Chapter 4

Chapter 4

It was a cloudy morning, as if rain was about to fall.

Since early morning, disciples of the Extreme Poison Sect had been searching in pairs in all directions.

“How long do we have to keep doing this? It feels like it’s been at least fifteen days already.”

“The Grand Elder lost one of his legs, so he won’t give up easily. We just have to keep searching until he tells us to stop.”

After searching for a while, one of them suddenly frowned.

“Ugh, the smell is terrible.”

“What is this smell?”

The disciples took out flat pills from the medicine pouches at their waists and placed them under their tongues.

It was a pill made with fish mint. Fish mint is a medicinal herb that’s difficult to use because it smells like rotting fish, but it can be used as a mild antidote. Keeping it in the mouth provides some protection against poisoning through the air.

The disciples then took out cloth masks and covered their mouths and noses.

“Be careful.”

“Mm.”

The disciples cautiously approached the source of the smell. When they cleared away some awkwardly placed branches, a cave appeared. The terrible smell was emanating from there.

The two disciples exchanged glances, then stepped back and put their hands under their cloth masks to whistle.

Shriek!

* * *

While the disciples of the Extreme Poison Sect tightly surrounded the cave entrance, Mang-ryo appeared.

In place of his severed leg, Mang-ryo was walking with a sturdy birch staff.

Thunk, thunk.

Making an asymmetrical limping sound, Mang-ryo roughly entered the cave.

Mang-ryo surveyed the inside of the cave with bulging eyes.

The cave was small. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to hide.

There was just a pile of grass that appeared to have been used as a bed, a few rotten fruits, and a similarly rotten deer carcass.

Mang-ryo’s gaze fell on the deer and paused momentarily. The deer’s belly skin was bulging.

“Hee hee.”

Mang-ryo approached and struck the deer’s belly with his birch staff.

Crack!

There was a sound of bones being crushed. When there was no particular reaction, Mang-ryo inserted his staff into the split in the deer’s belly skin and lifted it.

Inside the deer’s belly, he saw the curled-up corpse of Son Wi-hak. It was a horrific sight, already badly decomposed, and now with the head smashed from the recent blow.

Mang-ryo checked Son Wi-hak’s corpse several times. It seemed he had been dead for at least three or four days.

Mang-ryo smiled, baring his teeth.

“Yes, that’s right. I knew you couldn’t have gone far after being hit by my Death Poison Palm. You hid here and died from the poison!”

Mang-ryo’s eyes flashed with killing intent, and he suddenly struck Son Wi-hak’s body with his birch staff.

Thwack!

The already decomposed body of Son Wi-hak began to be crushed.

“You b*at*rd! You b*st*rd! You b*st*rd!”

Mang-ryo, still not satisfied, struck Son Wi-hak’s corpse repeatedly, reducing it to a pulp.

Crack! Crack!

Still not fully satisfied, he shouted:

“Where is that little brat!”

A disciple outside the cave answered:

“We didn’t see him when we came to the cave.”

Mang-ryo surveyed the cave once more. There didn’t seem to be any other place to hide.

“Urrgh… Where did he escape to?”

Bitter about losing his leg, Mang-ryo trembled with rage.

Mang-ryo shouted at his disciples:

“He was poisoned too. He either hasn’t gone far or is dead somewhere nearby! Find even his corpse!”

“Yes!”

Mang-ryo and his disciples left the cave, and it quickly fell into silence.

* * *

***

Three more days passed.

At the empty cave entrance, a disciple of the Extreme Poison Sect appeared and carefully examined the inside of the cave. After inspecting it silently for a while, he confirmed that nothing had changed.

“The Elder suspected something, but as expected, there’s not even a trace of human presence.”

The disciple of the Extreme Poison Sect held his nose.

“With the corpse poison, I can’t come back here again.”

The disciple left.

And two more days later.

The cave was so filled with the stench of rot that it had become uninhabitable for humans. The decomposing bodies emitted such a toxic smell that ordinary people couldn’t even look inside without their breath being cut off. Even insects no longer entered the cave.

But in the cave where nothing had happened for nearly five days, there was movement.

Squirm.

The deer carcass heaved and moved.

And from beneath it, Jin Ja-gang crawled out. His face was extremely emaciated, but Jin Ja-gang was still alive.

“Ugh…”

With a low moan, Jin Ja-gang struggled to push the deer aside. Beneath it was the pulverized corpse of Son Wi-hak.

Son Wi-hak had decomposed so much that it was difficult to recognize his form. Seeing this, Jin Ja-gang felt a pain in his chest.

He felt sorry for using his grandfather’s corpse to survive, and for not being able to properly take care of the remains.

Originally, Jin Ja-gang had planned to hide inside the deer’s belly. But he suddenly thought that if he were a tracker, he would certainly check inside the deer’s belly.

So he changed his plan. He would put Son Wi-hak’s corpse inside the belly, and he would hide beneath the deer.

He had dragged the deer to an uneven area of the floor with many depressions, and hidden his body in one of these depressions beneath the deer.

If Mang-ryo had pulled out Son Wi-hak’s corpse and examined it carefully, he might have noticed something bulging somewhere, but he didn’t. In his uncontrollable rage, he had pulverized the corpse without checking what was beneath it.

It was almost like surviving by pure luck, but it was also due to Jin Ja-gang’s determination to survive until the end.

Jin Ja-gang swallowed his tears, which were too dry to actually fall.

He imprinted the image of Son Wi-hak’s corpse deeply in his mind.

He would never forget this grudge.

Though he was surrounded by the stench of rot, covered in blood, and extremely emaciated, Jin Ja-gang stood there for a long time with an expression of viciousness unbefitting a ten-year-old child.

* * *

It was another fifteen days later that Jin Ja-gang finally left the cave.

The cave was so full of noxious fumes that the Extreme Poison Sect had stopped checking it. They believed that no living person could possibly survive in there.

But Jin Ja-gang had endured inside the cave, gnawing on the rotten flesh of the deer. Although the smell was terribly toxic, bearing the poisonous air wasn’t as difficult as he had expected. He didn’t even suffer much from food poisoning or stomachaches despite eating the rotten deer flesh.

Jin Ja-gang had some knowledge about certain diseases and medicinal herbs, so he knew this was certainly unusual.

After about a month and a half of searching without finding Jin Ja-gang, the Extreme Poison Sect finally withdrew, leaving only a small number of disciples behind.

Jin Ja-gang evaded the now less vigilant encirclement, circling around to descend from Hundred Flower Valley.

The outside world finally spread before Jin Ja-gang’s eyes.

* * *

Jin Ja-gang stole clothes from others’ homes, begged for food, or stole crops from fields. On rainy nights, he spent the night shivering under trees.

One convenience was that he didn’t get sick no matter what he ate. Even when there was nothing else to eat, he could consume rotten or spoiled fruit or fish without much problem. Afterward, he would pass foul-smelling stool, but Jin Ja-gang was satisfied just to avoid starvation.

But even that wasn’t easy to come by, so Jin Ja-gang was nearly starved to death by the time he reached the capital city of Yunnan.

It had been a month since he left Hundred Flower Valley.

***

The Martial Arts Alliance’s Yunnan Branch was built in the style of earthen wall houses, as was common in Yunnan, with two-story buildings with earthen walls and low ceilings. Several of these earthen houses were clustered together to form a large compound.

Befitting a branch of the Martial Arts Alliance, which boasted the highest prestige in the world, the main gate was wide open.

‘I finally made it!’

His heart was pounding.

If he could just reach that place, he could finally avenge the people of Hundred Flower Valley!

At this moment, Jin Ja-gang could see nothing but the main gate of the branch.

Unable to hold back the suddenly welling tears, Jin Ja-gang burst into tears and ran through the main gate of the branch.

“Please help me!”

At Jin Ja-gang’s parched cry, three or four warriors sprang like lightning from the guard rooms on either side of the gate.

“What’s the matter!”

The moment he saw the warriors of the Martial Arts Alliance, Jin Ja-gang felt all the tension leave his body.

‘I did it. It’s done now.’

Feeling his head spinning, Jin Ja-gang collapsed on the spot.

“The Extreme Poison Sect… they… killed all our… people…”

He couldn’t even finish his sentence before losing consciousness.

“Hey, kid!”

But the warriors hesitated to approach Jin Ja-gang.

Jin Ja-gang’s body swelling had gone down, but he was so starved that his bones protruded. The area around his eyes was sunken, and his lips were cracked with blood. Moreover, his skin was covered with unsightly mottled spots. He looked like someone with a contagious disease to anyone who saw him.

* * *

Jin Ja-gang slept as if unconscious, then woke up.

“Are you awake?”

In a small room, a diminutive, scholarly-looking middle-aged man was standing to one side.

Jin Ja-gang shrank back and looked around.

“Where am I…?”

“This is a separate chamber in the Yunnan Branch of the Martial Arts Alliance, and I am Seo Gil-pung, the Petition Supervisor of the branch. I heard you had something to report, so I waited until you woke up.”

Tears welled up in Jin Ja-gang’s eyes as he gradually returned from deep sleep to reality.

Seo Gil-pung spoke without approaching, standing at a distance:

“No one here will harm you, so please tell me what happened without fear. I heard you mentioned something about the Extreme Poison Sect…?”

Finally realizing that he had truly made it to the Martial Arts Alliance, Jin Ja-gang felt a surge of tears.

“The Extreme Poison Sect… invaded Hundred Flower Valley and killed everyone. My mother, my grandfather, everyone else too.”

“Hmm.”

The seriousness of the situation was evident just from Seo Gil-pung’s grave expression.

“It’s no small matter for one sect to attack another and annihilate it. Tell me in detail anything that could serve as evidence.”

Jin Ja-gang thought for a moment and then answered:

“If you go to Hundred Flower Valley, you’ll find the bodies of the people. They all died after being bitten by poisonous centipedes. I was also bitten by a five-colored centipede, but my grandfather saved me.”

At the mention of the five-colored centipede, Seo Gil-pung’s expression grew even more serious.

“So it seems you’re the only witness. And there’s no evidence.”

“There are people who were captured by the Extreme Poison Sect…”

“From what you’re saying, it sounds like this happened more than two months ago, which is plenty of time to destroy evidence. It’s unlikely that any traces remain in Hundred Flower Valley, and we can’t even be sure if the captured people are still alive. We can’t suppress the Extreme Poison Sect based solely on your word.”

Jin Ja-gang felt his mind go blank.

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It was a cloudy morning, as if rain was about to fall.

Since early morning, disciples of the Extreme Poison Sect had been searching in pairs in all directions.

“How long do we have to keep doing this? It feels like it’s been at least fifteen days already.”

“The Grand Elder lost one of his legs, so he won’t give up easily. We just have to keep searching until he tells us to stop.”

After searching for a while, one of them suddenly frowned.

“Ugh, the smell is terrible.”

“What is this smell?”

The disciples took out flat pills from the medicine pouches at their waists and placed them under their tongues.

It was a pill made with fish mint. Fish mint is a medicinal herb that’s difficult to use because it smells like rotting fish, but it can be used as a mild antidote. Keeping it in the mouth provides some protection against poisoning through the air.

The disciples then took out cloth masks and covered their mouths and noses.

“Be careful.”

“Mm.”

The disciples cautiously approached the source of the smell. When they cleared away some awkwardly placed branches, a cave appeared. The terrible smell was emanating from there.

The two disciples exchanged glances, then stepped back and put their hands under their cloth masks to whistle.

Shriek!

* * *

While the disciples of the Extreme Poison Sect tightly surrounded the cave entrance, Mang-ryo appeared.

In place of his severed leg, Mang-ryo was walking with a sturdy birch staff.

Thunk, thunk.

Making an asymmetrical limping sound, Mang-ryo roughly entered the cave.

Mang-ryo surveyed the inside of the cave with bulging eyes.

The cave was small. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to hide.

There was just a pile of grass that appeared to have been used as a bed, a few rotten fruits, and a similarly rotten deer carcass.

Mang-ryo’s gaze fell on the deer and paused momentarily. The deer’s belly skin was bulging.

“Hee hee.”

Mang-ryo approached and struck the deer’s belly with his birch staff.

Crack!

There was a sound of bones being crushed. When there was no particular reaction, Mang-ryo inserted his staff into the split in the deer’s belly skin and lifted it.

Inside the deer’s belly, he saw the curled-up corpse of Son Wi-hak. It was a horrific sight, already badly decomposed, and now with the head smashed from the recent blow.

Mang-ryo checked Son Wi-hak’s corpse several times. It seemed he had been dead for at least three or four days.

Mang-ryo smiled, baring his teeth.

“Yes, that’s right. I knew you couldn’t have gone far after being hit by my Death Poison Palm. You hid here and died from the poison!”

Mang-ryo’s eyes flashed with killing intent, and he suddenly struck Son Wi-hak’s body with his birch staff.

Thwack!

The already decomposed body of Son Wi-hak began to be crushed.

“You b*at*rd! You b*st*rd! You b*st*rd!”

Mang-ryo, still not satisfied, struck Son Wi-hak’s corpse repeatedly, reducing it to a pulp.

Crack! Crack!

Still not fully satisfied, he shouted:

“Where is that little brat!”

A disciple outside the cave answered:

“We didn’t see him when we came to the cave.”

Mang-ryo surveyed the cave once more. There didn’t seem to be any other place to hide.

“Urrgh… Where did he escape to?”

Bitter about losing his leg, Mang-ryo trembled with rage.

Mang-ryo shouted at his disciples:

“He was poisoned too. He either hasn’t gone far or is dead somewhere nearby! Find even his corpse!”

“Yes!”

Mang-ryo and his disciples left the cave, and it quickly fell into silence.

* * *

***

Three more days passed.

At the empty cave entrance, a disciple of the Extreme Poison Sect appeared and carefully examined the inside of the cave. After inspecting it silently for a while, he confirmed that nothing had changed.

“The Elder suspected something, but as expected, there’s not even a trace of human presence.”

The disciple of the Extreme Poison Sect held his nose.

“With the corpse poison, I can’t come back here again.”

The disciple left.

And two more days later.

The cave was so filled with the stench of rot that it had become uninhabitable for humans. The decomposing bodies emitted such a toxic smell that ordinary people couldn’t even look inside without their breath being cut off. Even insects no longer entered the cave.

But in the cave where nothing had happened for nearly five days, there was movement.

Squirm.

The deer carcass heaved and moved.

And from beneath it, Jin Ja-gang crawled out. His face was extremely emaciated, but Jin Ja-gang was still alive.

“Ugh…”

With a low moan, Jin Ja-gang struggled to push the deer aside. Beneath it was the pulverized corpse of Son Wi-hak.

Son Wi-hak had decomposed so much that it was difficult to recognize his form. Seeing this, Jin Ja-gang felt a pain in his chest.

He felt sorry for using his grandfather’s corpse to survive, and for not being able to properly take care of the remains.

Originally, Jin Ja-gang had planned to hide inside the deer’s belly. But he suddenly thought that if he were a tracker, he would certainly check inside the deer’s belly.

So he changed his plan. He would put Son Wi-hak’s corpse inside the belly, and he would hide beneath the deer.

He had dragged the deer to an uneven area of the floor with many depressions, and hidden his body in one of these depressions beneath the deer.

If Mang-ryo had pulled out Son Wi-hak’s corpse and examined it carefully, he might have noticed something bulging somewhere, but he didn’t. In his uncontrollable rage, he had pulverized the corpse without checking what was beneath it.

It was almost like surviving by pure luck, but it was also due to Jin Ja-gang’s determination to survive until the end.

Jin Ja-gang swallowed his tears, which were too dry to actually fall.

He imprinted the image of Son Wi-hak’s corpse deeply in his mind.

He would never forget this grudge.

Though he was surrounded by the stench of rot, covered in blood, and extremely emaciated, Jin Ja-gang stood there for a long time with an expression of viciousness unbefitting a ten-year-old child.

* * *

It was another fifteen days later that Jin Ja-gang finally left the cave.

The cave was so full of noxious fumes that the Extreme Poison Sect had stopped checking it. They believed that no living person could possibly survive in there.

But Jin Ja-gang had endured inside the cave, gnawing on the rotten flesh of the deer. Although the smell was terribly toxic, bearing the poisonous air wasn’t as difficult as he had expected. He didn’t even suffer much from food poisoning or stomachaches despite eating the rotten deer flesh.

Jin Ja-gang had some knowledge about certain diseases and medicinal herbs, so he knew this was certainly unusual.

After about a month and a half of searching without finding Jin Ja-gang, the Extreme Poison Sect finally withdrew, leaving only a small number of disciples behind.

Jin Ja-gang evaded the now less vigilant encirclement, circling around to descend from Hundred Flower Valley.

The outside world finally spread before Jin Ja-gang’s eyes.

* * *

Jin Ja-gang stole clothes from others’ homes, begged for food, or stole crops from fields. On rainy nights, he spent the night shivering under trees.

One convenience was that he didn’t get sick no matter what he ate. Even when there was nothing else to eat, he could consume rotten or spoiled fruit or fish without much problem. Afterward, he would pass foul-smelling stool, but Jin Ja-gang was satisfied just to avoid starvation.

But even that wasn’t easy to come by, so Jin Ja-gang was nearly starved to death by the time he reached the capital city of Yunnan.

It had been a month since he left Hundred Flower Valley.

***

The Martial Arts Alliance’s Yunnan Branch was built in the style of earthen wall houses, as was common in Yunnan, with two-story buildings with earthen walls and low ceilings. Several of these earthen houses were clustered together to form a large compound.

Befitting a branch of the Martial Arts Alliance, which boasted the highest prestige in the world, the main gate was wide open.

‘I finally made it!’

His heart was pounding.

If he could just reach that place, he could finally avenge the people of Hundred Flower Valley!

At this moment, Jin Ja-gang could see nothing but the main gate of the branch.

Unable to hold back the suddenly welling tears, Jin Ja-gang burst into tears and ran through the main gate of the branch.

“Please help me!”

At Jin Ja-gang’s parched cry, three or four warriors sprang like lightning from the guard rooms on either side of the gate.

“What’s the matter!”

The moment he saw the warriors of the Martial Arts Alliance, Jin Ja-gang felt all the tension leave his body.

‘I did it. It’s done now.’

Feeling his head spinning, Jin Ja-gang collapsed on the spot.

“The Extreme Poison Sect… they… killed all our… people…”

He couldn’t even finish his sentence before losing consciousness.

“Hey, kid!”

But the warriors hesitated to approach Jin Ja-gang.

Jin Ja-gang’s body swelling had gone down, but he was so starved that his bones protruded. The area around his eyes was sunken, and his lips were cracked with blood. Moreover, his skin was covered with unsightly mottled spots. He looked like someone with a contagious disease to anyone who saw him.

* * *

Jin Ja-gang slept as if unconscious, then woke up.

“Are you awake?”

In a small room, a diminutive, scholarly-looking middle-aged man was standing to one side.

Jin Ja-gang shrank back and looked around.

“Where am I…?”

“This is a separate chamber in the Yunnan Branch of the Martial Arts Alliance, and I am Seo Gil-pung, the Petition Supervisor of the branch. I heard you had something to report, so I waited until you woke up.”

Tears welled up in Jin Ja-gang’s eyes as he gradually returned from deep sleep to reality.

Seo Gil-pung spoke without approaching, standing at a distance:

“No one here will harm you, so please tell me what happened without fear. I heard you mentioned something about the Extreme Poison Sect…?”

Finally realizing that he had truly made it to the Martial Arts Alliance, Jin Ja-gang felt a surge of tears.

“The Extreme Poison Sect… invaded Hundred Flower Valley and killed everyone. My mother, my grandfather, everyone else too.”

“Hmm.”

The seriousness of the situation was evident just from Seo Gil-pung’s grave expression.

“It’s no small matter for one sect to attack another and annihilate it. Tell me in detail anything that could serve as evidence.”

Jin Ja-gang thought for a moment and then answered:

“If you go to Hundred Flower Valley, you’ll find the bodies of the people. They all died after being bitten by poisonous centipedes. I was also bitten by a five-colored centipede, but my grandfather saved me.”

At the mention of the five-colored centipede, Seo Gil-pung’s expression grew even more serious.

“So it seems you’re the only witness. And there’s no evidence.”

“There are people who were captured by the Extreme Poison Sect…”

“From what you’re saying, it sounds like this happened more than two months ago, which is plenty of time to destroy evidence. It’s unlikely that any traces remain in Hundred Flower Valley, and we can’t even be sure if the captured people are still alive. We can’t suppress the Extreme Poison Sect based solely on your word.”

Jin Ja-gang felt his mind go blank.

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