A Geek Changes the World
The Nokryong Singong—the Green Dragon Divine Art—was one of the two great pillars of the Sichuan Dang Family’s secret arts.
Even so, it had always been judged a step beneath the Dobansamyang-gwiwon-shingong, the supreme technique of the Hidden Weapon Branch. That was why, throughout the long history of the Tang Clan, the Hidden Weapon Branch had held the reins of power rather than the Poison Branch.
…Or so the story went. The story was wrong.
The Nokryong Singong was a broken martial art. Ridiculously broken.
Hwiyeom slapped his forehead and sighed. The ancestors of the Sichuan Dang Family had possessed this art and somehow managed to notice only that it could make internal energy toxic.
“Pearls around a pig’s neck. That’s exactly what this is.”
It was inevitable, really. Their entire framework of understanding was different.
The martial artists of the Sichuan Dang Family were, first and foremost, people of the murim—and physicians. In their minds, the only use for the Nokryong Singong’s nature was to produce “poison qi” and “medicinal qi.” Even that alone was enough to earn it the name of a peerless divine art. Internal energy that poisoned you just by landing a hit—how terrifying was that?
There was even talk that if a Hidden Weapon Branch master who used the Dobansamyang-gwiwon-shingong could simply load the Green Dragon’s toxic qi into their projectiles and fire them, the Dang Family might well become the greatest house under heaven. But that was impossible, and so the consensus stuck: the Nokryong Singong could alter the nature of internal energy, and that was all; in every other measure of combat power, it fell short.
Hwiyeom was different.
He was neither a murim man nor a physician. He was a modern man with a proper education, and he approached the Nokryong Singong the way a chemist would. The result was more varieties of internal-energy transformation than anyone else had ever produced.
Even he, however, had never managed one thing: making that transformed internal energy last.
Qi accumulated in the human body, but the moment it left the body it lost its form and dissolved back into the air. The Nokryong Singong was no exception. You could grant internal energy an explosive nature with it, but you could not inject that nature into an object and store it the way you stored nitroglycerin. The difference between the two was enormous.
And yet Dang Unhwa had done exactly that?
“I’m going right now.”
Hwiyeom surged up from his seat and headed for the explosives research wing of the Innovation Hall.
By the time he arrived, a crowd of the family’s direct-line members already surrounded Dang Unhwa, talking. Look at him. A popular man now.
At first, Unhwa had been treated like an outsider. He was the Family Head’s younger brother—as close to the main line as it got—yet he had made no secret of taking the Elder Council’s hand and gunning for the patriarch’s seat. Foolish politics.
I used to wonder why Hong Ilgon left him alone. Then I put him to work and understood. Once this bastard locks onto something, he turns into an unhinged maniac you can’t control.
This time, that temperament had worked in their favor. After getting catastrophically hooked on explosives, Dang Unhwa had thrown himself into experiments harder than anyone except Hwiyeom himself. Researchers from the direct line who had once frozen him out were now learning from him and treating him as a colleague.
“Oh—Young Master. You’ve come.”
“Our little Yeom is here?”
A distant cousin spotted Hwiyeom and greeted him; the others followed with warm hellos. When his aunt Dang Su-jeong tossed him a casual greeting without a scrap of formality, Dang Unhwa’s brow twitched.
“Hey, Su-jeong. Is the Young Master your buddy? Who do you think you’re talking down to? Young Master—you’ve arrived.”
Unhwa shot to his feet and bowed with crisp formality. Dang Su-jeong and Hwiyeom both stared at him with their mouths open. Hwiyeom recovered first.
“Uncle. Aunt. Everyone—thank you for your hard work. I heard Uncle had achieved something remarkable, so I came by to observe as well… Have you been injured?”
Hwiyeom’s brow tightened at the sight of both of Unhwa’s hands wrapped thick with bandages. In an explosives lab, even a light injury was never something you waved off. Treat a “lucky minor accident” as nothing, and something far worse was guaranteed to follow later.
Everyone’s reaction, however, was nothing like what he expected. Unhwa puffed out his chest with pride, and even Su-jeong gave a grudging little nod of acknowledgment.
“I didn’t get hurt in a blast experiment. I got hurt giving Explosive Poison a new physical property.”
“Please explain.”
At Hwiyeom’s words, Unhwa grinned and unwound the bandage from one hand. The wound made Hwiyeom’s brow crease again.
“That must sting.”
Skin had peeled away across Unhwa’s hand and arm. It looked like the inside of a mouth raw with canker sores—flesh dissolved, the red tissue underneath exposed.
“Definitely not a blast injury,” Hwiyeom said. “Did you douse yourself in acid?”
“Hahaha. Watch closely.”
Unhwa held out a finger and cycled the Nokryong Singong. A moment later—
“Hm?”
The Green Dragon’s green aura rose, then thinned into a colorless, vapor-like mist. Like the steam that pours off a body after hard exercise on a bitter winter day, the internal energy gathered in Unhwa’s arm was changing. And then, as if ice were melting, healthy skin on the back of his hand blistered open into a fresh wound—while, at the same time, a clear drop of liquid beaded at the tip of his finger.
The droplet swelled, then fell.
The instant it hit—
—pak!!—
A tiny spark, a sharp crack, and an unmistakable explosion.
“Nitroglycerin!”
The word burst out of Hwiyeom before he could stop it.
“Pardon?”
“What’s that?”
The Dang researchers tilted their heads. Hwiyeom shook his own as if nothing had happened and, instead of answering them, turned on Unhwa.
“How did you do it?”
“Until now we’ve only researched changing the nature of qi, haven’t we? No matter how hard I tried, I could never produce as many varieties as you. I decided the reason my Explosive Poison’s firepower lagged behind yours was exactly that, so I threw myself into property transformation.”
“And how did that lead to this?”
“I was so buried in experiments I forgot to eat, and a thought hit me. People take in food, break it down in the stomach and intestines, and draw out essence and qi to live, don’t they? Even murim fighters who pull qi from the air still starve to death if they stop eating.”
“That’s true.”
“So I wondered—if we can extract essence and qi from something material like grain… couldn’t we extract matter from qi?”
Hwiyeom had thought of that much already. From the beginning he had intended to use people trained in the Nokryong Singong as living chemical factories. But no matter how he altered internal energy’s properties, he had never found a way to defy qi’s nature—to keep it from scattering the moment it left the body and refused to stay put.
So how had Unhwa solved it?
Unhwa grinned under Hwiyeom’s baffled stare.
“But that still felt like grabbing at clouds. Changing matter into matter seemed easier and faster than changing qi into matter.”
“…No.”
Understanding struck Hwiyeom all at once; his mouth fell open.
“Yes. Exactly. If the body can dissolve grain and produce qi from it, then dissolving my own body to produce qi should work the same way. So I tried it. Qi produced by converting my body into qi doesn’t scatter as easily as ordinary Green Dragon internal energy. While studying that property, I worked to create Explosive Poison that would last instead of dispersing… and the result is this.”
Another droplet beaded on Unhwa’s fingertip, fell, and cracked into another tiny blast.
“I obtained this material form,” he said. “I named it Explosive Oil Qi. And…”
He opened a heavily secured safe and carefully lifted out a tiny vial carved from crystal. Inside, a translucent liquid filled a bottle no larger than half a little finger.
“This is the Explosive Oil Qi we produced yesterday. As you can see, it didn’t dissolve back into the air. It remained.”
“Ha… haha…”
Hwiyeom laughed like a man whose soul had left his body—then plunged straight into a world of his own.
The raw materials for nitroglycerin are glycerin, nitric acid, and sulfuric acid. Glycerin is nothing more than a fatty acid. Acetic acid is C₂H₄O₂, so you can get it from the breakdown of protein compounds as well. Unhwa’s skin peeled because he melted subcutaneous fat into fatty acids and melted his skin into acetic and nitric acid—like a solid chemical sublimating. He converted physical body into internal energy, then converted that internal energy back into matter. How is that even possible?
No amount of thinking produced a clean answer. What mattered more was that it had been proven possible. If you wanted to talk about what did and didn’t make sense, the whole world where people casually hoisted hundreds of catties and flung sword qi around had never made sense to Hwiyeom in the first place.
Everything I’ve dreamed of just became possible. The clock of progress is going to spin even faster. But the things that still need fixing aren’t one or two. Does it always have to consume the body? If we could break down dietary fats and proteins as they are and use those instead, we could synthesize chemical compounds with no risk at all…
“…Young Master?”
Only when Unhwa called him, worry in his eyes, did Hwiyeom realize how long he had been gone.
“Has anyone besides Uncle succeeded?”
Several researchers and Dang Su-jeong raised their hands.
“I’d like the method as well.”
The research queue had just exploded, and Hwiyeom’s heart was hammering so hard with excitement he thought he might lose his mind.
“Uncle. You have rendered a great service. This isn’t a commercial product, so it can’t be entered in the patent registry—but I will absolutely record this in the Dang Family Roll of Heroes. As the man who found a way to convert the Green Dragon’s energy into tangible matter, your name will be written into the family’s history forever.”
At that, Unhwa flashed a grin wide enough to bare every white tooth—perfectly suited to the nickname he had lately earned, Chiso Pongma, the Laughing Explosive Demon.
“All thanks to you, Young Master! From now on I’ll give this body everything I’ve got!”
A few years later, Dang Unhwa—by then a living explosives factory—would mutter under his breath:
“I should’ve just blown that bastard’s head off with Explosive Oil Qi back then and made a run for it…”
Once results started showing, progress accelerated at a visible clip.
Body vaporization, which only a handful of people could manage at first, soon became a technique every researcher could perform. Watching them all walk around wrapped in bandages, Hwiyeom issued two assignments.
One: research a method of converting food taken by mouth into internal energy, then converting that energy back into matter—without consuming the body itself.
Two: a method of transforming matter outside the body into qi, then back into matter again.
If either became possible, they would be able to do the kinds of things Hwiyeom had loved in a certain Japanese manga back in the twenty-first century.
Freely transmuting matter like the alchemists in one series… or creating something from nothing, like the atmospheric elemental adjustment device in another. Ohhh, the dreams just keep coming.
Of course, stages like that did not open their doors easily. Completion still looked impossibly far away.
At last, after two seasons had turned and the coldest stretch of winter had arrived, Hwiyeom received the report: Dang Unhwa had successfully extracted Explosive Oil Qi from pork he had eaten as a meal.
With pork protein and fat, the body can be used as a factory to produce nitroglycerin! We still haven’t even touched black powder, so the order is a little backwards—but this is a dream come true. All right. If that’s the case…
Hwiyeom went into the design office and began drafting something. No one there could have known that a single sheet of blueprints would become the signal flare announcing the rebirth of the Sichuan Dang Family’s Hidden Weapon Branch.
A few days later, Han Cheol, Head of the Metallurgy Department, stared blankly at the drawing and scratched his head.
“A hand grenade, you say?”