Hometown
The place where Gong Ryun had lived was a world of Sangongcho and Sangongdok.
Sangongcho grew across the entire planet. He had breathed it, eaten it, worked in it. Losing one’s internal energy to the Qi-dispersing effect was simply a fact of daily life.
Gong Ryun had once claimed that Sangongcho was harmless—that the dispersing effect lived only in the roots. That was true enough if you kept a few plants in a pot.
But when an entire region was planted thick with it, the dispersing compounds seeping from the roots began to stain the soil itself. Stained soil meant stained water. The air nearby took on the same component. Other plants either died under it, or, if they survived, grew up carrying the dispersing essence inside them. Herbivores lived on those surviving plants and on Sangongcho itself. Carnivores lived on the herbivores that had eaten Sangongcho.
And if that cycle spread across a whole planet—if it went on for hundreds of years—the planet itself became contaminated. Much the way centuries of fossil-fuel use can poison a world.
The place Gong Ryun had lived was, if he had to put a name to it… something like a planet made of poisonous mushrooms.
Atmosphere and soil alike carried the toxin. Sangongcho covered every stretch of ground. The rivers and ponds running through the land were little better than root-steeped liquor. The planet’s climate ran damp and marshy, so the air itself hung heavy with dispersing vapor. From the Sangongdok factories scattered across the surface, a poison wind blew without rest. And Gong Ryun had worked in those factories every day—constantly exposed to Sangongdok mid-process or finished—while the toxic wastewater from the plants fouled the water sources further still.
There, the people of the planet were born. They ate dispersing plants and animals. They drank dispersing water. They breathed dispersing air. They worked inside the poison.
A hell out of any martial artist’s nightmare.
Which was why no martial artists lived there.
Slaves lived there. An entire planet of slaves. A slave planet. The kind of place that floated around as an urban legend—rumors of its existence drifted through the galaxy, but almost no one seriously believed such a thing could be real. A remote island of a world, tucked into some neglected corner of the galaxy, beyond the reach of both the Galactic Government and the orthodox alliance.
Gong Ryun’s hometown.
They cultivated Sangongcho, processed it in the factories, and manufactured Sangongdok. They ate the crop as a side dish. Working the factory floor meant automatic exposure to the poison. The scent of Sangongcho—something close to phytoncide, a sharp, unforgettable edge—was the smell of home. The place he had lived his entire life. The place where his only family had been.
Smell is a sense tightly bound to memory. Catch the scent of wood burning in a hearth and you are back at your grandparents’ house, the same way scent can drag a flashback out of the past. That was why Gong Ryun kept Sangongcho inside his home—it carried the smell of the farm near the old house. A warm house. A space to rest with family, free of labor.
But the scent he was breathing now, in the poison-fogged inn, was the smell of the Sangongdok factory.
The place he had gone to work from evening on, after finishing the day’s Sangongcho farming. That vast factory packed with chemicals and machines, never stopping. Sangongdok compounds wreck precision machinery. Most machines of the galactic age run on the principles of martial arts—personal devices, for instance, that sense a living creature’s innate vital energy and automatically mark the death of a nearby monster. So the factory machines on that planet used fully mechanical parts from the Terra era: no high-performance sensors, no computers, no telekinetic engines. Old-fashioned devices that ran on oil, gunpowder, and a little electricity.
Dried Sangongcho arrived at the plant. On one side it went into the grinders; on another, chemical processing of Sangongdok; on still another, extraction. A conveyor-line sequence of steps. Hands lost to the machinery, lungs choking on chemical fumes—commonplace. And at the end of that tangled process, pure white crystals of Sangongdok came riding out along the belts. Grind those crystals fine and you had Sangongdok powder. Ultra-high-purity powder.
He had been doused in the stuff more than once or twice.
This takes me back…
The nostalgia had hit him hard. Gong Ryun drew another breath. He could feel his internal energy thinning—just a little. His resistance was more than enough; the loss was barely a scrap of a scrap. Even sitting here through a full meal, it wouldn’t drop dramatically.
Feeling it carefully, he realized it wasn’t perfectly pure Sangongdok either. Full-strength pure product would be expensive, and far too vicious.
He was still sunk in thought when a voice rose nearby.
“Cough… Sangongdok… freak… so the rumors… were true… the Sichuan Tang Clan… was right…”
It was still the Poison Blade Maiden, sprawled on the floor. She couldn’t even control her body well enough to evacuate.
“No. I told you—it’s not the Sichuan Tang Clan.”
Gong Ryun denied it flatly. But the Poison Blade Maiden seemed too far gone to listen; she kept talking to herself.
“The Sichuan Tang Clan… finally succeeded… the Poison Child of Sangongdok…”
“Huh?”
“It was an honor… to fight…”
“What’s a Poison Child?”
“Thud.”
“Hey—what the hell! Tell me and then pass out!”
The Poison Blade Maiden finished only what she meant to say and lost consciousness. Gong Ryun smacked his forehead.
What even was this.
Working from the situation and what he knew, “Poison Child” seemed to mean someone immune to poison. Immune to Sangongdok, in this case—so, the Poison Child of Sangongdok. …Then if you were immune to cyanide, you’d be a Cyanide Poison Child? Acid Poison Children? Drug Poison Children? He had no idea.
And immunity to Sangongdok wasn’t anything special. Being born after exposure to dispersing compounds in the womb and not developing resistance would have been the strange part. He hadn’t done anything deliberate to gain it. He had just eaten Sangongcho salad every day, drunk river water from Sangongcho country as drinking water, dug roots, spent every day making Sangongdok at the factory, and occasionally gotten a faceful of the finished product…
Hmm. Or was it special after all?
But that was every planetary citizen’s daily life. So everyone carried at least some resistance to Sangongdok.
The only thing special about Gong Ryun was…
Ah. Special?
Gong Ryun gathered internal energy into his hand.
Power flared up through his palm.
A martial artist.
He was a martial artist.
Of all those countless slaves, the only one who had grown into a martial artist was Gong Ryun.
Every planetary citizen used Honwongong. Honwongong was a foundational skill; without it, survival itself was impossible. It was less a martial art than something as basic as a way of breathing. But in that dispersing hell, no one could go beyond the bare foundation of Honwongong. They lived without ever drawing out even its original functions. Properly trained, they should have had the long lives, hardy bodies, and disease immunity of ordinary martial artists—and internal energy that simply grew with age. Planetary citizens never managed more than a slightly tougher brand of Homo sapiens. One or two tenths of capacity, if that. Weak enough that factory machines could take a hand, that forty-five degrees of heat could kill them with heatstroke, that a gunpowder weapon could drop them dead.
Honestly, even gathering internal energy in a dantian should have been impossible. Looking back now, it was hard not to wonder what Honwongong really was, that even humans pickled in Sangongdok had somehow been able to learn it.
In any case, Sangong-humans born under those conditions could not become martial artists. It was like telling someone to become an ice-person on a planet of burning magma.
But in this universe, events sometimes punched through impossible odds—the way there had been a Jeom Soi who killed the Heavenly Demon.
From childhood, Gong Ryun had been monstrously strong. Where others could scrape out two-tenths of Honwongong’s true performance at best, he could pull more than a hundred percent. He grew stronger as he grew up. No one had taught him anything special beyond the Honwongong his mother gave him. He never fell ill. He carted around sacks that grown men couldn’t lift. Heatstroke never took him. By adolescence, the shotgun blasts the neighborhood thugs fired while screaming they would kill him left nothing worse than grazes. Working his mother’s share as well as his own without sleep was still bearable. Without anyone’s instruction, he wrung Honwongong to its limit. With Honwongong alone, nothing else, he rose in that Sangong hell to a realm equal to an ordinary martial artist of the galactic age.
Talent.
In an endless mudflat of toxic industrial sludge, a single ordinary weed had bloomed. Its existence alone was proof. That was what a miracle was. This infinitely vast universe could bring forth any possibility. A miracle was a chain of unbelievable probabilities.
Born on a Sangongdok planet—and, impossibly, gifted with extreme talent. Information control should have kept him from ever knowing the world beyond the planet, yet his mother’s life-risking teaching had shown it to him. A slave should never have been able to leave the planet, yet an unbelievable stroke of fortune had let him succeed. And now he stood here. At last the weed had escaped the mud and set foot in the ordinary world.
Yes. He had talent.
But every time he recognized that fact, one person rose in his mind.
“Mother…”
Unlike him—like any ordinary planetary citizen—she had been unable to overcome disease, and had passed away. Gong Ryun’s heart sank. The scent of Sangongdok was dragging the past up in flashbacks.
“Right… that’s how it was. There were days like that… when nothing tasted good… I used to do this sometimes…”
From a nearby table he picked up a skewer of takoyaki someone had abandoned mid-flight. Then, from the gas nozzle of the Poison Blade Maiden’s mechanical arm, he pinched what little Sangongdok powder had failed to spray free—and dusted it over the takoyaki like salt.
“Even more of a kick than Sangongcho powder. Used to snap the appetite right back into place…”
He took a bite of his specialty-topped takoyaki.
“Mmm. The taste of home.”
Clatter.
A sound nearby. Jeom Soi. She was looking his way. Per shop policy, she was wearing a gas mask and checking on guests who hadn’t managed to evacuate the inn. A spare gas mask meant for customers slipped from her hand and hit the floor.