Mountain Stronghold 1
Ordinary amphibians grow their hind legs first, then the front ones. The hind legs begin as little buds between the tail and the body, slowly taking shape as they lengthen, while the front legs develop inside the body behind the gills and, once they’ve grown enough, tear their way out through the flanks.
But right after those front legs burst free, they’re still stubby and useless for swimming. They just hang there like ornaments, flopping against the body as the creature paddles along.
Hwa-yang’s front legs, however, were clearly doing the job of real feet. The way she was gripping the rim of the water tub had caught my eye the moment I looked.
Gyaaaaaah!
I already knew she grew by eating fire, but I never imagined that gulping down massive amounts of it would send her into a sudden growth spurt like this.
The sight of her front feet locked tightly around the edge of the tub made me reach out without thinking. I wanted a closer look at those feet.
With amphibians, a single front foot can tell you a surprising amount. Suction pads mean it can climb. Webbing means it can swim. Hooked claws mean it digs. Even if I couldn’t tell right away whether she was a frog or a toad, I could at least figure out if she was a terrestrial type with claws, a tree-frog climber, or an aquatic swimmer.
“So-ryong! Poison!”
“Ah—right, right.”
My attempt never got the chance. Hwa-eun and Sister Seol stopped me, and I had to pull my hand back with regret. One careless touch and I could get poisoned all over again.
It hadn’t been long since I’d suffered through poisoning and every unfair twist that came with it.
“So-ryong, have you already forgotten what happened just the other day?”
“That’s right. So-ryong, you have to be careful. How can you forget so soon?”
“C-come on. I’m not some baby fish.”
I told Hwa-eun and Sister Seol there was no way I’d forget something like that when I wasn’t even a fish—but honestly, the second I saw Hwa-yang’s front feet, I had forgotten completely.
How am I supposed to keep a clear head looking at that?
Even if words like “stripping” or “metamorphosis” applied to Hwa-eun, I could stay sane. But when the kids molted or transformed, staying rational was simply impossible.
Hwa-eun and Sister Seol seemed to catch that my excuse was a lie; both of them wore expressions that said they couldn’t do a thing with me.
“I-I just… without thinking…”
I gave them an apologetic look and turned back to Hwa-yang, already regretting that I hadn’t known she’d grow this fast.
I should’ve just fed her plenty. Controlling the portions was pointless.
Some amphibians are real gluttons, so I’d carefully limited her food for fear her stomach might burst. Looks like I’d been completely wrong.
Hwa-yang clearly grew exactly as much as she ate.
With ordinary food it goes into the stomach first, so overeating could actually rupture it. But for Hwa-yang, fire was almost certainly yang energy.
Eating a lot of qi wouldn’t make anyone’s belly explode, would it?
Cho and Bin or Hyang absorbed natural qi; Bing, Seol, and Dong-i fed on the cold energy that flowed from the ice jade.
Yo-hwa fed on my yang energy.
Of course there were creatures like the Golden-Haired Bee King that ate honey, but setting those aside, most spirit beasts grew by consuming qi. Eating a lot didn’t seem to be a problem at all.
If there was plenty of yang, wouldn’t she simply metamorphose or evolve?
Most of the venomous creatures I’d raised so far had done exactly that, so the theory felt solid.
In that case I should feed her well and turn her into an adult as soon as possible, right?
Once I knew she grew as much as she ate, the next step was obvious.
Stuffing her full until she became an adult—that was a guardian’s job.
I knelt so my head was level with Hwa-yang’s eyes and asked her,
“Hwa-yang, want some more food?”
She gurgled happily in the water.
-Pogeuruk.
It looked like she could breathe with lungs now, not just gills.
I had the water bandits cut more reeds and lit a massive fire in the village square.
With front legs already grown, I couldn’t help hoping that today we might see the end of Hwa-yang’s tech tree.
Front legs meant only the tail still needed to shorten for the whole process to finish, so it didn’t feel impossible.
Hwa-yang final tech, let’s go.
Using the water bandits for personal business made me feel a little guilty, but if Hwa-yang ate a lot and produced plenty of poison, it would help with village defense and bedbug control. It wasn’t only for me.
We gathered every scrap of firewood and dry timber we could find nearby and fed her. She made more than enough poison, but unfortunately her tail didn’t shorten right away.
It felt like stage-based growth, or like she needed to hit a certain threshold.
If I’d had the time I would have stayed up all night feeding her, but that wasn’t an option.
As the sun set, they started coming.
The bedbugs.
Once night deepened, bedbugs poured out from every direction.
The ones that had already entered the village had been cleaned up during the day by Hwa-eun tracking their scent, so only a few appeared. Beyond the water channel we had dug, however, they swarmed in a pitch-black mass just as expected.
People usually say cockroaches breed infinitely, but honestly cockroaches can’t hold a candle to bedbugs.
A single bedbug lays around five hundred eggs in its lifetime, and once they hide in the corners of a house they multiply without limit—geometrically.
“Dong-i! Just like you said, they’re swarming pitch black!”
“So-ryong, will it really be okay?”
“They probably won’t be able to cross the water.”
At my words everyone watched the water channel with tense faces. The moment the wave of bedbugs reached the water’s edge they stopped cold, unable to do anything.
They fear water because their bodies are extremely light and vulnerable to surface tension; get too close and they simply stick to the surface and can’t move.
“They stopped! They stopped!”
“The bloodsuckers stopped!”
“W-we’re saved!”
As the bedbug tide halted at the water’s edge, relieved faces broke into smiles.
From the opposite bank I threw rocks at them, taunting the little monsters.
“You want to eat, don’t you? You want to eat, you little bastards!”
That standoff lasted into the early hours of the morning.
I was dozing by the campfire when Yi-tae and a few water bandits on watch came over to report.
“Lord So-ryong, just as you said—the bloodsuckers have become more active!”
“Churp. Th-then prepare the water.”
“Understood!”
I wiped the drool from the corner of my mouth and rubbed my eyes. Yo-hwa approached and lifted me onto her back.
It felt like she was telling me not to get up, to sleep a little longer.
My eyes drooped shut again against her soft fur, but I forced myself awake and said,
“Yo-hwa, no. There’s work to do.”
-Kishi.
She still seemed to want me to sleep, but the work had to be done.
If I missed this window I’d have to wait until tomorrow, so I sat up and rubbed my eyes hard.
People think bedbugs bite at night, but they’re actually most active at dawn.
So we moved just before sunrise.
We changed the water in Hwa-yang’s tub, scraped it clean, carried it near the channel, and began spraying the insecticide at once.
“Lord So-ryong, preparations are complete. Shall we begin?”
“Ah—the bamboo water guns?”
“Here they are.”
I pulled on mittens woven from Yo-hwa’s thread, filled the bamboo water guns, and sprayed the poison-laced water in a refreshing arc toward the bedbugs massed on the far side.
-Jjiiiik.
A stream shot from the tip of the bamboo gun and rained down over their heads.
I moved along the water channel, carefully coating every cluster. By the time I finished, daybreak was already brightening the sky, and just like the day before the bedbugs began scattering in every direction.
“They’re retreating!”
“They’re scattering!”
A few hours later, when everyone had gathered for breakfast in the village square thick with dawn mist, Sister Seol suddenly shot to her feet mid-meal and pointed at the mountain.
“Dong-i! Look over there!”
I turned. The mountain, veiled in pure white fog, looked like a snow-covered Christmas tree. All across its slopes blue flames flickered and died like strings of blue lights blinking on and off.
Hwa-yang’s poison was definitely working.
The same flames continued through the forest near the village. Watching them, Sister Seol and Hwa-eun spoke in quiet awe.
“It’s pretty.”
“Truly.”
It was a death far too gorgeous and beautiful for bedbugs.
After repeating the same work for about two days, the bedbugs had clearly thinned out.
Now only a handful at most still tried to swarm the village.
Checking both the living ones that arrived and the dead ones left behind, I noticed something strange.
“It’s definitely strange.”
“What now?”
Sister Seol frowned, already bracing for bad news, and asked what was wrong this time.
I smiled at her and answered.
“The bloodsuckers. The ones that swarmed the village—strangely, there isn’t a single female among them.”
“Not even one?”
“Yes. Not even one.”
Bedbugs are among the insects hardest to sex. Their appearance is almost identical, so telling them apart is tough.
Similar size, no obvious distinguishing features. The only real clues are that males look a little more slender while females are a bit rounder.
Without placing them side by side, the difference is nearly invisible.
“That’s weird, huh?”
“Well, if human hands were involved, it might be only natural. If these things bred freely in the wild, who knows how far they’d spread.”
They had probably excluded females on purpose. Left to breed in nature, the bedbugs would have been impossible to control.
I looked past the village’s back mountain toward the larger peak beyond and said,
“Looks like we’ll have to go check over there.”
The village was mostly cleaned up now, and the ship repairs would finish soon. It felt like the right time to pay a visit to the bandits’ mountain stronghold.
Because we still had no idea how many bedbugs remained in the forest, Hwa-eun and I decided to go carefully by ourselves, riding Cho.
“Be careful, Dong-i.”
“Yes, Sister Seol.”
With Sister Seol’s repeated warnings still in our ears, I coiled around Cho’s body and rose into the sky. Below us Sister Seol shrank until she was only a tiny dot.
“Cho, fly toward that mountain over there.”
-Tseureut!
Once we had enough altitude I asked her to head for the peak that held the stronghold, and Cho wriggled through the air toward it.
After several nights of brilliant blue fireworks the mountain was unnervingly quiet.
The trees were so dense that nothing showed at first, but after a short circuit a clearing that looked exactly like a mountain stronghold came into view below.
They had hidden the place well with grass and trees on every side, yet they had never considered someone looking down from the sky, so the open yard stood out clearly.
I had Cho circle nearby while we examined the place for a long while. The stronghold remained dead silent.
“Think it’s safe to go down?”
“Yes. There isn’t a single person.”
We descended boldly into the center of the empty stronghold. Not one Green Forest bandit appeared to greet us.
We checked a few wooden houses and found only a handful of corpses already rotting, bones showing through the flesh.
When we stepped into the largest log house, that was when it happened.
The interior was packed with medicinal herbs and pills. A single corpse lay face-down on the floor, so far gone that bone was visible, waiting for Hwa-eun and me.
“This was probably the boss’s place?”
“Is this guy the boss?”
“I’ll examine the medicines first.”
“Understood. Hwa-eun, I’ll look around for anything else strange.”
-Tseureut!
“You’re helping too? W-well, okay. Cho, if you find anything weird, bring it to Daddy.”
-Tseureurreu!
While Hwa-eun went through the pills and herbs, Cho and I searched the rest of the log house.
Declaring she would help, Cho dashed about in a frenzy and finally crawled out from under the table in front of the fallen corpse, a dusty book clamped in her mouth.
-Tseureut!
“Aigoo, well done, my daughter.”
Cho couldn’t even read, so whatever she had found was probably nothing special. I stroked her head and took the book—
and the moment I looked at the cover, a familiar image filled my eyes.
Drawn on the surface were the five poisonous beasts I had once seen in the underground vault of the Five Poisons Sect.