

As before, the elder did not tell me where we were going. After walking for several days, we arrived at a cabin halfway up a mountain.

Its walls were coated with a mixture of mud and straw, and a shingle roof slanted over them. One side of the eaves leaned so badly that it looked ready to collapse.

No matter which mountain we went to, the cabin was always like that.

The yard was not very large. It was only big enough for ten adults to sit in a circle. Dense forest enclosed it on all sides, hiding everything beyond.

There was only one difference. This yard had a broad stone slab in its center.

It was a flat stone wide enough for one person to sit cross-legged on. The elder seemed to like it. At dawn, he would sit upon it without moving until daybreak, and after our midday sparring, he would sit there again and spend time there.

Several days had passed since we settled there.

That day, the elder's sword came at me as usual. It followed the same path I had received day after day for ten years.

My sword, which had always been too busy deflecting his, moved forward for the first time. I naturally sent the force in the elder's blade back in the opposite direction.

The tip of the elder's sword slipped away from where he had intended.

Without realizing it, I stepped forward. My wooden sword slashed into the elder's side.

It was the first time.

For the first time in nine years, the elder had let my sword strike his body.

We stood still for a long while. The elder's head was lowered, so I could not read his expression. I only saw the elder touch his side once.

Then the elder sheathed his sword.

For the first time, our midday bout ended early.

The elder went into the cabin and did not come out for a long time. I stood there blankly, waiting.

About two hours later, the elder emerged again with a book in hand.

It was an old book with nothing written on its cover. The elder gave me one week, mentioning my younger sister's arm again.

The slim book was packed with drawings and writing. There were images of what looked like a human body, covered in dots and lines.

For a week, I memorized it desperately. It was the first week I had not held a sword.

When the week was over, I could recall every drawing and every word in the book with my eyes closed.

That day, the elder silently listened as I recited its contents from beginning to end. Then he placed a hand on my back.

A sudden heat surged from the elder's hand. It felt as though I had pressed my back against a brazier. The heat passed through my tailbone, rose straight up my spine to the crown of my head, then traveled down through my face and chest to the dantian below my navel.

Up my back and down my chest. After repeating that natural flow several times, the elder withdrew his energy with a faintly trembling hand.

Once the heat had completely left me, something new remained in its place. Something the size of a millet grain had formed below my navel, cool and clear.

For some reason, the elder's complexion had turned noticeably pale.

That was when I first guessed the meaning of the drawings and words in the book. The elder called that energy Inner Energy, and one full circuit along that path a Small Circulation.

From then on, the elder disappeared for several days without saying a word. It had never happened before.

One day passed. Then two. By the night of the fifth day, I was seriously considering whether to run away when the elder finally returned, carrying a small box.

Inside was a single pill. A round pellet of deep blue-green that seemed to announce, at a glance, “I am no ordinary thing.”

I accepted the pill the elder held out. I wondered whether I should eat it, but refusing was never an option. The elder's eyes had that crazed look again.

I squeezed my eyes shut and put the pill in my mouth. For a brief moment, a cool freshness spread through my mouth instead of bitterness.

Then, in the next instant, it melted like snow and began expanding inside me with terrifying force.

It felt as though I had swallowed an entire waterfall. Before I could even prepare myself, enormous waves crashed through every corner of my body.

I drove the small warmth remaining in my dantian toward my tailbone. It was like desperately rowing a millet-grain-sized boat through a massive tsunami. Up my spine to the crown of my head, then down through my face and chest.

Several times, I could not breathe and nearly lost consciousness. Each time, I think the elder struck my shoulder or back with something to force me awake.

Now, I can no longer remember exactly what that night's pain was like.

All that remains is a hazy impression of turning that path over and over, driven by the instinct that if I stopped, my body would burst and I would die.

When I came to, the waves that had battered me from every direction were flowing obediently along a fixed path.

When they finally gathered completely in my dantian, a strange drowsiness came over me.

The millet grain had grown as large as a baby's fist.

The next day, I held a sword again. The difference was that I now used a real sword, one the elder seemed to have picked up somewhere.

It was a crude iron sword with chips along its edge, but it was still a real sword. The weight of metal pressed down on my grip in a way a wooden sword never had.

From that day on, the elder taught me how to channel energy into a sword. I learned to draw up the baby's-fist-sized energy coiled in my dantian, guide it through the veins of my arm, and send it flowing to the sword's tip.

Our daily midday sparring naturally changed to real swords as well.

Naturally, fresh marks from steel appeared on my body nearly every day. It was common for my shoulders to be cut and my thighs torn open.

Yet something strange happened.

Even when I suffered wounds deep enough to split my skin and draw blood, they would scab over after a night's sleep. Within a few days, they healed, leaving only a small scar behind.

At the time, I had no way of knowing whether that strange recovery came from the path in the book, the warmth that circulated endlessly within me.

I was simply glad it would not interfere with the next day's sparring, and silently gripped the bloodstained hilt again.

The autumn leaves that had dyed the whole mountain red fell away. White snow covered the mountain like a blanket, and new buds emerged once more.

By then, I no longer received wounds. Instead, fresh marks from steel began appearing on the elder's body.

At some point, the elder could no longer deflect my sword completely.

The cool, clear energy within me erased my wounds overnight. But the aged elder's wounds rarely healed. They merely accumulated ugly layers of scabs.

That was when I first thought I might be able to leave this mountain.

I can win.

Those words would not leave my head. I had waited ten years for them. Many nights passed when sleep would not come easily.

Even after making up my mind, conflict swept over me whenever I faced the elder across a meal the next day.

At times, I wondered if I truly had to kill him. At other times, I thought I was the mad one for hesitating.

The elder was a lunatic who had dragged me deep into the mountains and driven me toward death like an animal every day.

Yet the elder was also the one who stayed awake all night, boiling herbs and applying them to my body when my ribs were broken and even breathing hurt. Even if the elder was the one who had broken them.

On nights cold enough to cut flesh, the elder silently took off his outer robe and covered me with it.

We had never formed the bond of master and disciple, and the elder had never demanded that I call him Master. Yet ten years of eating, sleeping, and living together had somehow created something resembling affection.

From then on, I began looking for a reason to leave the mountain without killing the elder.

I could now defeat the elder through martial skill. If I could make the elder admit that he had nothing more to teach me, perhaps I could leave without a major conflict.

The flowers fell, and the muggy winds gradually turned cool enough to shake the leaves from the trees. Every day, whenever we crossed swords, I watched the elder and vaguely waited for the moment to lower my blade.

That was until a week ago.

After our midday sparring that day, the elder did not return to the wooden platform as usual.

The elder stood motionless in the center of the yard and watched me. His eyes were neither the crazed eyes he had when teaching the sword nor his usual blunt gaze. They were eyes I had never seen before.

In a terribly indifferent voice, the elder pointed out that my progress had slowed.

The elder said I seemed to lack stimulation, then gave me one week.

If I failed to show progress within that time, the elder would immediately go down the mountain and cut off my younger sister's arm. It was a sentence delivered far too calmly.

Yeona.

It was a name I had never spoken aloud in ten years. I did not even know how the elder had learned it.

Could he have already gone to find my family without my knowledge? My heart lurched.

But the moment that name passed his lips, an image of the seven-year-old child clutching my clothes at the end of an alley and weeping bitterly flashed through my mind as clear as lightning.

I was speechless, but tried to persuade the elder. The elder gave me no answer at all.

That evening, and again the next dawn, the elder taught me the sword as usual, prepared my meals, and took off his own clothes to cover me as he always had.

The only thing that remained unchanged in those silent actions was the one-week deadline.

As I lay awake through every dawn, I realized something. The elder had seen through every moment of hesitation during the half year I had wavered.

There had never been a chance for the compromise I had foolishly imagined.

My progress was only an excuse. The elder knew I would kill him, and he could not accept a blade that hesitated.

If I showed the elder misplaced mercy, spared him, and went down the mountain alone, then one day the elder might find a chance while I was gone and truly cut off Yeona's arm.

Part of me tried to reassure myself that the elder would never truly do that. But when I remembered the elder's vicious nature over the past ten years, I could not completely shake the cold foreboding.

Before the vision of the elder returning with Yeona's bloodied arm in hand, the thin affection built over ten years no longer meant anything.

Only then did my hesitation vanish completely.

Today was the seventh day.

Today.

Scrape, scrape.

The steel made one final pass over the whetstone. The morning sun had fully risen over the ridge and shone into the yard.

I lightly pressed my thumb against the edge. It was sharp enough. I wiped the sword clean with a cloth, gripped it firmly, and rose.

The elder, seated upright on the stone slab in one corner of the yard, finally opened his eyes.

The elder looked at me.

They were neither the elder's usual indifferent eyes nor the crazed eyes he had when gripping a sword. They were the same eyes that had tightened around me a week ago.

Deep within those eyes lay the heavy anticipation of someone who had delayed this for ten years.

* * *

“Have you finally made up your mind?”

“I will kill you today.”

At my calm answer, the elder moved his hand to his sword hilt.

“Can you do it?”

“I'll try.”

Shing.

Steel rang from the elder's worn scabbard. He rose from the wooden platform and slowly stepped into the yard.

We used the same footwork.

The soles of our feet glided softly over the ground as we moved across the yard with fluid steps. There was a stillness to it, as though we were walking on water.

I kicked off first. Holding my sword tip straight, I thrust directly toward the elder's throat.

We had exchanged blows for ten years. My body knew before my mind how the elder would counterattack.

Kiiing.

But the sword that met mine was not what I expected. Instead of the sharp crack of metal colliding, an unpleasant scraping sound struck my ears.

My sword did not reach the elder's throat. The elder's blade slid stickily along the flat of mine.

I had endured that trajectory for ten years. Naturally, I expected that in the next instant the elder's sword tip would use my force against me and slide toward my throat.

I twisted my shoulder on instinct, preparing for it.

But.

Nothing came.

The elder had bound my sword and simply diverted the full force of my thrust into empty air. There was none of the persistent killing intent that used to bore in, trying to tear me apart.

Only I, who had twisted my body to evade the expected counterattack, stumbled uselessly and lost my balance. I hurriedly drew my sword back and swept it sideways to guard against the attack that should have followed, then urgently twisted my body away from its forward momentum.

I braced myself against the ground, rolled away like an animal to create distance, and immediately regained my stance.

I was confused.

It was a sword path I had never seen in ten years. It was nothing like the persistent trajectory that had always used my sword's force against me to slide toward my throat or heart.

The elder's sword seemed to draw countless large and small circles in the air. It was an elegant movement, endlessly soft and flowing like water, seemingly about to break yet continuing without end.

The force in my sword was dispersing as though it had fallen into a swamp.

Was this truly the sword of that mad elder?

I stepped forward and swung again.

I struck down, slashed, then thrust once more.

Each time, the elder retreated half a step or circled around me, drawing rounded paths to absorb my attacks.

When I struck with force, he guided it into empty space. When I tried to withdraw, his blade clung to mine and tangled its tip.

It was an unnatural sensation, breaking down strength through absolute softness.

But after several more exchanges, my confusion changed into a strange sense of déjà vu.

It was completely different, yet surprisingly familiar.

That broad, rounded sword path strangely overlapped with the movements my body had learned after being beaten until they were carved into my bones for ten years.

The clear warmth planted in my dantian trembled faintly, as though responding to the circles drawn by the elder's sword.

Only then did I understand the nature of this overwhelming sense of difference. The roots of the two sword arts were probably the same.

Only the purpose of that softness was completely opposite.

If the sword the elder now extended was a massive shield, drawing natural circles to embrace and neutralize an opponent's strength.

Then the sword the elder had taught me for the past ten years flowed with the same softness and breadth, but its circles closed only around the enemy's throat. It was a cruel noose.

Rather than harmlessly diverting an opponent's strength, it slid up the enemy's blade like a supple snake and tore into their throat.

Killing Sword. It was a vicious distortion of this profound principle of subduing force with softness, twisted into nothing but a means of binding and slaughtering an opponent.

“There is no need to be surprised.”

The elder calmly spoke as he drew a soft circle and diverted my sword.

“Your sword was made to break this.”

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