Chapter 737: The Great Instructor Ximen Qing (9)

Now for the main topic: how to remove metal fragments embedded in the body.

Anyone who follows this method will be able to remove embedded shrapnel as easily as eating soft rice gruel.

The required materials are as follows.

A tool that can pull out metal fragments. Tongs, for example.

One or more people with metal fragments lodged in their body.

If you do not have such a person, you may also manufacture one by driving the fragments in yourself.

If you procure the material yourself, you must be careful: given the Central Plains’ hygiene level, high fever and rotting of the wound from infection may occur.

After that, strip the material’s clothing and lay them down.

Naturally, make sure the wound faces up.

Qing lay down gently on the floor, completely naked.

It would be more comfortable to lie on a bed, but blood might get on it, so she put down a towel and lay on the floor.

Still, the fact that Qing was lying there naked wasn’t anything particularly novel.

It was the sort of scene you could see as a matter of course; even when it wasn’t about removing embedded fragments like now, it wasn’t different from what she’d been doing all this time.

She preferred [N O V E L I G H T] to sleep naked, a strange habit she’d picked up during Ximen Surin’s self-defense Steel-qi class.

Anyway.

In principle, whether man or woman, beauty is completed by the face.

But even leaving the face aside, Qing’s bare body was dazzling.

The ratio of those long legs flowing from unusually high-set hips, the slim waist drawing a dramatic curve from those broad hips, and then the massive architecture above that—those were the finishing touch.

Metal fragment removal, step two.

With your fingertips, gently stroke the wound area and locate the metal pieces.

Qing gently stroked her own belly.

Her abdomen housed everlasting-cold-iron-level, beyond-human abs, but outwardly it was just smooth, dazzlingly white skin without a single flaw.

Watching that, Moyong Juhee’s breathing was somehow rough.

With pupils somehow dilated and a blush blooming on her cheeks, she gulped and gulped as she looked again at that lewd body.

At that, Jin Jangmyeong and Seol Iri both made displeased faces and sent Moyong Juhee annoyed looks.

But that was all. Ever since the ordeal, Moyong Juhee had kept a mild and yielding attitude.

So the two women did not go so far as to tell her, looking right at her, that her expression was extremely impure, or to please make it so they couldn’t hear her heart pounding, or anything of the sort.

You could say this just showed how important your usual attitude is.

And metal fragment removal, step three.

Pull.

Qing briskly yanked out a metal fragment.

Qing was a Flower Realm expert and also possessed beyond-human grip strength, so there was no need for her to rely on tools like tongs.

“Hff.” “Hff.” “Ah.”

The spectators could not help but be startled.

All of a sudden, the mood turned into a self-harm scene.

From the metal fragment that had pierced through live flesh, bright, bright red blood welled up in beads and then flowed down in a little rivulet.

“Tss. See? You saw that, right? This is how you do it.”

“What the hell. You just yank it out that stupidly?”

Jin Jangmyeong wiped away the blood with a towel, frowning.

“The muscles will heal and gradually push it out, sure, but in the end you have to pull it anyway, right? So whatever you can pull, pull now, and the ones you can’t catch yet will pop out after some time, then you pull them then.”

She could have done it alone, if only there were one or two fragments lodged in the muscle.

As it was, they would all pull and pull the Heaven-Shaking Thunder shrapnel together, and for the fragments that weren’t out enough yet, they’d pull tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and eventually everything could be removed.

“Me too. Me too.”

“Oh, Jayeo’s going to treat Dad too? Wow, our Jayeo’s a future paragon of filial piety, huh. At this rate they’ll put up a Filial Daughter Stele for you when you grow up. Oh, here’s a big one.”

Qing tapped her side with her fingers, then lightly scored it with Steel-qi on her nail.

It was only a small wound, but through the split-open skin, a dark Heaven-Shaking Thunder fragment peeked out.

Jayeo eagerly held out the tongs.

She caught the fragment and—tss—okay, that stung a bit.

TIK! TIK! The tongs clinked.

Because the fragment was lodged in Qing’s muscles.

Humanity’s strongest, everlasting-cold-iron muscles were not so easy that they’d spit out a foreign body just because some ten-year-old brat squeezed it with tongs!

“Tss.”

Even with countless fragments scraping around inside her muscles, Qing was walking, eating, and lying down just fine, so poking one or two of them wasn’t unbelievably painful.

But the human body reflexively shrank away in response to pain; the muscle clamping down on the fragment twitched and twitched, and from her mouth came, “Tss,” and again, “Tss.”

Jayeo flinched, and then, TIK, TIK. TIKTIKTIK.

“Does it hurt? Does it hurt?”

“Jayeo? Didn’t that feel kind of fun? Our Jayeo’s a future paragon of unfilial degeneracy. I’d better put up a Monument to Unfilial Degenerates at the Academy gate tomorrow.”

At that, Jayeo went “Oh no,” and quickly shrank in on herself.

Mm, but it was already too late. Killing was fun and all, but you still had to pick your targets...

Not that she’d expected much from Jayeo in the first place.

If it were going to come out that easily, the women physicians would have already removed it; the reason they had only pulled what they could, rubbed medicine on, wrapped it up, and left the rest was precisely because they couldn’t get at it.

“See, you saw that? You have to use inner power to pull them. If you coat the tongs with it, would that make it tong-qi, or whatever. Anyway, leave the ones that aren’t out enough, and only pull the ones poking sharp—OW!”

Qing let out a loud scream at a stabbing jolt of pain.

Then Jin Jangmyeong ostentatiously lifted up a large fragment caught in her tongs.

“Oh. Huge. Pretty sure mine’s the biggest.”

“Jangmyeong? This isn’t a game to see who can pull the biggest chunk—ow,”

Right after, Seol Iri extended her own fragment-tipped tongs to compare with Jin Jangmyeong’s.

They were similar, but Jin Jangmyeong’s fragment was just a little bigger, and a faint shadow creased Seol Iri’s brow as if she didn’t like that.

“Girls?”

“We should use this chance to fix her habits once and for all.”

Seol Iri nodded.

Well, she was the one who’d hugged the Heaven-Shaking Thunder.

Even the act of pulling the shrapnel out of her own body, she treated like a joke, so clearly she wasn’t hurting enough yet; she needed to really hurt properly so something like this wouldn’t happen again.

So the expressions on the two women’s faces went blank, and in silence they ran their fingertips over her skin, tapping the tongs with their other hands, full of the kind of determination that said they were going to wreck her.

Huh, this wasn’t it.

This wasn’t the scene Qing had pictured; not that it was the first time she’d failed to manage her own body.

Fine, you could take into account things like the life-or-death duel or the aftereffects of the Sword-Cut Wall.

But then she’d even gone and jumped into a bomb by her own choice, hadn’t she? That was why Seol Iri kept showing her mood with nothing but silence, and Jin Jangmyeong was the same after hearing what had happened.

Qing turned her head toward Moyong Juhee and begged with her eyes.

The mood’s getting weird here, Miss Moyong, can’t you do something about this?

“Hff, hff.”

But Moyong Juhee just sat there with a beet-red face, twirling the shard caught at Qing’s thigh, right where her fingertips touched.

“Hff, Miss, will this hurt? Or will it just be a prick? Do you think it won’t hurt that much?”

Mm. Yeah, her state was not great. Maybe the memories from when she’d been kidnapped were resurfacing. The way she trembled all over... now that she thought about it, this could be a sensitive area; Qing hadn’t thought this through—

“AAH, TSSSS,”

Either way, this was the result Qing had asked for.

One had to take responsibility for one’s own actions.

****

During breakfast, Yang Chil, captain of Sword Hall Training First Squad, felt a strong sense of wrongness.

Something was off, something was missing. What?

Yang Chil swept his gaze over his squad members.

First, the two from Eomchang County.

“You bastard, how can you just keep shoveling food in? After wrecking someone else’s family, how can you be that calm—your shamelessness has no equal.”

“All I have is my guilty conscience. So please, take this at least.”

“Kh, this lousy meat scrap. You think a pathetic thing like this can comfort me? Munch, munch.”

So Eumjo and Jang Bihu: a complainant avenger who only ever says he’ll avenge his clan, and the runaway son of the enemy family.

The sin of a family did not vanish easily just because its son left home.

But since Jang Bihu had thrown away the easy road of a comfortable unorthodox-boss life and joined the Righteous-Proper Martial Academy, it was a problem no third party could lightly take sides on.

Personally, Yang Chil felt Jang Bihu had become quite a decent person: as a first-rate martial artist, he kept looking after So Eumjo, watching his training and giving him visible consideration.

So now, even So Eumjo was all “enemy, enemy” just in words, and was clearly just grabbing the meat side dishes he was being given as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Next to them, Sword Jade Girl—already a peak-level expert from Sword Pavilion, serving as an instructor—was in the middle of eating with a dagger; strictly speaking, she was butchering her meal.

They said it was part of her training, but it was impossible to see how precisely the act of scooping rice with a dagger and stabbing and stabbing and stabbing the stew-soft pork until it was minced to shreds counted as training.

Beside her, Chang Yohong, wearing leopard skin over her training clothes; even as the weather grew gradually hotter, she didn’t shed a single drop of sweat.

But she made other people feel hotter just looking at her—how could she sit there with that thick leopard pelt draped over her?

And the obnoxious young master, Mandarlo—

Ah. That was it.

Yang Chil realized the cause of his sense of wrongness.

He wasn’t hearing the usual colorful expressions of relentless complaints that always came attached to mealtime.

What was this, why today, when the food was edible but by no means good enough to call tasty?

“Lord Mandarlo? It would seem the meal suits your taste?”

“Do you think I’m eating for the taste? If you want to learn, you need to eat well, that’s all. And it’s not so bad I can’t eat it, Brother Yang.”

A shiver ran straight down Yang Chil’s spine.

What did I just hear—Brother Yang? That brat just used respectful speech?

It wasn’t only Yang Chil’s reaction. For an instant, the sound of eating at First Squad’s table cut off.

Everyone stared at Mandarlo like, Did I just hear what I think I did?

But Mandarlo’s expression was perfectly calm.

Without the slightest change of color in his face, he went on speaking, utterly composed.

“Ah. Yes. I’ve been immature and have often spoken harshly and behaved rashly, so I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to everyone. You must have been uncomfortable because a rotten little brat without any manners was around you all this time.”

“You little bonehead, what did you eat wrong? You’re pissing me off—cut it out and just go back to whining and yapping like you always do.”

“I’ve also been very rude to Sister Chang. Even if you call me that, I can’t help it.”

Flames WHOOFED up over Chang Yohong’s leopard pelt.

She shuddered and scrubbed furiously at her own forearm.

“You little shit, what is this? Who are you? Why are you sitting there wearing that bonehead’s skin? Ha, no, wait—whatever. I actually like this version better.”

Even at Chang Yohong’s continued sarcasm, Mandarlo stayed perfectly calm.

Which, in its own way, made him even more annoying.

Apparently even a courteous attitude could be annoying.

“Um, Lord Mandarlo?”

“Please speak freely. You’re older than I am, aren’t you?”

“Ahem, mm, well then, Brother Man, did you—have you had some sort of change of heart?”

At that, Mandarlo answered as if he’d been waiting for the question.

“On the last outing, Instructor Ximen counseled me. She scolded me with a teacher’s love. I was deeply enlightened, and I realized how self-indulgent and childish I’ve been up to now. So I have resolved to become an adult in the future. That’s all.”

His squadmates looked at one another.

What kind of counseling do you even get to completely change a person like this?

Until now, even after getting beaten that badly, at most he’d stop for a bit and then go right back to mouthing off once the pain faded.

Did someone maybe pull his soul out and stuff someone else’s soul in?

What kind of talking-to do you give someone to correct—not correct, practically reengineer—a person like this?

And so, his squadmates just blinked and blinked.