Chapter 815: Our Wish Is Slaughter (6)

The best part of traveling is, no matter what anyone says, food.

Coming to a new land and eating some completely new dish you’d never even imagined before—that was the real essence of travel.

The problem was, a completely new dish you’d never imagined before tended to come with exactly that much risk baked into it.

Sandstream Grub Festival!

Sandstream Grub was an insect that lived in the fine sandy bottom of clear streams. It also went by other names—Water Ginseng, Insect Ginseng.

Because it was “good for you,” apparently. Riverbed wild ginseng. Insect wild ginseng. That kind of thing.

There were plenty of ways to cook Sandstream Grub, but the dish considered the best of the best was to blanch it in boiling oil, then steam it until it was fully done, and serve it whole—shape intact.

That way, the color and the silhouette stayed exactly like it was alive.

Of course, that was only on the outside.

Because to get there, they had to remove every last trace of fishy innards and the tough blood-vessel bits—so delicately that it took multiple master chefs swarming the thing, a distilled essence of culinary obsession.

While the inn’s runner kept spitting out passionate explanations, Qing’s honest review upon seeing that ultimate Sandstream Grub dish—the Grand Sandstream Grub Presentation—was this:

Mm. Ragworm.

Gaegu County was famous for high-quality Sandstream Grub to begin with, so more than half the dishes on the table were Sandstream Grub dishes.

Most of them, though, removed the head and tail, stripped off the hard shell and legs, and ended up looking like pale, sliced meat. Long strips. Nothing you’d stare at too hard.

But when the centerpiece of the table had a dish that practically screamed, This isn’t meat, it’s a ragworm, by preserving the original shape so faithfully—

This? Why? Why would a bunch of top-tier chefs gather together to painstakingly preserve the raw ingredient’s original form?

Was this some kind of nasty prank?

Like how, back home, some places went out of their way to catch an eel right in front of you and show you the whole “prepping” process.

To be fair, Sandstream Grub wasn’t actually a ragworm.

It had absolutely nothing to do with ragworms. It was just a snakefly larva that happened to look exactly like one.

Qing could eat pretty much anything.

But that didn’t mean she ate just anything.

Even if she wasn’t picky, food was half memory, wasn’t it?

And once bad memories clung to a dish, no matter how high-class the cooking was, it became hard to enjoy the taste.

And as for bugs—

Bugs were the one thing Qing couldn’t eat happily.

...Can we not just get normal meat? Beef, pork, horse, chicken, lamb, goat, pheasant, duck—something like that...

That was the moment.

Tang Nanna extended her chopsticks straight out.

She picked one up, checked it carefully front and back, and then—

Nom. One bite, just like that.

“Oh. This is... not bad. For some backwoods village in the ass-end of nowhere, it’s actually decent?”

The Sichuan wicked woman, Tang Nanna, had a short palate.

Because she was a wicked woman.

She was the real power in Sichuan, someone who’d grown up eating nothing but expensive things her whole life—so of course she was picky.

And now Tang Nanna was acknowledging it as a luxury dish!

“Here, Qing. Try it. It’s medicinal cuisine so it’s usually kind of whatever, but this one’s seasoning is actually pretty good?”

Right. Sichuan ate Sandstream Grub too.

Winter was the best season for it, so it just hadn’t shown up when Qing visited.

So while a rare spectacle unfolded—Qing, of all people, picking at her food—

Peng Daesan and Jegal Ihyeon exchanged a look.

Stiff expressions. Serious eyes.

When Peng Daesan tapped the table twice, Jegal Ihyeon gave a small nod.

Had the two of them plotted something?

Well, calling it a plot would be unfair. They were simply agreeing, as friends, that something needed to be said—some concern that needed to be addressed.

“Qing.”

“Hm? What?”

“This time... wasn’t it too much?”

“Too much what?”

“Jeong Ryujang, I mean. Merchants all over the Central Plains love to put ‘merchant ethics’ in their mouths, but isn’t it rare to find anyone who even practices a speck of it? From what I saw, he didn’t seem like someone you needed to treat so coldly.”

Someone had to stop that rampage, didn’t they?

That was what the two men had decided together.

And in this party, the people who could even attempt it—aside from them—weren’t there basically only Miss Gongsun... and if you went further, even within the Half-Sword Twin-Blade Society?

Qing blinked.

And just as she was about to speak—

“What the hell, you—are you done talking? So you’re saying our Qing should’ve batted her eyelashes at some filthy low-class merchant bastard? What, was she supposed to flatter him? Some Dog-Bone piece of trash merchant who crawled out of god knows where—he should be grateful just to host a noble guest and slam his face into the dirt! And he’s got the nerve to—what, this and that?”

Tang Nanna snapped into an ax-eyed glare and started growling.

GRRR.

If you asked Qing, this was exactly why you absolutely couldn’t leave Jayeo with Nanna.

They’d end up raising the world’s most precious little terror, for real...

Peng Daesan’s face visibly curdled.

“Okay, okay—Nanna, quiet. Um. San still hasn’t been... weathered enough. He’s innocent. Um. Pure?”

There was always a sky above the sky, a basement below the basement—

And for a rotten expression, there was always a rottener expression.

Peng Daesan’s face was exactly that.

“No, but isn’t it suspicious? In the first place, the strange plague is blowing up this badly, right? And he’s the guy who used the treatment medicine as bait to pull people in. But after he pulls them in by exploiting their desperation, suddenly it’s We’ll treat you like royalty? Why?”

“Didn’t Jeong Ryujang explain that?”

“No—none of it adds up. Why lie at all? If you need miners for your new coal mine, just say you need miners for your new coal mine and take them. Why go out of your way to hide it—so much that you’re even willing to ‘accept women’ as part of the lie?”

“It’s a coal mine. The local officials and gentry in this region would obviously get greedy. Trying to keep it quiet isn’t that strange—”

“Keep it quiet? What are you keeping quiet? Before we even went, we asked around, and everyone in the city already knew. ‘Some rich young master from Hangzhou got lucky, dug up an orchard, and found coal.’ That’s what they said—like it was common knowledge.”

“Mm.”

“And you might not know this, San, but if you’re feeding people tons of meat three times a day, letting them sleep on good beds, and on top of that paying a generous daily wage? If you recruit normally, applicants will line up in parade formation and circle the city wall seven and a half times.”

In the past, Qing was only one year into the martial world, and she’d lived through real, bottom-of-the-bottom vagrant life.

A job that good? Everyone would fight to get it.

And if a beggar dared step into the selection line, that day would become a day where someone “catches a beggar.”

In professional terms—

Kicking away the ladder!

It was exactly why beggars couldn’t get jobs and had no choice but to keep living as beggars.

What, Yunnan people were relaxed and lazy?

“If the terms were really top-tier—so good they prided themselves you’d still want to stay even after three years—then word would’ve spread, and miner applicants would’ve poured in like clouds.

“And on top of that, the whole operation is sloppy as hell for something so vicious. Even if it wasn’t us, the Diancang Sect masters could’ve forced Taepyeongja to talk. Then they’d stop by Shadow Market and come straight here, like, immediately.”

It was like someone wanted to bait people into charging in, furious over human trafficking disguised as “treatment medicine,” and then go—

Ta-da! Actually it wasn’t that! Surprise charm reversal!

The excuse felt too perfect.

Like it was prewritten.

“Mm.”

“And did you not see the way he acted? What does a merchant even believe in to hold his neck that stiff in front of martial artists—armed bandits with swords? He doesn’t have to shake like a leaf, but shouldn’t he at least be a little scared?”

Jeong Ryujang was far too calm.

Qing had pushed hard, demanding to see the manor lord’s face, and he hadn’t even seemed curious about the identity of this “passing knight-errant.”

“And like you said, San—this is kind of prejudice, but still. A kind merchant can exist. But a kind rich merchant can’t. If someone makes money, someone else loses money. How does a guy that young gather the capital to build some absurd mansion and start businesses like that in a ‘kind’ way?”

And on top of that—

His evil karma was a full twelve hundred.

Twelve. Hundred.

Isn’t that suspicious?

Even after hearing, seeing, and confirming everything, were they supposed to go, Ah, he’s such a solid young man. I really misunderstood, and just back off?

Peng Daesan’s words got stuck in his throat.

Because when you heard it like that, it really was suspicious.

Still...

Something.

With an aggrieved feeling, Peng Daesan shot Jegal Ihyeon a look.

This guy talked a lot, but he was smart. Surely he’d found a hole in Qing’s logic and could add something—anything—to balance this out.

And as if he’d been waiting for exactly that, Jegal Ihyeon opened his mouth.

“Indeed! This one is truly impressed. And furthermore—no matter how pure the coal is, if they pay labor costs to that extent, how could any profit remain? Clearly, there must be another intention.”

Peng Daesan’s eye twitched.

No, this bastard—

You’re betraying me here?

“See? Even Jegal says it’s suspicious. This is what I mean—San is too innocent, and it’ll be the death of him.”

“KHK.”

“Oh, our San. So innocent and soft-hearted—how will you ever survive this brutal rivers-and-lakes world? I’m worried. I’m really worried.”

“UGHH...!”

Peng Daesan was wronged.

He couldn’t not feel wronged.

It wasn’t that Qing was smarter than him.

It was that Qing had decided the conclusion first, and then inflated every doubt to match it.

Twelve hundred evil karma—no matter what, that wasn’t a number you could hand-wave away with Oh, I guess it was just a misunderstanding.

If he really was bad, then they’d have to make him suffer in a way where he couldn’t live or die properly.

And if he’d somehow racked up twelve hundred by being deceived by others, then that was still something you had to dig into and correct at the root—not something you could shrug off with Well, let’s do better next time.

And Peng Daesan had an even bigger reason he couldn’t help feeling wronged.

Because Jegal Ihyeon, that bastard...!

*****

Inside a room draped from wall to wall with long, dangling strands of brilliantly colored silk thread—

At the very front, on the raised seat of honor, a boy lifted a long-stem pipe to his lips.

A red ember flared.

And from the mouth of a middle-aged man, an ominous green poison miasma rose.

As it drifted slowly up into the air and scattered, the pattern embroidered in gold thread on a massive silk banner behind it revealed itself.

A centipede, a snake, a scorpion, a lizard, and a toad—five creatures coiled together, biting and writhing in a vicious battle.

These five were the 대표, the standard venomous creatures of the Central Plains.

So people bound them together and called them the Five Poisons.

And in this world, there was only one group that used that emblem.

The Five Poison Sect.

This was the Sect Leader Hall of the Five Poison Sect.

Which made it strange.

In the Five Poison Sect’s Sect Leader Hall, on the highest seat where the sect leader should sit—

Was a boy. Young enough to be called blue-green.

Even stranger—

Kneeling politely in front of the boy was a grown man.

The man everyone in the world called the Sect Leader of the Five Poison Sect—

Hu Cheonchi.

After the boy spent a while aggressively smoking poison herb, a woman—at some point, from somewhere—rose up with a smooth, sliding motion and whispered into his ear.

Hu Cheonchi flinched.

The woman gave a small smile with a face as white as wax—

And in the time it took to blink, she vanished without a trace.

“No need to care. It’s already dead.”

“D-dead...? Are you saying it’s a ghost?”

“Something worse. Hm.”

The boy took another pull of poison herb.

Then he spoke again, breathing out green poison miasma.

“I say, Cheonchi.”

“Yes, Poison Demon. Speak, and I will obey.”

Poison Demon.

The boy’s shocking identity.

If anyone else had been here, they would’ve gone HUUUH! and lost their minds on the spot.

Of course, if Qing saw that, she would’ve said something like, Who the hell is this Ten-Thousand-Poison Evil Demon, and why are you the only one acting like everyone should know that, but—

Still, by the rules of Central Plains sobriquets?

A two-character epithet was a privilege reserved for the very strongest—recognized by the world, counted on the fingers of one hand.

You could roughly guess how strong someone with a terrifying epithet like that would be.

But someone called that, wearing the shape of a tiny boy—

It was grotesque.

Or, you know.

The classic tragedy of a self-assigned epithet.

A severe disorder where your personal standards of “cool” are completely divorced from everyone else’s.

Poison Demon took another pull.

And—

HOO.

“A guest is coming. And not a polite one, either.”

KYAHAHA—somewhere, a small laugh.

Hu Cheonchi rolled his eyes—

And caught a glimpse of a woman’s hem slipping behind a pillar, hiding herself.

Something worse than a ghost...

A light chill crawled up Hu Cheonchi’s spine.

“Our great plan is in motion. I worry that taking in an annoying guest will create unnecessary trouble. But we can’t exactly refuse to greet them, either.”

“Then... we should go meet them.”

“You’ll find it quite entertaining. It seems there’s a woman from the Tang Clan among the guests.”

That was the moment.

Strands of crimson killing intent burst from Hu Cheonchi’s eyes.

Poison Demon smiled—satisfied.