Snow and Ice 4
Just as I was about to ask who exactly held the Ice Jade after my sister’s reply that she knew someone who had it—
Kku-kku.
A lizard’s cry rose from beneath my feet. When I looked down, a pair of yellow vertical pupils stared up at me as if to demand why the treatment hadn’t started already.
Only then did it hit me. We had gotten so lost in our own conversation that we had completely left the patient’s guardian waiting. I apologized to the little one peering up at me and said we needed to hurry with the treatment first.
“Sorry for the delay. Kept you waiting, didn’t I? We’ll finish the rest of the talk after we treat Seokcheok. This little one’s waiting, after all.”
“How strange. A lizard that understands human speech that well.”
“All right, So-ryong. Let’s treat that little one first. The poor thing looks frantic.”
I crouched down and showed the seed to the lizard while explaining.
“I’ll plant this seed first, okay?”
Kkuuk.
Even if it couldn’t grow any further here, as long as a faint trickle of energy still leaked out, planting it again was the right call. Until we could bring back the Ice Jade that might serve as their food, the two of them would have to scrape by on this.
So I first replanted Seolsam’s seed beneath the rock, then decided to examine the sick one more carefully. Earlier I had only given it a rough look because of the other lizard.
From that hasty check it had seemed like the sort of lizard that could drop its tail, but I hadn’t confirmed it properly. The reason I was checking the tail so thoroughly now was that, while I had said I would cut it, what I actually planned was to induce autotomy—not to sever it myself.
In other words, I wasn’t going to slice the tail off with a blade; I was going to make the lizard drop it on its own. When a lizard voluntarily sheds its own tail, that is called autotomy. Some species cannot do it at all, and although most people assume every lizard can regenerate a lost tail, that isn’t true either.
There are ones that can autotomize but cannot regenerate. Ones that can do neither. Ones that can do both. Lizards come in all sorts of varieties. We casually believe every lizard will simply drop its tail, but reality is far messier. That was why I was examining the tail so carefully.
The tip was rotting, so amputation was unavoidable, yet if the creature couldn’t autotomize I would have to cut the tail raw—and that was genuinely dangerous. Autotomy puts far less strain on the body because the lizard itself is doing the cutting. Severing an already-sick animal’s tail by force, however, could easily kill it. Confirmation was mandatory.
As I prodded the ailing lizard’s tail here and there, my sister’s question floated down.
“What are you doing, So-ryong?”
“Ah, I was checking the spot where the tail will separate.”
“Where it separates?”
“Yes. It’s called a detachment joint. There’s a predetermined place where the tail is meant to break, and I was looking for it.”
“Detachment joint? So a segment designed to come free?”
Lizards capable of autotomy share a common trait: their tails contain joints that are already primed to break. Those are the detachment joints. Think of them as specific sites along the tail where separation is pre-planned. When stimulated, specialized muscles contract and the tail simply drops off. A diaphragm seals the wound, blood vessels clamp shut almost instantly so there is barely any bleeding, and the connective tissue itself is segmented for easy release.
“Exactly. It looks like a lizard’s tail can snap anywhere, but it can’t. The break points are fixed.”
“Ahh… so it doesn’t just sever at random.”
I smiled at her answer and continued searching until I found the break points. After a moment, three distinct spots registered under my fingers.
Probably about three places.
“Did you find them, So-ryong?”
“Yes, three of them, it seems. That’s fortunate.”
“I never knew lizards this well—they have no venom, after all. How do you know all this, So-ryong? It’s amazing.”
If only a little of the tail had been rotting I would have tried to save as much length as possible, but nearly half was already gone. To keep the necrosis from spreading any farther I planned to drop it as close to the hips as I could.
Better that than risk the little guy dying just to salvage a bit more tail.
“All right, then. Let’s begin.”
Kku!
Having received the guardian’s consent, I announced the start of the procedure to the lizard watching me and began the “surgery.” Not that there was much to it—just my thumb and index finger.
I pinched the spot I believed was a detachment joint and applied steady pressure. That amount of force is usually enough to trigger a lizard into dropping its own tail. It is almost a conditioned reflex, which is why you have to be careful when keeping them as pets. A careless grab can send the tail flying, and even during mating a male can brush against it and cause a drop.
People say lizard tails regenerate, but that doesn’t mean perfect restoration. The regrown tail has no bone, is usually smaller than the original, and some individuals never regrow one at all.
I focused on the sensation at my fingertips as I applied gentle force. A strange pulse began deep inside the lizard’s hide—like a heartbeat throbbing under the skin. Something seemed to thrash within the tail, and then came a tearing sound.
Tssik.
Immediately the tail began to peel away from the body as if it were being yanked out by the roots. The hide slowly parted, revealing muscle, until at last even the skin separated completely. There was almost no blood; the break was clean. Surgery successful.
The motionless lizard either felt no pain or simply didn’t show it. Its eyes fluttered open once, then closed again.
Flap-flap-flap.
The moment it hit the ground the severed tail began to thrash. The cut surface looked almost like a goblin’s club, muscles jutting out in a dense cluster. Had the lizard been healthy, the stump would have writhed madly for quite a while, but with half of it already rotten the tail soon subsided into feeble twitches.
I picked up the wriggling piece and examined the cross-section, wanting to see how far the rot had progressed. If it had already crept deeper, we would be in real trouble. Surface rot that looks halfway up the tail often travels much farther along the bone.
What I saw confirmed my fears: the muscle near the final joint at the base had already turned gray. A freshly severed lizard tail should show translucent pink flesh still flushed with blood. This was pure ash-gray. A little later and the necrosis would have eaten straight into the body.
“Done. Nothing to it, right? Keep licking that stump so it doesn’t get infected. We’ll be over there—if anything happens, come get us.”
Kkuuk!
I still couldn’t bring myself to call them by the names I had given them, so I simply told Bing to look after Seol. Then we turned and hurried back to the campsite.
With the inflammation cleared from its eyes and tail, the little one would slowly regain its strength. When it finally began regenerating the tail we would need a solid supply of nutrition—which meant we had to go find that Ice Jade.
“Lady Hwa-eun, so who exactly has this Ice Jade?”
I asked my sister while we were still walking, before we even reached the campfire. The answer that left her smiling lips left me speechless.
“Hmm… how should I put it? Ah, I know. Let’s just call her some other weed, shall we?”
“What?!”
“The Ice Jade is in the possession of Lady Namgang Seol of the Namgung Family—one of the Three Flowers of the Murim, the Flower King Peony.”
“Uh…”
My sister, it seemed, held a longer grudge than I had expected. And Father-in-law—why on earth had he ever told her that…
Two days later the little one that had been lying collapsed finally came to. With the inflammation that had knocked it out now gone, its condition had clearly rebounded.
Kku-kku!
Kku-guk!
When we approached the human-shaped rock that served as their nest, the lizards greeted us with open delight. After several days they must have grown used to us; one of them even scampered out in front of the rock like a puppy.
Crazy. A lizard puppy. In my past life this would have exploded the view count.
In overall shape the creature resembled a fat-tailed gecko, yet its size made it look closer to a pinecone lizard as well. The sick one still hadn’t fully recovered, so I reached toward the healthy one. My palm met the rough knobs on its head and a cool, dry texture.
Ahh. This is the real charm of lizards.
Delighted by the long-missed feel of lizard skin, I asked,
“Have you been well?”
It no longer flinched when I stroked its head. My sister carefully stretched out her own hand, but the lizard twitched and eyed her warily.
Kku!?
“Why… why are you avoiding my hand?”
She sounded hurt, yet Bing seemed to be searching for something—mostly around her shoulders. I guessed it was because it had seen the little monkeys with her a few days earlier, so I rolled up my sleeve and showed them Gong-i.
Kya-haak!
The lizard recoiled in alarm, darting out of my reach. Sure enough, the sight of Gong-i sent it scrambling backward.
“It probably thought the little monkeys were still with you, Lady Hwa-eun.”
“They’re not with me. They were always with So-ryong.”
How shameless—she was selling me out just so she could pet the lizard herself. Once she rolled up her sleeves to prove she was empty-handed and reached out again, the lizard finally rested its head in her palm. When she gently scratched under its chin, it closed its eyes in pure bliss.
By now both of them were fairly used to human hands and had dropped every last scrap of wariness toward us. Because we needed the Ice Jade as soon as possible, I spoke to them.
“We have to head back now.”
Kkuu!?
Kku!?
Their eyes went round with shock. Even the sick one snapped its eyes open wide. Smiling, I explained,
“We’re not leaving for good. We’re going to find food for you. Seolsam isn’t growing any more, after all. Which means you probably can’t keep living here either. So if we bring back something you can eat… would you come with us?”
At my question the two blue lizards turned and stared at each other.
Leaving Bing and Seol behind for the moment, we returned to the Sichuan Tang Clan. Quite a few pieces of news had arrived while we were gone. The biggest, of course, involved the Blood Cult.
They had captured a Blood Cult spy who had infiltrated the Murim Alliance, then raided a hideout the cultists had built near Muhán—practically on the Alliance’s doorstep. Even under brutal torture the spy never opened his mouth, but they had followed an owl he kept and discovered the lair that way.
Mixed into that report was the matter of the lakeside poison I had discovered. We had thoroughly milked the bloodwood tree we brought back, extracted its toxin, and sent the first batch with the military. When they stormed the Blood Cult hideout, that poison had apparently racked up quite a body count. On top of that, the Alliance Leader had issued a decree and circulars denouncing Blood Cult members were being plastered across the entire Central Plains.
“The Alliance Leader even sent a personal letter of thanks. I’m very proud of you, So-ryong.”
Waiting for us at the Tang Clan was that letter of gratitude from the Alliance Leader. I wondered whether the rewards the strategist had promised had also arrived, but those would take time—more materials still needed to be gathered.
Once the backlog of conversation was finished, Father-in-law asked,
“By the way, did you catch any stone lizards? I’d like to see what they look like for the Poison Compendium myself.”
“Well, we did catch them… but only halfway, I suppose.”
“Halfway?”
“Yes. What happened was…”
I explained everything about Bing and Seol, and about the Ice Jade. True to a powerful household, Father-in-law immediately declared he would find a way to obtain it.
“Ice Jade, is it? That won’t be easy to come by, but I’ll look into it. Don’t worry.”
At his words my sister spoke carefully.
“Father, I have something to tell you about the Ice Jade. Actually, I know someone who already has it.”
“You do?”
“Yes, Father. So I was thinking of going with So-ryong to fetch it. Would that be all right?”
“The timing is poor. Where exactly do you intend to go?”
She answered with a coquettish little smile.
“To Anhui Province, where the Namgung Clan resides.”
“The Namgung Clan?”
“Yes. I saw that Lady Namgang Seol has the Ice Jade.”
Father-in-law mulled it over for a moment, then made a proposal.
“Hmm… In that case, would you run an errand on the way? I happen to have something that needs delivering along that route.”
An errand on the road. It seemed convenient enough, yet a small thought still crossed my mind.
Do I get paid for the errand? I’m still young enough to collect pocket money for chores, after all.