Chapter 73 – Teacher Dragon Fist
The snake-thing lunged.
I moved.
Melody cleared the scabbard in a straight, almost lazy line.
From the outside it probably looked like a simple horizontal cut—one step, one swing, nothing fancy. From my side, I stacked Vector and aura and mono-edge so cleanly they sang.
The blade touched the faceless "head."
For a fraction of a heartbeat, the world caught.
Then the cut went through.
No resistance. No bone. No sinew. Just the sudden, ugly collapse of a shape that had never quite belonged here.
The creature came apart like wet paper.
Not even satisfying gore—no blood, no proper organs. Just slumping meat and slack skin that tried to remember which way gravity was supposed to go and failed. The air smelled wrong for a moment, like burned ink and rotting sea salt, then even that evaporated, leaving only a smear of… nothing.
So Sang-kyu skidded to a halt beside me, breathing hard, clothes torn, hair wild.
"I. Hate. Snakes," he spat. "Snake things. Things that think they are snakes. Anything long that wriggles."
"You're welcome," I said.
"Always show up right after—" He stopped, squinted at the steaming remains. "Huh. You cut it better this time."
This time.
Like there'd been a lot of snake-entities in his life.
He turned his attention back to the street, yelling something at the bystanders to get back inside. They scattered. Doors shut. Latches slammed.
The moment we were alone, the shock hit.
Not from the fight.
From the pattern.
Abyssal Pact node. Outer fragment. Depth's Glance. Pact-broken cult leader mutating. Tower-sized flesh thing in Morel. Now random off-shoot horror chasing a thousand-year-old martial lunatic through the capital like it owned the place.
It wasn't normal.
It wasn't *this* world's normal, not even with demonkin and derivations and gods and regressions.
This was… game-balance.
A thought slid sideways through my head, too clean to be mine.
*What game was Nexuspia again?*
[ System ]
[ Query: Genre Classification – Title: Nexuspia: Argent Crown ]
[ Response: Heroine-Focused Scenario Simulation ]
[ Sub-Tag: Heroine Harem Routes Available ]
[ Note: Player Original Goal – Romance Multiple Heroines, Manage Faction Loyalty, Prevent Scripted Catastrophes ]
For a second I literally forgot to breathe.
Melody's voice nudged the back of my mind.
"Master?" she said slowly. "Did it just say harem?"
"Shut up," I thought back automatically.
A heroine harem game.
Right.
Of course.
Argent Crown wasn't just some generic fantasy strategy sim—it had always felt like someone had bolted an emotional mess onto a political sandbox and called it a day. In the first loops, I'd written that off as bad design. Now…
"You're telling me," I muttered under my breath, "that I have been dying over and over inside someone's *romance* game."
[ System ]
[ Clarification: Multiple Genre Blending – Romance, War Strategy, Horror Events ]
[ Advisory: Player Actions In Current Run Have Severely Diverged From Intended Flags ]
[ Result: Dynamic Difficulty Scaling – Hostile Entities Adjusted Upward To Maintain Challenge ]
Dynamic difficulty scaling.
"So because I stomped on some early flags and pre-empted your disaster events," I whispered, "you're compensating by throwing bigger, uglier things at me."
[ System ]
[ Affirmative ]
[ Comment: Current Run No Longer Resembles Base Nexuspia Narrative. Balance Algorithms Attempting To Reassert "Fun" ]
Melody snorted.
"Fun," she echoed. "Yes. Nothing says fun like being chewed on by things with too many eyes."
I pinched the bridge of my nose.
"If Argent Crown is Nexuspia," I thought, "what about Safon? Tide Dominion?"
[ System ]
[ Linked Title Detected ]
[ Safon Worldline – "Daoistopia: Tide Dominion" ]
[ Genre: Martial Cultivation, Sect Management, High Difficulty ]
[ Note: Cross-Route Connectivity – Certain Events & Characters Share Underlying Data With Nexuspia ]
Of course it did.
Two games.
Two continents.
Two different messes bolted together along invisible seams.
I exhaled slowly.
"So," I thought, "the third continent…"
The one no one talked about in history books. The one maps blurred. The one I'd only seen in glitches and distant System hints. The one the Goddess had carefully *not* mentioned.
Automatically generated?
Or deliberately hidden?
[ System ]
[ Response: Incomplete ]
[ Third Continent – Designation: Unknown ]
[ Status: Data Redacted / Access Restricted ]
[ Warning: Further Queries Will Return Error ]
A wall, right where I needed a door.
Figures.
"Master," Melody said gently. "People will stare if you stand in the street making faces at the air."
"I'm thinking," I said.
"You're brooding," she corrected. "Again."
"Same thing," I said. "Anyway. If that third continent is locked up this hard, then somewhere on it is the patch note for 'stop dying horribly to things from outside the universe.' I need to go there."
Honor student of the Imperial Academy.
Sword campus oddball.
Secret god of an underground organisation.
Now aspiring trespasser in whatever mystery the System didn't want to name.
Of course.
"Kid."
So Sang-kyu's voice snapped me back.
He was watching me with narrowed eyes, like he could see pieces moving behind my forehead.
"You made some kind of decision just now," he said. "Good. About time. But you can't walk that path with a body like wet paper."
I looked at him.
"Please teach me," I said.
No flowery phrasing.
No "honoured master" or "I humble myself before your wisdom."
Just the line.
Please. Teach me.
He studied me for a long moment.
Then he grinned, sudden and sharp.
"There," he said. "That tone. Not 'please save me,' not 'please make me special.' 'Please give me tools so I can break myself on my own terms.' Good. That I like."
He jerked his thumb toward the city gate.
"Come," he said. "We start with your meat."
***
Body Tempering Realm, he called it.
In Safon, they turned even basic training into something that sounded like a holy trial.
He took me out past the last houses, beyond the furthest fields, into the scrub and rock where the city's noise thinned to wind and insects.
We walked for over an hour.
Up, mostly.
Ocria sat in a basin, nested between ranges. So Sang-kyu picked a slope where a small mountain rose on one side and a long, uneven downhill stretch led back toward the city in the distance.
"Good," he said, squinting around. "Open, but not too open. Plenty of rocks to break ankles. Very inspirational."
"Glad the scenery meets your standards," I said dryly.
He ignored that.
Walked up to a tree near the slope—a sturdy thing, trunk thicker than my torso.
Without drawing a weapon, without gathering visible mana, he set his hand on the bark.
"Watch," he said.
Then he struck.
No flashy qi blaze. No roaring aura dragon.
Just a simple, tight punch from the waist.
The trunk exploded.
Not in splinters—more like it had been cross-cut along three points at once from the inside. Three sections dropped neatly: each about my height, maybe a little shorter, still wrapped in bark and leaves.
He caught one casually before it hit the ground and hefted it like it weighed nothing.
About one and a half metres, my old-world brain supplied. Roughly my own height—150 centimetres, give or take—but thicker. Dense. Sap still bleeding from the fresh wood.
He tossed it toward me.
I caught it.
Barely.
My arms dipped. My stance shifted.
Heavy.
Not impossible, but heavy.
"Body Tempering Realm," So Sang-kyu said, hands on his hips. "You strengthen skin, muscles, bones. You pay in sweat and blood instead of qi. You will want to skip this and go straight to 'cool glowing aura,' because you are a child and children are stupid. Don't."
"I'm twelve," I said.
"Exactly," he said. "Stupid."
He chopped another section off the remaining trunk with one hand. It flew aside, bounced, rolled, hit a rock.
"First run, one log," he said. "Up the slope, then down. No magic, no little tricks to float or lighten. If I see you cheat, I throw rocks at your head."
"Motivating," I muttered.
He grinned.
"Yes."
I hoisted the log onto my shoulder.
It bit into the muscle there, a dull, grinding weight.
"Go," he said.
***
The first ten steps weren't so bad.
Log over one shoulder, other arm out slightly for balance, feet picking careful paths between rocks and scrub.
By thirty, my legs burned.
By fifty, my lungs dragged.
By a hundred, my fingers had gone numb where they gripped the wood, and the bark had started to rub the skin off my collarbone.
I could have cheated.
Could have let Vector take just a fraction of the weight, distribute it along an invisible slope. Could have bled a little mana into my muscles, woven aura into a crude reinforcement. It would have been easy. No one here could *see* the difference.
Except So Sang-kyu.
And me.
And that was the problem.
I'd spent too many loops doing things the easy way. Patching over structural weaknesses with magic and derivation and System tricks, then wondering why everything fell apart when those crutches broke.
So I didn't cheat.
I just walked.
One step. Another. Breath in. Out. Shoulders screaming. Spine complaining. Thighs shaking.
"Don't think about the top," So Sang-kyu called lazily from somewhere behind me. "Think about not falling on your face and crushing your pretty little skull."
"Very encouraging," I panted.
"If you die from this, I was wrong about you," he said. "I am not often wrong."
It took… I don't know how long.
Long enough that time stopped being measured in minutes and started being marked in "how many times I almost dropped the log" and "how many times I promised myself I would take one more step and then reconsider my life choices."
Somewhere near the top, my vision narrowed.
The sky shrank to a strip.
The slope became an enemy.
The log became the entire world.
I hit the crest without quite realizing it, stumbled, nearly went over the other side uncontrolled.
"Stop," So Sang-kyu snapped.
I did.
He appeared in front of me, one hand casually catching the log as if it weighed nothing, taking the load off my shoulder. My knees nearly buckled at the sudden absence of pressure.
"Downhill," he said. "Slow. Don't run. You run, you fall, you break something, I leave you there to think about your choices."
"Love the support," I wheezed.
He just smirked and tossed the log back onto me.
Gravity made downhill worse.
The weight dragged. My toes jammed into the front of my boots. Every misstep threatened to turn into a slide with a tree trunk for ballast.
By the time we reached the foot of the slope again, my shirt was plastered to my back, my arms shook, and my shoulders felt like someone had taken a chisel to the joints.
I dropped the log and bent over, hands on my knees, drawing ragged breaths.
"Good," So Sang-kyu said cheerfully. "You did not die. Again."
"Again?" I rasped.
His eyes flicked over me.
"You have that look," he said. "People who have died and come back always move like they are a little surprised the ground is still under them. Now—future. When one log is easy, we go to two. Then three. Then five. Then we add rocks. Then we run. For now…"
He gestured toward a flat patch of ground.
"Stability," he said.
***
I should have known that was worse.
"Sit," he said.
He handed me not one, but five cups.
Actual cups. Real clay. Steam rising from the top of each one, smelling faintly of bitter tea.
"Where did you get—"
"Don't ask," he cut in. "You waste breath. Knees bent. Back straight. We call this horse stance where I come from. Here, you will call it 'that horrible thing that makes my thighs scream.'"
I dropped into stance.
Feet apart. Knees pushed out. Weight centered.
Immediately, my legs protested. The long log run had already lit them on fire; this felt like pouring oil on top.
So Sang-kyu balanced two cups on my thighs.
The heat bit through the fabric.
He put two more on my outstretched hands.
Then one on my head.
"Do not spill," he said. "You have one minute."
I lasted about ten seconds.
The urge to straighten my legs, to relieve the pressure, hit like a wave. My arms trembled under the stupidly light weight of the cups. The one on my head wobbled.
My mind did what it always did under stress: tried to run.
I thought of Nexuspia and Daoistopia and that unnamed continent. Of Vastriel and System dialogues and Outer beings and Yggdrasil and Julia and Noel and So Sang-kyu's ridiculous qi lectures. My thoughts skittered from crisis to crisis like a rat in a burning house.
The first cup slid.
Hot tea splashed my thigh.
I jerked.
The rest followed.
In the end I was sprawled on my back, drenched in cooling liquid, staring up at the sky.
So Sang-kyu peered down at me, upside-down from my angle.
"Five times," he said. "You fell five times."
"You counted," I said.
"Of course," he said. "First time, body fails. Second, mind fails. Third, pride fails. Fourth, anger fails. Fifth… if you still fall, you're actually tired."
"That is not a real system," I muttered.
He shrugged.
"It works for me," he said. "Again."
We did it again.
And again.
By the third attempt, my muscles had stopped feeling like mine. By the fourth, my thoughts had thinned down to a single, stubborn thread: *Don't move. Don't spill. Don't waste this.*
I shut the rest out.
Let everything else go.
Outer gods. Locked continents. Blessings. Loops. Traumas. All of it.
Just cups.
Just heat.
Just pain.
Somewhere, So Sang-kyu's voice floated through the fog.
"Shut off the noise," he said quietly. "Pain is loud. Fear is loud. Regret is loud. None of them help you keep water on your knees."
I focused on the rim of the cup balanced on my thigh.
On the way the liquid trembled, then steadied when I adjusted my breathing.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
The minute passed.
I didn't fall.
"Good," he said finally. "Now we know you can stand still without thinking yourself into the ground."
He took the cups away.
My legs trembled so hard I almost dropped anyway.
"Two more things," he said.
Of course.
***
The third exercise looked almost simple.
"Mountains are good teachers," So Sang-kyu said, leading me to a low rock face at the base of the slope. Not a sheer cliff—more like an uneven wall of stone, pocked with natural holds, rising maybe five metres.
"Climb," he said.
I eyed the rock.
"With what special technique?" I asked.
"With hands," he said. "No qi. No mana. No tricks. Only rule—do not come down until I tell you."
I climbed.
At first, it was almost pleasant.
Handhold, foothold, shift weight, pull.
Melody murmured pointless commentary in the back of my mind about leverage and angles.
Then So Sang-kyu ruined it.
"Hanging," he called up. "One hand."
I stopped.
"What?"
"One hand," he repeated. "Pick a hold. Trust it. Let go with the other. You fall, you climb again."
I hesitated.
Then I did it.
Fingers dug into a small protrusion. I let the other hand slip free.
Instantly, every muscle in my arm screamed.
The weight of my body yanked at my shoulder, tried to tear me away from the rock. My grip wanted to fail. My brain kindly supplied images of fingers popping out of sockets, of bones snapping, of falling backward and cracking my skull on a stone.
So Sang-kyu ignored all that.
"Breathe," he said. "Anger is loud, fear is loud, pain is loud. None of them help you hold on."
I gritted my teeth.
Counted.
One. Two. Three.
At ten, he let me grab the rock with my other hand again.
Then he made me switch arms.
By the time he finally called me down, the skin on my fingers had split, my forearms shook uncontrollably, and there was a constant high whine of protest in my shoulder joints.
"Good," he said. "Now we know you can hang on when everything in you wants to let go."
"And the fourth?" I asked, voice hoarse.
He smiled.
It was not a kind smile.
***
We walked a little further along the base of the mountain until we reached a narrow stream cutting through the rock.
"Water," he said. "Better teacher than stone. More stubborn."
A waterfall trickled down a short drop—a mere two metres, spilling into a shallow pool before running off as a creek.
Harmless.
Almost pretty.
So Sang-kyu walked into it.
The water hit his shoulders and sheeted off.
"Sit," he said. "Cross your legs. Back straight. Hands on your knees. No shields, no warming spells. Let the water hit you."
"It's cold," I said automatically.
"Yes," he said. "Good observation. Now go."
I waded in.
The shock hit like a slap.
Mountain water. Thin, clear, cutting cold. Even in summer it bit straight through clothing and skin. I sat where he pointed, cross-legged on the slick rock at the base, letting the stream hammer into the crown of my head and down my spine.
Everything in me tried to hunch.
Curl.
Protect.
"If you curl," So Sang-kyu said conversationally over the roar, "the water hits your neck, your shoulders, makes you twist. You get bruised, you get angry, you get up and run away. If you stay straight, it hurts different. More. But you learn how your body takes force."
My teeth chattered.
Goosebumps rose along my arms.
Hands numbed. Toes numbed. Thoughts tried to scatter again, this time not into worries, but into animal-level *make it stop*.
"Qi follows where mind leads," he said. "Mana, too. If your mind runs from pain, your power follows. If your mind stays, your power roots. You want to walk into Outer things and not immediately go insane? Learn to sit in a waterfall first."
I wanted to tell him I'd already gone insane and come back.
Instead, I closed my eyes.
Let the water pound.
Counted again.
One.
Two.
Three.
I lost track somewhere around thirty.
Every second stretched.
The stream pressed down, turned my breaths shallow, made my heart kick like a trapped rabbit.
"Master," Melody's voice whispered nervously in the back of my skull. "You're shaking. If you die from hypothermia after everything else, I will be very annoyed."
"Shut up," I thought. "I'm busy."
At some point, the cold stopped being *cold*.
It became… information.
The sting on my scalp. The way it cascaded along the curve of my skull. The line of pressure down my neck, between my shoulder blades, along the groove of my spine.
My body adjusted.
The muscles learned to soften just enough to take the hit without locking.
My breathing smoothed.
The noise of the water receded.
At the edge of perception, I could feel So Sang-kyu's gaze like a physical weight.
Finally, after what felt like three lifetimes and probably wasn't even ten minutes, his voice cut through.
"Enough," he said. "Out."
I unfolded my legs—slowly, carefully. Stood. Stepped out of the stream.
Water poured off me, soaking the ground.
I felt… awful.
Frozen.
Bruised.
Weirdly clear.
So Sang-kyu watched me for a long moment.
Then he nodded once, as if confirming something to himself.
"Body Tempering," he said. "You are already past what most call 'good enough.' Your frame is small, but dense. Your bones are thicker than they should be. Your muscles recover faster than they should. You move like someone who has died many times and learned from it. That is not normal."
"Is that a compliment?" I asked, voice rough.
"A warning," he said. "This body of yours is monstrous, boy. In a good way, maybe. Maybe not. But if you insist on walking into gods' games and locked places no one is supposed to touch, you will need every bit of it."
He clapped me on the shoulder.
I almost toppled.
He laughed.
"Rest," he said. "Tomorrow, we talk about qi seas and how not to explode your heart trying to copy mine. For now… be proud. You did not whine as much as I expected."
"I was too tired," I said.
"Even better," he said.
Behind his casual tone, behind the mocking grin, something moved in his eyes.
Curiosity.
Respect.
And, under that, a flicker of something like unease, as if even a thousand-year-old Demon Realm monster wasn't entirely sure what he'd just agreed to shape.