Sichuan Battles the Yellow Sea
CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG!!
The bronze bell mounted atop the watchtower at the agricultural cooperative pealed with savage force, and every head snapped toward the sound in startled unison.
"Huh? Was that bell always there?"
"That's the one! The bell they put up to ring if the locust swarms ever came!"
"It never rang once, so nobody even knew it existed!"
"Wait—if that bell's ringing right now, that means—"
"Locusts!! Locusts!!"
The cooperative worker hammering the bell screamed himself hoarse, and panic detonated through the crowd in an instant.
"What?! Locusts? For real!?"
"I—I don't see anything yet?!"
A few farmers still denying reality craned their necks toward the western sky—only for several martial artists from the Dang Family to bellow at them.
"You carefree fools! If the locusts are already visible, it's already too late! What are you standing around for?! Get those pest nets deployed now!"
"R-right, of course!"
"Emergency! Emergency! Locust swarm inbound! Locust swarm inbound! Emergency!!"
Delivery runners tore through the alleys, roaring the alarm at the top of their lungs.
And that uproar reached the provincial administration office in the blink of an eye.
More precisely, a courier from the Minjeongwon—dispatched by Ye-eun—delivered the report straight into the hands of the Provincial Governor.
"Your Excellency, an urgent dispatch. The locusts…"
"…Nothing is visible yet. Is this intelligence reliable?"
"At the very least, the Sichuan Dang Family has judged it so."
"Hrm…"
The Governor pondered a moment, then gave a firm nod.
"Mobilize every government soldier and every official laborer. Protect both the state fields and the private fields. Prepare to raise the pest nets."
"Yes, sir!"
"Deputy, go to the Regional Military Command in my stead. We must release the troops to face this crisis."
"I receive your command."
The Deputy bowed deeply at the waist.
The Governor turned his head again and spoke.
"Is the stock of Myeonghwangha sufficient?"
"The Dang Family released a hundred-odd casks. Each cask can blanket a radius of one hundred jang in toxic mist."
"A hundred jang times a hundred casks… a radius of ten thousand jang. Broad, and yet still narrow."
Against the vast farmlands of Sichuan—a third the size of the entire Korean Peninsula—it was nowhere near enough ground.
"Save every field that can be saved. Hurry."
"Yes, sir!"
The government offices exploded into motion.
"Faster! Faster!"
"Move it!"
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!!
War drums thundered. Soldiers poured out in formation. Carts hauled jars of pesticide while ranks of troops unfurled white hemp nets across the paddies.
The Sichuan Dang Family was moving just as fast.
"Any plot larger than one mu—a hundred paces by a hundred, roughly three thousand pyeong—hitch oxen and horses to the nets and gallop them out so the covers unfurl at speed!
Anything smaller, do it by hand!"
"You saving your martial arts to boil soup with later?! Move your asses!"
"Get those poison jars and the Bisampok over here! If a jar breaks, your skull breaks in my hand next!"
The Dang Family's martial artists surged as if they were prosecuting a war.
They hauled out the pest nets that had been rolled and staged along every field edge in advance, stretched them over the paddies, and drove stakes while the farmers helping them watched with desperate eyes.
"Will this really stop the locusts?!"
"…We have no choice but to trust the Young Master."
"Over here! We're short on Myeonghwangha!"
In roughly half a day of war-footing frenzy, Sichuan Province transformed beyond recognition.
Every livestock animal had been driven into its stall. Every paddy lay blanketed under white hemp pest nets. Pesticide stood poured into great cauldrons, ready to be vaporized at a moment's notice.
Beside those cauldrons, Dang Family martial artists stood tense and ready, mouths and noses wrapped in cloths.
"…If we go this far and nothing happens, that'll be a problem too."
"Is the intel on the locusts solid?"
The Dang warriors muttered among themselves.
Whether they wanted the locusts to come or not—even they couldn't say.
But then—
Walking beside Hwiyeom on inspection, Ye-eun's ears twitched.
Her gaze swung toward the western mountains, and—
"Uh…"
The lookout on the watchtower, who had been staring at those western peaks until his eyes nearly fell out, let his jaw drop open.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me…!"
He immediately shifted his grip on the mallet he'd been using on the bronze bell and began hammering the gong hanging beside it instead.
The signal that the locusts were beginning to engulf the cities of Sichuan.
"LO—CUSTS!!!!"
A vast dark cloud was cresting the mountain peaks.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ—!!
A thunderous roar that seemed to shake heaven and earth—hard to believe it was nothing more than the wingbeats of countless tiny insects.
The shadow of the locusts poured down the mountainside like a black torrent of mud.
Watching the greenery in their path vanish as if trees were being swallowed by a flood of yellow silt, Hwiyeom roared.
"Boil the Myeonghwangha!!"
The instant Hwiyeom gave the order, it raced through the Dang Family ranks.
They lit fires beneath the cauldrons already filled with Myeonghwangha and, at the same time, plunged the bamboo canteens from their belts into the liquid.
The cauldrons held Myeonghwangha—the special pesticide developed by the Sichuan Dang Family's Poison Hall specifically against locusts.
Inside the bamboo canteens was Bisampok—
the explosive poison that vaporized pesticide in an instant, created by the Dang Family's own genius madman, the Laughing Explosive Dragon, Dang Unhwa.
SSSSSSSS—!! BOOM! WHOOOOSH!!
As if ice water had been dumped into boiling oil, the Myeonghwangha met the Bisampok and reacted with violent fury, belching thick orange smoke.
From hundreds, thousands of cauldrons, the boiling Myeonghwangha became in moments a locust-slaying sunset that blanketed the skies of Sichuan.
And down onto that sunset plunged a yellow wave of locusts.
THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD!!
The grasshoppers that touched the Myeonghwangha hardened like stone and began to fall like hail.
One of the Dang martial artists let out a low groan of awe.
Myeonghwangha was a neurotoxin.
Its principle was nearly identical to the insect sprays of the twenty-first century.
By means of a substance that scrambled the insects' ladder-like nervous systems, it paralyzed the respiratory centers and motor nerves, killing them by asphyxiation.
Compounded from materials such as hyssop mint, pyrethrum, and geranium, together with the Dang Family's secret poison and acid solutions, the Myeonghwangha's effect was nothing short of outstanding.
The moment even a wisp of that orange fog was drawn into their spiracles, the locusts' wings locked solid as rock and they plummeted earthward like arrows.
But there were simply too many of them. Even the Myeonghwangha painting Sichuan's sky yellow could not stop them all.
"They're breaking through!"
"To the paddies! They're heading for the paddies!"
"Detonate more Myeonghwangha!"
RUSTLE-RUSTLE-RUSTLE!!
Locusts that had slipped the toxic fog and landed in uncovered paddies worked their jaws with greedy hunger, and crops vanished in heartbeats.
But even here, Dang Family poison lay in wait.
These gluttons that could devour dozens of times their own body weight in greenery every day had barely scraped a few rice leaves before foam began bubbling from the spiracles along their abdomens; they dropped and writhed across the ground.
No matter how desperately they tried to breathe, only foam boiled from their spiracles. The locusts thrashed in agony and then stiffened and died.
That was the power of the Guchung-po laid across the fields.
The other locusts fell into confusion.
A locust's eyes distinguish green and blue, white, and a portion of ultraviolet.
Green to find plants; blue and white to tell sky and cloud from earth.
But the paddies covered in white hemp pest nets looked, to them, like "sky and cloud" spread across the ground.
Dusty or impure yellowish hemp registered as "soil."
Even with paddies right there, the swarms failed to recognize them.
The locusts plunged into chaos.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ—!!
The ones flying over the nets mistook the mesh beneath them for cloud, inverted up and down, and climbed skyward again "to land."
Then, once aloft, they descended toward the nets once more to land.
The motion bred total pandemonium—and into that chaos the freshly boiling Myeonghwangha swallowed them whole.
Some locusts, still bewildered, began chewing the nets themselves—but the nets, too, had been coated in Guchung-po.
They foamed at the spiracles and sagged limp across the mesh.
"Aaaargh—!!! I want to throw Dangroe so bad!!!"
Watching Dang Unhwa howl at the seething mass of locusts, Dang Un-sang—who had been about to praise him for inventing the Bisampok—swallowed the compliment and scowled instead.
"Why don't you just go broadcast the family's secret techniques in the middle of the marketplace while you're at it, hmm?"
With this many eyes watching, they could not casually deploy Tang Thunder.
Especially when no one could predict how the government forces—who were fighting the locusts right alongside them—might react if they saw it.
Dang Un-sang spoke.
"Poison Division—show these vermin just how terrifying Dang Family poison can be."
"As you command!"
"Hidden Weapons Division—show them that the thunder of the Dang Family has not yet faded."
"As you command!"
At Dang Un-sang's order, the Dang martial artists shot forward.
"Uwahahahahaha!!! Die! Die!"
Dang Unhwa flung both arms wide, and from his sleeves yellowish vaporous streams blasted outward.
Every locust they touched melted with a sound like frying oil, hardened to stone, or thrashed itself to death in mad convulsions.
"Acid poison! Nerve poison! Paralytic poison! Explosive poison! Pick your favorite!"
"…No matter how you look at it, that bastard's a demon lord."
"We're lucky Hwiyeom keeps a tight rein on him."
"Are you sure? From where I'm standing it looks less like reining him in and more like thriftily exploiting the rampage."
At Dang Un-sang's words, Dang Su-jeong laughed.
"Still, I like this version of big brother a lot better than the idiot halfwit he used to be."
"Can't let an idiot halfwit big brother show you up, can you? Go demonstrate the power of the Hidden Weapons Division."
"What are you even saying, this big brother of mine."
Dang Su-jeong slipped a hand into her robes, fingers brushing the hidden weapons nestled there, and smiled a pure white smile.
"I've been a genius who reached Peak mastery with hidden weapons alone ever since people started saying the Dang Family's Hidden Weapons Division was dead. As if I'd lose to the Poison Division of all things."
"Go prove it."
"As you wish, Family Head, sir."
Dang Su-jeong soared upward as brilliantly as a phoenix unfurling its wings.
When she flourished her sleeves like a celestial maiden, a rain of flowers began to scatter from them.
A single flying needle, before its force was spent and it fell, punched clean through dozens of locusts.
And there were dozens, hundreds of such needles—
no, not only needles.
Iron pellets, caltrops, steel shards, throwing coins, hexagonal darts, pouch-shot, flying butterflies poured down like a cloudburst, whirled like snowflakes, scattered like petals.
When the beautiful dance finally ended, hundreds—thousands—of locust corpses lay tumbled at her feet.
"Hmph. I can't afford to fall behind either."
Dang Un-sang drew several pitch-black iron plates from his robes.
The one whose name was famous throughout the martial world was Dang Su-jeong, who had left the family and walked many a chivalrous road—
but the current strongest of the Sichuan Dang Family was, beyond any dispute, Dang Un-sang.
Though he had lost the Dobansamyang-gwiwon-singong, the hidden-weapon arts founded upon the Manryu-gwiwon-singong unfolded from his hands.
CRACKLE-CRACKLE-CRACK!!
As his formidable internal energy scoured across the plates, hundreds of iron shards—shattered fine as toothpicks—rose and drifted in midair.
Anyone who didn't know better would have cried out in shock, "Object Manipulation through Empty Air?!"—but this was no such high-level application of internal energy.
It was the crystallization of a lifetime of effort: sleepless nights spent trying to raise a collapsing family.
"Hundred-Eight Heavenly Flower Rain."
Dang Un-sang brought the hand he had raised overhead sweeping downward, and the iron shards shot forward like arrows from a company of archers given the order for simultaneous fire.
With that single technique, Dang Un-sang turned more locusts into pincushions than Dang Unhwa and Dang Su-jeong combined had slain.
On any other day the sight would have filled him with considerable pride.
But today, his martial arts brought him no pride at all.
"Go."
Dang Un-sang watched the Dang martial artists leap forward at his command, then lowered his gaze and stared blankly at his own hands.
It was a fearsome art that had reduced tens of thousands of locusts to pulp in a single stroke—
yet there were simply too many locusts, and his performance had barely affected the overall battle.
The Myeonghwangha created by the Dang Family, however, had killed tens of millions, hundreds of millions of locusts and sent them raining down; and the pest nets he had privately worried might prove useless had saved vast farmlands he himself could never have protected.
Dang Un-sang suddenly felt that his own hands were far too small and frail.
"…I think I finally understand a little of why Hwiyeom has been so obsessed with developing new weapons."
A strangely hollow enlightenment settled over Dang Un-sang.
Yet for all the complexity of his feelings, the battle against the locusts was already entering its final stage—
racing toward a dazzling victory that no other province could even have dreamed of.