The Genius They Say Every Academy Has (05)
Yesterday, when I came home with the right sleeve of my uniform burned clean off, Hana was in a fury — blazing, in a way that sat nothing like her usual cool head.
At first I thought it was the ruined uniform. Then Sena slipped over and tipped me off. Hana had been angry because I had been fooling around beside a fire hot enough to burn an arm away.
Sent in on that same Hana's orders, Sena had come while I changed, saying she would help, and spent the whole time checking my right arm — no wounds, no burns.
Overprotective. Hopelessly overprotective.
With a Flame Aura Heart, I could leap into a fire pit and come out with nothing worse than a few hairs lightly singed. Telling myself I would have to set a day aside and let the triplets know what realm I had actually reached, I set about sorting through everything that had happened today.
The Dark Fire Bird Corps.
An organization built for the sole purpose of standing against the Cheonryong Sword Family. Where Cheonryong prided itself on being the strongest sword house — strict bloodline supremacy, elitism, and the Heavenly Dragon Heart Art — these people had gone the exact opposite way. They possessed a special aura cultivation method that could draw aura even out of nobodies. Literally out of people who had already wrecked their own lives.
Offer up your lifespan and your life, and the method forged them into aura. Train long enough, and anyone could wield it. But without talent, without life force, you simply guttered out and died. A terrifying art.
They were people made one by an aura cultivation method called the Black Claw Demon Bell.
Their aim was to bring down the Cheonryong Sword Family and reclaim their former might, and because they gave no thought to the lives they spent — their own or anyone else's — they fit a villain organization perfectly.
Better than yet another villain outfit, I suppose. Honestly, though, same thing.
I never dreamed they would have known where the Imoogi Ointment was.
They hadn't stumbled onto it by chance. They had been hunting the Imoogi Ointment outright. Whatever it could truly do, Cheon So-hyeong must have been the one to realize it.
Put another way... this isn't the dregs Cheon So-hyeong ended up with. This is the ointment, whole and intact?
I had meant to dab a little near the heart, or, if there wasn't enough, give up and hide the jar away. Faced with this much of it, though, another thought stirred. Couldn't I spread it over my entire body?
"Should I try just a little? I can leave the dregs in the bottle."
Heart thudding, I opened today's spoils — the Imoogi Ointment.
"Ugh!"
The instant I cracked the seal, a rotting stench past all description flooded the room.
I slammed the lid shut and threw the window open to air the place out, but in that brief moment the smell had already soaked in. A vicious reek of rot rose from the blankets and the pillow.
"Urk!"
Thinking it over, this was a product discontinued ages ago. Decades old, at the very least. Of course it had rotted. I simply hadn't thought of that before I opened it, and earned myself a thorough bout of gagging.
"Urk...!"
While I sat there wondering whether I ought to use the stuff at all, I finally understood why the Imoogi Ointment had done nothing in the past, and why it had only shown its power once Cheon So-hyeong's turn came around.
Yeesh. How did Cheon So-hyeong even smear this on? Even granting Cheon Dae-seong had beaten him clean out of his senses...
I eased the lid open and brought a little near my hand, and the ointment clung, thick and gluey, as if it might ruin skin on contact. Whether to put any of it near my heart became an agonizing question. The stench was so foul I could have tossed the whole jar to Cheon So-hyeong without using a single drop and never once regretted it.
It was plainly spoiled. The trouble was that Cheon So-hyeong, finding it two years from now and applying it, had gained an enormous benefit — so I couldn't bring myself to abandon the ointment so easily.
I fetched a cotton swab and dabbed at it. The stuff stretched, viscous, foreign matter mixed through it, and no amount of time was going to make that smell familiar.
"Damn it. Did rotting until it went hard like this create the effect?"
I genuinely thought I would have been better off smearing shit on myself.
"Hoo... hoo!"
In the end, to keep the stench from spreading, I carried the Imoogi Ointment into the bathroom attached to my room. Plastic gloves, then rubber gloves over those, so thoroughly that none of it would touch my hands, and I scooped a portion onto my palm.
"Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!!"
It squelched. Every layer I laid down felt as if my skin were rotting underneath.
I spread it as thin as I could manage, the way you would lay down the sheerest film, working it over my whole body — and still I couldn't understand why even a miserable trace of the ointment left me feeling filthy. Leave a weak point the way Siegfried did, or Achilles, and you might pay for it dearly later, so I meant to use it from the crown of my head to the tips of my toes. Literally.
Crown of the head meant the scalp as well. I slathered it into my hair in revolting smears and worked it out wide, and the whole time a stench rose that set my scalp throbbing. Partway through coating every inch of myself I started to wonder whether the torso, the limbs, the vital points would be enough — then I squeezed my eyes shut and painted my body as if I were varnishing it.
After a long while of this, I had used only about a fifth of the ointment. I had been spreading it as thin as possible so I would use as little as I could — not out of stinginess, but because I hated the smell — and so a great deal remained. I clamped the lid shut on the jar I couldn't stand to look at and stuffed it into a sealing bag.
Damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it!!
The smell pouring off my own body made me regret the entire enterprise.
What if it doesn't work, because this isn't the Dragon Scale Heart Sutra?
The Imoogi Ointment had been made decades ago, from the hides and carcasses of the giant snakes that came out of a dungeon called the Imoogi's Den. In those days, reprocessing dungeon byproducts and selling them had been a fad, and the ointment was simply one more product of it.
People who coveted the regeneration of dungeon anacondas — beasts that knit themselves back together in moments, even when a sword cut them — had drawn out the venom and processed the remains after their own fashion. There had been almost no effect. A moisturizer, nothing more. Aura cultivation and mana resonance had not yet spread among the public, so it was a product that did nothing of note, discontinued when the Imoogi's Den was sealed shut.
Which means the only person who ever used this together with an aura cultivation method and actually saw results... is Cheon So-hyeong. No one else, practically speaking.
I needed to learn whether the Imoogi Ointment reacted to aura cultivation itself, or to the Dragon Scale Heart Sutra. If it was the latter, then all I held was a useless ointment that stank of rot.
"Hoooo...!"
The vile smell had my head spinning, but I closed my eyes and set the Aura Heart in my chest turning.
Heat began to coil around my body, stirring the ointment spread moist across my skin. I felt the thin layer dry, cling, and slowly sink in. It seemed to be absorbing — and yet my skin drew tight, as if all that was being taken up was the moisture.
A failure?
Crack!
The film of ointment split across my skin with the sensation of a drought-baked rice-paddy floor breaking apart. Had I sunk so deep into the trance that a long time had passed, and the stuff had simply dried and flaked away? Or was something else at work?
I felt the fragments clinging to me fall off, like unfinished clay crumbling from a surface, and I had to admit it. The Imoogi Ointment and I had no bond.
Should have just left it alone.
All that suffering for nothing — the ordeal, the scolding from Hana, enduring this smell, pushing it this far. I hadn't slept a wink through the night besides, and here I was putting myself through every kind of misery. If I wanted the stench off me, I could already write off any sleep I might have had today.
Resentful, I was just easing off the circulation and opening my eyes when—
"......Hm?"
Red light was seeping through the cracks in the Imoogi Ointment.
The splitting sound, the cracks themselves — those had been real. But the pattern was uniform, like the scales of a dragon, and over the vital points of my body the scales had formed large and thick.
Near the heart in particular, where the aura poured forth, a single scale had risen not in the natural line from head to foot, but reversed — growing from the feet up toward the head. The other scales around the heart remained overlapping it, as if they existed to shield that reverse scale. The sound of ointment falling away that I had heard a moment before was this intricate pattern over the heart being carved into place and laid bare.
A shake of my body, and the spent ointment sloughed off.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Like a serpent granted eternal life and shedding its husk, I — cloaked in Imoogi Ointment, sheathed in aura — had gained new scales across every inch of me. My whole body shone, clad in red scales.
"Sniff, sniff..."
Sena, on duty this morning, caught a strange smell the moment she opened the door and set about tracking it to its source. Fortunately I had already set my Aura Heart turning and burned a little of the air in the room, so dawn's stench disaster did not repeat itself.
"Sena today?"
Yesterday had been Hana's shift, and the rotation normally ran Hana, Duna, Sena, so I had expected Duna.
"Yes... Duna's focusing on guarding you now, Young Master, so she's off the schedule, and Hana and I will look after you together..."
She had brought the wash things in order to bathe me, and she faltered when she found me already drying my wet hair.
"Oh — let me dry your hair."
Unable to simply stand there, she sat me down and spread both hands over my head. From her right came a faint breath of flame mana; from her left, wind.
If Hana was the head maid, and Duna the bodyguard I had taught an aura method, then Sena's part was to support us with magic. Unlike Duna, whose parents had paid to have her trained in aura cultivation, Sena had never studied mana resonance at all. She was a natural-born mage who had taught herself — though the original word for her was witch, and since that was not meant kindly, people called her a natural-born mage instead.
"But, Young Master..."
"Yeah."
"Doesn't it... smell nice, somewhere...?"
"Dunno. Where from?"
"I think... it's coming from the bathroom..."
She drifted into the bathroom with the dazed look of a child who had just spotted a cotton-candy vendor, and there she found the Imoogi Ointment, rolled tight inside its sealed bag. Merely having it near me sent up a stench fierce enough to sting the nose and pound the skull.
"From in here... such a nice smell..."
Watching Sena — her usually hazy eyes bright and sparkling as she stared at the ointment in the bag — I found myself thinking the stuff might stink only to me, and be a fine thing for a mage.
"This... where did you get it...?"
"Picked it up on the way."
I wasn't lying. I had picked it up after putting down an officer of the Dark Fire Bird Corps.
She was looking at it with eyes that sparkled as if she wanted it, so I set the Imoogi Ointment in her hands.
"Try it near your heart."
Mana resonance, as I recalled, was also worked near the heart. I had no idea whether it would take the way an aura method did, but a sturdier heart could hardly do her harm. If I was already passing the effects of the Black Dragon Yeouiju on to Duna in a roundabout way, then giving Sena the Imoogi Ointment ought to be fair enough.
"......Does it make your chest bigger?"
Sena, it seemed, had been hoping for a different effect.
"Uh... well... probably?"
It would help her either way, so a lie of that size was allowed. Before two years were up, I could take back whatever scrap remained and put it back where it belonged.