Mountain Stronghold 2

The book stamped with the crest of the Five Poisons Sect was, just as I had suspected, clear and ironclad proof that the Five Poisons Sect was deeply involved in this affair—or that they were the ones behind it entirely.

Faced with evidence I could neither deny nor escape, I immediately turned toward Hwa-eun.

“Hwa—”

Ah, she looks busy.

I was about to call her name, but Hwa-eun remained completely absorbed in the piles of pills and medicinal ingredients, carefully checking something over.

I decided to examine the book myself while she finished her work. The cover reeked of the Five Poisons Sect from the first glance, but it wasn’t as though the book was going to run off while she was busy, and for all I knew the pages inside could be blank. Calling her over only to find nothing of real importance would have left me feeling awkward. The crest alone carried meaning, of course, but the true value would depend on what was written inside.

Let’s see…

—Flip.

The moment I turned past the cover illustrated with five venomous creatures, a single name leapt out at me. This was clearly a diary written by the deputy leader of the Centipede Unit—one of the Five Poisons Sect’s forces named after the centipede, much like the Island Snake Unit we had encountered before.

Aigoo, and here I thought it was something important… Good thing I didn’t call Hwa-eun over.

I had gotten my hopes up because of the crest, only to find someone’s personal diary. Why stamp a diary with the sect’s crest? Thinking of it in terms of my previous life, it felt about as special as a company notebook with the corporate logo printed on the cover that Cho might have found lying around.

A little disappointing, sure… but nothing’s more entertaining than reading someone else’s diary. Ehehe… Still, “Centipede Unit”? Pretty damn cheeky of them.

Learning it was a diary rather than some critical manual was a bit of a letdown from an intelligence standpoint, yet the fact that it was someone’s private journal only sharpened my interest. Judging by the name, it belonged to a woman. People always said the most entertaining books in the world were other people’s diaries—and among those, a little sister’s or big sister’s diary was the absolute best. She wasn’t my sister, of course, but I figured I could still look forward to something similar.

What truly rankled me, though, was that the owner of this book belonged to something called the Centipede Unit.

The nerve of them, calling themselves the Centipede Unit when they don’t even have a proper mascot.

I myself possessed the Flying Centipede—one of the Ten Great Poisons—and the Ink-Black Demon Centipede of the Twenty-Four Poison Branches, not to mention their base form, the Azure-Spotted Centipede… and even I hadn’t gone around calling myself the Centipede Unit. Yet these Five Poisons Sect bastards, who clearly only raised ordinary centipedes, had the gall to use that name? The sheer arrogance of it made my blood boil. They hadn’t even asked permission from me, the man who actually owned both a Ten Great Poison and a Twenty-Four Poison Branch specimen. The second I ran into these punks I was going to give them a thorough thrashing. It was basically a copyright violation. I might not have held an official copyright, but considering the centipedes I kept, they damn well ought to have recognized my rights.

Obviously the copyright belongs to me, right?

Muttering about their insolence, I turned the page. The first entry was dated Jingzhe of this past spring. The diary owner’s record began.

Hmm. Surprisingly rich intel.

I had assumed the diary would hold little strategic value, yet it opened with pure honeyed information. The writer seemed meticulous; the pages were packed with exactly the kind of details we needed. The giant army horseflies we had already suspected of being their handiwork were confirmed as the Five Poisons Sect’s doing, and I even learned the names of their internal combat units. Eager to see how much more gold lay ahead, I flipped the page.

—Flip.

I paused there and took a moment to organize everything I had learned. The contents were so grotesque that I needed to sort them in my head.

From what I had read so far I now understood O Cheong-yu’s true identity and exactly how these bastards had raised the giant bedbugs. The “Miss Cheong-yu” who kept appearing in the diary had to be that goth-fashion psycho woman who had once tried to human-traffic me after punching a hole through Geom-bong’s side. Being ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠called “Miss” meant she was of the Five Poisons Sect’s bloodline.

As for how they had enlarged the bedbugs and then raised them… the Five Poisons Sect really was completely unhinged.

They feed people to their bugs without the slightest hesitation, huh?

They possessed the mad cruelty to use human beings as livestock feed without batting an eye.

Just then Hwa-eun’s voice reached me from beside me.

“All of these are Blood-Replenishing Pills? Why are there so many?”

I turned to find crates stacked in front of her and all around her; even the large open boxes nearby were packed full of pills. From the way she tilted her head while staring at the medicines, she had clearly identified what they were. Every pill she had examined so far must have been the Blood-Replenishing Pills mentioned in the diary.

Looks like we should go through this book together.

Reading it side by side would be better. It would answer her questions in one stroke. So I invited her over at once.

“Hwa-eun, would you care to look at this with me?”

“Did you find something?”

“It’s the diary of the deputy leader of the Centipede Unit—one of the Five Poisons Sect’s combat forces.”

“The Five Poisons Sect!? A diary, though?”

At the mention of a Five Poisons Sect diary Hwa-eun hurried over. I let her read everything I had already covered. Once she finished the earlier pages her eyes flew wide open.

“Th-this is…”

Having just discovered the true nature of the Blood-Replenishing Pills she had been examining, she turned the next page of the section I had been reading with a stunned expression.

That was the final entry. The woman lying dead in this log cabin had almost certainly taken her own life.

I closed the book, stood, and decided to inspect the nearby breeding facilities. We needed to gauge their scale and how many bedbugs still remained. More importantly, the surviving females had to be eliminated without fail.

“Let’s check the place where they were raising the bedbugs first.”

“Understood, So-ryong.”

As we headed outside I asked Cho to fetch Aunt Seol.

“Cho, would you go bring Aunt Seol? I think we’re going to need her help on this one.”

“—Chirup!”

The Five Poisons Sect’s involvement was now certain, and the stronghold still held a considerable stock of supplies and medicines. Even though Hwa-eun was a daughter of the Tang Clan, Aunt Seol—who held the position of elder—would be far more useful for handling matters like this. That was why I had asked Cho to bring her.

I tucked the diary into my robes and stepped outside. Cho took to the sky on his errand and vanished down the mountain slope.

“They mentioned a cave, so it must be that way.”

“Then let’s head over there.”

Once Cho was gone, Hwa-eun pointed toward the mountainside. A short walk in that direction revealed a cave half-hidden among the trees. As we approached the entrance a faint, cloying stench of bedbugs drifted out from within. Quite a number still seemed to be left inside.

“What should we do?”

Hwa-eun looked at me, the scent making her ask for direction.

“We’ll prepare torches and go in. The males that escaped will all die within the year, but we have to deal with any females no matter what. As the diary made clear, even a single one getting out would be a disaster.”

“Will we be all right?”

Even if we failed to wipe them all out, any males that had already slipped outside could not reproduce on their own and would vanish within a year. The females still imprisoned, however, were another matter entirely. We had to confirm their presence ourselves and destroy them for certain.

After persuading Hwa-eun, we lit torches taken from the stronghold and carefully entered the cave.

—Crunch, crunch.

As we advanced cautiously into the darkness, I sensed bedbugs everywhere. The blazing torches kept them hiding in the shadows, unable to approach easily. A little farther in we found desiccated corpses scattered about and four large wooden doors set into the cave floor.

“Looks like they dug pits and covered them with wooden lids to raise them.”

The Five Poisons Sect’s bedbug farm consisted of deep pits dug into the floor and sealed with wooden doors. Every door, however, stood wide open, and the females they had supposedly isolated were nowhere to be seen.

Where the hell are the females?

The cave was not particularly deep; the ceiling was high but we had already reached a dead end, yet the place where the females were supposed to be kept remained invisible. While Hwa-eun and I scanned the area, a conspicuous mound of bedbugs in the far corner of the breeding grounds caught my eye.

“Wait—what’s that!?”

I raised the torch and approached the bizarre mass. The swarm of writhing bedbugs scattered in a frantic rush.

“Looks like they’re inside this.”

“Here?”

At that exact moment—

“Who the hell are you!?”

Just as I was about to lay a hand on the crate that almost certainly held the female bedbugs, a sharp male voice rang out from the cave entrance.

Startled by the unfamiliar voice, I spun around. A man holding a torch glared at us with fierce eyes.

Don’t tell me… The diary said the Centipede Unit Leader had stepped out… There’s no way this is him, right?

Talk about the absolute worst goddamn timing.