The First Molt
The day after we had grandly set the discipline of the premier Spiritual Medicine Family straight.
In the training ground behind the courtyard residence used by the family’s direct line.
"Again! Whether it has poison or not, where did I tell you to throw it?"
"At the center of the body, you said."
"And why the center of the body?"
"Because if you aim for the head or shoulders, they can easily dodge, so you throw it at the center so that even if they dodge, it might graze them."
"That’s right. The chest and abdomen are the best for that. Now, try again."
Stare down the straw dummy and aim carefully for the center…
In the training ground where a massive ancient dead tree several centuries old stood grandly in the middle, I was diligently hurling throwing daggers at a human-shaped straw dummy.
At the very moment I snapped my arm back like a rubber band and the throwing dagger left my fingertips—
Noonim came rushing into the training ground with a startled look on her face.
"So-So-ryong! This is terrible!"
Thud!
At Noonim’s cry as she burst in with a shocked expression, the throwing dagger that had left my hand sailed past the straw dummy and buried itself in the hollow dead tree behind it.
Grandfather, the Myriad Poison Divine Lord’s face twisted in displeasure.
"Hey! I told you to concentrate your mind when throwing daggers! If this were real combat, the enemy’s blade would already be at your throat!"
"I-I’m sorry."
He said to hit the ones far away, but now he’s just looking for an excuse to scold me…
I flinched at Grandfather’s rebuke and looked toward Noonim, who had come running to the entrance.
What met my eyes was Noonim, who already had large eyes, but now they were three times bigger than usual, as big as a pure romance comic heroine’s.
I asked carefully, gauging Grandfather’s mood.
"What is the matter, Young Lady?"
Then Noonim said something hard to understand.
"O-our kids! Our kids are acting strange!"
"What! Kids? What are you talking about!? You have kids?"
At Noonim’s words, this time Grandfather’s eyes went wide.
Of course—his unmarried granddaughter suddenly ran in saying she had kids. Who wouldn’t be shocked?
Realizing her slip, Noonim answered with a face as red as the Moon Laurel of her moniker.
"That’s not it. The centipedes. The centipedes are acting strange!"
She said mom and dad, and now she calls them our kids.
I suppressed a laugh at Noonim’s ditzy side and asked again.
"The centipedes, you mean?"
First, I scanned Noonim’s body at her words—to find the centipedes that should have been clinging to her.
Lately, whenever I did physical training, I usually entrusted the little ones to Noonim. Because if they stuck to me during martial arts practice, it made moving my body difficult. They ate, and I got freedom in the meantime. It had been working without problems so far.
But the centipedes were nowhere to be seen.
Did these guys hide in Noonim’s bosom?
Wondering if they might have slipped into her collar, I thoughtlessly reached to check inside her clothes, and Noonim flinched in surprise and clutched her collar.
She looked at me with startled eyes and said,
"Th-they’re not here. The kids all fell off!"
"Fell off!?"
"And something’s weird. How do I put this?"
Noonim couldn’t explain what strange thing had happened.
I had confirmed with the Azure-Spotted Centipede that they would stay on their mother’s body until they molted twice, so I quickly ran with Grandfather to the pavilion where Noonim had been. If something was wrong with them, it would be a disaster.
Arriving at the pavilion, I saw the centipedes lying motionless in the middle.
"What’s with these guys? Kids?"
I hurriedly jumped up onto the pavilion and examined them, revealing something odd. Their colors seemed a little more transparent. No, rather than transparent, it was as if they had put on an extra layer—like they were wrapped in plastic wrap. The moment I saw it, I understood the situation.
Ah, what—they’re about to molt.
It seemed their first molt was happening.
"You don’t need to be alarmed. Creatures with hard shells like centipedes shed their skin as their bodies grow. Right now, they seem to be trying to shed their shells."
"Shed their shells?"
"Yes, soon…"
I was in the middle of explaining to calm the startled Noonim when her cry of surprise rang out.
"Oh! Look! Over there! The head, the head!"
At Noonim’s shout, I turned my head, and the back of one of their heads began to swell.
Rip.
And the back of the head split open. Soon a yellow neck emerged, and the centipede’s head started to pull free from the shell. The body began to wriggle free. Like a soul slipping out of a body, it was sliding forward.
When it stretched out its freed body, what had been about the thickness of a thick sausage was now as wide as a forearm. Its body, which had been pure yellow, now began to take on a white sheen. And the shell seemed sharper somehow. As if filling the shell completely with bodily fluids, its body expanded and contracted repeatedly.
"Ohhh. What a fascinating sight."
"Truly. It looks twice as big."
"Ohhh. The second one is shedding its skin too."
"The third one’s head has opened!"
Noonim and Grandfather reacted with the wonder of people watching a nature documentary.
As the centipedes that had slowly emerged from their shells began to dry their bodies, Noonim asked,
"By the way, what are these children’s names?"
"Names?"
Come to think of it, I hadn’t named them yet. I scratched my head and answered.
"Oil-i, O-i, Osam-i?"
Noonim looked at me with a disappointed expression. She shook her head and spoke with a face that said it was ridiculous.
"Centipedes become dragons if they live for a thousand years. And when they become dragons, Oil-i, O-i, Osam-i? That won’t do. They need more majestic names befitting dragons. These are the children who will protect the Tang Clan for the next thousand years, after all."
"No, Young Lady, even if the centipedes live a thousand years, they can’t become dragons…"
Noonim believed that centipedes become dragons after a thousand years. It was like an elementary schooler believing Santa Claus is real. When I said that was absolutely impossible, Noonim appealed to Grandfather beside her for help.
"If Young Hero So-ryong knows so much about venomous creatures, how can he not know that? Centipedes become dragons after a thousand years. Isn’t that right, Grandfather?"
Then Grandfather nodded along.
Even if she was his pretty granddaughter, I felt I needed to reevaluate Grandfather, the Myriad Poison Divine Lord. Christmas is only protected for the sake of children’s innocence until elementary school. Noonim was twenty, so it was time to give her the red pill and make her face reality.
"Ah, well, a thousand-year-old centipede does become a dragon, so people also call centipedes Heavenly Dragons."
Well, what can I even say to these people.
Come to think of it, what kind of conversation could I have with people who don’t even have the concept of biological taxonomy? People who probably think spiders and scorpions are completely different animals.
Soon after, Noonim and Grandfather began freely naming someone else’s companion venomous creatures.
"How about something like Geumhu, Geumje, Geumsang? Since we put ‘geum’ for the most precious things in the Tang Clan, calling them Golden Empress, Emperor, and Minister."
So the kids would be called Geumhu, Geumje, Geumsang?
Noonim’s naming sense was worse than mine. The centipedes seemed to think the same, as they raised their heads to look at Noonim even while drying their bodies. If they had mouths, they would definitely have told me this was nonsense.
Setting everything else aside, our centipedes were all females. I pointed that fact out to Noonim first.
"Young Lady, those children are all females. Women."
"What!? All three?"
"Yes."
"Then what should we do…"
Before Noonim could unleash her worst naming sense, I decided to finalize the children’s names.
"Let’s just call them Cho, Hyang, and Bin."
"Cho, Hyang, Bin?"
"The one over there with long antennae is Cho, meaning first. The one constantly moving its antennae is Hyang, meaning fragrance, for the second. The third gets Bin with the character for light, because its shell is shinier than the others."
Noonim poked her cheek with her index finger, made a thinking face for a long while, then nodded.
"Alright. Well… the dad is the one who names the kids, after all."
"What?"
At Noonim’s words, Grandfather made a dumbfounded expression.
Normally, centipedes eat their own shells after molting, but the little ones showed no interest in theirs. Even when I held them up to their mouths, they turned their heads away, so it seemed they really grew on energy and qi alone.
Thus, three centipede shells were left behind. Three somewhat yellowish transparent shells remained on the pavilion floor. The centipede shells, crumpled like socks they’d taken off after wriggling free.
I was thinking I should stretch them out and make them look nicely taxidermied when—
Clang!
"This is!?"
"A precious material."
When Grandfather picked up one shell and lightly struck it with a dagger, a strange sound rang out. A sound like metal clashing against metal came from the centipede’s shell.
"The shell of the one we caught on Hainan Island was hard too, and sure enough, this is the same. It won’t even get a scratch from ordinary weapons."
I hadn’t known because the little ones were soft, but there was this secret hidden away.
As I picked up the fallen shell and examined it this way and that, Grandfather studied the one he was holding for a long time, thinking something over, then brought it over and held it against my arm this way and that—as if he were trying to fit me for custom clothes.
Then he nodded and spoke.
"With this, I should make So-ryong some fist gauntlets. If we connect the legs and bind them, we’ll get some fine gauntlets."
"Fist gauntlets!?"
"Yes. The length is just about right for the forearm, so making gauntlets that protect from the elbow to the back of the hand would be good. If we put the head on the back of the hand, we could coat these fangs with poison and use them to stab. It would be excellent."
Whoa! Centipede shell fist gauntlets! With fangs on the back of the hand!? Isn’t that basically a centipede man?
Grandfather was describing an awesome design he’d conceived. I’d thought he was a different kind of old man from the first time I saw him, and he really understood a man’s romance.
"Is that really possible?"
As I asked again to confirm if it was really possible, if it was really true, Noonim smiled.
"Our Tang Clan blacksmiths are extremely skilled. They make hair-thin needles and all sorts of hidden weapons, after all. So they should be able to make gauntlets from these children’s shells just as Grandfather said."
"Whoa!"
I’d thought of them as the greatest assassin clan of the Central Plains, but the Sichuan Tang Family wasn’t a bad clan at all. A clan that knew about romance, you could say?
So I was thinking of making two into gauntlets and taxidermying one when Grandfather’s voice continued.
"We should make the remaining one into hand guards for Hwa-eun. The inside is soft and the outside is hard, so it would be the perfect finishing touch for protecting the hands from hidden weapons."
No, I’d planned to keep one as a breeding record, but Grandfather was saying he’d make gloves for Noonim with the remaining shed shell of mine.
When I looked at him with startled eyes, Grandfather chuckled and asked,
"Why? Do you feel it’s a waste?"
At Grandfather’s question, Noonim looked at me with an expression that said, surely that couldn’t be? I quickly shook my head.
"N-no way. How could that be?"
I answered no, but honestly, it was a bit of a waste.
After a full day had passed, the centipedes crawled up onto my body. Their bodies didn’t seem fully hardened yet, but they seemed able to move well enough.
What had changed after molting was that once the first molt was over, the centipedes had now taken on a perfect centipede appearance. Centipedes belong to the subclass Epimorpha, animals that grow without adding more segments from the form they are born in. But the newly born ones had looked a bit round like millipedes, and now they had flattened out more, with harder legs and shells. Now they were perfect centipedes.
Their weight seemed to have increased a bit too; they felt definitely heavier than before.
"Wow, you guys got heavy."
Chirrr.
When I made a fuss about them being heavy, the centipedes let out warning sounds as if to say they were ladies too, how dare you call us heavy.
The ones that had flattened more than before started looking for new spots instead of their previous ones. Where before they had clung to my torso, now the flatter, slightly longer ones each wrapped around both my arms. And the remaining one wrapped around my waist and settled in.
Because the tips of their legs had gotten sharper, it tingled a little every time I moved, and I was getting used to their weight and size as I walked past the front of the family head’s hall with them wrapped around me.
"Hehe. See that? What did I tell you!?"
"As expected of the Sichuan Tang Clan. Family Head, let’s hit the pleasure houses today!"
Two burly men like older brothers with fists came out from the family head’s hall direction with excited faces and headed down the mountain. The money pouches in their hands clinking suggested they’d hit the jackpot somehow.
Even if this was an assassin clan, I was thinking they didn’t seem like people who belonged here when the voice of my father-in-law came from inside the family head’s hall.
"Go call So-ryong for me."
A voice telling them to go fetch me.
What’s going on?