Fire Carp 3
What the hell are you supposed to be?
It wasn’t as if I was asking because I truly had no idea.
I was simply too stunned to do anything else.
No matter how much size and color might vary, there was no way this Spicy Fabre of all people wouldn’t recognize that form.
Still, the only reason the question rose to my lips was that both the hue and the sheer bulk of the thing were completely new to me—and more than a little impressive.
So I stood there with a blank look on my face, staring at the creature they had introduced at Putuo Temple as a fire carp, when the startled sound transmissions of Hwa-eun and Sister Seol reached me from either side.
“So-ryong, that isn’t a fire carp, is it? No matter how I look at it. That looks almost like…”
“So-ryong, that… I can’t make sense of the size, but it seems rather like a tadpole… doesn’t it?”
Apparently I wasn’t the only one who refused to call the so-called fire carp a fire carp. Hwa-eun and Sister Seol, both better informed about animals than most ordinary people, wore equally dumbfounded expressions as they asked.
Just as Hwa-eun said, the creature was what the Central Plains called a gwadu—a tadpole. Not a brocade carp of any kind. It was unmistakably someone’s larval stage.
Definitely a tadpole, right? The color’s peach-pink. It’s so huge that a casual glance might make it look like a plump carp, but it has no pectoral fins, no dorsal fin at all, and that adorable little snout… That’s one hundred percent an amphibian larva.
A tadpole is the larval form of amphibians of the order Anura—the young of toads, frogs, narrow-mouthed frogs, and the like.
The sight of it set Spicy Fabre’s heart racing for the first time in ages.
A soft peach tinged with pink. From the larval stage onward the coloring was already so extravagant that it looked for all the world like the young of some promising poisonous frog or toad.
Snakes, centipedes, scorpions, moths—plenty of venomous creatures were impressive in their own right, but toads were classic, foundational poison-bearers. Cute, and with that easygoing manner that somehow made the people watching them feel easier too.
Was this what they meant by turning misfortune into blessing?
Yeondu would be a little disappointed, but an inner dan no longer seemed all that important. A tadpole of this size… I couldn’t help wondering what kind of frog or toad it would become when it finally grew up.
I almost felt let down with the Princess when she said there was no inner dan, but now I ought to thank her instead.
I had nearly been disappointed in her, yet this gift more than repaid the help I had given.
Before answering the two of them, I simply stood and watched the so-called fire carp wriggle and swim in the crystal-clear pond near the mountain summit, thinking.
And as I did, the oddities I had overlooked began to surface one after another. Distracted by the whole cross-dressing business, I had missed any number of strange points.
Now that I think about it, there were more than a couple of things that didn’t add up…
First, when people usually estimate a fish’s size, they talk in terms of a palm, a forearm, that sort of length. Yet every time the fire carp of Putuo Temple’s sacred peak was mentioned, the measure that came up was “the size of a head.” I had written it off as local eccentricity or a difference in standards—but no. The creature really was head-sized: a body the bulk of a human head trailing a long tail.
Then there was the fact that Putuo Temple sat on an island. Fire carp are freshwater carp. Even if it were a spiritual beast, finding a freshwater carp—let alone an ordinary carp—on an island was odd to begin with, and I had simply never registered the problem.
And that was not all.
This pond was called the Moon Reflection Pond—literally, the pool where the moon’s shadow falls. A pond, by definition, is standing water. Which meant that unless a carp had flown here, it could never have entered and lived in this place.
So of course a brocade carp living in a pond on an island in the middle of the sea made no sense at all. I had simply been too preoccupied with everything else to notice.
I was just about to pull my gaze from the creature and answer Hwa-eun and Sister Seol when their startled cries rang out.
“Nun Choa! Wh-what are you doing!?”
“S-Sister!?”
The two of them shouted in shock at the nun who had guided us, then came bolting over and mashed my face straight into their chests. I nearly shoved them off in surprise—then looked up and met their eyes. Both of them shook their heads in a frantic hurry. The expressions said, in no uncertain terms, that this was something I must never be allowed to see.
Wh-what is this all of a sudden?
I was still reeling from their shouts and the hands covering my eyes when the nun’s answer floated over.
“Hm? Why, I’m about to bathe, of course. The three of you should undress as well. Seeing as the Sword Marquis had me bring you up here, I assumed she meant for you to cleanse yourselves before going back down… The reason this place is the sacred peak of Putuo Temple, and why every male—indeed every male creature—is forbidden to set foot here, is that this is where we purify our bodies.”
So that was why this was the sacred peak of Mount Putuo and why no man was ever allowed to climb it: it was the nuns’ bathing place. If Putuo Temple, an all-women sanctuary, used this as a public bath, of course no man would be permitted anywhere near it. Hwa-eun scrambled to explain, flustered by the nun’s assumption.
“The Sword Marquis must not have had a chance to tell you. W-we only came to see the f-fire carp.”
“Ah, is that so? I simply assumed you were here to bathe. Well, now that you’re up here, you might as well wash. It’s not easy to climb this high when the sun is out, and bathing in this water leaves the skin wonderfully soft. You’ve come all this way without a proper chance to wash, haven’t you? Let’s go in together.”
“Ah—even among women, how could we bathe together when we’ve only just met?”
“Th-that’s right!”
Judging by the heat I felt coming from Sister Seol and Hwa-eun’s side, the nun still had not stopped undressing. To Hwa-eun and Sister Seol’s protest that even women could not simply strip in front of strangers, the answer that came back was utterly serene.
“This body is nothing more than flesh that will rot away. Shame is only a matter of how one chooses to feel. Come now—in you go.”
What kind of nun talks like a Casanova…?
It sounded less like enlightenment and more like a line for seducing women. Hwa-eun and Sister Seol answered with stiff faces.
“N-no. We truly only came to see the fire carp. We couldn’t possibly.”
“Th-that’s right.”
“The water here is so fine, though…”
When Hwa-eun and Sister Seol refused absolutely, the nun finally seemed to give up on the bath; the two hands covering my eyes fell away. The pond came back into view just as the nun, gathering her clothes and pulling them on, approached with a smile.
“Isn’t it adorable? About ten years ago, right after a typhoon passed, it simply appeared in the pond. We named it Yeong-yeon after the pond itself.”
The topic had thankfully shifted from bathing back to the tadpole—but Nun Choa’s words still left all three of us stunned.
“Ten years?”
“Ten years?”
First the revelation that it wasn’t a fire carp but a tadpole, then the nun stripping without warning, and now the news that the creature was already ten years old.
I-it has been a tadpole for ten years?
No amphibian on earth remains a tadpole for a decade. Granted, some desert toads breed in a few rainy days and then sleep underground until the next wet season, and some frog larvae hibernate as tadpoles—but that is either the adult stage or limited to winter. By spring a tadpole becomes an adult; that is simply how it works. I hurried closer and dipped a hand into the pond water. If it were a spiritual beast, perhaps the environment was wrong and it was in some prolonged dormancy.
Tadpoles are not especially active, but even while hibernating they occasionally swim about, so ordinary people might not be able to tell whether they are dormant or not.
It isn’t that cold, though?
The water was not particularly cold. The tadpole itself was wriggling about with far too much energy to look like anything in hibernation.
Definitely not dormancy.
I tugged Hwa-eun’s sleeve and had her ask the nun a series of questions. If I was going to bring this creature safely back to the Tang Clan, I needed as much information as possible about its environment and diet—and why it was still a tadpole.
“Hwa-eun, ask the nun whether they have ever tried feeding it anything, whether its size is the same as ten years ago—details like that. If we’re taking it with us, we have to know what it eats. I’ll circle the pond and look around in the meantime.”
“All right.”
“Nun Choa, may I ask a few things?”
“Of course. What would you like to know?”
“Ah—about that tad—I mean, the fire carp. I was wondering…”
Leaving Hwa-eun to talk with the nun, I quickly moved around the edges of the pond.
Let’s see what ecological secrets you’re hiding.
The guest quarters of Putuo Temple.
After dinner, Sister Seol, Hwa-eun, and I were all crowded into a single room. The reason was simple: we had asked to stay several days so we could study the creature’s habits more carefully, and Putuo Temple assigned guest rooms the same way the nuns themselves lived—three or four to a chamber. I had nearly been thrown by that, but thanks to Sister Seol I was already used to this sort of arrangement. I perched on the edge of the table and began reporting what I had learned that day.
“There was nothing special around the pond. The water wasn’t particularly hot or cold… Most of the pond is filled by rainfall, with a little seepage from cracks in the rock, but nothing remarkable. No heavy lime in the water—just clean, clear water. The grass and trees nearby weren’t anything special either.”
When I finished with my findings and looked at Hwa-eun, she nodded and took over with what she had learned from the nun.
“When they first found the little one, the nuns tried leaving scraps of rice and such for it now and then, but it never ate, so they stopped. They seem to think that because it’s a spiritual beast it simply doesn’t need food. As for size, it’s a little bigger than ten years ago, but not by much.”
They said it ate nothing—but that was only what the nuns believed because they didn’t know better. From my experience raising spiritual beasts, it almost certainly was eating something. The fact that it had grown even a little proved as much.
It’s definitely eating something…
Earlier I had even wondered whether, like Chona, Hyang-i, or Bin-i, it might be absorbing some kind of qi, so I had asked Sister Seol to check the flow of energy around the pond. But just as the Sword Marquis had said, Sister Seol only confirmed that the creature had no inner dan. I pressed Hwa-eun for more.
“And?”
“Well, the nuns visit the place at night with lanterns when they go to bathe, and they say the little one swims up to greet them happily. They also mentioned that by the time they finish washing and head back down, the oil in the lamps has run dry and they have a hard time of it—but that doesn’t seem especially important.”
“You’re right. Nothing particularly crucial there.”
Neither Hwa-eun nor I had turned up anything truly useful. The most important question if we were going to take the tadpole with us—what it ate—still had no answer, and my expression grew grim. Beside us, Sister Seol spoke with a worried look.
“But So-ryong, I asked around over dinner, and the nuns here are absolutely crazy about the fire carp—I mean, the tadpole. Is that going to be all right? All anyone talked about at the table was the tadpole. Even if the Sword Marquis says we can take it, if we actually do, it feels like there’ll be weeping and wailing. Will it be okay?”
True to her nature as someone who took pets seriously, she was worried the nuns would raise hell if we walked off with their tadpole. But that, at least, was nothing to worry about. Even if the Sword Marquis refused, I already had a perfectly good way to take it—nuns’ tears or no nuns’ tears.
“You needn’t worry about that. I can handle it.”
“You can?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm… Is that so.”
Sister Seol nodded at my reassurance, then looked out the window at the setting sun before turning back to us.
“We’ll leave that to So-ryong, then. In that case, let’s speak to the Sword Marquis and go back up the mountain tonight after dark.”
“At night?”
“Even if there’s nothing special by day, night might be different, right? Beasts mostly move after dark. We might see something we missed during the day.”
“Ah—of course!”
As someone who worked with wild animals, Sister Seol immediately suggested observing its nocturnal habits. Frogs and toads are largely nocturnal, after all. As expected of my sister. Sister Seol truly was qualified to be Spicy Fabre’s older sister.
“All right. Let’s do that!”
After sunset, in the dim hours of early morning once all the nuns had finished bathing, the three of us took lanterns and made our way back to the Moon Reflection Pond by memory.
The reason we had been allowed to move about the sacred peak on our own was simple enough: for all its reputation, the place was essentially a bathhouse and nothing more.
True to its name, the Moon Reflection Pond lay with moonlight shimmering across its surface. As we approached with our lanterns, the creature—just as Hwa-eun had learned—came wriggling eagerly toward us.
“Little one, what on earth do you eat?”
Before checking the surroundings, Hwa-eun crouched with her lantern hooked at her side and held out a hand; the creature stayed still and let her touch it. At that moment Yeondu popped out of my robes, eyed the creature, and smacked her lips with clear regret.
Shaa…
She seemed finally to have accepted the shocking truth that this was not a fire carp. I stroked her head with an apologetic look.
“I’ll find you a real fire carp and feed you next time. I’m sorry, Yeondu.”
Shaa-shaa.
Good-natured as ever, she looked a little disappointed, then nodded. And then—
As if she still couldn’t quite let it go, Yeondu glanced toward Hwa-eun and suddenly let out a cry of pure alarm.
Shaaa!
At the sharp sound in the middle of the night, everyone turned to Yeondu. She kept pointing her head insistently toward Hwa-eun, trying to tell us something.
“What is it? Yeondu, what is it?”
Sister Seol and Hwa-eun scanned the surroundings, but nothing seemed out of place. No danger, nothing unusual—both of them looked completely at a loss.
“What? It looks like Yeondu saw something, but there’s nothing here.”
“Why is she so startled?”
She saw something? What could Yeondu have seen at this hour… Wait—!
That was the moment it hit me.
Yeondu had infrared vision. Whatever she was seeing now had to be related to heat.
I lunged forward and brought the lantern Hwa-eun was holding close to the water’s surface—and the flame that had been rising from the oil cup inside the lantern stretched into a long, thin thread and began to be drawn across the water, straight into the tadpole’s mouth.