Chapter 383. Youngwoo Focuses on Cultivation 5 — Refusal
Youngwoo had grown tired of people who kept pressing until they got what they wanted.
He rose unsteadily, then crouched in front of the young novice.
Even squatting down, he was still taller than the boy.
"Your big brother is busy cultivating these days. I'd rather not have anyone interrupting me right now. Do you happen to have a sign that says Jeongsu Mulyo—'Quiet Cultivation, Do Not Disturb'?"
Jeongsu Mulyo (靜修勿擾): literally, "Quiet cultivation in progress; do not disturb."
The novice's eyes widened.
"There is one in front of the wonju's room."
"Then tell the wonju I need it and ask if I can borrow it. Hang it out front for me."
"You're not going?"
Youngwoo gave him a short and painfully direct account of what had happened.
He had come to help recover Liaoyang. Once the battle ended, one man began doing everything he could to become king. Youngwoo had warned that he would not stand by if the man tried to seize a throne, and ever since then the fellow had been approaching him through every possible route and wearing him down.
The novice trembled with indignation, clenched his fists, and sprang to his feet.
"I will take care of it."
Until moments earlier, he had been trying to persuade Youngwoo to come to the dining hall.
Now that he had heard the story, the proper direction of the matter seemed perfectly clear to him.
Apparently, the best way to persuade someone was to show them what was right and what was wrong.
Youngwoo extended a finger sword.
The closed door opened by itself.
He withdrew the finger sword and turned his fingertip in a small circle to the side.
The door swung shut again.
"Waaaaah!"
The novice jumped backward in shock.
Youngwoo spoke with complete seriousness.
"I am in the middle of something very important. That makes it difficult for me to concern myself with what is happening outside. Think of it this way. Suppose a person is given one opportunity in his entire life, and he may never have another period like this again. What should he do when people like that keep coming and bothering him? Those tiresome, greedy people who chase after him even after he says no."
The novice trembled again.
"I will take care of it."
As the boy strode away with great determination, Youngwoo added one more thing.
"No violence. Do not shout either. And do not lose your manners."
The novice nodded firmly.
"I will take care of it."
No further news came that night.
Youngwoo spent another night cultivating.
He had been told that long ago, this place had been used for yongmaeng jeongjin—fierce and unremitting practice.
Perhaps because he had heard that, even his own practice seemed to go unusually well.
Yongmaeng Jeongjin (勇猛精進): intense cultivation pursued day and night with reduced sleep and rest. In a meditation hall, it can also refer to a period of all-night practice in which one avoids lying down or sleeping and devotes oneself entirely to seated meditation.
Youngwoo had refused politely.
Then the request came again.
Again and again, until he was sick of it.
Apparently, Go Youngchang believed there was no tree that would remain standing after being chopped at ten times.
Reduced to the status of a tree that had to be felled, Youngwoo quietly expanded his sense of qi.
The sounds outside the meditation hall did not reach him through his ears first.
They came first as ripples of emotion.
He could feel the young novice's refusal—polite, yet firm.
And before him, he could also sense Go Youngchang's bewilderment.
Go Youngchang soon began pressuring the boy.
He said donations would stop.
He said the temple's circumstances would grow much worse.
He was trying to persuade a child so that the child would return and bother Youngwoo on his behalf.
The novice refused to yield.
Instead, he warned Go Youngchang that anyone who obstructed an immortal's cultivation would surely receive karmic punishment in return, and asked whether he was not afraid.
Go Youngchang apparently found the whole thing absurd, because he turned his head away.
The novice pressed his palms together.
"Then I shall take it that the Immortal's wishes have been properly conveyed."
And with that, he left the reception hall.
His small footsteps pressed into the snow and gradually faded away.
There was a curious resolve in those steps.
So it was true what people said.
When a person sincerely devoted himself to cultivation, the whole world eventually began to help him.
One should not spend every day saying, It cannot be done, it cannot be done, and breaking one's own path.
One simply had to place one's entire being behind it and keep walking steadily forward.
Even a young novice had come to help him.
Perhaps coming again and again to seek permission had been Go Youngchang's own way of doing his best.
He was trying to carry out what he had taken upon himself to do, and perhaps he considered that persistence a form of sincerity.
Once Youngwoo thought of it that way, he found himself wanting to repay the young novice somehow.
Late that night, he quietly climbed over the wall and slipped out of the temple.
He searched for the part of the city where a few merchants were still doing business and bought some millet cakes coated in grain syrup, roasted beans, and a little dried foreign fruit.
Things a child might enjoy.
No.
Things he wanted to give to that small person, whether the boy counted as a child or as a novice monk.
When Youngwoo returned, he hung the small bundle quietly near the entrance to the meditation hall.
The boy would see it in the morning.
It was directly beneath the Jeongsu Mulyo sign, where the novice would certainly pass.
Youngwoo still found it awkward to say thank you in words.
But this, at least, he could do.