Crisis at Daseogak - 2
Those who straddle the line guard it more fiercely than those who stand safely inside it.
Mad scientists.
Picture the archetype that runs through popular culture—the brilliant eccentric, half-genius and half-lunatic. The mad scientist dances right on the edge of moral and ethical lines, cooking up miracles that serve our side. Everyone knows his power is indispensable when facing a mighty foe, yet no one ever quite trusts him.
Now imagine the day he finally crosses that line too far, creating the enemy with his own hands and even arming them. The very people who once called him “Doctor” or “our dear professor” would scatter like leaves in a storm, screaming that they always knew the bastard would snap. In an instant he stops being the mad doctor and becomes simply the mad dog.
That is roughly how the orthodox sects view the Sichuan Dang Clan.
They walk inside the righteous fold, yet they wield poisons and hidden weapons, so suspicion and distrust never leave them. Precisely because the Dang take such pride in their orthodox status, they have turned every outside gaze into a watchtower and grown pathologically terrified of stepping over the line.
Even in the original game they were a pretty decent bunch.
It was the sort of title that kept yelling “This isn’t real wuxia!” at the player, but the Sichuan Dang still came off as one of the more respectable orthodox houses.
The problem was the Lust Demon incident twenty-odd years ago.
For the Dang that affair must have felt like standing on the very brink of the abyss. Officially the experiment was forbidden by the clan, yet a Poison Human created by one of their own had taken Dang poisons and become the Lust Demon. The current Clan Leader—then still the Young Master—had personally hunted the creature in secret, killed it, and buried every trace of the scandal.
Judged by what was known, they handled it with the clean professionalism expected of a great orthodox house. A disaster occurred; they identified it, erased it swiftly, compensated the victims, and even smothered the rumors. Applause would not have been out of place.
The problem is that Dangga Pungun got written.
Twenty years later the Lust Demon’s child appears and announces to the world: My father was the Lust Demon, and he was a victim of the Sichuan Dang Clan’s experiments. I had handed them a bomb in book form.
A Dokin forged through countless human experiments. An aphrodisiac poison usable for rape. Both had come from the Dang, and after twenty years of silence the truth could now explode into the open.
To the people of the Sichuan Dang Clan it must have felt like strangling the throat of some barbarian shopkeeper who had stood quietly by for two decades only to start screaming accusations now: We cleaned it up for you back then—why the hell are you doing this to us?
The fact that Dangga Pungun is so close to the real history is absurd… yet it also makes sense.
There were clues. Hwarin’s Dokin father and her mother. The father alone is a problem—knowing what the original game did to Hwarin, could he ever have been normal? And the mother… if her pathological hatred of her own child stemmed from rape, the bitterness becomes understandable.
A world without abortion. A marriageable virgin violated by the Lust Demon and suddenly pregnant. The psychological trauma is bad enough; her marriage prospects are ruined. How easy would it be to pour love onto that child?
Sprinkle a few tropes familiar to any wuxia reader on top of that, and suddenly the novel looks uncannily like reality.
I am so screwed.
They will never just let this slide.
I had poked the Dang’s darkest secret with Dangga Pungun, and the book had become a smash hit. From their perspective it was not “Oh, a novel? How charming. Sell lots of copies, ho ho ho.” No.
They will almost certainly treat it as a challenge to the clan’s authority.
I would end up in a Dang dungeon, sentenced to whatever punishment they chose. Even if I smashed a window right now and ran to the magistrate, no official would risk making an enemy of the Sichuan Dang Clan for the sake of a black-haired barbarian. They would look at Hwarin, murmur “Ah, an internal clan matter—the authorities do not interfere,” then wrap us neatly in rope and hand us over.
So what do we do?
“We did not write Dangga Pungun because we wanted to die. We wrote it because we wanted to live.”
Meet misunderstanding with a deeper misunderstanding. Give them a reason we had no choice.
“Hearing tales of the clan’s direct bloodline in an open room is inconvenient. Is there another floor above?”
Uigakju glanced at the warriors around him at the mention of Dang Geoho, then asked me.
“We live on the third floor.”
“Only the Deputy Head will accompany us. We go up.”
Hwarin and I, Uigakju, and the man who appeared to be his closest aide climbed the stairs. Why does every conversation require another floor? Is this a brutally hard tutorial tower or a death game?
“Hey. Yunho.”
As we entered the attic, Hwarin called my name softly, eyes asking what the hell I was playing at. To her the whole story must have come out of nowhere.
Just trust me and stay quiet.
I took her wrist and gave her a look that said, Big brother has this. Leave everything to me. She squeezed my hand once, hard, and nodded.
Years of selling miracle medicine together had taught us this silent language. Perfect.
“Impossible! I may not care for Dang Geoho, but he is of the previous Clan Leader’s direct line—one of the present Clan Leader’s younger brothers. If you are lying to save your skins, the consequences will be far worse.”
Uigakju settled into a chair in the attic and scowled, making the threat plain.
Of course he didn’t believe me. Who could? The idea that a direct descendant of the Dang was conducting human experiments was almost unthinkable.
Too high-born to believe? Then I’ll make you believe.
The climb from the second floor to the attic had been enough; my mind was already finished spinning. Now I only needed to speak. I smiled lightly and prepared the first probing shot.
“I’ve heard a certain rumor circulating. Twenty-odd years ago, one of the Dang’s direct descendants openly declared he wished to experiment with creating Dokin. It caused quite a stir, I understand.”
Start with the buried fact.
“You—how do you know that?”
Uigakju stared at me, startled.
How? Because the original game explained exactly why Hwarin looks the way she does. But I couldn’t say that.
There was another way.
“Before I worked at Daseogak I was a Maedamja wandering the Central Plains. A storyteller is an expert at speaking of things no one has ever heard… and also an expert at listening to things no one should ever hear. Ah—of course some of those stories are the sort you hear once and never dare let leave your lips.”
I made a comical face and clamped one hand over my mouth, advertising that I had heard but never told.
Uigakju regarded me with open suspicion.
A vague rumor picked up by a storyteller—easy to dismiss. I held his gaze a moment, then shifted my eyes to Hwarin, silently asking whether he intended to keep denying the evidence standing right in front of him.
“…Twenty years ago Dang Geoho did speak such words openly and was severely punished for it. Afterward, however, he is said to have reformed and grown hostile to the idea of Dokin.”
Faced with the living proof, Uigakju closed his eyes briefly and admitted the rumor.
Good opening.
“So after the punishment he simply decided to continue the experiments in secret. Ten years ago Hwarin received a visit from Dang Geoho. Is it possible he deliberately sought out children connected to that secret history?”
Second strike: a fact whose answer was already fixed.
Dang Geoho had handled the cleanup of the Lust Demon affair. That he had also gone hunting for the bastards was something Uigakju had never mentioned.
I tossed the inference out as a question, inviting agreement.
“Yes. He volunteered to track down the Lust Demon’s illegitimate children.”
For a heartbeat suspicion bloomed on Uigakju’s face: Dang Geoho, you bastard—could it be…?
Now.
I could not let that seed of doubt slip away; I had to make it grow and turn him to our side.
“More than ten years! All that time Dang Geoho pretended to teach her the clan’s martial arts while secretly feeding her poisons, trying to turn her into a Dokin. Did you know he was frequently and strangely absent from the clan during those years?”
“His outside journeys were… frequent, yes.”
“Do you have any idea how much pain and contempt Hwarin endured while deceived by him for a decade? Look! Look at her arm! Her face! Is this not the unmistakable mark of Dokin experimentation?”
Two facts had planted the doubt; the third had to harvest pity.
I pulled Hwarin’s arm forward and held it out. The discoloration had faded a great deal, yet the traces of poison still stood clear.
As a master of the Sichuan Dang Clan, Uigakju was steeped in poison arts and medicine. He could not deny what he saw.
“Ahem…”
He looked at her skin, then turned his eyes away.
He looked away so he would not have to admit it, but the act itself was admission enough—though he seemed not to realize that.
“Lord Uigakju. Do you truly not believe us? Or is it that you simply do not wish to believe? If Hwarin had not realized only recently that the ‘medicine’ he gave her was poison and fled, her condition would be far more horrific by now.”
Corner him with fact and compassion.
“The marks on this child are indeed those of a Dokin. But if Dang Geoho truly did such a thing, why did you come to Yichang instead of going straight to Sichuan? Had you gone there, he would have faced severe punishment.”
He could not deny Dang Geoho’s history.
He could not deny Dang Hwarin’s poisoned body.
So he was left with only one avenue of attack: our own actions. Exactly the final objection I had expected.
“Hwarin barely managed to escape, yet Dang Geoho is still hunting us. Who would believe the bastard child of the Dang and a black-haired barbarian if we simply walked into the Sichuan Dang Clan? We would only be delivering Hwarin into the hands of the very man searching for her.”
Direct bloodline versus bastard child. In a martial house that prized blood above all else, Uigakju knew perfectly well whose word would be trusted.
“And that… is why you wrote the book?”
Good. He was beginning to understand our logic.
“Yes. The incident twenty years ago was handled by the Clan Leader himself. If a matter connected to the clan’s secret history arose, I expected someone the Clan Leader trusted—not Dang Geoho—to appear. At first I was half in doubt, but when he heard Hwarin’s name and clearly did not know it, I was certain.”
I spoke with the smooth confidence of someone finally revealing a long-hidden plan, as if the words themselves were hidden weapons.
“That bastard Dang Geoho… truly making Dokin…”
Anger thickened in Uigakju’s voice. Almost there.
“It’s true. I was deceived by that bastard for ten years and suffered every day of them.”
Hwarin supplied the perfect supporting fire. Thank you, Hwarin. Time to finish it.
“We were already in a situation where doing nothing meant death. We did not publish the secret history of twenty years ago because we wanted to die. We wrote Dangga Pungun because we wanted to live.”
Meet misunderstanding with misunderstanding.
And make it clear that the danger was no longer merely the possible exposure of a twenty-year-old scandal, but the birth of an even more terrible new one.
Answer one incident with another. Answer one secret history with a greater secret history. Divert every eye toward the bigger crime. Now all that remained was the result.
Silence settled over the attic.
It was the taut silence that falls in a detective story just before the culprit is named. I closed my mouth and simply watched Uigakju.
Beside him the last light of sunset slipped through the window and lit the low dust floating in the air.
Uigakju kept his lips sealed and stared at Hwarin for a long time.
“…Child. What martial arts of the Dang have you learned?”
At the end of the silence he asked her. Hwarin named the arts she had been taught.
“The direct-line techniques. Ha… ha ha. Of course. To create a Dokin, the stable poison arts of the main bloodline would be best. That bastard Dang Geoho… so he was still conducting those cruel experiments on the bastards of the branch lines. Ha ha ha.”
Uigakju looked at Hwarin with a mixture of disbelief and bitter laughter.
Even the final piece of evidence pointed straight at Dang Geoho. But I could not relax. We were still the underdogs who had fought for our lives; I had to keep showing the face of the weak.
“Hwarin… we can finally live.”
I pulled her into my arms the way a lost child clings to an adult the moment he finds him again.
“Yunho…”
Her shoulders twitched once, then she hugged me back.
Her acting has improved. She even read my intention. But why is she squeezing so hard? I can’t breathe. The soft, heavy melons pressed against me felt good enough that I decided not to complain.
“The suffering is over. Hhhk.”
I thought of every injustice I had ever suffered and squeezed out real tears. There were so many that crying was easy. Life, honestly.
“Don’t cry, you idiot. Seriously. Why are you the one crying instead of me?”
“Tsk… How has the great Sichuan Dang Clan come to such a state…”
Uigakju watched us with a look of genuine pity.
“Child. Give me your hand.”
Hwarin had been strangely unwilling to let go, so the embrace lasted longer than planned. The moment we finally separated, Uigakju spoke.
At his request she held out her wrist and let him take her pulse.
“This…? Can it be? Sit down. Circulate your internal energy. I will perform a true qi guidance.”
After reading her pulse he started in surprise, seated her, and began sending his own energy into her back.
What now?
“Indeed. How is this possible…”
“What is it? Has Hwarin’s condition worsened? I thought she was improving because she stopped taking the poisons.”
“No. This is not healing. This… this is exactly why, as you said, Dang Geoho would never abandon her and would hunt her to the ends of the earth.”
Uigakju stared at Dang Hwarin for a long moment as if gazing at some priceless treasure.
“What do you mean?”
What is going on? Give me a reason. Is she not recovering after all? Is the power of a Yeokcheonja just a placebo effect?
Uigakju stroked his beard once or twice, settled his thoughts, looked at both of us, and finally spoke.
What he said was something none of us had expected.
“The Dang Clan’s forbidden tragic aspiration. A perfect Dokin. This child’s body is being forged into a vessel that can become a complete Poison Human.”