The Knight Seeks to Grow (3)
"I removed only the demonic nature bound up in the heart, and left the poison as it was. You said you already had a resistance to it, so if anything, it ought to be a great help in building that resistance further."
In the space of half a day, he had been steeped through with exhaustion, like a man entered in two triathlons back to back. Derek more than deserved the comparison. He looked ready to collapse where he stood, and yet his eyes alone still glimmered with life.
"The medicinal nature was so fierce it simply wouldn't harmonize. So I prepared three other elixir pills as well, imbued with water qi, earth qi, and wood qi. You have to take them in order."
"...Mm. Thanks."
Lee Han gave him nothing but that plain word of gratitude. He could have launched into a speech about how grateful he was, but that was not his way, and it would only have burdened the man. As if he knew it, Derek answered with a smile just as plain.
"...Yes. Then the rest, in a little while..."
Thud.
He never finished. He folded where he stood.
"Starting to think he's the one who ought to be taking the medicine."
Lee Han had already expected the collapse. He caught the falling man and laid him in the hammock strung up in a corner, then turned his eyes to the medicines set out on the desk.
A blaze of light.
"Well. Aren't these dazzling."
The tone stayed dry, but a surprise he could not hide settled in his eyes. He had asked for nothing more than simple processing, and yet here was something beyond anything he had imagined. Anyone could have told what they were looking at. These were supreme elixirs. Mere medicine, and still a heat-haze rose shimmering off them.
The three pills Derek had told him to take each shone like a luminous pearl—water-blue, gold, and green—and looked as if they would melt on the tongue the instant they were swallowed.
Nurture earth qi with water qi, grow wood qi with earth qi, and shield the whole body that way? Did this guy major in Eastern medicine?
A secret elixir, as though it had achieved the harmony of yin and yang and the five elements. Extraordinary, through and through. And yet not even a miracle drug that far from ordinary could compare to one single other.
"This isn't a miracle drug. It's a monster."
Fwoosh!
If a man could melt a luminous red sapphire down like water, it might look something like this. The beautifully shining red liquid gave off light as if it were fluorescent, and in his heart of hearts he wondered whether a human being was even permitted to drink such a thing.
But.
"He did say to take these first."
Lee Han did not hesitate. Was this not an elixir into which the boy had poured every last ounce of his spirit? There was a proper way for a grown man to answer that.
I'll leave none of it.
He swallowed the three miracle pills at once. Contrary to the thought that they would melt like water, they did not dissolve until they were down. But the moment the three of them slid along his esophagus—
Boom!
"!!!"
A shock beyond comparison with anything he had ever known slammed through the inside of his body. It was not that something had exploded. Only that a phenomenon violent enough to rival an explosion had erupted within him.
This thing... it feels like it's taking even the energy inside me.
The three pills were not merely swelling their presence by feeding on one another's energy. They were devouring Lee Han's energy outright. Vitality and vigor he had recovered only through an agonizing treatment at a priest's hands—all of it was being stripped away. A man might have misunderstood entirely, and thought someone had fed him this on purpose to poison him. That was how vividly it felt, in real time, as if his lifespan were shrinking.
The revulsion was that fierce. He wanted to spit the pills out at once, and yet—
Maybe I ought to just leave them...?
Lee Han stood by and let his energy be eaten, right up to the edge. He trusted that Timid would never mean him harm, and more than that, the pills' energy did not feel as if it were threatening his life. Rather—how to put it—the more these energies drank his vitality, the more something inside him grew clear in a different sense. Energies that did no harm by being there, but that he did not particularly need, were vanishing, and the capacity within his body seemed to be growing... It felt, somehow, like a vessel being forcibly emptied.
And so he let the three pills run wild as they pleased for several dozen minutes.
"...Kh."
Lee Han had lost even the strength to speak. Dizziness took him. His vision blurred, and he wanted nothing more than to lose consciousness on the spot. Had there been a mirror in the room, he would have been horrified. The body that had suited the words a frame of heroic bone so very well was past skinny, on the very verge of withering away to nothing. That his eyes were dim, and that there was no mirror in the present moment, was nothing short of a mercy.
Without even seeing the change that had come over him, Lee Han reached out and, with enormous effort, took up the bottle of red liquid.
Heavy.
It could not have weighed half a pound, and yet lifting it was as hard as anything in the world. Pain and misery, the craving for sleep and the craving for food—none of them would answer to him. Two desires surged until he thought he would go mad: he wanted to eat anything at all, and at the same time he wanted to eat nothing, lie down, and sleep. An unprecedented state. If his lust had not been sealed away, the scene might well have become too obscene to look at.
Amid all of it, Lee Han crushed every desire and every misery with nothing but endurance. Patience—this one thing, he prided himself, he would not yield to anyone. And so even when agony and appetite tried to rule his whole body like a current past all control, he resisted.
Shut up. Shut up... shut up—!
He issued the command to every inch of his uncontrollable body, as if ordering it: if you are mine, then follow my will.
Gulp.
And at last Lee Han forced the red liquid into his mouth.
Crunch!
It was closer to chewing than to drinking. He was plainly swallowing a liquid, and yet it kept writhing between his teeth, like tough pork rind, or a live octopus still thrashing.
"——."
But he did not spill a single drop. He only chewed, and chewed again. He ate as if he would never allow it to leave his mouth, and at last—
Gulp!
He chewed it down without leaving a trace.
Swallowing it, though, may have been where the trial began.
Thud—!
Thooom.
A tingling shock ran the length of him, as if he had been electrocuted. If a tiny man smaller than a finger existed, and you swallowed him by some mistake, and that enraged little creature then beat the inside of your gut over and over with an absurdly huge war hammer—it would feel like this. The agony was mad enough to invite the comparison. Lee Han did not even try to endure it. His body jackknifed.
"Ghhhkk..."
He could not even scream properly. There was no strength left to cry out with, and his eyes felt ready to roll back at any moment. It would not have been strange if his consciousness cut out then and there. The world went yellow.
Was this the pain of childbirth they said women in labor endured?
No—I'm a man.
For a moment Lee Han could only find it absurd. This couldn't be right. And yet the fact that he still had room to think meant it did not yet hurt enough to kill him. The energy of the three pills was probably what held back a medicinal nature this savage, wild as a charging bull.
Ha! And this is what you call medicinal nature?!
He had heard the potency was strong. He had also heard that the three pills had been prepared for exactly that reason. But this was not a level a man could wave away with the words medicinal nature, was it?! Lee Han could not even feel the pain the poison dealt him. Before the medicinal nature dwelling in the Ghost King's heart, his mind simply went faint. If the elixir he had taken first had not been standing guard over his stomach, he would have lost consciousness to the pain long ago.
...Maybe losing consciousness would be better.
A bitter smile came of its own accord, but Lee Han knew that blacking out was not a good choice. Didn't he need to know exactly what was happening to his body?
And so.
Damn it! Let's see who wins.
Puk.
For an instant he bit his tongue and drew blood. The taste of iron spread, and with that second pain he finally seized his reeling mind. Then, soon enough—
"Hoo—hooo!"
Tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.
He began to step. Boxing footwork. As if shadowboxing, he slowly started to throw his fists and draw them back. There was no vitality in him to speak of. Fatigue and the craving for sleep climbed without end, and yet the pain would not even let him sleep. He was one step from going mad. Then he would rather force the body to move. Better to fix his focus somewhere else, if only to protect his mind. Anyone watching might have thought it nothing but a brute's answer, but Lee Han willingly chose to sweat in order to beat the pain.
Fwoosh—!
He threw a punch and pulled it back, again and again. At first it was endlessly slow. Simply moving the body was, just now, endlessly painful.
Creak!
But Lee Han was stubborn. As if he refused to lose to mere pain, he threw his fists and moved his body with everything he had, and the punches that had been slow beyond belief gradually began to quicken. Punches into empty air. At first they were feeble things that could not have caught a single fly. But the longer Lee Han's punching went on—
Fwoosh. Fwoooosh!
Speed gathered, and power coiled in his fists. No—through his whole body. Hadn't he realized it the day before? That there was strength even inside softness. Strength existed everywhere like this, and even in a body whose muscle had all drained away like air from a balloon, it was possible to put forth force. In some form or other. And so a threatening sharpness began to settle into punches that grew endlessly faster. There might be no strength in them, but a keenness like an awl, or a great iron spike, had taken root.
This, however, was nothing one could call enlightenment. He was only doing what he could do: a desperate thrashing, meant to resist the pain and the sleep crashing down over him.
And that thrashing—
Creeeak!
—began, as if taking effect, to absorb the medicinal nature. It was a process that ought to have taken an entire day, but as if scorning that common sense, Lee Han forced his body into motion and absorbed the medicinal nature. No. He adapted to it.
"-----."
From some moment on, Lee Han only threw punches in a trance. There was no focus in his eyes. With his consciousness half gone, his body simply moved as his will commanded. And so he did not see it. What was rising, little by little, from his body.
Hsssssss.
Steam.
Hooooosh.
The vapor leaving him was the waste that had piled up in his body until now. The side effects of unidentified drugs a mage had forced down his throat when he was young, or else the corpse-poison accumulated as he drifted from battlefield to battlefield. Things that had stacked upon one another, knowingly and unknowingly, flowed out of him like sweat, and before he knew it the heavy fatigue that had occupied Lee Han seemed to have drained away entirely.
And more than that—
Boom! Boooom!
The medicinal nature went a step further, and swelled his thinned body back out. It did not merely bloat into lumpy, rugged bulk. The body had been hard as whetstone before, certainly, but now it was not only solid as stone. It had gained an elasticity like a spring, or like rubber. Lee Han had already trained himself to the limit, and had thought the room left for his flesh to develop was vanishingly small. That same flesh was now achieving something beyond encouraging growth—growth one might even call elastic, in every sense of the word. It was a leap.
This was a heaven-sent chance. But the chance could not be written off as nothing more than the help of medicine. It bore fruit because of the wretched life of the man called Lee Han, because of training so fierce, and so ready to stake a life, that an ordinary person would never even have dared it. Had anyone but Lee Han eaten the elixir, he could not have dreamed of growth like this. It would have amounted to swallowing one expensive nutritional tonic. A leaping growth, obtained only because it was him. To dismiss it as merely the medicine's doing would have been the wrong thing to say.
...Unfortunately, in this historic moment when the fruits of his effort were showing themselves, Lee Han—lost, of all times, in a trance—did not even know the changes unfolding in his own body, and only kept punching the empty air. No.
Crack. Craaack!
He was only repeating the Hundred-Pace Divine Fist, unconscious of it.
Endlessly.
And about ten minutes later, Derek, who had barely come back to himself, was struck dumb with horror. Part of it was the sight of a wall on the verge of being destroyed, but...
"Y-you just ingested that? You didn't even wait until I woke up?"
"......"
"I—I'm certain I said, before I collapsed, that there was an order to taking them. Do you not remember? No, more than that—didn't it hurt? If you take them without keeping the order, it's like pouring oil on a fire..."
"......"
"Y-you could have died, trying to endure that pain..."
"...Mmm."
"...Did it hurt a great deal?"
"Ahem!"
Lee Han gazed off at a distant mountain. They were underground, so there was no mountain to see, but just now he wanted to look at one anyway. And as he did, he thought:
Somehow...
...So that's why it hurt like a bitch.
The knight found himself confirming, all over again, a lesson that did not exist for nothing: when the head is stupid, the body pays for it.