Chapter 77: Cho, Hyang, Bin (2)
Translator: bjgoofy
Personality.
Personality refers to an individual’s unique psychological system that maintains and develops specific behavioral patterns in response to the environment. Although the term is generally applied to humans, it’s not very different when it comes to pets.
Anyone who has raised a pet would know, they all respond differently depending on the situation.
So if I were to describe the personalities of my three centipede sisters, this is what it would look like.
First, Cho.
Visibly, Cho’s most prominent feature is her longest antennae.
Her personality exudes leadership and charisma.
I call Cho the eldest, though honestly, all the Centipedes hatched from the eggs while I was asleep, so I don’t actually know who is the oldest or youngest.
But based on her actions, Cho was clearly the eldest.
-Tsurur! Tsurur!
The warning sound of the centipede that wakes me from deep sleep like a rooster before dawn.
Without looking, I knew the owner of this sound was Cho.
Cho waking me up was her way of signaling me to get up and head out for morning cultivation, but I desperately pleaded with Cho as I pulled the blanket over my head.
“Cho, let Daddy sleep just a bit more.... Daddy’s still growing....”
I'm still growing, so I need more sleep.
If she wanted a tall and handsome Daddy, then she had to let me sleep more.
-Tsurur!
But the urgent chirping continued, as if to say, “Daddy, hurry and get up, or you’ll be late and Grandpa will scold you again, and Mom will be mad too.”
I eventually sat up in bed, unable to resist the persistent chirping ringing in my ears.
She was making warning sounds so close to my ear that she might as well have been burrowing into it.
“Aigoo. Fine, Daddy’s up, Cho. Haah.... What kind of martial artist sleeps only four hours a day like a college entrance exam student.... And Cho, you’re just too diligent. You never skip a single day.”
Because I struggle to wake up in the morning, Nunim once jokingly said, “Cho, please wake Daddy up in the morning,” and Cho took that as a daily mission.
Thanks to Cho’s insistence, I had to get up, light the extinguished lamp, and wash my face with the water the maidservants had brought.
Only then, Cho, climbing onto my body along with Bin, would wake up Hyang, who sleeps more than I do.
Seeing how she takes care of Daddy and even her siblings so thoroughly, it’s obvious Cho is the eldest sister.
And that's not all.
When I take the now noticeably heavier trio to the training grounds, Nunim would already be there waiting to receive them, and it is there again that Cho’s eldest sister-like behavior shines through.
In the faint darkness at a distance, Nunim holding a lantern stood waiting.
Perhaps because she’s in charge of the children’s food, the kids adore her immensely. So the moment they spotted her, Hyang and Bin became excited and tried to jump off my shoulders to run to her.
-Tsurut!
A warning sound came.
At that, the two froze and turned to look at Cho.
At first, I didn’t understand what that meant, but later I realized.
Since Nunim and I would soon meet and I would hand them over to her anyway, the warning meant not to crawl across the dirt and jump onto her body.
Since centipedes are creatures that crawl on the ground, if they crawled on the ground, dirt would naturally stick to their bodies. If they then climbed onto Nunim, her clothes would get covered in dirt. So Cho was keeping the others in check.
“Soryong.”
“Hwa-eun, good morning, or should I say, dawn.”
“Yes, Soryong. Kids, come here.”
After the other kids crossed over, Cho would rub her face against mine like saying, “Do well,” and then go over to Nunim last.
The eldest daughter who takes care of Daddy, her siblings, and thinks of her mother too.
So Cho is definitely the eldest.
'She’s just so reliable. She’s the foundation of the household. Truly.'
After seeing off the kids and Nunim, and sweating it all out during the dawn Five Poisons cultivation, breakfast time would be just around the corner.
After finishing the dawn training, I headed to the pavilion.
Nunim, who had been looking after the kids, greeted me.
“Soryong, thank you for your hard work.”
“Was there anything unusual today?”
To Nunim’s greeting, I responded by asking if anything had happened today.
The reason I was asking such a question was because the Centipedes had been causing quite a lot of trouble lately.
At that, Nunim simply stared silently at her skirt hem without giving an answer.
Her gaze was fixed on one of them.
Though I had arrived, perhaps disliking the glare of the rising sun, they were hiding between the folds of Nunim's skirt.
Only their antennae were poking out, and the one with the most twitching antennae that Nunim was staring at was none other than our second child, Hyang.
It seemed likely that Hyang had gotten into trouble again.
‘Is it you again?’
Hyang is a rather peculiar one.
If I had to define Hyang’s personality in two words, it would be: curious and lazy.
They don’t seem to match, but there’s no other way to describe the little one.
Hyang spends most of her time asleep, but when she’s awake, she can’t stay still for even a second.
As if she recharges energy while sleeping and discharges it all into causing mischief.
If Nunim looks away for just a moment, she might find Hyang up in a tall tree, or getting stepped on by an attendant while chasing a fluttering butterfly and startling them, or clinging to the ceiling to watch as attendants eat.
She sleeps so deeply that she wouldn't notice if someone carried her away, yet she's so active when awake.
So while Cho may have caused the biggest incident recently, the true troublemaker on a regular basis is definitely Hyang.
“Today, while I was talking to an attendant, she was crawling toward the Golden-Furred King Bee’s nest, and I barely managed to catch her.”
"Oh my, that could have been disastrous?"
"Yes, all the Golden-Furred King Bees had come out."
“Ah, so that ruckus during training earlier was because of this one.”
When I tickled Hyang’s antennae, Nunim sighed, as if recalling the incident.
Hyang’s antennae drooped at my touch.
She must have fallen peacefully asleep from my touch.
Nunim gave an exasperated look at that.
I remember hearing in my previous life that when newborns are born, parents have to feed them milk and change their diapers every three to four hours, making that period very difficult, which is why that period is so hard that parents jokingly say, "Please grow up quickly."
But once the child starts walking, they start wandering all over, making their parents even more anxious, and perhaps that’s what Nunim is feeling now.
They say once children begin walking, people look back and think that the time when they were just lying down was the happiest.
Our Centipedes, too, were easier to deal with when they simply clung to our bodies.
Now that they’ve molted twice and started crawling around, it’s almost too much to handle.
"Haha, you've had a harder time than me. Shall we go for a meal then?"
“Haa. Alright, Soryong. You must be hungry.”
As we headed towards the dining hall, leaving the sleeping Hyang and the others attached to Nunim's skirt, one of them quickly climbed up Nunim's body and gently extended its legs toward me, trying to cross over.
She was timing it, gauging when to cross over.
At the sight, Nunim softly smiled.
‘There she goes again.’
The one trying to cross over was our youngest, Bin.
At Nunim’s smile, I subtly leaned a little closer to her side without making it obvious.
The reason I did that was because if I openly acknowledged her, she wouldn’t cross over.
Although she's a tsundere who likes me the most, she's too shy to cross over if I offer her to do so directly.
Maybe because she's the youngest, she follows me the most but has a shy personality?
Even when I fell into the pit, she reacted more intensely than anyone else. And though I, being a human, must feel very hot to her as a cold-blooded creature, she still sticks close to me at night to sleep.
As expected, when I leaned in a bit closer to Nunim, Bin, thinking she was completely sneaking over, quietly climbed onto me.
Though with her weight, there was no way she could actually sneak.
And on the way to the dining hall, she subtly began letting me know that she had crossed over.
She raised her head from my shoulder and lightly tickled my cheek with her antennae.
If I pretended not to notice, she would either make a small sound or put slight pressure with the leg she was using to hold onto me.
As if saying, "I've come over, please notice me."
-Tsurut.
As expected, her sharp little sound rang out.
If her words were translated, it would probably sound like this:
「Father, I have come, so hurry and pet me. I shall allow it.」
I chuckled inwardly and gently stroked her head with my fingertips, and her aloof chirping gradually turned into a pleased sound.
-Tsurur.
The eldest with leadership skills, the lazy troublemaking second child, and the tsundere youngest.
Though they may all look similar, my centipedes each had distinctly different personalities.
I hoped they would hurry and grow up into splendid Blue-Spotted Centipedes like their mother.
‘Even though it was in a dream, the body of the Blue-Spotted Centipede mother was truly splendid.’
I don't mean it in any other way, of course. While hugging the Centipedes felt like holding small dogs, being held by their mother felt like being embraced by a large dog.
I wanted to experience that in reality, not just in a dream.
***
Once Na-ok settled down in the Tang Family, the feeding system of the Venomous Creatures Garden began running smoothly.
Perhaps she was a particularly meticulous woman, as she didn’t let any uncleanliness slide by.
While the Tang family warriors would clean the enclosures and feed the creatures once a day, Na-ok would stay right by the Venomous Creatures Garden all day, continuously feeding and cleaning.
Moreover, it seemed she had been a breeder in her previous life. She even carried out individual selection, filtering out the weak or malformed and grouping the healthy, large ones separately.
So it was only natural that the crickets, which used to devour each other, began what breeders love to call explosive breeding.
Mealworms were breeding well enough, and now even the cricket supply had stabilized.
On top of that, Chinese hamsters were being born in sufficient numbers, and even though I had switched from feeding small frogs or toads to the Tiger Keelbacks entirely with pinkies, we still had an excess of pinkies.
In the previous life, I would have frozen the extras and used them as frozen pinkies, but in this era, there was no such thing as a refrigerator, so that created a problem.
The yellow mealworm, had already proven delicious to the Tang Family members and could be used as food. Crickets could also be eaten if necessary, so there was no problem, but hamsters were a different matter.
‘Doing your job too well can be a problem, huh?’
After sweeping my gaze around the interior, I stepped outside. Squad Leader Gu Pae followed and asked:
“Young Master Soryong, it seems we’ll have a surplus of pinkies, don't you think?"
I nodded in response to his words.
"It seems we'll need to fill the Venomous Creatures Garden with more creatures soon."
“Are you finally heading out to capture venomous creatures!?”
Squad Leader Gu Pae’s face lit up.
The warriors following behind him also wore expressions full of anticipation.
“Yes. We can snack on crickets or mealworms if necessary, but pinkies can’t be eaten by most warriors, can they? We could stop the breeding, but the best use is still to feed them to the venomous creatures. It’s time we increased our numbers.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
“Though we’ll need to wait for news from the Murim Alliance first.”
“Certainly.”
Squad Leader Gu Pae and the warriors of the Venomous Creatures Squad, who had brightened at my words, now nodded seriously.
To go collect venomous creatures, we’d need to organize an expedition, but it wasn’t so easy to get permission for outings at the moment.
All because of those damn Blood Cult bastards. That’s why the news I mentioned from the Murim Alliance was our primary condition for launching the expedition.
According to Father-in-law, they recently caught a spy within the Murim Alliance, conducted a surprise attack on a Blood Cult branch near Wuhan, and from the captured enemies, identified the location of the largest Blood Cult headquarters in the Central Plains. The Alliance Leader himself had gone on an expedition, and depending on how that mission turned out, it would decide whether we could go on our own expedition sooner rather than later.
If the cult’s biggest stronghold in the Central Plains was wiped out, chances were high the remnants would go into hiding again. That would put the family at ease and allow them to grant permission for our expedition.
***
Three days later, in the morning.
-Thwack!
“Ugh!”
A crisp smack echoed across my back.
-Thwack!
Another sound echoed from my thigh.
I clenched my teeth and endured the scream as I circulated my internal energy.
What I was cultivating now was the Iron Chest Technique, the unique martial art of the Fist Emperor.
Iron Chest Technique, truly a damn insane martial art.
When a person gets hit, the muscles naturally contract and flinch reflexively. But this technique required channeling internal energy into those flinching muscles and continuously hardening the body through the blows.
What that meant, in simple terms, was that you had to get beaten like a dog for your martial arts level to rise.
And so, with help from the warriors of the Venomous Creatures Squad, I began getting struck all over.
The only relief was that the progression was incredibly fast.
At this point, I could harden my body like stone for a brief moment if I timed it right.
I had just finished breakfast and was in the middle of getting beaten when I heard a commotion near the Family Head’s residence, close to the training grounds where I was cultivating.
Then, Father-in-law appeared.
“Son-in-law!”
“Father-in-law? What brings you here?”
It should’ve been his busiest time of the morning, so I tilted my head at his appearance. He smiled.
Stroking his beard, Father-in-law spoke.
“I brought the news you’ve been wanting to hear.”
“The news I’ve been wanting to hear?”
As I gave him a puzzled look, his explanation followed.
“A messenger has finally arrived from the Murim Alliance. The expedition was a great success. The Alliance Leader raided a village near the Viet Nation border and destroyed the Blood Cult’s base. They say half of the Blood Cult bastards were either killed or captured, and the remaining half fled into Viet Nation.”
“Th-that’s!?”
“Yes, it means you can finally go catch those venomous creatures you’ve been so eager for.”
“Ooooh! If I’d known this would happen so quickly, I would’ve decided on a destination beforehand. So then, where should we go?”
Just as I was regretting not having thought of a destination in advance, my father-in-law spoke up.
“If it’s the first expedition for Sichuan’s Tang Family Venomous Creatures Squad, then of course, it has to be Yunnan, where venomous creatures are overflowing!”
"Ah, right. Yunnan!"
Yunnan, a tropical region.
Even its entrance housed the Golden-Furred King Bees. The thought of what kind of poisonous insects might be living deeper inside was enough to get me truly excited.
*****
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