Back from the Dead
I was alive again. Somehow.
“Are you okay? Ugh… what do we do? There’s blood pouring from your eyes! What now?!”
“Ah. I’m fine. It’s getting better little by little.”
Az was slowly healing his eyes by circulating his poison arts. It seemed he still wasn’t worthy of seeing the light. Unlike the real night-vision goggles he’d seen in the military, this technique wrapped the energy of the Sichuan Heart Method around his eyes to pierce the darkness. The fact that it took time for his pupils to suffer damage from the light had only made things worse.
Thanks to that, the two burdens he’d first met in the pitch-black Execution Cave—blind Az and the brain-damaged count’s daughter—now had their first proper introduction. Sophia, who had somehow become the unintentional protector and leader of this hopeless party of weakest links, guided us forward while dragging her body that still ached with full-body muscle pain.
“This is called a Yongju Mushroom! It’s super delicious when you eat it!”
She was enthusiastically gathering mushrooms.
“Ah! This one looks like a Yongju Mushroom and grows alongside them, but it’s actually poisonous! For the sake of fellow gatherers, we have a moral duty to pull it out and throw it far away!”
“Aang~~”
Whoosh~~ Om nom nom.
Sophia shrieked in a panic.
“Y-you’re not supposed to eat that one!”
“Mm. It’s tasty. Tastes like chicken breast pickled in vinegar. I’m fine, so give me any poisonous herbs, mushrooms, whatever you’ve got.”
She must not have seen me eating that moss back in the cave. Sophia’s voice dripped with disgust as she kept going. ‘Would you like to try this one too? One bite and you’ll enter the gods’ garden of deadly poison.’ ‘This one causes diarrhea for a whole week…’ ‘This gives burning pain…’ ‘This makes your heart feel like it’s freezing…’ She seemed to be having fun now.
This world was the kind of place where one out of every ten steps brought you face-to-face with horrifically poisonous plants. Thank goodness I only ate what my mother cooked. The memories of the neighbors from the village where my parents and I had lived were clear, but because my previous life’s memories had resurfaced, they felt like complete strangers in my heart.
“By the way, Miss Sophia. Do you know where we are?”
“Yes! From the place names Mr. Az told me and the surrounding scenery, I think I have a pretty good idea where we are!”
“Oh! Really? Then where should we head now?”
Az couldn’t see, the count’s daughter had become an idiot, and both of them had already been declared sinners by divine oracle and sentenced to execution. (Along with anyone dragged along with them.)
“Um… after hearing the story in the cave, I thought about it too…”
“You helped us escape and kept us from starving, so in my opinion, how about we go to the city where I live?”
She didn’t have connections or anyone who could help her anywhere else. Besides, if they ignored her kindness now, they had no way to survive.
“Th-thank you!”
“No need, really. Hehe.”
“But where are we going right now? The path is getting rougher.”
“Ack! While I was looking for poisonous herbs I accidentally led us into the Demon Realm! Let’s go back! Hurry! It’s dangerous here!”
Rusty had returned alive from hell! She’d wrapped it up in goodwill and was trying to shove us straight into the jaws of the abyss!
Fortunately, we safely escaped the Demon Realm. While eating the poisonous herbs Sophia handed over and fiercely operating the Sichuan Heart Method, the purified poison energy accumulated in my dantian, making the circulation of internal energy much smoother. I kept wrapping my eyes with internal energy to aid regeneration, and soon my vision began to return.
Lifting my faintly trembling eyelids, the first sight Az saw after regaining his vision was… a woman beggar (Sophia) happily rummaging through a dirty rag she’d picked up somewhere, grinning from ear to ear while sorting through all kinds of grass and mushrooms. Next to her sat another woman beggar (the count’s daughter, name unknown) staring blankly into space with unfocused eyes.
They say you need to look at pretty and kind things to live a peaceful life. Was this the result of only seeing dirty things? Well, looking at the ups and downs of my life, it seems dying in obscurity or dying young is my passive skill.
“……Sigh.”
According to Sophia, it would take about a month on foot. The party moved without rest. We found a stream, washed ourselves clean, and when we reached a small village along the way, the village chief kindly offered us a helping hand. It had been so long since we’d eaten properly cooked food.
He even let us use the bathroom so we could scrub off the grime, and he generously gave us spare clothes in place of our rags. Finally, our party started to look like actual people again.
Now that she was clean, Sophia had a prim and cute face. Her happy smile as she rested looked genuinely content. Her silver hair, which barely reached her shoulders, seemed to shine. Maybe washing it activated some glowing function beyond mere cleanliness. Should I have washed her hair for her back in the cave?
The young lady had regained her noble aristocratic aura. Long golden hair flowing down to her waist and blue eyes that seemed capable of piercing through a person’s soul. Of course, those eyes currently had no focus, so she probably couldn’t even see what was right in front of her.
The chief lent us two rooms in his house—the women shared one, and I had a room to myself. I was drifting in and out of light sleep when I heard a loud crash from the next room. I rushed out and saw the kindly, benevolent village chief from daytime and the warmly smiling villagers who had welcomed us—now dragging the women away.
Only Sophia. The young lady, whenever the villagers’ fists or clubs struck her, would sparkle and thrash wildly.
“Ah! What the hell! I thought if you pinned them down they’d squeal and cry like little bitches!”
“Ugh! Hic! This bitch doesn’t even feel pain when you hit her!”
“Ah! Let go! Let go of me, you bastards!”
Even as Sophia punched them, the villager trying to drag her away had a blissful smile like he was remembering an old lover cuddling against his chest. His eyes gleamed as he grabbed her by the bed leg, trying to pull her down.
“These sons of bitches!”
Were the chief and all the village men completely different people at night? Their personalities flipped so drastically between day and night that it was impossible to know what was truly in a person’s heart.
I released the internal energy I had accumulated in my dantian through training. Poison spread from my entire body into the air. Since Sophia and the young lady were present, I released paralytic and tear gas poisons instead of bleeding or neurotoxins. The chief’s house instantly turned into a funeral hall as everyone collapsed to the floor, weeping uncontrollably.
Az quickly grabbed the bed leg, pulled the sobbing Sophia and the sparkling, struggling, crying young lady downstairs.
“Krrgh… Hey! You! Do you think I don’t know who you are?!”
“Huh? I used to serve our lord and visited the count’s territory! You bastard! What the hell did you do?!”
“Is that so? Then who exactly is this person?”
The chief groaned and answered.
“It’s Lady Claudia! The one executed as a sinner! If I report this, what do you think will happen?!”
That’s right. I remembered hearing about it before. Hmm… what to do? We’d already explored and escaped, so now we had to deal with a pursuit arc too… The more I thought about it, the more annoying it seemed.
“So only you knew about this, Chief?”
My eyes, which had been staring at the chief with a blank expression, began to gleam. As rage surged, the Sichuan Heart Method’s poison energy violently swirled throughout my body. The night vision awakened. Whether the ability had evolved or not, it surpassed mere suggestion and activated a clairvoyant power that pierced through surfaces.
I could see inside the old man’s skin. I saw his bright red blood vessels pulsing, and the organs twitching within them. The sound of his heart beating wildly in fear appeared right before my eyes. I turned my gaze to look at the chief’s face. The change in his irises, the sweat beading on the bridge of his nose… I understood.
“Not everyone in the village knows. But the people here just heard it clearly with their own ears, didn’t they?”
“Huh? S-stop! I won’t tell anyone! I swear to the gods!”
“No need to go to such troublesome lengths. There’s a much simpler way for us to trust each other completely.”
I released a completely different type of energy from my dantian than before. Mukeum Hyeoldam. The moment it took effect, it would corrode the throat so that blood would gush out like a fountain. After vomiting blood and suffering for a few days, blood would flow back up the airway, and the victim would drown by drinking their own blood. It was the final gift my close friend, Elder Tang Baek-gi of the Sichuan Tang Clan in my previous life, used to give to spies who maintained their silence until the very end in prison.
“Well then, we’ll be on our way. Thanks for everything.”
The chief bastard and the villagers seemed so sad to see us leave that they cried tears of blood from their mouths. Az went downstairs, helped the women—who were slowly regaining their senses as the poison dissipated—onto their feet, and prepared to leave the house.
Just as he was about to walk out, he suddenly changed his mind. He thoroughly looted the chief’s master bedroom and safe—money pouches, travel bags, spare clothes, food, anything usable as a weapon, and valuables that could be sold for cash—then quietly slipped out of the village.
“Az! Over there! There! Can you see that?”
“What is that? ……Is it a floater?”
A piece of white chalk was floating in the air. Or was it called chalk? It was clearly visible before my eyes, but my intelligence tokens were insufficient to analyze the reason and cause. I decided to just accept it and move on. After all, I’d already seen plenty of monsters.
According to Sophia’s explanation, angels lived there. She also said the temple was simply located in the city. Humans clung to the ground while the winged ones built tower palaces in the sky. Deep in my heart, a flashing scythe and hammer threatened to burst out.
As Sophia got closer to the city, she taught us various things about it.
“…So Haverug is a city ruled by the gods. It’s because the kings and popes fought in the past and the kings lost!”
“Well, there’s no way you could win against angels like those, right?”
“Ah! The angels hate humans! They’re not the type to help or anything.”
“Then how did the popes win?”
“During the war, when the temple side was at a disadvantage, they hid inside the labyrinth and held a siege! But! When the soldiers charged in, the angels got annoyed and just wiped out the entire army!”
It seemed human rights didn’t exist in this world. That explained why they dragged all those promising young people into the cave just because it was efficient and produced clear results.
Thanks to that, Az’s party used the stubby white chalk floating in the sky as a landmark and approached the city. The closer we got, the more it really did look like a piece of chalk.
“That’s strange… Sophia, how much farther is it from here?”
“Um… from here… that means! Ah! I’ve got it perfectly! It’ll take about a month from here!”
I felt a sense of déjà vu. It sounded exactly like what I’d heard a month ago…. It seemed Rusty’s ghost was still tormenting me from the darkness.
Occasionally monsters would appear, but for the most part we were able to follow well-maintained roads toward the city. Using the one-handed sword we’d taken from the chief bastard, we fought against small monsters about the size of children (Sophia said they were goblins). Because I charged in loaded with poison energy, no one dared approach the tip of my blade.
On the other hand, when I dropped my sword and was getting beaten, Claudia covered her fists and entire body in blood and took revenge for me.
“Huff! Huff! Oh my, thank you. I survived thanks to you.”
“......”
Claudia wore an expression similar to the one she’d shown me before, then slowly relaxed the strength in her eyes again. Maybe because we were getting closer to the labyrinth, Az’s party encountered quite a few monsters that put up a decent fight. Our party’s captain was Claudia, who turned battlefields into swamps of blood through sheer recovery power, me—Az—the master of poison arts who kept getting beaten while flailing and drawing monster attention, and Sophia, who handled cooking, supply gathering, guiding, navigation, and everything else.
“......”
“Tsk. This is too difficult.”
It seemed I had no affinity with swords. When I gave the one-handed sword to Claudia as a gift, there was nothing our party couldn’t handle.