Chapter 850

Blood Soul Gu.

Namho had identified the gu poison for us, and the name alone sounded ominous.

Then again, I’d never seen a gu poison with my own eyes before.

I studied the tiny creature writhing on the Divine Physician’s gloved palm.

It was much smaller than a grain of millet, with a thread-thin body the color of blood. It looked too small for an ordinary person to make out with the naked eye, yet it kept struggling to burrow into his skin.

As though that were its sole reason for existing.

“If I hadn’t been careful from the start, it would have gotten me. It’s incredibly strong for something so small.”

Sssk. Ssssk!

As if it understood him, Blood Soul Gu thrashed harder, trying to escape. The Divine Physician carefully enclosed it in his hand, slipped it into a tiny gourd, and sealed the stopper tight.

Only after checking for gaps several times did he take off his thick leather gloves.

“Blood Soul Gu… My Master taught me countless things over the years, but honestly, I’ve never encountered a gu poison like this.”

Namho nodded.

“That’s only natural. Blood Soul Gu is scarcely known even in Nanman. More precisely, there can’t be many people left who still remember the name.”

“You mean…”

“This was a very long time ago. Nanman was divided into three powers, like a three-legged cauldron, and they were locked in a terrible war. That was when Blood Soul Gu first came to light.”

I knew the story. I’d heard it several times during my stay in Nanman, and if you went back far enough, it involved my own sect, the Fire Gate Clan.

It had been passed down like a legend, by word of mouth and through the few records that remained. And one sect always stood at its center.

“…The Five Poisons Sect.”

The name came out like a groan. I looked at Namho.

“Are you saying Blood Soul Gu came from the Five Poisons Sect?”

“It was so long ago that I can’t say for certain. But if everything I saw and heard in Nanman is true, Blood Soul Gu was one of the venomous creatures the Five Poisons Sect created after countless attempts.”

“But I never saw anything like it in the Poisonblood Grounds.”

“Gu poisons favor deep, hidden places. Even after combing through the Poisonblood Grounds like you were stirring up a hornet’s nest, would you expect to spot something like that?”

He had a point.

The Poisonblood Grounds had crawled with bizarre monsters, including the Thousand-Year Spider. In all that chaos, I couldn’t have kept track of every creature—especially one as hard to see as Blood Soul Gu.

“I’ve heard of the Five Poisons Sect, too. One of our sect’s Four Founders left a brief account of Nanman.”

Jeok Cheongang had spoken up without warning. His somber gaze rested on the gourd holding Blood Soul Gu.

“But that thing is nothing like an ordinary gu poison. It’s hardy enough to survive having its body pierced by a large needle, yet it doesn’t carry enough deadly poison to kill its host outright.”

“That only makes it more likely to be Blood Soul Gu. Senior Jeok, the gu poisons you’re thinking of cause no trouble as long as the host takes the antidote at regular intervals.”

“That’s what everyone knows.”

“But Blood Soul Gu is different. Ordinary gu poisons are used to threaten and control their hosts. The Five Poisons Sect created that dreadful creature for one purpose alone.”

Everyone looked at Namho. He let out the breath he’d been holding.

“To kill its host. In a way, it’s a near-perfect means of assassination.”

“……!”

“I spent a long time in Nanman collecting information. I searched through every scrap of what little remained in the records and sought out the oldest and wisest people from each tribe. I had to feel my way toward the truth in their stories, then sift out whatever might be false.”

One day, after the Great Faction War had ended, the Martial God vanished without a trace.

Hundreds, even thousands, of sects bound together by every kind of interest and emotion had lost their focal point. Perhaps it was only natural that they began to collapse.

The Murim Alliance dissolved.

But the roots of the Hidden Shadow Pavilion remained throughout the world. In crumbling old inns. Along crowded streets.

And in the remote reaches of Nanman, where venomous creatures and fierce beasts ran rampant.

Namho was one of its deepest, oldest roots.

“The war between the Five Poisons Sect and the Nanman Beast Palace was fierce. Sometimes they were evenly matched; at other times, one side had the advantage.”

The war had lasted a hundred years, he said. Poison was poured into wells and rivers. The Nanman Beast Palace’s warriors and beasts cut down and tore apart the Five Poisons Sect’s Poison Men.

“All of Nanman was engulfed in poison and flames. Had it gone on, there would have been neither victor nor vanquished. Both sides would have perished.”

Namho looked from Jeok Cheongang to me.

“Until an outsider appeared.”

The leader of the Fire Gate Clan, who was traveling the world at the time, received a grand welcome the moment he arrived in Nanman.

A hundred Five Poisons Sect warriors greeted the stranger who dared enter their territory with poison and hidden weapons. The stranger promptly burned everything to the ground and joined forces with the Nanman Beast Palace.

“With the Fire Gate Sect Leader’s arrival, the tide turned sharply. The Five Poisons Sect must have realized they had nowhere left to retreat. As time passed, they began unleashing things more and more dreadful and vicious.”

When people have almost nothing left to lose, all that remains is spite.

The Five Poisons Sect prepared its final counterattack deep in Ailao Mountain, in its most secret and dangerous place: the Poisonblood Grounds.

“Near the end of the war, the Nanman Beast Palace’s finest warriors began dying one by one. Neither physicians versed in poisons and medicines nor spiritually gifted priests could tell why.”

The Divine Physician, who’d been listening to Namho in silence, spoke with a grim expression.

“They wouldn’t have had any visible injuries.”

“That’s right. It wasn’t poisoning or a plague. By the time the Nanman Beast Palace learned the cause, more than a hundred warriors had died.”

“Blood Soul Gu may move stealthily and be hard to see, but with so many victims, surely they could have found it sooner.”

“I thought so too. But there was a reason they didn’t.”

Namho shook his head slightly.

“Everyone was exhausted by a war that had lasted a hundred years. Peace had long since become a faded word, and death was seen as rest. In those circumstances, it must have seemed only natural for some warriors to succumb to madness.”

“Madness…?”

“That’s right. They said most of them would act like they’d lost their minds one day, then fight more bravely than anyone the next.”

The Divine Physician let out a faint sigh.

“The City Lord. Those were his symptoms. When I first heard about them, I thought he was suffering from an illness of the mind after losing his beloved concubine.”

“Blood Soul Gu grows stronger in a host whose mental strength has weakened. The two may well be connected.”

“Then how did the Nanman Beast Palace learn what was happening?”

“They said the information came from interrogating an Elder of the Five Poisons Sect after capturing him. At first, it wandered through the duodenum and the acupoints, using mild poison to cause auditory and visual hallucinations. In the end, it gradually ate away at the brain and drove its host to death.”

“……!”

“The warriors didn’t all die at the same time. Some lasted only six months; others held out for years.”

“So it only begins to act once its host is weak in body and mind.”

“That’s right. But its killing power fell far short of what the Five Poisons Sect had wanted, and it took far too long. Perhaps that’s why they managed to improve so few specimens before the sect was destroyed. That’s everything I found out.”

A heavy silence followed Namho’s last words.

No one spoke, but it wasn’t hard to guess what the others were thinking.

A great war that had drenched Nanman in blood for more than a hundred years.

And now, long after that war, Blood Soul Gu had appeared again—in a Great Nation official who wasn’t even a martial artist.

I closed my eyes. Two characters had been circling in my mind ever since I learned Blood Soul Gu came from Nanman. Instead of keeping them to myself, I said them aloud.

“Dark Heaven.”

The darkness before my eyes cleared. When I opened them, three faces looked back at me beneath the soft light of the night-shining pearls.

“Blood Soul Gu was almost forgotten even in Nanman. There’s only one way it could have reached the Central Plains. Dark Heaven brought it here.”

Jeok Cheongang spoke in a low voice.

“The Southern Heaven Demon Empress.”

“Dark Heaven has been in Nanman for decades, waiting for its moment in the Poisonblood Grounds. That was more than enough time to find Blood Soul Gu.”

“Enough time? They had time to spare.”

Jeok Cheongang gave a small nod, then asked, “But why would they harm this man?”

“That…”

My voice trailed off as I looked down at the City Lord of Sichuan Province’s corpse.

His arms and legs had gone cold. His face was white as paper, without a trace of pain.

Jeok Cheongang had put his finger on the question.

Why kill this man? And why do it so secretly?

He had held the high office of City Lord, but that was all. He was a moderately greedy, corrupt official of the sort you could find anywhere.

If Dark Heaven wanted him dead, they could take his life as easily as pulling a coin from a pocket.

So why go to all this trouble?

Was it because he had sent government troops to help us during the Sichuan Blood Tragedy?

The thought crossed my mind, but I shook my head.

No. If it was retaliation, a far more horrific death would have served them a hundred times better. They could have shown the whole world what happened to anyone who opposed Dark Heaven—even a high-ranking official. Then even those who thought Murim had nothing to do with them would have been too afraid to defy it again.

But if they chose this method anyway…

There was something else. Some goal Dark Heaven wanted to achieve that we hadn’t discovered yet.

And just as my thoughts led me there—

Step.

A faint footstep broke my concentration. I turned toward it on instinct and saw a small maid standing there, fear on her face.

“Um, well…”

Her hands were clasped tightly together. She looked at us anxiously and spoke in a voice barely louder than a whisper.

“I-I’m sorry, but the new City Lord asked me to find out when you’d be finished talking…”

Damn it. How had something so trivial broken my concentration?

I frowned without meaning to. Then a flash of insight shot through my mind.

The new City Lord. Ju Wongong. One of the few remaining members of the imperial family.

And the reason Dark Heaven had needed to dispose of the City Lord of Sichuan so secretly. No—not the reason. A suspicion.

If I was right, this was only the beginning.

The City Lord’s death was the first sign of Dark Heaven’s scheme, and it gave me reason to suspect they had one target in mind.

The Great Nation.

A chill ran up my spine.

Eyes wide, I watched the maid hurry away and managed to force out the words.

“We need to send people out. Now. Find out everything about the City Lord of Sichuan and Ju Wongong. No—the Emperor and all his relatives, too.”

At the same moment, a name surfaced in my memory.

Someone closer to the title of Son of Heaven than Ju Wongong, a distant member of the imperial family—or anyone else of imperial blood still alive.

Someone who might be the most important key of all.

“…Zhu Bao.”

“What?”

“Prince Shangshan. Zhu Bao.”

Inside my firmly shut Inventory, the token that little boy had given me seemed to tremble.