Chapter 690: Righteous-Proper Martial Academy, Opening

After the first-round exam ended and we’d taken a full day’s rest, we went to sleep and woke—strictly speaking, we were still in the middle of sleeping.

—Sister! Sister! Are you there!?

“What is it.”

A morning in which you open your eyes against your will is sharp.

If not for Jayeo lying with her cheek pillowed on my chest, a bad word might have slipped out, but Jayeo, light of ear in her sleep, also woke and blinked up at Qing in a tousled daze.

“Children don’t wake in the morning. Sleep more.”

“Then Jayeo keeps sleeping?”

“Mm. Zhang Mingyi, that brat.”

When Jayeo does something cutesy and you ask why, she always says her little mama taught her, does she not.

What is that girl always teaching the kid?

I’ll let it slide only because she really is adorable.

“Right. Jayeo keeps sleeping.”

“Then Jayeo snores sleeping.”

A signature Zhang-Mingyi cuteness act—call it, for short, a cute-act.

No, really.

If she keeps this up, I truly—this fits my heart exactly.

Zhang Mingyi knows my tastes too well.

Qing let out a soft snort of laughter and set Jayeo atop Seol Iri, who was lying beside her.

Jayeo clearly didn’t like the height of the new pillow and felt uncomfortable; she wriggled this way and that, setting her head down anew as she tried to find her posture.

But once Seol Iri falls asleep she absolutely never wakes.

She must have been uncomfortable, a faint line at her glabella and her brows resting faintly, making a thoroughly stifled expression; hm, I wonder if a martial artist can really afford to be this hard of hearing in sleep.

Qing threw on clothes roughly and stepped out to the guest hall.

For her, “roughly” meant garments trained to order under the Nuclear Forehead-Flick, a perfectly refined dressing technique so that nothing was out of place and the look was neat.

“What, Jegal? At morning o—Hyaaaahm. GAAAH. Gods, it’s the crack of dawn.”

Yawning long, Qing produced a thoroughly middle-aged uncle sound.

But when a beauty does anything, all is forgiven; any man would not only accept it gladly but praise it as a delightfully frank reversal.

“Sister, will you not use a little strength for the first time in a while? If you let your muscles rampage freely now and then and loosen them up, they won’t grow lazy, will they?”

“Eh.”

Muscles aren’t an internal-combustion engine; do you step on them now and then to burn off soot?

If you make them rampage suddenly, won’t you just get knots?

But Qing knew nothing of exercise science, and well, here in the Central Plains it might be so.

In this world, if you do not constantly practice breathing and circulating, the special human organs of this world—the cosmic-mystery qi channels, the meridians—grow turbid, clog, and harden.

Qing owned a very open mind.

If you fall overnight into a pseudo-martial Central Plains of primitive antiquity, wouldn’t anyone’s mind open.

“Why are you suddenly saying this in the morning?”

“Sister, the thing is—”

“Wait. You must have a most proper reason. Otherwise the crime of daring to disturb this lady’s morning sleep is an incomparable impiety.”

A commonly known fact with not a hair of falsehood relative to Qing’s station.

At that, Jegal Ihyeon gave his explanation.

The first-round entrance exam—its very name said it was only a first round.

“First round” means at least a second round is waiting.

Starting today, the second-round exam begins.

In the second round you must choose one of cutting wood with a blade, cutting stone with a blade, or cutting iron with a blade, and prove the attainment of the martial arts you’ve learned thus far.

Only, trees do not suddenly grow in an exam hall, nor do stone and iron sprout, so people must carry all of them in, must they not.

“Ah, so that’s why you were ‘weighing’ the other day—you weren’t playing around.”

“‘Weighing’? The meaning is utterly clear, is it not? Indeed, from before, Sister has used expressions that are uniquely peculiar yet immediately intuitive.”

When Qing first arrived at the Academy’s temporary headquarters, Jegal Ihyeon was clutching a massive stele.

Given Jegal Ihyeon’s splendid physique, she’d thought he was simply training external strength, but in truth he was transporting materials to be used in the second-round exam.

Of course, no one would order the heir of the Jegal clan to do such grunt work, so he must have volunteered for the sake of external-strength training.

“Mm. If it’s that, well. Those with strength should help.”

Qing assented meekly.

We’re all one family in the Martial Alliance; it wouldn’t do for some to sleep in late while others huff and strain at dawn to move cargo.

If you didn’t know, fine—but now you do.

As a martial artist’s realm rises, the sleep needed likewise decreases—no idea the principle, but one assumes some such effect comes to pass by the great mystery called internal strength.

Thus Qing, a master in Harmony, surely ranked among those in the Righteous-Proper Martial Academy admissions headquarters who needed the least sleep.

For Qing, sleep is a hobby, not a necessity.

Following Jegal Ihyeon out the guest hall’s gate and over to the main building, sure enough, everyone was hnnng-hnnng, clutching stone steles and iron pillars, loading them on carts, pushing and pulling and straining to move them—a chaos.

In the midst of it, a gigantic self-propelled autonomous stone stele was moving—not a stele, but Peng Choryeo with a stele on her back.

Peng Choryeo smiled and welcomed Qing.

“Oh, Qing, did you come to help too? Right, why would you wallow flat from morning; if you clench your muscles and loosen them up, you’ll feel fresh and good all day.”

Exactly what Jegal Ihyeon had said.

What is this? Is this truly a common-sense notion of the Central Plains?

While Qing was half-and-half, they entered the material—or teaching-aid—storehouse, and from the morning something shone dazzlingly.

It was the blinding perfect teeth of Ivory Sword Oh Jang-rak.

“Mm? Instructor Ximen? What brings you at this dawn? You could have rested more.”

“I heard there was heavy lifting and came to help.”

“Heh-heh, truly diligent unlike the young folks these days. If my own boy resembled Instructor Ximen by even half, no, a quarter, no, a quarter of a quarter, I’d carry him on my back.”

Ever since Qing salvaged his face in that “dancing punk back-destroy” incident, Oh Jang-rak had gushed favor.

“I’m grateful in spirit, but leave this sort of thing to the strong hands and rest more. Folks like us porters help while training external strength besides. Everyone here is drawing monthly pay; there’s no need to feel awkward.”

“Come on, I can pull some weight too.”

Qing raised and bent an arm.

Even so, all that happened was that the ample sleeve slipped down and revealed nothing but the fatally beautiful snow-white forearm of a Little-Minority adamant witch—nearly Diamond-Indestructible, and if one must add, a minority “adamant-gone-wild.”

“Oh, Great Hero. Sister is truly a porter among porters.”

“Mm?”

“Ah, Great Hero Oh. Hyun’s right. Qing is a proper porter, she is? Even I feel shy about my epithet in front of Qing. The travelling carriage should be Qing’s, not mine.”

Peng Choryeo joined in.

Oh Jang-rak’s gaze went to Qing’s slender wrist. If you took it lightly and twisted, it looked like the kind of delicate wrist that would go tok and snap.

“Right then, I’ll move this. If it gets hard, I’ll rest on my own. Heave-ho.”

Peng Choryeo nodded in gratification.

Jegal Ihyeon’s eyes flashed.

Oh Jang-rak’s mouth fell open.

For Qing lifted a stone stele as if picking up a tray.

Ordinarily when a person uses strength, a particular posture comes out; among porters you can gauge, from the height of the shoulders alone, roughly how much strength is being used.

In other words, she wasn’t using much!

Above all—what, lifting that in front?

What on earth kind of grip strength is this?

If Oh Jang-rak was astonished thus, what of the Martial Alliance haulers?

As Qing passed by, the carts they were pulling all came to a stop one and all, and they rubbed their eyes—was this truly the proper sight they were seeing?

Had they, from straining since morning, begun to see things?

Only, the buffer between the stele and the Heavenly Flower Sword was a truly majestic landscape—an unprecedented article that made even the stone envious, a sight from which one could not turn one’s eyes.

“Ah—Abbot Wolbong is here too.”

“HURK.”

THUD!

A bald head it was oddly hard to see decided for once to offer a greeting—he staggered and toppled and got himself buried under the stele.

“Eh. Are you all right?”

“I—I’m fine, I’m fine. Namu Amitabha.”

From under the stele came a perfectly normal reply.

For Wolbong is the true master of the Diamond-Indestructible Divine Art, the very human Diamond whom even Qing could pound so and he’d be fine.

Soon the stele rose slowly.

And when he looked at Qing—or so it seemed—he muttered “Mara—no, Amitabha,” sought a needless Amitabha, and then, ever so slowly, lay back down again.

“Are you truly all right?”

“P-please, go on ahead.”

He’s a little—no, a lot odd as a person too, isn’t he.

But unlike the first impression, it’s not as if anyone asked a Shaolin monk to haul cargo.

The very fact he was here meant he’d volunteered to help; so the person himself, perhaps, wasn’t bad.

Qing walked on, stone stele in hand, with brisk STEP STEP.

This too was a wondrous sight—how on earth was she seeing ahead to stride so boldly forward like that.

Having lifted a stone as tall as a person and raised it well above her head, from the front she appeared like a stone with legs.

Qing did not see the world with her eyes alone.

Thus, coming out with the stele in hand, Qing sensed a human shape of a peculiar pattern in the spatial awareness of her awakened art.

Ah—this shape?

“Sima-rang?”

“Heavenly Flower Sword? What—what strength... This is my defeat—no, if we do this, then in formal categories, the win and loss...”

Qing reflected a little.

There were this many people already at work since dawn, and meanwhile we’d just been sprawled out asleep.

Or was it that they only started today? At any rate.

“A-hem. Heavenly Flower Sword, if you think that this means you’ve beaten this Sima-rang, it will be a great mistake. Our contest begins now—”

“Already working since dawn? You’ve worked hard.”

“U-huhut, heh-heh! For geniuses of one-glimpse-grasp-the-whole like us, it is our destiny, is it not?”

One wonders how many of those “like us” turns of phrase he has left; and seeing as they always come out without a hitch, a reasonable suspicion arises that he contemplates them constantly in daily life.

Of course, Qing’s suspicion was not a suspicion but a very clear fact—but Qing did not have the ability to read the inside of people’s hearts.

“What can one do? Without this Sima-rang, the entire work of the Martial Alliance would be paralyzed. Those incompetent laymen there—their very nature is slothful toward the office of staff officer; which is precisely why we cannot leave the work to them.”

At that, the Martial Alliance staff officers wore expressions of having seen something filthy from morning.

But it was something they’d suffered not just a day or two.

Sima Chunbong was offensively diligent.

Thus the brute labor that began at dawn reached an early end as the space beneath the examiners’ gallery filled with materials.

Hm. I don’t know about “refreshed.”

But certainly, after using strength in the morning, shall we say the breakfast goes down more.

The second-round exam, compared to the first, proceeded at a great clip, for it was not a method that devoured time.

In the exam hall, bamboo stands and stone slabs, iron plates, and even stone steles the size of a person—and iron steles—were prepared.

Candidates could choose at least one to ten pieces of bamboo, or one among stone slab, iron plate, stone stele, or iron stele, and whether cutting or striking or thrusting, show off to their hearts’ content the power of the martial arts they had learned.

But more important than that was this: if you challenged, you had to succeed.

From the outset, the Righteous-Proper Martial Academy’s entrance standard did not cut from the top down by skill alone.

This was stated from the Academy’s recruitment circular—regardless of skill, they would recruit those of right mind and chivalry.

Therefore, the exam’s main evaluation criterion was how precisely you knew your own ability and how exactly you could express what you had learned.

But when the oldest are only in their mid-twenties and the youngest are boys still fresh-faced—can hot blood be like that.

Thus this time, at last, we will show you something—there was nothing for it but to become a pageant of phantom martial-arts demonstrations.