Day by day, the training became increasingly challenging, and in response, his ability to harness his internal energy became progressively refined. The seasons changed several times, and Jin Cheon-hee came to the realization that he had now reached adulthood, even by modern standards.
They must have grown a lot, too.
Jin Cheon-hee savored the warmth of a steaming cup of sweet rice wine as he read the letters from his “little brothers.” The marten, rabbit, and wolf-pelt scarves had all found their way to their rightful owners, and it appeared that they were all being put to good use.
As expected, Cheon-woo and Sama Hyeon had both sent back arrogant replies. They were unaware of the true nature of Yeo Ha-ryoon, but they were determined to test him and see if he truly possessed the right to make such a declaration.
While Cheon-woo’s response was understandable, fueled by his rigorous training at Wudang, Sama Hyeon’s reaction was a complete surprise.
I thought he was the rational type. Looks like his blood boiled over something unexpected. Isn’t it fine to just be friends, even if they’re not sworn brothers?
Jin Cheon-hee was currently working on a White Tiger Cloak Hide. It was a type of cloak, in modern terms, worn over one’s clothes to block the cold.
Apparently, Cheon-woo had hunted it himself. He had subjugated a white tiger that had been preying on commoners in the mountains. Jin Cheon-hee couldn’t have been more surprised when the escort agency delivered it. Cheon-woo had said he wanted his hyung to use the rest of the pelt, but there was far too much left over.
Jin Cheon-hee used Wind Qi and Void-Grasping Art to strengthen the needle.
This thing is going to break if I’m not careful.
Even regular deerskin was incredibly tough to get a needle through. Normally, he would need a specialized awl, but that would defeat the purpose of the training. He had to make do with a simple quilting needle.
Will the leather get damaged if I mix in Fire Qi?
Eventually, Jin Cheon-hee began to manage the entire process, from cutting to crafting.
***
And so, time flowed on again.
“Hee-ya. That game you invented recently. It’s getting a great response from the clinic’s patients.”
“Is it?”
Tak—
Zhuge Rin and Jin Cheon-hee sat facing each other over a square Baduk board. Zhuge Rin held the white stones, and Jin Cheon-hee held the black. Of course, “held” was not a physical act, but one of internal energy.
When he had first agreed to play Baduk with his Master, Jin Cheon-hee had expected to be utterly crushed. But once they started, he found it surprisingly manageable. He had begun by playing with a three-stone handicap, but now, he was down to just two. It was because his internal energy operation and his situational judgment were growing at a rapid pace.
Tak—
At first, it was hard just to place a stone where I wanted.
Was it because the blood of a Korean—a nation obsessed with games—flowed in his veins? This was far more suited to his temperament than simply sorting brown and white rice. His Master also seemed to enjoy playing Baduk with his disciple.
“Blue Jade.”
“Ah.”
Blue Jade. It was a game board modeled after modern-day BuXMarble, but adapted to the circumstances of the Murim.
“I just made it to keep the patients quiet in their beds, but it seems to be popular.”
“So it would seem.”
While the modern BuXMarble was a game of buying land, erecting buildings, and making money, Blue Jade was about establishing branch offices or private dojos in the Murim and earning money that way. It was the same concept, but instead of ‘Deserted Island,’ this version had ‘Hell Prison’ and ‘Closed-Door Training’.
The people of the Murim wouldn’t even listen to their own families, so there was no way they’d listen to a doctor. Unless they were in so much pain they couldn’t even get up, they would try to check out and go drinking. It was difficult to keep them from drinking or swinging their swords in the hospital ward, even when they looked fine on the outside but still needed to be monitored.
That was why he’d created Blue Jade, the Murim BuXMarble.
In an era where the only amusements for adults were gambling, drinking, and Baduk, the appearance of a new game caused a sensation. While BuXMarble-like games did exist in this age, they weren’t as systematically balanced as a modern, polished board game. Furthermore, the “Golden Key Card” element—an unpredictable factor of luck—set the hearts of the adult martial artists ablaze.
Here, it was called a ‘Fortuitous Encounter Token’.
An eighty-year-old sect leader, who had been swearing he’d leave immediately to avenge the gut-stabbing he’d received from some unorthodox faction bastards, learned to play Blue Jade and ended up staying peacefully in the hospital for a full week. Whether they went out to settle their grudges or not was their business; in the current situation, where absolute rest within the clinic was paramount, Blue Jade was a savior.
“Many merchant guilds are interested in buying the rights to Blue Jade.”
“I figured they’d just make a knock-off.”
This was an era without intellectual property rights, so he’d assumed anyone would just copy it.
His Master replied, “That’s true… but merchants also need to visit the clinic when they get sick. And several of the sect leaders who played it have insisted that they must experience that ‘flavor’ again.”
Hm… so they’re all itching for another game.
He hadn’t expected a board game to be this successful.
Since it’s come to this, maybe I should release something like HalXGallX in the Murim? It might… or might not… be helpful for martial arts training. But I can definitely see people getting hurt. Hm. Let’s save that for later. No need to cause unnecessary bloodshed.
His Master placed his next stone. Tak—
“And there are also merchant guilds that want to buy ondol.”
“Ondol?”
“The martial artists who experienced the ondol in our clinic want to install it in their own homes. If anything, this is a development that’s long overdue.”
“I wish soap had spread this much.”
Tak—
“Hahaha, don’t be so impatient.”
He truly hadn’t imagined that soap, the one thing he’d most wanted to popularize, would have such a lukewarm response, while ondol and a board game would take off first.
Right. Washing your hands can be a hassle. Even on Earth, how hard was it to teach kids to wash their hands? And here, his opponents weren’t kids; they were adults.
Jin Cheon-hee’s soap-popularization project had thus failed spectacularly. Fortunately, it had been a project funded by his own pocket money, and it had only survived at all because the clinic’s branches and associated pharmacies had bought some. Still, the financial loss was painful, and Jin Cheon-hee shed a few secret tears.
Ugh, it can’t be helped. Since it’s come to this, I’ll just sell Blue Jade and ondol.
Jin Cheon-hee said, “I’ll do it. Which merchant guilds said they were interested?”
“Hm. There are many. I’ll have Yoo Ho organize the list and send it to you. Come to think of it, the Putuo Merchant Guild, affiliated with the Putuo Escort Agency, and the Namgung Merchant Guild are among them.”
A crease formed between Jin Cheon-hee’s brows.
“But they’re also the ones who are selling the soap…”
“Hohoho, Hee-ya. Isn’t the immediate future more important than such things?”
His Master’s words, translated, meant: ‘Just give up on the soap, it’s not going to sell anyway, and at least recoup your losses.’
Jin Cheon-hee clutched his aching heart.
***
Time flowed on again.
Jin Cheon-hee spent every day busy. He performed surgeries, passed on his knowledge, and continued his own medical studies. He was particularly focused on creating a new antibiotic, which was a battle against time.
Streptomycin.
This substance, effective against tuberculosis, also called the “White Plague”, was one of the representative antibiotics extracted from the earth. It was discovered by Dr. Selman Waksman and his students, who, noting that tuberculosis bacteria were quickly destroyed in soil, studied ten thousand different soil microorganism cultures.
Their research revealed that Streptomycin was helpful, but they had already used up the original culture in the experiment, so they had to grow it all over again from scratch. After that hellish grind, he won the Nobel Prize.
This kind of experiment required taking a single idea and randomly testing and discarding, over and over, until one reached the desired result.
Fortunately, Jin Cheon-hee knew that to get Streptomycin, he needed to extract Streptomyces griseus, which belonged to the order Actinomycetales. He also knew what it looked like and how it functioned. He had even studied how to adjust the acidity during cultivation, how to use charcoal if needed, that the ideal temperature was around 35 degrees Celsius, and various other necessary factors. However, the efficiency was low, with a loss of over 50%. According to a recent paper, there was a method to increase cultivation efficiency by using a small amount of penicillin.
But… knowing and doing were two different problems.
A hellish grind of cultivating and isolating Actinomycetales was required.
About… ten thousand petri dishes’ worth?
Extracting Streptomycin would require a different kind of effort than penicillin.
Besides, the penicillin here functions a little differently than the one back home, so one or two things might be different this time, too.
This was a task that occasionally caused disasters even with modern science and technology, and he had to accomplish it in the Murim world by praying over petri dishes.
In this process, Jin Cheon-hee “ground up” both himself and Yoo Ho. Jin Cheon-hee was not lonely. Yoo Ho was an excellent lab assistant. There was no such thing as a Ph.D. in this era, so there was no risk of Yoo Ho running away.
And Jin Cheon-hee had one last shred of conscience.
A microscope.
Jin Cheon-hee dedicated his efforts to grinding Yoo Ho to develop a primitive microscope, specifically the Leeuwenhoek microscope, which was created around 1600. The key challenge was to create a glass sphere as small as possible, as a smaller sphere resulted in higher magnification. Similarly, Jin Cheon-hee tirelessly ground Yoo Ho until he achieved the smallest possible sphere.
Yoo Ho would scream, “Die, you bastard Young Master!”
And Jin Cheon-hee was just so fond of him. If someone asked which worked harder, the brown ox or the black ox, he could confidently answer that Yoo Ho worked the hardest.
Even if it was a primitive microscope, it boasted enough magnification to observe red blood cells. It was still a bit insufficient for observing Actinomycetales, but this was the absolute limit of what they could achieve with current technology, even after pulling out their very souls. His plan was to supplement it later, either by using internal energy or by improving the lens.
It’s so strange, Yoo Ho is.
He would never, ever say why, but Yoo Ho’s ability to manipulate fire was far beyond what a human should be capable of; he was just that skilled. It was so miraculous that even Jin Cheon-hee couldn’t figure out how it was possible.
“The unit cost will be very high, Young Master. And mass production will be impossible.”
Mass production would require a factory system. But even for Yoo Ho, there was a limit to his time and skill in lens processing.
“We’ll be lucky to make one.”
“That’s fine. I’ll be grateful just to complete a single one.”
As long as Yoo Ho knew the principle and structure of an object, he could build it, more or less. Of course, he couldn’t make things that required petrochemical refining, like plastic, but he could make things out of glass, iron, and wood.
It’s enough to make a ghost wail, but… it’s fine. Yoo Ho, my private slave.
Jin Cheon-hee looked at Yoo Ho, feeling like a building owner with a billion won in his pocket. He was so proud.
And Yoo Ho, in turn, vented all his stress from overwork by upgrading the wooden dummies. And those wooden dummies, when Jin Cheon-hee’s dice roll went bad, beat him mercilessly.
A beating in the name of Pushing the Palace and Passing the Acupoint Attack and external arts training!
Peok, peokpeokpeok!
“Ak, Aaaargh! Ak! That bastard Yoo Ho… Keoheok!”
The brutal beatings continued, night after night.
It was a crazy relationship.