The Thousand Poisons Immunity Body and the Green Heaven Squad Leader
Before anyone had noticed, the season of cold winds had arrived.
Farmers were bringing in the harvest with the joy of reaping on their faces, and the fruit hung so ripe it dropped from the branches one by one — a peaceful autumn. When an apple, blushed deep red, fell from its bough, someone caught it and took a great, satisfying bite...
"Ublp... mmph... mmph..."
...while someone else had something red being crammed into a mouth that had been pried open.
"Kehel... kock... kellock... Young Master, isn't this a little too far?"
I shook my head slowly at the sight of Dang Giyeong, spitting out every last thing I had gone to the trouble of buying for his own good.
"Can't you just shut up and eat? I bought all of it for you, and you're going to spit it out? Honestly... you have no respect for food."
The calendar said autumn, but the wind still clung thick and muggy as I took the blood curds back into my hand...
"No, seriously, why are you doing this to me? At least give me a reason!"
"When an elder hands you something, you shut up and eat it! A full-grown man, this picky about his food..."
"I am honestly about to throw up... could we not please take a short break first?"
"Yep. No."
"KYAAAAAAAK!!!"
And back into the mouth of the shrieking Dang Giyeong went everything I held in my hand.
Did I, too, enjoy this food-torture of mine? No — it was all carried out with tears swallowed down and a heart full of apology. But there was no path but this one, so there was nothing to be done. Better than hauling around some fool who'd get poisoned halfway there and spend the rest of the trip groaning on my back, it made far more sense to load him up on blood now and trust his regeneration to carry the two of us through that jungle.
"Uuurgh... gulp..."
Flop—
"Tsk... Is it a small stomach, or a weak gut? A grown man flopping over from just this much — how does that make any sense?"
Gazing down with the deepest disapproval at Du-sik, sprawled face-first across the table with a pallor like a case of indigestion, I let my mind drift back to a few days before.
It had all started a handful of days ago, while I was still savoring my peaceful existence as a shut-in recluse.
Knock, knock, knock.
"Young Clan Head, the Clan Leader asks for you."
"Yeah, be right out."
Hearing that my father wanted me, I threw on whatever clothes lay closest and headed for the Clan Leader's Hall — where a sight quite unlike anything before met my eyes.
The original white walls were gone, replaced by something rough and rugged to the eye.
And yet walls that, to anyone's judgment, looked like they would not break short of something truly extreme.
"Whoa... is this Cold Iron?"
Thud— thud—
Just how valuable had the things we carried out of the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang been, that they would sheathe the walls in that precious Cold Iron?
Well, solid was solid, and I gave the wall a few experimental raps.
"Muyeong, what do you think! Since we were at it anyway, we reinforced the whole place properly this time — if it still breaks after this, we'll just seize whoever broke it and pound him flat, won't we?"
And who should have slipped in from who-knows-where but the Financial Hall Master, regarding me with a face full of triumph.
"Yes... well, it does look sturdy enough. But were the treasures we brought back really worth enough to line the walls with Cold Iron?"
"Not even close, frankly. But at the meeting before last, my proposal passed — rather than patching the walls every single time, reinforce them properly once and for all — and so I came away with quite a handsome budget."
That figured. We hadn't brought out all that much back then; I had wondered whether they'd really gone and sheathed every wall in that expensive stuff.
Anyhow, I stepped into the Clan Leader's Hall, now all but transformed into a fortress...
...and plopped down across from the Elder Council Head to wait for the meeting to begin.
Seated, as befitted a Young Clan Head, closer to the head of the table than in days past, I found the arrangement rather agreeable.
In any case, the clan meeting commenced...
"Hey, you lunatic! What is everyone else supposed to do if you lot use it all up!!!"
"Then you should have said you needed it ages ago! We told you from the very start that we'd be using some of it — so why raise a stink about it only now?"
"What kind of deranged madman hears 'let us use a little of that expensive material' and understands 'we intend to burn through nearly a full cartload of it'!!!"
"And you can say that, after stealing the Gold-Threaded Serpent my boy brought home last time? Why not seize this opportunity and change your hall's name plaque from Detox Hall to Thief Hall?"
"You? You dare? So you're asking for a round with me?"
"Come on, then! Go on and take your best shot, you blockhead!"
As Dang Clan meetings always did, the hall masters had begun trading blows once more.
Today's bout was a fistfight between the Detox Hall Master and the Medicine Hall Master, and as for whether the wall reinforcement truly worked...
BANG— BOOM—
Heads rammed into the walls, bodies hurled across the room — and through all the mayhem, the walls held without a scratch. The other hall masters and elders nodded along as they murmured among themselves.
"Truly... now I see why the Financial Hall Master ranted and raved to force this through."
"Well, to be fair, spending the money once like that does beat repairing the walls every other day."
"So long as everyone keeps to the rule we laid down back then, it looks sound enough."
After the Financial Hall Master's proposal passed at the previous meeting, a single rule had been set...
The use of any martial art capable of damaging the Cold Iron — qi projection above all — is strictly prohibited.
It was hardly pocket change we were speaking of; were anyone to carelessly smash the walls, even the Sichuan Dang Clan — richest of the Five Great Clans — would lose a sum enough to set its hands trembling on its own. Hence the rule.
Granted, there had been that little episode where the Enforcement Hall Master drew out qi projection and got hammered senseless by the Clan Leader for it...
But setting that occasion aside, everyone had, on the whole, conducted themselves as model, law-abiding citizens.
Whether that was thanks to the self-restraint of guarding that final line, or to plain survival instinct, I couldn't say.
Anyway, the meeting carried on just as it always did...
Tap — Dang Jihwan, who had been savoring his tea with a placid face, soon set his cup down and spoke.
"Then it's settled. We send Muyeong to the Nanman."
"Yes, there really is no one else who could go. Just bring Du-sik — the Green Heaven Squad Leader — with me, please."
"Will one man be enough?"
"Judging by what I've heard today, anyone more would only be baggage. The Green Heaven Squad Leader is roughly at Thousand Poisons Immunity by now anyway, so the two of us will go and come back."
On the day's final agenda item — the investigation of Nanman — the Clan Leader had left everything to my discretion, so I had declared I would take only Dang Giyeong along...
"Young Clan Head... is it true? My grandson, at Thousand Poisons Immunity?"
"Probably?"
At the sudden promotion of his own grandson, the Elder Council Head turned toward me with eyes gone glazed, and I answered offhandedly.
"Then with that, I close today's meeting."
At those words the Clan Leader rose from his seat, and one by one the rest rose after him and began filing out of the hall...
"Yo... Young Master? Since when have I been a Thousand Poisons Immunity?"
Du-sik came rushing up to me, his face a portrait of pure bewilderment, demanding an explanation.
"Let's talk outside first. This hardly seems the place for it..."
And so the two of us made for the pavilion in the back garden.
Still unable to settle his disbelief, Dang Giyeong watched his Young Master sipping tea across the table from him and thought:
If he'd simply told me to come along, I'd have followed without a word... so why go out of his way to tell a lie like that...
"You're thinking right now that I fed you a load of bullshit earlier, aren't you?"
"Pardon? No...? Why would I ever..."
For some uncanny reason, Muyeong was always sharp in situations like this, and so the man forced the corners of his mouth upward as he answered.
"Hmmm... that expression of yours just now looked awfully mutinous. Or am I imagining it?"
"Yes. You are."
Dang Giyeong wiggled his fingers and, beneath Muyeong's suspicious stare, quietly kept watch for the moment a fist might come flying at his skull while he thought:
Nanman... I truly, deeply do not want to go there...
"You don't want to go? Then just say so. Dragging along someone who'd rather not come would be absurd anyway."
"I doooon't want to!!!"
BAM—
Just how long had Muyeong been rapping at his head? Now, adding a twist of the wrist so the bone itself rattled, Dang Giyeong was clinging by a thread to his swimming senses.
"You don't want to go? Then just say so. Dragging along someone who'd rather not come would be absurd anyway."
When Muyeong repeated those exact words, he cautiously opened his mouth...
"I do..."
Swish—
"I mean, it's not that I hate it? Wherever you go, Young Master, I would follow you even into a pit of hellfire."
As the fist rose again, he wiped away tears on the inside and squeezed out words that were nowhere near his heart.
Nanman.
The land that lay farther down, below Yunnan where the Diancang Sect stood.
A jungle that went on forever without showing its end, where anything even faintly gaudy that you picked up at your side turned out to be poison — a place where surviving as a human being was itself a struggle.
Yet it held far more of the things that could not be had in the Central Plains than one would expect, and so the Dang Clan had traded with that region for quite a long time.
Though, of course, most of what they brought back was poison-related.
It was a land where one careless swallow of the wrong water could leave you bedridden for a good long while, pouring out from both ends until sundown — and Dang Giyeong could not, for the life of him, understand why that mad Young Master meant to drag him there.
To begin with, wasn't he precisely the man whose talent for poison arts had never amounted to a thing, and who had papered over that failing with daggers and fist-and-foot work?
And now the very gentleman who knew that better than anyone was singling him out by name...
If he's taking anyone, he ought to take the White Heaven Squad Leader. Why on earth me...
"I told you earlier, didn't I? You're not at Ten Thousand Poisons Immunity yet, but you've got Thousand Poisons Immunity. That is exactly why I picked you."
"Huh? I'd say I'm lucky to manage Ten Poisons Immunity, wouldn't you?"
When he answered Muyeong's thoroughly incomprehensible claim with a baffled look, the man opened his mouth once more to explain.
"What, in the first place, do you think is the reason poison doesn't work on me?"
"Well... because you possess the Ten Thousand Poisons Immunity Body..."
"It's not Ten Thousand Poisons Immunity or any of that rubbish — I just bulldoze straight through it with regeneration."
"Wha...?"
For one instant, Dang Giyeong's train of thought derailed — then chugged back onto the rails.
"So the poisons do work on you... and you simply endure them..."
"Yep. So all you have to do is endure them too, and trust your regeneration."
"Er... is that even legitimate?"
"What, did you think there was some other clever way?"
"Well, no... but this is just too brainless a method..."
"Hmm... first thing, then, I'll need to stuff you with a truly heroic quantity of foods made from animal blood."
Watching his Young Master — who had already brushed aside every word he'd said and was muttering away to himself, deep in deliberation — Dang Giyeong broke out in goosebumps despite himself.
"Eating blood dishes out in the open here would be a touch unsightly, so... Du-sik, pack your things. We leave for Nanman tomorrow."
".........."
Darkness fell before Dang Giyeong's eyes.