Natural Enemy 6
Startled by Gu Cheon-ak’s cry, the pale-faced boy cradled in the woman’s arms broke into a smile and shouted back.
“What, you ask? I am your natural enemy!”
“Natural enemy?”
Natural enemy—a foe sent down from the heavens themselves.
He took another step toward the boy, yet a crushing sense of powerlessness flooded every inch of his body. It felt as though all the blood in his veins were scattering into countless fragments.
“Khuh…”
The Blood Cult elder known as Blood Eagle Claw, Gu Cheon-ak, had cultivated the Ghost Blood Explosive Flow Divine Art. Among all the internal energy arts of the Blood Cult, it was the most powerful that anyone short of the Blood Demon himself could learn—a supreme technique of the highest order. It accelerated the flow of blood to unleash sudden explosive power, or drained the vital blood of others to replenish one’s own inner force and stamina. So long as one could keep seizing vital blood in the midst of battle, the art promised a fighter could continue until his limbs themselves wore away to nothing.
And yet, after he had drawn the boy’s vital blood and circulated it once through his body, he found he could no longer move the blood inside him at all.
The Blood Cult’s internal arts did not travel through the acupoints. They channeled inner force through the blood vessels themselves, mixing qi into the bloodstream and sending it racing through the entire body. Absolute dominion over one’s blood was essential—yet that blood had completely slipped from his control.
It was absurd. Ordinary dispersing-power poison could never affect the Ghost Blood Explosive Flow Divine Art. Despite the name, such poisons only disrupted the flow of qi through the acupoints; they were useless against a method that used the blood vessels as its pathways. That very immunity had allowed the Blood Cult’s experts to sweep through the martial world thirty years ago during the catastrophe known as the Blood Cult’s Bloody Chaos, when the Blood Demon nearly returned. All they had needed to do was scatter dispersing-power poison and then harvest the martial artists who dropped like ordinary men.
But whatever this child had done, Gu Cheon-ak now felt exactly as the name suggested—his blood was scattering and crumbling throughout his body. That such an effect was even possible defied belief.
“W-what have you done to me, you little bastard?!”
“Noona! Something’s wrong with him! Attack!”
“N-Noona…?”
The Tang Clan girl looked startled for a heartbeat at the boy’s words, then steeled herself and lashed out with the Flood Dragon Whip.
Thin, razor-edged iron plates lined the whip; once it coiled around a limb and yanked, flesh and bone parted as cleanly as if severed by a blade.
Shhhk!
The whip streaked straight for Gu Cheon-ak’s throat. Under normal circumstances a fighter of her level would never have landed the blow—but reduced to little more than a common man, he could not dodge the coil that snapped around his neck.
“Keuhk!”
The Flood Dragon Whip cinched tight. In a panic he seized the whip with both hands, only for dark crimson blood to well between his fingers. The Tang girl’s face, cold as winter ice, filled his vision.
“Th-this is impossible! The Blood Cult’s return, the blood of the under-heavens—”
“Just shut up and die!”
Sensing his end, Gu Cheon-ak tried to force out one last declaration, but the whip tore free of his grip and throat before the words could finish.
Shhhk!
Deprived of his inner force, Gu Cheon-ak’s world spun. Thus ended the hollow death of Blood Eagle Claw, elder of the Blood Cult.
Honestly, I hadn’t been sure it would work.
In that moment, though, it was the only card I had left, so I’d gone all in and slammed my head against the wall—and somehow it paid off better than I ever expected. I’d hoped, at best, to poison him enough to kill him or drive him off. The result was far more decisive.
The instant his head left his shoulders, a fountain of scarlet blood erupted from the stump. His torso toppled backward like a snuffed candle and crumpled to the ground. The dark blood pouring from his body soaked into the rain-drenched earth, staining it a deeper red.
Silence followed.
No one could speak. The man who had raged through them like a great tiger leaping into a pack of wolves had simply collapsed in an instant of pure emptiness.
Then a single shout shattered the hush.
“We got him! The young lady has taken down an elder of the Blood Cult!”
“““Waaaaaah!”””
Cheers erupted from every direction.
“The young lady has claimed the head of a Blood Cult elder!”
“Long live the Sacheon Tang Clan!”
“Waaaaah!”
Fweeeee!
A clear signal dart from the Tang Clan streaked into the clearing sky. Warriors who had been scattered across the battlefield came flooding back into the open ground where the bloody fight had taken place.
Through it all, Noona held me against her chest, staring down with a dazed expression.
“So-ryong… what in the world did you do? How could you bring down a Blood Cult elder…?”
Water droplets fell from her hair and tapped against my forehead. I was soaked through, yet the arms that held me felt strangely warm. That warmth made my eyelids grow heavy. I’d lost a lot of blood, and the tiger keelback’s venom was finally taking hold.
I looked up at her and managed to speak.
“Noona… I think I need the venom treated. I got bitten by a tiger keelback…”
“A t-tiger keelback? But those don’t have venom—”
Her eyes went wide. The last thing I heard was her frantic shout growing fainter in my ears.
“Someone bring an antidote pearl! So-ryong’s been poisoned by a tiger keelback!”
“Young Master So-ryong! Young Master!”
Noona’s shoulders shook as she sobbed. Through my dimming vision I saw Cho, Hyang, and Bin scrambling up onto her. That was the final image that reached me.
A familiar floor.
Floor?
I blinked. When you wake after collapsing, you’re supposed to see a familiar ceiling, not the floorboards. Yet there I was, face-down on something that looked like the wooden frame they used for beatings in historical dramas.
I tried to move. Three urgent voices stopped me at once.
“You must not move, So-ryong!”
“So-ryong, you can’t move!”
“Stay still, child.”
All three voices I knew. One belonged to the family elder in charge of the medical hall, one to Noona, and the last to Grandfather—Man Dok Shin Gun, the Divine Lord of Ten Thousand Poisons.
“Where…?”
“You’re awake? It’s already been ten days since you collapsed, So-ryong.”
“Ten days?”
Noona was crouched beside me, watching my face. She wiped my forehead with a cool cloth and asked gently,
“Yes. Ten full days since you went down. Do you remember anything?”
“Yes… up through the Blood Cult elder falling…”
She nodded.
“Thanks to you we took his head, then rushed you straight back to the clan. The poisoning was so severe that if Grandfather hadn’t returned early, it would have been disastrous.”
“Just what happened? They said you were poisoned by a tiger keelback. Do those snakes even have venom?”
I answered from my prone position.
“Yes, Grandfather. The tiger keelback carries two different venoms.”
“Two?”
“Two? But everyone says tiger keelbacks have no poison…”
Noona was right. The tiger keelback—found across Korea, China, and Japan—had never been recorded as venomous in any of the three countries until the 1980s. The little bastards are timid; even when people grab them they usually choose flight over a bite. Apparently even the Tang Clan had never bothered to examine a snake that refused to bite humans, so they still believed the species was harmless.
“No. They’re just gentle. They still have two kinds of venom.”
“Very well. But they also said you used dispersing-power poison on the Blood Cult elder. From what I hear, you deliberately let him drink your blood while you were already poisoned by the tiger keelback. Does that mean the snake’s venom itself acts as dispersing-power poison?”
Leave it to the Tang Clan’s greatest master, Man Dok Shin Gun, to piece the whole picture together from the barest outline. I forced out an answer while still lying face-down.
“I believe so. It seems to work only on people of the Blood Cult, though. Even I never expected the effect to be this strong.”
“Ohhh! Remarkable! Do you know how many martial artists died in the Bloody Chaos thirty years ago? If only we had known this sooner!”
Grandfather’s voice was thick with regret. He could not hold back the next question.
“Tell me, then—why does the tiger keelback’s venom do that to Blood Cult fiends?”
“I can’t be certain, but my guess is…”
Snake venoms fall into two broad categories according to their mechanism: neurotoxic and hemotoxic.
Neurotoxins attack nerve cells or neurotransmitters, paralyzing sensory and central nerves until the heart and lungs simply stop. Cardiac arrest or asphyxiation is the usual ending.
Hemotoxins, on the other hand, destroy capillaries and muscle tissue by attacking cell walls. A bite from a hemotoxic snake often ends in multiple organ failure, rhabdomyolysis, or cerebral hemorrhage—blood bursting from the organs, toxic breakdown products flooding the circulation, or a fatal bleed inside the brain.
Anyone with a little medical knowledge might find that odd. Blood contains a protein called fibrin produced by platelets; when toxins dissolve cell walls or bleeding begins, fibrin forms clots that should seal the damage and keep the venom from spreading. Yet snake venom races through the body and kills anyway, thanks to one particular protein among the many in the venom: an anticoagulant. It suppresses the clotting factors in the blood so that thrombi never form.
Once hemotoxin enters the bloodstream it shreds the walls of red blood cells while simultaneously preventing the blood from clotting—hence the cascade into organ failure or brain hemorrhage.
“It keeps the blood from clotting?”
“Yes, Grandfather. In other words…”
That was why the idea had struck me in the middle of the crisis.
The very name “Blood Cult” suggested they worshipped blood. They drove their hands into living bodies to drink blood, and even from the dead they could draw blood at a distance. Against something that looked like a vampire knock-off or a giant mosquito, what would happen if you fed it hemotoxin?
I had asked myself that question and rolled the dice. The result had been better than I dared hope. The way he screamed about “dispersing-power poison” told me his inner force had felt as if it were shattering into pieces. Thank heaven the gamble paid off. Failure would have meant starting my third life.
“…so I believe the venom struck at the very foundation of their martial arts—the blood itself.”
When I finished, Grandfather threw his head back and laughed heartily.
“Hahaha! Hwa-eun told me you called yourself the natural enemy sent down from the heavens to the Blood Cult elder. Is that true?”
“Ah… yes, Grandfather.”
I answered carefully, worried it had sounded a little too middle-school-chuuni. His laughter only grew louder.
“Hahaha! You’re right. If you can render their inner force completely unusable, then you are indeed their natural enemy. They’ve been in hiding for thirty years and now they’re crawling back out, but this time we will tear them out by the roots!
They dared harm our family while I was away. Just as you said, our Sacheon Tang Clan will become their natural enemy.
Isn’t that so?”
Now that we knew their weakness, all we had to do was harvest tiger keelback venom in bulk. Those Blood Cult mosquitoes were finished. Exactly as Grandfather said, the Tang Clan—masters of poison—would become the natural enemy of the entire Blood Cult.
“Yes. We cannot let anyone who harms the people of the Sacheon Tang Clan walk free. A hundred punishments for a hundred crimes!”
You picked the wrong people to mess with, you mosquito bastards.
I swore then and there that I would wring out their very souls with Fabre-brand poison.
They’d scarred my arm, after all…