Chapter 342. Resting at Home
After emerging from meditation, Youngwoo simply lay back where he was.
He had thought circulating the Small Heavenly Cycle would ease his fatigue, but his body was still heavy.
He had killed many people.
The exhaustion in his muscles could be eased through breathing, but the weariness soaked into the soul did not settle so easily.
Lying on his back, he looked up and saw that even the ceiling had been carefully coffered.
This was a wealthy household.
The pillars and beams were fitted together solidly, and every ceiling board bore clear signs of careful workmanship.
Youngwoo drew in a long breath and slowly let it out.
After several such breaths, even the old sorrow buried deep inside him seemed to sink away.
He fell asleep where he lay.
Deoki entered carefully.
He stood at a distance and watched Youngwoo for a moment, then approached without making a sound and covered him with a blanket.
"The floor must be cold…"
He murmured softly, but Youngwoo did not stir.
Deoki tucked the edge of the blanket around him and muttered again,
"At this rate, your face will freeze crooked."
Still, Youngwoo remained sunk in deep sleep.
Deoki stood beside him for a long while.
The face of the sleeping man before him overlapped with the face he had seen inside the city the night before.
Deoki had witnessed the battle from very close by.
He had gone into battle as part of Go Hoewon's escort, so he had not been in a position to stay safely behind the fighting.
From barely more than ten jang away, he had watched Yi Youngwoo carve a road toward the southern gate.
People did not call him a master of the Realm of Transformation for nothing.*
Youngwoo had not actually reached the Realm of Transformation, but that was what people called him.
It was not empty praise.
Deoki had seen it with his own eyes.
For the first time in his life, he had witnessed a man's martial arts pass beyond what seemed possible within the ordinary bounds of martial arts.
The road inside the southern gate had been packed with enemy soldiers.
Torches shook in the wind, while smoke and dust hung low over the stone pavement.
The city's defenders surged out amid screams and shouted commands.
Spearpoints appeared first.
Shields closed the space behind them.
Men with swords filled the narrow street.
Youngwoo stood before them.
In his hand was a single hwando, not particularly long.
It was a short blade, but the moment it entered his hand, it became something entirely different.
When the blade moved lightly at shoulder height, Deoki could already sense the next cut contained within that movement.
Youngwoo took his first step.
It was not hurried.
Yet the spear thrust at him had already struck empty air, and Youngwoo's body had slipped in alongside the shaft.
The hwando flashed once.
The spearman's wrist buckled.
The next flash passed across the back of his neck.
After that, Deoki found it difficult to follow what happened with his eyes.
Youngwoo never stopped after cutting down a single man.
The moment his sword struck one enemy's arm, his foot was already entering beside the next man's flank, and while his body turned, the back of the blade smashed into another man's jaw.
Cutting, thrusting, and driving forward were not separate movements.
They flowed together in a single breath.
Three enemy soldiers rushed him at once.
The man in front raised a shield, while the two behind him thrust their spears over it.
Youngwoo did not avoid the shield.
He went straight into it.
The pommel of his hwando struck the upper edge of the shield at the same instant his knee drove into its lower half.
The shield-bearer rocked backward.
In that instant, Youngwoo's blade passed between the two spear shafts.
One man collapsed clutching his throat.
Another staggered back with his shoulder split open.
The shield-bearer lost his balance and fell, and Youngwoo's foot was already passing over his body into the next rank.
Deoki realized he had stopped breathing.
It looked less like a man fighting than a sword method brought to life.
The forms Youngwoo practiced over and over in the courtyard were unfolding exactly as he had trained them, only now amid blood and firelight.
The blade rose horizontally like Pyeongdaese, opening a road.
His waist twisted like Sayose, cutting diagonally through an enemy.
Then the sword rose overhead like Geojeongse and fell in the next instant, bringing a helmeted soldier down with it.
But there was none of the leisure of practice in those movements.
They carried the speed of battle and the pressure of death.
A single hesitation meant being stabbed.
A single swing drawn too wide meant being surrounded.
Youngwoo moved as though he could see every narrow opening before he entered it.
He chose where the blade would land first.
His body followed.
At first, the enemy soldiers charged with shouts.
Soon, the sound of those shouts changed.
As the men rushing forward with weapons disappeared one after another before Youngwoo, the soldiers behind them began stopping of their own accord.
Even those who had continued pressing forward while the front rank collapsed scattered as though they had come up against an invisible wall.
Youngwoo did not miss the opening.
He took another step.
The hwando swept in a long line from left to right, then his wrist reversed and brought the blade upward from below.
The steel flashed silver in the torchlight, then darkened as blood coated it.
Wherever he passed, enemy soldiers fell.
To Deoki, it looked as though a road was being created before his eyes.
Bodies overlapped across the stone pavement.
Blood ran between them.
Youngwoo advanced by making that road.
The Balhae soldiers behind him drove forward through the openings he created.
When one man tore open the head of the enemy formation, the soldiers behind him widened the breach.
An enemy suddenly burst from a side alley and struck toward Youngwoo's waist.
Deoki almost shouted without realizing it.
But Youngwoo's body was already half-turned.
His sword hand dropped low.
His elbow bent briefly, then extended.
The point of the blade entered the man's chest and withdrew.
The thrust was so quick and precise that the man managed another full step before collapsing.
Another enemy came at him from behind.
Without even looking back, Youngwoo stepped backward and lowered himself.
The enemy's blade passed over his head.
In that same instant, Youngwoo's hwando rose from below and opened the man's side.
While the man staggered and fell, Youngwoo had already turned forward again.
One stroke was enough.
He never used more than he needed.
That was when Deoki saw Youngwoo's face.
There was no great anger on it.
No excitement.
No pride.
His eyes were cold and settled.
His lips remained firmly closed.
The hand wielding the sword was fierce, yet the man himself was strangely calm.
That calmness was more frightening than anything else.
It was not drunken courage.
It was not madness intoxicated by blood.
He moved like a man walking a road he already knew, like someone carrying out a task whose every step had already been weighed.
Only then did Deoki feel he understood a little of what people meant by the Realm of Transformation.
If the mind wavered before the sword, the sword would be late.
Youngwoo's mind had settled into a single point.
The blade merely followed it.
At last, the enemy soldiers blocking the road became afraid.
They still held their weapons toward Youngwoo, but their eyes were already searching for side streets and ways to retreat.
Some threw down their shields and fled.
Others tripped over the bodies of their own comrades.
When the Balhae soldiers roared and drove forward, the formation inside the southern gate shook violently.
Deoki had watched it all from barely more than ten jang away.
It had been close.
Close enough to hear blood strike the ground.
The dull sound of steel meeting bone.
Helmets rolling across stone.
The sound of a man's last breath vanishing into the night air.
And yet Youngwoo's steps alone remained steady.
He advanced as though practicing his sword forms.
But that sword practice left countless enemies dead in its wake.
Deoki saw a long trail of bodies stretching behind him.
That road led toward the southern gate.
And at the end of it, the gate opened.
The blood of those who had opened the hidden gate, the charge of the Balhae soldiers, and Yi Youngwoo's martial prowess as he tore open the enemy front alone had all joined at that one point.
Had even one of those parts been a little slower, many more men would have died before the southern gate.
Now Youngwoo lay asleep on the wooden floor.
Deoki pulled the blanket up once more and covered his shoulder.
On the battlefield, this was the man who had carved a path through dozens with a single sword.
Now he slept quietly, his breathing barely audible.