A warrior brought his blade down on the huge jar set against one side of the cellar.
Claaang—!
The thick jar split into pieces and black poison mist gushed out. The poison spread as though licking the floor, rising to knee height in an instant, and wherever it touched, the faint life-force of those penned inside wavered perilously.
Coughing broke out one after another inside the cages. Those who had suffered the poison for a long time had not even the strength to rise; they could only clutch the iron bars and writhe, or sprawl on the floor and gasp. Even the small child huddled in the corner clawed at its throat and spilled out a thin, thready cough.
Pung wanted to run to the child that very instant. But the blades of the private soldiers pressed in from every side, and the other warriors, under Dokgo Muheun’s order, were already running for the remaining jars. The moment even one more broke, no one here would get out alive.
“A-yeong, stop the jars first!”
With the shout, Pung kicked the wrist of the nearest warrior. When the blade flew up into the air, he shoved his palm into the man’s chest and struck a pressure point, then sprang off the falling body and lashed at a second warrior’s shoulder. With the sound of bone wrenching loose the warrior tumbled away, but the poison mist pouring from the broken jar was already seeping deep between the cages.
“People can’t breathe!”
A-yeong, covering her nose and mouth with her sleeve, drove the hilt of her short sword into the knee of a warrior headed for the jars, only to be engulfed by the poison rising at once; she fell back a few steps, coughing roughly.
Pung’s insides burned. The eyes that read the flow, the fist that shattered boulders, neither was any use before that poison. The poison mist was no blade to be struck aside, no force to be turned off to one side, and an unseen death was closing in from all directions along the floor and the walls.
Hyeonheo, up on the stair, grasped the situation too. The old man’s palm grazed Dokgo Muheun’s shoulder and shook the stone wall, but just before he could carry through a final blow, a scream burst from the direction of the cages. In that instant Dokgo Muheun scattered a fistful of poison needles from his sleeve and turned.
“Blast!”
While Hyeonheo swatted the needles away, Dokgo Muheun fled toward the dark passage, not even glancing back as the poison mist engulfed his own underlings.
But Dokgo Muheun, just arrived at the mouth of the passage, stopped short.
A dark red energy rose out of the darkness, and the young man he had seen at the manor’s central hall and at the inn came walking out, a dark red blade hanging loose from his hand. Unlike his slow steps, his presence was sharp as a blade’s edge, and even the poison mist eating into the surroundings drew back like a frightened insect where it met the dark red demonic energy.
Pung instinctively put himself in front of A-yeong and the cages. That man had tested the power of the golden ring at the inn, and had leveled a murderous blade at him until Hyeonheo appeared. Why he had shown himself in this chaos, and whose side he stood on, neither could be known.
Dokgo Muheun’s face twisted.
“Hyeolhon… how are you here!”
The man with the dark red blade did not answer. Only, in the eyes fixed on Dokgo Muheun, a killing intent rose that seemed long honed.
“A dog of the Cult Leader dares to bar my path?”
Dokgo Muheun flung out both hands and dark yellow poison needles poured down like driving rain. The man called Hyeolhon set his scabbard at a slant without even drawing the blade. Dark red energy spread like a half-moon and flicked away every last needle, and several of them flew back to bury themselves at Dokgo Muheun’s feet.
Why would one who harbored demonic energy hunt Dokgo Muheun, who had colluded with the Demonic Cult? Pung could not guess the reason, but he could feel this much, that such killing will had not been born a moment ago. Hyeolhon’s energy was quiet as settled lava, yet beneath it boiled a rage held down for long years.
Judging perhaps that he could not break through head-on, Dokgo Muheun kicked off the wall and hurled himself into a side passage. Hyeolhon started after him, then threw a glance at the people coughing in the poison mist.
“Tsk. Foolish. That is not a poison you push away with your hands.”
Pung glared at him, still in the stance of raising palm force with both arms.
“Then you know a way?”
“It is a yin poison. Burn it with yang energy and scatter it.”
Hyeolhon’s gaze rested a moment on Pung’s eyes and on the golden ring.
“Use those eyes to find the grain where the poison runs thin. Make a path first, then pull the people out.”
Only then did Pung recall the principle of yin and yang he had learned from Hyeonheo. A poison cold and damp in nature would not scatter by wind alone. It would only strike the walls, push back, and clot the thicker, so the source had to be burned with yang energy.
“Why are you helping us?”
Hyeolhon’s eyes sank coldly.
“Do not mistake me. I am not helping you.”
He gripped the hilt of the dark red blade and turned toward the passage where Dokgo Muheun had vanished.
“My business simply lies that way. If you want them to live, do it yourself.”
The words were barely out before Hyeolhon’s form shot into the darkness. The torches swayed wildly and lit his afterimage, but even that was gone in the blink of an eye.
‘Hyeolhon….’
Pung repeated the sobriquet, heard for the first time, inside his mind. Dokgo Muheun had recognized him, and had called him the Cult Leader’s dog. That should mean he belonged to the Demonic Cult, and yet Hyeolhon was chasing Dokgo Muheun, the Cult’s own accomplice, as though to kill him.
But now was no time to chase questions, and when the child’s cough came again out of the poison mist, Pung sank his awareness deep into his dantian.
Hot energy surged up through his meridians into both arms. As he gathered even the strength he had honed countless times on the mountain peak into his palms, his forearm drew taut along the index finger of his left hand, and Pung, holding down the pain, opened his eyes wide.
The poison mist, which before had looked like a single black curtain, divided into countless grains. The thick poison seeped into the cages along the grooves in the floor, and between the veins of it thin paths remained, not yet fouled.
“I see it.”
Pung thrust a yang palm at the thickest channel.
Whoosh!
There was no flame, but the hot force swallowed the poison mist. The black fog twisted as though burning, then split apart, flinging out an acrid stench, and beyond the narrowly opened gap a path leading all the way to the exit was revealed.
“A-yeong, follow the right-hand wall! Three steps ahead you have to turn left!”
“Got it!”
A-yeong struck down at the lock of the nearest cage. When it did not break at one blow, Pung ran over, seized the iron bars with both hands, and twisted, putting the strength of his remaining yang energy into his arm. As the iron shrieked and gave way, A-yeong squeezed inside and began raising up those who could still walk on their own feet.
Hyeonheo did not delay either. Holding his breath, he plunged into the poison mist, pressed the pressure points of the fallen, drove out with his palm the poison that had worked into their bodies, and moved the people along the path Pung had made.
A few of the remaining private soldiers had tried to flee and been caught by the ankles by the poison mist. They were the very men who a moment ago had swung their blades to kill them all, yet Pung could not turn his face from them. After kicking away a blade that came flying in, he caught hold of an unconscious warrior and threw him clear to safety, and Hyeonheo asked in a low voice,
“Do you mean to save even those men?”
Pung, teeth clenched, tore the iron bars off the next cage.
“If I leave them to die, what makes me any different from them!”
Hyeonheo looked at Pung a moment and asked nothing more. The hardness in his gaze eased faintly, and he lifted two fallen soldiers at once and carried them toward the passage.
The poison mist hardly thinned. Pung wove between the cages, following the grain where the poison ran thin, and poured out a yang palm each time a path broke off. The people had to be pulled out before the opened gaps closed again, so there was not even a moment to steady his breath. His lungs ached as if burning and a pain like hammering rose at his temples, but Pung did not close his eyes.
Once, as he came back with an old man on his shoulders, the poison underfoot suddenly thickened; the black liquid that had run from the broken jar had followed the grooves in the floor and cut off the way ahead.
The urge to burst out with all his strength at once filled his fingertips, but Pung held it down and turned it toward a single spot on the floor. The exploding force burned the black liquid and gouged a hollow in the stone floor, and the blocked path barely opened.
The old man’s thin breath touched the back of Pung’s neck, and that sensation of a life still holding gave him greater strength than his draining inner energy.
A-yeong, too, supported a staggering woman as far as the passage, then took onto her back the small child who had been coughing in the corner, and when the child’s arm hung limp she bit her lip and held on all the tighter.
“Pung, this child’s breath is too weak!”
Pung examined the child’s meridians. A thin thread of life, crushed beneath the poison, trembled as though it might snap at any moment.
“Still alive. Take them out first!”
As A-yeong ran, Pung fired yang energy again and again along the path she would take, and while the poison mist parted to left and right Hyeonheo covered the rear, hauling those who had fallen senseless from the poison over his shoulder one by one.
How much time had passed could not be known, and the work of reading the grain of the poison, burning a path, and hoisting a body onto his back went on without end. His inner energy showed its bottom and hot tears ran from both eyes, but Pung counted the remaining lights of life one by one.
Five.
Three.
The last one.
When he dragged out the middle-aged man who had collapsed in the deepest cage, no living breath was left to be seen, and only after sweeping the cavern twice over in case someone had been missed did Pung turn his staggering body toward the exit.
The moment he reached the ground above, cold night air rushed into his lungs. Pung set the middle-aged man down and sank to his knees where he was, but as the sound of breathing rose from the people lying all across the yard, a faint smile spread at the corner of his mouth.
He had done it.
Not one single person had been left to be dragged away over the mountains.
Hyeonheo moved back and forth among the survivors, driving out the poison that remained. All of them were gaunt and hurt from long exposure to drugs and poison, yet no one looked to be losing their life that moment. The captured soldiers had been herded to one side with their pressure points sealed, so even if they woke they would not get away.
A-yeong held the child in her arms and watched its breathing, and when a labored breath finally came a while later, she burst into the weeping she had held back and stroked the small back over and over.
Watching her, Pung remembered the old woman who had wept with her missing grandchild’s shoes clutched to her chest. Whether this child was that grandchild could not yet be known, but tonight someone would have a lost family member returned. That thought alone spread a warm energy deep in his chest.
Hyeonheo came over and laid a hand on Pung’s shoulder.
“Well done, Danpung. You have saved a great many lives indeed.”
Pung shook his head and looked back at the cellar entrance. Black poison still stirred inside, and from the passage where Hyeolhon and Dokgo Muheun had vanished no sound came at all.
“It was not my doing alone. If that man called Hyeolhon had not told me, we could not have saved them all.”
“That is what Dokgo Muheun called him.”
Hyeonheo’s voice dropped low, and Pung nodded quietly. Hyeolhon had certainly tested him, and was a man who could become an enemy at any time, yet in the most desperate moment he had pointed out a way to save lives and then left without wanting any price for it.
A-yeong, the child in her arms, wiped the corners of her eyes.
“The way he looked at Dokgo Muheun was not ordinary. As if they had been enemies from long ago….”
“A person’s inside is never made of a single layer.”
Hyeonheo gazed into the darkness where Hyeolhon had vanished and went on.
“Wearing the robes of an orthodox sect does not make a man righteous, and harboring demonic energy does not make him wholly evil. That man will have a story and a purpose of his own as well.”
Pung turned the words over in his mind. Dokgo Muheun had held up the name of the orthodox sect while penning people like beasts, and Hyeolhon, for all the demonic energy he harbored, had shown the way to keep them alive. The world before his eyes was far too tangled to divide people by the two words orthodox and demonic.
A man who was a blade of the Demonic Cult, and who had gone to cut down one who had colluded with the Demonic Cult. For an enemy, he had told them how to save lives; for an ally, he was far too cold.
Pung could hardly take his eyes from the darkness where he had gone.
Just then, from far down the deep passage, a single cry of a blade burst out together with a dark red flash.
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