WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: HidingTurtle

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◈ Raised by a Ruthless Swordsman ◈

Chapter 3: Descending the Mountain

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I kicked off the ground again and sent my sword flying.

With a flick of my wrist, I twisted the sword point that had been flying straight ahead. Like a coiling snake, it clung to the elder’s blade and aimed for his throat.

The elder remained where he stood and raised his sword. Once again, he drew a perfect semicircle.

Shrrring.

The moment my sword touched his blade, the sensation of sinking into a swamp closed around my wrist again.

His sword clung to mine like a leech, guiding its path in a circle and sending the fierce thrust harmlessly past his shoulder into empty air.

I could not fall for the same trick twice.

Forcing life back into the recoil of my missed sword, I spun like a top and slashed at the elder’s lower body.

But the elder leisurely stepped back half a pace and lowered his sword point. Just before my sword could cut his legs, his blade traced a soft curve and lightly settled against the flat of mine.

The contact was shallow, yet the path of my slash was strangely forced down toward the ground.

Dust rose from the yard. Without stopping, I rushed into the elder’s reach.

The real close-quarters fight had begun.

Ten exchanges, twenty exchanges. Dozens of sword strikes tangled and slipped past each other. Steel ground against steel, filling the yard with chilling shrrring and scraping sounds.

The longer our swords crossed, the clearer it became. Our swords came from the same root, yet their forms were radically different.

There was not a single angularity in the elder’s Sword Path. It was an unbroken sequence of large and small circles, flowing like water.

No matter how fast or hard I thrust, he drew my strength into those circles and gently let it flow away.

It felt like trying to cut a massive, smooth iron ball.

My sword, on the other hand, was a venomous snake crawling over that perfect sphere, struggling to make a crack in it.

It pretended to flow obediently along the elder’s circles, then suddenly bent into strange paths, viciously driving toward his side, wrist, and brow.

A style that gave no thought to defense, obsessed only with tearing away even a little more flesh from the opponent it had ensnared.

Even amid that suffocating exchange, I held back the warmth the size of a baby’s fist, crouched beneath my dantian.

This was a clash of pure physical strength and swordsmanship, without Inner Energy.

Given the elder’s condition, he seemed unable to circulate his energy normally for some reason. Even so, I was certain that the strange energy I had felt on the day he first helped me gather my energy still existed somewhere within him.

I did not know when he might unleash that strange energy, so I had to save my own trump card as well.

But that was not all.

There was also a trace of stubborn pride.

If the elder truly refused to use his energy, or if he could no longer use it, then I wanted to end this fight without using Inner Energy either.

It was my own way of putting an end to the ten years I had spent rolling about these mountains like a beast, grinding down my bones.

I kicked off the ground again.

This time, I did not put everything into one strike. I loosened my wrist and kept the sword point nimble, attacking the elder’s upper and lower body in rapid succession.

My sword tried once more to coil around the elder’s blade like a venomous snake and climb upward. The instant our blades met, it rubbed greedily against his blade, a persistent killing move determined to tear at his wrist or throat.

But the elder’s sword still did not permit my killing intent.

Standing in place, he drew large and small circular paths through the air.

Then he gently brushed the side of my sword and twisted the direction of my thrust into empty space.

Whenever our swords collided, birds fluttered up from the branches before settling back down.

And then, as we passed thirty exchanges.

Clang!

The elder’s sword point, which had been twisting around mine, trembled almost imperceptibly for the first time, and the sound of steel went out of rhythm.

The elder’s swordsmanship was still perfect. But his old, broken body had begun to fall slightly behind the speed and reactions of that flowing, gentle sword.

The limits of his stamina had revealed themselves.

In that brief gap, where circle had to flow endlessly into circle, my sword forced its way in like a snake’s fang.

Shhk.

For the first time, the dull sound of flesh being torn rang out instead of empty air. The fabric near the elder’s left shoulder split open, and bright blood sprayed into the air.

The shock of the wound made his body sway slightly. The circular paths that had flowed like water broke completely.

I could not miss the chance.

Before he could regain his balance and pull back his sword to form a defense, I twisted my blade at an angle and drove it in.

There was no hesitation.

The tip of my sword was not aimed at his neck or heart. It was aimed at his right arm, still circling through the air without finding its path.

More precisely, at the wrist holding his sword.

The cold sword point bit deeply into his wrist.

It cut through flesh and crushed bone, splitting the wrist clean through as if severing the stubborn chain that had bound me.

Shhk. Thud.

Something dropped onto the dirt with a horribly clear sound.

It was the elder’s severed right hand, still gripping the bloodstained hilt. Blood gushed from the cut.

“...”

The elder did not even scream. Blood poured from his cut shoulder and wrist as his knees buckled and he sank heavily onto the dirt of the yard.

There would be no further counterattack. The great shield that had held me at bay was completely shattered.

I stood there as well, motionless, my bloodstained sword hanging at my side.

“Hah... Hah...”

My ragged breaths rose to my chin. I had forced myself through dozens of exchanges using only bone and muscle while completely suppressing the warmth in my dantian.

My lungs burned as if they would split apart.

With my blood-dripping sword lowered, I simply stood there, breathing hard as I looked down at the elder sitting on the ground.

For a while, I gathered my breath.

There were so many things I wanted to know.

Why had he used that sword today? What was it?

And beyond that, why me? What had he wanted from me that he had made me live such a grueling life?

Who exactly was he?

“Are you satisfied now?”

The wind passed between us. The sound of fallen leaves rolling across the ground broke the silence.

Yet even after I waited for a long time, the elder showed no sign of opening his mouth. All I could hear was the wet sound of blood soaking into the dirt from his severed wrist.

His head remained lowered, his body utterly still. He stubbornly kept his mouth shut until the very end.

That finally snapped the taut string of reason within me.

“Why did you do this to me?!”

I shouted without realizing it. My scream, as if it would tear me apart, echoed across the mountain ridge at dawn.

“Why did it have to be me?! Why did you drag me into this hell? Why did you do this to me...?!”

I had spent ten years rolling about like a beast. There had been countless nights when the pain of broken bones made me want to die.

And yet, I had survived those cursed, contradictory years by relying on his rough hands that applied herbs to my broken ribs, and the warmth of the outer robe he covered me with on cold nights.

A child who had never struck another person had become a monster who could cut off someone’s wrist without feeling anything strange.

“You made me into a monster! You made me this way!”

Even before my desperate cry, pouring out like blood, the elder remained silent. With calm eyes that held neither excuse nor regret, he simply looked up at me, covered in blood.

The moment I met those empty eyes, the rage that had boiled and raged within me cooled as if it had been a lie.

Only a terrible emptiness remained where those hot emotions had swept through.

Then a staggering realization crossed my mind.

Ten years. We had shared food, shared warmth, and finally reached this terrible moment where we tore each other’s flesh and severed each other’s bones.

We did not even know each other’s names.

The meager trace of affection between us, steeped in blood, became unbearably sad. I gripped my lowered sword tightly and spoke in a low voice.

“Tell me your name, at least.”

The elder’s dried lips moved faintly.

“...Hyeonam.”

Hyeonam.

I silently rolled those two syllables around in my mind. It was an unfamiliar name for someone of the secular world.

But what did that matter now?

It was the name that contained this mad elder’s entire life.

“I am Jin A-pyeong.”

For the first time in ten years, I spoke aloud the name that had lingered on my tongue.

“On your way to the next world, shouldn’t you at least know the name of the man who killed you?”

I took one step back. Still holding my bloodstained sword, I slowly bent my knees.

I prostrated myself on the cold ground and gave Hyeonam a deep formal bow.

I had never called him Master, and I had never become his disciple. But it was the first and last courtesy I could offer to the merciless teacher who had shattered my life and remade it.

When I slowly rose, I had no hesitation left.

I stepped closer. Hyeonam did not avoid the sword point approaching him. He took it fully into his eyes. His gaze was clear, without resentment or fear.

Shhk.

My sword pierced deeply into Hyeonam’s heart.

I relaxed my hand around the hilt. Once I let go, the elder slowly fell backward with the iron sword lodged in his chest.

The sight of him lying on the dirt overlapped with the elder who had crawled into our yard nine years ago and fallen to his knees at my feet.

The blue robe he had worn back then was nowhere to be seen. Instead, he wore faded cotton clothes so patched that their original color could no longer be known.

The shoulders exposed between the folds of cloth had shrunk by nearly a handspan, and his gaunt collarbones stood out sharply.

His hair was no longer tied atop his head, nor was there a wooden hairpin. His snow-white hair hung loose like that of a mountain beast, tangled with blood and dirt as it spread over the ground.

Blood slowly spread from the corner of his mouth through his unkempt white beard.

He bore no resemblance to the elder who had crawled into the yard that dawn nine years ago. Even life and death separated them.

And yet, he was the same person. Only much older and more broken.

What had made this person this way?

After looking at him for a while, I let my bloodstained hand hang at my side and walked toward one corner of the yard. There was a broad, flat boulder where the elder had been sitting in meditation until moments ago.

What did Hyeonam like so much about this rock that he always sat upon it?

I dropped down onto it.

I could not think of anything. Not joy, sorrow, or even relief.

For a long while, I simply sat there like someone who had lost their soul.

* * *

How much time had passed?

Only when the blazing sunlight began to sink westward and the shadows grew long did my frozen mind slowly return to reality.

I rose to my feet. Gathering broken branches and planks, I began digging into the dirt at one side of the yard.

Digging the earth with my bare hands took quite a while. By the time the sun nearly rested on the mountain ridge and red twilight settled over the yard, I was able to lay Hyeonam in the pit.

There was no proper stone to use as a grave marker. After quietly looking down at the grave, I brought out my old wooden sword from a corner of the hut.

Before I had held a Real Sword, I had gripped and swung that piece of wood until my hands blistered for nearly ten years, matching exchanges with the elder. I drove it deeply into the ground before the grave in place of a marker.

I looked at the humble mound for a moment, then turned and picked up the elder’s sword from the dirt.

On closer inspection, the crossguard between the blade and hilt bore a carefully engraved pattern. Inside a circle, a winding curved line divided it in two.

Unlike my crude iron sword, it was finely decorated, and it was clearly a sword worthy of someone with Hyeonam’s skill. It had to be better than my rusted iron sword.

After lightly brushing away the dust, I picked up the sheath that lay nearby and put the sword away. Unlike the sword, the sheath was plain and without decoration.

I entered the hut and began searching through the elder’s belongings.

Inside an old bundle hidden in the corner of a wall cupboard, I found a heavy money pouch. When I untied it, several silver ingots spilled into my palm.

They varied in size, and I had no idea how much they were worth. But they were heavy enough that they had to hold considerable value.

They would be more useful than anything to someone who needed to go down the mountain at once. I securely tucked the pouch of silver into my clothes and stepped outside.

The sun had completely set, and dim darkness had spread thickly over the mountainside.

At the entrance to the narrow path down the mountain, I stopped and deliberately looked back.

The yard where I had rolled about like a beast until flesh and bone had been worn away. The old hut that had sheltered me from wind and rain. And the humble dirt grave, with an old wooden sword planted in it, sleeping quietly in the darkness.

That was my ten years. I had buried all those years here.

I had no lingering attachments left.

Jin A-pyeong.

Three thousand, six hundred, and seventy-two nights after I had long surpassed the promised hundred nights.

At last, to return to my family’s embrace, I silently began walking down the mountain path as darkness fell.

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