Chapter 19
This is the story of how I was mistaken for a Foundation Establishment old monster.
‘I’m not an old monster! Why am I so mad about my age?’
#1
This was what had happened at the inn.
“Ahem! Anyway… I’ve more or less got it, so clear the way! I need some time to think in peace.”
First, I took care of my urgent bodily needs.
After I was done and washed my hands, I realized there was no way I could bring that rejuvenated old man home with me.
There was no way I could tell Mom and Dad, ‘I went to the market and picked up a peak expert to be my bodyguard!’
‘Run. The only sensible thing is to run.’
Fortunately, I had an escape plan.
I quietly beckoned to the innkeeper’s daughter, who was flustered behind the inn.
The girl, who had looked at my alt identity, Kim Muyeol, as if she’d fallen in love at first sight, blushed as red as a tomato and nodded when I asked, “Could I borrow an outer robe?”
I threw off the cumbersome outer robe of my martial outfit and unwound the cotton cloth that had been tightly binding my chest.
“Whaaaaa—!”
The moment the bindings came loose, my compressed chest sprang out, and I could finally breathe.
I lightly draped on a silk outfit and let my tied-up hair fall long.
And so, the “mysterious mountain spirit, Kim Muyeol” vanished without a trace, and the fresh-faced beauty Ryu So-ha took her place.
Not a pretty young man hidden beneath a bamboo hat, but the daughter of a respectable family, so delicately raised she seemed ignorant of the ways of the world.
‘Good.’
Since it would be pointless if my qi were exposed, I also stopped the Five-Element Return-Flow Method, and now I looked like an ordinary girl.
I gently opened the privy door and slipped out with demure little steps.
‘Ha! Fooled him.’
My bone structure and even the way I gathered my qi were completely different, so there was no way he’d recognize me.
And so, leaving behind the secret manual I’d bought for two hundred cash and all the gifts I’d received from the women, I escaped as Ryu So-ha.
#2
My experience with that quack stent surgery to clear Yan Nan-cheon’s meridians brought me an unexpected and enormous boon.
The experience of weaving and controlling the Five Elements—Water, Metal, Fire, Wood, and Earth—in real time within another person’s complicated meridians had pushed my micro-control abilities to their utmost limits.
“Who am I? I’ve raised this art to near the level of a~rt, to the realm of unity between self and qi, where I am spiritual qi and spiritual qi is me, huh? A technique with soul, y’know?”
I sat beneath the eaves, swinging my legs and humming.
Maybe because it was midsummer, the star-receiving trees were in full bloom in the yard.
They had flowers shaped much like cherry blossoms from my previous life, but were a strange kind of tree that only bloomed in midsummer, when the sun was at its hottest.
“Sakura, huh? Sakura! Yelim, show me your hand. Is it a winning one?”
I made a dumb joke, but the stifling heat did not let up.
‘I miss air conditioning. I want to set it to exactly 18 degrees, crawl under a blanket, and watch a movie in peaceful comfort.’
“It’s hot.”
The life of a refined young lady, who couldn’t even take off her top no matter how hot it got, was truly arduous.
‘Professor Willis Carrier… I miss you. Wait, no? I can make one myself, can’t I?’
It was time to fire up the brilliant mind of a STEM student.
The principle behind air conditioning was simpler than I’d thought.
A thermodynamic heat-exchange system using the compression and expansion of refrigerant!
I drew Water Qi and Fire Qi up from my dantian at the same time.
‘An application of the first law of thermodynamics and adiabatic expansion.’
First, I compressed the Water Qi to the extreme, creating a refrigerant sphere far colder than ice.
Then I used Fire Qi to forcibly heat the air around the sphere, creating convection.
As the compressed Water Qi expanded and rapidly absorbed the heat energy around it, the temperature beneath the eaves plummeted in an instant.
“Ahhh—! This is it! This is the stuff!”
A pleasant breeze that made the sweat on my forehead disappear.
“Professor Carrier, are you watching? Your student did it.”
“Oh my. So-ha, how is it so cold here? It’s like winter!”
“Mother! Your daughter has performed a little trick.”
“A trick?”
“Hehe. This is a top-secret cooling art from the Western Regions.”
“The Western Regions…? How did you learn that?”
From now on, I’d decided to pass off modern knowledge as something from the Western Regions.
The Western Regions excuse was useful.
“Hehehe, hurry and sit right here beside me.”
Thump, thump!
I patted the wooden floor and invited my mother, who was passing by, to sit down.
Mother said to wait a moment, then brought out a watermelon.
Good heavens, sweet, sweet, sweetest summer watermelon.
My mouth was watering.
In Zheng, where sugar was rare, watermelon was a precious source of sugar.
Rustle, rustle, Mother handed me watermelon cut into easy-to-eat slices.
“Slurp. Mother, you have some first.”
“Our daughter first!”
“Then I won’t hold back.”
I took a big bite.
“Is it tasty?”
“Wow! It’s delicious. So sweet, Mother. You should try some, too!”
“What are you doing, putting watermelon on your chest like that!”
“You’re the only one who can see, Mother.”
Then, just as I was enjoying the ultimate satisfaction of the cool breeze….
“So-ha!!”
Father burst through the gate and came running in.
“Oh, Father. You’re back already….”
“You, you little rascal! What did you do at the inn in the market!”
I flinched.
“W-what do you mean, Father…?”
“Don’t play dumb! I stopped by the market, and the whole place was abuzz with rumors. At the inn, a mysterious immortal had unblocked the qi and blood of someone called Sword Demon Yan Nan-cheon, bringing him to the realm of Reversal of Aging.”
“Ahaha, that happened, did it? Of course, it had absolutely nothing to do with me….”
“The whole town was turned upside down! A young swordsman with an otherworldly air wearing a bamboo hat—his clothes matched yours down to the smallest detail, So-ha!”
‘Is he angry?’
“So when I heard the rumors, experts from all over Zheng came flocking here, and our village became truly bustling.”
“I-I see something like that happened.”
“They say the cultivator had a face as pretty as a woman’s.”
“There are plenty of handsome men in the world.”
“Hmm.”
“Coincidences are… really scary, aren’t they? Hehehe.”
Mother gently stroked my head.
“My daughter really isn’t good at lying. You can’t live in this harsh world like that.”
“Ahem.”
Father cleared his throat, then his facial muscles twitched as he burst with irrepressible joy.
“Hahahaha! Madam! Our daughter, our So-ha, has truly become a cultivator who performs miracles! Aren’t you happy?”
“Oh my! Goodness, even this mother is a little interested in that… Reversal of Aging.”
“It’s not that easy… Eek!”
My parents swept me into their arms and danced around.
“Cough, cough! Father, Mother! Your daughter can’t breathe!”
Thanks to this incident, my parents’ overprotectiveness disappeared without a trace.
It was the moment I was recognized as a proper cultivator.
“So-ha. No, Muyeol. You now command the principles of the world, so this father won’t stand in your way anymore. Go out as much as you like and devote yourself to cultivation! I’ll give you all the support I can!”
With my father’s full support behind me, I successfully obtained a free pass to go out as my alt identity, ‘Kim Muyeol.’
It turned out the village enjoyed an unexpected tourism boom, and everyone was blooming with smiles.
First, the innkeeper put up a sign that read “Where the Immortal Stayed,” and even though he charged four times as much for the seats, customers still lined up.
The rice-cake seller started selling “Honey Rice Cakes Tasted by the Immortal,” and the apothecary sold the sobering pills the immortal had sought at several times their price.
Sword Demon Yan Nan-cheon apparently really did settle down in our town, serving as a guard who maintained order and protected the village, all the while eagerly awaiting cultivator Kim Muyeol’s return.
Thanks to him, even when martial world experts caused trouble, everything could be tidily settled(?).
It was win-win for everyone, killing two birds with one stone, wasn’t it?
#3
Before being a cultivator, I’m a physicist, and I have one interest.
To dissect every law of this otherworld through the lens of physics.
I made full use of the free pass I’d been granted and left the mortal world behind to conduct proper outdoor physics experiments.
I made several discoveries. For example….
First, thankfully, this planet was round.
I planted a long stick upright, measured the length of its shadow, and had a servant compare the Sun’s elevation at different locations at the same time.
Even beneath the same Sun, the shadow lengths varied depending on the location. This was a natural result only on a planet with curvature.
By calculating from the shadow lengths at two suitably distant points, I learned that the planet had a radius about 1.5 times greater than Earth’s.
It was a crude measurement, but sufficient.
At least I wouldn’t reach the edge of the world.
Though, who knew? It might turn out we were standing on the shell of an enormous turtle yaoshou.
‘Someday, when a lunar eclipse occurs, I’d like to see the shadow.’
I hadn’t proved we weren’t on the shell or shoulder of a giant turtle yaoshou, but it was enough.
Just confirming that it had curvature was a comfort.
And second, the refinement of Newton’s Second Law (F=ma).
Based on the fact that the magnitude of force differed noticeably when true qi or spiritual qi was involved, I added a ‘spiritual qi coefficient’ to Newton’s law.
F = (m₀ + αΦ)a + β∇P
Here, m₀ was pure rest mass, Φ was the density of true qi or spiritual qi, α was the coupling coefficient between matter and true qi, a was acceleration, and ∇P was the gradient of spiritual pressure in space.
Newton regarded mass (m) as an intrinsic constant that never changed anywhere in the universe, but that didn’t hold in this world, where spiritual qi was the foundation of all things and transmitted energy.
The pure physical mass of a stone, its rest mass (m₀), might be fixed, but I had to account for the density of the true qi (Φ) I injected and its coupling coefficient (α).
Borrowing from solid-state physics, I called this ‘effective mass.’
A baseball flying at 50 km/h could be caught easily with a bare hand, but at the same speed, it could shatter bones depending on how much true qi it contained.
The remaining terms express the gradient of spiritual pressure in space, but that’s not important right now.
Today was truly a historic day.
It was the day I measured the speed of light.
The reason I was going out of my way to climb to a mountaintop to measure the speed of light wasn’t simply to verify Einstein’s law of the constancy of the speed of light.
There was a much, much more important purpose.
To establish the modern scientific backbone: the basic SI system of units.
‘Damn that yard-pound crap!! Senior Brother Perišić!’
In my previous life, inches, feet, and pounds had already driven me crazy, but this world was even worse.
Chi, ja, zhang, li, geun, gwan, shijin.
People used different names, and the standards varied from region to region.
At this rate, I couldn’t formulate the laws of physics.
Even measuring force was hard when units of mass were all over the place, and measuring speed was impossible when distance and time were arbitrary.
‘You can’t do science with things like “about one incense stick’s time.”’
Science abhors approximation.
These vague units had to be abolished.
Just as lightning was the movement of electric charges and not the wrath of Heaven, spiritual qi and true qi could ultimately be treated as a physical quantity if measured and organized.
So what was the very first thing I needed to do?
Standardization.
Establishing standardized units of measurement would make it much easier to describe the laws of physics mathematically.
Then I needed precise units of length and time.
In modern physics, one meter was defined as ‘the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during one 299,792,458th of a second.’
These days, they used some tedious and pretentious definition based on cesium atoms, or whatever, but I thought using light was much more intuitive.
If I could accurately determine the speed of light, I could create standardized measures of length and time in this world.
I was climbing the mountain, carrying a precise copper cogwheel with 720 teeth that I’d specially commissioned from the village blacksmith a few days ago.
He’d said it was impossible to make after seeing my design, but my charm offensive was absolutely invincible.
“Hehehe. It’s luminous! Beautiful! Gorgeous! Wonderful!”
I was about to recreate the toothed-wheel experiment of the nineteenth-century French physicist Armand Fizeau.
It felt worth all the trouble I’d given the blacksmith.
Additional equipment: two mirrors and sunlight. That was all.
The measurement method was simple.
First, place mirrors on two distant mountain peaks.
The principle was quite intuitive.
Place mirrors on two distant mountain peaks.
Shine light from Mountain A through a gap in the cogwheel.
The light reflected by the mirror on Mountain B and returning to Mountain A naturally had to pass through a gap in the cogwheel for me to see it.
At first, the light that passed through the gap would return through the same gap and remain visible.
But once the rotation speed reached a certain value, the returning light would be blocked by the adjacent tooth instead of passing through the gap, and disappear.
If I knew the rotation speed at that point, the number of teeth, and the distance between the two mountain peaks, I could calculate the speed of light.
c=2×d×n×ω
Speed of light = 2× round-trip distance × number of teeth × rotation rate
It really couldn’t be simpler.
I installed the device on a rock halfway up the mountain. Yesterday, I’d gone up to the opposite peak in advance and fixed a small mirror in place.
“Fizeau did this experiment on Montmartre, didn’t he?”
I tried to adjust the mirror, my heart fluttering with excitement.
‘The mirror’s quality is pretty crappy.’
While I was trying to think of a solution, I came up with an idea for studying light.
‘Couldn’t I use water to make a precise mirror, magnifying glass, or prism?’
Next, I resolved to make glass and looked at the cogwheel.
But wasn’t mountain weather supposed to be changeable?
I’d definitely picked a clear, bright day, but in an instant, a thick blanket of pure white fog rolled in.
The fog was so dense that it blocked my view, and I had no choice but to give up the experiment.
‘It’s a shame, but there’s plenty of time!’
What was the advantage of eternal life?
That a failed experiment didn’t mean a failed life.
If I couldn’t do it today, I could do it tomorrow. If I couldn’t do it tomorrow, I could do it the day after.
If I couldn’t do it the day after, I could do it a hundred years later.
Bad weather was only a minor variable in the face of a scientist’s tenacity.
And so, leaving my disappointment behind, I started down the mountain….
The problem happened on the way down.
At first, I thought I’d gotten turned around.
Mountain trails all looked similar, and fog often made it hard to tell which way you were going.
But something was strange. The pine tree I’d just passed had been on my left, but when I blinked, it was on my right.
I’d made a small mark on a rock, but even after going around in circles, I still had no idea where I was.
Oh, damn it!
I’d gone and gotten myself lost.
Waaah.
I had no compass and had lost my sense of direction. I was waiting endlessly for the weather to clear when it happened.
Shhh—
The thick fog billowed, and someone’s silhouette appeared without a sound.
Judging by the man’s qi, he was definitely a cultivator.
“A pleasure to meet you, Fellow Daoist!”
Fellow Daoist? What, is he pizza dough?
We made eye contact, and he froze for ten seconds.
Then, as if he’d been hit by Unlimited Void all by himself, tears welled in his eyes.
“Eeeek!
Foundation Establishment
?!”
‘Foundation Establishment? Isn’t that the next realm? I’m at Qi Refining.’
But the next word seriously offended me.
‘Why is the word “old monster” pissing me off? Why am I so damn angry?’
In context, was he calling me an old hag? Something even worse?
Calling me an old hag.
Crack—!
Then, while still prostrating himself, he began to confess his sins in detail and bow repeatedly.
‘Well, well, look who it is. I was in a bad mood, so become my fertilizer.’
Calling this superlative beauty Ryu So-ha an old monster?
Your crime weighs as much as a clay pot!
So, become the
fertilizer for my knowledge
and die.
Hehehe.
