Chapter 660: A Cunning Mind, a Wicked Heart (4)

Kicking my butt is one thing—but why a butt-kick delivered with Weight-Adding Method?

Qing rubbed her stinging rear to smooth out the lingering qi and muttered,

“I feel like I’ve fallen for a trap.”

A hole bored so you could see the setting sun—of course any human being would instinctively lean in and look.

Knowing this old man’s temperament, this had to be on purpose.

If some later fellow came to test whether this was Ideation or descent, he clearly drilled it at an awkward height just so he could kick their butt.

“Tsk. Enough.”

The Heavenly Martial Emperor—or Qing’s own “Heavenly Emperor” projection—clicked his tongue and addressed Qing in a voice that wasn’t kind.

“Why are you playacting a mother you were never fated to be? You think raising a child is easy?”

“You haven’t raised one either. You didn’t take in a disciple, let alone a child. Anyone can say raising kids is hard.”

“Well, you’ve said the one correct thing. In a world where most can barely manage themselves, who raises a child? The ground is carpeted with fools who train all their lives and still die without so much as touching Harmony. Looks like you’re overflowing with leisure.”

The Heavenly Martial Emperor’s life was nothing but cultivation.

Even after reaching a height too high to mark, he always looked higher still.

Lover, child, disciple—mere distractions; his sole purpose in life was study.

“I don’t particularly want to live that harsh a cultivation-only life. And it’s not like I’m learning martial arts to spend them somewhere—I’m not keen on sprinting blind to the ‘next realm’ forever, either.”

“Hmph. What’s more important than completing yourself? And what do you mean ‘where to spend it’? Who do your righteous-gentlemen sects owe for your eating well and living well right now?”

“Mm.”

Come to think of it—you beat the bad ones senseless, smashed everything, turned the whole martial world over.

Now that I think about it, a reasonable suspicion arises: maybe you took preemptive measures before anything could hinder your cultivation.

At that, the Heavenly Martial Emperor’s mouth pulled into a grin.

Since this one claimed to be Qing’s own inner projection—the so-called “Heavenly Emperor Qing”—he could read the thoughts in her heart.

Hence the confusion.

No matter how lofty the Heavenly Martial Emperor was, reading minds shouldn’t be on the menu; so this must be my mental image born of the Sword-Cut Wall’s trace—right?

And yet here and there he behaved like the real one.

“That’s the path you walked. I’m not planning to spend a lifetime cultivating only, whether I die or ‘ascend.’ Completion—what completion. If I can protect my friends and my family, that’s enough.”

“We’ll see. Is that really so?”

“What do you mean, ‘really so’?”

“You’re still wobbling around at the paltry realm of the Flower Realm, so you don’t know. You look like you can at least get to the starting line. Let’s see if, after you surpass me, you can still run that mouth.”

See?

Is this what my inner “Heavenly Emperor” would say?

“What can’t you do? Be honest—you already know. Flying on your own two legs and smashing rock—this realm you’re in is tremendously fun, isn’t it? Are you truly, sincerely convinced your path—martial arts to protect what you have—is the one you mean to walk?”

“Wow. Do you realize you really sound like a demon-heart right now? Are you the Ten-Thousand-Slaughters Baleful Star wearing human skin?”

“Hmph. The demon-heart is your condition. If you could love yourself, you wouldn’t beg others for love. You lack it, so you borrow it from others.”

Qing’s brow twitched.

“Can we stop with the therapy I never asked for? Just show me the movement already.”

“Hmph. Out of words, so you swerve the talk. Tch. With a mind this frail, how will you become a great figure and achieve great merit?”

Even so, he stretched out a hand, and from the air, with a soft spiral, caught hold of a forming sword.

“Idiot. You felt nothing seeing Hollow Mountain’s arts?”

“Not particularly? All I saw was the handling of odd weapons. Ah, should I have gone to the Demon-Subduing Sword first?”

“If you saw Stratagem Arms, you saw it all. Hollow Mountain’s history is truly the practice of the art of war. Not ‘martial skill as an art of cultivation,’ but fidelity to the purpose of harming the other and taking life.”

In the past, the fighters of Hollow Mountain, on Daoist thought, added Buddhist mind-work and Confucian rite to raise a Daoist temple and found the Hollow Mountain Sect.

But in their roots, they remained killers.

They took killing the opponent—harming the other—as the essence of martial.

So Hollow Mountain’s martial learning, to the eye, is easygoing, rolling on the roadside like monks on the Great Vehicle—but in its true heart it carries a burning will to kill.

The totality of that is the Demon-Subduing Sword.

A sword that bears demons in its belly.

The Heavenly Martial Emperor nodded.

“That’s right. No matter the path to completion, no matter the cultivation of ‘the Way’—martial arts are ultimately the technique of harming the other. A crafty mind, a vicious heart. That’s why they say, if you aren’t ruthless, you aren’t a man.”

“Eh.”

Qing blinked.

His judgments were always skewed.

This rubs me wrong, that rubs me wrong—he saw the orthodox schools, left one movement, and what did he say?

“You’re wrong, I’m right. Do it like this.”

It was a geezer’s meddling, a scolding lecture.

Since when the all-praise track?

The Heavenly Martial Emperor bared a savage grin.

“There are those I like and those I don’t. Acknowledging the foundation of the art—and despite that, the resolve to complete it by the Way of martial learning—that spirit is exactly the Demon-Subduing Sword.”

And right after—

“Only, their skill is still poor; they haven’t produced a proper master, which is frustrating.”

Right on cue, the old man veered again.

“Enough about the bunglers. Brilliant girl—watch closely.”

He raised his sword straight up.

With the blade set between the brows, splitting the face in two—a posture rare in the Central Plains.

Because it has no advantages, is merely a touch stylish—and in blunt terms, a peacock’s pose for idiots.

Put a blade before your face and you block your own sight; when the enemy’s attack comes, your path forward is cramped; however you parry, your own sword will split your own skull.

But by now Qing had a fair handle on the man called the Heavenly Martial Emperor.

At his level, style alone suffices.

Better to flaunt an opening and invite the enemy’s attack.

Whether she read him right or not, he sent her a fond smile—and drew the sword in, then slowly pushed it forward.

It was a motion like taking a starting salute.

Only—a human-wrought starlight streamed out in a single line; the steel-qi that grazed Qing’s eyes touched the cliff and burrowed in, soundless, natural.

Qing too, entranced, drew her sword.

The First Movement is I Alone Am Exalted.

The words the Buddha is said to have cried at birth instead of a wail—a declaration that above heaven and below heaven, in all the world, I alone am exalted.

Thus, when the Exalted One sets his mind, the world is made to sway—so by swaying the sword, the world comes to you.

It is the ideal of becoming heaven yourself.

The Third Movement is Be the Master Wherever You Stand.

Only with your feet on the earth can a martial artist bring all strength to bear; therefore human strength can reach the sky.

Know your place—then you reach the heavens.

I am the center of the world; I am the earth itself.

And between the First and the Third—

between heaven and earth—

There is a point that touches neither heaven nor earth.

The point that stands between heaven and earth—human.

Qing’s sword pierces the point.

A human’s sword that pierces human.

With no preparation, no sign—following nature.

For the act of a human harming a human is as natural as breathing and blinking.

This movement: Without Poison, No True Man.

If you aren’t ruthless, you aren’t a man.

In that instant, Qing realized she had fully grasped the opening of the farthest-reaching martial art left by the highest-climbing martial artist.

The first three movements of the Dokgo Nine Sword Forms are the life-posture the Heavenly Martial Emperor left behind.

A downward cut that swings and rends the world.

A covert thrust that bears human malice.

An upward cut that relies on earth and stretches to heaven.

Hold yourself up as heaven.

Do not forget that you are only human.

Stand on the earth and look up.

Only—mm.

Qing looked at the Heavenly Martial Emperor and said,

“Mm. ‘Without Poison, No True Man’—the name’s a bit off.”

Without Poison, No True Man.

A phrase from Ma Zhiyuan’s The Crossbowman, saying that without ruthlessness you aren’t a true “man.”

For reference, in the Central Plains, if a woman is ruthless, she wasn’t a “heroic woman,” merely branded a wicked woman.

Cao Cao may be called a bandit, yet the ruthlessness of burying men alive is praised as the craft of a hero in troubled times; but Empress Lü, who cruelly executed Lady Qi to break the in-law faction’s tyranny, is treated as the wicked woman of the realm.

Mm—doesn’t sit right.

“Why? There’s ‘heroic woman’ as a phrase.”

“It’s not that—it’s that it’s utterly solitary.”

In the Dokgo Nine Sword Forms there was only me.

From the very name—seeking the solitary, lonely sword—it’s a vow to pour everything in to pursue the whole, perfect sword.

“Hmph. And since when is martial arts practiced in a crowd? Look at your friends. Fine—maybe by straining they can hit Flower Realm by sheer ki-yai. Do you really think those brats will help you in the end? Alone you’d at least train; with friends, you sprawl and play. Now you even claim you’re playing house—tending a child. Isn’t that just dead weight?”

“‘Dead weight’—that’s harsh...”

This is why the Dokgo Nine Sword Forms don’t suit me.

“Nothing else matters—go mad for martial arts.” Sure, a discipline so far-reaching is worth going all-in for—but still.

“Ties are vain. Only your own achievement will make you whole. Once you climb higher you’ll understand; there’s no need to nag.”

“When you say it like that, it only makes me push back harder, you know?”

“Hmph. Just don’t regret later that you could have saved a few years.”

And—POOF!—the Heavenly Martial Emperor suddenly vanished.

Mm. Sulking, maybe?

Since this elder reads the heart and all that, perhaps he took it to heart when I said the Dokgo Nine Sword Forms don’t suit me.

When she came to, she saw Hee-mae frozen in an awkward pose.

“Mm? What are you doing?”

“You’re not collapsing? Aunt said you’d faint after seeing the Sword-Cut Wall.”

And then Qing—huh.