Chapter 728: When Going Out, Maintain Your Dignity (22)

GRRRNG, GRRNG—

a phlegm-rattling breath scraped out, irregular and ugly.

On the bed lay a deathly pale woman. Even without a hint of color in her face, that beauty was easily peerless under heaven.

In the room where that bed stood, the stench of medicine was so thick it made your head hurt.

Sure, medicinal scent is supposed to be “fragrant” in its own way, but too much of anything is poison. When the fumes of decoctions fill a room and concentrate, what you get is not “fragrance” but the feeling your nose is about to drop off.

In front of the bed sat an old man with a face like a blank wall—Doctor Je, whom the locals usually called Elder Je, or just Doctor Je.

“There’s no chance she’ll ever wake up. All her organs are blown. Liver, intestines, every last thing in there is bleeding and full of pooled blood, so—hah, tsk tsk.”

Doctor Je shook his head.

Compared to the medicine of Qing’s homeland, Central Plains medicine was primitive. Of course, compared to the medicine of this era’s Western Regions, it was developed enough to be on a different level entirely, but still. All in all.

“She’s tough-boned enough that she’s still breathing, but she’s already a corpse. That swelling in her belly? All blood. You should ready your hearts.”

The listeners’ faces twisted with grief.

Tears welled in the women’s eyes; a choked “no...” slipped out, and just as a single teardrop was about to roll down—

“Ugh, hff.”

The dying woman, Qing, let out a strangled noise.

Had Qing finally died?

To the regret of certain enemies of Qing, it was just the sound you made when something hurt like hell.

The instant her mind surfaced, the pain hit.

Her breath snagged in her throat and a cold sweat started to seep out with a savage wave of abdominal pain.

For someone from Qing’s homeland—what this world would call a “modern person”—it was a very familiar empirical fear:

Wow, something has gone really, really wrong with my guts.

“I’m fucking dying, aaaaagh, somebody—somebody save me. What the—wow, wow, fuck. I’m seriously dying here.”

Just the usual “I’m gonna die” yelling.

The kind of thing someone with a brutally bad stomachache would shout; a bit of a phrase older men favored, but still, that groaning to let some of the pain out through your mouth.

Except.

When it really, really hurts, you can’t even talk.

If you were still capable of groaning like this, it meant you were barely hanging on to your sanity.

“Qing?” “Lady Ximen!” “My lady!”

Two people lunged for her at once and tried to grab her hand, only for their hands to smack together in midair and knock each other away.

Moyong Juhee and Seol Iri glared at each other over the clash—sudden “who-gets-to-hold-her-hand” duel—and Qing’s pain-glazed eyes trembled.

What the hell, I’m dying over here and these two... playing patty-cake?

“Too much stimulation. Quit it.”

Qing tried to wave a hand and instead wrapped both arms around her own belly; that made the abdominal pain flare and drag chest pain up with it, clamping her breath shut again. Another strangled groan leaked out.

Grinding her teeth, she forced her gaze around the room.

A whole crowd of familiar faces.

And then—an unfamiliar elder studying her with a look full of question marks.

Who’s that? Don’t know that face.

“Uh—nnngh—hello?”

Qing’s pain threshold was impressively high.

She felt like she might drop dead, but not quite drop-dead level yet, so she went ahead and dipped her head in greeting.

“H-how are you alive? How are you even talking?”

Qing blinked.

What? “How are you alive”?

So I was supposed to be dead? Or, wait, don’t tell me—

“Uh, did I die or something? Like, did I just... resurrect?”

“No, not that.”

Qing let out a small breath of relief at that.

So it’s not resurrection.

Good. Even for me, “came back from the dead” would be a bit much. Once you go all the way to dying and coming back, that’s not even “person” territory anymore, you know?

Watching Qing visibly relax, Doctor Je was the one left speechless.

“How is a patient with her abdominal cavity full of blood that... fine?”

“Ah, that explains why I couldn’t breathe right. And I’m not fine, I feel like I’m dying. Seriously. So, right, if you could give me some poppy...”

Her lungs couldn’t inflate, so even a shallow breath filled her chest and sent pain crashing through.

Qing stroked her own belly and—oh.

All of this is internal bleeding? How am I alive?

From the perspective of Physician Ximen Qing, proud owner of a Corpse-Blood Poison Body constitution, her professional opinion was: well, the blood didn’t actually leave the body, right?

Thanks to the constitution, the pooled blood inside wasn’t rotting—or more precisely, even if it did rot, it couldn’t really do her any harm. Saying it that way made her sound not at all like a human being, but anyway.

Doctor Je hurriedly reached out.

Qing saw the shape of his hand and obediently held out her wrist for him to take her pulse. As he felt it, his expression wrinkled deeper and deeper into honest incomprehension.

“Why are you alive? Why is your pulse... fine?”

Everyone’s eyes swung to Doctor Je at that.

“Why are you alive?”

Was that really something a doctor was supposed to say?

Doctor Je coughed, harrumph.

“Seeing as you’ve got enough breath to complain, you don’t need poppy. More importantly, just how strong are you? No, are masters at your level really supposed to be fine even if all their organs explode?”

“If you learned some special Divine Art, maybe you could be, right?”

“I’ve never heard of such an art.”

“Come on, Central Plains is huge. And did they really ‘explode’ that badly?”

“They’re just... shredded.”

A bruise is, fundamentally, a form of hemorrhage.

Tiny blood vessels burst, blood pools under the skin and discolors it. In this case, the explosion’s shockwave had given her internal organs a vicious set of deep bruises.

And the shockwave hadn’t been the only problem.

“What about the shrapnel?”

“Mm. Patients don’t usually ask that first, but the assistant physicians said they pulled out what was lodged shallow and sticking out. The stuff driven in deep wouldn’t come out and didn’t fester, so they left it.”

“No wonder I felt like I was dying.”

The abdominal pain was so overwhelming she hadn’t really noticed, but now that she paid attention, the little flares of muscle pain—if you could even call it “muscle pain”—the raw ripping sensations and all the foreign-body discomfort all over were, apparently, shrapnel.

“You look like you’ve studied medicine. I don’t need to lecture you at length. Ah, where did you learn it?”

“Great Langjung took a quick look at me once.”

Relief washed over Doctor Je’s face.

The Central Plains medical world ran on connections just like everything else. For a Central Plains person, there was no better guarantee of someone’s identity than their connections.

Some doctors saved anyone who came through the door, some only saved those with money, and some made a point of trying to save the decent ones. Doctor Je fell in the last category.

“Great Langjung, hm? Seems he decided not to write me down as some butcher, at least. Watching me dash over here, not even checking my own condition and begging someone to save a patient, he must have figured I wasn’t a fiend. Anyway, you know your own state; talk it through among yourselves.”

He’d just explained why he’d immediately mobilized people to treat Qing.

If someone was so desperate to save another that they didn’t even realize how badly hurt they themselves were, they probably weren’t a bad person—that was his thinking. With that, he left the room.

In the room that remained, Qing looked at her friends.

With a strangely pissed-off expression.

“Auugh. That hurts. I’m dying. Owww.”

She flopped back, milking it.

From both sides came anxious “are you okay”s as Moyong Juhee and Seol Iri, who had snuck around to the far side of the bed at some point, grabbed her hands in unison.

Peng Daesan simply watched in silence, three deep furrows carved between his brows.

What, like glaring at me is going to accomplish anything.

“Heavenly Flower Sword? Don’t you have something to discuss with me, your Deputy-Adjutant? Minor Water Art, really? Of all people under heaven, the Heavenly Flower Sword is using Minor Water Art?”

The reply didn’t come from Qing but from Moyong Juhee.

“Minor Water Art, what are you even saying? That wasn’t Minor Water Art, that was Divine Lady’s Hand.”

“Divine Lady’s Hand? No, that’s not—hold on. You’re telling me Golden-Sun Sword Blossom already knew? That the Heavenly Flower Sword was using Minor Water Ar—”

“Di. vine. La. dy’s. Hand.”

“...that she’d learned Divine Lady’s Hand.”

Now everyone’s stare swung to Moyong Juhee.

A wordless interrogation: so you knew?

Well, they had run around Nosan with their faces covered together, after all.

“Divine Lady’s Hand is a martial art Master created. It might look like Minor Water Art, sure? It’s perfectly understandable someone might misunderstand it that way? But Divine Lady’s Hand is Divine Lady’s Hand.”

Sima Chunbong caught on immediately.

So: it was Minor Water Art, but also not Minor Water Art, it was Divine Lady’s Hand; Master knew; and Master had stated she’d block it under the Grand Matron’s name.

Of course, Seol Iri didn’t care whether it was Divine Lady’s Hand or Minor Water Art. She just held Qing’s hand tight, brows scrunched harder than Qing had ever seen them.

Highest-ever reading on the Seol Iri Observation Index.

Yikes. Gunyeong is really pissed.

Qing slid her eyes away and muttered.

“First of all, sorry. But I didn’t die, okay? And I was sure I wouldn’t die, okay? I never once went, ‘I’ll die and everyone else will live.’ I don’t have that kind of plan and I’m never going to have that kind of plan. I can state that clearly. Your humble narrator here has a firm survivalist philosophy of rolling around in shit if that’s what it takes to stay alive in this world, and I hereby state that for the record...”

A vein bulged on everyone’s forehead.

“That’s what you’re going with?”

Peng Daesan rumbled in an ultra-ultra-ultra-low register—back home they’d have called it a subsonic growl.

Qing suddenly found the pattern on the blanket absolutely fascinating.

“At worst I’m going to be laid up for a few days. It’s not like I got hit by sword-qi, it was just some flying metal shards—”

“Heavenly Flower Sword? A Heaven-Shaking Thunder thrown by a palace master is ‘just’ some metal shards? That was an explosive shell forged by a weapons merchant using the Subtlety of Nuclear Fission. Do you not grasp that the fact you are currently alive is an absolute miracle? From the start, as the one who came here with us as representative of the martial world—no, as someone who, together with us and the rest of the Central Plains and the entire world, must stand at the center and lead this age in the right direction—do you possess even the slightest awareness of that role? The Heavenly Flower Sword’s existence is not just for the Heavenly Flower Sword but as the optimal subject for the development of the entire martial world...”

The part about applying the Subtlety of Nuclear Fission did make Qing reflect a little.

Subtlety of Nuclear Fission: you poured qi, and poured, and poured again into a weapon, filling it to the brim and then overfilling it until it couldn’t withstand the pressure and shattered.

And it wasn’t just about making it shatter. It was an art for forcing that explosion to blast in a single direction.

The shards of the broken weapon were lethal just from their speed, but every shard still held qi. All those fragments flung in every direction became countless pieces of qi-charged throwing weapons.

So they’d stuffed Heaven-Shaking Thunder full of qi in the same way, coating every shard with power.

Maybe I really did almost die.

Maybe Heaven-Breaking Demonic Qi actually did bust its ass for once.

That Heaven-Breaking Demonic Qi had vanished without a trace compared to its former monstrous volume and was now just a fingernail-sized smear stuck to one corner of her dantian wall.

For some reason, it felt pleasantly warm around there, her other qi knotted and snarled in a huge mess. The flow was so fierce it felt like all her qi together was pounding on the wall where Heaven-Breaking Demonic Qi clung.

Didn’t feel harmful, though.

Heaven-Breaking Demonic Qi was laughing......

Everything after that was nagging without much nutritional value.

Still, thanks to it, the others’ attitudes softened a little.

Huh. Chunbong really can talk. You do have to respect the brainy types’ ability to run their mouths.

“Ahem. Anyway, the point is, I am perfectly—ACK!”

Qing shrieked as a bolt of agony shot through her.

Seol Iri held up the finger she’d just jabbed into Qing’s side and stared at her with a long, steady look of reproach.

Gunyeong. Even you, Gunyeong...

“You’re mean.”

“...Yeah. Sorry.”

Seol Iri didn’t answer, just kneaded Qing’s hand hard.

Qing tried, with some effort, to change the subject.

“More importantly—right, so, I mean, yes, that, exactly, you know how much I—no, wait. What happened to the assassins? Hold up—did you just say ‘palace’? How do you know that? Did you catch them? You caught them, right?”

The thought hit her and she snapped the question out.

Sima Chunbong nodded.

With three super-transcendent masters and two “stragglers” on their side, failing to capture a gravely wounded super-transcendent assassin sandwiched between wounded comrades would have been the real scandal.

Qing’s expression turned urgent.

“Did you kill them? Or—no, if it was the palace, that means those bastards are their people, right? Where are they now—wait, those bastards are hardcore. They’re the type to bite poison and die the moment you blink—”

“Measures have already been taken. It’s not something I can decide on my level...”

Qing’s face lit up in pure delight.

So. They’d kept those bastards alive.