Chapter 396. Yi Youngwoo Devotes Himself to Cultivation
Yi Youngwoo, of course, had no idea any of this was happening.
After resigning and cutting himself free of those ties, he had settled into a deserted corner of a temple in Liaoyang and devoted himself to cultivation.
He had no particular plan.
At most, he intended to keep an eye on whether Go Youngchang attempted anything worse.
He had also grown distant from those who had once stood beside him, including Go Hoewon and his daughter Okjeong.
Because they had allowed the assassination attempt to happen, he had driven them out of their own estate and told them not to appear before him again.
His gaze had withdrawn from the world.
He had stepped away from war.
From councils, persuasion, and resentment.
The eyes that had always looked outward were slowly turning inward.
Youngwoo spent long periods staring at an invisible black spot within his own heart.
He did not know what it was.
Anger.
Emptiness.
Killing intent that had not yet fully faded.
Perhaps lingering attachment to the world.
He could not tell.
But the spot was certainly there.
He did not try to erase it.
He did not cover it with fine words or turn away from it in the name of cultivation.
He simply looked at it for a long time.
Like a man sitting in darkness and gazing into darkness, he quietly illuminated the black trace that remained at the center of his heart.
The only thing that moved was his breath.
Inhalation entered.
Exhalation left.
Warmth slowly rose from the lower dantian, while a low resonance from the middle dantian spread through the depths of his chest.
His body was still.
His thoughts grew distant.
Only his breathing reminded him that he was still alive.
Outside, men were moving to kill him.
In an upper room of an inn, Bae Junho was looking down at Guangyou Temple.
Salmak's people were filtering into positions around the temple grounds.
But Youngwoo's world, at that moment, had narrowed to a single small meditation room.
And within that tiny room, he was entering a world inside himself broader than anything outside.
He called it largely spiritual cultivation, but that did not mean theory or reasoning.
He was not opening books and analyzing principles.
He was not searching for conclusions between one argument and another.
He called it spiritual only because he had already passed beyond the stage of forcing progress through physical strength and muscle.
The actual practice was far simpler.
And far more relentless.
First, he aligned the body.
When sitting, he kept the spine straight, drew the chin in slightly, and rested the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth.
His hands rested on his knees.
He released the tension in his shoulders.
Rather than shutting his eyes completely, he lowered them halfway.
If the body lost its alignment, the breath would follow.
If the breath became disordered, qi would lose its path.
Next came breathing.
At first, he counted each breath as in the Buddhist practice of breath-counting meditation.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Whenever his thoughts wandered elsewhere, he began again from one.
The numbers were not a rope meant to bind the breath.
They were simply markers that allowed him to notice when the mind had scattered.
Once the breathing settled, he moved into regulated breathing.
He did not force the inhalation deeper than it wished to go.
He did not release the exhalation in haste.
As the breath grew finer and longer, warmth first gathered in the lower abdomen.
The lower dantian came alive with heat.
That warmth slowly circulated along the waist and spine.
From that point onward, breathing was no longer merely air entering and leaving.
It became the road along which qi moved.
Circulating qi was not a matter of forcing energy upward.
When the qi reached a blocked place, he let it remain there.
He evened his breathing, lowered his mind, and quietly illuminated that point.
Then, at some moment, what had seemed blocked would loosen slightly, and qi would begin to connect through it like a narrow stream of water.
At first, he had memorized the route written in the cultivation method and forced his body to follow it.
With time, the body itself began to remember the path.
He did not stop with seated meditation.
When his body stiffened from sitting too long, he loosened it through walking meditation.
He paced slowly back and forth inside the meditation hall, matching each step to his breath.
The pressure of the floor beneath his soles.
The bending and straightening of his knees.
Even the movement of his robes.
All of it became part of the cultivation.
When the steps became uneven, the mind scattered with them.
When the steps settled, thought gradually quieted as well.
Then came sword-walking practice.
It was cultivation performed while moving with a sword.
Not swordsmanship meant simply to swing a blade, but a way to see whether body, breath, and mind had entered the same rhythm.
He stepped forward while inhaling.
At the instant the sword tip flowed through its path, he held the breath.
When the form ended, he released a long exhalation.
If the sword tip trembled, the mind had trembled.
If the feet rushed, the breath had gone ahead of the body.
Sword-walking was a way of seeing the mind through the body.
Then he sat again.
After gathering what had scattered through movement and calming what had grown rough through breathing, he returned his gaze to the single point within his heart.
It was small and black.
At one moment it looked like anger.
At another, emptiness.
Then killing intent.
Then fear.
Youngwoo did not give it a name.
He only looked.
As his teacher had told him, he observed and illuminated.
Nothing more.
If he looked at that single point long enough, his sense of time began to change.
Half a sijin could pass like a single breath.
And within a single breath, memories buried for years could pass before him.
From that point onward, cultivation was no longer thought.
It was not a process of linking ideas together and reaching a conclusion.
It was the act of looking toward the place before thought arose.
Quietly entering the invisible darkness, toward the end of causes and effects that could not even be imagined.
He also observed the times when the qi of heaven and earth changed.
Just before dawn, when the cold of night reached its deepest point.
When the sun rose and its first light touched the eaves.
At noon, when yang qi reached its height.
When the sun began to fall and energy folded inward again.
At midnight, when all things lowered their breath within the deepest darkness.
At each of those times, the qi inside his body moved differently.
Youngwoo adjusted himself to those changes.
Before dawn, he lowered his breath deeply and warmed the lower dantian.
As the sun rose, he opened the body through sword-walking.
As evening approached, he gathered his qi inward through seated meditation.
Late at night, he looked into the darkness within his heart.
He was simply making sure that the small cycles inside his body did not fall out of step with the greater cycles of heaven and earth.
Perhaps one could call it the unity of heaven and man.
To Youngwoo, it was simply the state in which breath, time, and body became evenly aligned as one.
That was how each day was filled.
Seated meditation.
Regulated breathing.
Qi circulation.
Walking meditation.
Sword-walking.
Then seated meditation again.
From the outside, he looked like a man doing nothing at all.
Inside, however, the work never stopped.
Watching.
Illuminating.
Evening out.
Aligning.
That was why he called it spiritual cultivation.
It was not withdrawing from worldly affairs in order to lose himself in thought.
It was the work of shedding, layer by layer, the things he had mistaken for the world itself.