A Roundabout Return to the Beast Palace
When I had come drifting through the sky, I hadn't paid it much mind, but now that I was making for the Beast Palace on two legs, shoving through the jungle undergrowth, the old man's words finally sank into my bones.
"Man, there are fewer bugs around here than in Sichuan. If we lopped a piece off that jellyfish, I wonder if it'd sell as bug repellent?"
"Shouldn't killing the thing come first?"
Nanman, after all, was a name that called to mind, before anything else, its swarming insects and every species of venomous creature under the sun. That frog — bright red with black speckles, like a cut-open watermelon — had turned out to be a genuine delicacy, no less. And yet here, not a single bug was to be seen, never mind a snake or a frog.
Seeing this, I had to admit that beasts might really have it over people...
Then a second thought crept in and began to gnaw at me: if that jellyfish thing kept raising its strength and bulked up even further, might the bugs driven out of Nanman climb all the way up to Sichuan? So, in a fit of old man's paranoia, I brought it up...
"Du-sik, if the bugs chased out of this place crawl all the way to Sichuan, I am going to be seriously pissed. You get that, right?"
"How far do you suppose it is from here to the Tang Estate, Young Master? Does that even make sense? Ah... could it be that you're still feeling a bit woozy from the fog..."
I couldn't tell whether this heartless bastard was simply incapable of saying anything else, or whether he'd just never laid eyes on the true forms of the things called Calamities and so dismissed it all as lunatic rambling. Either way, I ran the count once more inside my head.
'Two...'
By the time I finished diligently practicing the character for endurance in my mind, the Southern Barbarian Beast Palace had come into view.
And the Beast Palace as it actually stood...
"Uh... hm. Why does this get to be a 'palace'? This is just a village..."
"Oh, come off it, Young Master. Where exactly do you see a village here? A place this size is a tribal settlement, obviously."
However you looked at it, if you were going to brand the place a palace, not a single building on the grounds standing two stories or taller simply did not follow. Palace, my ass.
This was a world in which the only places entitled to 'Palace' in their names were the Imperial Palace, the Ice Palace, the Potala Palace, and the Beast Palace — and this one drooped to a degree that felt like outright abuse of the privilege.
Back when I was deep into grinding out my Heavenly Demon build, the screenshots of players who had taken their endings through the other routes beyond the Central Plains had shown me the North Sea Ice Palace and the Potala Palace — architecture steeped in mystique. But this...
"Never imagined that 'mystique' would turn out to be the mystery of raw nature. If this is how it is, shouldn't they just rename themselves the Southern Barbarian Beast Tribe?"
"Well... they are the ones who named themselves that. Who are we to take issue with it?"
"They named it themselves?"
"That's how I heard it, anyway?"
In that case, I should have just coined my own epithet too... Even granting that 'Dragon' was off the table, I could still have made up something like Blood-Hand Poison Sovereign.
Mind you, a personal epithet and a sect name — effectively a trademark — weren't quite the same thing. Even so, what in the world gave a single village the confidence for this?
"Whew... At this rate, I might as well just stroll in through the front gate."
Shaking my head from side to side, I made for the main gate.
"Young Master? I don't think that's a good idea?"
"A scrappy little village like that would be lucky to have a Transcendent Realm or two. What is there to be scared of? Just follow me."
"If I recall correctly, the lord of the Beast Palace is Profound Realm..."
"Hey! Out of the way, you—? What was that?"
The instant I hollered at the guards standing watch before the gate, Du-sik's muttering from behind turned my head back around.
"Who goes there!!!"
Leaving the men to scream at the unidentified intruder with eyes full of wariness, I spun about and bolted outright.
"I said, who goes there! Identify yourself!"
The shouting kept ringing out behind me, but...
'Ergh, dumbass. Every faction keeps at least one Profound Realm master on hand as a fixture of the house — how do you forget a thing like that?'
Chiding my own intelligence, I swiftly melted into the jungle.
Ta-sa, the new lord of the Southern Barbarian Beast Palace, was clutching his throbbing head.
Just what had he done wrong, that things like this kept happening to him? Under normal circumstances he would never have been Palace Lord at all — merely an ordinary warrior of the palace — but thanks to what had happened of late, here he was.
A seat he had written off as hopeless from the very start. And now that he had, of all things, actually come to sit in it — was he supposed to be glad about that?
"Haah... Very well, I understand. You may go."
He waved off the warrior who had delivered his report, and once the man was gone, he was left alone in the room.
Thud— He drove his head into the desk.
A monster whose nature no one could begin to fathom lurked somewhere near the Beast Palace, and the people's dread only deepened by the day — and what, exactly, was he supposed to do about any of it?
If only I had somehow managed to stop them, back then... he kept murmuring, forehead still planted on the desk.
Ta-sa, the new Palace Lord of the Southern Barbarian Beast Palace. The story of how this mere boy of sixteen came to be master of the Beast Palace...
"I will go and confirm it with my own eyes."
One night, a tremendous roar had shaken the very pillars of the earth, and when the warriors dispatched the next day to trace its source failed to return, those were the words my father spoke. He was a man who could have been called the King of Nanman without a shred of exaggeration, and everyone took heart from his word...
"Th-the Palace Lord!!!"
A man who had clearly set out that very morning in my father's wake came home alone at sundown, raving the most preposterous things. There had been a monster, and the monster was, apparently, a monster... He rambled about matters no one could make head or tail of, so we waited for him to settle — and what he told us after that was stranger still.
"Father... has been taken?"
The man we had always heard had no match in all of Nanman had been seized in the blink of an eye and was, even as we spoke, being drained of his marrow.
The moment the words landed, my eldest brother — the heir already slated to become the next Palace Lord — set out for that place...
"Eldest Brother was taken too?"
He, too, had fallen to the monster, they said. At that news, my second brother made for the same place.
And the result, naturally...
"Second Brother was taken as well?"
"Aigoo... aigoo..."
All that came back was word that Second Brother, too, was having his brains sucked out by the monster, slurp by slurp.
"Aigoo... aigoo..."
"Mother!!!"
In the end, Mother fainted dead away.
Now, in a situation like that, surely the proper course would have been for my third brother to take up the lordship, even if only as a stopgap, and somehow scrape together a way forward. So why? Why my third, fourth, fifth brothers... why had every last one of them, from the eldest clear down to the seventh, marched off one after another to present themselves to the monster as a single meal?
There were no siblings left below me. And so, the moment the eighth piece of terrible news arrived, the people of the palace seized hold of me and pleaded:
"You absolutely must not go!"
Not that I had any intention of going in the first place.
And that is how I, at barely sixteen, came to sit in the Palace Lord's seat. Once I managed to look into matters properly, it turned out the monster kept its prey alive for quite a long while as it fed on their marrow.
Of course, midway through that investigation, that damned thing stormed the palace outright, and we ended up abandoning it and fleeing into the jungle. That is how the people of the Beast Palace came to live in rough huts thrown up from the surrounding trees, behind a hastily raised palisade.
And once the makeshift houses were finished, we ran headlong into yet another problem: what was to be done for the survival of the Beast Palace? In other words — was there any way to kill that monster, or at the very least to bind it where it stood?
The endless meetings yielded a single conclusion.
"Then the warriors are to bring in people from Nanman's other tribes, by whatever means necessary. Using them as offerings is the only way we buy ourselves time."
I knew. I knew full well how inhuman it was...
And yet — were the lives of one's family and friends not dearer than those of distant strangers? And so we... no. I shouldered the responsibility for all of it and gave the order.
Thus, at the cost of other villages' lives, we came to learn this and that, and little by little the monster's habits were coming into focus — at which point Maeng Sik, one of the finest warriors the palace had, failed a raid on a certain village, and another roar rolled through the region. Sending scouts to look into it while praying it wasn't so, I received from Maeng Sik news of yet another monster.
What sin had I committed, that such things kept happening to me...?
I agonized for a long while, forehead nailed to the desk.
"Bring Maeng Sik back to me."
"Yes, my lord."
So I summoned anew the man who had crossed paths with a monster twice and lived to tell of it.
He stood before me, fidgeting with his hands, unease written across his face — and I said to him:
"Bring me that being — monster or man, I care not which — by any means necessary."
"P-Palace Lord? What in the world are you saying?"
"You told me it understands the words of men, did you not? In the Central Plains they have a saying — set a barbarian to subdue a barbarian. I'm told that method is our last hope."
"So you mean to set the monsters against each other..."
"Precisely."
"And to that end, it is I who must go and fetch the monster..."
"You understand perfectly."
..........
Maeng Sik kept letting his sentences die unfinished, but in the end, wearing the face of a man who had given up on living, he bowed his head and left the room.
"Please, let him be someone I can actually reason with."
Eyes closed, I set my mind to the question of how, exactly, one goes about persuading a monster that wears a human face.
"Agh... my eyes."
After a good long while of peering down at the Beast Palace from midair, I drifted back down to earth.
"Du-sik, no telling whether the Palace Lord's kicked the bucket or what, but he doesn't seem to be here?"
"Are you quite sure you looked properly, Young Master? That shouldn't be possible..."
"If there's a Palace Lord, he'd be sitting in the best spot there is. And nobody in that big house reads like a lord to me."
A human body, you see, holds only so much blood. There are exceptions, granted, but as a rule, the amount is finite. Children naturally hold less than grown adults — and going by that measure, whoever occupied the finest house in that stockade was no Palace Lord...
"Did the Palace Lord get taken by that jellyfish?"
"Oh, come on... surely not. It's not as if a Profound Realm master is some folded-paper tile you can win off him in a children's game. How could he lose his own body to the thing?"
"Hmm... you think? Maybe I should just storm the place again."
"And then what if the Palace Lord comes back while you're at it? Won't that be a disaster?"
"Then we'll clear up the misunderstanding with words when that happens. I can't die anyway."
"And me?"
"For now, let's head back to the Beast Palace."
"Young Master? What about me? You will protect me, won't you?"
"We'll figure something out once we get there."
"Y-Young Master?"
And so, after a good long stretch of snooping, I set out for the Beast Palace once more — doing my level best to ignore the sound of Dang Giyeong weeping at my back, of course.