The Legend of Red Cloud - Chapter 91

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 91. Pungbi: On Wind Training
The ship departing from Goryeo reached Haenam Province at two ports: Haegu Port in the northeast and Munchang in the southeast.
Of these, Haegu Port was the most frequently used—a harbor where not only ships from Joseon arrived, but also vessels from the Jungwon mainland and even distant Wa.
It was at Haegu Port that Ryu, bearing the false identity of Ryu from the Gangdo Pung family, first set foot ashore.
Pung family Ryu.
That’s right. Pung Ryu.
A damnable name—perfect for being mocked as some idle good-for-nothing!
Even now, thinking it over made his blood boil. Ryu—or rather, Pung Ryu—squinted his eyes in irritation as he descended onto the dock.
He had come under the pretense of honoring a promise his father once made, so he needed to head straight to Munchang, where the Munchang So family waited.
There was a port where Joseon ships could dock there as well, after all.
The instructions passed down by Hyeol Yeong Ma Jon’s subordinate, who was operating in Joseon, had said the same thing.
But Ryu had no intention of dancing to Hyeol Yeong Ma Jon’s tune, even while carrying out his mission.
Once the objective was achieved, the man would have nothing more to say.
A hundred days?
He had no intention of spending all that time here.
He would settle things as quickly as possible and slip out of this godforsaken region.
Haenam Province, notorious for its insularity, lay wholly in the palm of the Haenam Geommun.
It would be wise to disappear before drawing the eye of Wol Pa Geom Hwang, master of the Baek Ui Ryeon.
To that end, Ryu reviewed once more what he had thought through aboard the ship.
Having reorganized those thoughts, Ryu moved forward.
The gazes of countless onlookers followed the unfamiliar outsider’s movements from all directions.
Moving through so many eyes, the first building Ryu entered in this strange land of Haenam was the nearest inn to the harbor.
Sitting in an empty seat, Ryu did something curious: he placed a slip of paper inscribed with information he wished to obtain into a cup on the table, turned it upside down, and set a silver coin on top.
That visible gesture was, in fact, the signal for summoning the disciples of the Haemilmun—the underworld information sect of Haenam Province.
The Haemilmun, which operated only within Haenam Province, shared the characteristics of the underground guilds already mentioned.
Even its membership.
Thus, composed of those who dwelled at the very bottom of society, the Haemilmun was accessible to anyone, and anyone could obtain information from it.
This present action was a secret method Jwa Ryang had once taught him for meeting a Haemilmun disciple.
For that reason, even those who saw someone sitting that way walked past as if they hadn’t noticed.
For there might come a time when they themselves would need to do the same.
Not long after Ryu had taken his seat, a server named Jeom So Yi approached, wiping the table, and asked.
“What would you like, guest?”
Though her words asked to take his order, the server’s hands had already deftly extracted the paper and coin from beneath the overturned cup.
It was movement so swift and deft that, had one not been watching carefully, one would have believed it had simply vanished.
“Somyeon.”
At Ryu’s curt reply, Jeom So Yi flashed him a smile and called toward the kitchen.
“One of the world’s most delicious somyeon noodles!”
The noodles arrived before the hour had half passed.
By the time Ryu had finished them, a slip of paper that Jeom So Yi had subtly pressed into his hand earlier had found its way into his garment.
Having emptied his bowl, Ryu rose without a word and left the inn.
As Ryu departed, Jeom So Yi approached the counter and whispered to the proprietor.
“Send word to Bun Ta. Someone has appeared bearing the exact same weapons as the Sea Demon of the East.”
The proprietor’s eyes widened with shock as he paused to consider whom the Sea Demon of the East might be.
Jeom So Yi continued swiftly.
“I’m certain. A bow slung across his back and three swords at his waist. Such weaponry belongs to only one person in this world—the Sea Demon of the East alone.”
At Jeom So Yi’s further explanation, the proprietor’s head bowed.
Though their titles in the inn were proprietor and server, within the Haemilmun, Jeom So Yi held the higher rank.
Confirming the proprietor’s acknowledgment, Jeom So Yi spotted a new patron entering and called out loudly in greeting as she approached.
“Welcome, please come in!”
As Jeom So Yi’s greeting rang clearly through the inn, Ryu—now at a distance—unfolded the slip of paper and read it.
<Namsan. Eastern ridge, Gwan Je Myo. Zi Shi (11 p.m. to 1 a.m.)>
Holding no information, only location and time, the slip soon returned to Ryu’s pocket. He lifted his gaze to judge the sun’s position, estimated the rough direction, and turned his steps southward.
***
The Gwan Je Myo, a shrine devoted to Guan Yu of the Three Kingdoms, is one of the most common shrines throughout the Jungwon.
And Haenam Province was no exception.
Built chiefly in remote mountains or at village entrances to seek blessings and ward off tiger attacks or pestilence, they served a protective purpose.
For this reason, so many had been constructed in the mountains that countless shrines had been forgotten and abandoned by the people’s memory—and the Gwan Je Myo that Ryu entered appeared to be one such place.
The roof was punctured, sections of the walls had crumbled, and only cobwebs clogged the shrine’s entrance.
Inside, beyond those webs, stood a statue of Guan Yu with wide-open eyes, blanketed in dust, lending the place a desolate air.
Ryu found a corner of the shrine, crouched down, and settled in to rest his weary body.
Throughout the journey from Gangdo to Haenam Province, Ryu had attempted to stir his Internal Force while aboard the ship, but as expected, the Dantian that Hyeol Yeong Ma Jon had sealed with his peculiar acupuncture technique yielded not a single strand of Internal Force.
Though they shared the same Hwa Gyeong realm, Ryu felt acutely the gulf in ability that separated him from Hyeol Yeong Ma Jon.
Then again, the man controlled a third of the Kangho, and everyone counted him among the three closest to being Number One in the World.
Yet he had not been cast adrift entirely unprepared with his Dantian sealed.
Hyeol Yeong Ma Jon had bestowed upon him a secret mantra, as if doing him a favor, and that knowledge now lodged firmly in Ryu’s mind.
It was called Pungbi—a secret technique of Haedong, likewise.
Not Internal Force, but a technique that drew upon natural Qi, specifically the breath of wind itself?
When Ryu had resisted, dismissing it as mere sorcery, Hyeol Yeong Ma Jon had simply felled a massive tree before him.
He had not drawn a blade, nor unleashed some tremendous surge of true Qi or sword energy forged from overwhelming force.
Ryu’s senses had detected no movement of Hyeol Yeong Ma Jon’s Internal Force anywhere.
At Ryu’s bewildered expression, Hyeol Yeong Ma Jon repeated the feat.
Only the target differed.
This time, a boulder the size of a house cleaved cleanly in two.
It was then that Ryu understood.
Air compressed to an extraordinary degree had followed the sweep of Hyeol Yeong Ma Jon’s hand through empty space and carved the rock asunder.
‘You see now it’s not sorcery?’
That was what Hyeol Yeong Ma Jon had said then.
By those words, Ryu grasped it.
The terrible power that Pungbi, the secret of Haedong, possessed.
The words Hyeol Yeong Ma Jon had spoken while teaching him the mantra of Pungbi still echoed clearly in his ears.
‘I’m not teaching you this for nothing. Pungbi is not a technique of practice—it is a technique of enlightenment. All the martial arts of Haedong’s tradition rely on enlightenment as their core.’
In short, it mattered not how long one trained, but rather how deeply one grasped the principle—that was the measure of mastering Pungbi.
Moreover, as already noted, Pungbi required no Internal Force whatsoever.
With his Dantian sealed to match the false identity of a man with a broken core, it was a technique perfectly suited to a Ryu who could no longer draw upon his power.
He had spent the entire journey from Jungwon to Gangdo, and then from Gangdo to Haenam Province, memorizing and re-memorizing it, striving to awaken that understanding.
But so far, he had only reached the stage of loosening his knotted muscles and beginning to activate them.
Even that achievement came only because he had already touched the sublime realm of Hwa Gyeong once before.
Without that, he would have understood nothing of the secret, no matter how often he recited it.
Of course, even so, he had accomplished merely the loosening of constricted muscles.
To loosen those tight muscles and activate them to a degree where all his strength could be drawn upon at any moment.
In other words, what he had achieved now was merely the effect brought by an advanced form of the countless breathing exercises that scattered people practiced in the streets.
Still, for Ryu with his Dantian sealed, Wind Training—the cultivation method of Pungbi—was all he could employ immediately.
Because it could at least bring his muscles to their optimal state.
Soon, straightening from his crouch, Ryu settled into a cross-legged position and began to slowly sense the wind around him, following the Wind Training technique of Pungbi.
Though nominally indoors, one wall had collapsed, opening to the outside—so the passage of wind was no difficulty at all.
Indeed, a cool breeze was felt at once.
Soon Ryu’s Wind Training began in earnest.
This meditation-accompanied Wind Training appeared not so different from Ungi at first glance.
Perhaps for that reason, Ryu adapted to Wind Training readily.
Yet Wind Training differed from Ungi in that all senses remained alert and awake.
No—the senses grew even more acute and keen than usual.
For one must feel the wind surrounding one’s body.
Ordinarily, wind, when it strikes something, rises and flows around it.
Naturally, wind lingers in the vicinity of objects.
Wind Training employs the very small, very light breezes that linger around things in this manner.
Having entered into Wind Training, Ryu first found the larger currents around him, then sharpened his senses further to locate the tiny, delicate wind clinging to his own body.
Once he found the small, light breeze flowing around his body like an embrace, he began to synchronize its rhythm with the speed of blood coursing through his own veins.
This step was the most difficult.
The speed of blood correlates with the rate of the heartbeat.
The problem was that no one could command their own heart to beat as they wished.
So instead, one artificially compressed the hundreds of Ki Meridians throughout the body to regulate blood flow.
Opening the meridians wide expanded the vessel capacity relative to blood volume, slowing the flow.
Conversely, compressing the meridians to constrict the blood vessels narrowed the passage relative to the volume of blood pumped from the heart, accelerating the flow.
Though Internal Force had vanished, memory remained; finding the meridians was not difficult.
But even Ryu, who over more than twenty years of cultivation had mastered the art of moving his meridians with ease, required more than three full days merely to learn this method of using surrounding muscle to compress the meridians and consciously adjust vascular capacity.
Yet Ryu did not know this was ten days faster than Hyeol Yeong Ma Jon had achieved it.
At that time, Hyeol Yeong Ma Jon was already aboard a ship bound for Haedong, so they could not have held such a conversation.
In any case, employing this newly-awakened method to compress the hundreds of meridians scattered throughout his body and synchronize the blood flowing through his entire frame with the wind’s speed, a subtle tremor arose.
Blood and wind resonated, drumming against the muscle held between them.
Immediately, an effect akin to Internal Force loosening his muscles began to manifest throughout Ryu’s entire body.
In truth, when he first experienced this, it had seemed nothing but miraculous.
It was the astonishing fact that the wind from outside could resonate with the blood flowing through a person’s flesh.
Moreover, the ability to release the muscles through that resonance was itself remarkable.
Yet that remarkable wonder extended no further than that.
Beyond loosening the muscles, it held no other effect, no other function.
Still, he had to cling to it now.
For the muscles had to be prepared to their fullest capacity if there was to be any help at all for what lay ahead.
And so, while Ryu sank deep into Wind Training, the sun descended and darkness fell over Gwan Je Myo.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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