Forbidden Garden - 2
She had been far too honest.
She should have softened her words a little. Looking at the Poison Martial Empress—visibly flustered to any observer's eyes—Tang Hwa-rin realized her mistake, and resolved to sugarcoat her answer.
"A quick first child?"
It would be between Yunho and me, after all. One meeting of the eyes and things would heat right up. We'd have our first soon enough. Though I wouldn't mind enjoying him a little longer first... No. It's already too late for that. We need a child soon.
She said it bashfully, but the Poison Martial Empress did not so much as stir at this second attempt. And then Tang Hwa-rin understood.
'That isn't the right answer either!'
She was done for. A silence as bitter as a midwinter cold snap stretched itself between the two women.
What do I do? Tang Hwa-rin agonized over how on earth to put it—that she meant to spend nights with Kang Yunho so feverish they would rob her of her senses, and bear his child—until at last the perfect phrase came to her.
"I-I want to become a good wife and wise mother."
Of course, it was already far too late.
"She is a more amusing child than I took her for."
The Poison Martial Empress's single remark stabbed cruelly at Tang Hwa-rin's heart.
What sort of nonsense had she spouted before the great elder of her clan, a woman renowned as the supreme master of the Tang Clan's previous generation? For one moment, Tang Hwa-rin wanted nothing more than to flee the room.
'I have to fix this!'
She wanted to become the Empress's disciple. She had to. Tang Hwa-rin racked her brains for all she was worth.
"I didn't become this way because I wanted to."
And so, in the end, she resolved to lay more of her own story bare.
"Not what you wanted to become?"
"Tang Geohu. I fell into that son of a bitch's trap."
Merely speaking the name sent fury boiling up through her. Tang Hwa-rin had killed him with her own two hands, and still she spat the name of a man she ached to kill all over again.
"I have heard the broad shape of that story."
"I was born without a father and grew up treated like a leper. Marriage was beyond me—I couldn't even dream of love, shut away in a back-alley room. And then one day, I met Yunho."
A smile bloomed in an instant across Tang Hwa-rin's fury-scorched face.
"Ah. This fiancé of yours."
"Even a woman like me—he treated me like anyone else. He loved me. When everyone said I had to be given up on, he alone refused, and staked his life to save me. He hauled me up out of the pit I'd fallen into, and then he promised to marry me."
"Even knowing the state your body is in?"
"They told me to give up. As if that made any sense! Don't marry until my thirties, they said. Anyone would point and ask if the whole world had gone mad. But do you know what Yunho said?"
Tang Hwa-rin's face was already brimming over with love.
"What did he say?"
"He said he would wait for me. The fool."
Her heart still pounded when she thought of it. The feeling swelled so high she wanted to run to Yichang that very instant. Tang Hwa-rin pressed a hand to her trembling chest.
"That is a rare man."
Surprise flickered across the Poison Martial Empress's face as well.
"How could I not love a man like that? You asked what I want to become as your disciple, Poison Martial Empress? A good wife and wise mother. That is my answer."
Tang Hwa-rin replied with her chin held high.
A woman who had never once lived an ordinary day in her life. Because Tang Hwa-rin wished to spend her whole life for the man who had loved her.
"You harbor not one dream as a martial artist, then?"
"People hoist me up on their shoulders—oh, the complete Poison Human, the Forbidden Garden of the Tang Clan—but I've no desire to become any great master of the martial world. You may not like hearing it, Poison Martial Empress, but I want to be happy with Yunho. I want to open my eyes every morning in his arms."
Perhaps she ought to have dressed herself up a little.
That she longed to carry on the Empress's legacy, that she wished to live for the Tang Clan, that she dreamed of standing among the great masters—she could have claimed any of it. But she could not bring herself to deceive the woman who might become her teacher with pretty lies.
And so Tang Hwa-rin confessed honestly. Her love for one man, and her dream for herself.
Even if the answer fell short of her hopes, it changed nothing. The feelings she carried would not bend.
The Poison Martial Empress regarded her in silence for a long moment. At last, she spoke.
"I have a tea I have been saving. Will you share it with me?"
"Yes."
Small smiles had settled onto the faces of both Tang Hwa-rin and the Poison Martial Empress.
"I have heard tales of your fiancé as well. They say that far from wilting before the Clan Head and the council of elders, he bent their iron wills and wrested you from them."
The Poison Martial Empress spoke as she savored the fragrant steam rising from her cup.
"Yes. I've heard the stories too."
You fool. The whole countryside knows by now. What am I to do with you? Tang Hwa-rin nodded, cheeks warming, as her fiancé's proud figure rose before her mind's eye.
"They say he spoke so brilliantly that more than one or two warriors felt their hearts tremble at the sight of such fearless bearing."
"Yunho makes hearts tremble even when his mouth is shut."
Taking after his father, perhaps—that was why they called him such a strikingly handsome man. The Poison Martial Empress laughed as she watched Hwa-rin glance away and casually heap praise upon her betrothed.
"Puhuhut. It seems I have heard a similar tale."
The Poison Martial Empress knew a similar tale indeed. A Poison Human, and her beloved. A very, very old story.
"Um..."
"I had one as well. A man who set my heart racing merely by crossing my mind—merely by standing at my side."
Tang Ok-ran stared blankly at her own reflection trembling on the surface of her tea.
She was well past seventy, yet hers remained the face of a woman only just entering her twilight years. Back when that face had borne not a single wrinkle, there had been a man who would gently tap her shoulder whenever she sat taking tea.
"......"
"In my youth, the murim was more chaotic even than now. The Orthodox and Unorthodox factions warred in an endless tug-of-war, and countless martial artists perished in the gap between them. As a warrior of the Tang Clan, I could not simply stand and watch."
"The Righteous-Demonic War..."
The story of the murim from roughly half a century past. Tang Hwa-rin had heard of it too.
"I told myself I had to win, whatever it took. That I had to survive. And I knew exactly how it could be done."
The Poison Martial Empress raised her empty hand. Tang Ok-ran was a supreme master of the Poison Qi Art, and from her fingers a toxic mist began to rise like fog.
The poison took visible shape as it climbed, thick and clinging—by every law it should have rotted everything it touched—yet it harmed not so much as a blade of grass before curling back and seeping into her body once more.
"A Poison Human?!"
Tang Hwa-rin grasped at a glance what that rising poison truly was.
"Think of it as something like a Half-Poison Human. I had trained in the Poison Qi Art, so my gaze was drawn naturally enough to the Poison Human. And those were not yet the days when folk shrieked 'abomination!' or sneered, 'those sinister Tang Clan devils'—so it was an easy thing, in that era, to lay a hand upon the forbidden."
"You made yourself into a Poison Human?"
The Poison Martial Empress nodded.
"Thanks to that, we won. The Tang Clan may not be hailed as the Number One Clan Under Heaven, but it became a house spoken of as the Hegemon of Sichuan. I survived, and I returned to Chengdu. And there, standing before the gate of the home I came back to, was my fiancé."
The Poison Martial Empress summoned up her husband's face as it had been in his youth.
"I heard your story when I was small too, Poison Martial Empress. They say you came home and were wed."
And the Poison Martial Empress, the Righteous-Demonic War behind her, lived happily for a long, long time. That was how the murim told the tale, and Tang Hwa-rin remembered it.
"I believed only happy things remained to me. That is—until I learned the truth of my barrenness."
The Poison Martial Empress looked up at the night sky with a grief that even an old woman's face could not conceal.
"......"
"I came home believing I held everything the world could give, only to find that I had become a woman who could not bear even one child of the man she loved. A half-wit of a woman, useless to the world. That was what I was."
"Becoming a Poison Human brings countless side effects with it."
That much Tang Hwa-rin knew well enough herself.
"The people of the world took to calling me the Poison Martial Empress. But the way I saw it, until the day my husband died I was nothing but a wretched Poison Empress of No Heir—a woman who could not carry on his line to save her life."
To a woman, barrenness was little different from a crippled body. It was an era when, if word spread that a great clan's daughter had been cast off for failing to conceive, the whole world would simply nod its head.
"I threw decades of my life at the Poison Qi Art. On the chance that somewhere, some remedy might exist. I read the Tang Clan's every volume, cover to cover. In the art itself, I attained greatness—but by then my husband had already gone."
"......"
Tang Hwa-rin could not force out a single word, face to face with a suffering that might so easily have become her own.
"Child."
The Poison Human who had endured so many bitter years called out to a new Poison Human.
"Yes."
"Will you become my disciple?"
For any other reason, she would have refused. Even had it been the Clan Head begging, she would have refused.
For the sake of the family, they might have said. To become a famous warrior, or a Poison Human who would see the very end of the poison arts. Had any of those been the price, she would have turned on her heel then and there.
It was Tang Hwa-rin's answer—that she wished to love—that had moved the Poison Martial Empress's heart.
"If I study under you, Poison Martial Empress... can I reach Yunho sooner?"
"If your love does not change."
"That, I can promise."
"Then I will teach you everything I have."
I only pray you never suffer as I did. The Poison Martial Empress held out her hand to Tang Hwa-rin.
"Then let me greet my teacher properly."
Tang Hwa-rin rose from her seat and bowed low, offering her new master a full ceremonial prostration.
It was the moment two fates entwined: the Poison Human who had never once taken a disciple, and the Poison Human who had never once had a teacher.
"Clan Head. So this is where you were."
It was the Tang Clan's garden pavilion, where pond and blossoms mingled in quiet harmony. The Poison Martial Empress appeared before the Clan Head, who had been gazing out over the water alone.
"Poison Martial Empress. There is no need for such formality with me."
"How could I possibly speak casually to the head of the clan?"
The Poison Martial Empress bowed at the waist as she spoke.
In all the Sichuan Tang Clan there was not one soul who did not acknowledge the Clan Head's authority—the elders of the family least of all exempted.
"Clan Head I may be, but when my aunt—who has cherished me since I was a boy—insists on addressing me so, it is nothing short of uncomfortable."
Tang Baek-ho showed a flicker of helplessness at his aunt's manner—a woman who had even romped and played alongside him in their childhood days.
"Very well. I shall relax, then. I have been to see the child, as you asked."
The Poison Martial Empress nodded to the Clan Head, then brought forth the answer to the request he had pressed upon her these past days.
"And was she to your liking?"
Tang Baek-ho had never once imagined the Poison Martial Empress would take a disciple.
In all her history, his aunt had never accepted a single one. He had merely hoped the girl might catch the Empress's eye—even a little—and be granted the gift of a single technique.
"I have decided to take her as my disciple."
"...!"
It was an answer beyond even the Clan Head's imagining.
"There is no need to look so astonished. Trace the matter back far enough, and the child becoming what she is counts as my failing too."
With a conflicted expression, the Poison Martial Empress drew up beside Tang Baek-ho and spoke as she gazed out over the garden pond.
"How can you say such a thing? Tang Geohu coveted your martial arts, Poison Martial Empress. It was nothing more than that."
"I should have withdrawn from the world long ago. A half-finished Poison Human wandering before men drunk on poison—how could their greed not catch fire?"
The Poison Martial Empress Tang Ok-ran was not a complete Poison Human, but neither was she a failure. She was a martial artist who had driven the Poison Qi Art to its extreme and submitted to the experiments toward becoming a Poison Human, rising as a Half-Poison Human.
To those within the Tang Clan who studied the Poison Human in secret, the Empress was both a summit they might one day reach and a being who stirred their greed.
"I will see to it that nothing of the kind ever befalls this clan again."
"Good. From the Clan Head, I can believe it. And as for that child."
The Poison Martial Empress turned to him with an expression of utter incredulity.
"Has something happened concerning young Hwa-rin?"
"Her craft. Wielded not as trained technique, but by raw instinct. It is stronger than mine was when I first earned the title of Poison Martial Empress."
The Empress had subdued Tang Hwa-rin with leisurely ease in the flower garden—but in truth, it had been one long chain of shocks.
Had she lacked her attainment in the Poison Qi Art, it would have been the Poison Martial Empress flattened on the ground. It was an achievement absurd for a girl barely past her twentieth year.
"She is the child who faced the Demonic Cultists and the traitors all on her own."
"Then a master without precedent in the Tang Clan's history is about to be raised."
"I ask you to look after that child, Poison Martial Empress. She is the Tang Clan's Poison Human, but... she is also to be my daughter-in-law."
Not as Clan Head, but as a worthless father, Tang Baek-ho bowed his head to his aunt.
"Look after her, I shall. Your daughter-in-law burns with a remarkable fire, you know. She has vowed to see her goal through, come what may."
The Poison Martial Empress nodded at the sight of him. A truly delightful story—one she could tell her disciple's father-in-law—had just come to mind.
"And what goal would that be?"
"She says her goal is to bear her fifth child before her thirties are over."
At Tang Hwa-rin's unforeseen declaration, the Clan Head—hard on the heels of the Poison Martial Empress—was struck entirely speechless.
Tang Hwa-rin moved her residence to the Forbidden Garden, where the Poison Martial Empress lived in seclusion.
Like a fledgling learning flight from its mother, she began again from the very beginning, learning everything piece by piece. The Empress's teaching was strict, but never cruel.
Before anyone knew it, the cold winter that had seen the lovers parted had slipped away, and spring arrived at the Sichuan Tang Clan.
"The people from the Daseogak have returned!!!"
"Tang Pae has returned!"
"Save it! Hurry! HURRRY! Volume three of Wind and Cloud of the Tang Clan!!!"
It was on just such a spring day that Tang Pae and his party—who had set out for Yichang at Kang Yunho's side—returned to the Sichuan Tang Clan and whipped up an entirely new commotion.