Chapter 709: When Going Out, Maintain Your Dignity (4)

When they’d first set out for procession training, the cadets’ mindset had been pretty light.

How hard could a three-day, no-sleep mobility exercise really be? Some even said it’d be easier than suffering through that horrific Peacock Posture; if it got them out of that, it would almost be relaxing.

“Man, it’s already summer.”

“Phew, air from the outside world.”

“So refreshing...”

But reality and imagination are different things. Imagination rises easily as something pretty; reality, by rule, is a gutter.

“It’s hot...”

“...”

“...”

Past Chuk Hour—about two in the morning—the cadets still walking had gone almost completely silent.

Just because a martial artist’s body could handle two days without sleep didn’t mean they were immune to mental fatigue.

And they knew they still had a long way to go, that this was only the first night, that even when morning came they wouldn’t be able to sleep. That not just tomorrow, but tomorrow night and the next morning, they’d still be walking...

It wasn’t that the situation was terribly difficult—it was just uncomfortable, and they knew it would stay that way. The knowledge that this discomfort would continue was what was wearing at their minds.

Of course, that applied only to first-raters and above.

For third- and second-raters, their legs were already starting to hurt physically too.

The one bit of comfort was that they could see other cadets in the same predicament before and behind them.

Once they descended the mountain, they were on the open Henan plains with only a few hills here and there.

In other words, the road was flat and even.

The movement route followed big and small rivers for more than four-fifths of the distance.

In other words, water was always available, the riverside was cooler, and if the heat got really bad, they could even dunk themselves in the water to drive it away.

And once they were off the mountain, they marched along well-maintained highways.

Which meant that in Henan, the Martial Alliance’s front yard, there was no real chance of random trouble from bandits or notorious criminals.

On top of that, each procession team had one person shadowing them—either an instructor or an academy warrior.

This was, in fact, an extremely safe training.

Just because it was a martial academy didn’t mean they’d throw cadets into lethal training and say “It’s fine if they die.” Nor would they shrug and abandon stragglers with a, “We don’t need the weak!”

The environment for that simply did not exist.

In training, safety was always the top priority.

Honestly, what educational institution would drive its trainees into danger?

If you shoved trainees alone into a dangerous environment with no leaders, or tossed them all in together and said “The ones who survive are the strong ones,” that would be the Jar of Solitude, not an educational institution.

Even in wartime, the army trained new recruits in safe rear areas.

So the moon tilted, and their feet kept going.

They descended the northern ridgeline of Righteous-Proper Martial Academy, followed the river northeast toward Yicheon County.

At Yicheon County, they turned, then followed the Yeoha River south-east along the riverbank.

Once they reached Yangseong County at the end of that stretch, they’d completed five hundred li: exactly half.

A line of martial artists shuffled past the walls of Yangseong, an honest city with full encircling fortifications, all of them wearing thoroughly rotten expressions.

“Ah, a city.”

“Yangseong County...”

“In this heat, a cheap cup of grain liquor would really hit the spot...”

“I’d be happy with just one proper plate of stir-fried, crisp vegetables. Doesn’t even have to be meat...”

Gulp. Then another gulp.

“I want to wash...”

“I feel like I’m going to mildew to death...”

The cleaner types especially were going crazy from the fact that there wasn’t a single non-sticky spot on their bodies.

And right there, just ahead, was civilization that could answer all those cravings.

Greasy dishes you could buy with a bit of silver, liquor to wash them down, baths to scrub yourself in, soft beds to sleep in—splendid human civilization, all right there.

But they couldn’t touch any of it.

Entering private homes was strictly forbidden.

How best to express that feeling of frustration?

In Qing’s homeland, when soldiers were loaded into trains or freight trucks and rolled through villages with civilization and creature comforts, you could see that same desperate expression on their faces as they stared out the windows.

They couldn’t exactly pretend they weren’t cadets and sneak off to buy something to eat with the instructors and academy warriors right there.

So all they could do at the city gate was stare at the display racks and open trays at the roadside stalls, gulping down their own spit.

For the record, the instructors were no different.

The ones who’d already reached high realms weren’t especially tired physically, but the boredom was real, and lack of sleep wore on them mentally.

And it wasn’t like they could just go grab food on their own.

Because it supposedly “didn’t look right” if instructors wore full packs, their loads had been kept light: since it was summer, they’d brought only yesterday’s rice balls to eat and were spending the rest of the time on grain-avoidance pills.

Qing in particular was weak to two things: boredom and hunger.

And right now, both those weaknesses were getting jabbed at once. So: wow, a city! Wow, an inn! Wow, taverns!

It was lucky Qing was wearing a veil.

If she hadn’t been, the absolute beauty counted among the foremost beauties under heaven would have been gazing at all that with a desperate, yearning look that would have driven countless bystanders into a lethal epidemic of lovesickness—the worst, incurable disease of all, the exact expression Central Plains people loved most. It would have been a mass-attack biochemical incident.

Ah, seriously. Deep-fried pork, lamb stew, pancakes, tearing open hot bread and soaking it in clear soup, hollowing it out and stuffing it with meat, grabbing so much food you jam your mouth and throat full, then blasting open the clogged passage with one huge gulp of liquor, aaah.

And yet she couldn’t go...

She couldn’t buy and eat something by herself while the cadets were clearly in training.

But it was right there. Why couldn’t she go?

They had chests full of gold. Why couldn’t they spend any?!

The soldiers on the city wall looked down at the suspicious group passing by under heavy packs.

They’d heard beforehand that the academy would be passing on training, but to the eye it was hard to tell whether these were peddlers or martial artists. Judging from their faces alone, they looked more like prisoners being hauled away.

The column turned away toward the southwest, their eyes fixed, their footsteps dragging.

And they walked.

And walked.

And kept walking.

They just kept going, on and on.

Walk, pause to choke down some porridge made from boiled grain rations, catch their breath, then walk again.

Gradually, starting from the bottom of the skill ladder, people began to spread out and fall behind.

So.

“Give that here.”

“I c-can sti...”

“We’re not just squadmates—we’re on a mission. We die together or live and arrive together. Hand it over.”

The higher-realm cadets began taking the packs from the weaker ones.

The training had been designed that way from the outset.

It was near mid-June, and the heat had been vicious since spring; now that summer was starting in earnest, it was really beginning to steam.

They hadn’t realized it up on the mountain, where Righteous-Proper Martial Academy sat on a lush ridgeline with year-round winds and a valley at its flank.

But down in the world, they were discovering anew: heaven and earth, this place is hot.

Toward dusk, they began to enter the southern approach to Pyeongdang Mountain County—the high saddle between two lines of peaks, where the mountain range dipped low like a broad ridge.

And draped along that ridge was a long, dull gray wall: the very wonder of architecture that Central Plains people called the Long Wall, and Qing’s homeland called the Great Wall of Ten Thousand Li.

Not that anyone in this era’s Central Plains found it particularly wondrous.

If you lived in Henan, you saw it here and there as a matter of course. Even if you weren’t from Henan, every big city had towering walls—if you went to Zhengzhou or Luoyang nearby, you could gape at walls much higher, thicker, and grander than this.

By comparison, this Great Wall was rather unimpressive.

In summer, dusk is winter’s night.

By the laws of the state, no one should have been allowed to pass the Long Wall’s gate at this hour.

But how could the commander of the Wall garrison coldly shut the gates against orthodox chivalrous warriors, sweating blood for their training?

It was absolutely not because of the golden chest sent by the Martial Alliance. It was entirely out of respect for the orthodox heroes who labored for the country in places beyond the reach of civil officials.

Of course, since the gate stood wide open and no soldiers were visible, this was an example of wise military handling.

As it happened, they had training scheduled and had stepped away, and the old gate of the Long Wall must have simply swung itself open.

They had absolutely not violated the law by opening the gate, nor had they any intention of letting these people pass.

As for what kind of training they were supposedly doing, ahem—perhaps “liquor-toxin detox training” in case of emergencies. They were training ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) the most important organ of the body, the liver, the organ you could blame everything on—and, secondarily, working on group cohesion.

Because if the commander pocketed all the bribes alone, his end would not be pretty. When free money came in and you spread it around generously, everyone could smile and stay on good terms for a long time.

Three nights short of the full moon, the night was bright, and the muggy early-summer heat was easing off, making it almost ideal weather for walking.

The cadets kept walking.

As they walked, their moon-shadows stretched and tilted, slid westward, and by the time dawn was breaking, they finally reached the foot of White-Cloud Mountain.

“Ah...”

“A mountain...”

The cadets muttered as they stared at the path up.

Righteous-Proper Martial Academy sat high on White-Cloud Mountain’s ridge. That meant that from here, they’d be climbing.

For six whole shichen.

It wasn’t as if they hadn’t known that—but the sheer tidal wave of despair that hit them anew was beyond words.

As expected, the last and crowning flower of any march was mountain climbing.

And this was a very serious bit of climbing.

In that gloomy air, the cadets started up the mountain.

Their feet were heavy; their calves felt like they were about to burst.

Their sweat had gone past soggy and turned to grease; every place skin touched skin stuck and peeled with a sticky rip that made their skin crawl.

The cadets without loads—the third-raters—were already at the end of their physical and mental limits. They didn’t know if they were going forward or backward anymore; they just put one foot out and let the other follow, entering the true automatic-movement state.

They marched on in a state of no-thought, no-self, continuing to move forward, alive but not really feeling alive.

The cadets with heavy loads were in agony too.

Central Plains packs weren’t exactly ergonomically designed. The weight didn’t distribute, it just crushed.

Their shoulders felt like they might actually separate from their torsos at any moment. Since their shoulders hurt, their backs knotted and hurt; since their backs hurt, there wasn’t a single spot on their whole body that wasn’t aching.

If you still had stamina left, your shoulders hurt. If you didn’t, your feet did.

Of course, Qing was completely fine.

A Flower Realm expert was not going to struggle with this kind of thing; her eyes were practically sparkling.

We’re almost there.

She was going to raze the instructor cafeteria to the ground; this was the day the instructor cafeteria perished. She would leave not a single grain of rice or barley in the storeroom.

Rice. Actual rice. Not grain-avoidance. Rice.

Suddenly buoyed, Qing raised her voice, her pretty voice ringing out loud and clear.

“We’re almost there! Cadets, are you tired?!”

Of course they were tired.

She was a high-realm master with only a light daypack; of course she wasn’t that tired. Meanwhile, if any of them fell over here, they had no confidence they could get back up, but they did have confidence they could fall asleep within three breaths.

But if it bothered them that much, they could become instructors themselves.

“No, ma’am!” “No, Instructor!” “We’re not tired!”

“In that case, straighten your shoulders, your waist, your chest, and walk with pride! Repeat: We can do it!”

“We can do it!” “We can do it!”

“Is that all the voice you’ve got?!”

What she actually said came out more like: Ish dhaat aall dha voish yoo can maaake!?—words she’d heard hundreds of times before, branded into her ears.

The cadets started screaming from their guts.

“We can do iiit!!!” “We c’n dooo iit!!”

“Send your support to your fellow Sword Hall cadets who are suffering right now as well! Sword Hall, we can do it!”

“““Sword Hall! We! Can! Do iiit!!”””

Voices echoed back at once.

—Greatest under Heaven! Blade Division! Saber shall be King-of-All-Weapons!

—Fist Hall! We are the ones who win!

Qing wasn’t just ad-libbing.

Forcing you to shout all kinds of bullshit at the tail end of a march was part of the scientifically designed training process in the first place.

Qing had simply given the signal that it was time to start shredding their throats.

Cadets at the front and back, already on the mountain path, started yelling at the top of their lungs team by team.

Sword is best, saber is best, our Hall stay strong, we can do it, we’re the ones who win, and so on.

At first, it was almost pure rage.

They were exhausted, their feet felt like their soles had been ripped open and their foot bones crushed, their shoulders were about to fall off, their bodies were sticky and clammy, sweat was streaming down them in disgusting rivulets—and now they had to yell this crap?

But humans were, in the end, fairly simple creatures.

As they forced the air from their lungs over and over again, that anger got vented.

At some point, everyone got pretty fired up and started shouting with actual enthusiasm.

After all, soon—very soon—this endless march would finally end.

And then, finally. At last. In the end.

Once they crossed the ridgeline, there below, across the valley, they saw the estate they’d dreamed of, the great buildings of Righteous-Proper Martial Academy, in one sweeping view.

One of the cadets muttered without realizing it.

“We’re home.”

In that instant, a shiver ran through all of them.

Home! We’re home!

After finishing this brutal training and extreme endurance, they had finally, at long last, returned to the home they’d yearned for in their dreams.

Some couldn’t hold back and started shouting it out here and there: Home! I’m home!

Qing smiled contentedly inside her veil.

Since when was Righteous-Proper Martial Academy your home?

Since now.

This entire training had been for those three words: “We’re home.”

Walking? They all knew how to walk.

Three days and nights without sleep? Any martial artist could handle that.

Comradeship? They’d be looking at the same faces all summer; it would be harder not to become close.

But a dormitory didn’t easily become home.

Loyalty? Affection for the academy? Whatever you called it—

This had been training to flip that switch in their hearts so they’d begin to think of the academy as their home.

Once Sima Chunbong heard those words, she’d immediately set about drafting the training plan, because she understood how important that sense of belonging was for a group.

The cadets themselves, of course, knew none of this; their faces were split with huge smiles.

They were clearly exhausted, but that didn’t dull the sense of accomplishment shining there.

They passed through the main gate of Righteous-Proper Martial Academy, where staff took their packs and handed out cool iced tea.

They hugged each other in joy, bouncing up and down, shouting that they’d done it—

Well, not literally bouncing; they were too tired for that, so it was more like a messy group hug.

And just like that, procession training: successful.