Chapter 192

Woon-jeong, who had woken up, saw Jin Ja-gang getting up at dawn again to go train.

Woon-jeong rubbed his eyes and said in a voice still heavy with sleep.

“Yawn. Poison Dragon benefactor is truly amazing.”

Bian Bu, who was beside him, chimed in.

“It’s not amazing, it’s relentless. But well, I can understand it in a way.”

“What? You can understand it?”

Bian Bu got up and fumbled around putting on his clothes. He grumbled that as he got older, his dawn sleep had disappeared.

“For that fellow, becoming stronger is survival, isn’t it? It’s not like he was born with a golden spoon in his mouth in some good family. Since he has no backing, he has no choice but to stand up on his own. He has to train when he can.”

“Hmm. Looking at Poison Dragon benefactor, I…”

Woon-jeong yawned.

“I think I should sleep a bit more. Without Master… yawn, I’ll be lazy while I can.”

Woon-jeong sat nodding off drowsily and then toppled over to the side.

Bian Bu chuckled in disbelief. Woon-jeong was probably at an age when he needed lots of sleep. When he was under Taoist Bok-cheon, he would have gotten up every day after being scolded.

Bian Bu looked at Jin Ja-gang’s retreating figure heading to the stream to wash his face and muttered.

“Well, people as relentless as that aren’t very common either.”

As he spoke, Bian Bu suddenly recalled someone who had been even more relentless and shook his head repeatedly.

The person who had brought Dan Ryeong-gyeong, who had been living normally as a daughter of a good family, to this state. The image of someone who had pursued his own advancement by casting one person and hundreds of innocent people into the abyss came to mind.

“Sigh.”

Bian Bu left the room and sat on the threshold, taking out a small pouch from his waist. He pulled out dried tobacco leaves from the pouch, stuffed them into his bamboo pipe, and lit it.

He was thinking of taking a puff of tobacco after a long time, but…

Soso, who always woke up when Jin Ja-gang left, saw this and came over to snatch away Bian Bu’s pipe.

Soso frowned and pointed at Bian Bu’s leg. Bian Bu protested that it wasn’t so.

“My leg is getting better, you little thing! Do you know how much I treasured and cherished that!”

Bian Bu spoke as if wronged, but Soso coldly turned the pipe upside down and shook it out.

Bian Bu tried to save at least the remaining tobacco leaves by gathering the scattered leaves on the ground, but burned his hand.

“Ouch! This thing! Such a precious thing! Ah, hot, ah hot. Damn it! There’s another relentless person here too.”

* * *

When Jin Ja-gang came out to a quiet place for his internal energy cultivation, Dan Ryeong-gyeong was already out and had settled in place.

For Dan Ryeong-gyeong, who needed to heal her body, absorbing the vigorous energy of dawn was very important. Just as Jin Ja-gang was training to become stronger, Dan Ryeong-gyeong was also devoting herself to internal energy cultivation to recover her body.

However, when she had been absorbed in cultivation for about one watch period, Dan Ryeong-gyeong suddenly coughed.

“Cough.”

Blood was mixed with the dry cough.

“Cough, cough, cough!”

Dan Ryeong-gyeong held white cotton cloth to her mouth and kept coughing, then finally retched and vomited blood and organ fragments.

Jin Ja-gang stopped his cultivation and stood up. Dan Ryeong-gyeong covered her mouth with the cloth and tried to raise her other hand to tell him not to come, then realized that arm was missing and smiled helplessly while shaking her head.

“I’m getting better. Nothing to worry about.”

Dan Ryeong-gyeong was unavoidably tearing out damaged parts because the poison energy settled in her body was too severe. Wounds were accumulating inside her body, but it was better than letting the poison energy penetrate deeper than now.

Dan Ryeong-gyeong let out rough, wheezing breaths.

“What tremendous poison. It clings to the qi and blood and continuously tries to penetrate the five organs as if it were alive. I’ve never heard or seen such poison until now.”

“Can’t the poison energy be removed?”

“The poison energy is firmly attached to the qi and blood, so if I forcibly tear it off, the qi and blood will be permanently blocked. I’m removing it by gradually dissolving the poison energy bit by bit, but inevitably the five organs are being damaged, so it looks like it will take several months to recover completely.”

Dan Ryeong-gyeong caught her breath for a moment and laughed “haha.”

“My internal energy has reached the level of pure refinement, so I’ve never feared poison, but this time I’m paying a severe price for that arrogance.”

Jin Ja-gang said calmly.

“Even if a trivial mosquito bites you, you become so itchy you could go crazy – isn’t that human nature?”

“Mosquito?”

Dan Ryeong-gyeong smiled as if it was something she hadn’t thought of.

“That’s right. Even when bitten by a mosquito, being itchy is human.”

No matter how much of a martial arts master one is, if bitten by a mosquito, it itches. They hear the mosquito’s wing beats and avoid it, or catch and kill the mosquito in advance for prevention. During important cultivation when they can’t receive even the slightest interference, they sometimes spread energy thinly over their skin to prevent being bitten at all.

Even if not that, they can deliberately block the sensation of mosquito bites or concentrate internal energy to neutralize the poison.

Of course, using internal energy for such things might seem ridiculous, but even a high monk who has cultivated for sixty years will have his mind scattered if bitten by a mosquito. It’s just that the high monk cultivates patience to avoid killing and accepts itchiness as part of nature.

So what about poison made to kill people?

“That was a good topic for contemplation. It gives me something to think about.”

“No.”

Though he had compared it to mosquitoes, in fact that was one of the methods Jin Ja-gang used poison. Even if poison wasn’t the main thing, poison as an auxiliary also had great effect.

Retch.

Meanwhile, Dan Ryeong-gyeong vomited another half-mouthful of blood.

Then suddenly Jin Ja-gang saw a strange light in Dan Ryeong-gyeong’s face. As the morning sun rose and sunlight hit, he felt as if the area around Dan Ryeong-gyeong’s eyes had slightly changed color.

It was a phenomenon that appeared when the regulation of internal energy became disturbed while coughing up blood.

“What’s wrong?”

“Excuse me for a moment.”

Jin Ja-gang approached Dan Ryeong-gyeong and examined the area around her eyes.

She looked tired and weakened, and her eyes seemed somewhat cloudy, but there seemed to be nothing else unusual.

“By any chance… are you suppressing the outbreak of poison energy with internal energy?”

“I am doing so.”

Naturally, Dan Ryeong-gyeong was using internal energy to prevent the poison energy from spreading for all twelve hours of the day.

Jin Ja-gang made a difficult request.

“Could you release the internal energy suppressing the poison energy for just a moment? Just very briefly will do.”

Jin Ja-gang wouldn’t ask Dan Ryeong-gyeong to release the poison energy for no reason and die.

Dan Ryeong-gyeong didn’t think long and nodded.

“I understand.”

Dan Ryeong-gyeong took a deep breath and very briefly released the poison energy she had been suppressing. The poison energy violently rampaged and spread. Dan Ryeong-gyeong immediately drew up her internal energy to block the poison’s spread.

Jin Ja-gang saw that the area under Dan Ryeong-gyeong’s eyes took on a dim bluish tint at that moment.

He had already seen this same condition before.

‘Baek Li-gwon!’

Silent Dragon Baek Li-gwon, whom he had met at Lan Family Village, had been like that!

‘Why didn’t I notice this until now?’

Baek Li-gwon didn’t even know he had been poisoned. Therefore, he wasn’t suppressing the poison, so the poisoning symptoms were showing. In contrast, Dan Ryeong-gyeong had been suppressing the poison energy with internal energy from the beginning.

During the fight with Dancing Buddha, she had been covered in blood, so there was no opportunity to check this subtle energy around her eyes…

Seeing Jin Ja-gang’s expression become serious, Dan Ryeong-gyeong asked.

“What’s the matter?”

“I can’t be certain yet, but…”

Jin Ja-gang continued carefully.

“I think it might be the same type of poison that Baek Li-gwon was poisoned with at Lan Family Village before.”

Jin Ja-gang took the cotton cloth Dan Ryeong-gyeong had coughed blood into, dabbed a little, and tasted it. He rolled it around in his mouth for a while to identify what poison it was and imprint it in his memory.

Soon his body began to ache and his lungs tingled with phlegm rising. However, Jin Ja-gang didn’t think this level could be called extreme poison.

But strangely, this poison was working fatally on Dan Ryeong-gyeong.

Dan Ryeong-gyeong, who had been thinking for a moment, said.

“What I was hit with is probably Tang family poison. But thinking about it that way, there are strange points.”

“What points are those?”

“I was poisoned by that fellow Mang Ryo before. But if Silent Dragon was poisoned with the same poison…”

Dan Ryeong-gyeong frowned.

“Isn’t it strange? That fellow Mang Ryo tried to kill Silent Dragon by poisoning him, but then took him to the Tang family for treatment?”

Dan Ryeong-gyeong’s arm had been taken by Baek Li-gwon. Mang Ryo had also been there. The two had joined forces to attack Dan Ryeong-gyeong.

Wasn’t this quite a bizarre situation!

“This poison probably flowed out from the Tang family. That fellow Mang Ryo has connections everywhere, so it wouldn’t be strange if he received and used Tang family poison. But the fact that he and Silent Dragon acted in ways that don’t match front and back is definitely strange.”

“That’s really true.”

For Jin Ja-gang, he couldn’t guess Mang Ryo’s intentions at all.

“Whatever that fellow is thinking, it’s certain that bad things are happening. But unfortunately, right now there’s absolutely no way to contact my friends…”

Since they were inside Qingcheng Sect’s territory, there was no way to utilize Dan Ryeong-gyeong’s connections and information. Right now they were in a safe state but also almost completely cut off from the outside.

Jin Ja-gang felt complicated thinking about Mang Ryo.

Mang Ryo was cunning, cruel, and unfathomable.

But it seemed that what had changed during the eight years Jin Ja-gang was trapped in the mine shafts wasn’t just his appearance.

What had happened to him during those eight years?

What had happened that made him stick his feet into various renowned sects in the martial world and do incomprehensible things?

* * *

Tang Ha-ran arrived at Mount Qingcheng expressing tremendous anger that anyone could see at a glance.

At the entrance to the mountain gate, a Qingcheng Sect disciple with a kind-looking face blocked her path and called out a greeting.

“Primordial Heavenly Venerable. Would Young Lady Tang Ha-ran please stop for a moment?”

Even though it was the first time seeing her face, the Qingcheng Sect disciple mentioned Tang Ha-ran’s name. Moreover, Tang Ha-ran had her hair tied up and was dressed like a man. Of course, she was wearing the characteristic jade-green silk clothes representing the Tang family, so they could know she was a Tang, but knowing the name Tang Ha-ran meant they had been paying attention for quite some time.

Tang Ha-ran stopped walking.

The Qingcheng Sect disciple cupped his fists and said.

“Mount Qingcheng is a place where many cultivators practice. Please suppress your anger and calm your mind. Entry to the mountain is currently impossible.”

Tang Ha-ran, already in an uncomfortable state of mind, couldn’t easily calm down. She spoke while gritting her teeth.

“I’m saying I want to go…”

The kind-looking Qingcheng Sect disciple shook his head repeatedly.

“It is not possible.”

“Is driving away guests without even asking the reason the Tao that Qingcheng Sect pursues?”

“Regardless of reason, those with killing intent cannot set foot on Mount Qingcheng. That is the same principle as the Tang family not carelessly letting outsiders into the inner courtyard of the Tang Family Great Compound.”

Tang Ha-ran closed her eyes and tried to forcibly calm her anger by breathing.

Then she spoke in the most composed tone possible.

“Is this acceptable now?”

“It is not possible.”

At that moment, sparks flew in Tang Ha-ran’s eyes.

The Qingcheng Sect disciple answered nonchalantly.

“Even now, killing intent is still visible in your eyes.”

Tang Ha-ran ground her teeth.

‘These stubborn Taoists…!’

Tang Ha-ran gave up trying to calm her anger further and just spoke with an edge.

“It seems it won’t work. Since I’m not as cultivated as you, Taoist, and can’t do any more, then please go directly and call them yourself.”

“Who… do you mean?”

“Poison Dragon.”

Tang Ha-ran said.

“Tell Poison Dragon that if he wants to cure Shandong Enchanting Flower, he should come down immediately.”