The Poison Well Runs Wild
The moment the group was pushed to the brink, Geom Mujin appeared like some kind of salvation out of nowhere.
"Sorry I'm late. You guys all okay...?"
He cut down the two fish-bodied Goema in a single stroke and started to ask over his shoulder, but the rest of the sentence died on his lips.
Behind him, Dang Yulin was on the ground, apparently knocked senseless by the severed head of a Goema he’d just taken off.
"Grrr... rrr..."
Whether she’d been hit squarely or not, her body lay sprawled on the deck, trembling violently.
"H-hey..! You okay—"
"Don’t go near her! Step back!"
Just as he moved in to check on her, Hayoung shouted.
Hissss—!
"....!"
Geom Mujin saw green smoke rising from Dang Yulin’s body.
Poison mist!
He immediately put some distance between them.
He himself wasn’t likely to fall to just any poison, but the kid tucked under his arm was another matter.
"Ugh... uuuugh...!"
The poison mist pouring off Dang Yulin only grew thicker.
No way—did she just unlock the Poison Well!?
Geom Mujin understood the situation at once.
Dang Yulin was one of the heroines of My Murim Academy, so there was no way he wouldn’t know her setup.
The Poison Well was an internal organ born only in the men and women of the Sichuan Dang Clan, and the key to their long-cherished wish.
The founder of the Dang Clan was said to have been a mysterious eccentric.
Like any proper Central Plains local, he’d shoveled down anything edible he could get his hands on, and one day he accidentally ate a poisonous mushroom.
-Ghk! Cough...! ...Huh?
He should have died from it, of course, but instead?
He didn’t die.
At first he’d suffered excruciating stomach pain, but afterward he felt even stronger than usual.
-Just one more time...
Assuming the poisonous mushroom was the cause of this strange phenomenon, the founder ate it again.
-Whoa!
His guess turned out to be right.
This time there wasn’t even any stomach pain.
He had already developed an immunity.
It was the moment he awakened a talent all his own.
After that, the founder devoured all kinds of poisons to build his strength.
In the process, he discovered that the poisons he consumed could also be generated within his own body.
He went on to create martial arts for handling that poison.
According to later research by his descendants, he had in fact been a freak of nature with an organ no one else possessed: the Poison Well.
Located behind the liver, that organ stored poison that entered the body.
It was an unprecedented organ, capable not only of releasing the stored toxins but even combining them.
And that kind of person went and picked up a poisonous mushroom and ate it.
A coincidence that was practically inevitable.
Thanks to the Poison Well, he went from being a nobody third-rate fighter to a grand master of poison arts who roamed the martial world.
In his later years he settled in Sichuan and laid the foundations of the Dang Clan.
After his death, his descendants carried on the family line, but they soon ran into a massive wall.
They simply couldn’t reach the level of a true poison-man like their founder!
They could handle external poisons, but unlike the founder, they couldn’t generate poison within their own bodies.
Strictly speaking, second and third generations did produce a few poison-men who could do it, but from the generations after that, their numbers dropped off exponentially.
After studying the matter, they quickly found the reason.
The bloodline inherited from the founder had grown thinner with each generation.
Their constitution and talent came from the blood, and that blood was fading, while the Poison Well itself was disappearing.
No matter how thick the blood, it couldn’t remain eternal. There was nothing to be done about that.
The Dang family’s internal arts and martial techniques could imbue qi with poison, but they still fell short of the Poison Well’s effect.
Still, they did have one method left.
It was atavism—throwback inheritance.
Though the odds were low, children were sometimes born with the aptitude to become poison-men.
The answer was explosive reproduction.
-Wife? Why on earth has the dinner table been nothing but eel and garlic for a whole week? I’d really like some meatballs.
-My lord husband, I took my medicine today.
-W-what are you talking about!? We already have five children under our roof!?
-Hehe, no you don’t. The pocket monster’s max is six.
-Gyaaah...!
With fertility-inducing drugs and the devoted efforts of Dang family men, they produced large numbers of descendants.
As the saying went, poison and medicine were two sides of the same coin, and there was enough overlap between the fields that making the drugs wasn’t difficult.
All of it was for the sake of having a child born with the Poison Well.
And even then, children born with that organ were extremely rare. In some generations, there were none at all.
In that context, Dang Yulin was the first Poison Well owner born in nearly thirty years.
...That was the setup I remembered, anyway.
One of the reasons the Sichuan Dang Clan never went all the way after me, even though I’d turned Dongryong into that state, was this.
Dongryong had not been born with the Poison Well.
Those without it ranked much lower in importance.
I could feel the poisonous energy coursing through the air.
My skin prickled all over.
If it felt like this for me, anyone else would be in real trouble.
"Kyaaah! W-what is this!? My face stings so much...!"
As soon as I thought it, O Naho clutched his face and rolled across the deck.
"Hngh...! Ahhh!"
Dang Yulin groaned in pain, her skin slowly turning a murky black.
Just because you have a Poison Well doesn’t mean you instantly become a poison-man the moment you click your fingers.
The Poison Well was still an internal organ, after all.
You had to take in poison, store it, detoxify it, combine it, and refine it.
Only when control over poison and control over qi were blended together did you finally become a proper poison-man.
And this isn’t that point in the story yet.
As a little early-stage baby heroine, she wouldn’t be able to handle the Poison Well properly.
So the poison now surging out of the once-suppressed organ was too much for her to control.
"Lady Yulin!"
"Sis..!"
"Stop."
I held back the two who were trying to rush over to Dang Yulin.
"Let go of me! We have to help Lady Yulin now—!"
Hayoung protested at being stopped, but Geom Mujin shook his head.
"Look at your skin right now. You think you can help like that?"
At his words, Hayoung checked her hands.
Red blotches were appearing across them.
She was already being poisoned by the poison mist.
"I can't believe it..."
Hayoung’s pupils trembled.
Even if she wasn’t on the level of the Dang Clan, she had some resistance to poison.
Not only that, she even carried a blood-poison antidote on her person, but...
"I-I said I was hiding twenty percent of my strength, but maybe that was actually true, looool..."
Come to think of it, she’d said something like that before ditching the academy, and now it seemed there was more to it than that.
"I-I don’t have much resistance to poison either. What should I do...?"
"What do you mean, what should you do? We save her and bring her out."
"Huh?? You, sir...?"
"If I don’t, then who will?"
I handed the little kid strapped to my side over to Dang Seorin.
"Watch this for a second."
"Y-yes? Huh...? Where did this child come from...? I definitely saw them leave just now..."
"Don’t ask."
As she tilted her head with the child now in her arms, I put on my best innocent face.
It was about time to use it.
"Benefactor."
Then Hayoung came over with a serious expression.
"If you’re going to save Lady Yulin, you’ll need this."
She handed me a long acupuncture needle.
"This is...?"
"A Stop-Poison Sealed Needle."
I acted like I was seeing it for the first time, but I knew exactly what it was.
"It was handed down in the clan for emergencies like this. You have to drive the needle into the Cheonjubyeol at the back of the neck."
"Cheonjubyeol... got it."
"Please be careful."
Hayoung warned me, glancing at Dang Yulin.
"Lady Yulin seems to be suppressing the poison somehow, but it could burst at any moment."
Just as she said, the poison swirling around Dang Yulin looked ready to explode at any second.
"You two get on the boat and escape ahead of us."
"But the boat's wrecked, though..."
"Repair it. You’ve got five minutes."
"T-that’s way too shor—"
"Five minutes!!"
"Understood!"
O Naho began frantically hammering at the ferryboat.
"Ahh...!"
Part of the poison mist burst free.
Fwoosh—!
I immediately spread my protective qi barrier.
Hissss—!
When the barrier touched the poison mist, the qi barrier began to melt away little by little.
The poison’s stronger than I thought...
"Tch."
Geom Mujin clicked his tongue and yanked at his mask.
A little of the poison had splashed onto it and was corroding the fabric.
"....."
Hayoung watched, wide-eyed, as the mask came away and Geom Mujin’s face was exposed.
"Hayoung?"
"...No, it’s nothing."
But only for a moment. Then she ran off to help O Naho.
Leaving them behind, I stepped forward.
In the original story, Dang Yulin’s Poison Well rampage was an event that happened here too.
Back then, the protagonist had also received the Stop-Poison Sealed Needle from Hayoung after hearing the exact same explanation.
But that idiot of a protagonist never actually used the needle.
Strictly speaking, he had tried to, but the moment he pulled it out, the poison corroded the needle and ruined it.
At the time he was still only an expert-tier nobody who couldn’t use the qi barrier yet, so there was nothing to be done.
Not my problem.
It looked like I’d be seeing the effect of the Stop-Poison Sealed Needle here—something that never even showed up in the original.
Let’s end this quickly. I still had to go beat the crap out of the demonic cultists.
I had mountains of work to do.
Just as I was about to move in on Dang Yulin and drive the needle in.
"....!?"
She lifted her head, and our eyes met.
"Y-you...!"
Her face twisted violently at once.
It clicked then. The thing I’d forgotten came flooding back.
Ah, the mask!
I’d taken off the mask earlier, so my bare face was fully exposed!
"Y-you...! You...!"
The state she’d been barely clinging to shattered when she saw the face of the family enemy who had just appeared out of nowhere.
Not only had he smashed her with a Goema head, he’d even been flagrantly t-bagging her on top of it!
Whether he meant it or not, Geom Mujin was causing problems left and right.
"Miss Dang, let’s talk this out like civilized—"
"M-my enemyyyy...!"
BOOM—!!
The poison mist Dang Yulin had been holding down exploded outward.
Sching—
Just before the poisonous cloud could engulf the deck, a clear, ringing sword note echoed out.
Geom Mujin Sword Style
Jinin Sword
Hoeongak
Within the poison mist, a sword gripped in reverse flashed in the moonlight, drawing a circle through the air.
As the circle the sword carved spun inward, it began greedily sucking in the surrounding air.
Wooooosh—!
The suction was strong enough to make even standing figures sway, and the poison mist was drawn into the circle.
The ring that had gathered every trace of poison in the area continued to swirl around the blade.
"Y-you...! G-geom... Mu...jin...!"
Dang Yulin, her complexion returning after she’d vomited out the poison, pointed at him with trembling fingers.
No one knew why, but the Dang Clan always repaid both kindness and vengeance without fail.
She tried to force more poison up from the Poison Well again, but—
"Tsk, tsk. I keep telling you not to rely on that stuff."
Thud—!
"Kyaaah...!"
Somehow, he was already behind her, and he drove the long needle straight into her Cheonju point.
As the Stop-Poison Sealed Needle went in, the restraints inside her body began snapping back into place one by one.
"I told the Dang Clan this already. Don’t neglect martial arts just because you’re obsessed with poison."
Relying only on poison over and over just made you helpless in the face of overwhelming force.
"Like this."
Wuuung—!
Geom Mujin invoked telekinetic manipulation and lifted dozens of tiny broken fragments from the deck into the air.
Fyu-fyu-fyooosh—!
With a flick of his finger, the fragments all fired at once.
Each shard flew off on a different trajectory.
Dang Yulin couldn’t take her eyes off the beautiful mesh of routes they traced.
"Graaah!"
"Saaa...!"
The Goema, now turned into pincushions with fragments lodged in their joints, vital points, and meridians, toppled backward.
"Even someone like me, who doesn’t know a thing about hidden weapons, can do this much. So what does that make you lot?"
Geom Mujin muttered with an almost disappointed air.
Then his eyes changed, and he looked upward.
"How dare you ruin my cult’s plan this badly!"
Before he even had time to mourn the death of the Goema soldiers, Sama Ryeong ambushed him.
"What, are you an idiot?"
Geom Mujin raised his sword and sent out a slicing strike.