(Chapter V — On the Humility of the Earth)
The wasteland wind drew a thin breath, rustling the warped boards of the old house. The unkindled candle held its eternal flicker—light without fire, flame without heat—casting long shadows across Khaldron's small garden.
The Sword Saint stepped outside, following a sensation he could not name, a pull like an old instinct awakening exactly where it once slept. His gaze fell on the earth.
And then—
He froze.
For beside the garden sat a black cat, silent as carved night. Its eyes glowed with deep amber—not bright, but ancient, the color of forgotten embers buried under centuries of ash. The creature did not move, yet the air around it hummed with the faint resonance of myth, as though reality itself chose not to disturb it.
Above the cat, perched atop a crooked beam, sat a crow. Its feathers shimmered like oil on water—dark, iridescent, layered with hidden tones that shifted with the slightest breeze: violet, green, obsidian, starlight. The crow's head tilted, one eye fixed on the Sword Saint with unnerving serenity.
Both creatures were utterly still.
Utterly present.
Utterly respectful.
A symmetry of mythic existence.
The Sword Saint blinked—
And his illusion cracked.
His old sight—the sight shaped by centuries of discipline—shattered like frost under sunlight, revealing the garden not as a mere patch of soil, but as a quiet miracle.
Seedlings glowed with faint inner warmth.
Leaves shimmered with life-force.
Roots pulsed gently beneath the ground.
The soil breathed like a living lung.
The cat blinked slowly at him, as if approving the clarity.
The crow let out a single, soft caw—reverent, not eerie.
The Sword Saint whispered, shaken:
"…I was blind."
Khaldron, seated at a wooden table with a steaming cup of coffee and a bowl of pork adobo, did not look up.
"You were," he said simply.
"Blinded by your own sharpness."
He rolled a cigarette from Murim tobacco leaves, hands steady, deliberate, movements woven with the stillness that shaped him. The Sword Saint watched the smoke drift from Khaldron's lips—gray, calm, spiraling upward like a spirit returning to the sky.
"What are these leaves?" the Sword Saint asked.
Khaldron held them up between two fingers.
"Tobacco grown at the border of old heavens. Its roots fed on forgotten breaths. In Murim, this is not poison. It is alignment."
"Alignment…?"
"In Murim," Khaldron said, lighting another cigarette, "weak leaf dulls the spirit. Strong leaf twists it. Mythic leaf—"
He exhaled. The crow's feathers rippled softly as the smoke passed.
"—centers the river of thought. A warrior inhales this, and his pulse learns calm."
The Sword Saint bowed his head in respect.
The black cat approached, sat quietly beside Khaldron, and curled its tail around its paws with ceremonial grace. Its presence radiated ancient patience, the kind found in beings who have watched centuries fade like smoke.
The crow hopped down, landing near the seedlings. It did not peck. It did not move. It simply watched, guarding the young sprouts like an old sentinel who remembered when the world was wider.
Khaldron picked up a spoonful of adobo.
"Eat," he said.
The Sword Saint hesitated.
"In Murim, pork… cattle… each meat has effect. They stir the qi-sea, change marrow, shift inner tides. It is dangerous."
"That is because you eat with fear," Khaldron said, chewing slowly.
"Food is not threat. Food is not salvation. It is simply food. But if you dwell while eating—"
He took another bite.
"—it becomes strength without disturbance."
The Sword Saint accepted a plate.
As he ate, the effects came—not turbulent, not violent, but harmonic. His breath steadied. His qi-root warmed. His spirit-core softened and expanded.
The crow cawed once, crisp as a drop of ink on parchment.
The cat closed its eyes, as if finding contentment in the Sword Saint's newfound calm.
"How?" the Sword Saint whispered.
"How do you make even food… tranquil?"
Khaldron sipped his coffee.
"You saw your garden wrongly. You saw yourself wrongly. You saw the world wrongly. That is why everything twisted around you."
The Sword Saint gazed at the seedlings—alive, mythic, breathing—and understood.
"I… misled myself."
Khaldron nodded.
"You expected too much. And expectation is the first veil on truth."
The Sword Saint bowed deeply.
"Teach me," he said, voice trembling with humility.
"Teach me to unsee the distortions. Teach me to dwell. To breathe. To eat without warping. To smoke without clouding. To live… without illusion."
Khaldron crushed the cigarette gently against a stone and looked at him—softly, calmly, with the gravity of someone who had long since walked beyond mastery.
"You are already living," he said,
"you simply forgot how to be alive."
The cat purred once.
The crow opened its wings, catching the
faint candlelight.
The unkindled flame trembled without burning.
And the garden—mythic, impossible—exhaled.