Covert Struggle
There existed a poison known as the Eight-Stop Poison.
Crafted by blending eight separate ingredients, each one alone carried only a mild toxicity—yet when combined, they transformed into a lethal toxin of exquisite subtlety. Its most lethal quality, however, was this: unless consumed in a massive single dose, the poison would not reveal itself until long after it had been swallowed.
That made it an assassin’s dream—a delicate, brilliant poison one could drip into a target’s meals over the course of several days, then slip away long before the victim ever collapsed.
The woman dressed as a palace maid had obtained it, and for a time she had been utterly intoxicated by her own plan.
It was a pity that the old, seasoned food taster had died and that she herself had not been chosen as the replacement—but even so, she believed she could still get past the taster and reach the princess herself.
She had been so certain of a perfect poisoning.
And then—
Crunch. Crunch.
Some random eunuch had appeared and reduced her entire scheme to foam on the water.
Watching the residence through the window, the maid’s face twisted more savagely by the second.
Please… just stop eating…
But her silent plea went unheard. The young eunuch scraped the plates clean down to the last grain. This was no longer anything resembling a food tasting—it was simply a meal.
“Buuurrp.”
The palace attendants let out hollow, disbelieving laughs. The Third Princess, finding the spectacle oddly fresh and entertaining, rested her chin on the back of her hand and simply watched.
The Third Princess was known to enjoy fine food while still favoring small portions, so the maid had carefully calibrated the poison’s proportions and scattered it throughout the dishes. And then some wild boar of a man had charged into that meticulously laid trap and torn the whole thing to pieces.
At last the lethal threshold must have been crossed. Foam flecked the eunuch’s lips; he gurgled, then toppled over in a heap.
“That damned eunuch bastard…”
Her perfect plan had collapsed in an instant, and a white-hot fury ignited in her chest.
Startled attendants rushed to the fallen young eunuch. One of them checked his wrist—and when no pulse answered, she turned pale and delivered the urgent report to the princess.
“H-he’s dead!”
Shock rippled through everyone present. A heavy silence settled thickly over the residence.
Cheon Su-gong, who clearly had not expected things to go this way, stood with his mouth hanging open in blank dismay.
“Don’t tell me… he didn’t actually have a plan…?”
The way the boy had been wolfing everything down, Cheon Su-gong had assumed he must have some method. But now they were saying his breath had stopped and his heart had stilled. The middle-aged man whirled toward the woman from the Sichuan Tang Family Manor, as if demanding an explanation.
She looked just as stunned—eyes round, mouth shut, her face stuck on a perpetual expression of What the hell is wrong with this guy?
“Damn it all…”
Beyond the window, the maid clenched both fists so hard her nails bit into her palms.
The food taster was dead. Which meant the poison she had prepared so carefully had never reached the princess—and her assassination attempt had failed completely.
“What kind of lunatic even is that…?”
A food taster with a glutton’s appetite? She had lived in the Imperial Palace for a long time, and she had never heard of anything like it.
In the end, instead of the princess, she had only managed to poison some nameless eunuch. Despair written across her face, she turned to leave.
But that was not the end of the shocks waiting for her.
“Kagh—!”
Like a man who had simply blacked out from choking and then woken up, the eunuch they had all believed dead sat up.
The attendants froze where they stood, struck dumb by the sight of a corpse lurching back to life.
“Ugh… thought I was a goner.”
One impossible spectacle after another left the room struggling to keep up. Far off by the window, one particular palace maid wore an expression of pure disbelief.
H-how…
That had been the Eight-Stop Poison. A toxin she had gone to great lengths to procure from the Southern Barbarian lands—enough of a lethal dose to drop a giant bear in a single blow.
“Is that bastard even human…?”
she muttered, her face ashen with horror.
Meanwhile, Cheon Su-gong approached the resurrected Mu Hong with a look of sheer exasperation.
“What in the world was that? Indigestion? Some kind of constitution? Something like that…?”
“No? It was poison.”
“……!”
Mu Hong’s calm reply drained the color from Cheon Su-gong’s face—and from every attendant nearby.
The Third Princess was silent for a moment, then swept a sharp gaze over the dishes laid out before her. Moments earlier, her appetite had been stirred; she had been about to taste them herself.
“Please pass a message to the imperial chefs.”
“…What message?”
Had he somehow identified the culprit? Cheon Su-gong asked with a loaded look.
“Tell them it was exquisite.”
But the words Mu Hong produced were nothing more than pure, sincere praise for the food.
“….”
There is a saying for food so good that two people could eat it and neither would notice if the other died mid-bite.
Seafood and bird’s nest that melted on the tongue, leaving behind only a teasing sweetness and deep umami. Meat whose juices burst at the first bite, and the smoky perfume that had seeped into every fiber of the grain.
I had wanted to cry out “Exquisite!” with the same stunned face as some cooking-manga protagonist. Unfortunately, I had passed out before I could manage it at the proper moment.
“Honestly, I can’t believe you. Was it really that good?”
In a deserted courtyard in the dead of night, Dang Yeohye had approached without a sound. She stood with her arms crossed, muttering as if I were beyond hope.
“The imperial chefs really are on another level.”
Unlike the street-inn cooks who fretted over profit margins, these dishes felt as though every last measure of effort had been poured into a single purpose: pure taste. Premium ingredients married to a master’s craft—meals far too fine for the mouth of a mere troubleshooter.
“Well, they weren’t made for you in the first place…”
She shook her head, as if to say that at least my gluttony never changed.
“So what? That gluttony is what saved Princess Dohwa.”
Apparently, right after I collapsed, Dang Yeohye had combed through every dish and identified the poison. Eight-Stop Poison, she said—a cunning lethal toxin used for secret assassinations. Normally a victim would die without ever realizing they had been poisoned. My piggish appetite was the only reason the princess had escaped unharmed.
Cheon Su-gong’s face when he heard that had been something to behold. He had said my bizarre gluttony had saved Her Highness—praise so backhanded I still wasn’t sure which way it cut.
“Anyway, how’s the Princess’s palace been since then?”
I swung both arms in a rough diagonal—left high, right low—as I asked.
“Chaos. Cheon Su-gong and the Eastern Depot martial artists practically locked the place down.”
She shrugged, saying a storm had blown through.
“Did they catch the culprit?”
“No. But following your advice, they filtered out everyone who was in the residence that day, and the list of suspects narrowed a lot.”
So Cheon Su-gong had decided to trust my ability to sense killing intent. That much was true—no one inside the residence that day had wanted anyone dead. There had only been shock and confusion.
“And once they traced the route the food had taken, the outline of the culprit started to show. They’re down to about ten people now.”
Quite a reduction.
“Ah.”
I nodded and twisted at the waist again, carving the air. While I had been given leave for having eaten poison, the others had apparently been running themselves ragged hunting the assassin.
“But you… what are you even doing?”
Dang Yeohye finally couldn’t ignore whatever I kept swinging at empty space and asked the question.
“Sword practice between engagements.”
“…With that stick?”
Ordinary eunuchs weren’t allowed to carry blades or swords here, so I had picked up a roughly similar branch and was running through the forms I had learned.
“Stick? Anyone can see this is a fine-looking sword.”
It had a grip, and a long blade-like shaft stretching forward. It even came with natural wrist guards on both sides. I showed it off from various angles as if to say, Isn’t this cool? Dang Yeohye snorted.
“Men. Still obsessed with stuff like that even after they grow up. So childish.”
How hard was it for a tree to grow into a shape like this naturally? Looking at a rare drop like this and feeling nothing—she really was as dry as ever.
“So what? It’s cool, and that’s enough.”
I muttered for her to mind her own business and continued flowing through the Chamgu Sword Art.
Whsshk— The blunt stick sliced the dawn air with a surprisingly sharp sound. If I concentrated just a little more, I felt as though I might see the lines again the way I had last time.
Ever since I had deliberately provoked Hwang Geolgae and danced on the edge of death, those faint lines had begun to appear now and then. It was a kind of hope torture—so close I could almost grasp them, which made it impossible to quit training. Even here, dragged into the Princess’s palace and tangled up in this bizarre assassination affair.
Salsung. Give me some advice like last time.
The little bloodthirsty thing used to get so excited whenever I practiced swinging a killing weapon. But ever since I had dug into its true nature, it had gone quiet—and now it wouldn’t even answer when I spoke.
Salsung, who was supposed to be sleeping inside me like some ominous star, kept only silence. We had teamed up well enough during the gambling-house job. Then again, maybe getting double-crossed by me that day was part of why it had gone quiet.
Salsung. You there?
Still no answer. For reasons of its own, it seemed to have decided not to speak to me.
“You’re not sulking, are you?”
……
Quiet as expected. That inner parasite who always picked fights and injected a little spark into my life—Salsung.
“Who’s sulking?”
“Not you, noona.”
Hearing me mutter, Dang Yeohye flinched on her own.
“Anyway—Cheon Su-gong says stop playing around and get back to the Princess’s palace.”
“He told me to rest for a while… Why the sudden change?”
I put on an exaggerated performance of residual poison symptoms still lingering in my body. After a man goes through something that big, a proper recovery period is only fair.
“I know you’re not sick. A guy who sat up yelling ‘exquisite’ isn’t going to convince anyone he’s dying.”
I was a man perfectly capable of cracking jokes even in genuine pain. Honestly, what a low-trust society this was.
“So why is he calling me?”
I asked, half-wondering if some new job had come up.
“Whether you meant to or not, you saved the princess’s life. Looks like she wants to reward you for it.”
“Let’s go right now.”
The Imperial Palace was where every rare treasure in the Central Plains gathered in one place. The idea of a reward from there made me intensely curious.
“It’s the middle of the night, you lunatic. Show up now and you’ll get cut down.”
“Ah. Right. Good point.”
I stopped mid-step toward the princess’s residence. By now the Eastern Depot men would have their defenses locked down tight, nerves stretched taut.
“But they still haven’t caught the culprit, right?”
“Not yet. Whether they’re meticulous or just lucky, hard evidence is still thin.”
Thinking about it, Cheon Su-gong’s original request to me had ultimately been to root out the poisoner. Failing to catch them meant the job was only half-done—and that left my conscience, and my heart, unsettled. In other words: I couldn’t in good conscience squeeze out even more money.
“If I show up at that meeting tomorrow with the culprit in tow… Her Highness would give me a double-double reward, right?”
“Double-dou… what?”
Dang Yeohye tilted her head as if I were speaking gibberish.
A troubleshooter shouldn’t leave a job this messy. Since I had already stopped the poisoning attempt, I might as well catch the poisoner too and deliver them gift-wrapped.
“Tell Cheon Su-gong this. Tomorrow morning, invent some excuse—any excuse—and gather every suspect in one place.”
Then I would be able to pick the culprit out cleanly. I said it with that confidence, and Dang Yeohye looked at me through half-lidded eyes.
“Can you really tell… who the culprit is?”
She had clearly been half-believing, half-doubting ever since Cheon Su-gong put his faith in me.
“If they’re nearby, and I keep my head clear… yes. I can tell.”
It wasn’t something martial skill or ordinary observation could explain—but Dang Yeohye had already seen this side of me once before.
“Some innate ability? Like that regeneration back then… No. We agreed I wouldn’t ask until you decided to tell me.”
She closed her mouth firmly, even though she must have been burning with curiosity. Still, she was being considerate—treating me like the benefactor who had once saved her life.
“Anyway. Let’s dig a trap.”
Whoever had mixed unnecessary poison into that magnificent meal was not getting away. I would catch them and present them before Princess Dohwa.
“Yeah. Got it.”
Reading my resolve, Dang Yeohye nodded.
How had it come to this?
One of the palace maids muttered the thought to herself as she hid among the crowd.
The poisoning attempt had been exposed, so she should have been slipping away quietly by now—but the Eastern Depot’s surveillance was vicious, and extracting herself was no simple matter. Still, she had cleaned up the evidence thoroughly, and she was a senior maid who had served here for years. If she simply endured the palace’s endless, pointless interrogations and suspicions, an opportunity would surely present itself sooner or later.
With that thought, she bit down on her lip and held her ground.
And then, before every watching eye, a young eunuch casually stepped into view.
That bastard… he really survived…
Even after watching him rise from the dead with her own eyes, she still could not believe it. The wretch who had ruined every last thread of her plan. Her face remained calm on the surface, but inside she seethed with a thick, boiling killing intent.
The young eunuch’s expression said that everything had just gotten much easier. He pointed straight at her.
“It’s that woman.”
“……!”
Every drop of color drained from the maid’s face.