Chapter 178 - The Giant's Legacy (2)

“Uburka, watching how you use aura helped me grasp a certain principle.”

“You mean the Fucking Aura Method?”

“Your mutilation of language is so appalling that I can hardly contain my grief... But yes. I glimpsed profound potential in the Fucking Aura Method.”

I spoke from my perch atop Uburka’s head.

“Formation arts.”

“Formation arts?”

Uburka tilted his head.

“What are those, old man?”

Formation arts.

Before meeting Master, I had barely read a few lines of martial arts fiction. Since then, though, I had learned the basics of Murim from my attendant spirit whenever I had the time.

Formation arts were, quite literally, methods for arranging a formation.

“Martial arts are fundamentally about learning to manage your own body. Formation arts, on the other hand, are what happens when several people perform them together.”

“Ugor. Are they like a battle?”

“Similar. But they’re different from a simple group brawl,” I said.

“Suppose people from sects with different underlying principles fight on the same side. That could be a joint attack or a pincer attack, but it wouldn’t be a formation art. You have to share the same doctrine. The same way of using aura. Only then does it become a formation art.”

“Are you going to teach me formation arts, old man?”

“Yes. More precisely, I’ll teach you the Divine Art of the Demonic Heaven first, then develop a formation art with you. I’ve never experienced formation arts myself, so I’m worried about whether it’ll work. But who cares if it doesn’t! We’ll give it a shot.”

“I don’t quite understand. Is there any reason we must learn this?”

“Hey, hey. My boy. If you start by questioning whether there’s a reason for something or whether it’s worthwhile, you’ll never get anything started!”

I tapped the crown of Uburka’s head.

“First, we just give it a casual try! If we can’t see a way forward, we give up. If we get a feel for it, we dig deeper. Okay?”

“I see. A casual try, you say.”

“Yep. Casual.”

I beamed.

“But, my boy, Daddy has a question for you.”

“What is it?”

“Have you ever gone hungry for more than a week?”

Uburka blinked.

“Gau?”

From then on, I taught him the Divine Art of the Demonic Heaven “casually.”

“The Divine Art of the Demonic Heaven consists of nine forms. Its much-awaited first form is the Flowing Sword of Death by Starvation. In other words, a sword modeled on the yearning and desperation of hunger. You could say that’s why you’re starving right now. Wow, dreams really are wonderful! We can stretch out time however we like, and no matter how hungry you get, you won’t die!”

“Kill me!”

Uburka howled, having already spent what felt like a week starving in the dream.

CLANK!

His arms and legs were bound in chains. I ate sweet fruit and delicious fish in front of him.

This was the result of defeating Uburka in a fair and square duel.

“Just kill me instead!”

“Are you suffering?”

“I am!”

“Does it hurt?”

“It hurts! Every muscle in my body is screaming!”

“That’s it! My boy. Make your sword sing with that suffering and pain. I’ve starved for a week myself. But you can’t just go hungry without thinking about anything. Picture a farmer starving to death somewhere in this world, and that farmer’s child. You have to keep them in mind as you starve.”

“My old man is insane!”

I taught him.

“Dreams really are wonderful. Think of a snowfield, and a snowfield appears. Think of a plague, and a plague breaks out. This is the perfect environment for learning the Divine Art of the Demonic Heaven. We didn’t have anything like this back in my day. Good grief.”

“Cold... Old man, I’m so coooold...”

“And that is the Embracing Sword of Death by Freezing! Picture the heart of an ordinary person who doesn’t have even a single blanket and scrapes together fallen leaves to cover their body.”

“I’ll fucking freeze to death before I can picture anything...”

“It’s okay, it’s okay. You won’t die. My boy, you’re the strongest warrior in Earth Spiritfolk history. This much is a breeze, isn’t it? Right?”

“For the first time in a very long while, I have no choice but to say it. Fuuuck...”

I taught him.

“Is it hard to learn? Does burning hurt too much? All right. Daddy will burn with you. Pain’s a little better when you share it. It isn’t better? It still hurts? Of course it does. We’re burning so it’ll hurt. But, my boy, I can’t hear you very well. If your vocal cords are burned, you can speak with aura. Look at Daddy. I’m chattering away with nothing but aura, without even moving my tongue. Now, give it a try.”

“This... is... hell...”

“Oh, that’s my little boy. You catch on so fast! The Divine Art of the Demonic Heaven is nothing less than unfolding the hells of this world, one after another.”

“How... did you ever learn... such a horrific martial art, old man...?”

“Good question.”

I smiled gently.

“How did I come to learn it, I wonder?”

I taught him.

[Purchasing ‘Appear in a Dream.’]

[100 Race Points will be consumed!]

[You currently have 8800 Race Points.]

Ten days.

While my fellow hunters were busy looking after their respective races, I devoted my time solely to Uburka. In terms of how long it felt, we spent far more than ten days together in his dreams.

“Hmm.”

I scratched my cheek.

“Well, not bad. Not bad at all. It’s a little disappointing, but I’ll settle for this.”

“Is that all?”

Uburka ground his teeth.

“I have experienced a living hell for ten days!”

“Well, um. The thing is... Teaching you made me realize something. I was just incredibly talented at the Divine Art of the Demonic Heaven. This thing is hard to grasp even if you’re practically overflowing with talent...”

“Of course it is! What madman could vividly grasp death by starvation, thirst, drowning, freezing, poisoning, disease, beating, and burning, all of them, and manifest them through aura! A person can only die once, and once they die, that is the end! Even I would not have dared to learn it outside a dream!”

“True...”

Our Demonic Cult was a pretty hardcore place.

“You’re the strange one for wielding such horrific martial arts freely in the first place, old man! How can you do it! No, it’s a wonder you’ve even managed to stay sane!”

I smiled.

“Thanks for the compliment. Now, after today, I’ll be saying goodbye to this era too. Before then, let’s at least work out a rough draft of a formation art together.”

“...”

“You may not have gained a deep understanding of the Divine Art of the Demonic Heaven, but at least you’ve reached the Demon-Entering realm. Uburka, you and I are now the sort who breathe in this world the same way. Now that we can share a dream, we should be able to manifest one too.”

“Up we go.”

I jumped down from Uburka’s head.

“Sit down.”

“Ugor.”

“Unlike martial arts, the principles behind formation arts haven’t been systematized. They’re all over the place. First, there are sects that create formations on the level of coordinated attacks.”

Sitting across from Uburka, I took a handful of pebbles and lightly stirred my aura. The pebbles rolled around in my hand like jacks.

“Think of each pebble as a single martial artist.”

“Understood.”

“Of the six, five move in a fixed rhythm. It’s a kind of music. Their opponent grows accustomed to the rhythm of those five. The moment that happens, the remaining one rushes in with a completely different rhythm.”

WHOOSH!

One of the six pebbles shot out in an instant. Uburka couldn’t react in time, and it struck his chest muscle.

“...”

Zero damage. But perhaps shocked by his own failure to respond, Uburka stared at me blankly.

“This is a formation art on the level of a coordinated attack. People have intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns. Rhythm is a pattern too. The core of this sort of formation art is to exploit a person’s powers of perception.”

“... Isn’t that remarkable?”

“It is. Though it’s the most basic level of formation art.”

I grinned.

Learning all sorts of things from my attendant spirit whenever I had time after inheriting the Demonic Cult’s lineage had paid off.

“The next level of development is illusion arts.”

I let aura rise from my palm.

“What does it look like?”

“It looks like flames.”

“Right. It looks like flames even though it isn’t fire. That’s because I’m imitating flames with aura. Uburka, when you grow huge as though you’ve become a giant, even though your actual body hasn’t grown, that’s a kind of illusion art too.”

I focused my aura on the six pebbles.

The pebbles blazed with fire.

“What would happen if six people set their aura ablaze together? Imagine being surrounded by those six. Now, wouldn’t you feel as though you’d fallen into the middle of an inferno?”

“Ugor.”

“The formation art we’re going to work out together will be like this too.”

TAP.

I snatched the little playing stones out of the air.

“For now, you and I are the only two who’ve learned the Divine Art of the Demonic Heaven. But what if there were three? What if that grew to six? What would happen if it grew to twelve, then twenty-four?”

“...”

“What if a hundred, three hundred, six hundred people learned the Divine Art of the Demonic Heaven and could all perform the same ultimate technique at once?”

Uburka’s eyes slowly widened.

The corners of my mouth were raised like a scheming little rascal’s.

“Alone, no matter how hard I try, I can only turn a radius of about five paces into an inferno. But if I perform the divine art with you, we could easily burn an area of ten, even fifteen paces. If hundreds of people joined us...”

“Could we burn the entire battlefield?”

Uburka’s mouth fell open.

There was something dreamy about his gaze.

Was he imagining the scene I’d described, entranced by it?

“Hundreds of warriors burn their souls according to the same mental image, the same principles. The battlefield would become an inferno in an instant.”

Exactly.

Not an individual skill, but a collective technique.

The new Divine Art of the Demonic Heaven I envisioned would be a formation art.

“You called it an illusion art, old man, but I think differently. When an illusion swallows the world, it becomes real.”

“Well? Worth a try, right?”

“I want to try it.”

“Okay. Let’s take it one step at a time.”

I smiled.

“For this formation art to succeed, we all have to hold the same mental image in our hearts. To sing in a chorus, everyone has to memorize the same lyrics. Uburka. You must not only spread the Divine Art of the Demonic Heaven among your people, but also spread the scenes we’ll share.”

“What scenes?”

“I’ll tell you now.”

I drew a mansion on the ground.

“It was when I met the children’s dolls in a secluded mansion...”

And I told him.

About the things I’d experienced so far.

The scenes I’d witnessed.

First Formation.

The Little Dolls of an Infernal Mansion.

Second Formation.

The Shadow Demon King Who Lived in a Borderland Village.

Third Formation.

The Peony That Bloomed in a Fallen Winter.

Fourth Formation.

The Moon Whose Heart Was Stolen by a Mirror.

Fifth Formation.

The Tears That Fell from a Rooftop.

Sometimes drawing pictures on the ground, sometimes shaping images with aura, I recounted the stories I’d lived through and the scenes I’d seen with my own eyes.

For now, these were merely stories. They had yet to take form, so I couldn’t even call them formation arts.

But they were scenes that would one day become the seeds of formation arts.

“These are the mental images I have. Five. There might be more in the future, and there probably will be, but for now, there are five.”

“I see,” Uburka murmured.

“You... live diligently, old man. I pride myself on living more intensely than anyone, but you are even more industrious than I am. Your time is extraordinarily dense...”

“It’s because I run around all over the place.”

“Could I travel to the same places as you, old man?”

“Who knows?”

I stood up.

“Maybe. You’re a boy who achieved bodily transformation all on your own. Perhaps you could even reverse your aging and regain your youth. I’m leaving this era, but you might survive until the next one and meet me again. And the era after that. And the one after that...”

“I’ll have to live a very long time.”

Uburka smiled.

“I will spread your stories far and wide among our race. I will make plays of them and put them onstage. I will tell them to our growing children. I will turn the five stories into five kinds of Cavefire, and demonstrate them myself at every darkest full moon. I promise. Just as you watch over our race, we too will never forget you.”

I held out my arm.

Uburka bent down and extended his hand.

My tiny hand was clasped in the Hobgoblin’s enormous palm, and we shook hands.

“Uburka.”

“Mm.”

“You’re a wonderful kid. Keep spreading your fucking magnificence throughout the world.”

Uburka smiled, baring his fangs.

“Of course, old man.”

And then.

‘I declare the stage cleared.’

[Stage clear.]

[The 33rd-floor stage has been cleared.]