- Morning Study
At the faint breaking of dawn, when the first pale light filtered through the sky, So-woon awoke.
He had collapsed into sleep without even removing his clothes, yet someone had tended to him.
His armor lay neatly stacked at his side, and he had been changed into clean garments.
It seemed his comrades had stripped off his cuirass and laid him down, and he had known nothing of it.
Inside the tent, his companions lay strewn in disarray, yet their armor and weapons were arranged in perfect order.
In the aftermath of fierce battle, such orderliness felt almost unnatural.
A thin blade of dawn slipped through the seams of the canvas.
Yesterday’s battle rose before him with vivid clarity.
The exchange of blades with Mong-roe, the arc of his strikes, the tangled paths of his own sword—it all resurfaced in a knot of memory.
The instant of peril when he had pressed forward, the weapon that had passed within a hair’s breadth—these reappeared as if happening now, and he found his shoulders shrinking unconsciously.
How long did I sleep?
There was no strength left in his body.
When he drew breath, he felt as though everything inside might leak away—a hollow hunger.
An emptiness.
As though if the shell were removed, the inside and outside would be the same void.
If he loosened himself now, the substance of his body might dissolve into dust and wind.
When he closed his eyes, Mong-roe’s massive blade traced again its dynamic orbit in his mind.
The technique from the martial manual—the blade forms that had blocked and pierced—repeated themselves.
He had followed the book, yet in practice it had not moved as he had imagined.
What had he done wrong?
The question rose again and again.
He did not account for Mong-roe’s prowess.
Instead, he believed the fault lay in his own study.
To any observer, it had been an astonishing performance.
To So-woon, it was unsatisfactory.
All around him, the others still slept.
A chill crept up from the ground.
The soldiers lay like corpses after yesterday’s battle.
Careful not to wake them, he rose quietly, dressed, and fastened on his armor.
He secured breastplate, backplate, and shoulder guards without omission.
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The faint clink of metal could not be fully silenced, but no one stirred.
He staggered like a scarecrow toward the place he had come to favor.
Dry brush, driven by the wind, had gathered into rough circular mounds that rolled at the slightest gust.
The morning felt desolate and forlorn.
Perhaps it was only the weather.
If only I had a proper blade…
After real combat, his sword paths were tangled.
The formulae would not settle.
Closing his eyes, he summoned again the nameless blade method from the beginning.
His memory was intact.
Yet as he breathed and moved, the sword path had changed.
The change was the fruit of battle.
Perhaps the new path was correct.
At a glance he saw where he had been lacking.
Or rather, he understood keenly where the deficiency had been.
If he altered the path at that point, perhaps yesterday he could have subdued the enemy more efficiently.
If only I had done it this way…
With eyes closed, he moved according to the manual and the memory of battle alike.
He had not known it from the first moment he received the book, but he had been obsessed with form and path.
The strange trajectories were not mere routes for the blade; they were postures that aided breath.
The manual did not instruct one to breathe in order to complete the path.
Rather, it reshaped the body—the path itself—to assist the breath.
Or so came his realization.
Thus once begun, the breath continued without end, and the blade had danced in its wake.
If before he had danced, now he moved like a slow, deliberate shadow.
Memory broke and resumed, resumed and broke again.
Each break slowed him further.
Partly from exhaustion, partly from contemplation of the path, his movements grew more measured still.
Lee Hee watched from a distance.
In oversized armor that did not yet suit his frame, So-woon looked like a tin puppet.
The camp was silent; the soldiers had not yet risen.
Yet something in So-woon’s movement was different.
Lee Hee had once leafed through the Compendium of Martial Arts Through the Ages and found a method he believed identical to the one he had learned.
What So-woon performed now bore only distant resemblance.
At first glance, it was chaos.
Where he himself would have snapped the body, twisted, struck the opposite flank, and lowered his stance, So-woon only half-turned, drew the sword in a sweeping pull, and brought it straight down.
It was wrong.
Yet the continuity was natural.
The crude-looking form might even be closer to the original.
It flowed.
A gasp nearly escaped Lee Hee.
A path he had never conceived seemed to come alive.
He learned this from the book alone…
The boy is a mess! Yet is he interpreting it in his own way? No instruction, only text. Some of those movements are utterly off. And with that he faced Mong-roe?
Lee Hee sighed.
It was entirely wrong.
Or so it seemed at first.
But as he compared deviations, he found himself thinking it was not wholly wrong.
It carried its own coherence.
Perhaps martial art itself was interpretation.
Reciting the mnemonic verses inwardly while observing So-woon’s movement, he found places where the boy’s version seemed more fitting.
Perhaps even General Yang, who had taught him, had not fully grasped those passages.
Yang had no manual—only memorized formulas.
And those differed subtly from the original text—order altered, words refined.
Perhaps So-woon’s movements were closer to the source.
It was astonishing.
In four—no, five days—he was drawing paths, shaping forms, aligning breath.
Right or wrong, the act itself was no small thing.
Lee Hee pondered.
How should he teach him?
To correct every flaw would require endless effort, perhaps beginning anew.
Yet to leave him unguided—where might such rootless art drift?
“Yusaengwon!”
Lee Hee called out, halting the movement.
“General, you have come.”
So-woon straightened and offered a military salute.
“You are diligent. I heard yesterday was fierce. Is your body well?”
“I am uninjured. But I have no strength at all.”
“Ha. Naturally. For you, it was nearly your first true battle. Still, you did well. As for your sword path… I think it may help if you see mine once. Would you?”
He swallowed the words, Everything you are doing is wrong.
Better to show than to rebuke.
The boy was clever; he would judge for himself.
“Thank you.”
“Give me your blade.”
Lee Hee intended to demonstrate with the student’s weapon, repeating the very movements So-woon had attempted.
But what he received was not a dao.
It was a straight sword.
“This is a sword, not a dao. I gave you a blade method.”
“I had no dao, General. So I used the sword my father left me.”
“What? You practiced a dao method with a sword? And yesterday—against Mong-roe—you fought with this?”
“Yes, General.”
Lee Hee could not immediately process it.
It defied sense.
Though similar at a glance, sword and dao were entirely different implements—different lines of attack, different principles of defense.
“…Heavens.”