Poison Dragon (True)?
Truthfully, even between lovers, when a text message more than five lines long arrives and you answer with nothing but a curt "k," a fight is all but guaranteed.
So a letter crammed to bursting with five thousand unspaced characters of Classical Chinese had me dizzy from the very moment it touched my hand.
".....This is a letter? Anyone can see this is a cudgel, not a letter."
I had originally set out to carry the unconscious Du-sik back to the Dang estate, but a bolt of pure laziness struck me halfway there, so I simply dumped him at a mountain hermitage and returned home—only for a servant to hand me a tightly rolled missive.
THWACK— THWACK— THWACK— THWACK—
"No, look at this thing... How is this a letter? No matter how you look at it, it's a club."
"I really couldn't say, my lord."
"Thanks anyway. Off you go."
The servant bowed his head and withdrew, and once I was alone in my quarters, I cocked my head and began working at the seal.
"Hmmm... Don't tell me someone's sent a bill for smashing up the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang? No... that can't be it. Makes no sense."
Thinking as much, I unrolled the neatly wound letter—and out slid a white plum blossom tucked inside the fold.
"So it's from Baekhwa. But what on earth makes it this thick..."
Only then did it click who the sender was, and I began slowly reading my way down the page.
Quite a long stretch of time later.....
"Argh, my eyes... Since when does a single letter take a geological age to finish?"
It was a grand symphony of densely packed characters, guaranteed to daze the mind and weary the eyes of anyone who dared look upon it, and I pressed both of mine shut, hard.
But by stubbornness and sheer force of will, I at last slogged through the lunatic-length letter...
"I await your reply."
— repeated over and over, page after page
With that refrain scrawled across the pages more times than I could count, I had no choice but to reach for brush, ink, and inkstone.
"Well, I should at least send back half the length....."
And so I ground out a reply, wringing every ornate flourish of rhetoric I possessed onto the page.
When that desperate bout of composition was finally over...
"Wow... So this is why they harp on about five thousand characters. Still, this length should pass, right?"
I rolled the finished letter up with loving care, called for a servant, and had it dispatched to the Zhuge Clan Estate—then sprawled across my bed and let my thoughts drift.
The Blade King's ninetieth birthday banquet, huh... Hebei sits on the exact opposite side of the map.
The letter my fiancée had sent, kneaded full of love, insisted that we simply had to meet at the banquet celebrating the Blade King's birthday...
"Can't my sister just go instead? Hebei takes nearly two months to reach on the way there alone..."
Beautiful as my fiancée was, and however much she swore she waited for me waking and dreaming, the thought of circling the entire Central Plains again—barely any time after a month-long journey had ended—was daunting before I even started.
"If I drop the right hint to my sister, she might go in my place... Something like: Baekhwa asked to meet at the Paeng Clan's, but I've decided I must enter seclusion."
Just as I was blurting out words that would have made anyone of the Zhuge Clan wail aloud in despair...
Bang—
"Young Master! How could you leave an unconscious man abandoned in the mountains!"
Du-sik came storming into my quarters, roaring at full volume.
"What were you planning to do if I'd been ambushed in that state!"
"So? Did you get ambushed?"
"No... Thankfully I came through unharmed, but still."
"Then there's no problem, is there? What kind of grown man scares that easily..."
"Does that sound like logic to you, sir? One of these days you'll abandon someone mid-breathing-meditation and just stroll off."
"Eh, I'd rather regulate my dinners than my breathing."
".........."
"Fuck... Laugh."
I snapped at Dang Giyeong for no good reason—he was regarding me with eyes full of sincere contempt—then clicked my tongue.
"Tsk... I left you there because I'd rigged up every safety measure imaginable first. You didn't honestly think I'd just abandoned you, did you?"
"Yes."
At that instant answer, I raised my hand...
Whoosh—
and Dang Giyeong threw up a guard entirely unprompted, widening the gap between us.
"What are you doing? Nobody's going to hit you."
"Were you not about to hammer my skull in yet again? Do you have any idea how many times you've clobbered my head? Press anywhere at random and all you'll find is lumps!"
"Cut the crap and look at this."
With that, I opened my palm to show him something...
"What is that... Huh? Why, it's a bat?"
"Yep. I made that little guy, stuck him on you, and left you at the hermitage like that. I'm hardly mad enough to leave an unconscious man utterly defenseless, am I?"
"Ooh... Then just how strong is this little cutie?"
Dang Giyeong rubbed the tiny bat between his fingers as he asked.
"This thing? It couldn't beat the neighborhood cat."
"Huh?"
"What?"
"Then why on earth did you stick it on me?"
"Its whole job is to slap your cheek awake if anyone suspicious comes by. That's all."
To that answer, he looked up at me with an expression of remarkable insolence.
A brief, awkward silence settled...
"So, anyway... If there's nothing else, get out."
"Yes, sir..... Oh, right—Young Master!"
"What now."
"By the way, were you planning to skip the Blade King's birthday banquet? Not that I was trying to eavesdrop, of course..."
"Haah..... Honestly, isn't Hebei just too far? The round trip alone eats up nearly half a year. Do I really have to go?"
"Aw, come on... Don't be like that—let's go together!"
"You want me to trek out to the ends of the earth? And bring you along, again?"
"Well, why not? If not now, when else will we ever get an outing?"
"Most people don't call a months-long slog an 'outing'..."
"Aigoo... On the way back we can just, oh, swing by Dongting Lake and play around before coming home, can't we? You'll have to head to Henan around then anyway..."
Something deeply strange came dribbling out of Dang Giyeong's mouth, so I gave him a puzzled look and asked,
"And why would I have to go to Henan?"
He answered with eyes that had started to go round before he apparently thought better of it.
"The Dragon-Phoenix Tournament opens at Shaolin this year, so you simply must go. How else would you ever claim an epithet like Poison Dragon?"
"That's this year?"
"It's held this summer, so the invitation will most likely arrive while we're off in Hebei."
"Tsk... Then it'd be smarter to head straight down from Hebei to Henan."
"And do some sightseeing on the side."
Truth be told, I wanted nothing to do with traveling all the way to Hebei...
"But how could anyone possibly resist Poison Dragon..."
The Dragon-Phoenix Tournament, held but once every five years, was an event no one could afford to skip.
Day after day, the same talk echoed through the countless inns of the Central Plains...
"I hear the great hero Severing Sword and the great hero Half-Moon Blade have sworn a death match this time?"
...or else:
"Have you gentlemen heard the news? The Mad Blade has beaten the Sword Dragon flat into the dirt!"
With epithets being bandied about like that, anyone saddled with an unlucky one would find themselves roasted for it in every corner of the Central Plains until they managed to trade it in for a new one...
To avert precisely these catastrophes, the rising prodigies threw themselves into the Dragon-Phoenix Tournament as though their very necks were wagered on it.
"Du-sik, though—if I enter that thing, isn't the balance just broken?"
"Bal... What did you just say?"
"I'm asking if my power wouldn't be wildly out of scale with everyone else's. People who are off the charts, like my sister or Lady Hani, can't even enter, after all."
Even that competition—the closest thing the Orthodox faction had to a festival—had its eligibility rules...
"Wasn't the age limit twenty?"
"Twenty-three, sir. Well, either way, the Young Lady and the Mad Blade have both aged out, so they can't compete."
A three-year-old could enter if they truly insisted, but the ceiling at twenty-three was firm.
In truth, twenty-year-old fathers of three were common enough in the Central Plains that the cap existed as a way of asking whether anyone older could still seriously be counted a rising prodigy...
"Ahem... My grandson has only just turned twenty-one, and already you say he's no rising prodigy..."
"Mine is much the same, in fact—my grand-disciple, I mean. Why not simply raise the ceiling while we're at it?"
And so, for the elders' convenience, the Murim Alliance leadership had bumped the entry age up to twenty-three.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand...
"So the field is nothing but freshly fledged chicks—doesn't my squeezing myself in amount to outright cheating?"
It was painfully obvious how ugly things would get with a True Transcendent Realm monster romping among brats barely past twenty, so I scratched my head and asked Du-sik...
"Hard to say, sir? You can't use your Blood Demon powers, and poison is naturally banned in the tournament, so you'd be entering effectively with both arms and both legs cut off, wouldn't you?"
"Come on, even so... You think I'd lose to those little squirts?"
"I hesitate to even say this... but if someone pressed a blade of sword-force to my throat and asked me to bet money on the winner, I don't believe I'd pick you, Young Master?"
Thwack—
Having collected yet another lump for the day, Dang Giyeong continued with his lips jutting out in a pout.
"This tournament is forecast to be the fiercest in nearly a century, and you'd be fighting at less than half your full strength..."
"It's that mouth. Always that mouth..."
"Mmmphhmph!!!"
As if one pleasant word would kill him, he'd gone and earned himself a smack with the most grating remark imaginable—so I seized his lips with my hand, waggled them back and forth, and let go...
"Owow....."
His lips, which had undoubtedly been stuck out of his own free will moments earlier, now jutted out entirely against it—swollen a furious red—and yet he opened his mouth all over again.
"If it truly looks hopeless, sir, then just douse the whole arena in poison. You'd take the disqualification, but you'd still walk away with an epithet just like the Young Lady did, wouldn't you?"
"I'm told that when my sister pulled exactly that stunt last time, Father collapsed clutching the back of his neck."
"Well, Lady Murin did come away with the rather lovely 'Poison Butterfly' for it. A spike in the Clan Head's blood pressure is a trifling price by comparison."
Deep down I figured, even so, there's no way I'd actually wash out halfway through...
"You're telling me that many supposed geniuses are showing up this time?"
"I am indeed? The Young Clan Heads of the other three families of the Five Great Clans—everyone but the Namgungs and the Zhuges—will all be competing, and the already-renowned rising prodigies of the Nine Great Sects and One Union are swarming in besides..."
"Some lineup....."
"Word is several disciples of the hidden recluses are crawling out of the woodwork, too?"
Since the leaders of every faction were all roughly the same age, I would suddenly find myself locking horns with their heirs—young Clan Heads and designated successors alike—and my head had already begun to ache at the thought.
"Turns out there isn't one single thing in this world I can just coast through."
Perhaps encouraged by the sight of me clutching my head and groaning, Dang Giyeong opened his mouth with fresh delight...
"And yet did you not make a free meal of the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, sir?"
They say a man can be reformed with the rod—but perhaps because he was no longer quite a man, every fresh blow to his head only made him cheekier. I heaved a sigh at the sight of him.
"Haah... You truly are something else."
"In any case, if all else fails, following the Young Lady's path is one option available to you. Just saying."
"And do tell what epithet you think I'd pick up doing that..."
"At the very worst, something along the lines of 'Poison Snake,' wouldn't it?"
"'Poison Snake'? Poison SNAKE? Hey! Is that any name for the Young Clan Head of the Sichuan Dang Clan, a pillar of the Orthodox faction? Anyone who heard it would take us for Unorthodox rabble!"
"Oh, come now, it's merely an expression."
"Well, either way, Hebei it is, then."
And so my journey to Hebei was decided.