A New Encounter - 3
Is Dang Hwarin a heroine?
The reason I sought her out the moment I found her had nothing to do with some lower-body reflex of if she's a heroine, I've got to romance her.
Yeokcheonja.
If Dang Hwarin ever asked me what the hell I really was, the polite thing would be to answer honestly — except I can't. That name is both my identity and my power.
I approached her first not because the girls I used to walk around with had all vanished, but because I had doubts about the Yeokcheonja ability itself.
People with actual social lives might think that way. A guy like me? Not a chance.
Speaking of which, that reminds me of a friend of mine.
"Yunho, I broke up with my girlfriend. I'm dying here."
"You absolute idiot. I'm the one dying — answering a drunk call in the middle of the night just to listen to you whine."
"Ugh. How am I supposed to live without her?"
"I manage just fine without a girlfriend."
"God, I envy you!"
"Are you picking a fight right now?"
If that bastard was going to show up a week later with a brand-new girlfriend, he could have spared me the phone call. Worrying about his love life is a sucker's game.
Anyway. If the power that comes with being a Yeokcheonja — this heroine-conquest authority of mine — really can rewrite the fate of every original female character and turn them into heroines, then it might work on Dang Hwarin too.
On the other hand, maybe the ability doesn't apply to her at all. Even if I use my knowledge of the original story to twist her destiny for a while, she could still end up as a villain later on.
Does the Yeokcheonja ability truly work on the original female cast? Or was Cheon Sohee — the Heavenly Killing Star — just a special case?
Getting close to Dang Hwarin, an original character, might be the only way to find out.
The problem is how to get close to her.
If I go the polite route — Haha, young lady. Hoho, young master — and try to build rapport with a friendly smile and careful conversation, how many years would it take to figure out whether she's a heroine?
Hell, the relationship might die at the "haha, young lady" stage.
Like some college freshman named Kang who got a cute classmate's number during a group project, sent a first message with his heart racing, got nothing that day, then received a single "k" the next day, replied in real time, and only after getting another lonely "k" the day after that finally understood what she meant.
I need a way to accelerate this relationship. Fast.
I've already got a setup prepared.
A plan I put together for the moment I faced her again.
My new backstory. The point of contact between me and Dang Hwarin.
Use that, and I can forge a connection with her.
The problem is, it requires a shocking truth.
This time my life isn't on the line, so I don't need some extreme lie. What I need is a buried truth.
A truth that will shake her to her core the moment she hears it. That's how I get close.
They say no flower blooms without being shaken. Even a Poison Butterfly needs a little turbulence, right?
Dang Hwarin.
Time for shock therapy.
"What Young Lady Hwarin should be curious about first isn't me. It's the identity of the person who taught you poison arts."
The opening move had to be shaking the one person she trusted completely.
I put on an easy smile and redirected the arrow of her interest away from myself and onto someone else.
"Uncle Dang Geoho? I think you've got the wrong idea. Uncle Dang Geoho isn't some shady character. He's been looking after me for over ten years. He's basically my benefactor."
Dang Hwarin scowled at me like I'd just slandered someone she cared about.
Even after learning she'd been fed poison, she still reacts like this.
Yeah. Telling someone to doubt their martial arts master — the man who's been like a father to them — is bound to piss them off. People believe what they want to believe.
Which is perfect for me.
If you want to make a butterfly falter, start by making it lose faith in the wing it trusts most.
"There is one experiment the Sichuan Dang Clan forbids above all others. Do you know what it is?"
I didn't bother arguing with her. I simply slid past her protest with a flexible question.
"No. I've got Dang blood, but I didn't grow up in the clan."
I know. I only asked to spark her curiosity.
"The creation of a Dokin — a Poison Human. An experiment that produces endless live subjects and endless corpses, which is exactly why the Sichuan Dang Clan banned it. Do you know what a Dokin is?"
"More or less. I practice the clan's martial arts, after all."
Dokin.
A human who has pushed their poison resistance to the absolute limit, then learned to store or even generate toxins inside their own body. In this world, it's the dark-evolution endpoint of poison arts.
Any member of the Sichuan Dang Clan would covet that realm at least once. And yet Dokin are an absolute taboo within the clan.
Humans aren't poison-aspected by nature. Build up all the resistance you want — swallow an extreme toxin and you die.
The Sichuan Dang Clan already has a neurosis about every mysterious death in the Murim prompting the question, Sichuan Dang Clan, was it you again? There is no universe in which they would authorize experiments that sacrifice people like that.
But the world has never lacked for people who do a thing precisely because they were told not to.
"There was a faction inside the Sichuan Dang Clan that broke the rules and conducted Dokin experiments in secret. Discovery meant death, but their twisted passion never quit. When it finally became impossible to run the experiments inside the clan, they came up with a plan."
"What plan?"
"If we experiment on ordinary people outside the Sichuan Dang Clan, we'll have the entire Murim after us — and the authorities too! So what do we do? That's it! We'll use bastards born with a natural resistance to poison, who are less likely to die mid-process, and who get so little attention from the family that no one bothers to watch them closely!"
I delivered the last line in the tone of a mad doctor who'd just had a brilliant epiphany, and pointed a finger straight at Dang Hwarin.
A bastard of the Sichuan Dang Clan. A victim of Dokin manufacturing.
Her.
"Uncle Dang Geoho… was really trying to turn me into a Dokin?"
Her green eyes trembled with unease.
"Purple hair, green eyes. Spotting a bastard who inherited the Sichuan Dang Clan's blood so strongly is easy. You play father, play master, and slowly turn the child into a Dokin."
"Don't fucking bullshit me! Uncle would never do that!"
Dang Hwarin bared her teeth and exploded with raw fury.
I'd expected this reaction. In the original story she kept trusting him and continued her Dokin training even as her body fell apart. Only later, when she learned the whole truth, did the betrayal make her shudder with revulsion.
"You saw more than enough evidence at the Seong Family Manor."
I looked at her coldly, as if asking whether she truly found nothing suspicious.
"No… Uncle would never…"
Under that cold stare, the doubts must have started surfacing, because her eyes shook again.
She already knows, deep down.
The martial arts manual for creating a Dokin. The drugs for creating a Dokin. The self who grew up swallowing them for ten years.
She just doesn't want to accept it.
How do you accept that the person who raised you was the one who drove you into misery?
But if I want to move to the next stage, I have to make her face it.
"Poison Hands. Poison Claws. You know there are methods of soaking the hands or nails in poison over long periods to wield powerful poison arts."
The seed of doubt had been planted, but she was desperately trying to keep it from sprouting.
Fine. Then I'd water it myself with anxiety until it broke the soil.
"I know. Why?"
"To become a Dokin, you have to ingest toxins and raise your resistance until your body becomes a vessel that can hold poison. As a side effect of that process, the vessel changes color — the same way learning Poison Hands or Poison Claws discolors the relevant body parts."
Out of consideration, I didn't look directly at her. Instead I carefully touched my own forearm, then my lower face. She would understand exactly what I meant.
"You're saying the symptoms on my body are proof of a Dokin?"
"It starts with discoloration of the skin. Before long the toxins you've ingested leave you in constant pain. Then, once your resistance rises, the pain stops for a while. But the Dokin-in-progress misreads that. Someone from the Sichuan Dang Clan gave me medicine, so the pain went away. That person is my benefactor. That's the delusion they fall into."
"…Yeah. That's what I thought."
She swallowed a low sound and reluctantly agreed.
Of course she did. It's your own setting from the original, after all.
"A bastard of the Dang Clan believes they've contracted an incurable disease. Using the poison arts taught by the person from the Sichuan Dang Clan, or taking their medicine, eases the pain a little — so they throw themselves even harder into martial training. Without ever realizing it, they end up pouring everything into Dokin cultivation."
"Th-then Uncle really…"
Overwhelmed by the full shape of the truth closing in on her, Dang Hwarin squeezed her eyes shut.
Good. First stage cleared.
Tell her the truth about the one person she relies on and shake her heart. But that only costs her trust in a single human being.
Now it was time to shake her entire life to its foundations.
"You train poison arts, ingest toxins, build resistance, then ingest more toxins. Nine out of ten people die during that process."
I told her just how dangerous the training she'd been put through really was.
"…"
Maybe it was the weight of a truth she couldn't accept, stacked on top of learning she'd nearly died. Dang Hwarin squeezed her already-closed eyes even tighter.
I simply watched her.
From the state of her body, I could roughly gauge how far the Dokin process had progressed.
Her skin hadn't started to break down yet. She was still in the stage of raising her resistance and forging the vessel that would hold the poison.
Whether she was a heroine or not, I didn't know. But at the very least, I could still stop her from meeting a miserable end.
I opened my mouth to tell her what came next.
"Once the vessel is formed, a Dokin creates an extreme toxin inside their body in the form of a poison core. That's where the remaining one-tenth dies."
"What?"
Dang Hwarin snapped her eyes open and stared at me again. Nine-tenths die, and then the last tenth dies too. Everyone who enters a Dokin experiment dies.
"Historically, a true Dokin has only been born a handful of times. Those lunatics are trying to manufacture that handful of miracles with their own hands."
Mad bastards walking a road soaked in blood just to touch a phantom.
A scientist talking about building a colony on Mars would sound more realistic and forward-looking by comparison.
"So in the end… everyone dies?"
Dang Hwarin muttered it like she couldn't believe it.
The poison arts training she'd endured to survive, to escape the pain, had actually been a road straight to the underworld.
A truth that negates an entire life. No one could hear that and keep their mind steady.
Dang Hwarin stared down at her own body with a look of pure shock.
I watched her in silence until some of that shock began to settle.
"What the hell are you? How do you know all of this?"
She must have pulled herself together a little. Dang Hwarin frowned and fixed me with a suspicious glare.
That meant the groundwork was done.
Time to harvest the seeds I'd sown.
"Do you know what happens when a completed vessel forms a poison core?"
I started by letting a thin edge of anger into my eyes.
"I-I don't know."
"The body melts. Because of the poison core, you suffer gut-ripping agony at random intervals. Poison seeps out of you like powder and everything around you crumbles. You die slowly, in agony."
In the original story, Dang Hwarin miraculously endures every stage of becoming a Dokin and ends up as an incomplete one.
That original Dang Hwarin's epithet is Dokjeop — the Poison Butterfly.
Isn't that a joke? A woman whose skin has broken down into something hideous, a villain character, given the epithet reserved for beautiful women who wield poison — Poison Butterfly.
In the original, Dokjeop is both her epithet and a slur. Like powder scattering from a butterfly's wings, poison dust constantly streams from her body.
"So how the hell do you know all that?!"
She shouted at me, frustration boiling over into irritation.
One look and you could tell her mind was gone.
I glanced around the room again. The wrecked interior. The overdue lodging fees hanging over her head.
I didn't know the full situation, but it meant she had no one she could lean on right this second.
On top of that, I'd just told her that the only person she trusted was the root of her suffering.
I'd told her that the martial arts she'd trained her whole life were a road to ruin.
No one to trust, and even her own life denied.
What happens if, in a situation like that, someone she can suddenly rely on appears?
"Because you aren't the first."
A man who knows the truth about Dokin.
"Not the first?"
"I know someone who was deceived by the Sichuan Dang Clan, suffered for a lifetime, and melted away into a handful of poison water."
Someone who can empathize with her pain, share her rage —
and who has a reason to reach out a hand to her.
"W-who?"
"A friend closer than blood. The dead man was my closest friend."
If a man who lost someone just like her suddenly appears before her eyes…
Dang Hwarin. You'll want to take my hand, won't you?