Chapter 355. Do Dark Things Have a Fragrance, Too?

Today, I lay on my side and watched the waterfall pouring down.

“…….”

I had not known before that waterfalls could help cultivate the mind. Perhaps it was because, if one placed the burning Jaha Inn beneath the waterfall’s stream, the flames would be extinguished in no time.

It was refreshing.

When I suddenly looked toward the top of the waterfall, the Three Calamities were looking down at me, and below them, on protruding rocks, stood masters like Im Sobaek, the White-Robed Scholar, the Sword Emperor, and the Fist King.

But no matter how I looked, there were not more than ten people above me.

As I added to the fantasy, someone abruptly appeared where the Sword Emperor had been standing, shouldered him aside, and sent him plummeting down the waterfall.

I wondered what sort of violent fellow it was, and it turned out to be the Mad Monk.

Of course, the ranking in my mind and the actual order of the masters positioned throughout the waterfall would be different.

What would have happened if the Mad Monk of my previous life had roamed the gangho and clashed directly with the Three Calamities?

Since it was something that never happened, I did not know either. It was difficult to freely predict battles between those whose level surpassed even my current self.

I sat up, crossed my legs, and gazed endlessly at the waterfall.

Just how many days had I stayed here?

After some forty days had passed, I forgot to count the dates. I also stopped wondering why most of our three daily meals were mainly chicken.

At the Steel Manor, we did not always train only in external arts.

I circulated my energy and regulated my breathing longer than ever before, slept longer than ever before while completely dead to the world, and engaged in more intense sparring than at any other time.

Most often, it was a situation where the White-Robed Scholar and I attacked Cheonak at the same time, but Cheonak, perhaps also researching something from time to time, would assign each of us our own role.

For example, with his left hand, he would compete against me in internal energy.

And with only his right hand, he would spar with the White-Robed Scholar.

We applied to one another imagined fights that could not be trained alone.

Sometimes we would sit in a triangular formation and compete in palm force, and at such times, perhaps because the White-Robed Scholar was also researching something, he would make all sorts of specific demands of the two of us.

Cheonak and I were both quick to understand, so we usually grasped swiftly what the White-Robed Scholar was trying to say.

In other words, we were not training alone…….

We were carrying out our personal training while helping one another with training and research.

To summarize the martial arts of the three of us, it went like this.

With his combination of internal energy and external arts, Cheonak could surge up from the very bottom of the waterfall, split through all the rough torrents, and climb all the way to the top. There was something I came to know through passing conversations: even if Cheonak had not become the disciple of the Black Immortal, he was a man who would have become strong. That was because, after wandering countless places in search of a child with the qualities to endure the brutal training the Black Immortal envisioned, the one he found was the young Cheonak.

That was what it meant when he said he had once been a slave.

Should I say that his very birth felt like looking at some divine beast from myth, something of a different class altogether?

After observing Cheonak up close,

I came to believe those unbelievable mentions of ancient great generals freely roaming battlefields alone on horseback through enemy lines of thousands, even tens of thousands.

If one’s class is different, it is possible.

The soldiers must have seemed like children of seven or eight. The cavalrymen must have seemed like boys in their early teens. No matter how numerous the enemy, with an old spear and a single horse that could run, he would have broken through the battlefield as easily as descending from the hill behind his house.

Cheonak was that sort of man.

From what I had seen beside him, even if a hundred or two hundred ordinary gangho masters came swarming in, it seemed difficult for them to handle Cheonak.

Therefore, even though the Murim Alliance had placed Cheonak, who had carried out slaughter within the forces controlled by the Black Immortal, at the very top of its list of public enemies, not attacking him had been the right judgment.

On the other hand, I also came to understand the White-Robed Scholar’s true worth better.

As Cheonak had said, this fellow had no interest in the combination of external arts and internal energy.

Should I say he was a man who had settled on his own path early?

The core of the martial art the White-Robed Scholar pursued was the free manipulation of lightness and heaviness.

It was like developing the Jeyunjong into something even more refined and specialized.

What he attempted through the principle of this lightness and heaviness was a martial study that would let him store even an opponent’s force or internal energy within his own lightness and heaviness for a brief moment, then return it, or twist its direction in an instant.

In other words, the ideal of the White-Robed Scholar was a martial study whose level was as high as the ultimate body Cheonak desired.

Paths are varied like this.

At first, even that clever White-Robed Scholar could not find his bearings and only prattled on about theory…….

Cheonak gave advice, and I occasionally refined things with nonsense.

When we sometimes attacked and defended as the White-Robed Scholar wished, he too began deciding the direction of his research and shaping it into a single martial art system.

Even Cheonak, who watched this from the side…….

told the White-Robed Scholar that if he completed his research, he would not be unworthy of being called a grandmaster of his era.

The White-Robed Scholar said it was the first time he had heard anything close to praise from Cheonak, so it seemed Cheonak also acknowledged that the direction the White-Robed Scholar pursued had meaning.

In any case, since this was a martial study the White-Robed Scholar could not devise on his own, there was the inconvenience of Cheonak and me having to face him constantly like puppets.

At times, while sparring one-on-one with the White-Robed Scholar, I even had this thought.

That it seemed like a martial art devised from beginning to end to divert Cheonak’s fierce attacks. In other words, a martial art that he would never even have thought of had Cheonak not existed was gradually being created.

If I brought the topic back to the waterfall I was looking at,

the White-Robed Scholar was a mutant who wanted to alter even such a raging stream of water.

Should I say his very perspective on martial arts was completely different from Cheonak’s from the start?

From some day onward, the White-Robed Scholar stopped sparring and spent the whole day meditating, then said this.

That he might not be able to complete this martial study in its entirety.

When martial artists of the gangho become engrossed, they often fall into qi deviation…….

But the White-Robed Scholar was a man clever enough that whenever that happened, he would simply stop thinking and drink, or follow Cheonak and train in external arts.

In that sense, I…….

just liked looking at the waterfall.

Because these unexpected forty-odd days were a kind of rest for me.

My current martial study is very different from Cheonak’s or the White-Robed Scholar’s. In truth, if I stood up right now and unleashed the Sun-Moon Radiant Heaven, I could cleanly blow away the waterfall before my eyes and even the rocks surrounding it.

But if asked whether being capable of such a thing meant my current level was similar to the Three Calamities or the other masters, that was a little ambiguous.

Because these strong individuals were clearly the sort who would not give me such an opportunity.

“…….”

Hearing footsteps, I turned my head and saw Cheonak and the White-Robed Scholar appear, sweat clinging thickly to their entire bodies, as they headed toward the waterfall.

Since the three of us were each training on our own, whether one practiced external arts or, like me, watched the waterfall, we paid no attention to one another.

Cheonak, his body submerged in the plunge pool, asked me.

“Sect Leader, do you think you can climb the waterfall by staring at it like that?”

I nodded.

“I think I will be able to climb it soon.”

“Your way?”

“My way.”

Cheonak spoke to Baegui Seosaeng.

“Baegaya, show us once.”

“Shall I?”

Was that Baegui Seosaeng truly the Baegui Seosaeng I had known? When he conversed with Cheonak, he seemed far beneath him.

Baegui Seosaeng entered the waterfall’s center, crouched, then shot up toward it. It was clearly an impossible speed and power, but as he reached the apex, the stream suddenly burst in the middle as if he had unleashed a palm wind. Using that recoil to break through the waterfall, he reached the summit and looked down at Cheonak and me with a supremely arrogant expression.

“Did you see?”

Cheonak muttered.

“You really do use tricks your whole life.”

“What matters is that I came up here, by whatever means necessary.”

Baegui Seosaeng snorted, then immediately sat cross-legged and closed his eyes. I couldn’t tell right away whether he was trying to circulate his qi or organize his thoughts.

Soon, Cheonak entered the waterfall and, as always, broke through it in an instant. He took a spot across from Baegui Seosaeng and closed his eyes.

Watching the two sitting cross-legged atop the white waterfall’s stream…

It felt like watching immortals.

Of course, those two were evil immortals.

As I observed the paths, training, realms of thought, and modes of thinking of these two men of completely different dispositions, I came to see myself objectively.

The truth was, I could now break through the waterfall in an instant.

Forty-something days was long if long, short if short. It wasn’t that I had realized the method from training here for a mere forty-something days—it was merely that forty days had been added to the training period I had carried over from my previous life.

I had found the solution.

It was internal explosion.

Even the concept was something I had created, and since I had never seen it in any secret manual or book, it was a nameless martial art.

Training here, I grew stronger day by day thanks to the environment and the surrounding experts.

I had originally been the Haomunju, but now I felt like nothing so much as a monkey undergoing wall-facing cultivation.

Though I was worried about the outside world as a whole.

I decided to trust my eldest brother. If a major problem arose, he would surely come find me personally or send someone. So I convinced myself that my training time was something earned for me by the Four Great Evils.

Only by believing so did my restless heart settle slightly.

I agonized over a name for internal explosion, organized its principles, and carefully studied it so that I wouldn’t explode myself.

If Jahasin-gong was already like the Jahagyeokjan engulfed in flames…

This internal explosion felt like the first flame moving from a torch to the inn. So perhaps it was a principle of cutting off Jahasin-gong’s power at the very beginning and applying it to a movement technique.

Because controlling Jahasin-gong on my own was difficult…

Returning to the starting point, I used the moment when extreme yin and extreme yang internal energies collided—in my own terms, the moment a spark was created—as the explosive force.

In doing so, absurdly enough, this became a single stage of Jahasin-gong. Depending on the sect, some might use the expression “ilseong.”

Arms crossed, I watched Cheonak and Baegui Seosaeng, the two villains, as I worried over naming internal explosion.

I was going through all this trouble hoping my disciple would become a knight-errant different from us, so I couldn’t use the character for “evil” in the martial art’s name. However, since it was a martial art I had created while rubbing shoulders with those dark men and scraping together clues one by one, the very first thing that came to mind was…

Am (Dark).

I believe that even those dark villains each have their uses. However, Baegui Seosaeng doesn’t have the makings of a sect leader.

It wasn’t that his vessel was small—its very purpose was different.

He only treats people like Cheonak as equals; it’s because he possesses the personality of a man who looks down on everyone. If a disciple were merely clever, they’d actually be incompatible. It would take someone with a rare and pure heart to learn Baegui Seosaeng’s martial arts completely.

A fellow disciple like Makgunja, who had left first, would likely have been the suitable person.

So while he was still an evil man, he was also an unusual man capable of opening his heart to a gentlemanly man.

Not pure evil itself—a man with his own unique fragrance, you could say.

Suddenly, I stopped thinking, stood up, crossed the Yongso, and welcomed the fiercely crashing waterfall on the crown of my head.

Above the waterfall sat men in the lotus position, emitting a dark fragrance.

I prepared for internal explosion, my own way.

To combine Ilwolgwangcheon in both hands, I had to draw up two types of internal energy from my dantian regardless.

If you calculated the path the internal energy took in terms of distance or sequence…

It was internal explosion, Jahasin-gong, Ilwolgwangcheon…

I really was a strange fellow, creating a martial art in reverse order: Ilwolgwangcheon, Jahasin-gong, internal explosion.

I crouched…

And shot up, attempting internal explosion exactly as I wished. I stretched out like a gale through the cascading waterfall and broke through it.

Swoooooooosh!

Though I was clearly breaking through the waterfall, I felt a bizarre sensation of rapidly plunging into deep water. At some point, the sensation of water against my entire body vanished, and clear air rushed in.

The moment I exhaled once…

I didn’t know how high I had soared, but below I could see Cheonak and Baegui Seosaeng sitting in the lotus position.

This was internal explosion, carried out my way.

I landed on a rock roughly in the center between Baegui Seosaeng and Cheonak, then gazed at the mountains and rivers spread out beneath the waterfall. Come to think of it, this was the first time in forty-something days I’d come up here to take in the spectacle.

“….”

Suddenly, Baegui Seosaeng opened his eyes and asked,

“You came up your own way?”

I nodded. Then Cheonak also opened his eyes and asked with a curious expression,

“You’ve been worrying over it for days, so you’ve achieved something. Is it a new martial art?”

“It is a new martial art.”

“The name?”

Riding the momentum of my gale-like ascent, I told the two of them the name of the movement technique applied with internal explosion.

“Amhyangpyo (Dark Fragrance Floating).”

Baegui Seosaeng looked at Cheonak and said,

“Somehow the ‘am’ (dark) seems to refer to us, or is it just my imagination?”

Instead of answering, Cheonak asked me,

“Munju, does darkness also possess fragrance?”

I sat on the rock and nodded.

“It did.”

“Why the past tense?”

I looked at Cheonak and said,

“Jinhyang noona had fragrance too.”

I looked at Baegui Seosaeng.

“My youngest disciple had the fragrance of a true gentleman, too.”

Arms crossed, I said to the two of them,

“It’s a fragrance that mustn’t be forgotten. Had the fragrance of my disciple who was called a true gentleman and of Jinhyang noona not remained with you two, I would have died at the hands of my senior brother or Muje long ago. Isn’t that right?”

Baegui Seosaeng and Cheonak stared at me silently.

“….”

Looking at the two of them, I redefined Amhyangpyo.

“Pyo can mean a gale, but it can also mean to flutter. It doesn’t really suit the name of a movement art or a lightness skill, but I’m not the type to fuss over such details anyway. I never met them, but I intend to remember Sister Jinhyang and Mak Gunja too. Since the fragrance of a dark age fluttered and saved me, Amhyangpyo will go on to become a movement art that saves many people.”

In truth, I had been able to create Amhyangpyo because of Cheonak and the White-Clad Scholar. But before that, the reason I was still alive and well right now was thanks to Junior Sister Jinhyang and Mak Gunja. Because those two had left behind, however faintly, the scent of humanity in these villains.

“……”

For quite a long time, these villainous bastards said nothing at all.