<I have never tried hard. Isn’t trying hard doing something that’s difficult? Everything was easy for me.>
-From the excerpt of the Swordmeister
…….
There were two gardens inside the Roman mansion.
One was a small garden located in the front, facing the capital, made for visitors. The other larger garden faced Con-Tian Mountain and was used as a training ground.
It was a large grass-patch that could barely be called a garden. In a corner of this garden, a young man was staring up at the sky on a hammock that hung between two trees. The sun was already going down, but he did not think about going back inside.
It had been a few months since he began wasting his time out on the hammock, watching the skies. He was not normally like this. He used to love training and talk about sword mastery with his father and brothers. However, the reason for his sword training wasn’t to be strong.
This man had no desire to become strong. He wasn’t interested in defeating foes or enemies with strength. The only reason he trained so hard was this:
He loved using his sword. No, he loved seeing the execution of anything he could imagine with his sword.
He did not know this when he was young. He trained as told to by his father and learned other essentials from the tutors that his mother brought in from outside.
However, he quickly found out that he had no talent in almost everything. To be more precise, he just couldn’t find anything interesting. He tried all sorts of hobbies such as instruments, but he could not get better and got bored of things quickly.
Making friends was also boring. How could one read another’s mind? Why did one have to fit in? His mother or brother seemed like mind-readers to him. His father seemed to agree with him on this, however.
The manners the Nobles followed were also boring. He understood the importance, but he could not learn it as easily. His parents insisted that he learn, so his teacher would not return until he wanted to learn.
He could not understand why he hated learning so much.
Yet as he grew older, he discovered the reason why. He hated learning anything other than the one specific thing he was good at.
And that was the problem.
The three things that he started learning since he was very young was to utilize his body, practice the sword, and controlling Bander. Most people started training at the age of five, but his father made him start earlier.
The training was fun and never boring. His father always mentioned that training was hard because the body was not yet ready to follow what the mind told it to do.
However, it was never hard. His father was known for his honesty, but in this instance, it seemed to be false.
His mind continuously told him how to move. As he pictured the movement, his body followed. And as he continued, his body became stronger, allowing his mind to come up with new routes. It continued on like this.
His body told him where the sword must go.
He did not have to think how he should swing, or where he should swing. There was no need. He just needed to swing it toward where he instinctively thought it should go and his father complimented him. He did not know the importance of sword forms, but according to his father and brother, they must be something important, so he learned them. However, he wasn’t sure if it was necessary.
As for Bander, it just grew on its own. His father taught him a secret training method to grow Bander inside the body, but it was much slower, so he secretly stopped doing it. He didn’t feel the need to do it since the Bander just grew on its own anyway.
According to his father, he would come across an invisible wall that would stop him from growing further. To be honest, there were slight moments where he felt something like that.
It was about five times… but it felt more like paper rather than a wall. It made him struggle for a few days and irritated him, so he trained harder and it went back to normal. That was five years ago.
He was so used to training with a sword so easily that he thought it was normal. But it was not. He just couldn’t do anything other than wield a sword.
After he overcame the wall at the age of twelve, he began learning other things.
It was more than a wall. Manners, horse-riding, instruments… everything just seemed like climbing up a cliff without any equipment. He knew he had to do, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He always went back to what he was good at.
His parents seemed to give up. So besides learning manners, he was on his own. After forty-five minutes of etiquette lessons, he was free to do whatever he liked.
A year later, when he was thirteen, something happened.
It was the same feeling he felt five years ago, and he was now seventeen.
Something blocked him and he could not get past it. His Bander did not grow any longer and his body stopped growing stronger. At first, he figured a few days of hard training would solve it, but it didn’t. It was the first time he felt something like this.
Then he realized how low his patience was.
The sword training that he loved was now the same as all the lessons he learned before. It was boring.
What was definite was that he needed to find another way to overcome it. However, he was sure that not doing anything would not have any effect on his skills.
That was why he had been gazing at the skies for months.
He just did not want to do anything. He couldn’t bring himself to continue something that he couldn’t do as he thought. That was why he kept gazing at the sky, ‘thinking’ about what he could do.
He couldn’t find a way. His mind stopped telling him what to do.
His body and mind used to tell him where to go and what to do.
But it wasn’t the same anymore. It was so irritating. He had never felt that way.
As he kept thinking about his issue, he ignored the answer he was arriving at.
‘Ugh…’