Chapter 239: The Knight Hated Dysfunctional Family (2)

Thud-! Thud-! Thud-! Thud-!

Thud-!

“Even if I retire from being a knight, I don’t have to worry about making a living now.”

When Lee Han tried hammering nails with his fist, or rather, his palm, the nails pierced the words with almost no hitch. Of course, it was always possible for him to hammer nails with his fist. However, while doing so, he would get his skin torn or even wounded. But now, without any technique, he was able to hammer nails with his bare hands. Not only was his hand fine afterwards, he was able to complete a very neat chair without any tools.

Thud-!

“I was just making it halfheartedly, so how did it turn out so sturdy?”

The handmade chair he made by splitting and trimming the wood with his hand knife without the help of tools, was rough but sturdy. Of course, there were a lot of parts that needed to be trimmed because he made it with no tools whatsoever, but the fact that he could do it with his bare hands was impressive enough.

It was as if he was proving the words ‘Why do I need a hammer and a saw to do woodworking? My fist is a hammer, and my hand is a saw!’

“I think you finally understand what it means to control one’s body according to their will.”

“…Do Aura Users always have to show up like that to be satisfied?”

“Hehe, I heard someone say that when someone gets older, they will enjoy mischievous pranks more. I think what they said is correct.”

Felicia, who suddenly stood behind him, sat down on the chair he had made while smiling like a mischievous child.

“It’s pretty good.”

She nodded a few times, as if she liked the chair, and looked at Lee Han’s upper body.

“So, answer me. Do you understand what it means to control your body according to your will?”

“…Honestly, I still don’t get it.”

“You are so honest.”

“But…”

Crack-!

“I think I understand a little bit why you’re telling me to train with my head and not my body.”

Lee Han’s palm split the thick firewood in half.

Like it was an axe.

When Felicia told Lee Han to train his mind, he was completely lost. However, that’s it. He didn’t think much about it.

-I just have to give it a try.

In the first place, Lee Han wasn’t someone who worried too deeply about anything. He’s also not a theoretical person, rather, he’s the type of guy who got to know something by making his body do the work. That’s why Lee Han followed Felicia’s words as it was instead of interpreting them in a complicated way.

Train with your mind. In other words, do image training?

After thinking so, he did it,

Image training. He did heavy lifting, such as lifting a barbell and doing squats in his imagination.

But when he imagined it,

-I-I don’t think this is right?

Rather than focusing on training his body in his imagination, he paid more attention to adding more details to his imagination. No, he didn’t do it because Felicia had told him to do so, Lee Han just felt it was something he couldn’t compromise on. After all, because of his personality, he couldn’t tolerate doing anything half-heartedly.

His life motto was to do his best even if he was going to do something stupid. That’s why he kept adding more details like a picky designer, and the parts he particularly paid attention to were,

His posture and the muscle tremors when he exercised,

How heavy the weight he lifted was,

How much he sweated and got hurt when exercising,

And,

Calculating the time it took his body to recover after intense training.

Lee Han, who succeeded in building a truly ‘realistic’ image by considering various other factors, spent the whole day doing it.

However, after he was done, he felt a big hole in his chest. It’s like the feeling of emptiness after having a fantasy relationship?

However, if there was a clear difference between imaginary love and mental training,

-What the? When did I sweat this much?

It was the fact that it affected reality as well. His whole body was soaked with sweat similar to the amount of sweat he shed in his mental training.

At first, Lee Han was puzzled and brushed it away as mere coincidence.

Drip-! Drip-!

-It happened again.

But, if a coincidence was repeated twice, it was no longer a coincidence.

When Lee Han opened his eyes after finishing his mental training, he was drenched in sweat, and Lee Han realized that this training was effective. After trying various things, he found out that the most important thing in mental training was extreme detail and concentration. If he lacked even a little detail or concentration, not only would he not sweat, but he would also feel embarrassed for doing something stupid.

… At some point, Lee Han tried to incorporate mental training into his daily life.

At first, he tried to do it while eating or walking, and although it was a difficult process, Lee Han finally could easily draw images of basic swordsmanship or punch while walking.

…Well, during the process to achieve that, he often fell down or rolled down a hill, but fortunately, no one saw him do i–

-Puhahaha! You are not even a gnoll, so why are you so stupid…

-There’s a saying that if someone get hit in the back of the head, they will lose your their memory, you know?

-…Huh? Why am I here?

-…

-…Ahem.

-Hmm.

Well, his assistant saw him. But, Lee Han thought that he’d never dare to tell anyone what happened. If he did, Lee Han swore he’d experiment on him to see if amnesia was artificially possible or not.

Anyway, after going through some trials and errors, nine days passed, and now, Lee Han’s body was…

“The weight of tummy muscles has definitely decreased, but it feels like only the useless muscles have fallen out.”

Ever since the fairy rebuilt his body, Lee Han thought his body was perfect. Not only were his bones, muscles, ligaments, and tendons all as good as new, but they were in perfect golden balance.

However, through mental training, Lee Han realized that his body, which was still lacking, could move towards perfection.

“Not only have my bones gotten stronger, but my senses have also improved? Moreover, it’s not something I can’t control anymore, I can control them as I wish.”

It was an incredibly strange phenomenon for Lee Han. But Felicia only nodded, thinking it was natural.

“It’s the result of training martial arts with your mind. Your willpower has carved your body to create the most ideal body you can imagine.”

“…Didn’t you say you’d forgotten all the theoretical parts?”

“Through our conversations, they’re starting to come to mind.”

“…”

“I-it’s true you know…”

“I don’t say anything.”

Rather than pressing her for the theoretical part of the mind training, Lee Han just proceeded to ask Felicia to explain what happened to his body.

Hearing that, Felicia,

“You seem to be treating me too roughly…”

Said so. However, she then explained it to him even. Looking at it closely, she was really someone nice because she still ended up explaining it even after grumbling.

“Ahem, as you know, there’s a limit to how much the human body can be trained. No matter how blessed a body is by the heavens, there will come a time when it reaches its limit of growth. However, if someone learns how to use their willpower, it’s a different story.”

Whoosh-!

She lightly swung the wooden sword she was holding as she said so.

“This kind of thing will be possible for them too.”

It was an action that looked like a joke, but what that one swing produced was…

Crunch-!

It was definitely not something to be dismissed as a joke.

“Did you see that? This is the result of training my swordsmanship with willpower.”

“…”

Lee Han blinked as he witnessed what she had cut.

Holy shit…

She can split clouds in half with just a wooden sword?

Lee Han had called her a yokai as a joke, but now he realized that it was not enough. It would be more fitting to call her ‘Great Yokai’.

“Willpower is like a guide for the journey to transcend oneself. That’s what my mother used to say a lot in the past.”

Iliad handed Lee Han the tea as he said so.

After eating the honeydew that Lee Han had given him, his eyes widened and insisted, ‘This precious thing should be drunk as tea!’ Because of that, he ended up having tea time with him.

While Lee Han drank it, the already strong floral scent spread in his mouth, and he was amazed at how accurate Iliad’s words were. Then, he put [Willpower] in his mouth.

“Pardon?”

“Haha, my mother isn’t good at explaining things theoretically, is she? So I’ll briefly recite something I heard a long time ago.”

“Well, I appreciate it, but… Now of all time?”

When Lee Han slightly complained to him because of the timing, Iliad just smiled.

“Wouldn’t it be better to learn it yourself and experience it yourself than to get a vague explanation? According to Arno, this is the advice Sir Lee Han often gives to his students.”

“I’m speechless.”

‘It’s better to experience it once than to hear it a hundred times.’ – This was the teaching Lee han often told his disciples, so Lee Han could not refute it. Moreover, after experiencing the changes in his body, the explanations made more sense.

“If I may explain further on behalf of my mother, I would say that willpower is the way to break human limitations. For example, there is ‘muscle.’”

“Muscle?”

“Yes, as Sire Lee Han knows, the human body has many unreasonable aspects. If you skip exercise for even one day, your muscles will shrink and your flesh will sag.”

“That’s definitely true.”

Lee Han knew that well. Two years ago, Lee Han suffered a terrible injury while trying to get rid of a strong Magic Freak and a slave master at the same time, aso he had to stop exercising for over a week.

However, rather than being refreshed after resting, what came to him was deep sadness that came from the fact that his body began to lose muscle and gain fat.

“…Muscles are something that doesn’t give you the same value for your effort.”

“Yes, that’s true. However, if you freely use your Willpower, it will be a different story.”

“…”

“Didn’t my mother say that? The more you train with willpower, the closer you will get to your desired ‘ideal.’ That’s the first step to breaking the limits of humanity.”

“…Are you telling me that I will not lose my muscle?”

“If that’s the image you want, then it will be done.”

“Then what image does the Sword Duchess have when she trained with her willpower? Oh, is that a family secret?”

“Haha, we don’t have something like that. Do you think there are people who can follow her footsteps or stop her just because they know?”

Iliad, laughing heartily at the funny words, told Lee Han what the Sword Duchess ‘ideal’ was without hesitation.

“My mother had an ideal of using ‘invincible swordsmanship’. So she swung her sword every day of her life, whether it was in her imagination or in her dreams without missing a single day.”

“…Not even a single day?”

“Yes, from the age of five when she first picked up a sword, she never missed a single day. She lived like that for about 85 years.”

“…”

As he heard that, Lee Han didn’t ask if that was possible like an idiot. It was clearly crazy, no, calling it that’s an understatement. It was madness, MADNESS. After all, it was something which was absolutely impossible to achieve.

But if it was done by a human who had become an Aura User…

It makes perfect sense.

No one ever should understand it from their perspective. Even if they were mad, no one would say anything because they were Aura Users.

After all,

They do it because they can.

They were not crazy people, but people who just do what they can. They were called ‘superhumans’ because they did things that others think were impossible.

“Based on that ideal, my mother always imagined the most powerful swordsmanship she could perform. Of course, this ideal swordsmanship was not completed in an instant. She survived countless crises including the battlefield and gradually improved her swordsmanship. After several decades living like that and her ideal swordsmanship was about 50% complete… I heard from her  that people started calling her ‘Sword Duchess.”

“…That’s amazing.”

Just hearing it made Lee Han respect her.

She just trained in the ideal swordsmanship she thought of, but at some point, she reached the ‘peak.’

As expedited, Aura Users were incredibly talented…

“It was indeed amazing. After all, someone who was once called ‘the most untalented swordsman’. ‘the shame of the Offen family’, and ‘the incompetent’ ended up like that.”

“…?”

“Oh, is this the first time you’ve heard of it? It’s a pretty famous story in the kingdom…”

Rustle-!

Iliad showed him a fairy tale book at that moment.

[The Ignorant Female Knight] was a title that sounded somewhat mocking, but the fairy tale book didn’t end with just one book.

“I personally find the second story, [The Defeated Female Knight], and the third story, [The Victorious Female Knight] fun. The fourth story, [The Glory of the Female Knight], and the fifth story, [The Female Knight’s Love], were honestly a bit embarrassing. I was a bit embarrassed writing my parents’ love stories.”

“…”

“Oh, by the way, there are ten stories. If you’re curious, I’ll give you all of them.”

“…Excuse me, the original author’s name seems to be written as ‘Iliad’, am I mistaken?”

“No. You saw it correctly.”

“…It’s a person with the same name as you, Milord?”

“No, haha!”

“…”

…The next day, Lee Han heard from his disciples that Iliad de Offen was one of the ten fairy tale writers chosen by the people of the continent. He also heard that [The Female Knight Series] he wrote was a bestseller that sold over ‘100 million copies’  in the southern, western, eastern, and central continents.