This was a first.
The first time I had crossed a swamp this long and wide.
The first time I had fought things that weren’t human while breathing Poison Mist like ordinary air.
Splash!
A sudden sound came from behind me. I pivoted smoothly and brought down my straightened hand like a blade.
Slash!
From what I could see, the thing was easily more than three zhang1 long.
But neither its sharp teeth nor its armor-thick hide could stop the qi in my knife-hand.
The enormous crocodile looked like something from a documentary about the Amazon. It split in half and fell onto the blackened water.
Splash!
The fishy smell of blood and an even fouler stench rose from it, but I only felt sick for a moment. I was holding up much better than I’d expected.
Then again, I’d been covered for some time in slime and blood that smelled worse than sewage.
This isn’t exactly fighting fire with fire.
Nanman Life Pro Tip: If you’re worried about a bad smell, get used to an even worse one.
“…Fuck.”
I had a brief moment of clarity, but the Poisonblood Grounds—shittier than working two shifts loading and unloading trucks—wouldn’t even allow me that much.
Swish!
A snake hidden in the swamp shot toward my neck like an arrow.
The moment it bared its black, razor-sharp fangs and opened its jaws wide toward my thigh—
Whack!
Fingers as thick as the branches of a great tree blew its triangular head away.
No question it was dead. The Beast Miao King caught its limp tail, slammed it into the swamp, and spoke with a grave expression.
“Dohn’ led yer gar’ down.”
“Don’t let my what?”
“Be gareful.”
“…Ah. Right.”
Roughly translated: Don’t let your guard down. Be careful. Something like that.
Nanman’s greatest warrior, now over eighty years old, was speaking less clearly than an eight-year-old because his mouth was stuffed with the poison-warding pearl.
“Almos’ dere.”
That pronunciation sounded awfully familiar.
I wanted to ask if he was from somewhere around Gyeongsang-do, but I held back. This was hardly the time, and just as the Beast Miao King had said, the swamp really was coming to an end.
That didn’t mean things had gotten any better.
Open Quest Window.
Ding.
System
Quest
My Good Sir, Do Not Cross That Swamp
You have entered the Poisonblood Grounds.
Deep within Ailao Mountain, once the headquarters of the Five Poisons Sect, lies this most secluded and secret place. It is home to life-forms unknown and undiscovered.
A cursed land filled with poison-laden mist and the spirits of countless dead.
No one can tell you what awaits beyond it. You have no choice but to see for yourself.
Grade: Supreme Peak
Restriction: Jin Taekyung
Mission: ???
Reward: ???
Failure: Death
“…”
No matter how many times I looked at it, this was ridiculous.
It had been a while since I’d seen a Quest window this short. The mission and reward were a mystery, but one thing was clear: fail and you die.
Then again, it had always worked like that. In the modern world’s Gates and here in Murim alike.
Win and live. Lose and die.
Simple, brutal logic.
Hunters and Murim practitioners alike were people who always lived with one foot in the Sanzu River.2
And just as I had every other time, I had no intention of dying now.
Splash.
When the swamp ended, relatively soft ground appeared. Every time the foul-smelling slime fell to the ground in the wake of my and the Beast Miao King’s footsteps, I could see the already blackish earth around us becoming even darker.
“Vile.”
The Beast Miao King spat out the poison-warding pearl and continued as he looked around.
“This is only the second time in my life I’ve seen a place this horrible.”
“What was the first?”
“The Great Faction War. Everywhere we went, there was a hellscape.”
He was comparing the Poisonblood Grounds to a war in which hundreds of thousands had slaughtered one another. That said enough about this place.
Fwoooosh.
Poison Mist rolled toward us over the blackened earth. The Beast Miao King swallowed a groan at the grim sight.
“Damn it. If I’d known this would happen, I’d have trained in poison arts when I was young.”
“You didn’t know. Isn’t that why you never learned them?”
The Beast Miao King nodded regretfully.
“Yes. I thought my own martial arts were enough. It’s why I never learned the beast-taming techniques everyone else studied, either.”
“That makes sense. Why learn something you don’t need?”
I suddenly felt a strange sense of kinship.
In the modern world, people gave up on math or English. In Nanman, they gave up on poison arts or beast taming. For the record, I’d given up on every subject when I took the college entrance exam.
“Come to think of it, I thought everyone in Nanman learned poison arts.”
“If they did, wouldn’t this be the Nanman Poison Palace instead of the Nanman Beast Palace?”
“…Oh.”
“That is a prejudice held by people from the Central Plains. It is true that the nature of Nanman’s land means we encounter poison easily, but most tribes primarily deal with ferocious beasts. After the Five Poisons Sect rose to power, we rejected poison even more strongly. You can tell just by looking at the divine artifact passed down through our Palace for generations.”
“Oh, I see… Wait.”
What did he just say?
I stopped for a moment and stared at the Beast Miao King. He frowned and looked back at me.
“What?”
“What you just said.”
“That we came to reject poison arts? After the harm this Palace suffered, it was only natural.”
“Not that. The divine artifact. You said there was a divine artifact.”
“Ah. That. I thought you meant something else.”
The Beast Miao King answered as if it were nothing, but from my perspective, it wasn’t something I could simply brush off with an Oh, I see.
“The Nanman Beast Palace had a divine artifact?”
“Any faction with a long history is bound to have one. From what I have seen, that is even truer in the Central Plains.”
He wasn’t wrong. Mid-sized sects and even neighborhood martial arts schools would hang an old iron sword on the wall, call it a divine artifact, and hope it made them look important.
But some objects truly deserved the name.
The Green Jade Buddha Staff was one: the divine artifact of Shaolin Temple, the Mount Tai and Northern Dipper of the Murim, whose lineage stretched back a thousand years.
And for some reason, Dark Heaven was targeting those very divine artifacts.
They had even caused the major incident known as the Shaolin Bloodshed to do so.
And the Nanman Beast Palace had one too?
As far as I knew, the Palace was more than three hundred years old.
An Outer Lands power formed by an alliance of dozens of tribes, it had arisen in the struggle against the Five Poisons Sect and, after a long war, become the dominant force in Nanman.
It wouldn’t be strange for it to have a divine artifact. What mattered was that this was the first I’d heard of it.
“I’ve never heard that the Nanman Beast Palace had a divine artifact.”
I did my best to sound calm. The Beast Miao King nodded.
“Of course not. It disappeared not long after the Palace was founded.”
“What?”
“Then again, it may never have existed. The Beast King Stone has been passed down from Palace Lord to Palace Lord as a legend. No one can even say for certain it was real.”
“The Beast King Stone…”
Its name alone was extraordinary. The Beast Miao King nodded at my quiet murmur and continued.
“As I said, it is a legend. A divine artifact carried by the first Palace Lord, said to make every ferocious beast under heaven obey him. It supposedly vanished after he and the founding Sect Leader of the Five Poisons Sect grievously wounded each other in battle.”
A stone with the miraculous power to command every ferocious beast under heaven. That was a legend if I’d ever heard one.
And one passed down by word of mouth for hundreds of years, at that.
If I started working on it right now, then in a few hundred years, I could insist that I had been born from an egg.
Still, I should keep the Beast King Stone in mind…
For now, though, it was far more plausible that the Southern Heaven Demon Empress meant to create a “rift” in Nanman than that she was after a legendary stone no one could even prove existed.
“By the way…”
“Yes?”
The Beast Miao King glanced between me and the Poison Mist, then hesitated.
“That. Do you have another one?”
By that, he meant the Myriad-Poison Ring.
I gave him a firm answer.
“No.”
“Then let me borrow it for a moment—”
“Hey, Mr. Yayul. Cut the nonsense and put the poison-warding pearl back in your mouth.”
“…What did you just say?”
“Ah. My tongue slipped for a moment. If you don’t want to get poisoned, keep the poison-warding pearl in your mouth.”
The Beast Miao King shot me a displeased look, but then put the large poison-warding pearl in his mouth without another word.
He might have held the lowest seat among the Ten Kings, but he was still a master worthy of belonging to them.
With martial prowess that had reached such a lofty realm and a vast reserve of internal energy, poison was unlikely to overcome him easily. Even so, a little precaution never hurt.
A High-Grade Poison-Warding Pearl should keep most ordinary poisons from penetrating.
And I had the Myriad-Poison Ring, a divine artifact of the Sichuan Tang Clan.
The Beast Miao King looked at me enviously before stepping into the Poison Mist.
Step.
His footfall sounded unusually loud.
Deep green mist covered everything, so thick I could barely see in front of me. The silence was just as strange.
As if something is watching its prey.
I could feel something watching us through the dense Poison Mist. Why, then, was it quieter here than in the swamp?
I wasn’t the only one who noticed.
—A small patch of grass ten or so zhang1 away. Northwest. Do you sense it?
A Sound Transmission reached my ear. I gave a small nod.
—The grass beside the rock?
—Yes. Something is there. Could it be…
I thought of Ailao Mountain’s Wraith. The ghostlike presence I had felt from it, and its ray-like movements.
—It isn’t the wraith. Even if it were, we couldn’t catch it from this distance.
—That depends on how we go about it.
The Beast Miao King thrust out a palm like lightning.
Boom!
Compressed air burst outward, scattering the thick mist for an instant.
Through the brief opening, I saw his powerful palm force sweep over the grass like a storm.
And then…
“Guh!”
There was a scream. Not the cry of a beast, but unmistakably the scream of a human.
“…!”
“…!”
The Beast Miao King and I stared at each other, eyes wide, then shot toward the source of the cry like lightning.
Whoooosh!
Countless thoughts flashed through my mind as I cut through the mist.
But the first two words that came to me were Dark Heaven.
It’s them.
Who else would be in Ailao Mountain, Nanman’s forbidden land—let alone here in the Poisonblood Grounds?
A jolt ran through my entire body. My heart pounding, I closed the distance of ten or so zhang1 in an instant.
Then I saw who had been flung out of the grass, and the words escaped me.
“What the hell…?”
Dark red blood stained the corner of his mouth. His eyes were wide open.
There was no doubt that he was a human corpse, but he was wearing clothing that was painfully familiar to both me and someone else.
“…Why is a Bai warrior here?”
The confusion in the Beast Miao King’s hollow voice matched my own. The man who had been alive only moments ago was a Bai warrior.
His body, dressed in white garments like a burial shroud, was tightly wrapped in something sticky and tough.
Rope. No, thread?
The Beast Miao King and I stared, unable to make sense of it.
That was when—
Rustle. Rustle-rustle.
When had they gotten there? Where had they been hiding?
Along with the countless presences approaching from every direction, I suddenly felt darkness settle over my head. I looked up.
At last, I saw them.
Hissss!
Some beings descended like ghosts from a tree so enormous that it was impossible to guess its age.
They had black bodies, countless legs, and stiff hair covering them. The Beast Miao King discovered them and muttered like he was groaning.
“…Thousand-Year Spider.”
The monster of the Poisonblood Grounds had appeared.
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