The Medicinal Bath from Hell
Cheon Yuhak’s cheerful suggestion to spar was the starting point, but Cheong found herself climbing the stairs leading to the medicinal bath instead. When she looked down from the top, the sight was so dizzying she wondered if this was what it felt like to stare straight into lava.
Cheong carefully set her foot down and immediately recoiled in disgust. “What the hell is this!? It’s solid!”
—You can even jump on it. Interesting, right? Jump around a bit, then stand still and it’ll slowly swallow you up.
Cheong bounced up and down on the surface of the medicinal liquid exactly as instructed. The sticky sensation clinging to her soles was extremely unpleasant, and she personally hated in-place jumping, so she stopped after just a few hops. As she stood there, her body began to sink slowly into the bath.
Cheong thrust her right arm straight up, thumb raised in triumph. Unfortunately, the liquid only rose to her navel, so the dramatic scene she’d imagined didn’t materialize. She then fought the resistance of the thick fluid, lowering her upper body until she could sit on the chair inside. The liquid level settled just below her throat.
And the sensation of being submerged in it?
“Ugh. This feels fucking gross……”
—Kekeke, right? It’s not watery and splashy like normal liquid. It’s sticky like a near-solid, which is why you could jump on it. The way it clings and coils around your body feels exactly like smearing glue all over yourself. It gives you goosebumps and triggers pure instinctive revulsion.
On top of that, the smell. With the surface right under her nose, the sour, rotten stench drilled into her skull like fermented skate that had gone completely bad.
“Ugh, what the hell did you put in this thing! Urk.”
—Better if you don’t know. Once you find out, you’ll never be able to get in again. Just remember this much.
It was a horrifying thing to hear—worse than not hearing it at all. Just what kind of ingredients would make him warn her like that? Hearing it made the whole thing feel even more disgusting and filthy. Cheong had the vivid illusion that tens of thousands of bugs were crawling all over her submerged body.
—Pretty horrible, right? I’ve heard rumors that you get used to it eventually, or so they say.
“Didn’t you go through it too, Master? Why are you saying ‘or so they say’?”
—Because you absolutely never get used to it, that’s why.
“Why do you keep saying things like that……”
—The name of the bath itself is the Reagent Cesspool. Ahem. Now all you have to do is circulate your energy. Operating the Awakening Divine Art is best. Later, if your successor has their own original cultivation method, just have them circulate whatever they already know. If they haven’t learned the Awakening Divine Art, simply double the duration. But, um. I’ll explain that part later.
“So I should start operating the Awakening Divine Art now?”
—That’s right. You might feel a bit ticklish, but it’s a natural reaction as the medicine is absorbed. Nothing to worry about.
“Ah. So it wasn’t just my imagination……”
It really wasn’t. Her entire skin felt itchy, as if being pricked by tiny needles or gently stroked with the tip of a feather. Sometimes it burned like someone had rubbed hot peppers all over her. And since it was happening across her whole body at once, sitting still was nearly impossible.
But her body wouldn’t move. She was trapped like someone sunk in a sand swamp, completely unable to budge. Even with Cheong’s monstrous strength, she could only shift at an incredibly slow, minute pace.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t force her way out if she really tried. Cheong gritted her teeth and vigorously drove the true energy of the Awakening Divine Art through her meridians. Only then did the tickling subside somewhat. The medicinal energy seeped into every part of her body along with the circulation, but the burning sensation across her skin—like her whole body was on fire—left no room for feeling itchy.
If she hadn’t kept her mouth firmly shut while circulating energy, a miserable groan would have escaped her.
—Heh. You’re going to suffer quite a bit from here on out. When the body’s in pain, time never seems to pass. Once the pain fades, the tickling starts. And just when you think you can endure the tickling, the pain comes right back. Try to last the next two hours like they’re a whole year.
Even now, Cheon Yuhak didn’t stop teasing her. Cheong’s eyebrows twitched. Damn it, I’m dying over here. It was spicy, stinging, aching, and hot. The truly evil part was that the discomfort never reached the level of overwhelming agony that would blank out all thought. It was perfectly endurable if she steeled herself, but it kept gently scraping at her nerves, constantly poking and prodding.
The tickling wasn’t strong enough to make her burst out laughing or convulse, but it lingered at that maddening threshold—like a sneeze that kept threatening to come but never arrived. It wasn’t that it was too difficult to bear; it was the constant interruptions that broke her concentration on circulating energy and reminded her how slowly time was passing.
From Cheong’s experience, it felt exactly like sitting through a notoriously boring four-hour lecture while having a persistently uncomfortable stomachache. In the end, it really was the kind of time Cheon Yuhak had described—something so grueling it felt like an entire year, nearly impossible to endure with one’s sanity intact.
Since he had gone through it himself, he was simply recounting his exact impressions. There was no way it would feel any different.
After what felt like forever, Cheong let out a startled breath. “Master? What’s happening? My hand—what is this?”
—What, is your body all swollen? Of course it is. You devoured every last drop of medicinal energy in the bath. It’ll go back to normal by the end of today, so don’t worry.
Cheong stared at her own hand. Her fingers had doubled in thickness. When she touched them, they felt puffy and squishy, full of fluid. Not just her fingers—her palms were swollen like bear paws.
Just in case, she looked down. Oh my god. What is this? What the hell is this?
If any Korean had seen her like this, they would have immediately thought of the mascot from that French tire company. Everything below her neck looked like that, yet her face remained beautiful, making the whole sight even more grotesque.
Fortunately, there was no mirror around, so Cheong remained blissfully unaware. Since it would return to normal by the end of the day anyway, the easygoing girl quickly shook off the thought and turned her attention to the state of the bath instead.
“Master? Is the bath supposed to end up like this?”
—Kekeke, surprised by the rotten water? The Reagent Cesspool absorbs the beneficial properties and expels the harmful ones, so when it’s finished it always turns into dirty sludge.
“Huh.”
Cheong looked down at the liquid she was sitting in. The sticky, sludgy medicinal bath that had reeked so badly it drilled into her nose had somehow transformed into something resembling cloudy bone broth.
“This doesn’t seem that dirty, though……”
—Kekeke. Since it came out of your own body, I guess you don’t find it dirty. Wash yourself properly, purify your clothes, and call me. It feels weird talking through a wall like this the whole time.
Cheong washed herself with the clean water prepared on the side and put on the clothes she’d brought. She’d wondered why he’d told her to wear something so oversized and loose. Now it made perfect sense.
Afterward, Cheon Yuhak entered the bathing area and peered into the medicinal liquid.
“Let’s see, let’s see just how rotten my disciple’s body—hm? What? Why does it look like this?”
“Is something wrong?”
“No. Medicine that’s too strong can become poison instead, you know. The beneficial properties are fully absorbed while the excessive parts are expelled, melting out the turbidity inside the body along with it.”
Because of Cheong’s special constitution that nullified all poisons, she had absorbed every bit of the medicinal properties while neutralizing the toxic elements, so nothing harmful had come out. Since Cheong had chosen that constitution herself, she roughly understood the principle even if she didn’t know the exact mechanics. Ah, that makes sense.
“Guess I didn’t have any turbidity.”
“Hmph. Did you undergo Body Reconstruction or something? Why wouldn’t you have turbidity? People are born with—”
“Didn’t you hear me? I already did Body Reconstruction. Last year.”
“Ah. Is that so. Still strange, though. Even if we ignore the lack of turbidity, a human body shouldn’t be able to absorb that much medicinal energy all at once……”
There had never been a previous Divine Thief who achieved Body Reconstruction before even beginning their training, so he could only accept it at face value.
“Haa. That was exhausting. Can we go eat now?”
“You’re hungry even after sucking up the entire medicinal bath? Food? Before the medicinal properties digest and turn into shit, we need to move on to the real training.”
The look on Cheong’s face was a perfect fifty-fifty mix of pitiful sorrow and shocked betrayal, as if asking how he could say something so horrible.
“Real training? What the hell is that? Then what we just did was……”
“The preparation stage. The key is to bend the joints while the body is coated in the medicinal properties. The time has finally come to use this.”
Cheon Yuhak dragged something out from the corner. No matter how you looked at it, the thing was far closer to a torture device than a training tool. It resembled the frames used to bind criminals, except bizarre mechanisms were attached to every joint. At a glance, it was clearly not a normal object.
“Um… Master?”
“Didn’t I tell you before? External arts training is a combination of four things: overwork, torture, poison, and medicine.”
Cheong pointed at the device with her finger. Cheon Yuhak chuckled and answered.
“It’s a combination of two. Overwork. Torture.”
“Now that I think about it, do we really need flexible joints when we already have such a sturdy body……?”
Cheon Yuhak smiled kindly.
“It’s a joke, you idiot. It looks scary, but it’s not actually that vicious. The training isn’t that difficult either, so you don’t need to be so scared.”
“What the— you scared me!”
Cheong let out a sigh of relief and laid herself down on the frame. Cheon Yuhak grumbled about how a girl could be so tall as he turned, tightened, pulled, and fitted various parts, adjusting the device. Soon, with a series of heavy clanks, iron rings covered nearly her entire body and locked into place.
“Master? It’s too tight. It hurts.”
“That’s because your flesh is swollen from the medicinal properties. Once they subside, it’ll fit perfectly.”
“It hurts a lot, though……”
“It’s fine. At this point, pain of that level should be nothing to you.”
“……? What did you just say?”
“Now. Open your mouth and say ‘ah.’ If you grit your teeth too hard you might damage them.”
As Cheon Yuhak spoke, he held out a gag. Cheong’s face went rigid.
“Master? You said it wasn’t a vicious— mmph!”
Cheon Yuhak was the Divine Thief. The moment Cheong opened her mouth to say “ah,” stuffing a gag in it was hardly difficult for him.
“That was a joke too, you dummy. Can’t you tell just by looking? It’s obviously designed to mess a person up properly. So naively innocent—how do you plan to survive the harsh murim like that?”
“Mmph! Mmph……!”
“Sorry. I’m just giving back what I received. Weren’t you the one who said good things? About the inheritance of hatred. If it really bothers you, you can just pass it on to your own disciple later.”
“Mmmp! Mmph……!”
“I’ll wake you up even if you faint, so don’t make it troublesome for your master and keep your mind clear. The medicinal properties only gather properly when you endure the pain while conscious.”
The true nature of the Flowing Softness Softening Refinement external training was to forcibly bend the joints in the opposite direction while the body was swollen from the medicinal properties. Because the medicine already saturated her body, the moment a joint was damaged it would immediately recover, gradually expanding the range of motion.
However, the pain of a person forcibly bending their own joints was no ordinary agony. It was the kind of pain that felt like being crippled. Only then would the medicinal properties react violently, preventing any anesthesia or loss of consciousness.
In the face of such pain, there was no regard for master or parent. As she thrashed wildly, flailing her arms and legs in every direction, the specially crafted steel frame existed for exactly that reason.
“Just endure for one hour. Think of it as pain that brings achievement and it’ll be bearable.”
At that, Cheon Yuhak finally revealed his true colors. Not even trying to hide his utterly wicked smile, he continued.
“For the record, I couldn’t endure it and ended up crying with snot and tears, wailing pathetically. Well, it’s fine. You won’t die, after all.”