Chapter 701: Instructor Bureau (5)

Handling the body is never easy.

Even if, in your head, you’re thinking, I should move like this, when you look at it from a third-person’s point of view, it just turns into some limp, creaking, bizarre mess completely different from what you imagined.

On top of that, people have a serious built-in defect: we naturally feel comfortable in bad posture.

Unless someone forcibly stamps into your head and torso the best possible posture, the most ideal habits matched to your joints and body proportions...

...you need a process of endlessly correcting yourself and then repeating that crafted posture over and over until your body internalizes it.

And then if a bad habit takes root in that posture, or if your body grows, or you put on muscle, you’re faced with yet another difficult challenge of fixing the habits you already drilled in.

This, too, was the strength of the great houses.

With data accumulated over a long time, they could quickly match each disciple with their optimal posture.

And with the seniority system—seniors teaching juniors in a chain—it meant that a disciple also doubled as teacher, making one-to-one, or one-to-a-few, or even a few-to-one customized guidance possible (this is why you want to become a beloved disciple).

The bonus effect was that by the time the disciple, raised and taught that way, reached the level of an instructor or elder, they would have more or less grasped their own educational doctrine.

Which is to say.

The cadets who had entered the Righteous-Proper Martial Academy had never once received that kind of great-house education.

Hm. Every one of them has terrible habits......

I even went out of my way to name the move Strong–Weak–Weak so it would be easy to understand, and yet everyone’s doing Strong–Strong–Strong, overflowing with zeal, or, you could say, stuffing way too much strength into their bodies.

“Attention, Heavy-Road Sword! Just swinging hard is not the answer! You will understand the correct posture, and the flow where each strike connects smoothly and flexibly! VOOONG VOOONG VOOONG! Don’t you think something about that sounds wrong!? VOOONG! BOONG-BOONG! Two beats: VOOONG! BOONG-BOONG! Repeat after me!”

“VOOONG! BOONG-BOONG!” “VOOONG! BOONG-BOONG!”

“Is that all the voice you’ve got! I feel like I could hear an ant crawling in front of the instructor!”

“VOOONG!! BOONG-BOONG!!” “VOOONG!!! BOONG-BOONG!!!”

“Attention, Quick-Road Sword! Same goes for you! SHA-SHA-SHA! If it’s just fast, is this some ‘World’s Best Swinging Contest’!?”

“Strong–Weak–Weak, Strong–Weak–Weak, you will understand this! Repeat after me! SHAAAK! SHA-SHAK!”

“SHAAAAK!! SHA-SHAK!!!” “SHAAAAK!! SHA-SHAK!!!”

“Gentle-Road Sword!”

“Yes, ma’am!!!!” “Yes, ma’am!!!!”

“Good answer! I understand that Gentle Sword is difficult! Instead of simply swinging, you are drawing and connecting lines with the sword, protecting yourself while leaving room in your wrist, thinking of it as placing the sword! Sword-Friend—no, Assistant Namgung, step forward!”

With Heavy-Road Sword you can more or less tell from the shifting of the center of gravity, and with Quick-Road Sword you can guess from the way each strike lands at speed, but with Gentle-Road Sword, if you haven’t actually received the opponent’s blade, it’s hard to understand.

So Qing demonstrates the spar herself.

“Like this—leaving room in the wrist and forearm! And right here at the path where you catch the enemy’s sword, CLACK!”

CLACK! A neat, solid sound of wooden swords striking.

“Strong–Weak–Weak! On the Strong, you leave even more room; on the Weak, you step out more aggressively! Assistant Namgung, come in! Like this—CHUUNK! CHAK-CHAK!”

THUNK. TTA-DAK!

The stronger softness actually produces less of a clashing sound when the blades meet, while the somewhat more aggressive second and third spaced strikes sound shallow but noisily rattle.

“Got it!? CHUUNK, CHAK-CHAK!”

“CHUUNK!! CHAK-CHAK!!!!” “CHUUNK!! CHAK-CHAK!!!!”

It had just slipped out of Qing’s mouth in her frustration as a rhythm theory, but it was also an extremely easy-to-grasp sword-theory.

Because if you’re going to swing in time with the beat, then on the faster beats you have to relax your strength that much more.

And so in the Drill Yard, which had been groaning with nothing but all-Strong blows as if the trainees were wringing themselves dry, a pretty decent series of sounds started echoing out in Strong–Weak–Weak.

“Oh, that one just now was good! Remember that posture!”

“Thank you ma’am!!”

The cadets of the Righteous-Proper Martial Academy were not conscript soldiers dragged in against their will, nor passive students forced in by some national law of compulsory education. (Of course, there are a few exceptions.)

Each of them was a hot-blooded man or woman of valor who had set out from faraway places to this foreign land, burning with the dream of azure clouds and with passion for learning, ready to throw their whole body into the flame. You can imagine their zeal.

Especially since the easy entry method devised by the Short Blade & Twin-Swords Society’s swordsmen made them feel overflowing with the sensation of learning something; they swung without even noticing how hard it was, fired up, and raised their voices in answer to the instructor’s words.

So they didn’t even feel time passing. Before they knew it, the DENG-DENG of the temple bell rang out, and they realized the midday meal hour had come.

“Eating is also part of training. Eating well builds up body and muscle, and the benefits of that hardly need to be explained. Am I right?”

“Yes, ma’am!!” “That’s right, ma’am!!”

“Then, cadets, enjoy your meal.”

“Yes, ma’am!!” “Instructor, you enjoy your meal too!!” “Understood, ma’am!!” “I’m starving!!”

How light would your steps be on the way to go eat after a satisfying round of training?

Everyone surged out, thrilled as if they were about to take off flying, and in the middle of that, Qing and her friends glanced at one another and curled their lips into sly, wicked smiles.

Yes. Please, enjoy your meal.

You really will need to eat well......

Because the real training starts from here on out.

****

The cadets’ diet put heavy emphasis on providing meat and rice in very efficient fashion.

What did efficient mean?

Mass cooking with cheap ingredients, of course!

And as is always the case with such efficient menus, it was, frankly, impossible to call the food particularly tasty.

If it were Qing’s homeland, then continuous breed improvement would have raised the baseline of ingredients, and the combinations of developed spices invented by educated people would have given mass-produced food its own special charms and strengths.

But spices in the Central Plains were expensive, and cheap ingredients inevitably tended to have flaws in the flavor.

On top of that, in the culinary world of the Central Plains, “mass cooking” was the sort of low-grade job handled by apprentice cooks.

A proper cook, so they said, must take up the iron pot and devote himself to a single table; making a huge batch and ladling it out for sale was the sort of yawning meal you scarf down in the marketplace, the sort of thing street vendors would do.

For those reasons—

“Hah. I don’t know if this is supposed to be a meal”—munch munch—“or pig slop.” Munch munch. “No, even pigs wouldn’t eat trash like this.”

A face dripping with noble refinement.

Same chairs as everyone else, and yet, somehow, a graceful posture.

It was the Sichuan young noble, Mandarlo.

The eyes of his squadmates snapped toward him, PAP-PA-PAK.

What the hell is that bastard whining for while he eats?

Well, because he was hungry.

In Qing’s homeland, hunger is its own side dish.

In the Central Plains, there’s a saying: “When you eat late, everything tastes like meat.” When your belly’s empty, every dish tastes like meat.

You can tell from that alone how deeply people in the Central Plains had loved meat since ancient times.

For reference, it’s said even Confucius, counted as the greatest sage of the Central Plains, would flip the table if there was no meat on it, to the point his wife, worn to the bone by his pickiness, finally ran away.

Of course, Confucius’s wife was not at fault.

Confucius, in the name of keeping his heart pure, would flip the table if the side dishes weren’t cut into perfectly neat squares or completely round, or if the dishes weren’t perfectly arranged. He insisted that only the finest foods were beneficial to the body, and if even one dish on that prehistoric, resource-poor table wasn’t made with the most expensive, freshest ingredients, he would flip the table again. On top of that, every kind of meat and dish had its own “proper” soy sauce, and if it was served with the wrong one, he would flip the table yet again.

By guarding his own heart that way, he rose to the ranks of the sages and preserved his health enough to reach, for those days, the extraordinary old age of over seventy. But in the end, he did not manage to protect his wife.

So, while people praise Confucius’s virtue and teachings, there are many who criticize him when it comes to his behavior at the dinner table.

If that was how he was, he should have prepared his own food; instead, he drove his wife and disciples like servants and only picked out the most expensive, rare, and painstakingly prepared meals to eat.

In any case, Sichuan’s young noble Mandarlo was now acting like he meant to live up to that kind of nonsense, putting on the same kind of pickiness as Confucius.

With words alone, of course—

While eating very well.

“Truly, this is shabby mountain greens.” Munch munch. “The rice is tasteless and dry, flat and joyless, mm.”

“The meat is like licking dry bones; I can’t tell if this is supposed to be pork or beef. The sauce is the kind where your mother yells, ‘The soy sauce is too salty!’—it would honestly be better if it weren’t here at all. Smack smack. The soup is thin as watered water; I’d rather just drink plain water instead. Slurp.”

Shabby mountain greens: poor, unimpressive wild vegetables.

Tasteless and dry: flavorless and parched.

Like chewing wax: leaves your mouth coated and dull, like eating candle wax.

Like licking dry bones: absolutely no taste left, as if you’re just scraping bone.

“Too-salty soy sauce”: Mom, the soy sauce is too salty—the sort of sauce you’d rather not have at all.

Thin as watered water: so diluted it’s like someone watered down water itself—plain, bland liquid.

As he carried on like that, dropping literary expressions, the faces of the members of Sword Hall’s First Training Squad, sitting around the same table, all soured.

Who the hell does this bastard think he is, throwing around fancy phrases like that.

If you hate it that much, don’t eat it, instead of stuffing your face and flapping your mouth.

People are trying to eat and he’s wrecking their appetite.

Even So Eumjo and Jang Bihu, who had been pretending not to see each other from as far apart as possible, were now wearing identical expressions as they glared at this walking disaster.

“Damn it all, being told to eat this kind of crap—this is trash even a dog wouldn’t eat! I absolutely refuse to eat it.”

Suddenly Mandarlo slapped his chopsticks down with a sharp TAP! and exploded in anger.

His squadmates’ eyes all dropped to his empty rice bowl.

He already finished all that and now he’s throwing a fit.

Then he leaned back in his chair, draped one arm over the backrest, and, tilting his chin up for no reason, spoke haughtily.

“Hah. As if you lowborn lot could even understand taste. Hm. Fine. You there, squad leader. Your name was Yang, wasn’t it? Looks like your sword skill is decent enough, so all right—why don’t you take this chance to change your fate a little?”

A vertical line formed between First Training Squad captain Yang Chil’s brows.

Mandarlo, however, only wore a refined smile.

“Hah. Well, I suppose it’s natural you don’t know who I am. Still, if I were you, I’d be listening carefully to what I’m saying right now. If you’re a man, shouldn’t you, of course, want to build a house of your own name and line? I happen to be someone who can grant that.”

“Hmph. And what brings such a precious young master as yourself all the way out here?”

“This is all for the sake of taking people under my wing. All the useful ones already have their leashes tied to some sect or other, so even if I go looking for servants, there just aren’t any talents to be found.”

“No need.”

“Really? Fine then. Just don’t come crying with regret later.”

With that, Mandarlo rose from his seat and turned his body.

“Where are you going? We still have afternoon training—”

“Hah-hah. Do you really think that with some puffed-up little position like ‘squad captain’ you’ve turned into my lord and master? I’ll see to it myself that I find my own way to afternoon training, so stop clinging to a precious person and go finish eating your dog slop.”

What the hell is wrong with that bastard.

Veins bulged on everyone’s foreheads, but that was as far as it went.

Because Sichuan’s young noble looked noble.

He really did look like he had something behind him.

In the Central Plains, having backing you can brag about openly is considered a legitimate personal ability, and not poking at someone who looks like they’ve got backing is one of the basic behavioral principles of the lower tiers of the martial world.

Following that principle, Yang Chil wiped Mandarlo from his mind in short order, then turned to his squadmates.

“Hm. Squadmates. It seems we have about one gak—thirty minutes or so—until afternoon training. What would you say to our squad going into Sword Hall early to review? Of course, if anyone is tired, you’re free to take a short rest.”

****

With the DEENG-DEENG of the great bell, the afternoon class began.

The instructor appearing one beat late was a kindness to the cadets.

If the instructor were already in place, the cadets would feel like they had to hurry over early and cut into their own rest time.

The reason Qing showed up about half a gak late was this considerate mindset, and definitely not because she had stuffed herself at lunch, taken a deep, luxurious nap, then woken up at the sound of the bell and wandered over to Sword Hall.

Even though she hadn’t explicitly taught them any formation drills, seeing how neatly they had already taken their positions by squad, she couldn’t help thinking that, yes, those who had voluntarily entered, taken the exam, and been accepted really were different.

So Qing, looking at her commendable cadets, opened her mouth for the first words of the afternoon class.

“Cadet who was sprawled out asleep after lunch under the Vajra Guardian statue in front of the Academy Office Hall, step forward.”

Commendable was commendable.

But what kind of bastard lies down and sleeps right in front of the admin office—no, the Academy Office Hall gate, out in the open? Hm? The Director is there, and on top of that, the academy’s management staff with the authority to grant free voluntary expulsion are swarming all over the place, and he’s got the guts to do that.

For reference, the word “guts” here is literal: big liver, big gall—meaning his liver is huge, his gallbladder is swollen.

The cadets all began murmuring.

They were whispering about which lunatic had gone and made trouble on the very first day.

Qing silently counted to ten in her head.

Oh? Not coming out? Well, then, can’t be helped.

“Cadet Mandarlo. Step forward.”