King of Swords 2-24

by Abbadon
Chapter:

“DEMON FLIPS THE CART

A strong internal/external style that grants a practitioner unbelievable muscular strength.  While not as reviled as infamous styles such as Leisure Kicks, Ecstasy Dart, or Hundred Wind Ghost Blade, it is nevertheless seen as a rude, renegade, and unrefined style, and as such has no official schools and must typically be learned by seeking out a wandering master. It is a popular style of many famous belligerent or mendicant knights, including (famously) the warrior monk Ippo Kemon who once defended a bridge by clogging it with a wave of dead men and horses.

It can only be learned by men and devils, who have the abundance of black Atum needed. A student of this style kindles their Atum and internal forces with unbelievable heat, by eating certain herbs and ingesting certain roots over a few weeks of time, during which the practitioner must train intensely. The result of this process produces a voracious and incredibly strong hot black Atum that suffuses far more of the body than normal, spilling over from its meridians and saturating the flesh itself, an effect which is normally quite painful and can in some cases cause a person to quite literally burn to death.

The masters of this style sweat profusely when they let this energy suffuse them totally, and their body becomes red and flushed with blood, and even seemed to steam. They are capable of absolutely absurd feats of strength, such as lifting an ox cart overhead with one finger, lifting a house sized boulder, or (as I once witnessed in a duel) hurling an opponent several hundred meters into the distance. An old master once boasted to me that he had hurled a royal sailing ship at an opponent once while drunk in his youth, which I calculated later was about 2000 short tons (2500 imperial tons).

The well known drawback to this style is a practitioner must eat and drink around three or four times as much as a normal person of their weight in order to stoke their internal fire. Without such regular fuel, their own body is consumed and they quite literally combust. The masters I talked to were rather unconcerned about this particular quirk and took it as a matter of religious importance, one of them going as far as to say that most old masters that know their time is getting near stop eating, so that when they next enter battle their body will consume many of their opponents in its violent self immolation.”

– Manual of Hands and Feet