Free Web NovelBetween the white cliffs, the Eom family and Dong family prisoners were shivering.
Their upper bodies had been stripped bare, and because this was a place thick with yin energy, their bodies could not endure the cold.
It was so bad that even the Central Plains martial artists who had brought the prisoners had taken up guard far away at the mouth of the valley, and the Northern Sea Ice Palace warriors were doing the menial tasks in pairs.
The prisoners were lined up in front of a secluded hall.
The Ice Palace warriors watching them occasionally took them inside in groups of five, but no sound came out.
Had their heads broken from the cold? Even as they felt anxiety, the prisoners found themselves wanting to go into the hall quickly.
Perhaps because that wish was fulfilled, before long the hall door opened.
Creak.
At a glance from the old man, the ashen-haired man standing beside the prisoners led five of them to the entrance.
The Fourth Seat received them and silently closed the door.
The martial artist who stepped into the hall was puzzled.
He had expected torture devices, but there were five tubs.
Steam was rising up from the tubs.
The prisoners instinctively found themselves wanting to get into them.
It was suspicious—where had the prisoners who had gone in first disappeared to, and how had such clean water been prepared—but their wariness could not suppress their desire to escape the cold.
Splash.
The woman with her long hair tied down into a single tail quietly went over to the brazier. The water in the large cauldron was bubbling and boiling. The woman scooped out a bit more of the hot water and poured it into the tubs.
“Please put them in one by one.”
At Tang Sohwa’s words, the Fourth Seat pushed at their backs. Even though he did not use much force, they went into the wooden tubs of their own accord.
“Ah.”
A prisoner let out a sound of admiration.
His whole body tingled and he felt good. freёweɓnovel.com
A similar sound came from beside him.
The five martial artists warmed their bodies in the tubs. They did not know what cruel torture might come, but that would be a matter for later.
The Fourth Seat tied ropes over the tubs to keep them from leaving, but they barely noticed. On the contrary, they even felt it was pointless. Even if someone tried to drag them out by force, they did not want to leave from here.
The woman with her sleeves rolled up to her elbows went over to the side table. She turned over one sheet of dry paper and picked up her brush.
“Tell me your age.”
“Thirty-two.”
They all obediently answered their own ages. The woman wrote down their ages.
She also asked whether they had any chronic illnesses and then asked when they had received the Blood Demon’s dokgo.
As their bodies became comfortable, they gradually began to see their surroundings.
Their eyes were drawn to the folding screen spread along one wall. It was excessively long. It was as if a wall had been set up to hide something.
Creak.
The woman finished her questioning and brought over the jar that had been on the side table.
Then she began adding it little by little into the tubs. In the first tub, she put in so little that one could call it just a few drops; in the second tub, she put twice that amount; in the third tub, she put twice that again, increasing the amount in that way.
The black liquid, which looked like ink, slowly dissolved into the hot water.
As they watched it, pain suddenly spread through their legs.
“Aaagh!”
It was because the Fourth Seat had stabbed a prisoner’s thigh with his sword.
Blood flowed out of the opened wound in a steady stream. Before they even had time to feel uneasy, the woman said something that made their skin crawl.
“This is water that erases the Blood Demon’s dokgo. When the medicine enters your body, the Blood Demon’s Will will no longer belong to the one who prepared the drug, but to me. It means that from now on it has to follow my will, not the Blood Demon’s.”
“What are you... ugh!”
When the prisoner, choked with anger, tried to ask back, the Fourth Seat struck the back of his head. With the terrifying hundred ghosts standing behind him, everyone could only keep quiet.
The woman walked between the tubs, checking the water.
The prisoner who had been struck on the back of the head glared at the woman, then lowered his gaze to follow hers.
Beneath the red blood drifting like smoke in the water, black liquid was surging out in great gouts. The Blood Demon’s blood was being drawn out.
“U... uwaaah!”
The prisoner panicked and tried to clamp his wound shut with his hand.
If one tried to forcefully draw out the dokgo, it would come out a little and then go back into the body again. And then it would try to kill its rebellious host.
The prisoner clumsily tried to push the torn flesh together as if stopping the bleeding, but because the wound had been made under the water, it was useless. Like smoke spreading through the air, the dokgo squeezed through the narrow gaps and poured out.
At that moment, the ink-like liquid the woman had dropped suddenly picked up speed.
Ssshhhkk.
The two kinds of water rushed at each other.
First, there was no contest. The ink-like liquid began devouring the Blood Demon’s blood as it was.
“Hhhuaaagh!”
The prisoner’s body trembled at the unbelievable sight.
Because the black liquid chased the Blood Demon’s blood and burrowed back into the wound.
His entire body itched madly. The prisoners beside him also scratched their bodies furiously.
With an expressionless face, the woman flicked a glance at the water clock on the side table. Then, writing something down on the paper, she spoke.
“You must not lie to me.”
“Keuh!”
She had only said a single sentence, yet the prisoner at the far end coughed up blood.
“So it is affected by the mind. It seems that even just thinking of telling a lie makes the dokgo punish you.”
Murmuring as if studying the nature of the dokgo, Tang Sohwa wrote down what she had confirmed.
“Are you all human?”
“Yes!”
A brisk reply came back.
Even the one spitting blood nodded as he answered.
“Then all of you become rabbits.”
“Yes?”
At the absurd demand, a stupid question came back. The prisoners blinked, not knowing how they were supposed to answer.
“Ugh!”
“Krheuaagh!”
The prisoners clutched their hearts and spat blood.
Tang Sohwa watched that sight and moved her brush.
“So the dokgo reacts even when I demand something impossible.”
After watching them pour out blood for quite some time and gasp for breath, Sohwa checked the water clock. However, the prisoners only suffered; they could not die.
“Seeing that the dokgo keeps you breathing, it seems that whether you succeed or not, as long as you obey its will, it does not kill you?”
No answer came back. The prisoners looked as if even breathing was difficult. Their faces had turned purple, and the blood vessels around their eyes had burst, leaving red spots.
Sohwa changed her way of thinking.
“Do you have the desire to become rabbits?”
“Yes, we do! W-we will, ugh, we will become them. We’ll do anything, anything you w-want!”
A retainer of the Eom family, tears streaming down his face from the pain, answered as if pleading.
She altered her command.
“Then find a way to become rabbits.”
“Yes! We will definitely find it!”
“W-we’ll become rabbits somehow! Please spare us!”
With their cries, the prisoners’ complexions returned to their original color.
Perhaps feeling the dokgo’s movement, the prisoners stroked their chests and let out sighs of relief.
Even after that, Sohwa asked a few more questions and recorded the reactions.
By good fortune she had gotten her hands on someone who carried the Blood Demon’s dokgo. He was alive, and even bound, so she could not afford to miss this opportunity.
However, because time was short, Sohwa did not rest for even a moment as she continued the experiment with over a hundred Eom family and Dong family retainers.
“Keok, keuh!”
The moment the last prisoner lost his mind, the experiment finally ended.
It seemed the sun had started to set; the surroundings were dark.
Before she knew it, she had filled five whole volumes of records. Sohwa set down her brush and began tidying the side table.
Creak.
At that moment, the Bloodline Master came inside.
“Is everything finished now?”
“Yes, we only need to clean up.”
The Bloodline Master’s eyes shifted to the side. The Fourth Seat was staring at Tang Sohwa with a blank expression. He was already a person whose thoughts were impossible to read, but today it was especially hard to fathom his intentions.
Before long, the Fourth Seat revealed his thoughts on his own.
“Do you really have to go to the Central Plains?”
Sohwa, who had been putting the side table in order, lifted her gaze.
The Fourth Seat spoke in an emotionless voice.
“I wish you would stay in the Northern Sea. The Northern Sea suits your nature better than the Central Plains.”
Baek Unhyeon looked around the hall, wondering what might have happened to make him say something like that.
Blood was splattered all around the tubs, and from beside the folding screen, hands and feet of prisoners stuck out; it was impossible to tell whether they were dead or alive.
‘...To say the Northern Sea suits her nature.’
How could he describe the Northern Sea as such a cruel place?
Baek Unhyeon felt a sense of unease, but he held his tongue, thinking that the Ice Palace Seats inside the palace and the Ice Palace warriors outside were so different in their thinking that they might as well be different races.
However, it seemed that Tang Sohwa also did not particularly like the Fourth Seat’s words.
“...I do not know whether saying I match the Northern Sea is supposed to be a compliment, but I match the Central Plains much better.”
Tang Sohwa’s expression was dark.
It was understandable. She had often heard people say that something “matched” her nature, and most of the time it had been an insult.
When the Supreme Elder insulted the Namgung Clan, he had said that the Namgung were a clan whose nature matched hers, and Tang Hae-han, when giving her venom from a viper even detoxifiers were reluctant to handle, had said it was poison whose nature matched hers.
Perhaps sensing her feelings, the Fourth Seat gave a small laugh and corrected his words.
“I would need to find Black Horn’s records to be sure, but the probability that you have Northern Sea blood mixed in you is high.”
Sohwa did not particularly react, but the Bloodline Master flinched. However, before he could even ask, the Fourth Seat stretched out his hand and pointed at Tang Sohwa’s dantian.
“From the looks of it, your meridians seem to be blocked, so stay here. I’m thinking of teaching you myself. I’ll open your meridians and raise you so that within a year you will function properly as a person.”
Sohwa quietly swallowed.
‘So the Crimson Blood Hall Lord has managed to run away without getting caught by the Fourth Seat.’
Fortunately, it seemed the Fourth Seat had not noticed her constitution.
There were occasionally people whose meridians were blocked from birth. It was an illness caused by their inborn energy clogging their meridians, and that body was completely different from Tang Sohwa’s.
Her body was not one where something blocked her meridians and kept them from opening; it was a body where even if you created meridian paths, they would simply disappear again.
In short, it was not a body whose condition could be improved by extracting the energy blocking the meridians or forcibly forcing someone else’s energy in to create them.
In her previous life, the Supreme Elder had acted on a reckless impulse and tried to forcibly open Tang Sohwa’s blood vessels, but all he did was drive her to the brink of death.
The fainted Tang Sohwa had recovered after sleeping for half a day, but had it been someone else, they truly would have lost their life.
At that time, Tang Min had become the second person after the Tang Clan Head to learn of Sohwa’s constitution.
Because of that incident, Tang Min had a huge fight with the Tang Clan Head and, for the first time, apologized to the Clan Head whom he had always treated as a joke.
Since she had no intention of revealing her constitution to outsiders, Sohwa gave a roundabout refusal.
“I am direct blood of the Sichuan Tang Clan and feel pride in my clan. Also, the nature of the Tang Clan and myself...”
She had meant to say that they matched well, but perhaps because she had been brainwashed over a long time, the phrase that she “matched” someone’s nature felt like an insult to her clan, and her words trailed off.
“...The work I do best is work I can do within the Tang Clan, and I also place the safety and prosperity of the Tang Clan first. Just as the Fourth Seat can display the greatest power of his inborn strength here in the Northern Sea and is the one most needed for the rebuilding of the Ice Palace.”
However, the Fourth Seat did not back down.
He laughed and stubbornly insisted.
“You are still young, so your thoughts could change. If your heart changes, come find me.”
