The Formless Poison Human
There had been a bit of a commotion over the greetings, but in the end the five of them exchanged names and took their seats. Once seated, Yoo Eunhyeon’s eyes drifted naturally to the table in front of him.
Looks like they’ve been deep in discussion for a while.
Books lay scattered open across the tabletop, and the papers beside them were covered in writing and sketches related to poisons and the human body. The ink still carried a faint scent and hadn’t fully dried—clear signs the materials were still in active use.
“I’m glad you two showed up. Their conversation was so dense I couldn’t follow a word of it. I was just about to die of boredom.”
“Isn’t Brother Dang part of Dok-yeon-won?”
“Not a chance. I’m decent at scheming, sure, but I’m nowhere near smart enough to sit around doing this. And Dok-yeon-won already forces you to keep your internal energy suppressed the whole time you’re inside—which is miserable enough to adjust to—on top of the actual work.”
“So the work must be that important.”
“Mm. I couldn’t explain it properly back then, but I heard you got the gist from the Outer Chief.”
“Not the whole story.”
“Then this works out perfectly. Let’s leave these two here and move somewhere else.”
Dang Jaseung said this, then glanced once each at Ju Wongong and Dang Eunseon as if seeking permission.
“That should be fine, right?”
“Yeah. The technical side I can handle with Master Wongong. If I need help with anything, I’ll call for you separately.”
Dang Eunseon nodded. Ju Wongong, as if the earlier moment had never happened, had already tuned Yoo Eunhyeon and Ju Yu-ryeon out completely and was rifling through the documents on the table, absorbed once more.
“Uncle Wongong, we’ll be heading out now. Later…”
Yoo Eunhyeon offered Dang Eunseon a light bow and tried to address Ju Wongong as well, but the moment he spoke, Ju Wongong only lifted his head long enough for a brief nod before dropping his gaze back to the table, clearly finished with the interruption.
Seeing that abrupt change from moments before, Yoo Eunhyeon wondered whether he had somehow offended the man and started to speak again—only for Ju Yu-ryeon to catch him by the shoulder.
“Leave him. Dad’s always like that. Let’s just go.”
At that, Yoo Eunhyeon gave up trying to talk to Ju Wongong and followed Dang Jaseung out of the room toward another one. Once they were out of Dang Jaseung’s earshot, he whispered to Ju Yu-ryeon.
“What do you mean he’s always like that?”
“Exactly what I said. A little while ago Dad talked about priorities, remember? Well, his priority just shifted away from us and back over there. Dad ranks everything and handles it in order. Whatever sits highest gets his absolute best effort—no exceptions. And there’s something that always sits at the very top. You can guess what it is, right?”
“Medicine, I’m guessing.”
“Right. He does care about family. He loves me, and he loves Mom. But both of us sit lower than medicine on the list.”
Yoo Eunhyeon looked briefly startled, then understood the kind of man Ju Wongong was. Simply put: a man who lived by ranked priorities. Most people ordered the things in their lives to some degree, of course—but only things that could be measured that way. They didn’t put a price on the unpriceable.
According to Ju Yu-ryeon, though, Ju Wongong assigned a rank to everything he possessed and acted accordingly. That was how you ended up with scenes like this.
“Usually you can’t even compare things like that… You can’t rank whether you like your mother or your father more, can you? They’re both your parents. They’re family. They’re precious.”
“But Dad does it anyway. And he always puts the more important one first.”
“……I think I understand why you and Auntie are the way you are.”
Yoo Eunhyeon said it with a bitter little smile and fell silent. Ju Yu-ryeon had nothing more she wanted to say on the subject either, and they had reached their destination, so she closed her mouth as well.
“In here.”
The two of them followed Dang Jaseung into the room he indicated and sat where he gestured.
“Somehow this looks exactly like the room we were just in.”
“Of course it does. Every room in the inner compound is built the same.”
“Bleak place.”
Yoo Eunhyeon muttered it while eyeing the barren chamber, but none of them had time to dwell on décor. The three of them got straight to the point.
“You’ve already heard that the main house is researching the Jeokgang-dokshi.”
“We have. And that you need medical expertise for it.”
“The truth is, the Jeokgang-dokshi techniques we possess are incomplete. We only ever obtained fragments of them by chance from remnants of the Jahyul Sect in the first place.”
“Hmm…… Is that so?”
Honestly, there was no way for anyone to verify whether Dang Jaseung was telling the truth. Even if they were hiding something, there would be no way to confirm it—and you couldn’t exactly press someone who was insisting they weren’t. So Yoo Eunhyeon had only echoed the words as a kind of acknowledgment. Still, Dang Jaseung either took the tone for skepticism or felt a twinge of conscience, because he added an explanation.
“We were never interested in the Jeokgang-dokshi itself so much as the poison techniques the Jahyul Sect used to create it. Even if a fully intact Jeokgang-dokshi existed, we would have no desire to use a weapon that vile.”
Yoo Eunhyeon privately thought that poison itself was already a thoroughly vile weapon, but compared to a Jeokgang-dokshi it was certainly the lesser evil—and this was hardly the moment to argue the point. He kept quiet.
“They really didn’t use it for a hundred years, so there’s at least some credibility there.”
“I’m grateful for your trust, Miss Yu-ryeon.”
“But if you already have the Jeokgang-dokshi techniques, what exactly are you researching?”
“As I said a moment ago, we have no intention of resurrecting such a vicious art. That said, for a poison-using house like the Dang Clan, the Jeokgang-dokshi is an undeniably attractive technique. So…… we intend to take only its strengths.”
From Dang Jaseung’s words, Yoo Eunhyeon could already guess the Dang Clan’s real aim. Reviving and deploying actual Jeokgang-dokshi might help them weather their current crisis—or it might isolate them completely from the rest of the murim. So the clan was trying to extract only what it needed from the incomplete techniques. That much was clear.
“Is that even possible?”
“It’s difficult. Whether it’s possible at all is still an open question.”
“And yet? No—you must at least have a rough sketch of how you’d put it to use.”
“We do. What we want is the Muhyeong-dok-in—the Formless Poison Human.”
“Formless Poison Human?”
Yoo Eunhyeon tilted his head at the unfamiliar term, but Ju Yu-ryeon stepped in with a brief explanation.
“Poison is normally treated as a kind of hidden weapon. You carry it and deliver it somehow. But there are people who take the poison into their own bodies and wield it through martial arts. Those people are called poison humans—dok-in.”
“That’s a thing? Wait—is that even possible?”
Hearing it for the first time, Yoo Eunhyeon asked again, and this time Dang Jaseung elaborated.
“An ordinary person obviously can’t hold poison in their body. But if you start adapting the body to poison from childhood while building internal energy to suppress the poison’s effects, you can create a poison human whose very flesh is made of toxin.”
“It sounds simple when you say it like that…… but it looks extremely difficult.”
“Even in the Dang Clan, true poison humans are rare.”
“And it can’t be all upside, either.”
Even without prior knowledge, Yoo Eunhyeon could tell at a glance that being a poison human was no light matter.
“The downsides outweigh the upsides, honestly. Poison exists to harm people—carrying it inside you is never going to be pleasant. No matter how hard you suppress it with internal energy, all kinds of side effects are inevitable.”
“So what’s a Formless Poison Human, then?”
Yoo Eunhyeon’s lightly joking tone eased the atmosphere that had grown a little heavy. Dang Jaseung gave a short laugh.
“Same idea, basically. Put simply, a regular poison human is obvious at a glance—you can tell just by looking. A Formless Poison Human is someone who carries poison but shows none of the outward signs. It’s been a long-cherished goal of the Dang Clan’s research for generations.”
“So you’re trying to minimize the side effects. You’re taking the part where the Jeokgang-dokshi—even though it’s a corpse—doesn’t look like it’s full of poison from the outside.”
“There are other aspects to the Formless Poison Human as well, but that’s the primary objective.”
“But isn’t that only possible because it’s a corpse?”
“I don’t know the details myself. The theory side of things has to be left to the people back there.”
“Hmm…… I see. If you actually pull it off, it would be incredible.”
Yoo Eunhyeon nodded, and so did Ju Yu-ryeon, who had been listening just as carefully. If a Formless Poison Human could truly be perfected, it would be an enormous boon to the Dang Clan. Having grasped the core of the matter, the two of them exchanged a few more brief words with Dang Jaseung before parting ways and leaving Dok-yeon-won.
“Whew. I can finally breathe again.”
They already knew the way back to their lodgings, so Ju Yu-ryeon declined an escort. She circulated her internal energy to clear away the lingering medicinal effects, stretched her whole body, and muttered under her breath.
Yoo Eunhyeon did the same, flushing the drugs from his system with internal energy, then asked her,
“What do you think?”
“There might be things he didn’t say, but I don’t think he was lying. There’s no real reason to drag us all the way into Dok-yeon-won just to feed us a story.”
“Not that. Do you think they can actually create a Formless Poison Human?”
“That I really don’t know. Even with Dad helping, the Dang Clan wouldn’t have left it as an unfulfilled ambition through their entire long history for no reason.”
“True enough. Still, there’s nothing we can do about it either way, so let’s just drop it.”
Yoo Eunhyeon had even less to add on that front than Ju Yu-ryeon did, so he simply nodded. By then they had reached their lodgings and gathered once more in Yoo Eunhyeon’s room.
“All right. We’ve seen your uncle. Shall we leave the Dang Clan now?”
“Already? You were so eager to see Dad, and you barely even got to talk to him.”
“I paid my respects. That’s enough. And from the look of things—based on what you said—we won’t get a proper conversation out of him until this whole business is finished anyway.”
“Mm…… That’s fair. Right now Dad’s priority is locked on the Jeokgang-dokshi. Until something related to that comes up, he won’t spare us any attention.”
Ju Yu-ryeon understood perfectly well that even if Yoo Eunhyeon wanted to talk more with Ju Wongong, the situation simply wouldn’t allow it. She nodded, and Yoo Eunhyeon shrugged.
“So we leave.”
“And do what once we’re out?”
“Head back to that inn, I guess. It’d be nice if the Demonic Cult got in touch one of these days.”
“I’ve got zero reason to object. Finally some proper free time.”
Ju Yu-ryeon had no cause whatsoever to oppose Yoo Eunhyeon’s suggestion, so she agreed at once. The two of them managed to steal a few minutes from the busy Yeo U-hui to say they were leaving; she simply nodded at their choice without further comment. Yoo Eunhyeon had half expected the Dang Clan—having already told them everything about the Jeokgang-dokshi—to hesitate over letting them walk away so easily. Surprisingly, the two of them walked out without the slightest trouble.
“I guess at this point it doesn’t matter if we go around talking about it to the righteous or demonic factions. Which also means the Jeokgang-dokshi is pretty much an open secret by now.”
“True. The Cheonmumaeng was already almost certain, and the Demonic Cult is probably the same.”
And so the two of them returned to Ilcheon Inn. Yoo Eunhyeon was about to push the door open when he hesitated for a moment; behind him, Ju Yu-ryeon jabbed him in the back with a finger.
“What? You’re not going in?”
“Last time the Hyeonyangmun disciples had the place staked out. They’re not doing that again, are they?”
“Doubt it. There are a few guests around, but I don’t sense anything like that.”
Trusting her assessment, Yoo Eunhyeon opened the inn door. A waiter bustling between tables spotted him and hurried over at once.
“Welcome! Wait—honored guest! You’ve come back to us. Heh heh. How may I assist you?”
The waiter had started out treating Yoo Eunhyeon like a complete stranger, then immediately switched to familiar recognition the moment he caught sight of Ju Yu-ryeon a step behind. Yoo Eunhyeon let out a dry little laugh. It was more absurd than insulting. Honestly, between the two of them, Ju Yu-ryeon was the one who left a stronger impression anyway.