Poisoning 3
"Cho-ya, wait here with Aunt Seol. Dad and Mom have somewhere we need to go for a bit. Someone's sick, so Mom and I are going to take a look. All right?"
"Okay. Cho will stay with Auntie. We've been having fun with Auntie for days, right? Come back soon, Daddy. Let's go."
-Chirp!
After telling Cho to wait a little while, I followed Military Advisor Jegal Hu at a run. The place we headed for was the Guest Pavilion, where ordinary visitors to the Murim Alliance were housed.
We, of course, had been assigned a private residence behind the Alliance Lord's Hall—Shintu of the Five Emperors was staying with us, Sister Seol was a guest, and I myself had already rendered some service. Jegal Hu's nephew, known as the Earth Dragon, had apparently been given lodgings in the Guest Pavilion like any other visitor to the Alliance.
So much for the Five Dragons and Three Phoenixes.
Murim Alliance warriors already ringed the Guest Pavilion, sealing off the whole area. From the noise at the main gate and around the perimeter, it was clear they had locked the place down completely.
A poisoning involving the Military Advisor's own nephew—no wonder they had gone to full alert.
We passed the grim-faced sentries, followed the long corridor lined with rooms like little studio apartments, and stopped in front of one of them. Fist Dragon, Sword Dragon, and Bow Phoenix—whom I had met earlier—were already pacing outside with worried faces.
"Military Advisor!"
"Yes. Nothing further while I was gone?"
"No, sir. Inside, the Earth Dragon is being tended by Eumbong, the physicians, and people from the Jegal Family."
We opened the door and stepped in. The small room was already packed with more than a dozen people. Beside the bed where Jiryong lay, a woman—Eumbong, the Sound Phoenix—clutched his collar with swollen eyes while he stared blankly at the ceiling.
As our party entered, the crowd parted down the middle like the Red Sea. Through the gap, Eumbong spotted us, shot to her feet, and cried out.
"Poison Flower! Please—please, save my Cheon-rang… my Cheon-rang…!"
Rang—a pet name lovers used for each other. So Eumbong and Jiryong were a couple, then.
Right now she looked heartbreakingly tender and pitiful, but after we had parted earlier and Hwa-eun had explained, I knew the truth: this woman practiced sound arts—screaming or plucking instruments to burst eardrums and rupture meridians. A terrifying fighter.
Eumbong rushed forward as if Jegal Hu were not even there and seized Hwa-eun's hand.
"I understand. Please calm yourself."
Earlier her face had been much whiter and her lips a vivid red, as if she had bitten a mouse—makeup, apparently.
Hwa-eun freed her wrist from Eumbong's grip and moved toward Jegal Yong-cheon's bedside, asking me to come with her.
"So-ryong, you as well."
"Me too?"
"Yes. You know a great deal about poisons."
I wondered if there was really any need to call me over, but the next words made sense. I was a specialist in biological toxins, after all, so she wasn't wrong.
I nodded and stood with Hwa-eun at Jegal Yong-cheon's bedside.
All right, let's see what kind of sudden poisoning this is supposed to be.
I looked down at the man on the bed. When we first met I had thought him unusually pale, but beyond that, for someone supposedly poisoned, there was nothing outwardly strange about him.
Hwa-eun glanced at a man standing near the bed with needles laid out and asked,
"You've sealed the acupoints and meridians to slow the flow of blood, I see. You say the symptoms resemble poisoning? Are you certain?"
He looked so normal that even Hwa-eun was doubtful. Poisoning usually came with labored breathing, fever, bleeding, or some other physical abnormality—and Jiryong showed none of that.
The man bowed his head.
"Yes. At first we thought it was some illness, but it did not seem so. We have a physician trained in toxins; when we had him examine the patient, he said it appeared to be poison…"
He glanced aside. The man who received that look stepped forward and cupped his fist toward Hwa-eun.
"I am Won-gyu. Do you remember me, young lady?"
"Won-gyu? Ah—you must be one of the physicians our family sent a few years ago at the Murim Alliance's request."
"Yes, that is correct, young lady."
He lowered his head at her words. So he belonged to our Sichuan Tang Family and had been posted here on loan to the Alliance. Poisonings were common enough in the Murim that such a posting made sense.
Hwa-eun nodded and questioned the man called Won-gyu.
"What were the symptoms?"
Until now she had been skeptical, but now that she knew he was one of our own, she seemed ready to trust him.
"Fortunately the amount does not appear fatal. At present the acupoints are sealed, but before they were closed we observed severe convulsions and slurred speech."
"Slurred speech and convulsions… Have you identified the poison?"
"I am sorry. My mastery of poison arts is not high enough…"
At a higher realm one could identify a poison the moment one took it in; his was not high enough for that.
"Then we will have to confirm the symptoms again from the start. I will begin with the pulse."
Hwa-eun's hand settled on the wrist of the dazed man on the bed. A moment later she finished her examination and nodded with a grave expression.
"It is poison, without a doubt."
Killing intent and furious shouts erupted at once.
"See!? It must be those Blood Sect bastards!"
"Who dares do this to our Yong-cheon!"
"How dare they poison a young master of the Jegal Family!"
Hwa-eun's next words cut through the murderous atmosphere.
"I would like to observe the symptoms. Would you release the meridians and acupoints you have sealed?"
Military Advisor Jegal Hu cried out in alarm.
"Then the poison will spread and kill him!"
They had sealed the meridians to keep the toxin from circulating—opening them would let it run free and kill him, or so he feared.
Hwa-eun shook her head.
"If what I suspect is correct, the poison will not spread."
"Will not spread?"
She nodded. After a brief hesitation, Jegal Hu stepped forward.
"Do it."
"Yes, sir."
At Jegal Hu's nod, other men nearby moved in. Strong-looking warriors surrounded Jiryong. One of them touched several points on his body—and what followed was astonishing.
It began with the dull eyes of Jiryong finding a spark of life again.
"Wh-what ish thish!? M-my body…"
The confident voice I had heard at our first meeting was gone. What came from Jiryong's mouth, thick with fear, was a heavy, slurred speech. His jaw seemed locked; he could not form the words properly.
And that was not the only shock. The corners of his eyes and mouth twitched violently, and before long his whole body began to shake—like the final death throes of a beast shot through with an arrow.
The men who had ringed the bed had clearly been waiting for this. As the tremors worsened, the strong warriors seized Jiryong's limbs.
"Khh… m-my body…"
"Ch-Cheon-rang! Hic…"
At the sight of him, Eumbong buried her face against his chest between the men and burst into tears. When her great sobs filled the room, Hwa-eun turned to the others and gave orders.
"That is enough. Seal the acupoints again. Include the water points as well."
"Yes!"
The points were sealed once more, and Jiryong sank back into sleep. Hwa-eun looked down at him and asked,
"Has the Earth Dragon recently complained of frequent headaches? Trouble remembering things? Sudden outbursts of temper?"
Jegal Hu rubbed his chin, lost in thought.
"Well…"
He was only the uncle; he could hardly know every petty detail of his nephew's days. And what nephew would dare lose his temper at his own uncle? I decided the question had been aimed at the wrong person and looked at Eumbong. When our eyes met she flinched, then spoke carefully, gauging the room.
"I… I was close to him, so I know. There were times his head hurt and he couldn't remember things. He forgot promises he made to me—I was quite hurt about it more than once lately."
Hwa-eun nodded at the answer and turned to Jegal Hu.
"That settles it. This is not a poisoning from today."
"Not from today!?"
"No. He has been poisoned very slowly, over a long stretch of time."
"What!?"
The atmosphere grew even colder than before. Military Advisor Jegal Hu of the Murim Alliance spoke in a voice like ice.
"Then how long, would you say?"
"At least half a year."
"…"
At the words half a year, the killing intent Jegal Hu had been holding down flooded the room. This meant a deliberate, carefully prepared attempt at slow poisoning—and, just as with Yeong-yeong's case, only someone close could have managed it.
Hyang-i, irritated by the pressure of that killing intent, crawled out of my robes and looked toward Jegal Hu.
-Chirrrr.
The feeling that flowed from her was clear enough: Daddy, what's wrong with that guy? Should I ask? Should I bite?
I stroked her head, trying to calm her, while Hwa-eun spoke as if to soothe Jegal Hu in my place.
"Please compose yourself, sir. It may not have been deliberate on anyone's part."
"What? Not deliberate?"
"Yes, sir. What poisoned the Earth Dragon is mercury."
"Mercury?"
Mercury—a word I had learned when studying poisons in the Tang Family.
Mercury… right, that's quicksilver. Ah—so when she said he had been poisoned for a long time, she meant chronic mercury poisoning.
With that single word I understood Jiryong's symptoms, and why Hwa-eun said the poisoning had been long-term and possibly unintentional.
His condition felt exactly like Minamata disease from chronic mercury poisoning. Even as a specialist in biological toxins, I had covered a few everyday poisons for broadcast work; the neurological symptoms of Minamata disease I had studied then—trembling lips, speech impairment, whole-body motor disorder—matched Jiryong perfectly.
And I understood why Hwa-eun said it might not have been intentional. In a backward age like this, mercury was used as medicine. The elixir of immortality Qin Shi Huang had swallowed had been loaded with the stuff. People had even drunk liquid mercury as a tonic.
But liquid mercury is poorly absorbed by the body; unless taken over a long period, it does not poison you. That is simply the nature of the metal. In my previous life mercury showed up in any number of everyday objects—thermometers most famously. Children bit the tips, swallowed the mercury, and got rushed to the hospital more often than you would think, yet that amount almost never caused real poisoning.
So if Jiryong was poisoned, he had almost certainly been taking mercury over a long stretch of time.
"Has he been taking medicine mixed with mercury all this while? Or regularly swallowing some kind of spirit pill?"
This time both Jegal Hu and Eumbong shook their heads.
"No. Not that I know of."
"Not that I know of either."
"Strange. It feels as though he has been taking it for quite a long time…"
The case seemed to be sliding into a maze. I dug through what I had memorized from the Tang Family's introduction to toxicology.
Mercury is refined by roasting cinnabar, right? They said the fumes are extremely toxic and you have to be careful. Inhaling that smoke can cause acute poisoning that stops the breath—so it can't be that kind of exposure…
Wait. Cinnabar. I've heard that somewhere else. Where?
As I turned the lesson over in my mind, the word cinnabar rose again—and with it, a memory from the Namgung Family.
"The chastity mark is something a woman stamps on her body to prove her purity. You raise a lizard in a jar and feed it cinnabar until its body turns red. Then you grind it in a mortar and stamp it on her skin. If she is pure, that mark will never wash off, no matter how hard you scrub."
The feed they used to abuse those lizards—that was it.
Turns red…? Wait. No. It can't be—
The image that flashed over the words turns red when eaten was Eumbong's crimson lips. I whirled on Hwa-eun in shock.
"Hwa-eun—wait. In what I learned at the Tang Family, the raw material for mercury is cinnabar. Can you get mercury poisoning just from ingesting cinnabar?"
Hwa-eun smiled at me as if I were an especially bright pupil and nodded.
"That's our So-ryong. Exactly right. I never even taught you that far, yet give you one thing and you grasp two. Cinnabar is the source of mercury, so yes—it poisons you with mercury just the same."
At her answer I looked down at the sleeping Jiryong. A hollow laugh slipped out of me.
"Ha…"
Ah… you poor young lovers…
This was exactly why lipstick had to be non-toxic. And now I had to figure out how on earth to explain that.