Murim's First Cesco
First things first—I have to keep the family from catching malaria.
After summoning the Dokwadae commander and checking the remaining stock of Myeonghwangha, Hwi-yeom launched a massive pest-control operation across the Southern Savage Beast Palace and its surrounding lands.
“We’re going to set off a poison that only kills mosquitoes and insects—please don’t be alarmed!”
“It won’t harm animals, but breathing it in still isn’t great for your health, so stay indoors!”
With Hắc Hổ Hiến Lang’s permission, the Dang Family warriors under Hwi-yeom’s command went to work with military precision—placing and detonating Myeonghwangha charges, then burning dead branches and leaves in the ditches and marshy spots near the Beast Palace and mixing the ash with stagnant water to create lye, which they poured everywhere.
When the sunset-colored poison mist swept through the jungle, the children ignored the adults’ warnings, darted through the smoke like monkeys, and laughed their heads off at the novelty of it all.
Watching them, Hwi-yeom wore a peculiar expression.
“Huh. Guess kids chasing after the fog truck is a universal constant.”
“Isn’t that stuff pretty harmful?”
Hắc Hổ Hiến Lang asked, and Hwi-yeom answered,
“Well, it’s not exactly healthy, but don’t worry. It’s harmless to humans… hang on, it even kills fleas and bedbugs, so maybe it’s actually a net positive?”
“It kills fleas and bedbugs too?”
“Yes. Every bug dies.”
“…Can we set it off inside the houses?”
“…Excuse me?”
“You said it kills fleas and bedbugs.”
“Mmm, as for remaining stock…”
“If you allow it, I’ll throw in ivory and amber on top of the rubber latex and hides.”
“Where should we start?”
As Hwi-yeom’s eyes gleamed with the righteous fury of a man about to exterminate every last bedbug that dared infest his precious clients’ homes, Ye-eun muttered under her breath, her gaze seeming a shade sharper than usual.
“This human-supremacist. This mass murderer!”
“Hm? What was that? I was concentrating and didn’t catch it.”
“…Nothing. Cough!”
Her coughing had grown noticeably worse.
Hắc Hổ Hiến Lang occasionally met her eyes and tried to strike up a conversation, but Ye-eun diligently ignored him and pretended not to notice. Meanwhile Hwi-yeom, eyes spinning from new business ideas and virgin markets, completely failed to register the subtle chemistry between them.
Thus the Dokwadae warriors—suddenly reinvented as the world’s first Cesco—carried wooden tubs the size of rice bowls filled with Myeonghwangha into private homes, mixed in the explosive catalyst, and left. The vaporized Myeonghwangha flooded every room in an instant.
The animals were the ones who lost their minds.
“Achoo!!”
“Kyaaung!!”
Even beasts sneeze. Leopards, wolves, tigers—the great predators who were as much family as anyone in the Beast Palace—kept streaming tears and snot while sneezing nonstop from the Myeonghwangha fumes. A few people with especially keen noses reacted the same way.
Once the entire Beast Palace and every nearby village had been fumigated, the Dokwadae commander carefully approached Hwi-yeom.
“Um… about the amount we’ll need for the return trip…”
“Send people back to the main house. Tell them to bring every last drop of Myeonghwangha we’ve got.”
The stockpiles they had piled high against locust swarms would still be sitting in the agricultural co-op warehouses, being sold as brown planthopper pesticide.
A dozen Dokwadae warriors rode as messengers back to the Dang Family.
“Bring out all the Hogol-go.”
Hwi-yeom’s tiger balm—vaseline blended with mint and extracts from herbs excellent for bruises—was already an essential item for every martial artist.
“Listen carefully. Hogol-go contains mint, so it has that strong cooling scent, right? That smell repels mosquitoes.
The rubber forest is crawling with them, so before any pest-control work you will smear Hogol-go all over yourselves. Understood?”
“Yes, sir!”
He also made a request of Hắc Hổ Hiến Lang.
“Mint is a mosquito repellent. Please gather mint for us.”
Sichuan already grew plenty of mint even by Central Plains standards, and the hotter, wetter jungles of the Southern Savage produced even more.
“Not just true mint—will catnip work too?”
“Anything that smells like mint!”
“Understood.”
The brave warriors of the Southern Savage Beast Palace scythed through the forest and returned with armfuls of mint. Hwi-yeom and the Dokwadae steeped it in oil until they had something very like mint essential oil.
“Mosquito repellent. Everybody apply it.”
“Young Master, I went to look at the big swamp they mentioned. I don’t think we can purify that place.”
“Then we leave it alone. We can’t wreck the entire ecosystem. But every small puddle nearby gets thoroughly cleaned—especially the ones that form in rotten stumps or between rocks.”
“Yes, sir!”
Once the mosquito hum vanished from the Beast Palace grounds, smiles bloomed on every face.
“Whoa, it actually works.”
“They said the Dang Family allies were poison experts—turns out they’re miracle workers!”
“After we set off that Myeonghwangha and went back inside, the baby bedbugs that had been hiding in the ceiling and floor crawled out and died. I mean… the sheer numbers…”
“Same here—there were so many I had to sweep for ages!”
Charitably speaking, their houses were built of eco-friendly materials; uncharitably, they were all-you-can-eat human buffets for insects. Between the banana leaves and rubber-tree leaves that formed the roofs, and the grass mats on the floors, how many bloodsuckers could there have been?
People of the Southern Savage Beast Palace had been bitten by bugs since the day they were born and had long grown used to it. Now, for the first time, they slept without a single bite and without the endless whine in their ears—and woke the next morning in utter bewilderment.
“Nothing… itches?”
“I didn’t wake up once to scratch—I slept deep!”
“Ahhh, so this is what a brilliant morning feels like…!”
“It’s all thanks to our Dang Family friends’ poison!”
“Divine Cloud!”
“Yellow Blessing!”
The Beast Palace people’s affection for the Dang Family was seconds away from punching through the atmosphere.
Watching the spectacular success of the pest-control campaign, Hwi-yeom chuckled and started scribbling with brush and ink. Ye-eun, observing him, asked,
“What are you writing?”
“A business proposal.”
“…Out of nowhere?”
“Out of nowhere? Can’t you see it? To me that yellow Myeonghwangha fog looks like a fog of money.”
“You’re not seriously planning to do this regularly and charge the Beast Palace for it?”
“Obviously. How many months do you think one treatment lasts? If we run periodic insect-control operations, the Southern Savage stays free of pests, we get a long-term straw stuck in their wallet—win-win, right?”
“No, trading grain for rubber latex is already…”
“There’s so much more to extract here than just rubber and phosphate rock. Dig and you even get oil. We already have to sell grain to Yunnan on a regular basis—if we only sell grain, can supply keep up with demand?”
“I’ve never in my life heard of oil coming out of the ground, and what exactly do you plan to use it for—sigh, never mind.”
Hwi-yeom grinned at Ye-eun’s expression of pure incredulity.
“You’re not coughing much these days, Ye-eun.”
“Yes. I’ve drunk so much Myeonghwangha I must have built up immunity.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Once the residential zones were purified and the preparations for large-scale work were complete—mint oil for the skin, huge quantities of lye for the bogs—the Dokwadae headed into the rubber forest.
“Pour!”
“Detonate!”
“Clear!”
“Burn!”
The Dokwadae conducted the insecticide campaign exactly like a military campaign. Yellow fog billowing from the Myeonghwangha jars dropped countless insects mid-flight (and not only mosquitoes), while bugs that had been hiding among leaves and bark flipped onto their backs and writhed. Like a tank corps rolling across a battlefield already pulverized by bombers, the Dang Family warriors dumped lye into every puddle they found.
“Uh, this one has fish in it—and the water’s clear.”
“Leave it. Mosquito larvae only live in stagnant, dirty, rotting water.”
“I am going to wipe mosquitoes off the face of the earth.”
No one likes mosquitoes. The Dang Family warriors ground their teeth and systematically destroyed every possible breeding site as if they were annihilating a blood feud enemy.
And they still weren’t finished.
“Let’s plant mint throughout the rubber forest.”
“You said mint drives mosquitoes away?
We’ll plant mint in the Palace residential zone and the rubber forest as well.”
While Beast Palace warriors joined the Dang Family in the rubber-forest mosquito genocide, the rest of the Palace people busily dug up every scrap of catnip in the woods and transplanted it into the village.
“The real problem is that swamp. It’s too huge to fix with a bit of lye, and a whole ecosystem has already formed inside it…”
Vietnam is full of wetlands. The area where the Beast Palace stood lay upstream of the Red River—what the locals called Sông Hồng—and here stretched a marshland far larger than Changnyeong’s Upo Wetland.
“Looks like we can’t do anything about this place after all.”
Of course they could have done it if they truly wanted to: pump out the water, build dikes, destroy the swamp completely. But Hwi-yeom could not imagine the locals cooperating that far, and he had no desire to wreck the natural environment on purpose.
Hắc Hổ Hiến Lang was less disappointed than expected.
“Leave it. Reducing the damage where people live is enough. That Myeonghwangha of yours isn’t just killing mosquitoes—it’s wiping out every other insect the forest needs as well.
We don’t know what side effects might appear, so let’s stop here.”
“…Yes.”
The tropical rainforests of the Southern Savage were vast; purifying the residential zone and the rubber forest would not seriously shake the wider ecosystem.
And somewhere Hwi-yeom never saw, someone else was quietly helping protect that ecosystem.
“Leave this place. Go where there are no humans.”
Scritch-scratch.
“Water beetles, giant water bugs, dragonfly nymphs, water striders… tell every child that eats mosquito larvae.
Only when the mosquitoes are gone can the forest stay safe.”
Splash-splash.
“Spiders, hold off on hunting dragonflies for a while. We need to join forces and sweep the mosquitoes clean.
None of you want to see the forest wrapped in poison fog again, do you?”
Kiiiiii.
“Dragonflies, robber flies—fill your bellies with mosquitoes only for the time being.”
Bzzzz.
Whiiiiiing.
Thus the insects of the forest, following someone’s orders, launched a campaign to exterminate the traitorous mosquitoes that threatened their own survival. Even the German mustachioed dictator who once committed unspeakable crimes against humanity would have felt a pang of defeat watching how swiftly and thoroughly the mosquitoes were wiped out.
For the record, one person suffered unintended collateral damage from this movement.
“Nooo! Why aren’t the mosquitoes refilling?! My—my business plan! My grand ambition to realize the world’s first Cesco!”
About a year later, Hwi-yeom—who had been cheerfully drafting a scheme to milk money out of the next mosquito outbreak—supposedly despaired when he discovered the mosquitoes simply refused to come back.
…Still, true to the principle of “even if you fall, you don’t get up empty-handed,” he pivoted from public-works mosquito eradication in forests and along roads to a residential fumigation service that removed bedbugs and fleas from roofs and floors, and eventually made a profit after all—but that is a story for a little later.
In any case, the mosquito-extermination plan that left the Beast Palace stunned, the Dang Family shuddering, and Ye-eun coughing a great deal ended in such overwhelming success that the rubber forest became a mosquito-free clean zone where laborers could come and go without trouble.
When the workers scored the trees and set collection cups beneath the cuts, milky rubber latex dripped steadily into the containers. Watching it pool, Hwi-yeom grinned.
What should I make first with this? Rubber gloves? Perfect—the Poison Hall, which handles toxins every day, will welcome them with both hands, and so will housewives suffering from dishpan hands and the farmers working the paddies of Sichuan, now the rice-production capital of the empire.
Speaking of farmers, rubber boots can’t be left out either.
Boots? And boots remind me of rubber shoes.
Easy to mass-produce, tougher than straw sandals, lighter than wooden clogs, lighter even than leather shoes—the best-selling product of an entire era!
But did he really have to choose only one?
“I’ll do them all—they’re all mine, heehee!”
“Yeom-ah, are you feeling all right?”
Dang Su-jeong asked with a worried face. Hwi-yeom whipped his head around. The faint, oily glint of mania in his eyes made her shoulders twitch.
That’s the face of a man poisoned by money!
“No, I’m fine. More importantly—if I say I want to take some of the farmers who’ve become beggars in Yunnan Province, will the Provincial Administration Commissioner get angry?”
“Hmm? If you tell him you’re giving them jobs and taking them away… well, why would he? Better to go to another province than stay a Yunnan beggar, right?”
“Then let’s pack.”
On the day Dang Family warriors arrived in the Southern Savage carrying Myeonghwangha for the return journey and grain aid for the Beast Palace, Hwi-yeom exchanged farewells with the Palace Lord.
“Leaving already?”
“We’ve stayed a few months as it is. We still have to get back before the harvest ends.”
“True enough…”
The Palace Lord gave a short laugh, then grew serious.
“Be wary of the Central Plains.”
“?”
What on earth was this sudden nonsense?
Hwi-yeom tilted his head in rare puzzlement, and Hắc Hổ Hiến Lang spoke in a quiet voice that almost felt ominous.
“I do not believe Hyo-seon was murdered by the Heavenly Demon and the Demonic Cult. Looking at the circumstances of that war, the story simply doesn’t hold water.”
“….”
“Something is off. I am certain the people responsible for that friend’s death are in the Central Plains.”
After a moment of silence Hwi-yeom gave a small nod. He did not know the full details, but the Palace Lord’s atmosphere made it clear he should at least listen.
An old man who survived the Orthodox-Demonic War wouldn’t spout empty words. I’ll look into it once I get back.
Thinking that, Hwi-yeom said,
“Thank you for the warning.”
“The only ones we can trust are those who fought through the great war together with us. The Beast Palace, Diancang, the Dang Family, and perhaps Emei.”
“I’ll keep it in mind. Don’t worry—I’ll use the rubber latex we’re taking from here to fleece the Central Plains bumpkins right down to their underpants.”
At Hwi-yeom’s joke the Palace Lord finally smiled again.
“Until we meet again, grandson of my comrade.”
And so Hwi-yeom left the Southern Savage Beast Palace.