Dang Seryeong
Whenever the original work described the disciples of the Greatest Under Heaven, it reached for the same words again and again: beautiful enough to steal the breath from your lungs.
The line was meant to capture a heroine's lovely face. But unless you had seen that face with your own eyes, there was only so far words like those could ever go.
"Answer me. How did you come here, and on whose introduction?"
If he said that the mere sight of her raised gooseflesh across his skin, would that be enough to make anyone understand?
Hers was a beauty of an entirely different kind from Yeon Ihwa's. That face carried enough force to strike the cheeks of modern idols and celebrities and leave them reeling.
He had lost himself for a moment. Only belatedly did he answer.
"I came on Gu Noin's introduction."
"...Gu Noin?"
Of course Dang Seryeong was suspicious.
Gu Noin was a name he had lifted from the Seonseon Pharmacy's secret cipher — Old Gu's Golden Wound Salve — and he had blurted it out only because no other name had come to mind.
Dang Seryeong asked,
"...What did she look like?"
"An elderly woman, wearing a monocle. She used an art that erases the senses. Her realm looked to have reached the full maturity of the Peak Realm, and her weapon was a short dagger."
He began to explain, in detail, what had happened only a little while before.
She must have been convinced — absolutely — that her wet nurse would never leak information. As the description of the old woman went on, the misunderstanding unraveled at once.
"Ah... so that's how it was..."
The tension left Dang Seryeong's face, and in a heartbeat she looked like a puppy.
A moment ago she had been bristling like a cat with its fur stood on end, killing intent pouring off her. Now she wore an expression that was frankly adorable.
"...I'm sorry, but would you go into the treatment room you can see over there and wait a little? There are still quite a few patients left..."
"Of course."
He forced the corners of his mouth up into something like a smile, turned, and walked in the direction she had indicated.
Hwa Baek, too, could not help going soft before a kind person.
What kind of person was Dang Seryeong?
As the original story told it, she was a righteous woman. She could not abide injustice, and if someone was hurt, she healed them. A character of unmistakable good.
And yet, precisely because of that, she was unhappy. Because of no one else but her father.
Only after a full hour had passed did Dang Seryeong show her face again.
"I'm sorry. There were unusually many patients today."
Yes. Of course you would be like that.
You are someone who cannot bring yourself to ignore the sick standing right in front of you.
"......"
Hwa Baek shook off the stray thoughts rising in him. This was not the time to waste pity on her.
"But what brings you here? If my wet nurse allowed you into this place, it can't be an ordinary matter."
So the monocled old woman was Dang Seryeong's wet nurse. No wonder the girl's trust in her had struck him as anything but ordinary.
Thinking so, Hwa Baek went straight to the point.
"I have something to say about the Clan Head of the Sichuan Dang Clan. That is — about your father."
"My father?"
"Yes. And before we come to the heart of it, allow me to say one thing. I know about the abyss of the Dang Clan."
……
"...What?"
Bewilderment crossed Dang Seryeong's face. Her ears had heard him. Her mind had not understood.
Watching her, Hwa Baek said it again.
"I mean exactly what I said. I know the dark interior of the Dang Clan — the Myriad Poison Lineage."
Her face changed in an instant.
As if to give her unease somewhere to go, Dang Seryeong's fingers twitched. A shadow fell across that pale, milk-white face. Her pupils trembled hard, and her pulse lurched. In this moment she was badly shaken, and she could not hide it.
Small wonder. The abyss of the Dang Clan was a truth no one knew, save the direct bloodline.
"...So. What is it you have to say?"
To know of the Myriad Poison Lineage was, without exaggeration, to know every hidden shame of the Dang Clan. Proclaim that fact to the world, and the clan's reputation would be driven into the dirt. The damage might prove temporary — but the Sichuan Martial Tournament was drawing near, and if the truth were made public on the eve of a season that important, the Dang Clan would fall into chaos.
Dang Seryeong did not want that. Not yet. The opportunity she was aiming for was not this one.
The opportunity Hwa Baek was aiming for was precisely this one.
"Don't you want to change the Dang Clan?"
"I..."
Her face looked as though she were hesitating. Hwa Baek knew better.
Dang Seryeong wanted it fiercely. To cut out the tumor that had rotted and festered through. To see the Sichuan Dang Clan reborn as an orthodox sect, whole and unashamed.
And Dang Seryeong knew that by her own methods, it was impossible. Which was why now was the optimal moment — the moment she needed a great power beside her.
She herself knew that better than anyone.
The abyss of the Dang Clan. The Myriad Poison Lineage.
To understand it, one first had to understand Dang Mugi, the Lord of Ten Thousand Poisons.
Hegemon of Sichuan, and Dang Seryeong's own father. In the history of the Dang Clan he was a martial artist so strong that men spoke of him as its foremost. He had achieved the Myriad Poison Body, a constitution fewer than five people in the entire history of the murim had ever attained, and aside from the founding Clan Head he was the only person ever to wield the clan's divine relic, the Willow-Leaf Flying Daggers.
His ability as Clan Head was no less outstanding. He had raised the Sichuan Dang Clan into the hegemon house of Sichuan.
But he had one fatal flaw. He was an emotionless psychopath — not from some defect born into the brain, but because he had made himself that way. The price of that bargain was his martial genius and the Myriad Poison Body.
And he had tried to make his own children the same.
The eldest son and Young Clan Head, Dang Seryeong's older brother, Dang Sehyun, had been brainwashed by his father into a doll without feeling. Dang Seryeong had nearly suffered the same fate, but she had barely managed to flee the family. Left alone, she founded a secret clinic: the Seonseon Pharmacy. She set up small branch clinics all across Sichuan, and the main clinic under her own care she veiled with sorcery, so that eyes would not easily find it.
But she never left Sichuan.
Because —
"You still believe the Dang Clan can be turned back."
She had not been able to abandon the clan. She believed she could restore the kind older brother Dang Sehyun had once been.
"......"
To the silent Dang Seryeong, Hwa Baek spoke.
The words sank into her heart like poison.
Even now, if she closed her eyes, a scene rose before her.
"Seryeong! How do you like it here?"
A flower field. Flowers of every kind and color, blooming thick. Anyone could see it had not been raised by ordinary means, and it was her brother's pride, always.
"Seryeong. If there's anything you want to eat, anywhere you want to go, just say the word. This brother of yours will take you anywhere."
Her memory of those days was faint, but she thought the self of that time had taken after her father. Nothing she did stirred her. Pain, when she felt it, she simply let be. The world she looked at had the color drained out of it. It was dark.
But then — the day her brother, for once, brought her to the training ground.
"...Seryeong. Your brother's sorry, in advance."
It had hurt. A little.
Lethal poison seeping in through skin that split open. Her brother, swallowing tears as he hurled his flying daggers, and herself striking back. But what saddened her more than any of that —
"...I can't."
A brother who could not bring himself to finish her.
"Then die."
A father who spat it, cold.
"......"
And herself, searching however she could for an opening in her brother, trying to kill him.
After the siblings' duel to the death, her brother seldom showed himself. Was it because he was angry that she had tried to kill him? They had tried to kill each other, if only for a moment. If the distance between them closed easily after that, that would have been the strange thing.
At first, that was what she had thought. Until, after a long time, the thought of her brother rose in her, and she went to see his flower field.
"...Brother?"
A sight she had not seen in a very long time. They had gone so long without meeting that the thought itself felt true. Then was this feeling gladness? Was it joy?
But that unfamiliar emotion did not last.
"Yes, Seryeong. It's been a while."
Because she saw her brother speak with a faint smile, eyes that held nothing at all. Because she saw a face no different from the one she usually saw.
Only then did she realize. The flowers around them. The landscape of the field, once dressed in so many colors. All of it had turned to colorless ash-gray.
The only place in her world that had ever held color wore, from that day on, nothing but a cold gray.
A day passed after Hwa Baek's conversation with Dang Seryeong.
In that time, at her request, he remained at the Seonseon Pharmacy. He had yet to hear her answer, but he was not anxious. In the end, there was only one choice she could make.
"Juhong."
At his word, four figures rose from his shadow. Clad each in black, they formed up behind him.
"Time to get ready."
A nod.
Juhong gave assent for all of them, and Hwa Baek went on.
"Tomorrow, we go to kill one of the Two Lords of the Black Lotus."