Chapter 156: Absorption (4)
Translator: bjgoofy
When Lee Tae grasped the meaning of what he'd said and scowled, the eyes of the river bandits, who had been on edge from the moment I appeared, clouded over with even greater dread.
The dead man had surely been someone walking around in perfect health only the day before, yet now he'd been found as a shriveled corpse.
It clearly didn't look like an ordinary death, so it seemed our kids were under heavy suspicion.
A person drying up and shriveling to death was something supernatural, so it was perhaps only natural that a supernatural being, a Spiritual Creature, would fall under suspicion.
And since the kids suspected of the crime were the ones I commanded, the river bandits were obviously afraid of me as well.
In their eyes, didn't I and the kids look like a demon summoner and his demons?
'This is annoying, but the timing couldn't be worse. I suppose I'll have to clear up the misunderstanding.'
I'd kept feeding the river bandits the message that the kids ate people in order to frighten them, and of all times, someone had to go and meet such a bizarre death in a situation like this.
With the matter of the shipyard also at stake, a misunderstanding like this was a real problem.
In any case, just as I was thinking I needed to set the record straight.
Before I could even get a word out, the river bandits' dread turned to outright terror at a sound that came from behind me.
-Tsur? 『Papa?』
I'd told her we would go outside together once the fog lifted, but when I rushed out after Lee Tae without a word of explanation, it seemed Bin had followed right behind me.
At the sound of Bin's cry, the river bandits recoiled in sheer panic.
"Hyeeeurk!"
"Hwaaa!"
The sight of a seven-meter black Centipede sliding silently out of the fog was certainly enough to terrify anyone.
On top of the thorough scare I'd given them the day before, with the misunderstanding piled on, the river bandits scrambled backward, some of them landing flat on their backsides.
And yet, inside my head, Bin's voice was coming through ever so adorably.
It seemed I needed to act fast.
I called Hwa-eun close, conferred with her, and decided to clear up the misunderstanding with Lee Tae and the river bandits at once.
If it deepened any further, there'd be no taking it back.
"It seems the river bandits think our kids turned that Mummy into what it is, so I'd better clear up the misunderstanding."
"Our kids!? What an absurd thing to even...."
Hwa-eun's face turned to one of disbelief at my explanation.
She gathered Bin into her arms and said,
"They're such small, gentle, sweet kids, and this is so upsetting...."
Honestly, the forms of Cho and Bin only looked small and adorable to Hwa-eun's eyes and mine; strip away the affection filter, and what you had were seven-meter monsters of a kind.
So I gave an awkward smile at Hwa-eun's reply, then stroked Bin's head myself and explained to Lee Tae.
"It seems you think our kids made that corpse? That Mummy? Made it like that, but it's a misunderstanding."
"A misunderstanding?"
"Our kids don't eat people."
"What!?"
Lee Tae started violently when I said the kids didn't eat people.
He asked back with a look of utter disbelief.
After all, I'd given him so many messages the day before about being eaten.
"B-but yesterday you clearly said you'd feed us to them...."
"That was just to frighten you. These kids are Spiritual Creatures, so they don't eat anything."
At my words, Lee Tae and the river bandits exchanged glances.
They seemed to be wrestling with whether or not to believe me.
I decided to lay out the reality for the wavering Lee Tae and his men.
It was a rather cold thing to say, but it beat letting the misunderstanding pile up.
"You don't have to believe me, but if the kids really did eat people, would I have any reason to step forward like this and explain myself?"
If Cho, Bin, and Yohwa truly did eat people, then frankly, Lee Tae and his band of river bandits would have no way to stop them.
And all that would be left for river bandits unable to stop the three was to sit there and be devoured one by one.
When I pointed that out, Lee Tae flinched and then nodded along.
"C-certainly. If Spiritual Creatures went on a rampage, no one could stop them, so there'd be no reason to sneak about devouring people."
At Lee Tae's words, the river bandits shuddered, as if recalling the previous day.
One of them asked Lee Tae,
"Ch-Chief, then how did Beom-gyu die?"
Just then, footsteps sounded from the direction of the cabin, and Seol noona emerged from the fog and said,
"That's what we're going to find out, starting now."
***
For the time being, we decided to examine the corpse first, with Seol noona's help.
According to Seol noona, the culprit's traces were bound to remain on the corpse.
It wasn't a wrong thing to say, and she declared with confidence that among the Beast Palace's Miscellaneous Skills was one for reading the traces left on a corpse, so we entrusted the body to her.
She said it was a skill that had developed from examining which beast had torn into a carcass; I was half-skeptical, but watching her work on the corpse, she was quite the professional.
In a way that hardly suited the era, she was meticulously checking the pupils, the inside of the mouth, even the marks on the skin.
With no gloves to be had, Seol noona poked at the corpse with something like a pair of chopsticks.
After turning the body over with the river bandits' help, Seol noona tilted her head and offered the opinion that the corpse was not a Mummy.
"First off, strictly speaking, this isn't a Mummy."
"It isn't?"
Hwa-eun asked back at Seol noona's words, and Seol noona nodded at the question.
"A Mummy refers to a corpse that's dried right out, but this one has had all its blood drained away. That's why it's so shriveled and pale like this. The skin too, it hasn't dried out yet."
"All the blood drained out of the body?"
I'd assumed it was a dried-out corpse, but Seol noona's explanation said otherwise.
When I widened my eyes at the talk of all the blood being drained, Seol noona nodded again.
"Mm-hm. When a person dies and becomes a corpse, the blood congeals and leaves blotches on the body, you know? But this corpse doesn't have a single one of those.
Normally, whether it's a beast or a person, those blotches start to appear about half a Shichen after death, but this corpse shows no trace of them at all. That means the blood was sucked out, every last drop, while the person was still alive, or within one Shichen of death."
"Then, surely not, the Blood Cult!?"
When it came to talk of blood being sucked dry, the prime suspect was, naturally, the Blood Cult.
At my mention of the Blood Cult, everyone's face tightened with tension.
If my guess was right, it meant a member of the Blood Cult might be hiding within the village.
"Certainly. When it comes to blood, the Blood Cult...."
"Th-the Blood Cult, you say!? Those vicious fiends!?"
But just then came Seol noona's voice.
"The Blood Cult cuts a wound into the body first and sucks the blood from there, doesn't it? But this person doesn't seem to have any such wound.
The way I see it, it's not the Blood Cult. This is something different."
Indeed, just as Seol noona said, the Blood Cult were like mosquitoes, cutting wounds into people's bodies with knives or daggers and sucking blood through them.
The Blood Cult elders had shown exactly that, and with no wound present, the Blood Cult couldn't be the suspect.
"Is there anything else, perhaps?"
Since opinion had tilted toward it not being the Blood Cult, I felt a little reassured, if only slightly.
When I asked whether she'd discovered anything more, Seol noona shook her head.
"Well? If there'd been blood left, I could have learned a bit more. With no blood, the wounds aren't easy to see either."
Regrettably, Seol noona's answer was that what she'd found was the extent of it.
If there was nothing more to learn from the corpse, then it seemed we ought to examine the scene.
The scene was every bit as important as the body.
"Then, for now, let's go to this man's home. There might be some trace left behind."
"Right, let's do that."
"Soryong, I'll check whether there might be any poison left on this corpse. It's a bit strange that he died inside the village in the dead of night and no one noticed."
"A-all right. Hwa-eun."
Leaving Hwa-eun to check whether poison had been used, I headed into the village together with Lee Tae for the time being.
Perhaps because of the effect of the night's events, the villagers watched us with fearful eyes and murmured among themselves as we crossed the village.
Past the gazes of the people, where we arrived was a small Thatched Hut at the foot of the mountain, a little house with a reed roof and walls made of standing bamboo.
"It's here, Lord Soryong."
Following Lee Tae's lead, when I stepped inside, I saw a single bamboo bed within the disordered interior.
The area around the bed was in considerable disarray, no doubt because of all the people.
"My men say he was lying on that bed like a corpse. Ah, lying there having become a corpse...."
As I listened to Lee Tae's explanation and approached the bed, sure enough, there came the faint scent of Cilantro wafting through.
It was a scent Koreans don't much care for, but I figured the people here probably ate cilantro often because of the fishy smell of the fish, and decided to check the inside of the Thatched Hut a little more.
"He was lying right there on the bamboo bed...."
"Yes, and his body had stiffened too, they say."
Apart from a ragged blanket, there were no particular marks on the bed, and along with Lee Tae and Seol noona, I carefully checked the doorway and windows for any other clues, any sign of someone's coming and going, but nothing out of the ordinary turned up.
"There's nothing here."
"Certainly...."
Returning to the boat without any particular gains, I asked Hwa-eun whether she'd found any poison, but the answer that came back was that the results wouldn't be ready until tomorrow.
"Whether there's poison won't be clear until tomorrow."
"Surely no one else will die before Hwa-eun figures something out?"
"S-surely not. Seol noona, if that happened, it'd be a disaster."
I forced down the unease that rose in my heart at Seol noona's question, but didn't they say a bad feeling is never wrong?
The next dawn, river bandits came running through the daybreak mist to tell us that another victim had appeared.
"L-Lord Soryong! People! People! Found dead! This time it's two of them!"
"Two of them!?"
It seemed the case was growing more baffling by the day.
***
The place Seol noona and I rushed to was another house near the small Thatched Hut we'd visited the day before.
When we stepped inside, a young man and woman who looked to be a married couple lay dead on the bed, just as they were.
No sign of resistance, the two of them just as they'd fallen asleep, holding each other tight.
"No one touched anything, right?"
"Yes, Young Miss."
Seol noona hurried over, examined the two, and said with a grave expression,
"Both of them have no blood either, sure enough."
This time, too, the same story: no blood.
It was then.
Seol noona, examining the two dead, seemed to find something odd and tilted her head as she spoke.
"What's this?"
Feeling around the blanket near the bed, Seol noona brought her hand to her nose and sniffed.
"Is there something?"
"There's water. The blanket's wet."
"Water? Not urine they let out while dying?"
"No. There's no smell of urine, you know? It is a bit fishy, though. Strange?"
Just as Seol noona kept tilting her head, trying to make out the nature of the liquid.
Through the window thrown open by a breeze blowing in from outside, the scent of cilantro drifted faintly in once more.
The scent of cilantro, felt again and again here and there, gave my mind the faintest tickle.
But nothing came to me.
'What is it? I feel like I'm forgetting something important.'
Seol noona and I examined the place for a good while, but in the end there were no gains today either, and the mood in the river bandits' village turned thoroughly grim.
I'd explained myself actively, but it seemed I hadn't managed to convince everyone.
Around the afternoon, Hwa-eun said she'd found Paralysis Poison on the first corpse, so I tried to think of some blood-sucking Venomous Creature, but nothing in particular came to mind.
And that night.
While Seol noona and I were fretting, saying that please, no one should die today, Lee Tae came to our boat, which had been hauled up onto the shore, bringing a fish dish.
"This isn't much, but...."
"You said you had no provisions to spare, so what's all this for. Why did you bring it?"
"I brought it because I'm grateful that you're truly looking into the deaths of wretches like us. Lord Soryong."
"You ordered your men to patrol the village today, didn't you?"
"Yes, I split them into three teams of two and ordered them to circle the village."
It was carp lightly fried and then simmered in soy sauce.
I'd already eaten supper, but there was care in the bringing of it, so when I put a piece in my mouth, the smell of earth flooded across my tongue.
The earthy smell peculiar to freshwater fish filled my mouth.
"Ugh...."
A retch escaped me without my meaning it to, and the cilantro I disliked came naturally to mind.
Flustered by my retching, Lee Tae spoke as if he'd made a grave blunder.
"O-oh no, I made it to our own taste and botched it. I'll make it again and bring it back. Since you came from the land, the fishy smell would naturally...."
"N-no, it's fine. It is fishier than I expected, though. But there's no Cilantro in it?"
When I tilted my head, since the cilantro I'd kept smelling wasn't in the dish, the answer came back.
"Well, we can't really taste the fishiness, so we don't bother putting cilantro in."
"You don't usually put cilantro in?"
"Right. How many years has it been since we last had cilantro?"
The moment I heard Lee Tae's words, a page from my insect-venom encyclopedia flashed across my mind.
The large quantity of bodily fluid left on the bed, and the smell of cilantro.
'Why didn't I think of that!?'
"Bin!"
-Tsurur?
When I ran toward the cabin and called Bin's name, Bin promptly poked her head down from the cabin entrance.
Grabbing a single Lantern, I dashed toward the village and shouted,
"Let's go!"
Running with Bin, where we arrived was the first victim's house.
When I lit up the walls and checked all around, there was something that had trickled blackly down one of the walls.
The thing I'd been looking for was right there.
And in that moment.
-Pitter-patter.
-Tsurururu!
When I lit the ceiling with the Lantern, palm-sized Bed Bugs began to fall from the ceiling like raindrops, and Bin, startled by the sight, coiled around my body and began to cleave the Bed Bugs in two.
-Crack!
The culprit behind the Water Stronghold murders was, without a doubt, palm-sized Bed Bugs.
*****
Join our Discord for announcements or to report any mistakes.