Bark!
Squeak!
Hwanggu and Noe-jin were already making a fuss, demanding to know why they hadn’t gotten any. Jin Cheon-hee hurriedly handed them a piece each, then warmed the dried fish with Scorching Yang Energy and set it in the middle of the table on a sheet of paper, using it as an improvised plate.
Drawn in by the savory smell, Yeo Ha-ryoon took a bite.
Crunch.
“It’s delicious.”
“Yeah, right? Eat up. You look like you’ve lost even more weight.”
“That’s just in your head, hyung. I’ve gotten bigger.”
“No, you’re all angles. This is what happens when you live on things like Fasting Pills. Eat more.”
Yeo Ha-ryoon looked like he was about to argue, but he swallowed it and kept picking at the snacks his older brother pushed toward him.
It really was delicious.
“Anyway… I know you want peace, hyung, but there’s nothing I can do to help. Cheol Mu-baek already handled everything, and the second mission they gave me was basically a formality. There hasn’t been any properly transmitted information. I’m sorry.”
“You’ve got plenty of enemies inside the Demonic Cult. It can’t be helped.”
Twice, he’d managed to hold him back and stop the killing, but only to shave a little off the Heavenly Demon’s bloodbath. In the first place, Jin Cheon-hee hadn’t expected Yeo Ha-ryoon, whose sensibilities were fundamentally different from ordinary people, to suddenly become good at politics inside the Demonic Cult. No matter how closely Ilkana shadowed him as an adjutant, Yeo Ha-ryoon was still Yeo Ha-ryoon.
Isn’t a martial-arts novel protagonist always treated like an alien existence by everyone around him?
“So, did you find the Blood Immortal Cult? That was your first mission, wasn’t it?”
“A large number of Blood Immortal Cult spies were discovered inside the Demonic Cult. The Heavenly Demon personally beat them to death.”
She must have been furious. She lived beyond good and evil, but traitors were the one thing she never tolerated.
“Still, I didn’t think she’d act personally.”
Even in Supreme Heavenly Demon, the Blood Immortal Cult caused chaos inside the Demonic Cult. Back then, it happened while the Heavenly Demon was in seclusion, preparing for ascension. So why were the ones who were supposed to crawl out only after she’d finished everything and gone into preparation being discovered now?
Ha… hahaha. Is this… because of my influence after all? Even Ilkana is alive…
Did the butterfly effect really twist that far?
Yeo Ha-ryoon continued, voice even.
“And the place we found while chasing those Blood Immortal Cult dogs is here. Quite a few of them are hiding in this area.”
“So you found them?”
Sip.
“Not… yet.”
Yeo Ha-ryoon answered with a solemn expression.
“If it’s hard to find their tail, it means they’re buried deep. It also means this place is safe for now, so don’t worry too much.”
“Hyung. You don’t have to comfort me.”
“It’s not comfort. In a way, it means you arrived early, before it could grow bigger.”
“Is that a strategist’s intuition? Or your weird, uncanny prediction again?”
At that, Jin Cheon-hee looked at Yeo Ha-ryoon with faint surprise.
That really is protagonist-level intuition.
Even so, this is the world inside Supreme Heavenly Demon, and I’m a reader who fell in from the outside. In the novel I read, you were the protagonist. What am I supposed to do about a story that insists on revolving around you?
Jin Cheon-hee deliberately changed the subject.
“Come to think of it, how do you track the Blood Immortal Cult?”
“They’re fanatics who worship the Blood Immortal Cult. We just need to find the Blood Immortal Cult True Energy.”
Jin Cheon-hee put on a deliberately exaggerated look of curiosity.
“Oh? Blood Immortal Cult True Energy. So how do you find that?”
“This one finds it.”
Yeo Ha-ryoon snapped his fingers, and something appeared in the corner of the room.
Meow…
It was a small cat, pitch-black from head to toe.
Jin Cheon-hee blinked. “A spiritual beast?”
“Hm. You figured it out right away. It’s a Black Snow Cat.”
Bark!
Hwanggu let out a low bark.
He couldn’t smell the Black Snow Cat at all. Hwanggu had been losing face in more ways than one lately, and while that meant the Black Snow Cat was anything but ordinary, Hwanggu still looked quietly offended.
Jin Cheon-hee ruffled Hwanggu’s head.
Black Snow Cat. One of the top spiritual beasts within the Demonic Cult. It showed up in Supreme Heavenly Demon too. As Yeo Ha-ryoon’s pet, it was used to track enemies.
Meoow?
The Black Snow Cat padded over and rubbed its cheek against Jin Cheon-hee’s finger.
Yeo Ha-ryoon watched, openly surprised. “Interesting. It doesn’t cozy up to anyone but me.”
“Maybe I smell delicious.”
Bark!
Squeak!
Hwanggu and Noe-jin made noises of protest, clearly displeased by the newcomer.
“Want some beef jerky too? I grilled it with Scorching Yang Energy.”
Jin Cheon-hee offered a strip, and the cat gulped it down in an instant.
Grrr!
Squeak, squeak!
Watching the Black Snow Cat get beef jerky only made the two of them more indignant.
“Aigoo, let it go,” Jin Cheon-hee muttered, as if he were talking to children. “Don’t I feed you two good things separately every day?”
Two spiritual beasts, and both of them greedy.
As he handed over another strip, Jin Cheon-hee asked, “So how’s the Northern Sea Ice Palace these days?”
“There’s an epidemic. Not enough people have caught it yet to say it’s spread widely, and the transmission method is strange enough that calling it an epidemic feels off, but still.”
An epidemic?
Jin Cheon-hee’s eyes widened slightly.
Yeo Ha-ryoon went on as if it were nothing. “Since there aren’t many patients yet, the Northern Sea Ice Palace doesn’t consider it serious. They’re taking measures, too.”
“What’s it called?”
Yeo Ha-ryoon shrugged. “I don’t know. People here call it Confusion Fever.”
“Confusion Fever. Symptoms?”
“I don’t know that far either. They said they gathered the patients in the Healing Center, so why don’t you go there?”
“Thanks.”
Jin Cheon-hee sprang to his feet.
He opened the door to go out, then hesitated, glanced up at the ceiling, and greeted someone as if they’d been there the whole time.
“Ilkana. Long time no see. I thought about pretending I didn’t notice since you looked like you were on a mission, but still. It’s been a while.”
Then, as if dumbfounded by being addressed so casually, someone wearing a mask dropped down with a thud.
“You noticed, of course, brother.”
“Even Hwanggu noticed.”
Sniff!
Ilkana grumbled, clearly unhappy. “So the Black Snow Cat’s better at stealth than me? Dammit. That stings.”
“Don’t start. You’re fine.”
Jin Cheon-hee pulled something black from his medicine box. It was something called chocolate back on Earth.
“Eat it when your sugar dips. Sugar’s hard to come by out here.”
“Thank you.”
“Ha-ryoon-ah. You’re here, so you wouldn’t have gotten yours yet.”
“Hm?”
Jin Cheon-hee looked at the snack box again.
The last piece.
The one he’d saved and saved, the one he’d meant to eat on a hard day, after sending the rest to the people he cared about.
“…”
His hesitation was brief.
“Here. You eat it too.”
He walked back to the table and set the chocolate down.
“If you return to the Demonic Cult, it would’ve arrived there already, but it might’ve spoiled, so it’s better to eat it now.”
And if Yeo Ha-ryoon went back to the Demonic Cult, they would be parting again. Even if something did arrive later, it wouldn’t be the same, and Jin Cheon-hee swallowed the words before they could slip out.
Yeo Ha-ryoon studied the black piece. “What is this?”
“What I used to eat back in my hometown whenever my sugar dropped.”
“The color’s black.”
“It’s delicious. Sister Gongsun Yeong ate one and kept trying to steal more, so I had a hard time defending it.”
Chocolate stamped with letters of the alphabet. He’d tried so hard to recreate what he’d eaten on Earth, then given up when the shape refused to come out right. Still, after distributing it to the people he treasured, this Murim world had started to feel like home, if only a little.
Writing in the letters that I hoped it suited their taste was embarrassing, but still… it’s the maker’s lingering attachment, isn’t it?
I hope they enjoy it. That chocolate. Common on Earth, but here, only I have it.
Jin Cheon-hee grinned.
“Hm. Yeah. Giving away the last one like this is the best.”
Did he feel what his brother meant?
Yeo Ha-ryoon nodded, expression solemn. “I’ll enjoy it, hyung.”
“Yeah.”
As if shaking off the lingering attachment tied to that last piece, Jin Cheon-hee turned and shot out of the room like an arrow.
Ilkana watched his back for a long time before speaking. “Brother hasn’t changed at all.”
“…”
Yeo Ha-ryoon took a slow sip of alcohol.
If he used his internal energy again, he would return to a body that couldn’t taste. So in this moment, he had to cling to the sensation of being alive as much as possible.
Because what sustained humanity didn’t come from morality, conscience, or refined sensibility. It came from trivial things: eating, drinking, feeling pain, catching scents in the air.
While Yeo Ha-ryoon quietly savored the alcohol his older brother had made, Ilkana asked, “By the way… Demonic Cult brother. Why didn’t you tell Big Brother that the Blood Immortal Cult might be behind the epidemic?”
Yeo Ha-ryoon answered without hesitation. “Because whether I tell him or not, hyung will go treat patients. And protecting him is my job as his younger brother. Besides, if hyung starts treating them… those Blood Immortal Cult bastards will show their faces.”
“…I see.”
“There’s no need to burden a physician’s mind with useless words.”
But wouldn’t Jin Cheon-hee have noticed already? Ilkana thought.
He understands why Yeo Ha-ryoon stayed quiet, worrying over a brother who walks into danger on purpose and grinds his limbs against blades.
The problem is that the opponent is Jin Cheon-hee. The scheming he shows once in a while, despite looking pretty and a little dim, is beyond ordinary people.
“Well,” Ilkana said at last, “it’d be nice if we can handle it on our end, Demonic Cult brother.”
***
Waiting until an epidemic has grown huge is already too late.
In the past, there had been an incident where the Blood Immortal Cult tried to trigger an outbreak. Watching them contaminate a water source to spread cholera had been genuinely appalling. Fortunately, back then, it wasn’t a disease unique to Murim, so Jin Cheon-hee could respond with his own knowledge.
But what if it was a Murim-specific illness this time?
The worry surged harder because the patient he’d treated just before this had been a case of Nine Yang Severed Meridians. Even so, knowing the future of the Northern Sea Ice Palace and the Ayesha Kingdom, he couldn’t stay still as a physician.
Standing in front of the Healing Center, Jin Cheon-hee covered his mouth and nose with cloth and pulled on the gloves he’d prepared. He also made sure to tell Hwanggu and Noe-jin to wait far away for a while, because he didn’t know whether this was a disease that could infect animals, too.
Around the Healing Center, tents for the poor had been pitched. Someone clutched a child and fell to their knees at Jin Cheon-hee’s feet.
By now, Jin Cheon-hee had learned enough of the Ayesha language to understand what they meant.
“Young Master, please. Our child has no rice to eat. If you can give us anything, please…”
He’d heard that thanks to geothermal heat and reliable precipitation in this region, there was no real fear of famine, whether through cold-climate crops or fish from the huge lake. Of course, farming here meant hardy crops, and most people still relied on hunting and fishing, but even so, there supposedly wasn’t a shortage.
He didn’t stop to wonder where all that food had gone. He simply reached into his travel bag, hurriedly pulled out a small bamboo tube, and handed it over.
Clumsy Ayesha spilled from Jin Cheon-hee’s mouth. “Boil this whole thing. It’ll turn into porridge. It’ll keep you from starving for now.”
“Thank you. Thank you!”
The lands ruled by the Northern Sea Ice Palace were a place where the gap between rich and poor was unprecedentedly vast. In Hangzhou, at least, officials were dispatched to manage taxes and military supplies, and relief rice was distributed when necessary, and the climate wasn’t as harsh as it was here.
Here, there were almost no poor people with all ten toes intact.
They’d imported that many ondol heated floors, and yet there was no ondol in Yeo Ha-ryoon’s safe house.
Jin Cheon-hee didn’t need to ask where they all went. The Northern Sea Ice Palace martial artists’ homes. Guest rooms in lavish, enormous houses that didn’t even have owners staying in them.
He’d even heard they built separate dog rooms larger than people’s houses and installed ondol in there, too.