Chapter 27
Heo Injun was, by nature, respectful toward Geom Mujin, but somewhere beneath that courtesy there had always been a faint, almost unspoken distance.
It probably came from the fact that they had not known each other long and that Geom Mujin’s position as his benefactor made the relationship a little special.
But even that was old news now.
“Please trust me, Sword Lord Geom.”
Heo Injun looked at him as though some invisible wall between them had narrowed all at once.
“O-oh. Yeah, sure. I’m counting on you.”
I had a lot I wanted to say in response to that look, but the situation did not exactly leave me any room for it.
“Shaa… shaa….”
Even now, the child’s breathing was growing weaker.
“Damn. We need to hurry.”
Heo Injun rose straight from the bed and moved to the side.
He shoved the bookshelf in the room aside.
Behind it, as plain as day, was an iron door that looked suspiciously like it belonged in some secret stronghold.
Creak, creak—
Heo Injun pulled a key from his robes and inserted it. Immediately, the iron door answered with the sound of hidden machinery turning over.
“Follow me.”
“O-oh, okay.”
Rattle—
I followed him inside.
It was a private room set apart from the clinic proper.
Medical books filled the shelves, and all kinds of anatomical specimens and herbs hung densely from the ceiling.
This was straight-up mad scientist...
“This is my personal laboratory.”
“Why would you make a lab into a secret room?”
Was this guy actually okay in the head?
So he really was the Poison Demon, huh?
He’d been lying to me last time, hadn’t he?
“Huh? Isn’t it only natural for any family with a bit of money to have a secret room like this?”
“......”
Heo Injun said it as casually as if he were stating the obvious fact that the sun and moon revolved around the earth.
“Ah, right. Of course.”
Yeah. Sure. A house can have a panic room.
Twenty years into martial arts, and I’m still getting surprised by stuff like this. Guess my education is still lacking.
I’d spent my life without even a roof over my head. How was I supposed to know?
“I’ll lay the child down.”
Heo Injun placed the child atop the treatment table.
Though come to think of it, that looked less like a treatment table and more like a dissection table. Maybe that was just my imagination.
“First, I’ll check the pulse.”
As he said that, he took out some needles.
Any kind of treatment had to begin with making sure the pulse was still alive.
“Wait. I’ll do that.”
I stopped him and took the child’s wrist.
I sent inner energy into her body.
As I’d already confirmed earlier, the meridians inside her body were on the verge of tearing apart.
If I flooded them with energy blindly, they’d never hold and would burst.
So instead of shoving in a large amount, I injected only a small quantity, but made sure it entered cleanly and decisively.
Vwoom—
Inner energy refined thin as thread slipped into the ragged meridians.
The moment my energy entered, the child’s own energy reacted.
Qi naturally flowed from above to below.
Though only a tiny amount, the quality of my inner energy far surpassed hers, and her own qi began to follow it.
Go on.
My energy, snugly threaded along both flanks of her body’s channels, set out from the dantian.
It circulated through the entire body by way of the enlightened gate, Baihui, Yintang, and Tanzhong, then returned to the dantian again.
The route above was the circulation path for regulated breathing and inner cultivation.
Geom Mujin was now artificially inducing the child into regulated breathing and circulation.
Originally, this method wasn’t just about gathering qi; it also healed the practitioner’s wounds and strengthened the body.
“Shaa… shaa….”
Even if it couldn’t fully restore someone teetering on death’s edge, it could at least buy them a little more time.
This is the best I can do in her current state.
Any more than this, and the meridians wouldn’t hold.
“...The pulse is slowly returning.”
Heo Injun’s eyes widened as he checked the child’s pulse.
He didn’t know a thing about martial arts, but he could tell how absurd this was.
Interfering with another person’s qi and making it move at your command was incredibly difficult.
Even controlling the qi inside your own body required a lifetime of miserable, sweat-soaked training. How much harder must it be to handle qi inside someone else’s body?
That was why, when masters taught their disciples, the most they usually did was guide the flow of qi in a simple manner.
Of course, even that wasn’t something just anyone could do.
Only masters whose command of qi had reached an advanced level could perform true energy guidance, and yet...
Geom Mujin was doing something beyond that.
Sword Lord Geom... just what are you?
Compared to the principles of martial arts, regulated breathing might have been lower in difficulty, but Geom Mujin manipulated the child’s qi without the slightest hesitation.
Every time Heo Injun looked at his benefactor, he ended up being shocked all over again.
“I’ll keep the pulse going, so you focus on the treatment, Doctor Heo.”
“...Understood.”
Heo Injun quickly gathered himself and nodded.
The shock was the shock, but right now he needed to focus on the patient in front of him.
With Geom Mujin keeping the pulse alive, the child’s most urgent problem was reactivating the organs that had begun to shut down.
No matter how much Geom Mujin artificially maintained her pulse to prolong her life, he couldn’t keep doing it forever.
As it was, he could not move at all while holding the pulse.
The instant he let go, Anubis would come to claim the child’s life.
Still, thanks to Geom Mujin’s support, Heo Injun had saved time and went straight into the real treatment.
Otherwise, he would have wasted far too much time just keeping the pulse alive.
Tap, tap, tap, tap—!
Heo Family One Hundred and Eight Needles
Vital Organs Awakening
Needles flew in at lightning speed and were inserted into acupoints around the major organs of the human body—heart, lungs, stomach, kidneys, pancreas, and more.
This was the secret needling technique that had made Heo Injun famous not only in Gangneung, but across Gangseo as the region’s greatest physician.
It had originally been a secret technique of the family, though supposedly it had been improved in Heo Injun’s generation.
That’s how I remembered it from my old, dusty database of a brain.
But fuzzy memory aside, his acupuncture was the real deal.
As the name One Hundred and Eight Needles suggested, more than a hundred needles came flying in, yet not a single one was off by even a hair.
In a different way from the Tang Clan, who specialized in hidden weapons, this was downright ghostlike skill.
No—if anything, it was more impressive.
With the Tang Clan, you just need to throw at places that’ll probably kill somebody. This is the exact opposite.
Healing people was far harder than killing them.
Heo Injun’s needles drove only toward places meant to save a life.
How is a man who doesn’t even practice martial arts this good?
The needles inserted around the body’s acupoints sent their energy to the major meridians.
The major acupoints, receiving that energy, pushed it inward and stimulated the organs.
Through the connection created while moving the child’s qi, Geom Mujin could feel the whole process unfold.
So this is basically a defibrillator.
And just as I was starting to worry whether that would really work...
Thump—! Thump—!
“!?”
Incredible as it was, the child’s organs, including her heart, began to grow steadily more active.
As blood circulation resumed, a faint flush slowly returned to her face, the sort of rosy color a child ought to have.
Hmm. Even so, she still looks pale.
Apparently she’d already been the naturally pale type.
“Now that the organs are back on track, you can let go.”
Once the organs regained activity, Heo Injun removed the needles and spoke.
“Right.”
He had applied needles to boost vitality.
“That’s taken care of the immediate danger, but the meridians are still the real issue.”
The meridians were still in tatters.
“Yeah, they’re in pretty bad shape.”
“Yes. Honestly, I had thought the child was somehow still alive—sorry. That was a pointless thing to say.”
With a face full of guilt, he bowed his head in apology.
He looked exactly like a doctor who’d misspoken in front of a patient’s guardian.
And now you’re making me feel weird, man.
“Anyway, this is troublesome. Meridians are hard to fix with medicine or regulated breathing alone.”
Meridian damage was basically an internal injury, so it needed a different treatment.
The best method was...
“We need an elixir.”
The spirit energy contained in an elixir had to be used to heal the meridians, but I didn’t have one on hand.
Not that elixirs were easy to come by these days, especially after the Orthodox-Demonic War.
I folded my arms and looked down at the child.
“Haa...”
A sigh slipped from Geom Mujin’s lips.
The girl had been a blood-sucking little monster who’d tried to kill me, sure, but I couldn’t forget the way she had once grabbed my hand and cried.
Well. No choice then.
“Doctor Heo. I’m going out for a bit.”
“Pardon? Right now?”
“Just now, all-powerful Jesus gave me permission to become a righteous thief.”
If I were stealing from anyone, Taeho Sect would be the ideal target, since most of their manpower had already been stripped away to hunt down the Goema.
Not only had I nearly crippled the Taeho Sect Master, and now I was thinking of robbing them like it was nothing!
If he hadn’t become one of the Seven Martial Stars, he would have been an outrageous demonic bastard!
The guys with the fattest wallets in Gangneung probably have a few elixirs stashed away...
“Please wait a moment.”
At that moment, Heo Injun stopped him.
Setting aside the nonsense about being a righteous thief, he had more or less guessed what Geom Mujin intended to do once he left.
“Even if Sword Lord Geom hadn’t said that, I was going to try a method myself.”
“What?”
Heo Injun took something out from a drawer at the back of the lab.
“What’s that?”
It was a small wooden box, just the right size to hold an elixir.
“...Shall I call it one of the traces left behind when I struggled to save Yul?”
With a faintly bitter expression, Heo Injun opened the box.
Click—
“An elixir?”
Inside was a single pill.
“It’s an elixir I made myself... well, not quite an elixir. More like a medicine I made while aiming for one.”
Back when Heo Yul was suffering from meridian blockage, he hadn’t simply wandered from sect to sect begging for elixirs.
As a physician, he had worked to create a medicine of his own, and only after every attempt failed did it come to that.
What he’d taken out now was one of those failures born from failure.
“It’s called Bo-Myeonghwan, the Life-Preserving Pill.”
To preserve life.
It was easy to see how desperately he had wanted to save his daughter.
“It was made in an attempt to protect Yul’s meridians and at least slow the progression of the meridian blockage.”
Of course, by the time the medicine was completed, the disease had progressed so rapidly that it had already become useless.
I didn’t ask whether it was effective.
The man standing before me had been the one who, in the original world, had turned the martial world upside down with his medicine.
“If this medicine is combined with Sword Lord Geom’s guidance of qi...”
“Might be worth a shot.”
Robbing a sect could wait until afterward.
“I’ll need to crush the pill first, so please wait while I do that.”
“No need.”
I took the Bo-Myeonghwan from him and opened the child’s mouth.
“Oh? This child’s teeth...”
“Ahem! In it goes!”
Grip—!
I immediately packed force into my hand.
With a grip strong enough to wring water from stone, a drop of the pill was pressed out and fell into the child’s mouth.
“Gulp...”
“From here on, we need to focus, so stay back.”
Chomp.
Once I confirmed that she had swallowed the droplet, I hastily closed her mouth.
The medicine passed down her throat and released its energy.
Sensing that energy, I placed my hand on her dantian.
As it happened, there were few people better than me at treating internal injuries.
Why else had I been able to survive all those long years ruling the martial world as a loner?
Of course, part of it was because I was ridiculously, absurdly strong, but I hadn’t started out that way.
Back when I was a martial arts newbie, I’d gotten beaten up more than once and barely clung to life more times than I could count.
And back then, as an unaffiliated wandering martial artist, I didn’t have some weird, half-senile female master with reverse-aging to treat my internal injuries, nor did I have a sister-disciple humming along to boil me chicken soup.
If I didn’t want to die on the roadside, I had to grit my teeth and perform my own treatment.
After enough repetitions, before I knew it, my skill at treating wounds—especially internal injuries—had reached an expert level.
That long, miserable history of hard-won experience now came pouring out without restraint.
The medicinal energy of the Life-Preserving Pill began spreading through the cracked, ragged meridians.
Rather than treating everything at once, we fix the urgent parts first, little by little.
If I tried to heal everything broadly in one shot, I might run out of energy later.
Besides, the Bo-Myeonghwan wasn’t a true elixir, so I had to distribute it carefully.
Under Geom Mujin’s guidance, the cracked meridians gradually knit themselves back together and returned to their proper places.
While I was treating her, I realized something.
This kid was accepting the medicine’s energy better than I’d expected.
When external energy enters a body, some of it usually gets rejected, whether a little or a lot, but here there was almost none of that.
That was lucky for now, but was it another one of the special traits of a vampire?
Carrying that question in my mind, I continued the treatment.
* * *
After spending about two full shichen treating the meridians, we stepped out of the lab.
“I’ve also had an IV set up, so we’ve done all we can for now.”
“...Right.”
I deliberately ignored the drip-drip of the IV beside us.
If I paid attention, I’d lose. If I paid attention, I’d lose.
Why did needles lead into that in the first place, and why the hell was an IV appearing with such no-context energy? If I paid attention, I’d lose.
“Have a drink. It’s calamansi.”
“Thanks.”
Heo Injun handed me a cup while I sat on a nearby stool.
Glug—
The refreshing tartness of calamansi cleared my head.
When you’re sick, you’re supposed to eat well. Maybe I should feed that kid something too.
Or wait—if she was a vampire, did she only want blood?
“Try not to worry too much. She’ll be fine, just like Sword Lord Geom.”
“Like me...?”
When I glanced at the child, Heo Injun offered me a gentle, reassuring look.
“Hey, Doctor Heo. I’ve been meaning to say something since earlier.”
“Yes?”
I wanted to clear up the misunderstanding before it got any deeper.
Now then. How was I supposed to phrase this?
After a moment’s thought, Geom Mujin opened his mouth.
“That kid. She’s not my child.”
“Huh?”
Drip—
A stream of calamansi trickled from Heo Injun’s mouth.
Well, at least I should tell Doctor Heo the truth.
“That kid. She’s a Goema from Mount Mui.”
“Wha—!?”
Drip—!
The calamansi came pouring out like a waterfall.