Suck 4
When I-tae grasped the meaning of his own words and scowled, the eyes of the river pirates—who had been on edge from the moment I appeared—flooded with even deeper fear.
The dead man had surely been walking around just fine until yesterday, yet he had been found as a shriveled husk of a corpse.
It looked nothing like an ordinary death, so our kids were under heavy suspicion.
A person withering away to nothing was a supernatural affair, so it was only natural that the spirit beasts—supernatural beings themselves—would take the blame.
And since the suspects were the children I commanded, the river pirates were clearly terrified of me as well.
In their eyes, didn’t my kids and I look like a devil and a devil-summoner?
It’s irritating, but this is awfully coincidental. I’d better clear up the misunderstanding.
I had kept pushing the message that the kids ate people just to scare the river pirates, and of all times, someone had to die in such a bizarre way right now.
With the shipyard matter still hanging over us, this kind of misunderstanding was the last thing we needed.
Anyway, I was about to clear things up.
Before I could even open my mouth, the river pirates’ fear turned to outright terror at the sound that followed me from behind.
-Tseuru? 『Dad?』
I had told them to come out together once the fog lifted, but when I rushed out after I-tae without a word of explanation, Bin-i had apparently followed.
The moment Bin-i’s cry reached them, the river pirates recoiled in pure horror and scrambled backward.
“Huuuaaak!”
“Hwaaa!”
A seven-meter black centipede gliding out of the fog was more than enough to freeze anyone’s blood.
Already thoroughly terrified from yesterday and now laboring under this misunderstanding, the river pirates even landed on their backsides as they retreated.
In my head, Bin-i’s voice sounded adorably tiny.
Quick action was clearly needed.
After calling Hwa-eun over for a brief word, I decided to clear I-tae’s and the river pirates’ misunderstanding at once.
If it sank any deeper, there would be no walking it back.
“It looks like the river pirates think our kids did that to the desiccated corpse. We need to clear up the misunderstanding.”
“Our kids!? What kind of nonsense is that…”
Hwa-eun’s face said the very idea was absurd.
She cradled Bin-i and spoke.
“They’re so small and gentle and good-natured… it hurts…”
Honestly, Cho and Bin-i only looked small and cute through the affection filter in Hwa-eun’s eyes and mine. Strip that filter away and they were seven-meter-class monsters.
So I gave an awkward smile at her reply, stroked Bin-i’s head myself, and explained to I-tae.
“You seem to think our kids turned that corpse— the desiccated one—into that state. It’s a misunderstanding.”
“A misunderstanding?”
“Our kids do not eat people.”
“What!?”
I-tae nearly jumped out of his skin when I said the kids did not eat people.
He stared back at me in pure disbelief.
Well, yesterday I had hammered home the message that they would be eaten, after all.
“Y-yesterday you clearly said you’d feed us to them…”
“That was just to scare you. These kids are spirit beasts; they don’t eat anything.”
I-tae and the river pirates exchanged glances.
They were clearly weighing whether to believe me or not.
I decided to give the deliberating bunch a dose of reality.
It was a cold thing to say, but better than letting the misunderstanding pile higher.
“Believe me or don’t—it doesn’t matter. But if the kids really ate people, would I even need to step forward and explain myself like this?”
If Cho, Bin-i, and Yo-hwa truly ate people, I-tae and his river pirates had no way of stopping them.
And for river pirates who could not stop the three, the only option left would be to sit quietly and wait their turn to be eaten.
When I pointed that out, I-tae flinched, then gave a slow nod.
“C-certainly. If spirit beasts ran wild, no one could stop them. There’d be no need to sneak around and eat people in secret.”
The river pirates shuddered, yesterday’s events clearly flashing through their minds at I-tae’s words.
One of them asked their leader,
“Ch-chief, then how did Beom-gyu die?”
Footsteps approached from the cabin. Seol noona emerged from the fog and spoke.
“That’s what we’re going to find out now.”
With Seol noona’s help, I decided we should examine the corpse first.
According to her, traces of a violent death always remained on a body.
She wasn’t wrong, and among the Beast Palace’s odd skills was one for reading the marks left on a corpse. Seol noona spoke with such confidence that I left the body entirely to her.
She said the skill had grown out of examining what beast had fed on a kill. I was half-skeptical, but watching her work the corpse was surprisingly professional.
She checked the pupils, the inside of the mouth, even the fine traces on the skin—meticulous work that felt out of place in this era.
With no gloves, Seol noona poked and prodded with something like chopsticks.
With the river pirates’ help she turned the body over, then tilted her head and offered a new opinion: this was not a desiccated corpse at all.
“Strictly speaking, this isn’t a desiccated corpse.”
“It isn’t?”
Hwa-eun asked back. Seol noona nodded.
“A desiccated corpse means a body that’s completely dried out. This one just had every drop of blood drained. That’s why it’s all wrinkled and pale. The skin’s the same—it hasn’t actually dried yet.”
“All the blood was drained from the body?”
I had taken it for a dried-out husk, but Seol noona’s explanation said otherwise.
My eyes went round at the words “every drop of blood.” She nodded again.
“Yeah. When a person dies and becomes a corpse, the blood clots and leaves stains on the body, right? This corpse has none of that.
For beasts or people, those stains start appearing from half a shichen after death. This one has no such marks at all. That means every last drop was sucked out while he was still alive—or within one shichen of dying.”
“Then… the Blood Cult!?”
Blood completely drained—naturally the first suspect was the Blood Cult.
At the name, every face around me tightened with tension.
If my guess was right, a Blood Cult dog might already be hiding inside the village.
“Certainly… if it’s blood, the Blood Cult…”
“Th-the Blood Cult!? Those vicious bastards!?”
But Seol noona’s voice cut through.
“The Blood Cult opens wounds on the body and sucks the blood from there, right? This man doesn’t seem to have any wounds like that.
In my view it’s not the Blood Cult. This is something else.”
She was right. The Blood Cult were mosquito-like vermin who cut open flesh with blades or daggers and drank through the wounds.
Even their elders had shown that same method. Without wounds, we could not pin this on them.
“Anything else?”
The consensus had tilted away from the Blood Cult, and I felt a small measure of relief.
When I asked whether she had found anything more, Seol noona shook her head.
“Hard to say. If any blood had remained I might have learned more. Without it, even the wounds don’t show clearly.”
That was all she had managed to discover.
If the corpse had nothing more to give, then we needed to check the scene itself.
The scene was every bit as important as the body.
“Then let’s head to this man’s house. There might still be traces left.”
“Yeah, let’s do that.”
“So-ryong, I’ll check whether any poison remains on the corpse. It’s strange that he died inside the village last night and no one noticed.”
“Ah—all right, Hwa-eun.”
Leaving Hwa-eun to test for poison, I headed into the village with I-tae.
Perhaps because of the night’s events, the villagers watched us with fearful eyes and whispered as we crossed the settlement.
Past those stares we reached a small hut at the foot of the mountain—reed roof, walls of standing bamboo.
“This is the place, Young Master So-ryong.”
Following I-tae inside, I found a single bamboo bed amid the clutter.
The area around it was thoroughly disturbed, no doubt by the people who had found him.
“My men say he was lying on that bed like a corpse. Ah—lying there as a corpse…”
I approached the bed while listening. A faint scent of cilantro drifted up.
Koreans rarely care for the smell, but I figured the locals here used it freely to mask the fishiness of their catch, and I set about examining the rest of the hut.
“Lying on the bamboo bed just as he was…”
“Yes. They said the body was already stiff.”
Aside from a ragged blanket there was nothing of note on the bed. Together with I-tae and Seol noona I checked the doorway, the windows, every possible sign of entry or exit. Nothing unusual turned up.
“Nothing much here.”
“Agreed…”
We returned to the ship empty-handed and asked Hwa-eun whether she had found any poison. The answer was that results would take until tomorrow.
“I won’t know if there’s poison until tomorrow at the earliest.”
“Surely no one else will die before Hwa-eun finds something?”
“N-no way. Seol noona, that would be a disaster.”
I forced down the anxiety that rose at Seol noona’s words, but they say uneasy feelings are never wrong.
The next dawn, river pirates burst through the fog with news of another victim.
“Y-Young Master So-ryong! A person—a person has been found dead! This time it’s two!”
“Two!?”
I had the strong sense the case was sinking into a labyrinth.
Seol noona and I ran to another house near the small hut we had visited the day before.
Inside, a young man and woman—clearly a couple—lay dead on the bed exactly as they had been.
No signs of struggle. They still held each other as if simply asleep.
“No one touched them, right?”
“Yes, Miss.”
Seol noona hurried over, examined them both, and spoke with a grave face.
“Both of them—no blood either.”
Again, drained dry.
Then Seol noona, still checking the pair, seemed to notice something odd. She tilted her head.
“What’s this?”
She felt around the blanket near the bed, then brought her fingers to her nose and sniffed.
“What is it?”
“There’s water. The blanket’s wet.”
“Water? Not urine leaked at the moment of death?”
“No. No urine smell. It’s a bit fishy, though. Strange…”
While Seol noona kept tilting her head, trying to identify the liquid, a breeze from outside pushed the window open and once more carried in the faint scent of cilantro.
That same cilantro smell kept tickling the back of my mind wherever I went.
Yet nothing quite clicked.
What is it? I feel like I’m forgetting something important…
We searched for a long time with Seol noona, but the day yielded nothing more, and the mood in the river-pirate village turned thoroughly black.
I had explained myself aggressively, yet clearly not everyone was convinced.
Around afternoon Hwa-eun reported finding a paralysis toxin in the first corpse, so I considered the possibility of some blood-drinking venomous creature—yet nothing specific came to mind.
And that night, while Seol noona and I were fretting that no one must die today, I-tae came to our ship—now hauled up onto land—carrying fish dishes.
“It’s nothing much, but…”
“You said you had no provisions, so why bring something like this?”
“I brought it because I’m grateful you’re looking into the deaths of men like us with real care, Young Master So-ryong.”
“You ordered your men to patrol the village tonight?”
“Yes. Three pairs of two, circling the settlement.”
Crucian carp, lightly fried and then braised in soy sauce.
I had already eaten dinner, but the gesture deserved a taste. The moment the piece hit my tongue, a mouthful of earthy mud-smell flooded in.
The unmistakable earthiness of freshwater fish filled my entire mouth.
“Ugh…”
I nearly retched on the spot, and the cilantro I hated so much sprang unbidden into my thoughts.
At my reaction I-tae panicked and spoke as though he had committed a grave offense.
“Th-this—we cooked it to our own taste and made a mistake. I’ll prepare it again. Of course, coming from the land, the fishiness—”
“Ah, no. It’s just fishier than I expected. But… there’s no cilantro?”
The cilantro I had been smelling everywhere was missing from the dish. I tilted my head, and the answer came.
“We don’t really notice the fishiness, so we don’t bother adding cilantro.”
“You don’t use cilantro much?”
“Yes. It’s been years since I last ate any.”
The instant I-tae’s words reached me, a page from my mental encyclopedia of insects and venomous creatures flashed through my mind.
The large quantity of bodily fluid left on the bed—and the cilantro smell.
Why didn’t I think of that!?
“Bin-ah!”
-Tseureureu?
I sprinted toward the cabin and called her name. Bin-i immediately lowered her head from the entrance.
Lantern in hand, I raced toward the village and shouted,
“Let’s go!”
The place we reached was the first victim’s house.
I swept the lantern across the walls and checked every surface. Down one wall something black had trickled in a thick stream.
What I had been looking for was right there.
And at that exact moment—
-Hudududuk.
-Tseureureureu!
When I raised the lantern to the ceiling, palm-sized bedbugs began raining down like a sudden downpour. Startled, Bin-i coiled around my body and began slicing the creatures clean in half.
-Kwajik!
The culprit behind the water-village murders was unmistakably a swarm of palm-sized bedbugs.