Growing Pains
In a high fever that set his entire body ablaze like a fireball, Hwiyeom groaned through several days and nights.
The cause was the disharmony between a body that had been mercilessly overworked—scheming businesses day and night and touring work sites throughout his growth years—and the inner energy that was expanding at breakneck speed.
One moment he suffered the searing heat of a body burning from within; the next, chills swept over him as if he had been plunged into an ice bath, leaving every joint so cramped it felt as though trees were driving roots through them and forcing them to grow.
Squeezing time from their crushing schedules, Dang Un-sang and Eun Seol-ran visited their son’s quarters, guided his energy circulation, and held his hands for a long while.
“Anyone who cultivates poison arts passes through this stage. You’re a little early, but everyone overcomes it. Be strong, my son. We believe in you.”
Elder Bak Chang-eon also came to Hwiyeom’s rooms.
Even as he twisted in agony, Hwiyeom managed a jab at the elder whose under-eyes had gone dark and whose skin looked rough.
“Hard work, handling my duties too?”
“Yes. If I could, I’d fall ill in the young master’s place.”
“Somehow that doesn’t sound like concern for me…”
“You must be mistaken. This old man is very fond of the young master.”
Bak Chang-eon briefly summarized the business matters that had arisen while Hwiyeom lay bedridden, then fled under Ye-eun’s withering glare.
Ye-eun clicked her tongue.
“I cannot understand why that man comes to a sick young master and tactlessly rattles on about work.”
“There are people in the world who can only show goodwill that way.”
Hwiyeom smiled.
The chief and deputy of the Poison Pharmacy, the senior pharmacists, and the quality-control foremen all came to wish him a swift recovery. The two master smiths and the master carpenter of the Innovation Hall likewise paid lengthy, talkative visits.
Hwiyeom’s fever climbed higher still.
Worried by a heat so fierce that consciousness itself became hard to hold, Dang Un-sang sent Hwiyeom’s aunt, Dang Su-jeong—the foremost master of the Poison Branch.
It was his first meeting with the woman famed throughout the martial world as a heroine.
“So you’re the boy who made All-purpose Salve? They call you a genius, and your poison-art attainment isn’t half bad either. That means you’re an exceptional talent—take pride in it. I nearly died myself once.”
Dang Su-jeong, who seemed the open-hearted type, helped guide Hwiyeom’s inner energy.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t lessen the pain. You have to keep drawing true qi without rest through this suffering if you want to grow. Now—focus.”
Under her guidance the circulation of true qi grew smoother, yet the pain only intensified. By the time she left, Hwiyeom was on the verge of collapse.
Consciousness flickered out again and again.
In the stuttering light of awareness that blinked like a fluorescent bulb, Hwiyeom—no, Jeong Pansu—watched his past unspool like an old film projector.
The day a traffic accident took both parents at once.
The relatives at the funeral who eyed one another, none willing to take him in.
The years of abuse and discrimination as he was passed from relative to relative.
Being dumped in an institution at last.
The moment he came of age, diving headlong onto construction sites.
The hard years of learning trades and scraping money together, when people endlessly called him a ruthless bastard.
Building a conglomerate from bare fists—that process had been his entire life, its absolute climax.
Then betrayal. Bitter betrayal.
A life hurled into the abyss—yet he had risen again…
And then…
While every scrap of memory floated past, Hwiyeom drifted between the faint lights of recollection like a fish drawn to a fishing lamp.
Whenever his consciousness threatened to be swallowed by a memory and his true qi lost its path, the formulas within those memories became his guide and steered the energy back onto the proper course.
A pleasant sensation of gentle fingers stroking his hair made Hwiyeom open his eyes. Ye-eun sat at his bedside with a tender expression, wiping the sweat from his forehead and changing the cool cloth.
Without thinking, he asked,
“Ye-eun.”
“Yes, young master.”
“Do you know of the Samyo—the Three Great Demons?”
While investigating the deaths of the assassins who had come after him, Hwiyeom had encountered the term Samyo, yet every trail had ended there. He asked on a vague, half-formed hope. Ye-eun hesitated a moment, then nodded.
“…I do.”
“Lying here is boring. Won’t you tell me the story?”
“….”
After a short silence Ye-eun spoke.
“It isn’t a particularly entertaining tale.”
“That’s fine.”
“…It happened a very long time ago.”
In a quiet voice Ye-eun began.
The story of a physician who had been a thoroughly good man until enemies slaughtered his family and turned him into a vengeful demon.
Of the spider who owed him a life-debt, the mantis who shared friendship with him, and the butterfly who fell in love with him.
Ye-eun’s soft voice continued like a lullaby.
Hwiyeom groaned in pain, panted under the fever, or shivered with chills, yet he never stopped listening.
The story was interesting.
It had the rises and falls of a life, the trials of a bare-fisted man who seized both revenge and worldly success, and the exaltation that came as reward.
There were companions, friendship, a woman, love, loyalty, family.
Yet no matter how brilliantly a flame burns, a flame is only a flame; the day of its extinguishing always arrives.
On an especially cold winter’s day the man, surrounded by the Three Great Demons, breathed his last as if merely falling asleep.
That was the end of the man’s story.
“And what became of the Samyo?”
“…The Three Great Demons remained, but each chose a different path.”
The butterfly who had loved the man wasted away and followed him into death.
The mantis declared there was no reason left to stay and departed.
The spider buried the butterfly beside the man in his grave.
“And after that…?”
“After that?”
“After burying the man, what became of the spider? Did the spider never miss him? Or forget everything? Did she remain with the Tang family, or leave?”
“…Heh. Who knows?”
Ye-eun gave a strange little smile. Seeing that Hwiyeom had lost consciousness again, she whispered something soft.
“…Rest a little. I’ll stay by your side.”
But Hwiyeom never heard her; he was already asleep, breathing the even rhythm of deep slumber.
Only after ten days did Hwiyeom finally rise from his sickbed.
When he circulated his inner energy he was startled to discover how greatly his interior had changed.
“My dantian, which was no bigger than a grain of millet, is now the size of a walnut.”
Hearing of his son’s achievement, Dang Un-sang smiled with quiet pride.
“You have been taking them steadily, yet your dantian could not absorb the energy of the poisons and spiritual medicines. It has now taken in a portion of that. Size matters, but the degree to which the meridians are open matters more.”
“Yes… how to put it? Before, when I cultivated, my inner qi felt as though it were forcing its way along a narrow mountain path of meridians. Now it feels as though it is traveling a narrow but smoothly paved straight road.”
“There is more. The poison core that had been separate from the dantian has now merged with it, has it not?”
“Yes.”
“That means your body has begun to accept poison qi not as a foreign, harmful energy but as part of itself. You have passed the most important first gate of Poison Person training. Truly my son. Haha.”
“Is it that impressive?”
“Every poison cultivator passes through the gate. Yet most unorthodox martial artists never clear it in their entire lives and live in constant fear of being poisoned by their own toxins.”
So basically a perfect TOEIC score certificate.
Hwiyeom promptly lost interest. He trained martial arts because they were necessary, yet his identity remained far more that of a businessman than a martial artist of the jianghu.
Seeing that his son was less excited than expected, Dang Un-sang sighed.
“What a dull boy.”
“I apologize.”
Dang Un-sang clicked his tongue softly, shook his head, then brightened again and spoke in a gentle tone.
“Since you have formed a poison core, I will now properly transmit the ultimate art of our family’s Poison Branch—the Green Dragon Divine Art.”
“The Green Dragon Divine Art?”
“Yes. Look at the true-green robes you wear. Only direct blood of the Tang family is permitted to don them. Green is the wood of the Five Elements and at the same time the color that symbolizes both poison and medicine. The dragon is the sovereign of all beasts, a being that traverses earth and heaven. It is a martial art truly fitting for the Poison Branch of the Tang family.”
“I see.”
Hwiyeom felt no particular thrill. It merely seemed as though one more assignment had been added to the list of things he had to memorize, study, and master—enough to make him want to sigh.
Yet quite apart from his mood, his brilliant mind drank in the formulas of the Green Dragon Divine Art that Dang Un-sang transmitted as dry earth drinks water.
And as he practiced, the remarkable qualities of the art began to reveal themselves one by one.
Material synthesis is possible? That’s insane—scientifically that doesn’t even—ah, right, martial arts themselves make no scientific sense…
The Green Dragon Divine Art converted poison and the energies of heaven and earth into inner energy, then converted that inner energy back into poison and expelled it—much as a snake drinks water and produces venom. The difference was that the practitioner could freely alter the poison he created. Any toxin he had ingested, been poisoned by, and whose nature he remembered could be reproduced.
Tang masters had used this trait only to manufacture endless varieties of poison. Hwiyeom’s eyes lit up at an entirely different possibility.
This is basically a human chemical plant, free of charge!
In a world without electrolysis equipment or the various organic catalysts and materials he knew, he could manufacture none of the industrial products of his former life. But if he used the effect of the Green Dragon Divine Art…
Fritz Haber earned the nickname ‘the man who made bread from air’ by fixing atmospheric nitrogen. Take one more step and you can make ammonia from nitrogen, nitric acid from ammonia. Mass production of gunpowder becomes possible without saltpeter fields or guano. And if ‘making poison’ means synthesizing substances inside the body, the materials you can theoretically produce are endless.
Of course, forming every kind of chemical compound inside a human body was, by any rational measure, pure madness when one considered the effects on the flesh. Yet Hwiyeom was already half-crazed with the vision of turning himself into a walking chemical factory via the Green Dragon Divine Art.
Apart from working hours he carved time even from meals and sleep for practice; the progress was inevitably extraordinary.
While his poison arts advanced by leaps and bounds, his skill with hidden weapons barely improved at all. Even if the secret throwing techniques of the family had fallen into disuse, the basic methods of throwing daggers, needles, and pellets still remained, so Hwiyeom had begun learning them some time ago. He did so only out of the duty of a direct descendant, however, and the results were merely passable.
While such martial progress unfolded, the waterworks construction in Seongdo gathered rapid momentum once the Tang family’s first “puddling furnace”—built under Hwiyeom’s direction—was completed.
The puddling furnace, specialized for mass production, turned out vast quantities of steel that crucible furnaces could never handle. Tang craftsmen forged that steel into rebar by the ton. Carried by steam carriages and wheeled carts to the construction sites, the rebar was driven firmly into the ground. Outside it, wooden forms for pouring cement were assembled section by section.
For security the work was not performed simultaneously along the entire route; instead it proceeded in short segments that the Poison Phoenix Corps could oversee. Consequently the Elders’ Council remained ignorant of what was happening inside those sections.
When well-mixed cement, gravel, and sand were poured into the wooden forms and allowed to set, reinforced-concrete structures took shape. The craftsmen could not hide their rapture.
“This method will change the future of architecture!”
“We no longer have to tear up whole mountains searching for stone of the right size!”
“No more hammering granite until our wrists give out!”
Previously, erecting a building required first locating a source of granite in bulk, then cutting that granite into uniform blocks—an enormous labor even before the ordeal of transporting the heavy stone. The new construction method that mixed cement, sand, and gravel on site to create concrete was nothing short of revolutionary.
When Hwiyeom received the report that the craftsmen were cheering and praising him, he scratched his head.
“It would be nice if they still like it after they’re thrown into large-scale civil works forever… but that’ll never happen.”
The news that they were celebrating a technology that would grind them into dust for decades to come made him look upon the craftsmen with pity.
Another year slipped by in that fashion.
Hwiyeom turned eleven. The waterworks were finished at last, and the opening ceremony of the fountain was at hand.
As a guest of honor Hwiyeom was invited, together with Dang Un-sang and Eun Seol-ran, to the government offices of the provincial administration.
It was the day of the opening ceremony for Sichuan’s first pressurized water fountain.