Not by Medicine Alone
Laborers hurried back and forth across the estate grounds.
They checked every wheel and seat of the carriages once more, packed the saddled horses with a solid feed of fodder, and hauled the luggage already prepared for the road.
More than a dozen carriages stood ready.
And now, with departure for the Jusan Archipelago at hand, the members of the Seoho Gwak Family stood waiting, their faces set and grim.
"…What did you say?"
At the final hall-leader council held just before departure, one of the leaders raised his voice.
"Poison?"
It was because a letter of pointed significance had arrived from the Cheonhae Merchant Group.
The same Cheonhae Merchant Group that had underwritten every expense of this succession duel between the two great families—and that had publicly declared it would entrust the escort of its next trade caravan to whichever house claimed victory.
"Yes. It says the Jusan Baek Family may well scatter poison across the dueling stage, so we are to be on our guard."
"Huh."
"They contact us out of nowhere and tell us to prepare for detoxification?"
"What are they playing at?"
"They hand us information warning us against the Jusan Baek Family? On the face of it, it looks as if they're already taking our side."
"But that is hardly likely."
Someone spoke with flat certainty.
"They're putting us in their debt."
Several of the hall leaders listening nodded in agreement.
What sort of place was the Cheonhae Merchant Group?
A merchant house that, the saying went, would pull out a scale the moment a blade cut them and weigh the blood that spilled. A people who measured profit and loss in every word they spoke. If they were offering counsel, they had a purpose.
"If the Second Young Master wins the duel, it would be the perfect moment for them to claim credit, wouldn't it?"
"And what about the Jusan Baek side?"
"Exactly. Word that the Cheonhae Merchant Group advised us is bound to reach those Baek dogs as well."
"Which means they believe they can weather it."
"Or they mean to make it unmistakably clear who is setting the two of us at each other's throats."
Family Head Gwak Seo-ryong had listened for some time as opinion after opinion spilled from the hall leaders' mouths. When his heavy voice finally rolled through the air, every other mouth closed.
"A rebuke… that is what it is."
Yeo Geum-hwi, master of the Cheonhae Merchant Group.
Recalling the man as he knew him, Gwak Seo-ryong's mouth curved in a faint smile.
"If the Jusan Baek boy who is to face Yeon tries some underhanded scheme before the duel, it is something we would notice well enough if we simply paid attention. By saying nothing of it, we have drawn their eye—and this is their way of prodding us."
The Cheonhae Merchant Group only joined hands with forces that made money.
Turned around, that also meant it was a house forever asking whether the forces it dealt with had the strength to bring in profit.
"Merchant groups are always like that."
To them, money had no beauty and no ugliness.
The ability to earn was, in their eyes, true skill. So there was no reason the Cheonhae Merchant Group should be offended by whatever tricks the Jusan Baek Family might attempt before the duel.
Securing an uninhabited island of the Jusan Archipelago—terrain favorable to themselves—as the dueling ground was skill. Spreading poison, so long as one was not caught, was skill. Refusing no means and no method for the sake of victory was skill.
And so, to a Seoho Gwak Family that seemed to have made no provision against such things, the Cheonhae Merchant Group was now prodding them to do the job properly.
"Amusing."
Gwak Seo-ryong only laughed, a low, rolling sound.
"I never have gotten used to a merchant's way of seeing. They seem to have run their calculations in a great hurry—and that is precisely why such men can never become martial artists. Am I wrong?"
"Yes."
The man who bowed his head beneath that gaze was Wi Jong-geuk.
Wi Jong-geuk, Leader of Biryongdang.
The presence he carried now was nothing like what they had seen of him inside the family estate.
He had only added one more heavy blade across his back—yet a keen edge seemed to wrap him whole, as if a single touch would slice something clean through.
"I am of the mind that detoxification is not accomplished by medicine alone. What do you say, Hall Leader Wi?"
"I agree, Family Head."
Hearing Wi Jong-geuk's answer, Gwak Seo-ryong slowly turned his head. Wherever his gaze met a hall leader's, that man nodded as if in assent.
Yes.
Looking back, they had spent all this time guessing only at the Cheonhae Merchant Group's intent, and not one of them had spoken of measures against the Jusan Baek Family's poison.
There was only one reason for that.
Receiving Gwak Seo-ryong's unspoken look, Wi Jong-geuk rose slowly from his seat. A man steeped in the logic of the martial world, he turned his face toward the window and continued.
"What stops poison is prestige."
Biryongdang—the family's foremost armed force.
With proud eyes he looked upon those elite warriors of whom it was said that a single flare of killing intent sent mountain bandits and river pirates scrambling for their lives.
"If it should seem those dogs mean to use a lethal poison on the Second Young Master…"
Wi Jong-geuk, Leader of Biryongdang—whose name stood without shame among the Three Hundred listed in the Gangho Seoyeollok as the strongest of the martial world—opened his mouth.
"I will simply cripple the lot of them."
Crack!
A mast snapped and was swallowed by the sea.
As the pirates who had gone down with it screamed in terror—
"Khahahaha!"
—the man who rose with a waterspout of seawater was a martial artist in his middle years.
"I'll get to see that Seo-ryong bastard again after all this time!"
Above a sea that reeked of blood, wreckage from shattered pirate ships and the thrashing bodies of screaming pirates lay as thick as sand on a beach. The man kicked off every one of them as if vaulting a flight of stairs and soared into the air.
"That pup Wi Jong-geuk, or whatever his name is—he'll come too, won't he?!"
He leapt with a face that looked ready to die of pure delight, and where he came down amid glittering spray was the prow of a ship.
A vast sailing vessel.
More precisely, the prow of a great ship that rode at ease in the very center of a sea where a dozen pirate craft had been smashed to pieces.
Thud.
He landed lightly. Beside him, a retainer of the Jusan Baek Family approached with a towel.
"Family Head."
"Mm!"
"A moment."
As the man wiped his face with that towel, the news the retainer had brought reached his ear—and then:
"…What?!"
The Family Head of the Jusan Baek Family.
Baek Ryang-san's mouth split wide in a grin.
"Khahaha! So that greasy lump Yeo Geum-hwi has a head on his shoulders after all! Good! That's how it should be! What kind of Cheonhae Merchant Group would it be if they let their money go so easily—where's the fun in that?!"
Even after hearing the rumor that the Cheonhae Merchant Group had sent a letter of counsel to the Seoho Gwak Family, Baek Ryang-san only laughed as if it were nothing.
Then he flung a look toward the ship's rail and roared.
"Jung-hyeok! Are you there?!"
"Yes!"
At once a pillar of water erupted beside the great ship, and Baek Jung-hyeok appeared, planting his feet upon the blood-soaked wreckage of a pirate vessel.
"That Gwak Yeon, or whatever his name is—humiliate him thoroughly!"
"Yes!"
"Make the whole world understand that our Jusan Baek Family is the foremost house of Zhejiang!"
"Don't worry, Father!"
Answering with a spirit as fierce as his father's, Baek Jung-hyeok pushed back hair soaked in blood and seawater and spoke on.
"With this duel against that Gwak dog, I will raise our Baek name into the Seven Great Families of the Central Plains!"
"Khahaha! Good! I'll be waiting!"
"…I wonder."
The last remark drifted down from high on the great ship's towering mast.
"They say the eldest son of the Namgung Family is so handsome. If we join the Seven Great Families, I'll get to see him, won't I?"
"Sister, stop spoiling the mood!"
"You just do your job properly. Fight fair for once. The people who mutter behind your back about how you ignore the rules in a duel—everyone who matters already…"
"Rules?!"
A sudden growl of fury left Baek Ryang-san's mouth.
"By rules, do you mean those little games of house-play decided by fools lesser than you?"
"Father, that was…"
"In a duel of life and death, you would have him keep rules?"
"I misspoke."
The woman who leapt down from the mast and quietly bent one knee before Baek Ryang-san—his own daughter—heard him continue in a snarl.
"When a fight is over, the one left standing is right, and the one on the ground is wrong. Is that not a simple truth?"
"It is."
"Look. Who, right now, is the one standing on this wide sea!"
Beyond the ship's rail it was plain to see.
All around, the wreckage of pirate ships littered a sea stained with blood. Upon it, pirates groaned where they had fallen, or already floated belly-up and drifting.
And in the midst of it all—
—stood Baek Jung-hyeok alone, his expression haughty and sure.
The mad dog of the Jusan Baek Family, weapons glittering with sunlight strapped all over his body, washing his hands in the blood of the pirates who had rushed him from every side.
Toward that son who so resembled him—rather than his daughter—Baek Ryang-san raised his voice.
"I hear the Gwak Family's second son coming out this time is not even worth your facing! Don't drag it out!"
"Yes, Father!"
"In fact, it's better that it isn't their first or third. Facing a worthless opponent is the perfect chance to show them how terrifying you are! Do you understand?!"
"How could I not!"
Baek Jung-hyeok answered with ringing clarity.
He drew a short blade he had driven into the chest of a fallen pirate beside him, studied its tip, and went on.
That is to say—
"As it happens! I've found a truly remarkable poison this time…"
—looking upon a newly compounded poison whose every test was now complete.
"With this, I will handle that Gwak dog like the neighborhood mutt he is!"
Rattle, rattle!
By tomorrow they would reach the Jusan Archipelago.
Inside a carriage escorted on either side by mounted warriors—
—Gwak Yeon recalled what Wi Jong-geuk, Leader of Biryongdang, had said to him on the day they set out.
Young Master.
If you sense anything amiss, do not hesitate to speak.
That Baek Jung-hyeok would use poison was nothing surprising; Gwak Ho-shin had already told him as much. In his previous life, too, he had met men who insisted on using poison in a duel even if it meant being cursed for it.
There is a chance this Baek Jung-hyeok will have laid poison across the stage in advance.
But scattering poison over the ground where a duel would take place was not so common. Whether a dispersing poison that scattered inner energy or a mild sleeping draught that brought on drowsiness, the unspoken law of the martial world was that all such things were to be used only after the duel had begun.
Still—
Well. It hardly matters.
Gwak Yeon was not particularly worried.
And that was not only because of the sword case at his waist.
Take it.
This? It looks like an ordinary blade…
Have you ever smelled plum blossom? When the flowers first open the scent is mild, but by the time snow-laden branches meet the spring wind, their true fragrance stings the nose. Water it well, and bring it into bloom.
Oh-ho.
Ha Mu-won's secret weapon, received at the last possible moment the day before departure for the dueling ground.
Even without that divine armament—which for now looked ordinary, but would gradually reveal its true form as it grew used to his hand or as his inner power manifested—
…Heh.
Gwak Yeon brought his other hand to his waist and once more confirmed the foundation of this composure of his.
A wine gourd hung at his belt.
He popped the stopper and gulped it down.
Drunkenness rose at once—and just as quickly was gone.
As he had learned at Jeowun-banjeom, once he had become a vampire he could, whenever he chose, purge any intoxication circulating through the blood of his whole body. And this vampire power, which he had half-doubted, was not limited to wine alone.
Again he drank, long and deep.
A strange haze settled over his mind.
The phantasm drug mixed into the liquor—obtained from a black-path rogue in a Hangzhou back alley—spread tingling through his whole body in moments.
"Hmm."
He lightly cut his arm. Dark-red drops of blood welled up at once, and in the same instant the foggy sensation was wiped clean away.
Sizzle.
By the time he flicked the poisoned blood onto the floor, Gwak Yeon was already as clear-headed as he had been before drinking the drug-laced wine.
In other words—
a vampire's innate power that could even detoxify on its own.
On the eve of the duel, having experienced this absurd ability for himself, a low murmur slipped from Gwak Yeon's lips.
"…Unbelievable."