Is Food Torture Really Torture?
Is food torture really torture?
Did you know? This mad country of ours has every food under the sun. I'd figured, at most, they'd have dishes made from cow's blood—but goat, pig, duck... Watching them haul in every legged creature imaginable and drain each one of its blood, my jaw dropped of its own accord.
Of course, every region kept its own specialties, so getting that many dishes onto a single table in Sichuan was no small feat...
"If this isn't enough, just say the word. Money is no object."
"Aiyo, this is more than enough, sir!"
The power of money was truly mighty. Isn't there a saying about that very thing? If a problem can't be solved with money, you ought to ask yourself whether you simply didn't have enough of it.
Anyway, the innkeeper, giddy over handling that much coin for the first time in ages, burned with a thoroughly renewed sense of professional pride...
"Young master, it's all well and good, but... isn't this a bit too much?"
At the sight of a table big enough to seat ten grown men, piled to bursting with food, Dang Giyeong's pupils began rattling around like a madman's.
"If I eat all of this, I think my stomach's going to burst and kill me?"
Looking at him—staring back at me with an expression that declared the whole thing flatly impossible—I smiled my most benevolent smile and replied,
"Do you know why humans are great? Because we are beings of infinite possibility."
"What does that have to do with any of thi—"
"Giving up before you've even tried is no different from running away."
"No, why are you suddenly spouting nonsense..."
"I've seen men die of hunger, but never once have I seen a man die of being too full. So stop worrying and let's give it a try."
"Am I the only one who can't follow this conversation?"
I didn't know what I was saying either, if I was honest. I was simply babbling whatever came to tongue, because the second-best way to persuade a man, as everyone knows, is to blather things that sound vaguely profound.
"Now then, say ahh... come on."
"Young master, I genuinely cannot eat all of this. You're not even playing a prank with the food—why on earth are you doing this?"
"Would it kill you to shut that mouth of yours and just eat nicely?"
"How am I supposed to eat with my mouth shut?!"
And the very best method of all...
"Open up."
"Nnuuuoooaaaghh!"
...was to enlist physical means. Why he so fiercely opposed my earnest attempt to move us both toward a brighter tomorrow through peaceful channels, I will never understand.
Anyway, once I'd pried Dang Giyeong's mouth open by force of command, he cursed me with his eyes and shook his head every which way.
"STOP!!!"
But did he truly believe screaming would change the outcome? The man already couldn't twitch a finger without my say-so...
And so, his body frozen solid with nothing left moving but that gaping mouth, I began pouring the dishes down his throat, bowl and all.
Who knows how long it went on. In the end, I triumphantly emptied every last dish on that table into Du-sik's stomach...
"Huurk... hck..."
Only when I saw him heaving for breath, his face the color of a man whose lungs were about to give out, did I finally release the binding.
"Done!"
"Young master what did I ever do to deserve this do it twice and I swear I am running off to eat with the friend I've got a crush on where else would you ever find a thrall as obedient as me and this is how you repay me....."
The instant his restraints came off, Dang Giyeong launched into his grievance without pausing for breath, while...
"Now then, time to run the test..."
With so many noisy people underfoot these days, I let his whining slide in one ear and out the other as I prepared the next stage.
"Uh... uh... Young master? You're not thinking what I think you're thinking, are you?"
"Now where did I put it...?"
As I patted myself down, hunting for something, Dang Giyeong's face went paler by the second.
But as fortune would have it for him...
"Hmm... I forgot to pack some separately. Du-sik, you wouldn't happen to have any poison on you?"
Having dashed out the door without remembering to stock up at the clan estate, I carried no poison of my own to speak of...
"No? Two daggers are plenty for me. Why would I go to the trouble of hauling poison around?"
Naturally, as one of the Dang Clan's martial squad leaders, he had the stuff strapped inside his robes as he always did—he simply spat out the lie with the straightest face imaginable.
"Really? Then I suppose there's nothing to be done..."
With that, I drew a thread of poison energy out of my own hand, wearing a look of deep regret.
Of course, having witnessed this with his own two eyes, the man nearly seized up rushing to stop me.
"Young master...? If what I heard from the White Heaven Squad Leader is right, you botch the blend three times out of ten? You're not thinking of using that on me, are you?"
"Aw, it's fine. You really think a mere three-in-ten chance is going to come up and bite us?"
"It's not three in a hundred, it's three in TEN—that sounds far too high to me?!"
"It's fine, it's fine... just trust me. Although, come to think of it, I haven't practiced lately, so it's probably fifty-fifty by now....."
"Then that's an even bigger problem!!!"
Anyone who's ever played a game knows how rarely a thirty percent success rate actually lands. With Dang Giyeong showing not one shred of sympathy for my plight, I lowered my hand, face a picture of profound disappointment.
"Fine, fine—if you hate it that much, how could I possibly force you? I am a very kind person, after all."
"Ah... yes..... Of course. A very kind person. Certainly."
Leaving him to his grudging reply, I walked over to where we'd stowed our luggage, retrieved a single gourd bottle, and came back...
"Young master? That thing looks awfully familiar..."
"Then let's have you knock this back instead."
"You... you want me to drink Bone-Dissolving Powder? Is this actually real?"
"Of course it's real. Just squeeze your eyes shut and gulp it all down in one go."
"Ah... ah....."
He seemed to have surrendered at last. I pressed the gourd into the hand of the man now slumped limp where he sat, staring blankly at nothing.
The truth was, Bone-Dissolving Powder had never been meant for the living. From the very beginning, it was a tool for cleaning up corpses.
And with good reason—the stuff melted an entire body in the blink of an eye. How could anyone in their right mind use that on a breathing human being?
Because anyone who swallowed it melted away far too gruesomely, even the orthodox and unorthodox sects alike kept to an unspoken rule: the powder was for corpses, and corpses only.
Of course, behind closed doors—whether you hurled Bone-Dissolving Powder, volcanic ash, or plain old gunpowder—anything passed, so long as no evidence remained.
Still, to use it on a living man in broad daylight... even I had to wonder how I could possibly bring myself to do such a thing.
But of course it was fine—Du-sik wasn't a human being anymore, after all...
Anyway, the moment Dang Giyeong pulled the stopper, the powder's trademark reek hit him like a slap to the face, and he wrinkled his nose and asked,
"Young master... am I truly drinking this?"
"Yes. You're drinking it."
"Really, truly?"
"Mm."
"I'm really, really drinking this?"
"Oh, for heaven's sake—!"
Pop—
He stalled so long that I ended up tipping the Bone-Dissolving Powder down his throat myself...
"KYAAAAAAHH!!!!!"
"Hmm... I really will have to keep feeding him more, then."
Watching Dang Giyeong sprawled across the floor and raving fit to burst, I went off to place an additional order with the innkeeper.
And so, for days on end, the screams of a hog at slaughter echoed from a certain inn in Yunnan. Not that anyone ever laid eyes on what went on inside—someone had booked the whole place out, after all.
Still, barbaric as the method was, it seemed to have done its work...
"Hoo... with these pitiful little poisons, you'll be hearing no more screams from me."
"Oooooh....."
Dang Giyeong had become something in the rough neighborhood of a Thousand Poisons Immunity Body.
Preening as though he'd achieved enlightenment all on his own, the sight of him prompted me to say,
"Then let's get moving to Nanman. You said that business over there was urgent."
"We're finished? So I really am a Thousand Poisons Immunity Body now?"
"Yeah. At this level, you could shrug off nearly every poison in Nanman and still have room to spare."
"Kiyah... as expected of the young master. At last I grasp the magnitude of your design."
It was rather funny, watching the man who'd spent these past days shuttling between food torture and the real thing, cursing me out fifty thousand times over, now beaming from ear to ear and groveling all over again.
"Hoh... honestly, we could afford another few days here....."
"I'll have everything ready within the hour!"
Not even waiting to hear me out, he went darting off to pack. I snorted despite myself, and then, as my laughter faded, I murmured:
"After all we've been through... surely he won't go and die of poisoning on me..."
Watching that scampering back of his, I heard my own voice drop low, steeped in an old and familiar sorrow.
"He can't die... he mustn't die....."
Just how long were these damned memories of mine planning to keep me chained in place...?
I was still doing my best to quiet the heart that had begun pounding away in my chest when—
"Time to depart!!!"
That smiling face of his—beaming with pure sunshine, utterly at odds with those slit eyes that looked shifty no matter how long you stared—drew a hollow laugh out of me as I rose from my seat.
"Right. Now we really go."
And with those words, Dang Giyeong and I finally set out for Nanman.
"By the way, why on earth are those people all the way out here?"
"How should I know? That's exactly what we're going to find out."
Before I knew it, the jungle had begun to close in around us...
Shwack— shwack—
The undergrowth grew so tall it could swallow a grown man's sight, and Dang Giyeong hacked away at it, carving out our path. The heat stewed us alive, and the humidity alone was enough to summon curses unbidden... I passed the time in deep contemplation of the eternal question: why on earth would anyone choose to live in a place like this.
Prick—
What possessed it to bury that stinger in my fair, porcelain skin, of all things...
Peeling the scorpion off my trousers—no telling when it had latched on—I grumbled,
"God, there are a disgusting number of bugs out here."
"Scorpions aren't bugs, though?"
".........."
"Scorpions are arthropods, you see, whereas insects have a head, a thorax, and an abdomen....."
Thwack—
It was already hot and muggy enough to fray my nerves, and the moment he opened his mouth over nothing at all, I presented him with a fist brimming over with love. Only then did he deign to say something useful:
"Still, the forest really is stranger than it used to be. You never used to see that many of those things this far in."
"Oh... so you've seen it yourself? Now that's actually reassuring..."
"No? It's just something I heard."
".........."
That damned fool's true worry, perhaps, was never dying of poison at all, but dying by my fist.
Be that as it may, we made for the village said to sit at the very edge of this jungle...
"Whew... it's a mess. A proper mess."
"You're telling me....."
I had no choice but to clutch my forehead in my hands.