Family Members 2
My biggest problem was that my heart was far too soft.
Given a centipede’s natural aversion to water, I had figured dunking myself would peel the little ones right off me. And sure enough, the moment I stepped into the water, they scrambled up onto the top of my head for safety.
All I had to do now was submerge for a second and scoop the floating critters into a jar.
I thought I was home free—until my head slowly sank under and those pitiful cries started up from my crown.
- Churrr.
- Churr.
- Churrrrr.
Big brother, why are you doing this? What did we ever do to you? Big bro! Please! We hate water!
It wasn’t as if I could actually understand centipede-speak. Just a feeling, but that was exactly how their sounds came across.
So what was a guy to do…
They’ll leave on their own soon enough. Maybe I should just leave them for a few days?
The mournful little cries were already tilting my thoughts toward letting them stay a while.
After all, they’d lost their mother. Was it really right to coldly peel them off like this? Centipedes only leave their mother’s body after two molts, and that period isn’t all that long.
Besides, they seemed to think I was their mom, and at this stage they had no venom, so no real danger. A little inconvenient, sure, but walking around with a giant centipede draped over you? That was every poison-creature lover’s dream.
Insects, arthropods, reptiles—they don’t recognize their owners the way mammals do, and they aren’t exactly pets, so bonding can be tough. Having them coiled around your body was basically the next best thing to true pet companionship.
“Alright, big brother will leave you be for a while. Just don’t bite me or hurt me, got it?”
- Churrr!
- Churr!
They answered with their little sounds. Finished with my bath, I hurried back toward the abandoned Taoist temple.
And the moment I stepped over the threshold at the entrance…
There, sitting on the stone steps of the pavilion I used, was a middle-aged man.
The fellow who claimed to be the lord of some house called the Tang Clan looked up from where he sat and greeted me with a delighted face.
“Oh!? Elder?”
“Oh! Young hero!”
His face was so glad it felt like he meant to repay me for helping hunt the mother centipede. He had promised a reward if I found the thing, after all.
Looked like a well-off family. Maybe he’ll give me some money? Should I ask him to catch a few deer? Making jerky would be perfect—I’m still in my growing phase, after all.
Just as the bright-faced man drew near, a chill ran down my spine. Something like a wind shot toward him, and he suddenly went flying backward, slamming into the stone steps and coughing up mouthfuls of blood.
- Kwa-boom!
“Keheuk! Cough! Cough!”
“E-Elder! Ghk!”
I tried to rush over in shock, but something caught the back of my collar.
My legs slowly lifted into the air, feet pedaling at empty space.
Then an old man’s voice reached my ears.
“I heard the Tang Clan brats had entered Hainan Island, so I came to look—and what do I find but the son of the Mandok Singun, injured and alone.
I have never once forgotten the faces of you and your father that I glimpsed from afar ten years ago! Today I shall send your head to your father, the Mandok Singun, as a gift! Hahahaha!”
I couldn’t catch every detail, but it felt like this guy held a grudge against the father of the Tang Clan lord. And with a nickname like Mandok Singun—Ten Poisons Divine Lord—these people were clearly tied to some organization or other.
Twin swords, twin axes, that kind of flashy title vibe.
Hey, why are you dragging me into this? Settle it among yourselves.
The middle-aged man forced himself up, blood still at his lips, and demanded of the old man holding me:
“Cough! Who in the world are you, Senior, to oppress this young hero and myself?”
“Hahahaha. Don’t you recognize this face and these crimson fists? I am the Blood Hand Rakshasa Tak Un-yang, the one your father left in this state!”
The maniacal laughter and the voice thick with hatred—if things went wrong, today was going to end badly.
The old man’s grudge seemed enormous.
But the Tang Clan lord begged him in a resolute voice to release me.
“That young hero is no martial artist and has no connection to us. Will you not let him go? Your grudge is with our Tang Clan alone. If you release him, I will offer my neck without resistance.”
A “don’t drag civilians into this” kind of vibe.
I thought, hey, not a bad guy, and nodded inwardly that grudges between these chop-suey types should be settled among themselves.
But the old man with the chuuni nickname Blood Hand Rakshasa just sneered at the words.
“I will slaughter anyone who has so much as brushed sleeves with the Tang Clan! Does the Buddhist saying not claim that even a brush of sleeves requires three thousand affinities from a past life? Hahaha!”
“Gyaaah! S-save…”
He spun my body around to face him and slowly tightened the hand on my neck.
That crushing grip was intense. Separately, a strange sensation that made my knees go weak had my body trembling when—
- Churrrrrrr!
- Kwaddeuk!
The baby Azure-Spotted Centipedes hidden in my clothes suddenly let out fierce cries, bursting from both sleeves and my collar to sink their fangs into the old man clutching my throat.
“Keheuk!”
The old man’s bulging eyes filled my vision—eyes that couldn’t believe what was happening.
Then strength slowly drained from his hand.
I hastily pulled free of his grip and looked at his face. In an instant the old man had turned pitch-black and collapsed to the ground.
- Thud.
Good grief! Weren’t they supposed to have no venom at this stage!?
The awkward situation of my pets having just killed a person.
I slowly turned my head to the middle-aged man and asked:
“Uh… this guy was a bad person, right? H-he seems dead…”
I was pretty sure he was a villain, but the fact that my pets had killed someone left me asking with a vacant expression.
It was the first time I’d seen a person die.
Aside from myself, that is.
Yet somehow the middle-aged man looked delighted at my question.
Even though a man had just died.
I-is he a psychopath?
The fact that the baby centipedes had venom—and that it was lethal enough to kill a man—sent a chill through my guts, but I forced myself to calm down and hurry with first aid.
One was already dead. If I dawdled, we might end up with a second corpse.
The middle-aged man had coughed up a terrifying amount of blood. If I didn’t stabilize him fast, it looked like we were heading for a double funeral.
Of course I didn’t actually support him under the arm.
I was half-afraid the centipedes would pop out again and bite him too.
So I simply guided him inside the pavilion I used. There was a bed there, and of every building in this abandoned temple complex it was the least ruined—perfect for laying the Tang Clan lord down.
The door had taken a beating from the stone chips that sprayed when the man slammed into the steps, but the interior was still fine.
“H-here, please lie down this way.”
“Cough. Thank you, young hero.”
“Anyway, the village is far and there’s no way to call a physician. If you can tell me where your companions are, I’ll run and fetch them. No—wait, I can’t just leave you either.”
I fretted, shifting from foot to foot, until the man spoke with a kindly smile.
“I’m fine, so don’t worry. A few days of rest and I’ll be good as new.”
Coughing up blood meant internal damage—ruptured organs, a perforated stomach, something in that neighborhood. And he claimed a few days of rest would fix it.
A man who wasn’t even a doctor sounding that casual made me straighten up and answer firmly.
“Please don’t say that. You’ve vomited this much blood. You’re in critical condition!”
But he only kept smiling.
“I’m a martial artist, so I’ll be fine.”
“A martial artist?”
“That’s right. A martial artist.”
Come to think of it, even in the middle of the crisis earlier he had shouted that I wasn’t a martial artist and should be released. The words dragged up memories of the old wuxia movies from my previous life.
No way…
I asked again with a doubtful look.
“By martial artist… you mean the ones who fly around shooting palm winds and all that?”
“Not every martial artist can do that, but yes—you could say that’s the idea.”
Thinking it over, the way this middle-aged man had gone flying earlier did feel an awful lot like being hit by a palm wind.
Holy crap!
Only now did the existence of those giant centipedes make sense.
This wasn’t the past. This was some other world entirely.
A shiver of realization ran through me—that I had fallen into a completely different world—when he spoke again.
“Thanks to you, young hero, I kept my life. I am grateful for the grace of saving me. Allow me to introduce myself properly. I am Dang Cheol-san, lord of the Sichuan Tang Family.”
“Ah, I’m Wi So-ryong.”
I hadn’t had any name to speak of in this world, but the moment he said “martial world” I thought of a famous martial-arts actor from my previous life and cobbled the name together on the spot.
When I introduced myself as Wi So-ryong, the man nodded.
“Little Dragon, is it? A fine name.”
“Thank you, Elder. Still, you’re hurt—should I head to the village and bring the rest of your family? That grandfather of yours?”
Introductions were done; it was time to fetch the others from his household. But he shook his head.
“No need. My father has already left for Sichuan with the other warriors. The ones remaining in the village will come this way in two or three days anyway.”
“Oh… then what should I do? Water, maybe… no, you coughed blood so water’s out… rice porridge… no, not that either.”
I looked awkward with nothing useful to offer, and he smiled.
“I’ll simply circulate my energy and rest for a few days, so don’t fret. If I need food I’ll say so then.”
“Understood, Elder. Uh… then at least let me wet a cloth and wipe the blood from your mouth.”
“No—before that I have many questions. May I ask them a moment?”
“Wouldn’t rest be better?”
“This much is fine.”
At his insistence I stopped heading off to make a wet cloth and sat beside him again.
Then, as if he had been holding them in forever, the questions poured out.
“Those venomous creatures wrapped around your body—are they centipedes? Where on earth did you obtain them, and how did you tame them like that? And while I waited for you I looked around without the owner’s permission—are all the countless venomous creatures inside this place yours?”
“Uh… well…”
I answered as carefully as I could.
The centipedes had hatched from the eggs of the Azure-Spotted Centipede the men had taken, and everything inside was what I raised.
“Oho! You hatched the eggs!?”
“Well, they were just about ready to hatch anyway…”
“You can even tell that?”
“Huh? Well… sort of.”
“Remarkable!”
The man was praising my breeding skill. I hadn’t had anyone to show off to in years, so Dang Cheol-san’s compliments put me in a good mood. I decided to pull out a few years’ worth of breeding achievements and brag a little.
“Just a moment, Elder.”
I hurried to the medicine chest and took out a single Bawangling Cave Gecko.
An ordinary Bawangling Cave Gecko has bold yellow stripes on the body and white stripes on the tail. This one, though—body pure yellow, tail pure white.
Just those two colors.
In my previous life it would have fetched tens of millions of won—no, hundreds of millions. The crowning jewel of my breeding work.
“Ahem. You can raise them like this too, you know.”
I held it out as if to say, this is the level I’m at, but the man only blinked.
He clearly had no idea how impressive it was, so I brought over another one and explained.
I guess I have to spoon-feed him.
“Hmm… this is an ordinary cave gecko. From creatures like this I repeatedly selected the ones with the biggest yellow body stripes and white tail stripes, paired them, and eventually produced a specimen of just these two colors.”
“Y-you created the colors!?”
Now he finally grasped my achievement. He pressed in a hurried voice:
“Th-then… is it possible to select only the strongest-venomed ones, pair them, and create even more potent specimens!?”
In theory, yes—but there was no way to measure venom strength, so it was impossible.
I shook my head.
“If I could tell which ones had stronger venom, of course it would be possible. But that’s hard…”
“I-is that so! Is that truly so!”
“Whoa! You scared me!”
The half-dead man suddenly bellowed as if he’d swallowed a steam locomotive. I nearly jumped out of my skin. He seized my hands and stared at me with blazing eyes.
“You. Become one of our household!”
“What!?”
Household—meaning join his family.
It sounded like he wanted to take me in as a subordinate or underling…
If they could fly with lightness arts and shoot palm winds, that sounded pretty good. The problem was that, from what I’d just seen, being a martial artist looked a little dangerous.
Crazy people coming to kill you kind of dangerous. I hesitated, and he began listing benefits one after another.
“First, if you join our household, every martial art of the Tang Clan will be taught to you without reservation. Spiritual medicines, spiritual herbs, any poison you desire—you will obtain them all.
With your talent, you might even capture or raise the Ten Legendary Poisons of the Central Plains that live on only in murim legend, might you not?
And of course I don’t mean to boast, but my daughter, one of the Three Flowers of the Central Plains…”
“W-wait!”
I stopped the rapid-fire list of benefits.
Something unbelievable had just flown past.
“What did you just say!?”
“Hmm? Ah, you’re still young but already a man, eh? That’s right! My daughter, one of the Three Flowers of the—”
The Tang Clan lord kept shoving some flower at me.
I had zero interest in that kind of grass, so I shook my head and asked again.
“No, not that plant stuff. Before that.”
“Hmm? Martial arts?”
“No, after that.”
“Spiritual medicines and herbs?”
“Even further back.”
“The Ten Legendary Poisons of the Central Plains?”
In my previous life I had died hunting the world’s ten most venomous snakes. The words “Ten Legendary Poisons of the Central Plains” struck straight through my chest.
I grabbed the Tang Clan lord and demanded:
“Are they as incredible as the Azure-Spotted Centipede!?”
He grinned.
“Of course they are. The Azure-Spotted Centipede doesn’t even rank among the Ten Legendary Poisons of the Central Plains—it’s a lower-tier venomous creature. From house-sized scorpions to golden frogs that shine like pure gold… whatever you imagine, they will be greater still.”
At the words “Ten Legendary Poisons of the Central Plains,” the idea of becoming a household member suddenly looked very appealing.
Should I try it?
To a man, aren’t the Ten Legendary Poisons the ultimate dream?
Or is it just me?
Anyway.