The Delay Was Already Past the Point of Tact
"Ha. What a piece of work."
Dang Yulin snorted and crushed the tiny letter in her hand.
Fssssh—
The poison leaking from her palm corroded the paper in an instant.
"Unni...?"
Dang Seorin, her younger twin, tilted her head at her sister’s reaction, wondering what on earth that letter had said to set her off like this.
On the fluttering scraps of the letter, one word was still visible: Lia-rudol.
How many times is this now?
Dang Yulin frowned.
The letter she had received was a notice saying the delivery of the item she’d ordered had been delayed.
Unlike the ridiculously convenient homeland of Geom Mujin’s transmigrated soul, this world had a vast landmass, and bandits were scattered across the country like deer. That meant shipments could be delayed, lost, or derailed by accidents along the way.
As someone from Sichuan, on the fringes of the Central Plains, she understood that much.
She understood, yes, but—
Not even departing in the first place is way over the line!
And not once, not twice, but three times!
At this point, even a Namgung swordsman would have crossed the line hard enough to split lightning.
Tsk. If they’d used the Dang Clan’s name, this never would’ve happened.
Dang Yulin clicked her tongue inwardly.
When she had entered Cheonmu Academy, her father—the head of the Dang Clan—had given one strict order to her and her sister:
Never use the Dang Clan’s name for private matters.
The clan head had no intention of raising his daughters into spoiled little brats.
Letting your children or disciples throw around the name of the faction they belonged to was the fastest route to ruining them.
This was something the Nine Great Sects and the Five Great Clans especially needed to watch out for.
The sight of people groveling just because of a sect’s or clan’s authority might satisfy some base craving, but satisfaction led straight to laziness.
Worse, the overconfidence that swelled far beyond one’s actual level could become a threat to life itself.
“You there—are you that barbarian everybody’s been talking about lately? Well? Hurry up and crawl through the legs of the Great Southern Sect already.”
“That sword looks nice. A filthy black-haired wretch like you using such a fine blade? Must be stolen. I, Huangbo Jugun of the Huangbo Clan, will need to interrogate you.”
In the past, quite a few people had learned that lesson the hard way after picking on some black-haired passerby, and the Dang Clan had been among them.
In any case, because her father had ordered her not to use the family name, she had submitted the request under an alias, and clearly that was why they were treating her like a joke.
“...I think I should leave the academy.”
“Huh?”
“I need to go to Hubei Province.”
“W-what?!”
Dang Seorin panicked at her sister’s shocking declaration.
The students of Cheonmu Academy generally lived in the dormitories.
Mount Taiyuan, where the academy was located, was mountainous, so commuting from home was basically impossible.
And now she was saying she’d go to Hubei Province?
That was just another way of saying she was ditching school.
“B-but what about the academy...?”
“If I say I’m in seclusion because of a breakthrough, it’s fine.”
As an educational institution devoted to martial training, Cheonmu Academy accepted a sudden closed-door retreat prompted by enlightenment as an excused absence.
“B-but that’s...”
Dang Seorin trailed off.
On the surface, it sounded like the perfect excuse, but there was a problem.
Cheonmu Academy was no fool; any student who missed class on the grounds of seclusion had to show improved results after coming out of retreat.
If they couldn’t, it was an automatic absence.
“I knew this would happen, so I’ve been hiding thirty percent of my real ability all along.”
Dang Yulin curled one corner of her mouth.
The seniors’ advice that in the martial world you had to hide thirty percent of your true strength had been dead on.
“In that case...”
Dang Seorin had nothing left to say to her sister, who had already prepared for everything with frightening thoroughness.
“Th-then... take care on the way...”
“What are you talking about? You’re coming too.”
“Eep?”
Dang Seorin, who had been about to slip away into the shadows, wore the betrayed expression of an otter having its shellfish stolen.
“M-me too...? But I need to focus on my studies, and I’ve got a whole pile of scheduled work...”
“Scheduled work? You mean the thing where you hole up in your room every day after class?”
At her sister’s sneering remark, the shut-in instincts inside her rang the alarm.
Ding! Ding! Dingding!!
This was a minimum two-week-level disaster!
The moment she stepped outside, a shut-in like her would start burning through stamina and internal energy alike, so she immediately prepared to vanish with concealment arts—
“Grab her, Hayoung.”
—but Dang Yulin’s tongue was faster than her escape.
“Yes, miss.”
Thud—!
Just then, a pair of hands shot out from behind Dang Seorin and seized her around the waist.
The owner of those hands was a young woman with blue bobbed hair and a strangely cool gaze.
She was Hayoung, a retainer from the Dang Clan who had entered the academy as an attendant to guard and assist the Dang sisters while they were away from home.
“L-let go... Hayoung...!”
Dang Seorin, her tactical stronghold compromised, thrashed in place.
Jiggle jiggle—
Her other two mountains swayed in the air.
Oh, so now this wench—
The shaking was messing with her heart too, and Dang Yulin’s eyes turned sharp as axes.
“T-this is an order...!”
And she was stressing their master-servant relationship while calling it an order.
As expected, Dang Seorin was more clever than she looked.
“Nope. I’m not letting go. That’s an order.”
As the sisters’ contradictory commands collided, Hayoung calmly rolled her eyes and spoke.
“If you refer to yourself in the third person, call me your older sister, and end every sentence with meow, I’ll consider it, Miss Seorin.”
Hayoung recited the absurd condition without even changing expression.
“Se... Seorin doesn’t want to go to Hubei meow... So Hayoung unni... please let Seorin go meow...”
Dang Seorin lowered her head in mortification and begged in a voice that sounded half-dead.
“Understood. However, I will have to decline that request.”
“Eh?! W-why...?”
“In the martial world, you must not take other people’s requests at face value.”
Hayoung offered Dang Seorin a little lesson in martial-world survival.
“T-that’s impossible... You tricked me...”
“I did not. I said I would consider it, not that I would let you go.”
Feeling along Dang Seorin’s side, Hayoung judged the state of the waistline there to be alarmingly precarious.
The girl needed exercise. A trip to Hubei and back would be excellent dieting.
“Give it up already. Hayoung’s on my side too. You don’t have anyone on yours.”
“Uuu...”
Dang Seorin pouted miserably.
In truth, Dang Yulin already knew Hayoung was on her side.
From the moment Seorin was the one who had brought the letter that Yulin herself could have carried, she’d understood exactly what Hayoung was thinking.
Hayoung thinks Seorin’s been cooped up too much too.
The two women exchanged a glance and nodded.
“Then let’s set out as soon as the seclusion paperwork is done.”
“Understood.”
“N-nooo...”
She ignored the pathetically weak voice whining before they’d even left.
The seller kept delaying delivery for personal reasons, so what else was there to do?
They’d just have to go there in person.
Fine, let’s see how personal those reasons really are.
I’ll make sure they spend the rest of their life with nothing but diarrhea.
Dang Yulin glared at the address written at the end of the letter, her eyes blazing.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
In a dark, sealed chamber.
“Krrrgh...!”
Thud—!
“Kraaaah...!”
Bang—!!
Every time a sound like a beast’s whimper rang out, a shockwave shuddered through the chamber.
The source of the sound was human, not beast, but that didn’t make it entirely wrong.
Every time the middle-aged man screamed, he slammed his head into the wall and floor in a way that hardly seemed human at all.
“Kraaagh!!”
Bang—!
The middle-aged man drove his forehead into the chamber wall.
And that wasn’t the end of it; after that, he kept rolling across the floor, smashing his body into the wall, the ground, anything he could reach.
Drip-drip—!
Each time, fresh blood sprayed from his body.
You might think he’d gone insane, but that wasn’t it.
The mind behind this self-destructive conduct was clearer than ever.
“Kraaaah!”
Of course, with the immense pain coursing through every inch of his body, he had no room to speak.
“How is he holding up?”
Then the door opened and a man stepped inside—Ma Sung—asking the question.
“The same as before. He’s enduring the pain and continuing treatment today as well,” answered the chief steward, who had been watching over the middle-aged man in case anything happened.
The behavior that looked like madness or self-harm was, astonishingly, a form of treatment.
“...At this point, the lord of the estate is becoming less and less astonishing and more and more terrifying.”
Ma Sung wore a slightly stunned expression as he looked at the middle-aged man—Bang Dupil.
Bang Dupil, lord of Baekmun Express, had declared revenge in front of his son’s corpse and immediately begun treatment that very day.
If he was going to tear his enemies to pieces, he had to break the chains first.
—Heehee, you want to cure your drug addiction?
The physician he’d found through the underworld’s back channels proposed a treatment method.
—Someone once said drugs aren’t something you quit; they’re something you endure.
Human beings were essentially beasts vulnerable to stimulation, so once they became addicted to a sensation they’d tasted, it was nearly impossible to escape it.
You could find people who had never once indulged in self-gratification, but you’d be hard-pressed to find one who had never even tried it.
—Enduring isn’t enough. You have to cut it off completely.
If he couldn’t quit even after losing his one and only child, then he was less than a beast.
—If you’re going to attempt something close to impossible, there will be immense pain. Can you endure it?
—My heart is already in hell.
Bang Dupil had said it like Gonou undergoing surgery without anesthesia at Hua Tuo’s hands, but it hadn’t lasted long.
“Kraaaaaah!!!”
The agony the physician had warned him about wracked Bang Dupil’s body.
At present he was only smashing himself into walls and floors, but in the beginning he had been spraying all manner of bodily fluids everywhere from top to bottom.
—Hee-hee! Don’t hold anything back. Let it all out.
The physician’s treatment method was to wash out the meridians clogged by drug residue by drawing out corrupted blood.
He called it the Great Blood-Exchange Method.
“Method” sounded noble enough, but the pain was so severe it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call it witchcraft.
If you drew out everything at once, you’d die, so he removed blood in amounts that wouldn’t kill him, then forced new blood to be generated to dilute the poisoned remnants.
For that, he drank medicine every day to stimulate blood production and then bled him.
But there was one thing everyone had overlooked.
—Hmm... I don’t know exactly what drug he took, but this stuff is nasty. Looks like I’ll have to keep going.
The brutal addictiveness of Jamsungdan didn’t vanish after one treatment.
Even after one full round of blood replacement, the drug residue in his meridians still remained.
—C-continue...!
Wanting a complete cure, Bang Dupil ultimately underwent a second round, then a third.
And that was how he ended up like this, before the two men now standing here.
“Kraaaah!!”
Bang Dupil drove his forehead into the floor.
“Hnn...”
Watching that, Ma Sung folded his arms.
Bang Dupil and the others who had taken Jamsungdan all went through the same treatment.
That was why he knew.
He knew exactly how painful that was.
Even he and the other escorts hadn’t dared attempt a second treatment.
“Kahk...”
Thunk—
After rampaging for a while, Bang Dupil collapsed onto the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.
The blood-exchange treatment was over.
“Lord!”
“Are you conscious?!”
Ma Sung and the chief steward rushed to him.
“First, drink this.”
The steward poured medicine into Bang Dupil’s mouth to stimulate blood production.
“How long... how long was I like that...?”
Bang Dupil swallowed the medicine and asked haltingly.
“Today makes thirty-five days.”
“Ma Sung... what happened to the thing I ordered?”
“At first they resisted, saying we should follow the proper order, but we persuaded them. It’s now in the final stage.”
At that, Bang Dupil’s eyes snapped open.
Despite his corpse-like, blood-smeared appearance, his gaze blazed with fierce will.
Clench—!
He tightened his fist with all his strength.
The Great Blood-Exchange Method had put monstrous pain into his flesh.
But pain that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Through that endless succession of agony, his body had climbed to a higher level.
He could feel it in his fist.
“...Chief Steward.”
“Yes, Lord.”
“Contact that bastard. Tell him we’ve caught the White-Headed Heavenly Awakening Eagle.”
As he said it, a thick killing intent settled into Bang Dupil’s eyes.
It was finally time to kill those bastards who weren’t worth chewing and swallowing.
But he didn’t know.
He didn’t know that the fire of his revenge had been aimed at the wrong place all along.