Chapter 123: Poisoning (3)
Translator: bjgoofy
"Cho, sweetie, wait here with Seol noona. Mommy and Daddy have somewhere to go for a bit. Someone's sick, so Mommy's going to check on them. Okay?"
"That's right, Cho, stay with Auntie. You've had fun with Auntie these past few days, haven't you? Now say, 'Have a safe trip, Daddy.'"
-Tssrit!
After telling Cho to wait for us, we followed Strategist Zhuge Hu to the Guest Hall, where ordinary visitors to the Murim Alliance were lodged.
Our group had been assigned a private quarters behind the Alliance Leader's Hall, what with having one of the Five Elders, the Divine Thief, staying with us, plus Miss Seol as a guest, and even me with my share of merit. But Zhuge Hu's nephew, the one called Wisdom Dragon, had apparently been given a room in the Guest Hall where most visitors to the Murim Alliance stayed.
'Five Dragons Three Phoenixes... nothing all that special.'
The area around the Guest Hall was already swarming with Murim Alliance warriors who had formed a perimeter around the building. Judging by the commotion near the entrance and surrounding areas, it seemed they had completely locked down all access.
The nephew of the Murim Alliance's Strategist had been poisoned, so naturally it felt like they'd sounded a full alarm.
We passed through the grim-faced warriors standing guard and followed the long corridor of the Guest Hall, lined on both sides with small rooms like studio apartments, until we stopped before one particular door.
Fist Dragon, Sword Dragon, and Bow Phoenix, whom we had met earlier, were already there, pacing back and forth with worried expressions.
"Strategist!"
"Yes. Nothing happened while I was away?"
"No, sir. Wisdom Dragon is inside, being attended to by Sound Phoenix, the physicians, and the Zhuge Family's people."
When the door opened and we stepped inside, the small room was already packed with over a dozen people. On the bed lay Wisdom Dragon, and beside him sat a woman called Sound Phoenix, clutching the collar of his robe. Her eyes were swollen from crying, and Wisdom Dragon himself was staring blankly up at the ceiling.
As our group entered the room, the crowd parted down the middle like the Red Sea.
Through that gap, Sound Phoenix spotted us, leapt to her feet, and cried out.
"Po-, Poison Flower! Please! Save Cheonrang, please, Cheonrang...."
"Rang" was a term of endearment between lovers.
It seemed Sound Phoenix and Wisdom Dragon were a couple.
She looked desperately tender and pitiful now, but after we had parted ways earlier, Hwa-eun had explained that this woman practiced sound arts, a terrifying discipline where she could rupture a person's eardrums or meridians by shrieking at the top of her lungs or plucking an instrument.
Sound Phoenix didn't even seem to register Zhuge Hu's presence. She rushed forward and seized Hwa-eun's hand.
"I understand. Please, calm yourself."
Earlier, her face had been noticeably paler and her lips had been vividly red, but that must have been makeup.
Hwa-eun freed her wrist from Sound Phoenix's grip and headed toward Zhuge Qiao's bedside.
She asked me to follow her as she went.
"Soryong, come closer too."
"Me as well?"
"Yes. You know a great deal about poisons too, Soryong."
I didn't see why she'd need to call me over, but what she said next made sense.
After all, even though my specialty was biological toxins, the point still stood.
I nodded and took my place beside Hwa-eun at Zhuge Qiao's bedside.
'Let's see, then. What kind of poisoning is this supposed to be?'
I looked down at Zhuge Qiao lying on the bed.
When we first met, I had thought he looked far too pale, and aside from that, there was nothing visibly wrong with him despite the claim that he'd been poisoned.
Hwa-eun turned to a man standing near Zhuge Qiao's bed with acupuncture needles laid out and asked,
"It appears you've sealed his acupoints and meridians to slow the blood flow. You say it looks like poisoning? Are you certain?"
She seemed skeptical too, given how perfectly fine he looked on the outside.
If it were truly poisoning, there should have been some external signs: rapid breathing, fever, bleeding, or other physical abnormalities. But Wisdom Dragon showed none of those outward symptoms.
The man bowed his head low and replied.
"Yes. At first we thought it was some kind of illness, but it didn't seem to be. We had a physician with some knowledge of poisons examine him, and he said it appeared to be poison...."
As the man glanced to one side, the person who received his gaze stepped forward and offered Hwa-eun a Cupped Fist Salute.
"I'm Wongyu. I'm not sure if you remember me, Young Miss."
"Wongyu? Ah, you must be one of the physicians our family sent a few years ago at the Murim Alliance's request."
"Yes, that's correct, Young Miss."
The man bowed his head at Hwa-eun's words.
It seemed he belonged to our Sichuan Tang Family and had been dispatched to the Murim Alliance at their request.
Poisoning incidents were fairly common in the murim world, so he must have been serving on assignment here.
Hwa-eun nodded and asked Wongyu,
"What were the symptoms?"
Until now she had seemed uncertain, but learning he was one of their own people seemed to convince her that his assessment wouldn't be wrong.
"Fortunately, it doesn't appear to be a lethal dosage. His acupoints are sealed for now, but before we sealed them, we observed severe convulsions and slurred speech."
"Slurred speech and convulsions.... Have you identified the type of poison?"
"I'm sorry. My mastery of Poison Technique isn't advanced enough...."
If his mastery were high enough, he'd have been able to identify any poison absorbed into his own body on the spot. He was saying his level was too low for that.
"Then we'll need to verify the symptoms again. Let me start with a Pulse Diagnosis."
Hwa-eun reached for the wrist of Wisdom Dragon, who lay there with glazed eyes. After a moment, she finished her examination and nodded gravely, her expression serious.
"It's definitely poison."
At that, killing intent erupted from the crowd, along with furious shouts.
"S-surely! Could it be those Blood Cult bastards!?"
"Who dared to do this to our Yongcheon!?"
"How dare they poison the Zhuge Family's Young Master!"
Cutting through that murderous atmosphere, Hwa-eun spoke again.
"I'd like to observe the symptoms. Could you unseal his blocked meridians and acupoints?"
At that, Strategist Zhuge Hu cried out in alarm.
"Won't the poison spread and kill him!?"
He meant that if the barriers keeping the poison contained were removed, wouldn't the poison spread and prove fatal?
Hwa-eun shook her head at his question.
"If what I suspect is correct, the poison will not spread."
"It won't spread?"
Hwa-eun nodded at his question, and after a moment's deliberation, Zhuge Hu stepped forward and said,
"Do it."
"Yes, understood."
At Zhuge Hu's nod, several men nearby moved into action.
The sturdy men stepped forward and surrounded Wisdom Dragon.
When one of them pressed several points on Wisdom Dragon's body, the result was startling.
It began with Wisdom Dragon's vacant eyes regaining their focus.
"Wh-why ish my body like thish!? M-my body...."
Utterly unlike the confident voice from when we first met, what came from Wisdom Dragon's mouth was slurred and full of unmistakable terror.
As if his mouth had gone rigid, he couldn't form his words properly.
And that wasn't the only alarming thing. The corners of his eyes and lips trembled violently, and eventually his entire body began to shake.
Like a dying beast in its final throes after being struck by an arrow, Wisdom Dragon convulsed terribly.
The men surrounding him had clearly been braced for this, ready to restrain his body.
As the trembling worsened, the burly men seized his limbs and held him down.
"Kghhk. M-my body...."
"Ch-Cheonrang! Sob...."
Confronted with how dire Wisdom Dragon's condition was, Sound Phoenix buried her face in his chest among the men holding him and burst into tears.
When her loud wailing erupted, Hwa-eun gave an instruction to those around her.
"I've seen enough. Seal his acupoints again, please. Block the sleep points as well."
"Understood!"
His acupoints were quickly sealed once more, and Wisdom Dragon sank into sleep.
Hwa-eun gazed down at him quietly and asked,
"Has Wisdom Dragon been complaining of frequent headaches recently? Or having trouble remembering things? Or flying into sudden rages?"
Zhuge Hu gripped his chin and sank into thought.
"Hmm...."
As an uncle, he wouldn't have known such trivial details about his nephew's daily life, and what kind of madman would fly into a rage at his own uncle?
Realizing the question was directed at the wrong person, I glanced toward Sound Phoenix. When our eyes met, she flinched.
After glancing around nervously, she spoke in a cautious voice.
"I-I was close to him, so I would know. He did have headaches and trouble remembering things. He'd forget promises he made with me, and it upset me several times recently."
Hwa-eun nodded at her answer and turned to Zhuge Hu.
"That confirms it. This didn't happen today."
"It didn't happen today!?"
"No. He was poisoned very slowly, over a long period of time."
"What!?"
The atmosphere in the room dropped even colder than before at Hwa-eun's words.
Strategist Zhuge Hu asked again in a frigid voice.
"How long, would you say?"
"At least half a year."
"...."
At the words "half a year," the killing intent Zhuge Hu had been suppressing radiated outward in every direction.
This meant someone had planned and prepared a slow, deliberate assassination, and just like what had happened with Yeong-ryeon, only someone close could have carried out such a thing.
Hyang, apparently bothered by the killing intent, crawled out from inside my robe and turned to look at Zhuge Hu.
-Tsurur.
The feeling that flowed from Hyang was: Daddy, who's that guy? Should I bite him? Shall I bite him?
As I stroked Hyang's head to calm her down, Hwa-eun spoke up as if trying to settle Zhuge Hu in my place.
"Please calm yourself, Elder. It may not have been intentional."
"What? Not intentional?"
"Yes, Elder. The substance Wisdom Dragon was poisoned with is quicksilver."
"Quicksilver?"
Quicksilver. A word I had learned back when I was studying poisons at the Tang Family.
'If it's quicksilver... that's definitely mercury, right? Ah! So if she said he'd been poisoned over a long period, she means chronic mercury poisoning?'
Hearing the word quicksilver, I could make sense of Wisdom Dragon's symptoms, and I understood why Hwa-eun said the poisoning had been prolonged and might not have been intentional.
Wisdom Dragon's symptoms seemed very much like Minamata disease, caused by chronic mercury poisoning.
Even though my specialty was biological toxins, I had covered a few common everyday poisons for broadcast purposes, and drawing on what I had studied about mercury poisoning at the time, the symptoms of Minamata disease included lip tremors, speech impairment, full-body motor dysfunction, and other neurological symptoms.
They matched Wisdom Dragon's symptoms perfectly.
And Hwa-eun's comment about it possibly being unintentional made perfect sense too, because in a backward era like this, mercury was used as medicine.
After all, even the elixir of immortality that Emperor Qin Shi Huang consumed was said to have contained large amounts of mercury.
People had even drunk liquid mercury as a remedy, or so it was said.
However, liquid mercury is poorly absorbed by the body, so it won't cause poisoning unless taken over an extended period; that was the nature of the substance.
In my previous life, mercury was used in quite a few everyday items, the most common being thermometers.
It happened surprisingly often that children would bite the tips of thermometers and swallow the mercury, ending up in the hospital, but even that amount wasn't enough to cause poisoning.
So if Wisdom Dragon had been poisoned, it must have been from prolonged ingestion of mercury, plain and simple.
"Is it possible he has been continuously taking medicine mixed with quicksilver, or perhaps consuming elixir pills over an extended period?"
This time, both Zhuge Hu and Sound Phoenix shook their heads.
"No. As far as I know, he hasn't."
"Not to my knowledge either."
"That's strange. It certainly feels like prolonged ingestion...."
The case seemed to be reaching a dead end.
I thought hard, dredging up what I had memorized from the introductory toxicology courses at the Tang Family.
'Mercury is produced by heating cinnabar, right? They said toxic fumes are released in the process, so you have to be extremely careful. And that inhaling those fumes can cause acute poisoning and stop your breathing... so it couldn't have been that kind of exposure....
Wait, cinnabar. I've heard that word somewhere else, haven't I? Where was it?'
As I chewed over what I had learned, the word cinnabar surfaced in my mind.
I recalled what had happened at the Namgung Family.
「A Chastity Mark is applied to a woman's body to prove her Purity of Body. You raise a lizard inside a jar and feed it cinnabar until its body turns red, then you grind it in a mortar and stamp it onto the woman's body.
If her body is pure, the mark cannot be washed away, not even with water.」
That was the very substance created from lizards, a form of abuse disguised as medicine.
'It turns red? Wait...!? C-could it be!?'
The claim that ingesting it turned the body red overlapped in my mind with the image of Sound Phoenix's crimson lips.
I turned to Hwa-eun with a startled expression and asked,
"Hwa-eun, c-could it be... I learned at the Tang Family that the raw material for quicksilver is cinnabar. Can ingesting cinnabar also cause quicksilver poisoning?"
At that, Hwa-eun gave me a smile that said she was truly impressed.
Nodding, she answered,
"That's our Soryong, all right. Correct, Soryong. We didn't even teach you that far, and yet here you are, learning one thing and figuring out two. That's our Soryong for you.
Since cinnabar is the raw material for quicksilver, ingesting it leads to exactly the same quicksilver poisoning."
At Hwa-eun's answer, I looked down at Wisdom Dragon, asleep on the bed.
A hollow laugh escaped me.
"Ha...."
'Ah.... the follies of young love....'
This was precisely why lipstick needed to be non-toxic.
How on earth was I supposed to explain this? It was beyond awkward.
*****
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