Fire and Ice, Part 2
Father-in-law quickly pressed a few of my pressure points to slow the poison’s advance, then went straight into the detoxification.
I was poisoned, true—but the silver lining was having one of the Tang Clan’s greatest masters right beside me. That’s reassuring, at least. Having the Central Plains’ finest poison specialist as my personal physician was enough to set my mind somewhat at ease.
“Don’t worry too much. I’ll attempt the detoxification myself first.”
His steady words helped me relax a little—until Hwa-eun and Sister Seol, both staring at the water jar, turned to him with questions.
“But Father, both Sister Seol and I touched Wol-yeong too. Why is only So-ryong poisoned? It’s strange. If all three of us touched her, shouldn’t all of us have been poisoned?”
“That’s right, Elder. Wol-yeong touched me and Hwa-eun as well… So why only Ryong? Don’t tell me it’s a poison that only affects men?”
In my current state of poisoning, the most obvious suspect was the newest addition to our group: Wol-yeong.
We hadn’t discussed it aloud, but everyone’s thoughts had silently converged on the same conclusion.
Nothing like this had happened before she joined us, and given that I was exhaling blue flames—eerily similar to a creature that drank fire—suspecting her was only natural.
But as Hwa-eun and Sister Seol pointed out, they had touched her as well. Both of them wore expressions of pure confusion.
Sister Seol had even gone so far as to ask whether it was a poison that only afflicted men.
Thinking it through carefully, though, the only thing the three of us had in common was the fact of having touched her. The timing did not match at all.
The most recent contact had been mine alone.
Sister Seol and Hwa-eun had only handled Wol-yeong right after we reached the boat—twice in total: once when we first saw her at Moon Reflection Pond, and once after boarding.
I had warned them that amphibian skin was sensitive and that they should avoid touching her as much as possible. After that, as far as I knew, neither of them had laid a finger on her again. Only I had.
Even checking whether her hind legs were growing had been something only I did.
That was how I finally understood why I alone had been poisoned. Damn it… making such a rookie mistake. Did I get too excited just because it had been so long since I handled an amphibian?
The first thing that flooded my mind once I grasped the cause was pure self-disgust.
If I had properly registered that she was an amphibian tadpole, I should have been far more careful.
Some poisonous frogs and toads do not produce their own toxins. They eat spiders, scorpions, centipedes, ants, and the like, then store those poisons and repurpose them as their own.
They recycle other creatures’ venom because they cannot manufacture any themselves.
That was why, when kept in a breeding room and fed non-toxic prey, they remained harmless and easy to raise—but the moment you started feeding them anything collected from the wild, they immediately began producing poison. You had to be meticulous about their diet and care. But who would have guessed a creature that eats fire would start producing poison from that?
It wasn’t raw prey; I had never imagined fire itself would let her generate toxin. Still, for someone who dealt with venomous creatures for a living—someone who could never be careful enough—this was an inexcusable slip…
Especially after I had already witnessed so many exceptions among the spirit beasts. The path of Spicy Fabre, poison specialist of the wuxia world, is never an easy one.
At least I was the only one poisoned. That was something. The flames pouring from my nose and mouth seemed to have settled, so I turned to Hwa-eun and Sister Seol and explained what I had figured out.
Father-in-law was far too focused to answer their questions himself.
“*Cough. Cough*… Certain poisonous salamanders and frogs can’t produce their own toxins. They collect poisons from other things and use them as their own. Looking at it that way, this little one is clearly making poison by eating fire.
“So before she ate any fire, she had no toxin at all—which is why only I, the one who touched her most recently, got poisoned.
“The poison she started making from the first fire I fed her probably began seeping out around the time her hind legs started growing.”
When we were still at Moon Reflection Pond, and even in the early days after moving her to the boat, touching her had been fine. She had almost certainly never eaten fire before then.
The poison she began producing from the first flames I gave her must have started leaking out for the first time as her hind legs developed—and that was why I was the one who got hit. That was my theory, at least.
Sister Seol and Hwa-eun’s eyes went round with shock.
A poisonous creature that ate fire and produced toxin from it? Of course they were stunned.
“Ryong, are you feeling a little better? But… it makes poison by eating fire?”
“Poison… from eating fire?”
Just then, a low groan came from Father-in-law as he worked on me.
“Ugh. Why is this…?”
Something wasn’t going smoothly. The sudden sound of his frustration sent a spike of anxiety through me.
It felt like the treatment was failing. What is it? What’s not working?
My heart began to pound with rising dread—and in that exact moment, something hot and wet ran from my nose.
—Drip. Plop. Tap. Tap…
A sudden nosebleed poured out.
Maybe the earlier fire-breathing had torn or abraded the inside of my nostrils. Blood gushed freely from my nose.
A nosebleed itself was nothing. The real problem was what happened the instant that blood hit the floor.
Flames erupted from the deck.
—Whoosh!
The moment the dripping blood landed, fire shot upward from the boards.
“Th-this!”
Father-in-law, still mid-groan, flicked his sleeve in alarm and snuffed the flames at once—but a black scorch mark now marred the floor of the new boat.
The ugly soot on the fresh deck barely registered. What stunned me far more than even coughing fire was the fact that my own blood had ignited. What kind of poison turns a human’s blood into gasoline!?
My eyes went wide at the revelation that a toxin could make blood itself catch fire. Hwa-eun’s voice rose, sharp with urgency, as she turned on her father.
“Father, the detoxification? How is the detoxification going?”
Watching my blood burn had clearly pushed her into panic.
Only then did Father-in-law shake his head and speak.
“If it were your grandfather, perhaps—but I cannot do it. I’ve never handled a poison like this… I can’t separate it from inside the body. I tried, and it proved impossible.
“I thought it might be a type of Fire Blood Poison, but it’s completely different.”
Fire Blood Poison was one of the Tang Clan’s dreaded toxins. Those afflicted felt as though the blood in their veins was burning—hence the name.
But as Father-in-law said, Wol-yeong’s poison was nothing like it.
It wasn’t that I felt a burning pain. My blood was literally catching fire.
A declaration of surrender from a poison master.
At his words, Hwa-eun and Sister Seol both went deathly pale.
“Th-that can’t be…”
“You can’t cure it!?”
Expelling poison with inner energy was delicate work. I had learned enough of the poison arts to understand what he meant.
The process usually involved flooding the body with one’s own qi, isolating the toxin, driving it to one side, then opening a wound there and draining it out with the blood.
But this was a type he had never seen before—so distinguishing it was proving nearly impossible.
“Th-then what do we do?”
“D-don’t tell me our So-ryong is going to die?”
Sister Seol already had tears welling in her eyes, convinced I was done for.
Thankfully, Father-in-law shook his head. Oh good—so it’s not a lethal toxin, at least?
“Fortunately, the poison itself doesn’t stop the breath or halt the blood. So it won’t kill him, but…”
It wasn’t a neurotoxin or a blood toxin of the deadly sort, so I wasn’t going to die. That much was a relief.
But just as I started to relax, he trailed off. Hey, don’t leave people hanging like that!
My brief joy hadn’t even faded before his trailing words ignited fresh anger—
and once again blood streamed from my nose, flames blooming in its wake.
—Whoooosh.
Father-in-law snuffed the fire in a flash, then steadied me as he continued the explanation.
“C-calm yourself, son-in-law. From what I can tell, this poison won’t take your life on its own—but its nature is extremely violent. If you use inner energy, move your body too vigorously, or let your emotions run high… it will flare up like this, or… or…”
“Or?”
“Or what?”
He kept repeating “or,” so everyone pressed him for the rest. Father-in-law swallowed hard, then left us with a single word.
“Ex… explode…”
“Explode?”
“Explode?”
Sister Seol and Hwa-eun both tilted their heads at the word. It was such an absurd answer that it didn’t quite land—until a single thought flashed through my mind. No way. Don’t tell me… if my emotions spike, or I circulate inner energy, or I move around too much, I explode? Even with fire coming out of my mouth and nosebleeds that burn, there’s no way it goes as far as exploding…
Surely blood catching fire didn’t mean actual detonation, right?
I looked at him with a questioning gaze, hoping he meant something else entirely. Father-in-law squeezed his eyes shut. Damn it!
—Creak. Squeak.
The cabin filled with the soft groans of timber rubbing against timber.
Wol-yeong’s poison demanded absolute rest, so I lay as still as possible in the hammock Yo-hwa had secured inside the cabin.
We had already passed Akyang, where we had met the Princess, and were heading farther upstream.
Sichuan wasn’t far now. Once we reached Sichuan we could bring Grandfather and get proper treatment. Until then, I just had to hold on.
If things turned critical along the way—though I sincerely hoped they wouldn’t—I still had a last resort.
Namely: the Five Poison Divine Art.
“So-ryong, just take it. It’s dangerous. I already told you I don’t care anymore.”
“Yeah, Ryong. Just do what Hwa-eun says and get it over with.”
As Hwa-eun and Sister Seol kept urging from beside me, there was indeed an easy way out: simply accept Wol-yeong’s poison as one of the toxins in my Five Poison Divine Art.
If Wol-yeong happened to be a toad of low grade, I would end up a ruined build; if she was a frog, I’d become a trash character. The risks were real. But if I successfully incorporated her poison into the Five Poison Divine Art, the poisoning would be solved in a single stroke.
Any toxin absorbed through the Five Poison Divine Art granted powerful resistance—making it the simplest path out of this mess. But this Spicy Fabre’s soul will not allow it.
The Ten Great Poisonous Creatures and the Ten Poisons were the very engine that drove this Spicy Fabre through the murim world.
How could I let a threat of this level break my resolve? Abandon the Five Poisons and the Ten Poisons? Unthinkable. Absolutely not.
A man barely had enough room to wrestle with the Five and the Ten—was I really going to waste time fretting over whether I’d become a trash character or a ruined one?
So I answered both of them with a smile.
“A man has set his will. How could I bow to a little threat like this? We’ll reach Sichuan soon and I can be treated by Grandfather, so please don’t worry too much—either of you. What could possibly go wrong in the meantime?”
The journey was almost over.
I spoke lightly, trying to soothe them that nothing serious would happen. Both of them looked thoroughly exasperated.
“Ryong, if you keep being stubborn and something goes wrong, Sister is going to scold you within an inch of your life!”
“So-ryong, you’ll get it from me too!”
They were clearly saying it out of sheer frustration.
I was still lying in the hammock, smirking at the two of them, when—
—Creaaak.
The boat suddenly lurched.
As the vessel heaved, Sister Seol’s temper flared like dry tinder.
“I told them to handle the boat carefully! Why is it doing this!?”
She was already on edge because of me. The moment the deck pitched, she stormed to the cabin door and yanked it open—
only for a boatman to come running, voice raw with panic.
“Everyone hold on tight! A-a huge downpour must have hit upstream—big water and branches are coming down on us!”
“What!?”
“What did you say!?”
The Yangtze was an obscenely long river, and the Central Plains an obscenely vast land. It was entirely possible for a massive rainstorm upstream to cause flooding downstream even while the lower reaches stayed dry.
But why did it have to be now?
I screamed the words inside my head. Stop the forced bad luck! Please!
Heaven itself was clearly jealous of my Five Poisons and Ten Poisons.