First Kiss, Part Two
With my fists clenched tight, the sour liquid that stung the tip of my tongue went down my throat in big, easy gulps.
The fluid the queen bee forced into me shot straight past my throat and slammed into my stomach.
It was like knocking back a glass of hard whiskey—the liquid’s path made me painfully aware of exactly where my esophagus and stomach were.
And in the middle of all that chaos, one thought filled my head completely.
More than anything else, the fact that my first kiss had been stolen by a queen bee.
Yeah. That was the only thought crowding my mind. I wanted my first time to be a kiss that shared our hearts… My romance is…
Bees clung all over me so I couldn’t even resist, and the more I thrashed the tighter their legs squeezed.
In the end I gave up struggling and went limp, and the liquid the queen kept pouring into me continued to flow down my throat.
—Gulp. Gulp.
And then, a moment later.
The kiss that had felt both short and endless finally ended; the queen’s antennae gently patted the top of my head.
—Churp. When her mouth left mine, a long string of liquid stretched between our lips before snapping.
I sank to the ground in hollow despair, and the bees simply dragged me out of the hollow tree, then popped back into the hole themselves.
So you had your fun and that was it… Even the queen bee is still a queen, huh…
The sudden absurdity left me rattled, but for now I just started walking from the hollow tree toward the entrance of the training grounds.
—Thud. Thud.
I was still blankly heading that way when it hit me.
I hadn’t fully processed that the queen had stolen my first kiss, yet the sour taste lingering in my mouth finally clicked.
What the hell is this… Wait. Hang on!? Don’t tell me what I just swallowed was ro—
But right before I could finish naming what I’d eaten, something else took over.
In my confusion I hadn’t noticed, but once the haze cleared, my body started screaming that something was wrong.
With every step a strange discomfort seized me.
A weird, ticklish unease.
At first I figured my mental state had just collapsed from kissing the Golden-Haired Bee King, but it wasn’t nausea. An odd sensation was rising from my lower abdomen, right below the navel.
—Thump. Thump.
When I focused, something the size of a grain of sand pulsed faintly in my lower dantian—small, urgent throbs.
By the time I nearly reached the training-ground entrance, that tiny pulse had swelled, and all sorts of symptoms began exploding through my body.
My vision tinted red and heat seemed to flood me.
No—my vision was turning red and heat was flooding me.
And that sand-grain pulse in my lower abdomen had clearly become a full heartbeat.
—Thump-thump.
Heat surging through my body and the pounding in my dantian.
The world started spinning.
Something was racing along pathways inside me, spreading without pause.
Wait a second—this is definitely the dantian I felt when I was learning the Five Poisons Returning to Origin Divine Art! They said the Golden-Haired Bee King’s honey raises two months of internal energy… so then the royal jelly the queen eats…
The realization that the pulse was my dantian hit me just as I figured out why my tiny core was going haywire.
Through my dimming vision I saw, far off, Grandfather Mandok Singun and Noonim racing toward me.
“So-ryong-ah!”
“So-ryong!”
Then a massive wave of heat swallowed me whole.
The moment they heard So-ryong had been dragged off by the Golden-Haired Bee Kings, Mandok Singun and Dang Hwa-eun came running in a panic.
They found him walking out of the training-ground entrance with a vacant expression.
—Thud.
So-ryong swayed once, then toppled over like a log.
“So-ryong!”
“So-ryong-ah!”
Somehow Dang Hwa-eun moved faster than her grandfather, flying like a swallow to catch him in her arms.
She checked his condition at once.
Flushed red cheeks, a strangely sweet scent on his breath, and a bizarre heat pouring off his body.
The arms holding him felt scorching hot.
“This is—!? Grandfather, something’s wrong with So-ryong. Heat is pouring from his body!”
“Move aside and let me see!”
Grandfather rushed over, took So-ryong’s pulse, then spoke with startled eyes.
“This is… He’s barely begun cultivating, yet it looks like he just swallowed an enormous spiritual medicine!”
“A spiritual medicine?”
“Yes. I don’t know what he ate, but it was a big one. We have no time. I’ll guide the medicine’s energy—stand guard!”
“Yes, Grandfather!”
According to So-ryong the Golden-Haired Bee King’s honey wouldn’t form again for a long while, so whatever he’d eaten was a mystery.
Grandfather hurriedly stripped off So-ryong’s upper clothes and began guiding the spiritual energy.
No matter how potent the medicine, Grandfather was sweating with effort, yet every meridian in So-ryong’s body still bulged as if ready to burst.
The three little ones clinging to Hwa-eun—Cho, Hyang, and Bin—grew anxious and started climbing up and down her body.
“Don’t worry. Daddy will be fine.”
Even after her words the three centipedes fretted. When Hwa-eun warned them that crossing over to So-ryong might make things worse, they finally settled down.
Truly mysterious little creatures.
—Ughnn.
When I came to, the first thing I felt was a cool sensation on my forehead.
I cracked my eyes open and saw Noonim’s worried face, her cheeks faintly pink as she wiped my brow with a damp cloth.
Then her anxious voice reached me.
“So-ryong? Are you awake?”
“Wh-where…?”
It wasn’t my room, so I asked. She continued wiping the sweat from my forehead as she answered.
“This is the Tang Clan’s Medical Hall. When we heard you’d been taken by the Golden-Haired Bee Kings we ran to the training grounds, but you walked out on your own and suddenly collapsed. Grandfather and I brought you here. Do you remember what happened?”
Right. I got dragged off by bees and had my first kiss stolen… I’m sorry, Noonim! Khuh…
I’d wanted it to be with her…
Grief that my first kiss had been taken by someone else—no, by a venomous creature—made me hang my head. Noonim looked startled.
“So-ryong, are you all right!? What’s wrong? Does something hurt? Should I call Grandfather?”
But nothing good would come of her finding out, so I steadied myself and answered.
“Ah, no. Just… for a moment…”
She pressed me with that same worried look.
“What on earth did you eat? Grandfather says it was somewhere between a mid-grade and high-grade spiritual medicine. Not the Golden-Haired Bee King’s honey—something else. An inner core, perhaps?”
Spiritual medicine? Oh right. It felt like I was force-fed royal jelly.
Her words brought back the forgotten fact.
The queen of the Golden-Haired Bee Kings had fed me royal jelly.
And thinking about it, what we’d done wasn’t really a kiss so much as the nutritional exchange bees perform among themselves.
I’d prepared a home for them, so maybe it was a housewarming gift—feeding a guest.
She had definitely given me royal jelly, so it was more like a meal than a kiss.
Besides, there’d been no feelings involved.
Thank goodness. It doesn’t count.
I decided it was a definite no-count and answered her question.
“Ah, so what I ate was… The queen fed me the food she herself eats. I don’t know the exact name, but if I had to give it one, I’d call it Bee King Jelly.”
“Bee King Jelly?”
Explaining royal jelly meant explaining bees in general, so I gave a detailed account to Noonim, who was clearly curious.
“How should I put this? There are three kinds of bees in a hive.”
“Three kinds? Last time you only mentioned the queen and the workers. There’s another?”
I’d already told her about the queen when we first brought the Golden-Haired Bee Kings here. I nodded.
“Yes—workers, drones, and the queen. As I said before, the queen lays eggs her whole life, and the workers work their whole lives.”
“Then… what about the drones?”
She seemed curious about the drones, so I smiled inwardly as I answered.
I could already picture her reaction.
“Well, of course…”
“Of course?”
“They share the pleasures of cloud and rain with the queen… and other than that, they can’t do a single thing. Drones, that is.”
“…”
Noonim fell quiet, apparently chewing over this new knowledge.
Then she spoke with faintly flushed cheeks.
“Ahem. W-well then. Anyway, please tell me more about the Bee King Jelly.”
She was building a little resistance; she recovered her composure quickly. I thought it was cute and continued.
“Yes. The bees gather honey and pollen into the hive because that’s what they live on—but only the workers actually eat the honey and pollen.”
“Then what about the queen?”
“From the day she’s born until the day she dies, she lives solely on the Bee King Jelly the workers produce for her.”
To be precise, worker larvae only receive royal jelly for a short period; after that they switch to honey for energy and pollen for protein.
But the queen eats only one food her entire life: the royal jelly made by the workers.
As workers age their duties change, and during the period they nurse the brood their salivary glands transform into something like mammary glands that secrete this royal jelly.
Bee milk, if you will.
“Ah, I see. The food the queen eats for life.”
While she nodded along, I put extra weight into the next part so she would really listen.
“But Bee King Jelly has a special effect.”
“A special effect?”
“An ordinary worker lives only about a month and a half, yet a queen who eats Bee King Jelly can live up to sixty times longer. Impressive, isn’t it?”
“Ahh… so that’s why…”
I’d expected something like, “My goodness! Workers live such short lives? And the queen lives sixty times longer!?”
Instead she just nodded calmly.
The reaction was so underwhelming I felt a little deflated…
Then she smiled brightly.
“That clears up the mystery. Congratulations, So-ryong. You said the Golden-Haired Bee King’s honey grants two months of internal energy, right?”
“Congratulations? Well… yes, I did say that.”
I tilted my head at the sudden congratulations, and she explained.
“Because the internal energy method you’ve learned is the Tang Clan’s introductory art—the Five Poisons Returning to Origin Divine Art—you couldn’t absorb every last scrap of the spiritual energy. But if the honey gives two months of power, then according to what you just told me, eating Bee King Jelly has given you exactly sixty times that—ten years of internal energy.”
“Ten years?”
“I congratulate you on this fortuitous encounter.”
At her words I quickly circulated my energy and felt the dantian—now the size of a chestnut.
A vast power I never could have sensed when it was only a grain of sand was writhing inside me.
“This is…?”
“You’ve now obtained roughly the internal energy of the Ten Poisons Realm. Once you pass the Tang Clan’s examinations, you’ll be formally recognized as having reached the Ten Poisons stage.”
Joy that I now had enough energy to use lightfoot techniques and launch hidden weapons like Noonim lasted only a moment.
No—while I’d been preparing for the regular curriculum, her words suddenly told me I’d passed the equivalency exam and now had to take the college entrance test.
I was supposed to memorize the scents of over four thousand poisons and remember the positions of a thousand thrown hidden weapons. Panic hit hard.
In my previous life people called me a genius at memorizing anything about venomous insects I cared about, but my grades in actual studying had been… a little different.
Studying is never that easy…
While I was drowning in terror of the approaching exam, Noonim spoke in a slightly embarrassed voice.
“Um… later, take a look in a silver mirror as well. The Bee King Jelly… it seems to have other effects too.”
“A silver mirror?”
She told me to look in a mirror.
I tilted my head, and just like when I first woke up, her cheeks flushed pink again.