Chapter 132: Dark (2)
Translator: bjgoofy
"So, Soryong! Soryong!"
"Ryong! Snap out of it! Why is this kid suddenly doing this again?"
As Soryong toppled toward the campfire, two hands shot out like arrows and a strand of spider silk caught both his arms and the nape of his neck.
Hwa-eun and Seolpyo, flanking him on either side, had seized his arms, while Yohwa, positioned behind him, had fired a thread of silk to halt his fall.
-Kishi!
Pulled back just before he plunged face-first into the flames, Soryong's body tilted gently backward instead.
The moment he settled onto the ground as though he had simply fallen asleep, Hwa-eun and Seolpyo leaned over him with alarm written across their faces, checking him over.
The first thing Hwa-eun checked was his eyes.
She had inspected the termites twice before Soryong ate them, but she needed to determine whether he had lost consciousness for some other reason, or whether some kind of toxin had paralyzed him.
She pried open his eyelids and quickly examined his eyes, only to find them vacant and unfocused.
If he had fainted, the whites of his eyes should have been showing. If he had been paralyzed, the light in his eyes should still have been there. But behind his closed lids, his eyes were hazy, as though his very soul had slipped away.
"How can this be?"
"Could there have been some kind of poison after all?"
"No. I don't think it's poison. I checked twice before he ate them, and his symptoms don't look like poisoning now, either."
The Divine Thief asked in an urgent voice, his alarm plain to hear, but Hwa-eun had clearly confirmed that the termites were free of toxins before Soryong ate them, and Soryong himself, well-versed in venomous substances, had also declared them safe.
She checked again now, but the state of his eyes was all wrong for poisoning or paralysis.
That was when it happened.
Seolpyo, who had been reading his pulse first, grabbed Hwa-eun's hand.
Then, from Seolpyo's lips, her expression blank, came words they had all heard once before.
"The, the Beast Heart Technique...."
"The Beast Heart Technique? You mean the...?"
The Beast Heart Technique was the mental cultivation method of the Beast Palace, one of the original roots of the Five Poisons Returning to Origin Divine Technique that Soryong had mastered.
The memory surged back at once, the incident when Cho became a Flying Celestial Centipede and had sent Soryong into a deep sleep.
A sleep that had lasted a full fortnight.
"Cho! Cho! Come down here, please!"
Hwa-eun swiftly called down Cho, who was likely drifting somewhere overhead on lookout duty at Soryong's request.
She feared that Cho might have grown again, triggering the same thing that had happened last time.
She had shed her shell recently, after all, and Cho was the only suspect at the moment.
It also brought to mind the warnings from both Seolpyo and the Beast Palace Master, that forging a bond with a fearsome venomous creature ranked among the Ten Great could cause the practitioner's mind to go haywire.
When she called Cho down in such a rush, the centipede descended without a clue as to what was happening.
Hwa-eun questioned her urgently.
-Tssrit?
"Cho, your father collapsed. Do you know anything about it?"
-Tssrit!? Tsurur!
But Cho only caught sight of Soryong lying behind Hwa-eun at that moment and let out a cry that was unmistakably startled.
There was no way to know exactly what she was saying, but from the way she was panicking, it didn't feel like Cho was the cause.
Seolpyo gathered herself and offered the same assessment.
"I don't think it's Cho. The energy of the Beast Heart Technique doesn't feel the same as last time. Besides, if Cho were the cause, wouldn't she have fallen asleep too, like before?"
When Hwa-eun thought it over, Seolpyo was right.
Cho had fallen into a deep sleep alongside Soryong back then, so if Cho were responsible, she would have been asleep now as well.
"Then, could it be? Hyang!"
"Hyang? Now, now that you mention it!"
Perhaps still sulking from earlier, when she'd been scolded for not listening to her father, Hyang was sleeping on Hwa-eun's shoulder.
What if this wasn't just ordinary sleep?
She hadn't woken through all this commotion, and that made her the next suspect. Hwa-eun tried calling out to her softly.
If both of them had fallen asleep due to the Beast Heart Technique, forcibly waking her didn't seem wise, but she needed to confirm whether Hyang had truly lost consciousness the way Soryong had.
"Hyang? Hyang? Are you sleeping?"
Under the tense gazes of Hwa-eun and Seolpyo.
There was no response at first, making it seem like it really was the Beast Heart Technique, but then Hyang stirred, brushing her antennae down with a foreleg as if something tickled.
And she began making the same little sounds she always made while sleeping.
-Tsurur.... Tsurur....
She was clearly just asleep.
Even in the midst of all this chaos, the little creature was peacefully scratching her antennae with her foreleg and dozing away.
She was obviously dead to the world, the kind of sleep so deep that someone could carry her off and she wouldn't notice.
Seolpyo quickly placed her hand on Hyang's body to confirm, then shook her head.
"I don't think it's Hyang, either. I can't sense any Beast Heart Technique energy from her."
"Then why so suddenly? It's not that thing you told us about before, is it? His mind being devoured by the beasts?"
Hwa-eun asked with a worried expression, wondering whether the Beast Heart Technique might have let the venomous creatures consume Soryong's mind, and Seolpyo shook her head.
"That's not it. If his mind had been devoured, he'd be thrashing around like a wild beast right now, but he looks like he's just sleeping."
"Th, then.... why on earth...."
If it wasn't that, either, then none of this made sense.
As Hwa-eun stared at Soryong with worry etched across her face, Seolpyo clapped her hands together as if she had just figured something out.
"Ah! Cho and Hyang aren't the only ones Soryong bonded with through the Beast Heart Technique, are they?"
"Not just Cho and Hyang.... Ah! How could I forget that?"
Perhaps the shock of Soryong's collapse had briefly rattled her, but now that she thought about it, Cho and Hyang were not the only creatures Soryong had linked his Mental Image to through the Beast Heart Technique. There was one more.
"Bin?"
"Bin. She's still out there."
The youngest daughter, who had left home.
Bin.
***
When I opened my eyes, what filled my vision was a space dense with fog, black as smoke.
No matter where I looked, nothing but pitch-dark haze in every direction.
There wasn't a single speck of light, and I had no idea how I could even perceive this black fog in such darkness, yet its presence registered with strange, unmistakable clarity.
"Wh, what is this?"
The confusion lasted only a moment.
The very first thought that came to me in this situation was this:
'Don't tell me this is... one of those things where I'm trapped inside my own Inner World!?'
When Seolpyo, my Older Sister, and my Adoptive Father taught me the Beast Heart Technique, they had warned me that my consciousness could be consumed by Cho's, and to be careful.
They worried that a Spiritual Creature's mind would be far stronger than a human's, and that I might be overwhelmed.
Given that I was conscious and relatively lucid in this dark, pitch-black place, the thought that came to mind was that perhaps my consciousness had been locked away somewhere, while Cho's mind had taken over my body.
You know how it goes in comics and such: when the protagonist loses control of their body for some reason, they end up crouching in some dark, gloomy corner of their own Mental Image, sinking into a pit of despair.
Waiting until someone from the outside comes along and rescues them.
"Damn it. I'm not running around doing crazy things right now, am I? No, wait, if it's Cho who took over, there's no way she'd do anything like that, right?"
That seemed like the most likely scenario.
For now, I decided to ask Cho for help.
There was no way Cho had seized my body on purpose. Most likely, this had happened because her mind, being that of a Spiritual Creature, was naturally and overwhelmingly powerful.
Since her mind was connected to mine, she would surely help me.
'There's no way my daughter would do this to her father on purpose. No way.'
"Cho! Cho! Daddy's in here! Come help me!"
When I called out for Cho at the top of my lungs, the black fog rippled and undulated as though it were alive.
This had to be Cho reacting.
'Oh! There's definitely a response!'
It felt certain that the fog was reacting to my voice.
Each time I called for Cho, the black mist churned and swirled as if it were alive, and Cho seemed to be flustered on her end as well.
For now, I decided to praise her so she wouldn't panic, and ask her to get me out.
"I'm sure you didn't do this on purpose, right, Cho? It was probably just an accident, or something that happened even though you didn't want it to, right? Our Cho is such a good girl. You're the daughter who loves Daddy the most, so let's think of a way to get Daddy out of here."
I was calling out in every direction, asking for her help, when it happened.
The black fog suddenly seemed to darken with fury, turning into something like a thunderhead, and then one side of it parted, revealing a narrow path.
A narrow path lit by a glow.
It felt as though the light itself was beckoning me forward, so I hurried toward it.
It had to be Cho showing me the way.
"That's my girl! My beautiful daughter!"
It seemed Cho had come up with a solution.
Praising her as I followed the light, I walked on for a short while.
Where the light ended, the figure of a person came into view.
Even at a glance, the presence felt similar to how Cho had appeared last time.
"Cho!"
I called her name and dashed toward the figure.
But when I reached the woman, what I saw was not Cho.
"Wh, who...?"
The Cho in my memory had been a hauntingly beautiful woman with blue hair and blue eyes, radiating a mysterious aura. But the woman before me had hair as black as night and eyes just as dark.
She certainly gave off an air as enigmatic as Cho's, yet she was someone I had never seen before.
'Wh, what?'
What's more, from her expression, she seemed thoroughly furious.
When I blinked in surprise, the woman let out what appeared to be a sigh of exasperation.
The thought that flashed through my mind in that moment was "Turning Dark".
'Don't tell me Cho has... Turned Dark!?'
Everything about her being black, that had to mean she had Turned Dark.
Blue Cho becoming black could only mean Turning Dark.
With that thought, I cautiously asked, wondering if Cho had somehow undergone a dark transformation.
"Cho?"
The woman's eyes turned frightening in an instant.
No matter how far Cho might have Turned Dark, there was no way she would look at her father with such hostile eyes, and it immediately occurred to me that I was barking up the wrong tree entirely.
"I, I'm wrong? Th, then, who are you?"
'Could it be a Queen Ant? No, I didn't activate the Beast Heart Technique to register anything...'
Thinking it over carefully, the last thing I had eaten before ending up like this was roasted termites.
The thought crossed my mind that perhaps the termite Queen Ant was a Spiritual Creature, and because the worker termites had exchanged nutrients with their queen before dying, consuming their bodily fluids had inadvertently registered the queen.
But the strange thing was, to register a venomous creature, one had to ingest its bodily fluids while chanting a specific Oral Formula of the Beast Heart Technique, so there was no way an unwanted registration could just happen on its own.
I found myself backing away involuntarily under the woman's piercing gaze.
That was when it happened.
The woman's expression suddenly shifted to one of bewilderment, and she whipped her head away, refusing to look at me, then seized the collar of my garment at the shoulder.
I stared at the hand gripping my collar, then asked, my face blank.
"Could you be... Bin?"
Because the spot the woman had grabbed was the very same place our Bin, with her tsundere streak, would bite whenever she pretended she couldn't help but show affection.
Whenever Bin was angry or about to slink away, she would slyly catch the edge of my collar in her mouth as if to say "don't go". And that was exactly where this woman's hand had landed.
The woman's expression flooded with surprise and a rush of emotion, and she threw herself into my arms.
And just as I expected, the feeling that washed over me was unmistakable: Daddy is still the best.
'As if this father wouldn't recognize something like that.'
I may have stumbled a bit at first, but at least this much meant I wasn't completely disqualified as a father, and my consciousness began to grow hazy.
***
"Bin!"
When I opened my eyes, there was the familiar ceiling.
I called out Bin's name and bolted upright, and the startled voices of two women reached my ears.
"Soryong, are you awake?"
"Ryong! Are you back with us?"
I turned my head to find Hwa-eun and Older Sister Seolpyo staring at me with wide eyes.
"Where am I? How did I...?"
I was lying in my quarters in the Tang Family estate.
On my own bed.
I had seen Bin in my mind, but my last memory was of going out to search for the Heavenly Silkworm, discovering the termites, and eating them.
When I asked how I had ended up here, Hwa-eun came closer, gently stroked my forehead, and spoke.
"It seemed best to leave you be, but Older Sister Seolpyo said it would be better to move you somewhere closer to the estate, so we brought you here."
It seemed they had carried me back to the estate after I collapsed.
"I see, but B, Bin? Has Bin come back?"
When Hwa-eun mentioned Bin's name, I asked for news of her, but Hwa-eun shook her head.
"No. So it was Bin who caused you to collapse this time?"
"Most likely...."
My words trailed off at the answer that she hadn't returned yet.
That was when it happened.
A sudden commotion erupted from outside.
-Rumble rumble.
A low tremor shuddered through the ground, and the alarmed shouts of guards began ringing out.
"B, block it!"
"Over there!"
"It's heading toward the Inner Courtyard!"
I tried to rise from the bed, but my body refused to cooperate after lying still for so long.
I asked Hwa-eun and Older Sister Seolpyo for help.
"Quickly, get me outside."
They must have sensed something from the commotion as well, because neither refused. They propped me up on either side, and the moment we stepped through the door, it happened.
The earth of the inner backyard heaved upward in a line of swelling mounds, as though a mole were tunneling beneath the surface, the trail racing straight toward us, and right in front of my quarters, the ground erupted.
-Burst!
And from below burst a massive centipede the likes of which I had never seen, her body a glossy, lustrous black.
Despite having burrowed through the earth, her body gleamed, sleek and polished, a black so deep it seemed to swallow light like an abyss.
She was clearly a size larger than Cho had been when she became a Flying Celestial Centipede.
-Tsurur.
A scream tore from my throat before I could stop it, drawn out by the sheer beauty of that true black.
'Th, this is insane!'
"Gyaaak!"
There was no doubt about it. The runaway youngest had come home, upgraded.
*****
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