Hebei Peng Family 3
“What!? Strip my daughter’s clothes!?”
“Ghk— W-wait a second…”
I tapped the wrist of the Paeng Family lord whose fist was knotted in my collar, the way you tap out in a fight.
—Tap tap tap.
At this rate I was going to choke to death.
But Lord Paeng, who clearly had no idea what a tap meant, only tightened his grip instead.
Urgent shouts rose from Father-in-law and Elder Sister beside us.
Father-in-law seized Lord Paeng’s arm and forced it down.
“Lord Paeng! Wait a moment! My son-in-law must have a reason for saying such a thing! It is not what you are imagining. Isn’t that so, son-in-law?”
“Lord of the Paeng Family, please let go and hear him out to the end.”
Lord Paeng wiped the blood streaming from his nose with the back of his hand and bellowed,
“Fine! You want to strip the clothes off my daughter who has not even reached her tenth year, with that lecherous look in your eyes—let’s hear what possible reason you could have!”
His whole body shook with rage.
Lecherous, my ass!
Even as the world swam from lack of air, the accusation felt outrageously unfair.
What kind of degenerate looks at a child under ten that way?
My tastes run toward more mature, generous-hearted women like Elder Sister, thank you very much.
“Haaah… Ghk… Aigoo. Nearly died there…”
Thanks to Father-in-law and Elder Sister I finally wrenched free of Lord Paeng’s grip.
I put some distance between myself and the man who had just slandered me, caught my breath, and then explained why the little girl’s clothes had to come off.
“*Cough cough!* Lord of the Paeng Family, please calm yourself and listen to the end. When I said we should remove the young lady’s clothes, I meant we should strip her completely and change her into different clothes.
The reason I suddenly suggested it is this: she may have collapsed because of something she brought from the Paeng Family—clothes or belongings. I was about to propose that we remove every last one of those things from her person.”
“Huh?”
Arms crossed, he had been staring at me as though I were garbage; now his expression slowly shifted.
He looked down at his own clenched fist, swallowed hard, squeezed his eyes shut, and shouted,
“I, Paeng Mu-hwan, doubted Young Hero’s words, so—”
“Wait!”
It felt exactly as if he were about to start beating his own face again—some kind of self-punishment habit.
I grabbed his hand.
“I’ll take it as your heart being in turmoil because your daughter collapsed. Let’s leave it at that.”
He grinned like a simpleton, missing a tooth, and brightened at once.
“To be so generous about another man’s mistake… You’re already a great hero! Thank you! Hehe.”
Apparently he was simply relieved he didn’t have to hit himself.
But I wasn’t finished.
I immediately explained that we needed to change the little girl’s clothes and what we would do next.
“Ah, and from now on the young lady of the Paeng Family will be cared for by our Tang Family, so for the time being I forbid any meetings with members of the Paeng Family.”
When Lord Paeng first described the symptoms, he had said she would collapse once and then recover after a few days.
So the plan was to move the young lady while she was still unconscious and manage her separately.
If we changed her from head to toe, cut her off from every Paeng Family member, and she still collapsed, then the cause was not poison—it was something else. That would clear the mutual suspicion among the Paeng Family themselves.
“Huh? M-me too?”
“Yes. If the same symptoms appear while we are looking after her, that means it is not because of the Paeng Family people—it is some other cause. So please leave her with us for a while.”
When you raise venomous insects, snakes, or amphibians, the keeper has to watch them with extreme care.
They cannot speak or explain themselves, so you have to read from their behavior whether something hurts and whether their condition is good or bad.
And once you decide a creature is sick, what then?
Finding the cause is the next step after discovering a sick child. A keeper usually tries one of two methods.
Those two methods are the elimination method and the addition method.
Elimination means removing the animal’s environment or food one item at a time until you find the cause. Addition means changing the entire environment at once and then adding things back one by one.
So for the young lady of the Paeng Family, I was going with the addition method.
With an animal it might be different, but she was a person. Instead of the elimination method—which might let her collapse several more times from a cause that hadn’t yet been removed—I wanted to strip away every possible cause at once and reintroduce them one by one.
That would put less burden on the child, and if we found the cause it would also clear the misunderstanding among the Paeng Family.
“Oho. Son-in-law, that way we may not pinpoint the exact cause, but at least we can tell whether it is poison or not.”
Father-in-law understood what I meant and nodded; Lord Paeng gave a stiff nod of his own.
“Understood. I leave her in your care, Lord Tang.”
“So-ryong, watch the child for a moment. I’m going to the Hall of Myriad Poisons to fetch different incense.”
In the guest room of the courtyard where the direct line of the Tang Family lived, Elder Sister left me alone with the still-unconscious little girl, saying she would go to the Hall of Myriad Poisons.
Now that she could distinguish every incense she had brought the first time, she wanted to try others.
“Yes, Young Lady. Understood.”
I saw her off and examined the child who still looked half-asleep.
“Haa…”
A sigh escaped me the moment I looked at her face.
The sigh was because of the present situation.
The reason I had insisted on isolating the little girl from the Paeng Family people…
was that because of me, Elder Sister and Mother-in-law were going through unnecessary hardship.
The reason the child was lying in the guest room of the direct-line courtyard of the Tang Family:
After hearing my suggestion, Father-in-law had decided thoroughness was best, so he had the child brought inside the courtyard where only the direct line lived and restricted the maids’ attendance to the absolute minimum.
So the child’s care fell to Elder Sister and Mother-in-law.
I was merely running odd jobs on the side.
And it had already been three days.
“She should be waking up soon, right?”
According to Lord Paeng, she usually woke after three days once she collapsed, so I was staring blankly at the child, wondering when she would open her eyes, when—
Her brows trembled.
A moment later her eyes snapped open; she looked at my face and blinked.
“Oh, Young Lady Paeng, you’re awake? Do you know who I am?”
I asked to check her consciousness now that she was awake, but instead of answering, the little girl sat bolt upright and started patting herself down.
She was wearing clothes Elder Sister used to wear—slightly large and unfamiliar—so she seemed awkward in them.
Then she stared at me with wide eyes.
Her lips wobbled like waves.
A moment later a wail burst out that made me wonder if this was really the same child who had been collapsed in pain.
“Waaaaah! It’s gone!”
The room rang with the cry.
Startled, I tried to soothe her.
She must have been shocked to wake up with a stranger after collapsing.
Since she was saying “it’s gone,” it was probably because her father, Lord Paeng, wasn’t here.
“There, there. Young Lady, you’re upset because Lord Paeng isn’t here, right? You were sick, so Lord Paeng went to find medicine. Come on, stop crying. He’ll be back soon.”
But Young Lady Paeng shook her head violently.
“Candy!”
Ah, so that’s what it was?
The little girl of the Paeng Family woke up and looked for candy instead of her dad.
Lord Paeng might feel a little hurt if he saw this.
According to Elder Sister, when they changed her clothes after she collapsed they found several secret pockets—like the ones the Tang Family uses for hidden weapons—stuffed with candied fruit.
I had wondered where the endless supply of candy came from; it was coming out of those pockets.
So she was probably looking for her candy.
“Waaaaah! My candy!”
Elder Sister said the Paeng Family was famous for wielding great sabers and for having tremendous strength, but this little girl seemed to have been born into the wrong family.
She looked as if she had real talent for sound arts that could attack with the voice alone.
I really feel like my ears are going to bleed and I’m going to collapse!
I covered my ears and spoke to the little girl.
“Now, Young Lady Paeng, c-calm down. You just woke up after collapsing, so you can’t eat candy yet. First eat some rice—no, some porridge—and this big brother will make you candy, so stop crying.”
“Sniff. You’ll make it for me?”
The crying stopped like magic at the mention of making candy.
I nodded quickly.
Before I died from a venomous snake bite, the most popular snack in Korea had been tanghulu—candied fruit—and I had made it a few times for my broadcasts.
Of course, I had made mine with scorpions and insects instead of fruit.
“Of course. Young Lady Paeng, do you know how to make candy?”
“No.”
“You’ve only ever eaten candy made with hawthorn berries, right? Have you ever tried candy made with xigua?”
“Xi-xigua!?”
She shook her head hard at my question.
Xigua was the Central Plains word for watermelon.
She must have liked watermelon; her eyes went huge and she asked again.
“R-really?”
“Of course. But only if you eat your porridge well, listen carefully, and promise not to throw a crying tantrum until Lord Paeng arrives.”
At my words the little Paeng girl bumped her tiny fist into her palm, then made a cute martial salute and answered,
“The Paeng Family keeps its promises well! If I break it, I’ll punch myself in the face!”
“What?”
Kids learn by watching, so you should never show them anything bad—apparently the Paeng Family regularly punched their own faces.
In the end I had to grab the little girl and lecture her for a long time that she must never hit her own face.
What the hell are these Paeng people teaching their kids!
“Big Brother! Show me the big bees again today!”
“Sure, shall we?”
Yeong-yeong clung to my leg and dragged me toward the training grounds.
It had been ten days since Yeong-yeong started living inside the courtyard.
The guests from the Emei and Qingcheng Sects of Sichuan, as well as those from Hubei, had all returned except for a few martial artists dispatched by the Murim Alliance.
The official reason was that they could not catch the Blood Cult’s trail; in reality, since they had captured the Blood Cult infiltrator inside the Murim Alliance, they had taken a detour back to the Alliance to raid the main base.
Meanwhile Yeong-yeong and I had become close thanks to the power of candy.
Close enough that Lord Paeng had been shocked when I reported Yeong-yeong’s condition a few days ago.
“So, is our Yeong-yeong doing well?”
“Yes, she woke up and is getting along just fine. She eats well and listens well.”
“Huh!? She eats?”
“Yes, yesterday she ate a whole lot of fried pork.”
“H-how did you get her to eat!?”
A question delivered with a face that simply could not believe his daughter had eaten a meal.
“She just ate well on her own?”
“Hahaha!”
While Lord Paeng looked dumbfounded at my answer, Elder Sister came running over.
“Greetings to the Lord of the Paeng Family. So-ryong, Young Lady Yeong-yeong is looking for you, asking where Big Brother So-ryong went.”
“Big Brother!?”
I chuckled at the memory of Lord Paeng staring at me with renewed suspicion, and headed for the training grounds with Yeong-yeong.
These days we almost always went to see the Golden-Mane Bee Kings, because the bees absolutely adored Yeong-yeong.
In a slightly different sense of the word “adore,” of course.
The reason the Golden-Mane Bee Kings liked Yeong-yeong was that, being a child, she inevitably dribbled candy juice onto her clothes when she ate, and the bees loved that sweet scent.
Whenever she showed up they happily licked the sticky sugar stains, so Yeong-yeong thought the bees liked her and insisted on visiting every day.
They’re not thinking of her as food… right?
Following Yeong-yeong’s request I took her hand and headed for the entrance of the training grounds where the Golden-Mane Bee Kings lived, when—
Yeong-yeong shook off my hand, ran over to a pile of stones by the roadside, squatted down, and said,
“Big Brother, there’s a bee here too!”
“A bee?”
Having gotten friendly with the Golden-Mane Bee Kings, she must have thought other bees would like her as well.
I quickly warned her.
“Yeong-yeong, other bees can sting, so be careful—”
“Ow ow ow!”
“Are you all right?”
Sure enough, Yeong-yeong clutched her left wrist and backed away.
When I checked her quickly, a red sting mark showed on her left wrist.
I swatted away the bee that was still attacking her; what fell to the ground was a single hornet.
An aggressive species—it must have charged the moment Yeong-yeong approached.
“This won’t do. We need to go to the Medicine Hall first.”
“It’s fine, really…”
“Just in case. Let’s put some medicine on it.”
Hoping the Tang Family would have some kind of medicine, I piggybacked Yeong-yeong and headed for the Medicine Hall.
Then, from my back, Yeong-yeong started squirming and scratching herself, and suddenly began gasping for breath.
“Haa… Haa…”
“Yeong-yeong!?”
I knew this reaction.
Yeong-yeong was clearly going into anaphylaxis.