Even looking straight at her, Bu Eunseol could not help doubting his own eyes.
"You are truly Instructor So?"
She wore her usual guileless expression and grinned at him.
"Hm?"
But her face had changed entirely, and the plain, homely smile of before was nowhere in it.
Was that not a naive charm, beautiful and pure past all measure, that no beauty in the world could have imitated?
"Why?"
As So Okrim blinked her large eyes, Bu Eunseol cleared his throat and changed the subject.
"What in the world happened here?"
He looked around, tilted his head, and wore the face of a man who could make no sense of any of it.
"We were passing the third gate. I am certain of it."
"Ah?"
So Okrim's eyes went wide for an instant, and then her face reddened.
She had remembered holding Bu Eunseol tightly in her arms.
"R-Right? The scenery changed all of a sudden, didn't it?"
Flustered, she finally took a look around.
Trees stood in ranks like a green wall, giving off a faint fragrance, their branches swaying gently on the wind.
Sunlight leaked between the branches and fell across the ground like threads of gold.
At a small waterfall in the distance, the spray caught the light and glittered like silver dust.
Flowers bloomed thickly all around it, and each time the wind brushed past, the petals scattered like snow.
Birdsong somewhere far off, rabbits and deer at play among the trees...
It was, in every sense, a Peach Blossom Paradise.
"What on earth happened?"
So Okrim scratched her head.
"It looks like we've been moved somewhere else entirely."
The plateau, where even a breath fell heavy, had vanished without a trace, and in its place stood a scene as warm as this?
"Don't tell me we're near the Gentle Flower Valley? That would mean we crossed a hundred li while we were unconscious."
So Okrim folded her arms, looked at Bu Eunseol, and asked with a stiff face.
"Do the two of us sleepwalk?"
"If we truly covered that distance while we were unconscious..."
Bu Eunseol shook his head.
"Then ancient formation studies must have been among the mechanisms built into the Branch."
In the past, Han Sangja had installed an ancient formation that shifted the flow of qi in an instant, meaning to draw out the Covenantor of the Sacred Domain.
"While we were senseless, the inner mechanisms and the formation must have triggered, and we passed through the same corridor that once showed us the Mind World, which let out at another point."
"Something like that exists?"
"From what I have experienced, it is not impossible."
So Okrim puffed out her cheeks and smacked her lips.
"Anyway, there isn't one normal thing left in the martial world these days..."
She was still speaking when she swayed, as though a wave of dizziness had taken her.
"What's wrong with me?"
"Are you all right?"
"Something's odd. Everything looks too low."
When she staggered a second time, Bu Eunseol quickly caught her by the arm.
In the doing of it, their faces came close enough that their noses nearly touched.
"Are you all right?"
"Hm?"
"Your face is red."
Flustered, So Okrim straightened up at once.
"I'm fine, I'm fine."
Then she planted her hands on her hips as she always did, looked up at the sky, and laughed out loud.
"Someone with high internal power has smooth blood flow, so of course the color is always good."
But her body had grown slender, and with her hands at her waist the now-baggy robe pulled taut against her.
Her voluptuous figure stood out plainly.
Bu Eunseol turned his eyes away before he knew he was doing it, and spoke.
"I think it must be because your bone structure has changed."
"My bone structure, changed?"
"Your body has changed."
Bu Eunseol cleared his throat and pointed a finger at her waist.
Only then did So Okrim register her narrow waist and her lost height.
"Huh? What is this?"
Something felt wrong, and she went scrambling off to the waterfall.
"Whoaaa."
Staring at the face reflected in the water, So Okrim let her mouth fall open and ran her hands over both cheeks.
"My face has gone back to the way it was!"
Born under the Heavenly Martial Star, she had possessed extraordinarily beautiful features to begin with.
But perhaps it was because she had trained in the secret arts of the Essence Three Realms, which had inherited the Baekri Family's mysterious martial essence.
Or perhaps because she had eaten spiritual medicines like rice since she was small... either way, the power of the Heavenly Martial Star had come out in her body.
By the age of ten she stood tall enough to look down on grown men.
By thirteen she had put on muscle enough to outdo a martial artist who had drilled in external arts his whole life.
A fortuitous encounter during her earlier travels through the martial world with Bu Eunseol had taken some of that frame and muscle off her.
Even so, she had stayed too big and too imposing to pass for a woman's body.
Now, though, she had thinned to rival one of the Three Great Beauties of the World, a woman so frail and sprite-light that she was said to be able to dance on an open palm.
Her line was as fine now as that of Danri Seoheon, the one they called Song and Dance on a Palm.
"I'm back to how I was!"
Eyes brimming, So Okrim came running at Bu Eunseol.
"I'm back!"
Whump.
She was so overjoyed that she threw her arms around him and held on tight.
With her height so plainly reduced, her forehead now came only to Bu Eunseol's philtrum.
Still holding on to him, she shouted.
"Now I'm really me!"
"That is a relief. Truly, a relief."
Bu Eunseol patted So Okrim gently on the back.
She had carried the build of a Guan Yu for decades, and now she had her own body back. How great must that joy have been?
"Huh? Hold on a moment."
Then she wiped her tears away all at once and spoke.
"I never brought the Sacred Fire Secret Transmission to completion. So how did my body go back to normal?"
"What do you mean?"
"The grandfathers told me that to dissolve the Heavenly Martial Star's power out of my body completely, I absolutely had to finish the Sacred Fire Secret Transmission."
She had been born under the Heavenly Martial Star, which carried an overwhelming divine strength from birth, and because of it her body had developed abnormally.
The Sacred Fire Secret Transmission was the highest secret art of the Essence Three Realms, a martial art that came endlessly close to the Baekri Family's original power.
It had to be carried to the twelfth level of mastery.
Only then, they said, could she control that power fully and return her body to its original state.
And yet her body had gone back without her ever completing it?
"Wait. Wait a moment."
So Okrim looked around her with a bewildered expression.
"Then the Sacred Fire Branch vanishing, does that mean..."
She looked at Bu Eunseol, her face caught somewhere between doubt and wonder.
"Were you really my destiny?"
"What do you mean?"
"My youngest grandfather said that the day I met my destined partner, the Sacred Fire Branch would disappear."
"He left words like that behind?"
"Of course. You think I went looking for fortune-tellers out of boredom?"
So Okrim had not been chasing fortune-tellers on a vague whim.
She had believed the story her youngest grandfather told her as a child, and she had been searching for her destined partner ever since.
Rumble.
Just then a tremor spread out through the ground.
Sensing something in that instant, Bu Eunseol unfolded the Mind's Eye of the Beast Way.
At once he could feel a deep passage running beneath the ground they stood on, fitted out with mechanisms of every kind.
"This is not the Gentle Flower Valley. It seems to be a secluded valley not far from the Branch."
Bu Eunseol said, looking around them.
"There is a deep passage below that runs all the way to the far side. The moment we cleared the third gate... the Branch must have collapsed, and the floor we stood on rose to the surface somewhere near here."
"Not ancient formation studies, just machinery?"
"That is right. I have seen mechanisms like it in Jiaozhi."
There had been a secret cave beneath the forest of Jiaozhi where Pahon lived.
When its interior gave way, a whole section of it had been thrust up to the surface.
The Sacred Fire Branch, most likely, was built on the same kind of mechanism.
"You really do seem to go back and forth between worlds every time."
At So Okrim's words, Bu Eunseol let a bitter smile settle on his lips.
"There are times I think so myself."
Against his own wishes, he kept becoming entangled with the powers that had steered the martial world for generations.
And everything connected to them...
Every last one of them shook the accepted sense and order of things down to the root.
"Then has the Sacred Fire Secret Transmission been completed?"
If the words So Okrim's master had passed down were true, the sequence was plain.
She had met her destined partner, the Sacred Fire Secret Transmission had completed itself while the two of them lay senseless, and the Branch had come down because of it.
"Well, now."
So Okrim drew a deep breath and spread both arms wide.
"Let's just try it and see."
The Sacred Fire Secret Transmission was not a martial art so much as a secret method for maximizing power, so it had no need of anything like an opening stance.
But this was the first time she would unfold it, and the occasion moved her to strike a grand pose anyway.
Vwoom.
So Okrim gathered her power with everything she had.
Rumble.
The earth's axis shook, and the pebbles lying on the ground began to drift slowly up into the air.
It was a staggering amount of internal power.
"Ha-ap!"
She thrust out her hand.
Boooom!
In a tremendous flare of light, the trees of the forest dozens of jang away (1 jang = 3m) were ground to powder in a single stroke, as though they had melted.
"Formidable power."
"No, this isn't the Sacred Fire Secret Transmission."
Looking down at her two hands, So Okrim knit her brow.
"Why is it only my internal energy that got stronger?"
"Internal energy?"
"Mm. My internal power used to sit at about seven sixty-year cycles."
She pressed a few times at her now-slim lower belly as she spoke.
"Right now it feels like it's reached nine."
"Nine sixty-year cycles."
A strange thought came to Bu Eunseol, and he checked over his own body.
Sure enough, the inner core he had stored inside himself had shrunk somewhat.
"That would be..."
Bu Eunseol spoke with an embarrassed look on his face.
"The internal power stored in my dantian seems to have flowed into Instructor So's body."
"Stored internal power? And what is that supposed to be?"
If he did not give her a straight answer, she looked ready to ask it into his ear all night long.
Bu Eunseol knew her temperament well, so he calmly explained the Taoist secret and the condition of the inner core.
"So the power of that inner core you stored is inside my body..."
Only then did So Okrim's mouth fall open, as though something had dawned on her.
"Then I didn't complete the Sacred Fire Secret Transmission at all. I completed the Dual Cultivation Art, didn't I?"
"The Dual Cultivation Art?"
"The Sacred Fire Secret Transmission is a Dual Cultivation Secret Art from the start, something two people refine together."
So Okrim explained calmly.
"Until you reach the realm of Great Perfection... its true force only shows when two people join their strength and unfold it together."
Under Bu Eunseol's steady stare, she scratched her cheek and went on.
"There's supposed to be a training chamber past the three gates. That's where we were meant to refine the Sacred Fire Secret Transmission together."
However much her face had changed, So Okrim was still So Okrim.
She kept up the same rough-and-ready manner as she carried on explaining.
"Completing the Dual Cultivation Art means exactly this, sharing the power each of you holds. And we already shared ours... so the Branch must have decided it was all finished and shut itself down."
"So that was it."
So Okrim had held on to Bu Eunseol with the single thought of keeping him alive.
Nothing had been in her mind but taking some of the agony off him.
Bu Eunseol had been no different.
She had moved to take the body-rending force into herself in his stead, to shield him.
And he had tried to shoulder every last part of that agony himself.
Their bodies met, their pulses ran together, and the breath of the two of them became one breath as each fought to keep the other alive.
And the power each of them held began to seep into the other.
People say easily enough that body and mind become one.
But for two people's bodies and minds to truly become one is impossible even for twins.
For that one moment, though, it had been otherwise.
Bu Eunseol and So Okrim had truly been one.
"Then so long as I am with Instructor So, I can use the power of the Sacred Fire Secret Transmission."
"That's right."
"How is it unfolded? I feel nothing out of the ordinary."
"I'll teach you the working method."
So Okrim calmly passed the method on to him.
"I see."
Bu Eunseol's eyes brightened once he had received the whole of it.
"The Sacred Fire Secret Transmission is not a martial art at all. It is closer to a secret method for using power with extreme precision."
"Close, but a little off."
So Okrim explained calmly.
"Take palm force. To use it, we pour internal power out of the dantian and along the flow of the meridians and the qi and blood, right? But some of that power is lost over the distance it travels."
The dantian is like an enormous lake, brimming with the water that is a martial artist's internal energy.
The palm that delivers the palm force, by contrast, can be likened to a parched rice paddy far away.
To send water from the lake to the paddy, ordinary martial arts run it down a long, winding channel.
That is, they let the internal energy flow along the meridians and the qi and blood.
But just as water soaks into the earth and burns off in the sun along the way, internal power is naturally lost in transit.
In the end, however much water is drawn from the lake, only three or four trickles ever reach the paddy...
And the martial arts treat that as natural loss.
"But what if you could skip all of that and send the internal power straight to the palm?"
She folded her arms and wore a look full of pride.
"With a single sixty-year cycle of internal power, you'd put out the force of six or more, wouldn't you?"
Whoosh.
Her long hair streamed out on the wind.
In a word, this was what the Sacred Fire Secret Transmission did.
It lifted the lake's water into the sky and gathered it into a black cloud directly above the paddy.
Then, whenever it was wanted, it drove a lightning-laced downpour straight down on that very spot... a marvelous secret method indeed.
"There is no journey, so there is no loss."
Bu Eunseol nodded again and again, exclaiming like a boy from a remote mountain village seeing the imperial capital for the first time.
Nothing even close to this idea had ever appeared in the martial arts of the martial world before.
"Then when two people unfold the Sacred Fire Secret Transmission..."
"That's right."
So Okrim spoke with a solemn expression.
"One person feeds in the internal power, and the other puts that power out at once, pure and undiminished... That is the Dual Cultivation Art of the Sacred Fire Secret Transmission."
"There is something I am curious about, though."
Bu Eunseol turned the method So Okrim had passed him over in his mind and asked.
"Exchange the force and the power passes (交勁傳力); let the bodies meet and the force answers (身交勁應). By this method, power can only be shared when the two bodies are touching... I do not understand what that means."
"There's an old saying, isn't there? Where bodies touch, feeling follows."
So Okrim spoke gravely, arms still folded.
"When skin presses against skin, that contact lets your hearts reach each other, and the power carries across with them."
"You are saying that heart and power both carry across simply because skin touches?"
"Don't tell me you're playing dumb on purpose."
"I truly do not understand."
"Sly thing."
So Okrim shot him a sidelong look, then closed the distance all at once and held out her hand.
"Circulate your qi the way the method says, and take my hand."
Bu Eunseol took her hand without a word of complaint.
Nothing in particular happened.
"We've grabbed each other's hands more times than I can count, fighting side by side... maybe that's not enough?"
So Okrim thought it over for a moment, then said to him,
"Come a bit closer."
Left with no choice, Bu Eunseol stepped a little nearer.
"No. Closer."
"I have come."
"No, just a little more. More, more..."
In the end their faces came so close that their noses were near to knocking, and Bu Eunseol found he had stopped breathing.
And it was the same for So Okrim.
Her cheeks were so white that a touch seemed likely to come away dusted with snow, and now they flushed red.
Ziiiing.
A hot energy welled up all at once from Bu Eunseol's dantian.
The instant their hearts stirred for one another the Sacred Fire Secret Transmission engaged, and So Okrim passed a portion of her internal energy across to him.
Fwoosh.
For a moment Bu Eunseol felt as though his whole body had caught fire.
She had not handed over any great quantity of internal power.
And still a force that felt fit to reduce everything to ash was churning inside him.
"That's about one sixty-year cycle of mine, you know."
"Only one sixty-year cycle?"
"Mm. Go on, pour it out."
Bu Eunseol nodded and sent palm force flying at a mountain far in the distance.
Boom!
The blast rolled out from that distant peak, and an entire cliff face came down whole.
"Now do you see what I meant?"
Bu Eunseol nodded.
He thought he finally understood why So Okrim had been crying out those words, 'destined partner', all this time.
This was the ultimate secret art of the Essence Three Realms.
Its power was fully the equal of the Profound Divine Technique Qi of the Baekri Family.
"So this is why the Three Realms raised their banner against the Baekri Family."
Bu Eunseol clicked his tongue and shook his head.
"They certainly had the confidence for it."
The Three Realms had risen against the Baekri Family that made them.
He had wondered how anyone could conceive of treason against a great family said to have opposed the True Demon since the earliest ages.
The answer was that the Baekri Family had handed its own creations far too much power.
―'If I'd mastered the Sacred Fire Secret Transmission, I could thrash not just the True Demon's underlings but the True Demon himself, if he came in person!'
The boast So Okrim had made back then had been no bluster at all.
If this power could be wielded freely by one person alone?
It would be more than enough to face the Baekri Family's masters and their transcendent strength.
It could contend on even terms with the True Demon and his blood relations as well.
Bu Eunseol let out a long sigh.
"Had it not been for the Essence Three Realms, the martial world would have fallen into the grip of the Three Realms long ago."
The Essence Three Realms had been founded by righteous people who could no longer stomach the Three Realms' cruelties and slipped away with the martial essence.
The Three Realms had lost a great deal of their vitality because of it, and he had assumed that was why they wanted the Essence Three Realms put down.
As it turned out, the aim was to seize the essence of those martial arts back.
"Well, that's about the size of it."
So Okrim shrugged, and Bu Eunseol's expression turned grave.
"Then the Three Realms have not shown their real strength yet at all."
Each of the Three Realms had its own Realm Lord, and the only one to have shown his face so far was the Returning to One Realm Lord.
And the Returning to One Realm Lord's martial prowess was at a level Bu Eunseol still could not match.
They kept themselves hidden and moved in secret.
What they were after and what they truly commanded were both still unrevealed...
That made them feel like a deeper, darker threat than any of the abyss forces.
"But we've got a martial art to match theirs now, so there's nothing to worry about. Right?"
So Okrim winked one eye and smiled.
"With the Sacred Fire Secret Transmission, we can take on anyone."
Bu Eunseol's face went awkward for a moment.
The Sacred Fire Secret Transmission was formidable, certainly.
But it carried power through the ticklish, subtle feeling that passes between a man and a woman.
That made it, in practice, a martial art only lovers could unfold.
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