The Poison Feather Bird
When the girl came to her senses, Uncle Cheolsan checked her condition first thing.
Then he immediately asked the village chief to gather the sick again.
“The effect’s better than I expected, given how small the creatures are. Would you mind collecting the patients once more?”
“Ah, of course!”
The chief was about to bolt outside on Uncle Cheolsan’s request, so I called out to stop him.
“Wait!”
Chagas disease has an incubation period, and even among those infected, only about twenty to thirty percent develop serious symptoms. That meant every single villager needed the medicine—carriers would vastly outnumber the visibly ill.
“What’s the matter, young hero?”
“Elder, if we can give the medicine to everyone in the village, then everyone must take it. The disease doesn’t break out the moment you’re bitten. There’s no way to know who is sick or when they will fall ill.”
Uncle Cheolsan rechecked the recovered girl’s pulse at my words, then nodded.
“Hmm… Then we’ll have to dissolve it in water and share it out. The dose was a bit much for the girl, after all.”
Apparently the examination had convinced him that melting parasites required far less potent ingredients than melting Gu.
On the chief’s orders the villagers gathered before his house in the dead of night. The Tang Family head dissolved the Myriad Poisons Melting Pill he carried into water and spooned a share into every mouth—patients and carriers alike.
“Oh! She’s waking up!”
“The fever’s gone and her mind is clear!”
“We’re… we’re alive! Truly, you are the village’s benefactor!”
“Waaah…”
Even diluted, the medicine brought quite a few people back to their senses or restored their strength, just as Uncle Cheolsan had said. He might have been a little too high on Tang pride, but results like these made the pride feel earned.
When the crowd pressed in to praise his medical skill, he shook his head.
“I only handed out the medicine. Everything is thanks to this young hero. Without him diagnosing the cause, we would still be lost. Your true benefactor is not me—it is him.”
“Young hero, thank you!”
“Young hero, we are grateful!”
“The young hero is our village’s savior!”
In a black company a superior steals the intern’s credit without blinking; yet here was Uncle Cheolsan, whose own pill had done the healing, deliberately giving me the glory. I upgraded my evaluation of the Tang Family of Sichuan on the spot. A man who yields credit to his juniors is a man of fine character—someone worth serving as a superior.
+100 points. Uncle Cheolsan seems like a good guy. Even if he did slap me across the face.
And so the dying village regained its vitality.
Of course, many had recovered their wits, but that did not mean full recovery for everyone. Chagas parasites invade organs, causing deformity, enlargement, and central-nervous damage; those who had collapsed almost certainly carried permanent damage to heart or organs. Killing every parasite did nothing to reverse an already hypertrophied heart. In my previous life the only cure for an enlarged heart was a transplant—and heart transplants were pure fantasy in this era. Most of these people would live with disabilities for the rest of their days.
The chief’s granddaughter had been lucky. She had collapsed from simple frailty before any serious cardiac damage set in; once she took the Myriad Poisons Melting Pill, her irregular pulse vanished. Uncle Cheolsan checked her pulse several times and declared the heart sound—small comfort, but comfort nonetheless.
After dosing every villager, he turned to the chief with a regretful look.
“Those whose hearts are already deeply afflicted… I fear there is nothing more I can do. When I return to Sichuan I will mention the matter to the Needle Sage and the Medicine Sage. A disease caused by parasites living inside the human body should pique their curiosity enough to bring them here.”
According to Uncle Cheolsan, the Central Plains boasted two peerless physicians—the Needle Sage and the Medicine Sage, “immortals of medicine and of pills.” He intended to ask them to examine the villagers. The chief answered with an apologetic expression.
“Ah, no. This alone is more than enough. I thought the village would simply die out one by one… Just being alive is fortune enough.”
A warm atmosphere settled over the night. Joyful voices of those who had recovered filled the village—yet I reminded them the work was unfinished.
The most important task still remained.
“Elders, celebration is premature. The matter is not finished.”
“What do you mean, young hero?”
“Ah—right. It isn’t over yet.”
The chief tilted his head; Uncle Cheolsan grasped my meaning at once and first confirmed how long the pill’s effect would last, hoping for something lasting.
“Elder, how long does the Myriad Poisons Melting Pill remain effective?”
“Normally it not only melts any Gu but prevents new ones from taking root for three months. Diluted and shared, though… perhaps half a month?”
Half a month of protection was better than nothing. I turned back to the chief.
“This disease is contracted through insect bites. What happens if they are bitten again after half a month?”
“Ah—of course. We must eradicate the insects themselves, young hero!”
Exactly. Kissing bugs hide in thatched roofs and wall cracks by day, then crawl out at night to feed on people. The Li people of Hainan Island thatched their roofs with palm leaves—perfect nesting sites for swarms of the bugs. Though they looked like stinkbugs, they belonged to the assassin-bug family; village roofs and stone crevices were their preferred habitat.
I asked the self-proclaimed poison expert next.
“Elder, do you happen to have any poison that kills insects?”
He had boasted of his vast knowledge of toxins; surely he dealt in insecticides as well. We needed both a killer and a repellent.
He smiled.
“Naturally. The main house keeps pyrethrum brought from the Western Regions, but we have none here. So we will decoct cinnamon bark and Sichuan peppercorns in water and spray it. Those two are extremely effective against insects—poisonous to them, one might say. Direct contact kills; even the scent keeps them away. That should suffice.”
Right—people used cinnamon and Sichuan pepper as insecticides in the old days.
Memories from my previous life’s studies of insects and venomous creatures surfaced: eugenol in cinnamon and sanshool in peppercorns were potent insecticidal compounds.
“Ah, I believe I’ve heard the same. Chief, would you gather cinnamon and Sichuan pepper for us? As the elder says, we’ll boil them and spray every house, every roof, and every stone crevice around the village. We’ll also hang bundles above the beds so the kissing bugs dare not approach while people sleep.”
“Understood, young hero. I’ll send people to collect them at once!”
The chief’s shouted orders launched a full-scale pest-control campaign across the village.
“Gather cinnamon and Sichuan pepper! Tonight we wipe out every last one of these cursed bugs!”
The villagers’ furious eradication drive against the nocturnal kissers began, and soon the entire settlement was steeped in the warm fragrance of cinnamon and pepper.
After the noisy night of pest control one would expect exhaustion, yet morning found the village in full festival mood. No—it was a festival. The fact that they had slammed the gate in our faces only the day before might as well never have happened.
We were still tired from the late night when, at first light, we were invited to something like a village hall. A long table held bamboo trays laden with meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables—a proper banquet.
“This is our Li people’s welcoming feast, the Long Table Banquet. Honored benefactors, please eat your fill! We are truly sorry about yesterday!”
“We’re sorry!”
The Long Table Banquet was said to have deep history and tradition: simply sitting at a long table and eating the dishes set before you. To someone who had been surviving on rice bought with snake skins and radishes grown behind the Taoist temple, it tasted like pure honey. Even when I sold snake skins I had never dared spend the money on meat—only rice. So this was my first real home-cooked meal since reincarnation.
Wonderful. Who knew home cooking could make a man this happy?
I attacked the spread with the same desperate speed I had once shown for venison. Village women flocked around, piling more food onto my plate with smiles.
“Young hero, more meat?”
“Eh? Yes—thank you!”
“Try the fish too. You’re so cute.”
“Aigoo, fish as well!”
While Li songs filled the air and wine was poured, Uncle Cheolsan and the warriors grew merry. Then the chief, seated at our table, spoke in a careful, deeply apologetic voice.
“Elder… about what you said at the village entrance yesterday.”
“What I said at the entrance?”
“That you were searching for a village where people had gone missing.”
“Ah, yes. Why do you ask?”
Treating the Li villagers had temporarily pushed our original goal down the priority list, but we had come to Hainan Island hunting the lair of the great demonic master Tak Un-yang, the Blood Hand Rakshasa. His Blood Hand Poison Claw required human blood and marrow, so we had been looking for villages that had suffered mass disappearances.
When Uncle Cheolsan nodded, the chief’s face brightened.
“I had no way to repay your kindness, so I made inquiries in case it might help. I heard a rather strange story.”
“A strange story?”
“Yes. Among the women who recovered last night is a girl who married in from another village. A few years ago her natal village suffered a bizarre calamity—people vanishing one by one…”
We all looked at one another. Everyone was thinking the same thing.
That’s the one!
“Where is it?!”
“Well… over that way…”
Under Uncle Cheolsan’s urgent questioning the chief’s hand pointed west.
A ghost village.
Following the chief’s directions we reached a Li settlement deep in the southwestern mountains of Hainan Island. It was a ghost village—not a single living soul in sight.
“Not a person to be seen.”
“Looks as if they fled in a panic. The houses feel old, yet belongings are still inside.”
“If people were vanishing, you’d think the survivors would have run to neighboring villages and raised the alarm. Strange.”
Even for a great demonic master as vicious as Tak Un-yang, a village of this size must have held at least a hundred or two hundred souls. The total absence of inhabitants felt uncanny. We continued searching up the mountain.
Near the summit a foul stench rolled over us. Uncle Cheolsan’s face darkened.
“Corpse stench…”
He shot into the forest with qinggong. Corpse stench meant rotting bodies. I crashed through the undergrowth after him with the other Tang warriors.
What appeared was a large cave, its mouth barred by a bamboo grate.
“What is this place?”
“Ugh—this…!”
In the clearing beside the cave lay a mountain of corpses—everything from bleached skeletons to bodies only recently dead. Insects swarmed, laying maggots; more insects and venomous creatures gathered to eat the maggots; snakes came to eat those insects; dead snakes and bugs in turn hosted new eggs. Life and death cycling endlessly—a living hell.
“Even corpse poison has formed…”
“Hideous. Young hero, don’t look!”
If you’re going to block my view, do it a little earlier…
The Tang warriors stepped in front of me, but I had already seen the entire atrocity. A documentary-style massacre, live and in color. It felt so unreal I could barely accept that the heaps were actual human remains.
Once we recovered our wits we smashed the grate and searched the cave for survivors. Inside, the filth-streaked cavern held none. Judging by the freshest corpses, Uncle Cheolsan said, the last survivors had been alive until quite recently—until Tak Un-yang perfected his martial art and slaughtered them all. That was why the man had dared attack Uncle Cheolsan: anyone who feared Cheolsan’s terrifying father would never have been so bold.
Good riddance to the bastard.
The horror of the scene and the lack of survivors cast a brief gloom. Then a thatched hut that appeared to have been the man’s dwelling was found right beside the cave. While Uncle Cheolsan and the warriors searched it for secret manuals, I squatted alone near the cave mouth, watching poisonous insects and snakes crawl toward the entrance.
Suddenly the heavy beat of wings.
—Flutter.
I turned at the loud sound. A large bird settled onto the corpse heap with a great flap of wings.
“Huh? I’ve never seen a bird like that.”
I was no ornithologist, but I knew a fair number of birds, and this one was completely new. It was the size of a large eagle, with long legs and purple plumage that flashed violet-green whenever light struck the feathers. Golden crest feathers crowned its head like a royal diadem.
Stranger still, I first thought it had come for carrion—yet it merely strode among the bodies and snipped off the heads of crawling snakes, swallowing them whole.
I was staring blankly when one of the warriors finished his search and approached.
“Young hero, what are you—eh!? That bird? We can’t let it further defile the dead.”
Assuming it was a scavenger like a crow, he stepped forward, picked up a stone, and hurled it.
—Thwack!
—Kiiiruru!
Instead of fleeing, the bird loosed a piercing cry and fixed the warrior with blood-red eyes. The glare felt like pure malice. The man snatched up another stone and threw again.
“Damn beast—how unlucky!”
—Flutter!
At last the bird took wing to avoid the stone. At the same instant a bizarre phenomenon began. The moment its wings beat, the ground where it had stood darkened as if twilight had fallen. The wind from those wings swept outward—and every snake and venomous insect flipped onto its back.
No—flipping was only the first instant. They began to melt. Corpses, bugs, snakes—everything liquefied like overheated butter.
—Sssssss!
From the breast of the Tang warrior who had thrown the stones, a thick white vapor suddenly boiled upward, as if he were cradling dry ice.
“M-my realgar!”
The startled warrior yanked a lump of realgar from his robes, yet its volume shrank at a terrifying rate. From what I had learned living with the Tang Family these past days, realgar detected poison and briefly blocked it. A reaction this violent meant an unimaginably potent toxin—the realgar was vaporizing in frenzy.
Then a hand seized me by the scruff of the neck.
“Ghk!”
As my body was hauled toward the cave, Uncle Cheolsan roared at the Tang warriors.
“Into the cave! That is unmistakably a Zhen—the Poison Feather Bird!”
Poison Feather Bird?