Chapter 134: Silver (1)
Translator: bjgoofy
When Hyang announced that she had Daddy all to herself, Cho and Bin did seem momentarily startled, their antennae going stiff, but they appeared to be trying hard not to think much of it.
After all, they had each put forward their own arguments: Daddy said bigger was prettier, or, Hyang, you can't even carry Daddy and fly, can you? That sort of thing.
Bin seemed to be under the misunderstanding that I unconditionally thought bigger was prettier, while Cho had been appealing to her ability to fly.
They were running a little happiness circuit in their heads, and to be fair, they weren't wrong.
It was true that bigger was somewhat better than smaller, and the ability to fly was certainly a fine thing to have.
But that little rascal, after rubbing her face against my cheek from atop my shoulder as if to taunt the other two, dove straight into the folds of my collar the moment Cho and Bin started seething with fury.
I had always thought our Hyang was just a slightly mischievous, sleepy daughter, but she turned out to be a troublemaker beyond compare.
-Tsururrr!
-Tsurur!
The second-born had shut the door and fled from a fight.
『Come out! Come out here!』
『Just come out for a second!』
Hyang blithely ignored her older sister's and younger sister's demands to come out, and from the warmth of my chest, she let out the contented cry of a victor.
-Chururr.
Naturally, that sound only made Cho and Bin angrier.
As a father, a kaiju war within the household was absolutely unacceptable, so I calmed them both down.
"Daddy loves all three of you exactly the same. So let's not fight, okay? Anyone who fights... no, anyone who fights, Daddy's going to be very unhappy with. Understood?"
With that declaration that I loved them all equally, I barely managed to settle the two down, but that night, we all came to naturally understand why Hyang had been so insufferably smug.
No matter how much parents believe they treat their children equally, differences in treatment inevitably slip out depending on the child, without them even realizing it.
They say every finger hurts when bitten, but some fingers hurt more than others.
That is what they call favoritism.
Not that I was guilty of it, of course.
I would divide my affection perfectly fairly among the three.
But favoritism is something that can arise from both the parent's side and the child's side, even when neither wants it.
When I was young, my father left for work at the crack of dawn and always came home late in the evening.
On top of that, on his only days off, the only days we could see him, he did nothing but scold us sternly, which made him somewhat intimidating.
Since we hardly saw him on normal days, and when we were together he only showed us his strict side, it was incredibly hard to grow close to him for that reason.
So we naturally liked our mother more, and the question of who got the spot next to Mom in our one-room home was the biggest nightly battle between my younger sibling and me.
One side was reserved for Father, who would come in later, so who would claim the remaining spot beside Mom was the greatest rivalry between us.
After several squabbles, our mother, with the wisdom of Solomon, instituted a rotation system. But I never imagined that same midnight competition would play out in my own quarters.
-Tsurur!
-Tsurur!
The furious hissing of Cho and Bin.
In my quarters, Cho and Bin had clashed once more over who would sleep beside me.
Even with Hwa-eun as their mother, the girls had been with me from the moment they were born, so they clung to me more.
Unless it was a special occasion, sleeping alongside me was the norm.
For that reason, the battle for the spot beside me had erupted between Cho and Bin, just like the fights between my past-life self and my sibling.
"H-hey, girls, c-calm down!"
The Central Plains had developed a standing-style living culture like the West, which meant people wore shoes indoors as well.
Because of that, just like in the West, the Central Plains was a bed-frame culture.
Rather than laying out bedding on the floor, it was customary to sleep on wooden bed frames, essentially raised platforms.
Think of it as sleeping on a wooden platform large enough to lay out a single set of bedding. The bed frame I had used on Haenam Island was practically just a bare platform, but the Tang Family here was wealthy.
The bed frames were luxurious by default.
How luxurious, you ask? Three sides were enclosed by carved wooden panels and draped with fine fabric.
The only way in was from one open side, and the problem was that the bed was only about two meters long.
At six and seven meters respectively, the two of them could not both climb onto the bed.
So the bigger girls had to stick just their heads in from the entrance side and sleep like that.
Before Bin had grown, Cho would poke her head into the entrance from the floor and loosely coil the rest of her body around mine to sleep. But now that Bin had grown too, the spot by the entrance had become the contested territory between Cho and Bin.
『I'm sleeping next to Daddy!』
『You already slept next to him plenty when I wasn't around!』
『I couldn't sleep either because I was out looking for you!』
The two oversized girls competed to shove their heads into the entrance.
At least they hadn't lost their grip on reason entirely, carefully avoiding any damage to the bed frame. But then Hyang poked her little head out from my chest and tossed a single remark at her older and younger sisters.
-Tch!
A sneering little scoff.
After all, Hyang could just coil around my body and sleep.
Their grown bodies had created a situation of unintended favoritism.
Just as Hyang had said earlier, when it came to the daughters' contest of affection for Daddy, Hyang was the winner.
Victory by decision went to Hyang.
She was completely exempt from the competition.
Whether walking or sleeping, she could stick to me all by herself, and that was that.
-Tsururrr!
-Tsurrit!
The moment Cho and Bin realized this, their reason crumbled.
'Forget it, I don't care anymore, I'm sleeping next to Daddy!'
Something like that, perhaps.
And with the collapse of their reason came the collapse of my bed frame.
When six- and seven-meter creatures engaged in a physical brawl, a wooden bed frame didn't stand a chance.
-Crack!
-Crash bang!
The bed frame collapsed outright, and my table and chair were smashed to pieces along with it.
In short, every piece of furniture in the room was utterly destroyed.
"What on earth is going on!?"
"Ryong? What happened?"
"What in blazes happened, Soryong?"
Hwa-eun, Seol noona, and the other elders came rushing in with alarmed faces, roused from their attempts to sleep by the sounds of interior remodeling coming from my room in the middle of the night.
I was buried under the wreckage of the bed, and Cho and Bin were in the process of demolishing it further, so of course they were shocked.
In the end, I asked the guards on watch duty to help remove every piece of furniture from the room, and had one side of the quarters packed full of dry grass.
This was not the kind of fight that scolding would resolve, and it was going to happen every night, so I decided I might as well lay down straw and sleep on the floor with all three of them.
I had plenty of experience sleeping on floors in my previous life, after all.
It was unavoidable for the sake of peace.
The dry grass I had prepared for keeping hamsters was spread thickly over the space where the bed frame had been. I laid a single blanket on top of it, and the moment I lay down, the two of them claimed their spots on either side of me with lightning speed.
Peace returned once more.
I had closed my eyes to sleep, then cautiously asked the two of them.
"Girls, could you maybe ease up on the arm-pillow thing? I think Daddy's arms are going to go numb by morning."
-Tssrit!
-Tsst!
They seemed to be telling me to just bear with it for tonight.
***
The commotion ended, and the next morning, the Divine Thief, having apparently heard that I was awake, came to visit with his disciple Yeong-ryeon.
"So you're up? I was worried something truly serious had happened."
"Are you alright, Young Hero?"
"I'm sorry for making you both worry."
"But how has your room turned into a barn? There isn't a single chair in here."
"P-please, sit on the floor. Because of the children...."
"I come to visit the live-in son-in-law of Sichuan's Tang Family, one of the Seven Great Families, and the floor is covered in straw."
The Divine Thief was dumbfounded by the state of my room's interior.
I seated the two of them on the floor and asked what had happened after I collapsed.
I had gotten a rough account from Hwa-eun and Seol noona the day before, but I wanted to know what had become of matters like the stonemasons, which the Divine Thief had said he would handle.
"By the way, how are the preparations going for the Heavenly Silkworm Thread excavation?"
At my question, the Divine Thief shook his head.
"I was going to ask my hyung-nim, the Beggar Emperor, to look into finding stonemasons, but on further thought, this isn't really something to handle that way."
"Pardon? Why not?"
He had told me to trust him, and now he was suddenly changing course.
Just as I was wondering what was going on, Hwa-eun, sitting beside me, nodded and answered.
"Ah, you're worried it might be discovered by others."
"Exactly. After all, it's the method for obtaining my sacred relic. The fewer people who know, the better."
"Ah...."
He had been planning to find a martial artist or stonemason who could break the tower, but there was no need to create more people who knew the secret.
The Divine Thief spoke in a hushed voice.
"So, since you said you'd be raising the Heavenly Silkworms anyway, I thought we might as well get help from the Tang Family instead. Though I'm not sure that old poison-lover will lend us anything."
Since we would be the ones doing the foster-rearing, it made sense to use our own people.
It was a sound idea, but there was a problem.
Warriors would need to go and chisel them out with picks and hammers, and with the ongoing issues involving the Five Poisons Sect and the Blood Cult, pulling a large number of warriors from the family would be difficult.
That was when it happened.
Just as I was about to reply that it would be hard to spare many people from our family and that it might take some time...
"H-hey, girls, put that down! You'll get in trouble!"
Seol noona's flustered voice came from outside.
I sprang to my feet and turned to the Divine Thief.
"I'm sorry, but I think I need to step out for a moment, Elder Divine Thief."
I had asked Seol noona to watch the girls and keep them from fighting during the brief time I received guests, at least until the pecking order was settled. But it seemed like something had gone wrong.
After excusing myself to the Divine Thief, I rushed outside.
At first I thought a fight had broken out, but there in the rear garden, my daughters were adorably playing a game of jacks.
A game of jacks with slightly oversized stones.
'What in the world....'
Cho and Bin were competing as if to show off their strength, each holding one of the rear garden's landscaping rocks, which were bigger than a human torso.
"Girls?"
Cho and Bin startled at my voice.
-Thud!
The landscaping rock Cho had been holding dropped to the ground.
-Crack.
The landscaping rock Bin had been holding shattered on the spot.
They said the Ink-Black Ghost Centipede could crush even boulders, and it was true to the letter.
"Th-this is...!?"
The Divine Thief's astonished voice came from beside me as he followed me out, and in that moment, Bin's monstrous strength brought to mind a member of the Tang household who could assist the Divine Thief.
One who was not human, which meant even fewer people would learn the secret.
***
"This creature can break through it?"
Three days later, we returned to the nest of the termites I had named Pagoda Termites.
Before the tallest tower in the center of the basin, the Divine Thief asked with a tense expression.
Could Bin really break this tower?
"Did you not see for yourself, Elder? She can crush even harder stone."
"That's true, but...."
He seemed anxious that the trip might be for nothing.
But I had tested it several times when the Divine Thief was not around, so there was nothing to worry about.
Bin had lost the Poison Fangs she'd had as a Blue-Spotted Centipede, but in exchange she had gained even sharper teeth, monstrous strength, and the ability to dig through earth.
The reason she likely remained among the Twenty-Four Poison Branches was probably the same as Yeondu the Flying Celestial Serpent: the lack of a potent venom.
"Bin, right there. Make a big hole right there."
-Tssrit!
I estimated where the queen's chamber would likely be in such a tower-building colony and asked Bin to make a large opening there. She charged in without hesitation.
The moment Bin latched onto the side of the tower and sank her teeth in, the outer wall of the termite mound, hard as concrete, crumbled away like styrofoam.
-Crack. Crack.
As Bin peeled away the shell of the outer wall and light began to seep into the interior, it happened.
A sudden vibration from somewhere.
-Rumble rumble rumble.
A tremor began emanating from inside the termite mound.
"What's this!?"
"What is that sound, Soryong?"
Termites are creatures that communicate through vibrations.
A sound powerful enough to shake the entire nest could only mean one thing: a summons for every soldier termite.
"The soldier termites are coming! Bin! Get the poison ready!"
-Tssrit!
At my command to prepare her poison, Bin drew in an enormous breath, and her body swelled up taut.
From a flat centipede to something like a plump sausage.
Bin had lost her Poison Fangs, but that did not mean she had lost her poison entirely.
Like Cho's Fog Poison, she could spray toxin through the spiracles on her body.
Rather than causing poisoning, it worked like tear gas, stinging the eyes and making it hard to breathe, and on top of that, the gas was denser than air, so it settled low to the ground.
-Pwoosh!
The instant thousands upon thousands of soldier termites thrust their heads out from the cross-section of the mound, a black smoke-like poison erupted from the spiracle holes along Bin's flanks.
The soldier termites that had been surging forward recoiled in alarm and scrambled back inside.
Termites, after all, were the type of insect that retreated inward and sealed off their tunnels when they judged an enemy too powerful to fight.
With the soldier termites routed, I asked Bin to carefully locate the queen's chamber.
"Bin, if you hit something harder than the rest while digging, let me know."
-Tssrit!
The queen's chamber of a termite colony is oval-shaped and extraordinarily hard. Finding it and sealing off the entrance would allow us to capture the queen, the king, the attendant workers, and the larvae all at once.
-Crack!
At my request, Bin began burrowing deeper inside.
She dug for only a short while.
-Tssrit! Tssrit!
"Found it?"
At Bin's cry signaling she had found something, I followed her in, and the interior was bright enough to make the Night-Luminous Pearl the Divine Thief had lent us unnecessary.
Luminescent mushrooms carpeted every surface, casting a pale glow.
'Ah, so these are the type of termites that cultivate fungus gardens to feed on.'
What the sudden appearance of mushrooms brought to mind was the fact that these termites fed on this very fungus.
Most people assume all termites gnaw on wood to survive, but in reality, not every termite species feeds on wood.
Some termites, like these, create beds from wood pulp and cultivate mushrooms on them, feeding on the fungus instead.
Making a mental note to take some of these mushrooms along when we collected the termites, I pressed onward.
That was when I saw them.
Cocoons of pure white, just ahead.
As I had expected, there were not many, but roughly thirty cocoons were clustered together in one corner of the termites' mushroom-farming chamber.
"Found them!"
My primary objective was the queen's chamber, but for now, I had located the secondary target: the cocoons.
I hurried over and examined one of the cocoons, about the size of a butternut squash.
-Clatter.
And in that moment.
The pile of cocoons shifted and collapsed, and from the very center of the heap, a single cocoon emerged that was nothing like the pure white ones, a cocoon gleaming with brilliant silver radiance.
"Wha...!? Wh-what is this?"
It was an utterly unexpected windfall.
*****
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