The Mad Demon's Favorite Ingredient
There is a certain code among the wandering warriors of Murim. The title Sighing Mad Demon referred to a lunatic fiend who lived for sighs of despair. A perverted bastard who went absolutely feral at the sight of other people's misery and grief. This was precisely why the Blood Sect was so dangerous. Their chaos wasn't driven by some grand ambition like conquering the martial world or righteous revenge. No, their motives were purely personal whims. And for the Sighing Mad Demon, the ultimate reason for his existence, the pinnacle of ecstasy, was shoving someone into complete and utter despair, then savoring the way their face slowly crumbled.
And right now, he had obtained what he considered one of the finest ingredients of his life. A wave of euphoric joy surged through him.
“Kuhuhuk! Huhuhuhuk! Yes, magnificent. Truly magnificent. Loyalty? To think a child would stake her very life on something like loyalty! What a masterpiece!”
Gyeong Damgan burst into maniacal laughter like the madman he was.
“So, what should I do with this child? How can I make it even better?”
To drag that brilliantly shining, beautiful child into the black abyss of despair, to make her curse the world and scream in agony, to thoroughly break her—how delightful that would be. How unparalleled. He had to calm down. He had to calm down.
Gyeong Damgan barely managed to speak, his face twisted from trying to hold back his laughter.
“Right, a promise is a promise. You wandering curs, get lost already. If you clumsily try to remove it, you’ll die in agony. But if you obediently follow my orders from now on, you might just preserve your worthless lives. Of course, you’ll have to obey me for the rest of them.”
How intoxicating it was to hold someone’s life in his hands and force them to obey through threats. The rotting expressions on the faces of the wanderers who sensed their fate sent Gyeong Damgan into raptures. And even amid all that, the Goddess Sect disciple who glared at him with an unshaken gaze pleased him even more.
Yes. She had to be strong. As resilient as a brilliant, unbreakable diamond.
“Aaaack!”
Another scream rang out across the hall. The Goddess Sect disciple also dropped to her knees, bending at the waist before collapsing to the floor. The gu insects had all spewed their poison at once.
“Didn’t I tell you to listen to my commands? When this old man says leave, you leave. When I say come, you come. Like a well-trained mutt.”
At that moment, the Goddess Sect disciple spoke, fumbling for words.
“I-I’m fine, so all of you should leave now. I’ll find some way to deal with this……”
“Kuhuk, Miss……”
The wanderers’ eyes turned red. Perhaps too ashamed to say anything else, they simply left without another word.
What a magnificent sight this was!
Gyeong Damgan felt a tingling sensation in a certain part of himself that had never stood up in his entire life.
Meanwhile, Cheong had roughly figured it out.
Hmm. So when they spit poison, it feels warm. Looks like the bugs don’t actually kill you from inside. The poison they spit is harmful, but the bugs themselves don’t seem particularly dangerous even if they’re inside the body.
If the gu or whatever got completely digested like a piece of fried chicken, or if she couldn’t feel the poison at all, she wouldn’t know when to pretend to be in pain. Fortunately, right when she felt a burning sensation around her solar plexus, the wanderers all screamed at once. Cheong matched their rhythm and pretended to be in agony, and the old fiend looked extremely satisfied.
“Kuhuhuhuk! Child. Yes. I think I need to explain your situation a bit. First of all, well.”
The old man clicked his tongue and said,
“Why don’t you take off your clothes? Let me see that body of yours.”
Cheong frowned deeply.
Fucking perverted old bastard. If you’re going to live that long, at least age gracefully. Why the hell does he look so old?
Come to think of it, wasn’t the portrait of the Face-Slasher of a middle-aged man with a huge nose? Why was this guy an old man?
Setting that aside, with no hostages present, Cheong had no reason to listen to him.
“You’re dreaming big, old man. I’ll strip if you pay me fifty thousand gold taels in advance, dear customer.”
“Kuhuhuk! Good! The fun is in the initial resistance! If she just trembled and obeyed meekly, where’s the entertainment? But for a disobedient child, punishment is necessary, isn’t it?”
Then her solar plexus burned as if she had gulped down strong liquor. The gu was spewing its poison again. Cheong immediately collapsed to the floor and let out exaggerated groans of pain.
However, when Cheong was truly in pain, she made sounds like “Keuk, euk, kkeok,” with phlegm rattling in her throat and her vocal cords scraping. The fake moans she was making now sounded more like “Ahuk, haeuuut, ahuk”—closer to lewd, erotic cries.
Of course, since Cheong was an actress with no one around to record and review the footage, she was quite proud of her performance.
As she writhed in what looked like obscene agony, Cheong thought,
This is pretty convincing. When the bug spits poison, it feels warm like drinking alcohol. Even without actually drinking, I get the sensation of being drunk. Isn’t this a total win? It’s like an infinite free alcohol supply.
Thinking about her favorite drinks, Cheong’s mind sharpened for the first time in a while.
Infinite supply? There was no way it was truly infinite. No matter how much poison a tiny creature produced, there had to be a limit to the amount. Besides, since it was a parasite, it had to consume something to make the poison. It couldn’t turn everything it ate into poison and spew it out, so there had to be a limit to its reserves.
It wasn’t a particularly useful deduction since the poison didn’t affect Cheong anyway. Still, if these gu things were that useful, everyone would be raising and using them. There must be some massive drawback that she’d never even heard of them before.
Because Cheong’s thoughts had gone on for quite a while, she failed to notice that the gu had stopped releasing poison and was catching its breath.
Gyeong Damgan cackled.
“How long do you plan to keep up this act? You were so bold with your defiance earlier, yet now you’re squirming on the floor like a bug. Kkeuk.”
“Ah. It’s over already? Whew. That’s all? It’s not much. If you want me to take my clothes off, you’ll have to try harder. I was just starting to feel a little pain. Haeuuut.”
Damn it, I was still talking.
The heat rising from within made Cheong dive back into her act.
“Over? Aigoo. Ahuk.”
“You think I’ll take my clothes off for this? They say sunlight is better than wind, so you should warm me up properly. Huaaat.”
“Stop! Stop! I get it! Ah, did you fall for it? The gu isn’t much either. Ahuhuk!”
“Seriously, seriously stop! I understand! Ah. But what exactly am I supposed to understand? Huaaeut.”
Cheong continued to tease him lightly, deliberately provoking the gu to release more poison.
This was completely different from the scene Gyeong Damgan had wanted to see. He had wanted her to tremble in fear, strip herself, and bow her head in submission. Instead, even while screaming that it hurt, the moment it stopped she would provoke him to do more.
The biggest victim in this moment—no, the biggest victim bug—was the poor little gu inside Cheong’s body.
Damn these human bastards! Let the gu rest a little!
Eventually, the little gu, its poison sac completely emptied and exhausted, ignored the queen gu’s signals and went completely limp.
“Hmm. Looks like the gu used up all its poison. Is that it for today? What a shame. If we’d gone a little longer, I might’ve taken my clothes off. Try harder tomorrow.”
“……For someone who rolled around so energetically, you certainly have a lively mouth.”
Gyeong Damgan’s voice trembled strangely. The one who had swept the floor while claiming to be in pain was Cheong, yet for some reason, the one feeling upset was Gyeong Damgan.
No, from the beginning, was this really the proper attitude of someone who had swallowed a gu? It felt somehow different from an unyielding will. More like… carefree? How dare she?
When Gyeong Damgan ground his teeth, Cheong kept spewing whatever nonsense came to mind. Since not everything that came out of her mouth qualified as proper speech, “spewing” was the more accurate description.
“Then, can I leave now too? I just need to come when you call later, right? Since trying to make me do weird stuff doesn’t work anyway.”
“Leave? Where do you think you’re going?”
“Huh? You let our wandering warrior friends go, didn’t you?”
Cheong asked back as if she didn’t understand.
Wasn’t the plan to plant the gu, hold their lives hostage, and make them do all sorts of bad things?
“Come on, just let me go. I have to go bet on some arm wrestling matches in Ganggyeong, and if I don’t go back, my master will worry. I’ll keep my mouth shut and come running the moment you call, so let’s call it a day here. How about it? What does the perverted old bastard who’s lived too long think?”
“What an impudent bitch. You’re definitely planning to run off and try to remove the gu. There’s no way I’d let you.”
Why won’t he let only me go?
If he planted the gu bug or whatever and said, “From now on, you are a spy of the Blood Sect!” before sending her off to force her to do shady things, that would have made sense. But… remove the gu?
If he sent her away, it meant the gu could be removed. He had let the wanderers go because they couldn’t do it. Which meant that she had something—wealth, skill, background, whatever—that the wanderers didn’t, and that something allowed her to remove it.
Cheong’s mind spun at incredible speed when it came to protecting her own safety. Though honestly, if she had simply asked Jegal Ihyeon or any of her other acquaintances even once, she wouldn’t have needed to rack her brain like this. Information about gu wasn’t some closely guarded secret.
This was why people needed to learn things properly.
“Very well. Let’s see just how long you can keep acting so carefree.”
As Gyeong Damgan spoke, he tapped the floor lightly. A moment later, a cleverly hidden lid opened, revealing a secret passage. The lid was, of course, manually operated.
Cheong’s eyes sparkled as she watched the hand that opened the secret passage in the floor.
There are Blood Sect bastards down there! Wow! Blood Sect! Wow! Bad guys!
“Now, go in.”
Gyeong Damgan commanded. Cheong obediently descended the stairs leading underground. Only when she reached the dimly lit landing did the eerie purple glow in her eyes finally reveal its color and glint.
During that time, Cheon Yuhak was not simply sitting around watching the show.
The moment Cheong had smashed through the paper door with the wanderers in high spirits, a figure had slipped out through the roof and fled in a hurry.
“Tsk tsk. As expected.”
His disciple really was sloppy with the cleanup. Cheon Yuhak clicked his tongue and moved. If Cheong had heard him, she would have demanded to know who exactly was the sloppy one.
Why was there such a well-developed underground facility in this ancient, barbaric Central Plains? Underground levels were supposed to be a modern development, weren’t they?
Of course not. Underground construction was one of the specialties even primitive humans—somewhere between chimpanzees and monkeys—had excelled at since the medieval period and earlier. And the cities along the great rivers of the Central Plains had been repeatedly buried by floods, with new cities built on top of the sediment throughout history. This created layer upon layer of underground structures. Utilizing the legacy of their ancestors made building underground bases remarkably convenient.
And so, in an underground prison where not a single ray of moonlight leaked in, lit only by a fingernail-sized lantern, Cheong lay peacefully on the cold floor inside a dark iron-barred cell.
The prisoner treatment here is pretty bad. How can they not even give me one blanket? I’m not asking for a pillow, but shouldn’t they at least provide some ragged quilt? How am I supposed to sleep on something this cold, hard, and uncomfortable?
Exactly half a gak later.
Cheong was snoring loudly.
And inside Cheong, the little gu that had been completely exhausted and limp finally came to its senses.
Plants naturally produced their own toxins. But poisonous animals and creatures had to consume things that could become poison in order to produce it. The same was true for gu. Originally, gu had begun as beneficial parasites that lived inside human bodies and ate harmful substances. Only after methods to control specific species were developed did they evolve into the vile trick of dominating others.
Meanwhile, although Cheong’s Corpse-Blood Poison Person constitution made her immune to poison, it didn’t purify and erase toxins like some mythical treasure (or artifact, in modern terms). The poison that entered simply couldn’t harm her body. It stayed inside until it decomposed over time, or exited if it was the kind that left the body. The poisons that remained simply stayed where they were.
Thus, the little gu that had regained consciousness wriggled its hungry stomach and wandered through Cheong’s internal organs, searching for something to eat—something to fill its empty poison sac. It was truly a poison-eating insect in every sense of the word.
Then it reached a certain point and tasted a single drop of bile. Oh, what a world! There lay a crystallization of a wondrous poisonous liquid it had never tasted once in its entire life as a gu.
The little gu wagged its tail and frantically devoured the poisonous fluid. As it sucked up the bile, its color grew just a tiny, almost imperceptible bit darker and redder.
Of course, Cheong, who couldn’t see inside her own body, had no way of knowing. And the gu, which had no eyes to see color, remained equally unaware.