PTSD
Smack— Smack— Smack—
Like waves shattering against a seaside cliff, the relentless smacking rang out across an open clearing somewhere in Hubei.
"Nnngh... come on... that's... that's enough."
Paeng San lay pinned beneath me, moaning and begging in a voice on its last legs, but...
"Enough? Who decided it was enough? Your etiquette lessons aren't finished yet."
With him crushed flat under me in a full mount, I hammered away at his cheek as I spoke.
"Y'see... I'm weak-hearted, you know? The second you cry, I'll let you go. So cry. Go on, cry."
"E-Eek!"
The face I'd seen just that afternoon was nowhere to be found — black and blue from one end to the other, swollen taut enough to burst, so mangled it was impossible to even guess how hard Paeng San had been worked over...
"You little bastard!"
He still had strength to spare, apparently; the same man who'd been begging moments ago started thrashing and convulsing all over again.
Watching him strain to squirm even an inch out of the mount position—
"Wow... building up a resistance, are we? You'd be perfect talent for the Dang Clan. Real shame you were born into the Paeng Clan..."
Lamenting that a body which developed poison resistance that easily had been born a Paeng, I brought my index finger up to his lips.
Drip—
A bead of blood welled from my fingertip and fell, sliding straight into his mouth.
"!!!!!"
Paeng San could only glare at me with bloodshot eyes, frozen in place all over again.
"I mixed in acid poison this time, so you won't be going anywhere for a good long while."
As I raised my hand once more, he shot me a look brimming with despair and fury in equal measure. I ignored it, drumming on his cheek like a man beating a drum, and let my thoughts drift back to the days before.
"By the way, young master — is it true you still can't properly control your poison energy?"
That was what the White Heaven Squad Leader had abruptly asked me at an inn, back when the carriage that had set out from Sichuan was passing through Chongqing. I scratched my head and answered.
"Yeah, well... I can spew out poison strong enough to melt somebody down to the bone, but dialing the output down to the point where it just incapacitates them? That part doesn't come easy."
Over the past few months I had devoured every kind of poison there was, mineral toxins to organic venoms — no fewer than several hundred varieties — and I now carried a poison energy so vicious it would rank among the deadliest in the entire Dang Clan. But...
"I think the problem is that everything mixes itself together inside my body however it pleases..."
Unlike the others, who wore their poisons on their persons, or the Clan Head, who blended the toxins inside his body at will, all I could manage was to mindlessly spit back out whatever I had swallowed.
Hearing my answer, the White Heaven Squad Leader mulled it over for a moment, then nodded and said,
"I'll help you with that part while we make for the Zhuge Clan Estate."
"You? Why?"
When I asked in a voice thick with suspicion—
"Oh? What... is it that you can't bring yourself to trust the word of a madwoman who struts around with a live snake for a scarf?"
"No, that's not... why are you like this..."
After barely soothing her through yet another sudden fit, I asked again, and she told me,
"Because among the squad leaders, I am the most adept at handling poison."
"Ah... I see."
She revealed she had originally come out of the Poison Manufacturing Hall, and she was confident that of all the squad leaders, she handled poison best. I conceded the point—
Right... if I study under the clan's one and only star instructor, I'll improve in no time.
And with that thought, from that very day I found myself enrolled in roughly ten days' worth of crash-course private lessons.
"Please, just lower the output! Are you trying to kill every living thing in sight?!"
"I'm trying to control it!"
It had not exactly been smooth sailing from the beginning...
"The problem, young master, is that everything in you is mixed together. Start by separating the poison energies inside your body, one from another."
"Are you hearing yourself? Do you have any idea how many kinds of poison I've eaten by now? How am I supposed to separate them all?"
"With will and effort, nothing is impossible."
"Hah... every last squad leader in the Dang Clan is twisted in the head, I swear..."
"What was that you just said?"
"N-nothing. I said I would start putting in the effort right now..."
Only after I stayed awake for three days and nights straight, isolating every single poison energy in my body one by one, did my progress finally begin to pick up.
Several more days slipped past like that...
around the time the carriage passed Yichang.
"So? This about does it, right?"
As I spread my right hand and coiled a different poison into every finger — neurotoxin, acid poison, paralytic venom — Dang Jihyeon's jaw dropped open.
"No... how on earth."
"What?"
"There is simply no way it could have been that easy..."
Leaving her to mutter with the face of a woman deep in an existential crisis, I sank into my own thoughts.
Heh... so it really is supposed to be that hard. It only worked because I used a shortcut — otherwise I'd have burned an obscene amount of time on it...
I clicked my tongue and grumbled inwardly, but I brushed it aside soon enough with the philosophy that a good outcome is a good outcome.
There was, admittedly, a minor incident where Jihyeon, apparently robbed of all pride by my genius, went hollow-eyed and let her mind slip its leash entirely, but...
barely a day after that, someone picked a quarrel with us at the inn, handing me live combat experience — and so I had been running performance checks on my newly tuned skill, with Paeng San as my test subject.
Anyway — back to the scene at hand...
"KYAAAAK!!!"
With Paeng San abruptly shrieking and convulsing beneath me...
"Ooh, shit... note to self: never, ever use this one on a person. Okay, so first I feed him this..."
"Kghk!"
"Hey, hey, hey! You don't get to die! Come on... hold on, just hold on!"
The moment his breaths turned to rattling death-gasps and his face began to drain toward ash, panic seized me, and I went to work on the antidote with sweat streaming down my face—
"Just what do you think you are doing, young master?"
At the sudden voice I spun around, and there stood the White Heaven Squad Leader, arrived who knew when.
I greeted her like a lifeline and pointed at Paeng San.
"He's dying! Do something about this..."
Behind me, the Paeng Clan guards came sprinting toward their second young master as though their soles were on fire, and Dang Jihyeon waved them off with an irritated flick of her hand.
"Stay where you are. Come any closer and you'll poison yourselves for nothing..."
With that, she drew something like a medicinal pellet from the pouch tied at her waist, kneaded it between her fingers several times, and fed it to Paeng San.
"Khaah... hoo....."
The man who had looked ready to swim across the River of the Dead itself — mercifully — had color flooding back into his face, and he exhaled long and slow.
Only then did I let out a sigh of relief of my own.
"Whew... he really did almost die..."
Despite the bite of winter, sweat had beaded thick across my forehead. Jihyeon watched me wipe it away with eyes gone cold and sour, and laid into me like a scolding schoolmistress.
"What exactly were you doing to the Paeng Clan Head's son? If I had not come, just what were you planning to do?"
"Well... I'd have hauled him up and sprinted back to the inn, obviously."
At my answer, delivered while sheepishly scratching my head, she pinched the bridge of her nose and heaved a sigh, then beckoned to the Paeng guards waiting in the distance.
"The antidote has done its work. Come and collect him."
Before the words had fully left her mouth they came hurrying over in a fluster, scooped up Paeng San, threw me one last glare, and left the clearing.
Amid it all, one man who seemed to be their spokesman stayed behind and addressed the two of us.
"Fault lies with both sides in this affair. Might I suggest we let the matter pass, unspoken and unsettled?"
At his words the White Heaven Squad Leader glanced my way—
"Let's do exactly that."
I answered with a careless nod, and the man bowed low to me in thanks before vanishing after the rest of the Paeng party.
Once he was gone, I looked over at Dang Jihyeon.
"So? ...Didn't I look every bit the Young Clan Head of a great clan just now?"
I asked with a sheepish grin, and she answered with a look of pure incredulity.
"Spare me the nonsense, young master. We should return to the inn — it is already far later than it ought to be."
Hearing that, I looked up at the sky, and the sun that had hung high overhead when I started working Paeng San over was now bleeding out into dusk, sinking away beyond the horizon.
"His cheeks were just so damn satisfying to hit that I lost all track of time. Sun's already gone..."
"Haah....."
Hearing that, Jihyeon let out a long, incredulous laugh...
"Let's get back before it gets any darker."
"..... As you say."
Wearing my most awkward of smiles, I hurried her along, and we made for the inn.
"AAAAAAAH!"
Deep in the dead of night, when everyone was fast asleep, someone bolted upright with a scream.
"Hnngh... hnngh..."
Paeng San, cold sweat streaming off him like grease skimming off a pot of boiling meat broth, panted out ragged, groaning breaths as he scanned his surroundings...
"Wh... where am I?"
Realizing he lay alone in a dark room, he pressed a hand to his chest, exhaled a long breath of relief, and the events of earlier came flooding back.
"Haah....."
That guy... that guy's face just now — it was definitely...
Dang Muyeong — who had grinned at first only to hammer Paeng San's cheeks with a face gone glacially, utterly blank — had dredged up one of the memories Paeng San most desperately wanted to forget.
Years ago...
Paeng San had attended a funeral held at the Dang Clan, in the company of the Blade King.
Back then, the young Paeng San — bored to tears while the Blade King was briefly called away — had complained of the tedium to another Paeng Clan retainer...
"...and that, it's said, is how he died."
Listening to the retainer's gossip about why the man being mourned had died — gossip offered up purely to entertain his bored young master — Paeng San snorted a laugh.
"He really died like that? What an idiot... fitting for a family that dabbles in poison, I suppose..."
Before the mockery had even finished leaving his mouth, someone came walking up to him—
CRUNCH—
"AAAAAAAH!"
—and drove a fist clean through the chest of the retainer who had been running his mouth.
The man shrieked in agony, and then, with a heavy, meaty thud, he crumpled — blood erupting from every part of him, dead without so much as a last word...
"Ugh...."
Because he had been standing right beside him, Paeng San was now painted head to toe in blood. And he could only stand frozen, staring up at the face of the one who had seized him by the throat and lifted him clean off the ground.
Trickle—
Feeling a telltale warmth spread through his lower half, Paeng San had no choice but to take in that face, every last detail of it.
It felt as though a great serpent... no, a colossal imugi — a serpent-dragon out of legend — had coiled itself around him, binding him where he stood and staring him down. As he shook like a leaf, he saw the Blade King sprinting toward them in a panic from far off.
And then...
The Dang Clan Head's grip slowly, slowly tightening...
The Blade King kneeling before him, head bowed...
The shouts and clamor of the crowd...
Paeng San lost all track of time — and when he finally came back to himself, he was somehow standing before the Paeng Clan Head.
"You witless fool!"
For all his savage looks, the Clan Head had never once raised a hand against his own children in his entire life — yet his palm cracked across Paeng San's cheek, and Paeng San went tumbling across the floor...
"Haah... thank the heavens the Retired Clan Head stepped in when he did..."
His father paid no more attention to the son sprawled on the floor than to a stray dog. Paeng San stared up at him, dazed, but the answer that came back was ice cold.
"Useless wretch... I can't even stand the sight of you. Get out."
After that day, for the better part of a month, Paeng San could not sleep properly — the instant he closed his eyes, that scene was waiting for him...
He'd spent a long while trying to forget, and it was only years later that he believed he had finally put it all behind him. Now, he felt that memory surging back up to the surface.
"Hnngh... that bastard's face... it was the same as the Dang Clan Head's from back then, no doubt about it..."
Of course, now that he was fully grown it no longer threw him into convulsions the way it had in his childhood — but looking down at himself, soaked in sweat and shivering with goosebumps from head to toe, he could only scoff bitterly at his own sorry state.
"Hah... turns out the Dang Clan had another monster all along... damn it all..."
Once bitten, twice shy — his heart kept thundering like a war drum, and so he lay there in the dead of night, gently coaxing it calm, and tried once more to drift off to sleep.