Day Two of Poison-Invulnerability Training
On the second day of training to reach Poison-Invulnerability, the only thing leaking out of the practice chamber was Dang Hye’s screams.
“Aaaaargh!”
Dang Hye’s face changed color every second as she sat submerged in a tub brimming with poison. For an ordinary person, it was pain enough to kill her ten times over already.
But Dang Hye, as befit a daughter of the Dang Family, was enduring it well.
“Is this about the limit for today?”
It was probably night outside by now, the sun already gone and darkness settled in. Which meant Dang Hye had been holding out through agony, screaming all the while, for half a day.
“Haa. Haa.”
Her breathing gradually slowed, and no more screams came from her mouth.
She looked at me with heavy-lidded eyes. Then a small voice slipped out of her mouth.
“Just. Kill me……”
“We’re only getting started. Kill you?”
I wasn’t sure she even heard me. Before I’d finished speaking, her eyes had already slid shut.
I hauled Dang Hye’s body out of the tub and sat her up, then pushed my inner power into her body and began drawing out the overloaded poison.
Before she lost consciousness completely, I managed to pull out the poison that had invaded her body. But I didn’t do that.
What Dang Hye needed wasn’t safety.
What she needed was understanding what poison truly was.
Poison was a weapon that could kill an enemy with ease. At the same time, it was a weapon that could kill the one who wielded it. That was why Dang Hye had to feel just how dangerous poison was for herself, and walk the edge of death.
Poison-Invulnerability wasn’t something you reached simply because your inner power grew stronger or your resistance to poison improved.
To Dang Hye, this would be a hellish experience, but it would temper her into something harder.
“Still, if she collapses this fast, we’re going to be short on time.”
I lifted my hand from her body. Her skin gradually returned to its original color, and her breathing slowly began to steady.
“Sleep a little and wake up.”
I laid her body on the floor, and her expression eased at last.
I left Dang Hye’s training room and walked at an unhurried pace. The Dang Family’s halls were like a maze. If you walked without paying attention, you’d lose your way before you knew it.
Still, that wasn’t much of an obstacle for me. I already had the layout of this hall etched into my head.
As my pace carried me onward, the gazes of those in the Dang Family began turning toward me. And the moment I stopped, a hard pressure rode on those looks, trying to pin me down.
The guards at the family head’s quarters.
“What business do you have here?”
The man standing at the forefront of the guards stationed before the family head’s quarters glared at me and asked. I smiled back at him.
“I came to see the Dang Family Head.”
“We received no word that a guest was coming. Leave.”
The order to turn back came down, but I didn’t move. I only kept smiling. At that, the guard’s brow twitched and his momentum sharpened.
“I won’t say this twice. If you have no special business, leave.”
“Whether it’s special or not should be for the Family Head to decide, shouldn’t it?”
“Do you even know where you are, mouthing off like that?”
“Where else? The Dang Family.”
At my words, the man’s face flushed red. At the same time, the guards protecting the family head’s hall drew their knives and pointed them at me.
If I so much as moved one step, those blades would be sent my way.
But they never got the chance.
A low voice cut across them and stopped the knives in place.
“Let him in.”
It was Dang Bo’s voice from inside.
The guards’ sharp looks didn’t vanish, but they soon shifted aside.
When I stopped before the door to the family head’s quarters, it creaked open slowly.
The Dang Family Head’s hall was spacious and grand, as befitted one pillar of the Five Great Clans. Yet unlike the others, it was thick with the smell of herbs and plants.
Inside the hall, the family head’s seat was veiled by gauze. When I came to a stop before it, Dang Bo’s voice drifted over.
“What do you want to say?”
Dang Bo’s voice sounded as emotionless as a man with no feelings at all.
Honestly, even that would’ve been fine. The problem was that the moment his voice rang out, the scent of poison surged fiercely through the hall.
Not that I was the sort to mind that.
I reached out, drew back the gauze, and stood before the family head’s seat. Then I placed a hand at my waist.
“Must there be a reason to come see a friend?”
“Friend? You and I?”
Dang Bo looked at me for a moment as if I were absurd. Seeing that expression, I pulled a wine jug and two cups from my waist.
“We shared a cup of wine. Doesn’t that make us friends?”
I poured wine into one cup and set it before Dang Bo. Then I began filling the remaining cup.
“Get to the point.”
Poison began seeping out around Dang Bo like mist.
That much was certain. So this was the kind of household Dang Hye came from. Nothing about it was easygoing.
Try to say anything, and they’d try to kill you on the spot.
I tipped back the wine in my hand and spoke.
“I was curious. What poison it was that had poisoned the Dang Family Head.”
At my words, Dang Bo’s expression sharpened even further, as though he might kill me on the spot.
“As far as I know, the Dang Family Head has reached Poison-Invulnerability. On top of that, you’ve spent your whole life steeped in poison.”
I poured wine into the cup again and drank it down.
“So what poison could possibly have poisoned you that you’re dying?”
“……”
At my words, Dang Bo said nothing. He simply lifted the wine cup before him and brought it to his lips.
“You’ve laced the wine with poison.”
“Yes.”
“You dared poison the wine the Dang Family Head drinks? You really do seem eager to die.”
Dang Bo’s expression twisted. In contrast, I only lifted the corners of my mouth.
“Trying to kill the Dang Family Head with poison. Is that truly possible? Even this kind of poison, I drank without so much as blinking.”
“What exactly are you trying to say?”
“Am I the strange one for trying to assassinate the Dang Family Head with poison? Or is the Dang Family Head the strange one for being assassinated by poison?”
“……”
Dang Bo’s sharp gaze remained, but his mouth did not easily open.
How could it? The Dang Family Head dying from poison? It was unimaginable. No, in the long history of the Central Plains, no Dang Family Head had ever died that way.
“If you won’t answer, then I will. The truth here is simple. Dang Bo. You’ve been poisoned, and you cannot detoxify it yourself.”
“……Say I can’t detoxify it, as you claim. Then what can you do? Can you break a poison that even the Dang Family Head could not?”
“How could I detoxify something even the Dang Family Head can’t? Of course I can’t.”
“……Then what do you mean to do?”
“If you don’t know the antidote, the answer is simple. I’ll catch the ones who do.”
“The ones?”
“Yes. I’ll catch the ones who administered the poison.”
“Even I didn’t know I’d been poisoned. They were that elusive. How do you mean to catch them?”
“That’s what we need to find out now.”
At my words, Dang Bo let out a sigh. But I didn’t stop there.
“Are there people who want to kill you, Family Head?”
“There would be more than one or two. I am the Dang Family Head.”
“Who comes to mind immediately?”
“Hard to say.”
“I have a pretty good guess.”
“Who is it?”
I looked at Dang Bo with an old, unshaken expression.
“With my mouth empty?”
“……You’re insane.”
At my words, Dang Bo’s shoulders seemed to loosen, and the corners of his mouth lifted slightly. He drew back all the poison lingering around him.
“Still, I don’t dislike insane men. Listen carefully, Baek Mugeuk. I am of the Dang Family. The Dang Family repays kindness double and enmity tenfold.”
“You’re a good deal more straightforward than those old sects.”
“So stop spouting nonsense and speak properly.”
“Since you put it that way, I will. To catch them, we need to know the current situation exactly.
At the Martial Alliance Banquet, they tried to wipe out Mount Hwa and Mount Zhongnan with Formless Poison. And the current Dang Family Head is poisoned and dying.”
I could see Dang Bo gradually focusing on my words.
“Is there no connection between those two incidents? If the only person who knows the recipe for Formless Poison dies, the Dang Family won’t even be able to clear its name.”
“Then the Dang Family would be blamed as the culprit behind the release of Formless Poison.”
“Exactly. Which means they’ll want only one thing: for the Dang Family Head to die. Still, what’s galling is the very idea of killing you with poison.”
At my words, Dang Bo did not flare up. Instead, he looked at me with a steady gaze. I actually knew that this calm was more frightening than anger.
Ordinary rage could be spat out and done with. This calmness meant the steel of a martial artist’s resolve.
“The heads behind the two incidents are the same.”
“That does seem likely.”
“Which is why I need the Dang Family Head’s cooperation to catch them.”
“What sort of cooperation?”
“Start by telling me exactly what symptoms the poison causing your condition produces.”
“Aconite, wasp poison, purple gromwell, white snake grass……”
One poison name after another spilled from Dang Bo’s mouth. There were so many that once the list passed a hundred, I started thinking I’d have to give up trying to remember them.
“Yellow arsenic, mercury.”
“Stop. Stop!”
“It isn’t over yet.”
“You said you don’t know what poison it is. And what good are those poisons if you’ve reached Poison-Invulnerability?”
“I have reached Poison-Invulnerability. And all the poisons I’ve mentioned would be harmless to someone who had. However,”
Dang Bo paused for a moment, then spoke slowly.
“All of those poisons are the ones I am currently poisoned by.”
“What? Family Head, don’t joke like that.”
At my words, asking him not to joke, Dang Bo’s expression remained utterly serious.
“You’re serious.”
“I am serious.”
I found it hard to believe him. How could poisons he had already overcome poison him again? Why would Poison-Invulnerability or even Ten-Thousand-Poison-Invulnerability exist otherwise? Wasn’t it to become immune to such things?
“Do antidotes not work either?”
“They do not. Even antidotes fail to detoxify it.”
“Since when?”
“I don’t know when it began.”
“How can that be?”
“Because I am always in a poisoned state.”
“……”
Why had no one realized Dang Bo was poisoned in the first place? No, why had even Dang Bo himself noticed it so late? There were two reasons.
One was that, as Dang Bo said, he had trained every day while remaining in a poisoned state.
The other was that no one would ever imagine the Dang Family Head would be poisoned by something so ordinary.
“Haa… this is a headache. Still, what’s clear is that the poison infecting the Dang Family Head has stepped outside the bounds of the poisons we’ve known so far. Or it could be a poison that affects other poisons.”
“I think so too. I’ve been combining and testing poisons in many ways, but……”
“So nothing like this has been found before.”
“That is correct.”
“How long can you hold out?”
“……”
Dang Bo lifted his head and looked up at the ceiling. He was probably calculating how much time he had left.
The fact that he could remain alive even after being poisoned by so many poisons was only possible because he was the Dang Family Head.
His expression was so impassive that it looked as though he felt no pain at all, but his body was probably like a hellscape right now.
“At this rate, I won’t make it to the Orthodox Alliance gathering.”
“I see. Time is short, then.”
To prove the Dang Family’s innocence, Dang Bo had to be saved no matter what. Which meant this could not end with merely catching the culprits.
We had to find the antidote to the poison affecting the Dang Family Head.
“That will be enough for today. I’m tired.”
Dang Bo looked at me, still lost in thought, and murmured in a low voice. It was a dismissal. I gave a light salute and turned around.
“Dang Hye’s……”
At that moment, Dang Bo’s voice called out.
“Yes?”
“Did you say your first journey into the martial world was enjoyable?”
His expression and voice were still devoid of feeling. And yet something about it was different. I turned my head slightly.
“You’d have to ask the person herself.”
“……”
No answer came back. When the door to the family head’s quarters opened and I stepped out, the guards were waiting with sharp eyes on me.
Their stares held until I disappeared from view.
“What a clan it is. Hard to grow attached to at all. Everyone seemed like a cold-blooded bastard, but after hearing that question from the Family Head, maybe they’re not all like that after all.”
I walked slowly toward Dang Hye’s training room. Not long after, I saw a man approaching from the opposite direction with the Dang Family retainers beside him.
The instant his eyes met mine, the man’s mouth curved faintly.
Then he passed me by and headed toward the family head’s quarters.
“That must be Dang Pae?”
Dang Pae, the Dang Family Head’s eldest son. He wasn’t someone I remembered from my previous life. That was because the second son, Dang Ho-yeop, had risen to become the Dang Family Head, and then vanished from the record.
“Dang Hye. This is going to be rough for you.”
Dang Pae, who had just brushed past me, was, in my eyes, a martial artist who had reached the mature pinnacle stage. His cultivation was also far above Dang Hye’s, but the bigger problem was that he was clearly not a sane man either.
From the way he was slipping poison into me as he passed, it was obvious.
“So he really is a Dang bastard. First meeting, and he’s already arrogant.”