Fog smothered the Demon-Immortal Pavilion.
From the outside, the mist was so dense you couldn’t even tell people lived there at all. Hidden away in that wall of white were the two eccentric brothers known together by the sobriquet Demon-Immortal.
They were twins with identical faces, but their clothes and their bearing were so different that no one would ever mistake one for the other.
The man in black was called the Venom Demon. His complexion was dark, his presence oppressive.
The man in white was called the Medicine Immortal, and his whole air was that of a quiet scholar. Same features, yet a lifetime devoted to different disciplines had carved an entirely different mood into each of their faces.
It was the Venom Demon who lifted a cup of pitch-black, unknowable tea, drank, and then curtly addressed his disciple.
“Leaving the mountain?”
“Yes, Master.”
“Confident, aren’t you. Barely twelve years of training and… that’s enough, is it?”
“No, Master.”
“Or is it that you’ve grown sick of poison?”
“No, Master.”
The Venom Demon narrowed his eyes.
“Even if you make it to the Unorthodox Faction’s territory, you’ll only get dragged into the mess of the martial world. People are best off living quietly, somewhere with good mountains and clear water. Like us….”
Listening, the disciple—Jin Sohan—kept his face carefully blank.
The Venom Demon was the last person who should be saying that.
Back in his youth, he’d roamed the martial world stirring up trouble wherever he went. But this was how he always talked, so Jin Sohan was long past being thrown off by it.
“Master, I’m still young. And you once promised you’d let me go back to my hometown every four years. Somehow that turned into twelve. Please think of it as a short leave and let me go just once.”
The Venom Demon snorted.
“Leave?”
“Yes.”
“You really think the Mystic Lunar Dance Troupe you used to belong to is still holding out under the Unorthodox Faction?”
“I have to see it with my own eyes.”
“It’ll be gone. Torn to shreds. That place had plenty of beauties, didn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And the performances were famous.”
“Yes.”
“The Unorthodox Faction’s gangs will have swarmed in and ripped the troupe apart. The beauties taken, the men butchered… If I had to bet, I’d say the Blood-Whisper Sect or the Ghost Blade Sect claimed it.”
Jin Sohan’s expression sank, heavy and complicated.
“Yes. That’s entirely possible.”
“Oh? So you’ve already thought that far?”
“Yes.”
“And then what? What do you intend to do?”
The Venom Demon waited. Jin Sohan answered calmly.
“I’m twenty-six this year.”
“I know that.”
“I’ve spent twelve years here with my masters… but fourteen with the Mystic Lunar Dance Troupe that took me in when I was an orphan. If there is kindness, I will repay it. If there is hatred, I will return it.”
When Jin Sohan answered with that earnestness, the Venom Demon’s mouth curled into a crooked grin.
“I told you your martial arts aren’t complete yet….”
Jin Sohan allowed himself a small smile.
“Even if they’re incomplete—should a disciple of the Demon-Immortal really be afraid of them?”
The Venom Demon snorted again.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. You’re not us. Just because you’ve developed a strange regenerative body doesn’t mean you can defeat the countless masters in this world. Don’t delude yourself.”
The Medicine Immortal, who had remained silent, finally spoke.
“If you were heading to land ruled by the orthodox sects, I might have let you go. But… your hometown is under the Unorthodox Faction, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Then the Venom Demon’s prediction will be right. If you return, you’ll only stir up more bloodshed. And you still insist on going? Then there’s no point in my trying to stop you.”
Jin Sohan held to his stance to the very end. His answer was still simple.
“Yes. Even if only one person is left, I’ll repay the kindness I received.”
The Venom Demon and the Medicine Immortal clicked their tongues at the same time.
“Tch….”
“Stubborn thing… And if they’re all dead?”
“There’s no way every last one of them could be gone. It’s still a place where people live.”
At that, the Venom Demon let out a long sigh. He’d raised the boy since childhood, and yet Jin Sohan still had no real sense of what the martial world was like—what kind of people the Unorthodox Faction produced.
Jin Sohan, on the other hand, wanted to settle debts of gratitude and revenge… and he wanted, at last, to escape his masters’ grasp. His teachers—especially the Venom Demon—did not fall within the bounds of what anyone would call normal.
A normal man wouldn’t repeatedly poison his disciple day and night just to test the effects.
Jin Sohan was sick of it. Sick of being poisoned. Sick of being treated. Sick down to the bone. Even the peculiar regenerative power he’d developed thanks to the Medicine Immortal made him uneasy. Because of the Venom Demon’s bizarre toxins, the color of his eyes had been growing steadily more clouded.
He was grateful for the martial arts he’d been given—but becoming a test subject, time after time, was a pain that never became easier to bear.
True, he hadn’t reached complete immunity to all poisons, but he’d come close—at least “immune to a thousand poisons.” Even so, he couldn’t help wondering how long his body could endure.
I want to go back.
Whether you called it descending the mountain, entering the martial world, or returning home… Jin Sohan didn’t care.
He just wanted to get out.
If he stayed here, it wouldn’t be strange at all if, one day, he ended up as a sacrifice in his masters’ pursuit of an undying body.
The only mercy was that after twelve years of being master and disciple, the Demon-Immortal at least treated him well enough now to listen to what he had to say.
And how hard had Jin Sohan worked to build that kind of relationship?
He’d done it because he’d always clung to one desire: that he would go home someday.
And he also knew, better than anyone, that soon the Demon-Immortal would have to leave this place.
They’re out of poison and herb ingredients….
They weren’t ordinary masters. To procure the rare herbs they demanded, they’d have to scour the world again.
Sensing that his disciple’s resolve wasn’t some passing whim, the Venom Demon sighed and said:
“Stubborn… who did you get that from? Fine. It’s been a while—show me that Divine Art of Lies of yours. I’ll decide after I hear it.”
Jin Sohan’s eyes lit up at once.
Got him.
He answered with spirit.
“Yes. Then I’ll now demonstrate the Divine Art of Lies.”
The Divine Art of Lies.
In plain words, it was an art of lying.
The Mystic Lunar Dance Troupe was, in other words, a troupe of performers. From childhood, he’d learned all sorts of lowly tricks there, and when his master saw his talent, he’d grandly named it the Divine Art of Lies.
In short: it was acting.
Every time Jin Sohan performed his Divine Art of Lies, both masters enjoyed it immensely.
He shifted his expression and adjusted his voice to spin the lie.
*****
To the Demon-Immortal, it didn’t matter whether the disciple’s words were true or false.
If the story was amusing and interesting, they believed it. If it was dull and tedious, they dismissed it as a lie. They were men of that peculiar sort.
Once Jin Sohan had ordered his thoughts, he began.
“The truth is, my body hasn’t been like this since birth.”
“Ridiculous.”
“Let him talk.”
As the Demon-Immortal’s eyes started to sparkle with interest, Jin Sohan allowed himself a small, satisfied smile.
The beginning’s good….
With a grave expression, he went on.
“Even if I had told you the truth, it’s so absurd that the two of you would never have believed me.”
The Medicine Immortal’s eyes shone with naive curiosity, as if he meant to believe every word. His temperament was entirely different from the Venom Demon’s—though their eccentricity, at least, ran in parallel.
Jin Sohan continued.
“I was born, I’m told, in a dye shop on the main street of West Black Road. After I lost my parents, I was taken in by the Mystic Lunar Dance Troupe.”
“We know that part. Get to the point.”
At the Venom Demon’s brusque interruption, Jin Sohan went straight on.
“In one corner of the troupe’s wide training yard, there was a peach tree.”
“A peach tree?”
The Demon-Immortal both fell briefly silent, picturing it.
“And what about this peach tree?”
“There’s a rare thing they call ‘clear-sky stone liquor,’ right?” Jin Sohan said.
“Yes. Rare, but it exists. Don’t tell me you drank some kind of wine that had collected beneath the tree?”
“No. But I suspect the effect was similar. The truth is, I usually ate the best peaches from that tree myself. I was always hungry, so I knew exactly when they’d ripen and when they’d be at their sweetest. Then one year, the tree began to give off an incredibly fragrant, honey-sweet smell. High up in the branches, there was a peach completely different in color from the rest—a golden peach. No matter how I struck the branch, it wouldn’t fall. I called it my Sun Wukong Peach. I couldn’t reach it, so all I could do was watch it. Then one day, I saw a strangely shaped snake dangling there, its head buried deep in that very peach.”
The Venom Demon’s expression changed. If there was a chance it was some rare kind of snake, he couldn’t help himself.
Catching his reaction, Jin Sohan smoothly pressed on.
“I could tell at a glance its body was strangely limp, like a man dead drunk. I knew right away—that thing had gotten drunk eating my Sun Wukong Peach… and after a while, it fell to the ground—!”
“It fell! And then?”
Jin Sohan let the moment stretch, then continued.
“It had two heads.”
“Your lies really are reaching their peak,” the Venom Demon snapped.
The Medicine Immortal, however, murmured in fascination:
“A two-headed serpent… Rare, but such spirit creatures do exist.”
“If such a thing truly existed,” the Venom Demon muttered, “it would have produced the greatest venom in the history of the martial world. What a waste.”
Jin Sohan went on without pause.
“In any case, the serpent’s body was strangely transparent. One head gleamed red, the other shone gold.”
“Then that wasn’t just any two-headed serpent… It would be a Yin-Yang Serpent.”
“I don’t know the name. In any case, I was furious. It had eaten the Sun Wukong Peach I’d been saving. And when I was hungry, I often caught snakes and roasted them, so I drew my knife, thinking I’d cut off the head of that drunk little beast…”
The Venom Demon’s pupils trembled. Jin Sohan shifted the rhythm of his tale.
“…But I stopped. Instead, I grabbed what passed for its neck and carried it to the kitchen. It was dawn—no one was there. I set a pot of water to boil and wondered how to cook it. But it turned out there was no need for cooking at all.”
“Why not?”
“Because a serpent close to a spirit creature has an inner pellet, doesn’t it? I learned that after coming here.”
“That’s right.”
“The two-headed serpent, after eating the Sun Wukong Peach, suddenly spit out two inner pellets. One red, one gold. The problem was… both were giving off a thick, rich peach scent. It seemed something had gone very wrong when it ate that fruit.”
At that, both masters swallowed, each seized by a different thought. One was imagining a supreme poison; the other, a peerless elixir.
The Venom Demon asked:
“So what did you do?”
Jin Sohan deliberately slowed his words.
“To be honest… I decided those two pellets were my fate.”
“Your fate?”
“Yes. I could leave them be and spend the rest of my life dancing with the Mystic Lunar Dance Troupe… or swallow them and die, unable to overcome the venom. That was my dilemma. Or else—”
He raised one finger.
“I could swallow them… and draw into my body the power of an elixir the world would never see again.”
“Of course you should’ve eaten them! I could have—ah. That was before you ever met us.”
“Yes. In any case, I made up my mind. I shut my eyes and swallowed. I dared to gamble because I believed the venom in the red and gold pellets had been neutralized by the divine power of that peach. I swallowed them both at once.”
“Oh, that was the right call.”
The Venom Demon nodded. The Medicine Immortal hurried to ask:
“And then what happened?”
Jin Sohan paused again. Back with the troupe, he’d learned that a good story lived and died by its timing.