Something Hot and Sizzling (3)
Once the order came down, everything moved at a dead gallop. The household sprang into motion as though their very lives hung on my father's single word — and in all likelihood, they did.
By evening, I was already face to face with the thing called the Salamander's Tongue: a long, crimson slab of matter that radiated heat entirely of its own accord.
I understood now why the nobles had recoiled from it in horror. This was no mere tongue. It was, how should I put it... a pure, congealed mass of fire qi.
"Senior."
Thalia glared at Vitten as she said it.
"Does that appear to you to be an age-appropriate toy for the Young Master?"
"It's far too dangerous. One slip and someone could be badly burned."
With Lily piling on as well, Vitten found himself with nowhere left to hide.
"I was only joking, all right? How was I supposed to know it would come to this?"
He protested with all the fight gone out of him, then finally raised the white flag.
"Sorry."
Vitten wore the sullen face of a man caught red-handed.
No need to mope, Vitten. You're my benefactor.
And that was no joke: from this very moment, my fate had arrived at a critical turning point.
Right here lay evidence no one could dispute — proof that this world was an entirely different one from my past life, and proof that the Frigid Yin Severed Pulse was no incurable disease.
The awe I had spent my whole life searching for sat right before my eyes, and to think I would behold it alone, with Master left behind, felt like such a waste.
"Young Master." Lily approached and spoke with careful deliberation.
"You can see the heat shimmer rising off it, can't you? If you touch it, you'll get an ouchie. An ouchie."
"Ouchies are fine."
"No, they are not. The tears will come pouring right out of you. Young Master mustn't get ouchies, so I'm going to put this away in the storeroom for now, all right?"
"Don't wanna!"
I hugged the jar holding the tongue to my chest. After everything it had taken to get my hands on it, there was no world in which I handed it over.
"Young Master, if you give that to me, I'll go out later and fetch you piles of those Lava Spirit Cores you're so fond of! Piles! This many!"
Vitten was attempting to sway me with a shameless fib. A brilliant maneuver, I would grant him — one built squarely on the fact that I had once shown an interest in lava spirit cores.
An ordinary child might well have taken the bait. Well... tough luck, Vitten.
"Forgive me, Young Master." Thalia lowered her head.
"Pardon the discourtesy."
So she intended to take the tongue from me by force. If a child's safety ranked above all else, it was the only call to make.
And now, the moment of decision had arrived.
For a hardened knight, prizing a single object from a child's hands was hardly a task at all — and with my strength still beyond reach, it was a task soon to be performed on me.
Move, Ivan.
Before Thalia's hand could extend, I issued the order to Ivan through a thread of intent.
Clatter. THUD—!
A tremendous racket erupted behind me. Ivan dropped its head — its helmet — straight onto the floor, and three heads whipped around in unison.
"What the—?"
Gulp.
Seizing that exact opening, I slurped the tongue out of its jar and down my throat in one slick swallow — then kindled the Samadhi True Fire and burned it to nothing inside my stomach.
As Master was fond of saying, when a Daoist comes upon something good for the body, the first order of business is to shove it down his throat and see.
Fire qi leapt up like a brushfire and spread along my qi and blood into every last corner of me. Cold sweat beaded thick at my temples, and my tongue sizzled as though a branding iron had been pressed to it.
"Young Master!"
Lily shrieked, her voice cracking.
"Y-you have to spit it out! Quickly!"
Vitten stammered, too startled to get a full sentence out, while Thalia pried my mouth open with lightning-quick hands.
But the tongue had already been consumed by the Samadhi True Fire, leaving not so much as a trace behind. In its place, a monstrous heat was venting from every pore of my body like a volcano.
And my judgment had not failed me.
I had gathered all the enlightenment a man could ask for in my past life; the only thing left for me was to secure the qi itself.
"Young Master, are you all right? Hmm? No ouchies?"
"No ouchie."
Ouchie, my foot. A whole new realm was spreading wide open before my eyes.
"Sir Vitten, would you go fetch some water? Cold water, please — not hot!"
Vitten bolted for the kitchen the moment Lily asked. Call it a guilty conscience, but his feet seemed to have grown wings.
In the meantime, Lily ran her hands over me here and there, checking for anything amiss.
"If anything hurts, you must tell me right away. Understood?"
"Yep!"
This was why one never took one's eyes off a child, not even for a moment.
Contrary to her worries, I was in the midst of receiving a fortuitous opportunity.
To put it in metaphor, it was much like a molt. Just as an insect is at its most fragile in the passage from chrysalis to adult, a Daoist is at his most vulnerable in the leap to the next realm.
Vulnerable enough that even a well-meaning hand laid on me at the wrong moment could tangle my qi and blood and send me spiraling into qi deviation.
I could die, even.
But in my past life, my highest realm had been Spirit Transformation.
The turbulent pulse that arose when breaking through Foundation Establishment was something I knew down to its last wrinkle.
In other words, even with the fight for the high ground of my next realm raging at full tilt inside my head, I was still perfectly capable of playing the guileless young master in front of Lily.
She, tears still hanging on her lashes, spent a long while checking me over before she finally confirmed that nothing was wrong and heaved a great sigh of relief.
I hadn't wanted to frighten her.
But with my severed pulse liable to seize up again at any moment, how was I supposed to stand by and watch the tongue get buried in a storeroom?
My past life had taught me that an opportunity you fail to seize the moment it arrives is no opportunity at all.
I could feel the fire qi slowly settling into place. Getting my hands on the tongue had been the hardest part; from here on, all that remained was keeping my qi and blood from bolting out of line. At the very latest, the ascent would be complete before daybreak.
With every variable resting in the palm of my hand, they could all rest easy.
"Y-young Master?"
"Hm?"
I answered in a perfectly level tone. Lily's expression, however, was anything but level. She pointed a finger at me and cried out in alarm.
"There's fire coming out of your eyes!"
...Hm?
Chris was in a foul mood today. In truth, he had not known a good mood in recent memory.
The culprit was a creature who, barely two years prior, had not even existed on the family tree.
Iden Esterji.
He had certainly administered more than enough poison to the boy's mother, and yet the brat had crawled out into the world all the same.
Worse still, word was that he had awakened an Awoken Ability in the midst of it all.
The ability itself was nothing remarkable — if anything, it seemed the sort that gnawed away at its owner's own body — but an Awoken Ability, as a rule, evolved into new aspects as its bearer grew older.
That he had awakened a nature-type ability, precious beyond all measure, was enough on its own to twist Chris's guts into knots.
There was no need even to mention how unpleasant their first meeting had been. If the brat had simply swallowed his poison quietly back then, there would have been no further nuisance to speak of.
"Stanis."
"Yes, my lord."
The black-haired boy, Stanis, bowed his head to Chris. A sleek, glossy-feathered crow sat perched on the boy's shoulder.
"Father paid a visit to his residence?"
"Yes, my lord."
"Why?"
"They say Young Master Iden suffered a seizure of unknown cause. Out of concern for his condition, His Grace—"
"Why! Why is it always him!"
Chris snatched the inkwell from the desk and hurled it at the wall. Even as it grazed his cheek by a hair's breadth, Stanis did not so much as twitch an eyebrow.
"It is sympathy, my lord," he said.
"Sympathy blinds a man's eyes."
Chris's breath came in rough gasps.
A few days earlier, Duke Drek had been leading his army toward the ducal residence to hold the Victory Commemoration rites. Nobles aplenty, Chris among them, had gathered at the residence to await him.
Yet at the mere report that his third son, Iden, had taken ill, the Duke had altered his route without a moment's hesitation.
"That is not all. He is said to have bestowed a treasure from the vault on the spot — that most precious Salamander's Tongue, no less."
Chris panted for breath as he glared at Stanis. His deep brown eyes burned with fury, and then, little by little as the moments passed, soaked into fear.
"Father... is Father going to cast me aside?"
Stanis stepped in close.
"It is a perfectly plausible outcome, my lord. If you simply leave Young Master Iden be."
"B-but the assassination failed, and Father has even assigned two knights to him. What am I supposed to do at this point?"
"Direct attacks must be set aside for the time being. Too many eyes are fixed upon the matter."
"Then what? Am I to simply stand by and watch him flourish?"
"Leave it to me."
He leaned in to the boy's ear and murmured, low and soft.
"I will see to it that this problem never troubles you again."