Chapter 572: Toward That Remote, Rural Backwater (4)

“I don’t care. Hmph.”

She snapped over and flopped face-down, so when Qing pushed up on an elbow and looked down, that little mouth was jutting way out.

And then she goes and makes it cute—which softens you up.

“I’m going to pay my respects to the Grand Head of House. Not coming?”

“Hmph. Don’t care. Go wherever.”

“I really am going.”

“Go or don’t.”

Ah, seriously. How am I supposed to endure that?

That was the moment Qing’s patience shattered. She reached straight out and pinched Tang Nana’s upper and lower lips between thumb and forefinger.

Call it her way of protesting, but on that Blooming Five Beauties face—already a naturally round, gentle face—those lips poked out long only made her cuter.

“Ugh, this little snout—slice it up and you’d get five plates’ worth.”

“Mmf! Mmf! Mmmmff!”

“You keep acting cute and you’re going to get it. What are you, seven? All lip.”

When she let go, Tang Nana was about to cry.

Those big eyes filled so bright with wet that Qing could see her own face reflected, and that, unavoidably, led to a thought: Mm. My face. Pretty, sure—but in a place with so few mirrors I still can’t get used to my own reflection.

“You’re too mean. You don’t even try to understand how I feel.”

A brief, useless bit of self-praise, and then—no forced tears like those she squeezes out now and then at the Myriad Flowers Pavilion. This was real hurt, swelling up wet.

Qing ruffled Tang Nana’s hair.

“I know exactly how you feel. You worry I’ll strain myself again, or that we’ll get entangled with the wrong bastards out there and end up chased around like last time. You think I don’t know you’re worrying about that?”

“If you know, how can you be like this?”

“I do know. I said I do. But what is there to get tangled with out there? Hardly anyone lives across Qinghai in the first place. And it’s Kunlun’s territory—who’s going to pull a blade and jump us like last time?”

“Even so—when the mothers tell me to stay, you should be the one telling me to come with you. Do you think I’m trying to go have fun? I’m the one who’s always nursing you; my chest gets sliced open and eaten for it. How am I supposed to just sit on my hands and wait?”

“That was only the shameful past of a weak me—when I was barely a super-transcendent wannabe. Now I’m Flower Realm. And you? At your level, there is no such thing as worrying over the great, youngest Flower-Realm Heavenly Flower Sword, ma’am-ma’am-ma’am. For the record, there are three ma’ams because I’m about three times as great.”

Nana’s tearful face crumpled further—hurt melting into are you kidding me.

Qing smiled softly and stroked her hair.

“I want to go with my Nana too. But are we going just to play this one time? I should be building up goodwill with your family, shouldn’t I? If people say, Look at that Heavenly Flower Sword—she dragged Nana off even after we said it was the Head of House’s birthday; I’m disappointed, then next time I try to go anywhere with you they won’t look kindly on it.”

“......”

“If I bank goodwill now, then later, when my Nana says she’s going to see me, they’ll say, Ah, the Heavenly Flower Sword—yes, for her you should go, and they’ll let you. Right?”

“...Yeah.”

“I’m doing this because I want to see you for a long, long time. In my heart I’d tie you up and carry you off even if you said you weren’t coming. Where does my patient think she’s running? But—don’t we want the long run? Shall we drain the pond to net a few fish?”

Drain the pond to catch the fish.

Yes, empty the water and you’ll have a full cart of carp today—and nothing to raise or catch ever again.

Don’t sell off the future for the gain in front of you.

“I’m heartsick too. A trip without my Nana—just thinking it, my chest is splitting already. What do I do? How do I live without you? What if I die of loneliness? Ah—ahh— I—I’m dying. Hurry. Hug me. Hurry.”

“Stop. Enough.”

“Not going to hug me?”

Nana snorted.

But the corners of her mouth were twitching.

“Honestly. Qing—how do you talk that smooth? No wonder you lure every last scoundrel man and woman—ah, not Sister Gyeon. Fine. I’ll let myself be fooled this one time.”

This is Qing’s true skill.

That fearsome mouth—the formless fatal poison even the Grand Head of House acknowledged—wasn’t only for fogging an enemy’s reason and whipping them into rage.

When she commits to running that tongue, she melts a person’s heart. Call it heart-tongue, the realm where the tongue speaks for the mind.

“Come on—let’s go see Poison Grandpa—no, the Grand Head of House. Mm... and Iri, what are you doing? What is that supposed to mean?”

“Woo. Woo.”

Seol Iri, lips stuck way out, made a sound. What—an imitation duck?

While Qing paused to puzzle out the meaning—

“Where do you think you’re sticking that snout?”

Tang Nana darted a hand in first and pinched Seol Iri’s lips, giving them a good shake—

A rare sight: on that usually faint face, a sharp, crumpled expression spread.

****

Poison Grandpa still looked every bit the immortal.

One mustn’t forget he is also a terrifying elder forever tinkering with ingenious, reputation-killing extreme toxics.

“Oh? If it isn’t the Heavenly Flower Sword. What brings you to look up an old back-room relic?”

“I came to ask you something.”

“The moment an old man loves best. All right then—what—mm, hold on. First we need tea. Madam Sichuan!”

A thought pricked Qing:

If all the matrons working in a Sichuan household are “Madam Sichuan,” what is this—Madam Sichuan No. 1 through No. 100? Numbered tags?

In truth, he wasn’t calling any one person in particular—just addressing the lower staff with a gentle praise-name, per the Grand Head of House’s kindly nature.

Back home you might say “Auntie,” “Ma’am,” “Mother,” and so on.

“So—what are you curious about?”

“Ah—do you happen to know anything about a constitution called the Corpse-Blood Poisoner?”

“Mm? Corpse-blood poisoner? That ‘corpse-blood’—the dead blood you draw out with leech-like things?”

“Yes. Probably.”

“Hmmm.”

He stroked his long beard.

Madam Sichuan set the well-steeped tea down still in the pot, and he kept stroking.

“Nothing comes to mind. I racked my head for any such type among poison adepts.”

“Ah...”

“Only—those grand-sounding notions? Names that sound like something—most of them are phantoms. I suspect that one is too.”

“Phantoms?”

“Do you know what a ‘poison person’ is supposed to be?”

Among poison practitioners there’s a dreamt-of apex: the mythic state called the All-Poisons Body, the “poison person.”

Your marrow secretes venom; your blood itself turns lethal—the final evolution of poison arts.

If your body generates toxin automatically, your poison arts are limitless—and in a pinch you just spray blood. You become poison itself.

“Wow. A literal massacre weapon.”

“Sounds nice? There’s no such thing.”

“Pardon?”

“No such thing. Just something people imagined. If venom soaks into your marrow, you die—how would you live and belch toxin forever? You could spin a hypothesis about generating poison stock in the middle dantian and somehow doing this or that—but if that were feasible, then before the Heavenly Martial Emperor, some ‘Sovereign of Poison-Blood’ would have appeared.”

“Eh.”

He laughed, belly-deep.

“You keep one of these shiny lures around and it’s easy to hook disciples, and a high goal stirs ambition. You know how martial folk go on about a ‘Heaven-Forcing Realm’ and a ‘Realm of Nature’? Why name realms no one in history has ever reached? Because they don’t exist in the first place.”

“The Heaven-Forcing Realm and the Realm of Nature don’t exist? Didn’t—uh—the Heavenly Martial Emperor achieve them?”

“He dwelt at the Life-and-Death Boundary. Why is it called that? It’s the stage that leaps past life and death—ascends to become an undying immortal of the heavens. He did ascend; he abided in the Life-and-Death Boundary and then simply went up.”

“Then why talk about the Heaven-Forcing and the Nature realms?”

“Didn’t the Heavenly Martial Emperor say it himself? When people pestered him about realms: that he had attained enough to impose his will upon heaven. Proper orthodox fighters took that as ‘the next realm.’ But in my eyes, he was simply the sort to speak strong: My philosophy is enough to go against heaven. That’s all.”

“And the Realm of Nature?”

“Same as with your ‘poison person.’ People say: if you refuse ascension at the Life-and-Death Boundary and keep honing, won’t you become a superhuman who wields the very world’s nature like hands and feet.”

Which is to say, “Corpse-Blood Poisoner” is likely one more made-up thing.

As the supposed poisoner herself, Qing found that... unconvincing.

“Ah—you’re going to Kunlun, you said. Is that what you’re going to ask about? Hmm. Well, when it comes to sorcery, the story bends a little.”

“It does? How?”

“If you chase the roots of martial arts far enough back, they run to that subcontinental sorcery of old...”

He skipped what Qing had already heard.

Qing used the gap to crunch a cookie. Oh—these fried honey cakes. As expected, snacks are best in the old style. Real honey. I couldn’t get these even back home.

Those fried honey cakes spread across the Central Plains and rattled the country—a true original craze.

Bitter tea and sweet honey cakes—oh, even with a full stomach, they slide down.

Qing skipped the bits she knew by heart.

“Only—martial arts and sorcery have become wholly different arts now. A martial artist pens qi up in the dantian—thus he holds a world within the self. So when he reaches a realm and forms a complete inner world, his personal will defies and bends the world. That is Ideation.”

“Ah. You’re talking about Harmony.”

Qing couldn’t help a little shoulder-pride.

“Sorcery, by contrast, uses not the person but the world held by all. People belong to the world too, and sorcery bottles the common imaginations—slanted just a little—into forms: language, liturgy, rites.”

“Mm. I don’t get it at all.”

“Why, there are ‘formations’ as well. Since antiquity, geomancy held that the energies of heaven and earth affect people; a formation is precisely the act of imprisoning that imagination within form.”

“Mm.”

Qing recalled the Heavenly Demon Tomb.

And even now, isn’t the First Heavenly Demon—ruined into a shut-in—lurking somewhere in her inner depths?

Is that sorcery?

Parasitic minds exist everywhere—spirits that seize bodies show up in every land.

“Well, that’s just as I heard it. When I was much younger, I wondered—if the ‘poison person’ is impossible by martial arts, might sorcery manage it? But there are too many charlatans in the world; people stopped believing in sorcery. So in our age, the orthodox paths of thaumaturgy have all but vanished. What remains—barely feels like sorcery at all.”

What remains are the Corpse-Puppet Arts, those ‘great arts’ they still call branches of martial work, formations, acupoint sealing—

“Wait—acupoint sealing is sorcery?”

“You’d know if you studied medicine even a little. If you press here a bit, a person’s speech stops? Muscles seize? They sleep like the dead? Does that sound like physiology to you?”

“Ah.”

“Alchemy is the same. If you leave a ‘cold’ herb lying around, does it freeze? If a ‘hot’ herb sits there, does it catch fire? But if you marry them well and brew them with care, out comes a wondrous great elixir with real efficacy.”

In the end, this means: go ask Kunlun.

Still, it wasn’t a total wash. Bit by bit, this primitive, ancient, ‘uncivilized’ Central Plains grows oddly persuasive.

Everything seems plausible—except me.

Mm. Thinking harder would only hurt. And at this point, what good would it do to rattle my ontology?

I am here. My friends are here.

That’s enough.

Have another honey cake.

I eat, therefore I am.

Qing smoothly rerouted the train of thought.

“Ah, Elder—have you got any fun poisons you’ve been working on lately?”

His eyes flashed.

When a man’s hobby-hinge gets tapped just right, you hear the click: I was born for this explanation. The flood was coming.

“Ah! Yes. I’ve perfected a few blends of late, and—”