342.
Time That Does Not Flow**
On the plains of Taiping, even the wind seemed to have stopped.
Grass had begun to sprout again where flames once spread.
The surviving horses breathed slowly atop the mud.
When human hands withdraw, nature recovers with startling speed.
The moment footsteps fade, the wind finds its path again.
The front line was frozen.
Arrows had ceased.
The war drums slept.
Between the tents, thin strands of soldiers' laughter drifted through the air.
The laughter was not a sign of an ending, but a brief pause to catch one's breath.
Park Seong-jin stood atop the ramparts, gazing across the river.
A heavy fog hung low, and beyond it lay Zhu Yuanzhang's camp.
This stillness could last a long time.
It was not something to be resolved in a year or two.
They called it chasing the stag—
a contest for the throne and for power.
The struggle for the Central Plain.
As it had been with Liu Bang and Xiang Yu, so it was now.
By day, soldiers grilled dried meat and waved across the river.
At a distance where the line between enemy and ally blurred, gestures passed as though greeting kin.
Across the river, it was impossible to say who had begun first.
From one side or the other, small straw boats crossed back and forth, trading goods.
Merchants of the river.
Dried fruits coated with malt syrup were laid out.
When Park Seong-jin first saw it, he frowned.
"They could be enemies."
Someone beside him laughed and said,
"Even enemies get hungry, don't they?"
Park Seong-jin paused, then let out a quiet chuckle.
The smile did not dissolve vigilance—it shifted its meaning.
Soldiers gathered by the fires and began to sing.
Songs of their hometowns.
Songs once sung at village markets, songs their mothers hummed in the evenings.
The melodies drifted across the river.
After a moment, another song answered from the far bank.
The words were different, but the voices carried the same homesickness.
Park Seong-jin closed his eyes.
He turned over the phrase a battlefield without fighting in his mind.
Silence was not the conclusion of peace—it was waiting that summoned the next storm.
While soldiers laughed, commanders could not sleep.
Rest was not leisure; it was the reordering of ranks.
In the place where movement had paused, the scent of battle clung thickly to the wind.
When the wind shifted, a lone drum sounded—thud.
No follow-up signal came.
The echo of a mistake.
Anger surged inside Park Seong-jin.
Yet at that single sound, every soldier lifted their head at once.
It was a sound that froze the chest.
The battlefield remained a battlefield, even at rest.
As night deepened, fog descended again along the riverbank.
Park Seong-jin stepped alone beyond the gate and stood on a low rise.
The moon hung half-full, and its light spread across the river like a film of oil.
From far away came the sound of a dog barking.
Its owner was unseen.
All boundaries had grown indistinct.
He reflected.
He had always practiced the same walking blade.
True energy filled his middle dantian, dispersing like mist as it transformed.
He had never skipped a day of practice.
The pale flow of light that followed each movement felt almost tangible in his hands.
Even on the battlefield, he had not neglected his cultivation.
Day after day, the practice accumulated and refined into true energy.
Yet not long after reaching his peak, that energy had begun to surge upward, touching the upper dantian.
Even to himself, the speed felt excessive.
Such an early stirring of the upper dantian was a sign of danger.
A ringing sensation—ting, ting—swept through his body.
Each time, though he knew it was too soon, his mind heated first.
His fingertips grew impatient on their own.
It felt as though the slightest touch would trigger a great change.
He had taken no elixir, yet his progress was rapid.
One misstep, and he could be ruined.
There were countless who had gone astray in cultivation.
Most people stop at a certain point.
I, too, will stop somewhere.
Youth runs ahead of fear.
To strike through the upper dantian is to enter the realm of transformation.
Could he reach it?
When the war ended, he would have to return to his master at Mount Guwol.
The desire to walk that path quickly grew stronger.
The realm of transformation—
few had ever reached it.
Yet here, on this battlefield, his body kept knocking at that door.
Unease deepened.
All a human can do is continue what lies before them.
That simplicity remained the only truth.
Then, suddenly, Yoon Dam's words came back to him.
"The one who does not move is the most frightening."
Only now did those words sink into his flesh.
Whether the truths gained by swinging a blade truly aligned with the order of the world was hard to judge.
But the sensations he had seen and felt were close to reality's grain.
A sense of inevitability clung to his body.
Truth grasped through movement felt like the truest truth of all.
At dawn, Park Seong-jin saw a faint light flicker across the river.
Not a flame, but a lantern.
It swayed in one corner of the enemy camp.
Its owner was unseen.
Yet that single point of light looked like a signal—
a sign that the frozen world was preparing to move again.
He narrowed his eyes.
"This peace won't last."
As the words left him, the wind rose.
The light flickered—then went out.
Once more, only silence flowed across the plains of Taiping.