Chapter 375. Communal Labor 3
Youngwoo, who had been working alongside the others, drew in a deep breath.
Cold air filled his chest.
He watched the men chopping wood for a moment, then slowly walked toward an empty spot away from the others.
A tree stood straight in the snow.
Its base was so thick that two grown men would barely have been able to encircle it with their arms, and its trunk rose high toward the sky.
Youngwoo stopped before it.
He drew his hwando and raised it upright before him.
The blade gleamed pale in the winter light.
The weight in his hand was familiar.
On battlefields, he had cut through armor and the body beneath it in a single stroke.
That sensation quietly returned to his palm.
If I do this properly, perhaps I can cut this too.
He had never tried.
But it felt possible.
Before the thought of cutting wood came the sensation of simply passing through something that stood in the way.
It did not feel as though the blade had to overpower the tree.
Rather, breath, qi, and edge had to align in a single line and pass through it.
Youngwoo looked around.
The monks and soldiers had gathered around the tree that had already fallen.
No one was watching him.
He placed his feet shoulder-width apart.
The soles of his boots bit firmly into the snowy ground.
He inhaled.
Then stopped.
Within that brief stillness, the sounds of the mountain receded.
The chopping of axes.
The voices of men.
The creaking of cartwheels.
For one instant, all of it moved far away.
The world held its breath.
A pale aura rose along the flat of the hwando.
At first it was thin, like frost.
Then it spread along the spine and tip of the blade like a long white flame.
Youngwoo's wrist moved.
Whish.
The sound was brief.
Yet within that brief sound, time seemed to empty itself.
The instant the blade moved and the instant it touched the tree seemed to have no interval between them.
He had certainly swung his arm.
The blade had certainly traveled forward.
And the tree had certainly stood before him.
Yet in his perception, the middle had vanished.
The sword was already through.
He had expected it to bite into the wood.
He had expected the thick trunk to seize the blade and send a dull shock up through his wrist and shoulder.
Instead, the hwando passed through the tree as though it had cut nothing but empty air.
"Aaang."
A strange resonance came from deep inside the trunk.
It sounded almost like a door long locked from within suddenly coming free.
For a moment, nothing happened.
The tree still stood.
Snow remained on the branches.
Then, one breath later—
Craaaack.
The base opened along a diagonal line.
Split apart.
Unable to bear its own weight, the enormous trunk slid sideways.
Branches tore through the air, and clumps of snow exploded in every direction.
Kwa-kwa-kwa-BOOM.
Youngwoo hurriedly stepped back.
When the tree struck the ground, the mountainside trembled once.
He looked down at the hwando in his hand.
There did not seem to be so much as a drop of sap on the blade.
The pale sword qi lingered faintly for a moment, then dissolved into the winter air.
He had thought it might work.
And it had.
Youngwoo immediately walked toward the next tree.
This time there was less hesitation.
He planted his feet, straightened his waist, and lowered his breath.
Heat rose from his dantian, passed through his chest, and flowed into his arm.
The boundary between his hand and the sword blurred.
White sword qi rose from the hwando held high above him.
The light did not flicker like flame.
It looked more as though a strip of winter moonlight had been cut away and laid over the blade.
Youngwoo brought the sword down diagonally in a single stroke.
Again, the middle vanished.
Time slipped past somewhere beyond his perception.
Only the place where the sword had risen and the place where it had passed remained.
The time of the swing itself seemed to be erased before his eyes.
Only the result appeared in the world.
The base split.
The tree stood for a moment, then slid along the severed surface.
The huge trunk tilted in the opposite direction, its branches smashing through neighboring trees as it fell.
Kwa-kwa-kwa-BOOM.
The soldiers working in the distance looked up.
The monks stopped what they were doing.
They were trying to see who had managed to fell such a large tree with an axe.
Youngwoo quickly slid the hwando back into its sheath.
Then, as though nothing had happened, he walked over to the fallen tree and mixed in among those trimming branches.
Snow began to fall again.
White flakes settled quietly over the freshly severed stump.
Youngwoo called to the guest-receiving monk.
"Over there. I cut down those trees."
The monk hurried over in disbelief, then stopped dead.
Two enormous trees lay stretched across the snow.
The bases showed no axe marks and no grooves from a saw.
The severed surfaces were smooth.
Almost as though they had been shaved clean with a razor.
So this is what they meant when they called him a master.
The guest-receiving monk stared at the clean stumps for a long time, then looked back at Youngwoo.
"Well, since you are already at it, could you cut them into smaller pieces too? About this long."
He spread his arms roughly shoulder-width apart.
It was an outrageously shameless request for an absurd amount of work.
And yet his expression was perfectly serious.
He looked as though he considered it the most natural thing in the world to ask.
With such a kindly, earnest face turned toward him, Youngwoo found it strangely difficult to refuse.
The monk spoke again.
"If you could cut them into lengths suitable for splitting into firewood later, it would help us tremendously."
Youngwoo blinked.
"Ah... all right."
Chapter 376. Communal Labor 4
He walked back toward the tree he had felled.
The trunk lying across the snow was so thick that even two grown men together would have struggled to wrap their arms around it.
Normally, they would have needed more than a quarter of an hour of sawing just to cut away a single section.
Youngwoo stood before it and took his stance again.
The hwando slowly rose.
A faint white aura bloomed once more along the blade.
He held his breath and brought it down.
Shhk.
The wood separated.
There was no thud of an axe biting in.
No rasp of a saw grinding through the grain.
The instant the blade passed, a thick section of trunk fell cleanly away at the exact length he had chosen.
A piece large enough that a grown man would have had to strain to lift it dropped onto the snow with a dull thump.
Youngwoo stepped once to the side.
He raised the sword again.
Brought it down again.
Shhk.
Thump.
Another section dropped away.
The cut surface was just as smooth as the first.
It looked almost as though the tree itself were breaking neatly at its joints.
One by one, the men wielding axes stopped working.
The monks holding saws stared blankly in his direction.
The soldiers looked at one another with their mouths open.
Work they had been struggling over together for ages was being finished by Youngwoo with a single breath and a single downward stroke.
The guest-receiving monk watched in astonishment for a moment, then quickly recovered himself.
"That length over there is good. If you make them just a little shorter, they will fit perfectly into the stoves in the monks' quarters."
Youngwoo turned toward him with the sword still in hand.
The monk measured the desired length again with both hands.
His eyes were desperately earnest.
Youngwoo laughed under his breath.
"All right. I will cut them to fit the stoves."
The monks immediately brightened.
The worksite, which had been filled with complaints about cold and hardship only moments before, suddenly buzzed like a festival.
Some rolled the cut sections toward the carts.
Others began uncoiling ropes to tie them down.
Youngwoo stood before the trunk again.
White qi rose briefly along the hwando in the winter light.
Every time the blade descended, the thick trunk separated into another uniform section.
Pieces of future firewood multiplied across the snow.
Each flash of Youngwoo's blade sent another piece of wood dropping away.
The monks and soldiers who had come out for communal labor gradually stopped what they were doing.
Before long, everyone had gathered to watch.
At first there was shock.
Then silence.
Even the falling snow seemed to pause and hold its breath.
Then came the exclamations.
Every time Youngwoo brought down the sword, sounds of amazement escaped from the crowd.
"Waaah."
"Whoa..."
Youngwoo suddenly thought that displaying one's cultivation before a crowd might itself be something shameful.
Their practice could not become a marketplace performance, no different from the tricks of traveling entertainers.
He sheathed the hwando and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
"Let us stop here."
The guest-receiving monk pressed his palms together.
"I had no idea you possessed martial skill like this. Had I known earlier, I would never have dared treat you so casually."
Youngwoo shook his head.
"That seems wrong too. How can someone pursuing cultivation treat others differently according to their ability or strength?"
The monk immediately laughed.
"You are right about that as well. I have already strayed from the path. Ahaha."
He was the sort of man who found it easy to admit when he was wrong.
How many people twisted their own personalities and ruined relationships simply because they could not admit even the smallest mistake?
Did acknowledging an error somehow wear away one's humanity?
People who could not admit fault were often less unable to see facts than unable to endure the image of themselves collapsing the moment they accepted those facts.
They treated correction as attack.
They blurred responsibility.
They offered explanations before apologies.
They worried about their own dignity before the consequences of their actions, and spoke more loudly of their own sense of injustice than of the person who had actually been harmed.
They refused to admit even small errors, slips of the tongue, or failures of judgment.
As though one small admission might lead to some enormous collapse.
They hid behind power and righteous causes, covering themselves with words such as for the country and for the greater good.
The stronger the image they held of themselves, the more terrified they became of seeing it crack.
But this monk had acknowledged his mistake immediately and tried to restore the awkwardness between them.
Youngwoo suddenly found himself liking the man.
Most people did not admit their own faults easily.
Whenever possible, they turned their heads, changed the subject, or searched first for the path that would protect their own feelings.
Youngwoo found himself thinking about it more than he expected.
He said,
"I have become a spectacle. I should stop."
The guest-receiving monk smiled brightly.
"Ahaha. Even so, thanks to you, our workload has dropped enormously. If we take just this much back, I think it may last us through an entire season."
"Surely not."
"Let us move it and head back. Our original goal for today was far less than this. I thought even half this amount would have been a great success. Ahaha. Thank you."
The guest-receiving monk, who was directing the work, encouraged the others.
"Thanks to the warrior benefactor cutting the wood for us, the rest has become much easier. Let us load it quickly and tie it down. Make sure the heavy pieces are secured tightly so they cannot fall. Everyone, give it your best."
The words lingered in Youngwoo's ears.
They were encouragement, not military commands.
When asking something of another person, someone other than oneself, that was surely how it ought to be done.
And yet it sounded strangely unfamiliar.
He had been in the army too long.
Dozens of men combined their strength to load the large amount of wood onto the carts.
The soldiers, who already knew something of Youngwoo's martial ability, had become harder to surprise.
For the monks, however, it was a sight none of them had ever seen in their lives.
They occasionally glanced at Youngwoo and began keeping just a little more distance from him.
"Come on, come on. Let us hurry."
They had cut a great deal, but with more than seventy people working together, five carts were filled in no time.
"Let us go!"
At the guest-receiving monk's shout, the carts began to move.
But the heavy loads did not roll easily over the snowy road.
The monks pushed from behind.
The soldiers tied ropes to the fronts of the carts.
When two horses pulled each rope taut, the frozen wheels groaned and began to turn.
With everyone combining their strength, the heavy carts slowly found their way along the road.
Youngwoo followed at the very back.
Chonggi offered him a spare horse, but Youngwoo declined.