Inevitability - 2
Why the hell is that woman coming out from there?
Didn’t that ajumma run off to Shaanxi? Did Dang Geoho chase all the way to Shaanxi looking for Dang Hwarin?
So someone who used to live in Sichuan Province stops by the Seong Family Manor in Daeheung County, Hubei, heads to a mansion in Shaanxi, then hears that Dang Hwarin is in Yichang and heading back to Sichuan—and sets a trap on top of it? And while he’s at it, turns Hwarin’s mother into a hostage?
Even villains have to be diligent and hardworking, I guess. With that kind of dedication, if he’d poured the same effort into something wholesome he could’ve built the greatest clan under heaven. What terrifying passion.
Even in open ground, escaping won’t be easy.
There aren’t many black-clad survivors left, but every one of them is a high-level expert. If I try to run with my ordinary steps, I’ll look like a turtle crawling to them.
Better just watch how things unfold for now.
“Crazy bitch? This fucking bitch can’t say a single decent thing to the mother she hasn’t seen in forever.”
What a heartwarming mother-daughter relationship.
Hwarin’s mother seemed to have forgotten where she was and the fact that she was tied up; the second Hwarin called her a crazy bitch, she snapped right back at her.
Figures. The woman who ruined half a dozen lives while living at the Seong Family Manor wouldn’t have ordinary personality flaws.
“Why are you even here?”
“You think some random bastard dragged me here? Are you that dense, or do you already know and you’re just mocking me—hurghk!”
“Shut up.”
Dang Geoho wore an irritated expression as he pressed the side of Hwarin’s mother’s throat; no more words came out of her mouth.
Pressure point on the mute acupoint? The more I see of acupoint striking, the more amazing it is. Mute button, sleep button—they’ve got the whole remote control.
“Why’d you even bring this crazy bitch here? Don’t tell me you’re planning to threaten me by killing her?”
Dang Hwarin stared at Dang Geoho with an expression that said she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
Threatening to kill her? That won’t work. If anything, promising to keep the bitch alive and healthy until she dies of old age if Hwarin doesn’t take the poison pill might actually get results.
“I will give you the power of life and death over your mother.”
Dang Geoho must have known that already, because he dropped a bombshell of a statement.
“What?”
“Your mother knew everything. And for her own wealth and glory she even cooperated—a piece of trash. No, when her relationship with the Seong Family head soured, she blackmailed me and demanded poison herself.”
Hwarin’s mother knew about the experiments? And she wanted her husband dead? Even a prince who loves seizing the throne through treason would bow his head to that level of filial impiety.
“So what? Who’s the real bastard I want to kill?”
When Hwarin sent him a murderous glare, Dang Geoho opened his mouth with a broad, fatherly smile.
“Hwarin. I understand the urge to kill the man who made you this way. But I am different from the mother who shoved her own child into hell. I cherished you like my own daughter. If you become a Dokin, I will give you every luxury and glory that outshines all the years of pain. So take that anger out on this woman and come with me.”
These days people run human experiments on their own kids? What a load of absurd sophistry.
“Untie her.”
Hwarin, please tell me you’re not falling for that bullshit.
When Dang Hwarin looked at her mother with eyes full of rage, Dang Geoho nodded and released the pressure point.
“H-Hwarin.”
Hwarin’s mother stared at her with a face full of terror.
“You really knew everything?”
“I-I found out later!”
So she did know. A shadow crossed Hwarin’s face. She let out a small sigh and closed her eyes as if trying to swallow her fury.
Her eyelids still trembled; she hadn’t calmed down at all. No. If this keeps up Hwarin is going to cross a river she can never come back from.
“Hwarin! You don’t have to become a beast just because you kill a beast of a woman!”
When I shouted at her, Hwarin looked at me with startled eyes.
Hwarin, this isn’t some moral lecture about not committing filicide. You’re softer inside than you look.
If she rides the rage and kills her mother, that wound will stay with her for the rest of her life and keep tormenting her.
That wound could turn her into the Poison Butterfly for real. I don’t want that ending.
“This bitch isn’t even worth killing.”
Maybe she read my mind. Hwarin flung the knife she was holding away.
“Then she’s useless, so she has to die.”
“No!”
Hwarin swatted away the hidden weapon Dang Geoho threw.
“So you do value your mother’s life after all. If you want to save her, swallow it.”
Dang Geoho sneered at the sight.
“What are you talking about? She’s not worth saving.”
“You say that, yet you’re still trying to protect your mother.”
Dang Geoho watched Hwarin casually shift to shield her mother behind her back.
“Because I’m not this crazy bitch.”
She’s right. She doesn’t want to kill her, but she’s not about to take the poison pill just to keep her alive. Still, if we leave her alone, Hwarin’s mother dies.
Then Hwarin becomes exactly like the mother who stood by and did nothing.
The standoff between Dang Geoho and Dang Hwarin dragged on. All this drama over someone she can neither kill nor save. What a chicken-rib of an ajumma.
“Useless bitch.”
Contrary to my expectations, Hwarin’s mother was no bland, unsalted chicken breast you force yourself to eat for a diet. She picked up the knife that had fallen to the ground and spoke.
“W-What?”
“How have you always been this clueless? You think doing this will make them spare me? …Ack!”
Hwarin’s mother charged a black-clad with the knife she had picked up. The black-clad was not the type to stand there and watch.
In a single move Hwarin’s mother collapsed in the dirt, both arms severed.
“Y-You crazy—?”
Hwarin rushed to her fallen mother in shock.
“Idiot girl. From the moment they dragged me here I was already a dead woman, so I figured I’d play mom one last time.”
The bleeding was catastrophic. It wasn’t just her arms; a wound had opened across her belly as well.
“Stop the fucking act! Why are you pretending to be good? Why the hell are you pretending to be good!”
“Listen, you little bitch. This isn’t pretending to be good—it’s me being a pain in the ass till the end. So don’t live a shit life like mine. Live well. You like that black-haired guy just now, right? Think carefully. Once you date a black-haired man, you can never date anyone else.”
“You crazy bitch! Hey! Heyyyyy!”
Hwarin shook her mother’s shoulders, but the light in the woman’s eyes was fading fast.
“I don’t want to look at your face, so take your sweet time before you follow me to the afterlife…”
Had Hwarin’s attitude stirred a scrap of maternal instinct? Or was it simply the final thrashing of a wicked woman who refused to dance to anyone else’s tune till the end?
For a woman who had upended her daughter’s entire life and the lives of everyone at the Seong Family Manor, it was an absurdly empty death.
No tears fell from Hwarin’s eyes as she watched her mother die.
“…Mom.”
She only bit her lip as if in agony.
“Useless to the very end.”
Dang Geoho tossed a single line at the ridiculous death of the final card he had prepared.
“What did you just say?”
“If you don’t swallow it, I’ll kill every last one of them. And if you still refuse, I’ll drag you to the Demonic Cult.”
“Hwarin! Even if you swallow it, everyone still dies!”
Everyone here is a hostage for Hwarin. Our lives only keep going as long as she stays in Schrödinger’s poison-pill state.
“This black-haired bastard has been nothing but an obstacle.”
Dang Geoho could no longer tolerate my words; he seized me by the throat and lifted me clean off the ground. Again with the neck-crushing?
Contrary to expectation, it wasn’t pain in my throat I felt—it was the sudden disappearance of gravity.
“Huh?”
A floating sensation. As if someone hit five-times speed the second an electric massager appeared in a video, the scenery whipped past.
Ah. He threw me.
That brief thought was all I managed before a tremendous impact slammed into my back.
“Yunho!”
Through the blood running into my eyes I saw Hwarin’s blurred figure racing toward me.
Dang Hwarin sprinted toward the flung Kang Yunho, face white with panic.
“Yunho! Are you okay? Yunho! Yunho!”
Was something broken? Heart racing, she hastily checked his condition. Her hands were frantic; the one who stayed calm was the injured Kang Yunho himself.
He caught her wrist, showed her he was fine, then spoke so only she could hear.
“Hwarin. Let’s grab a horse and run.”
Just the surface of his skin, thank goodness. Since he never even carried a sword, the injuries weren’t serious. Dang Hwarin exhaled a small sigh of relief. But run? What was he talking about?
Without turning her head she followed his gaze sideways. Only then did she realize: the place Yunho had been thrown was the inn’s stable.
It was nothing but a T-shaped roof with no walls; undo the tethers and they could gallop away at once.
Even while being thrown he had already found an escape route. This man’s crisis management truly deserved respect.
Can we both get away?
The horses the Dang clan people had ridden were clearly thoroughbreds. Ordinary martial artists would have a hard time catching them.
She felt the gazes of the black-clads watching her from behind. They hadn’t followed even when she ran to Yunho; that was pure confidence they could seize her whenever they liked.
If we run together I’ll live, but Yunho dies.
Her mother was dead. The man she had thought of as a father for ten years had deceived her. Now only one person left in the world was precious to her.
Was her own life so precious that she should stake him as collateral?
“Yunho. Play dead.”
Dang Hwarin had made her decision.
“What?”
Yunho stared at her with a blank face.
“When things get chaotic, run.”
She did not want to die. But if she did die, she wanted the last face of hers he remembered to be a smiling one.
She smiled at him and turned away.
“The Thousand-Year Centipede poison pill. Hand it over.”
Leaving Yunho behind, Dang Hwarin walked up to Dang Geoho and held out her hand.
“So you’ve finally decided.”
“If even one more person dies, I’m not going with you.”
“I promise.”
Dang Hwarin stared at the Thousand-Year Centipede poison pill placed on her palm. Looking closely, it was a poison pill, yes—but only a broken fragment.
Too precious to feed entirely to one person, was that it?
She looked at Kang Yunho’s blood still wet on her palm. The face she had just seen might be the last one she ever saw of him. She should have stolen a kiss while she had the chance.
No. If she did that her eyes would keep going to him.
He needed to escape; she could not afford that.
Dang Hwarin clenched her fist lightly, using Yunho’s blood as a talisman, smeared the poison pill thoroughly with it, and swallowed it whole.
The moment the poison pill hit her stomach it flooded every meridian.
A lethal toxin no ordinary human could endure ran wild through Dang Hwarin’s entire network of acupoints. She felt as if a burning centipede were crawling through every inch of her body.
The poison was meant to melt flesh after escaping the meridians, yet it could not leave her acupoints. A body prepared for more than ten years did not hand over control so easily.
Shut up and follow me.
At her single command the poison qi began to gather in one place.
I have to concentrate the poison.
Under Dang Hwarin’s will the toxin that had tried to spread through her whole body collected into a single point and began to form a new poison core.
The extreme poisons that had slept in her body for over a decade wrapped around the Thousand-Year Centipede toxin like a cocoon, forcing it to condense.
Just as a spider wraps prey caught in its web, Hwarin’s will and the toxins already inside her spun the poison core tighter and tighter.
No. Not enough.
The barely gathered poison qi threatened to leak. If she failed to hold it, her flesh would collapse. She had to endure. But it was not enough. Something was missing.
At this rate she would fail.
Despair welled in her heart just as she caught the conversation between a black-clad and Dang Geoho.
“If this girl becomes a Dokin right here, won’t she be able to take revenge on us?”
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
“We have already fed fragments of the Thousand-Year Centipede poison pill to multiple test subjects.”
“And they all failed, didn’t they?”
“There were partial successes. Two died while the core was forming. One succeeded, then days later burned with fever until her brain melted. The last child endured the fever, but her entire body melted and she did not last long either. In the end this girl will also lose consciousness from the heat. That is when we take her.”
The last child must have been Yunho’s friend. In that instant the image of Yunho’s face when he yearned for another woman flashed through Dang Hwarin’s mind. Her heart ached as fiercely as the poison.
She had to endure. If she died here she would leave yet another wound in his heart.
And there was something she hated even more.
I refuse to be second.
If she died now she would be remembered only as “close friend, plus one.”
She wanted to live. As long as she lived, second place was fine. Someday the day would come when she could shove aside the first place in Yunho’s heart and declare that she was standing right here.
As long as she lived, the final victor would be her. Dead, she would be the eternal second.
Yunho. Yunho. Yunho.
One man filled Dang Hwarin’s chest to bursting. If she died she became second. No—if she died, Yunho might die as well.
She could not lose him.
Perhaps because that single man now occupied her entire heart, something strange stirred inside her body.
This is… Yunho?
The blood she had swallowed together with the poison pill. From it she felt Yunho’s energy. The moment she touched that energy, it flowed, strangely enough, straight toward the most dangerous place—the poison core.
Could it be?
A tiny thread. But a thread that could solve the greatest problem.
Dang Hwarin did not let go.
“Then we no longer need hostages. I’ll go slit the throat of that bastard who went flying.”
The black-clad heard Dang Geoho’s words and drew his blade.
“Who said you could?”
“Kraaaaaagh!”
Dang Hwarin opened her eyes, rose, and seized the black-clad’s shoulder. In an instant the man melted away.
“Success? Speak.”
Dang Geoho took a step back, face mixed with wariness and rapture.
“No. Failure.”
Dang Hwarin looked at the black-clads with a defiant face, then down at her own body.
Not enough.
Not complete.
She knew it better than anyone.
She was not a perfect Dokin.
But.
“But it’s more than enough to kill all of you.”
Enough to protect him.