The woman snorted and spoke in a sneering tone.
"Keeping him alive is just a matter of slathering him in medicine, but there is no way to undo his blocked qi and blood. His limbs will twist, and he will fall asleep every night in bone-grinding pain. All because someone set out to wreck his vital points."
She didn't need to give me that look. I knew. But it wasn't going to happen that way this time.
"I'll take care of that."
"And how would you manage that?"
"Would Heaven's Table Ginseng do?"
"......!"
Her sharp eyes flew wide.
"Why, not confident?"
When I asked with a faint smile, she bristled.
"That would be enough. Provided you can really get your hands on it."
"Then we're settled."
Terminal compulsive liar? That was exactly the look on the woman's face. And no wonder.
Heaven's Table Ginseng was a legendary treasure you couldn't obtain even for an untold fortune.
Its very name said it was wild ginseng for Heaven's own table, so what more needed saying?
But staring at me like that wouldn't get her anywhere. She wouldn't believe me even if I told her.
"Until I get back, please just keep him from dying."
"......I will keep that in mind."
Nice to deal with someone who gets it. I nodded and headed outside.
***
Meanwhile, once the woman was left alone, an old man came hurrying out from within.
He was the owner of this apothecary and the physician who had examined Kang Woo-jin.
"Young Lady, are you all right?"
Yet surprisingly, he bowed respectfully to a woman young enough to be his granddaughter.
Naturally.
Her name was Tang Seo-rin.
She was a direct descendant of the Tang Clan, one of the Six Clans of the Divine Land and the foremost family of Sichuan, and one of the most outstanding prodigies of the Righteous Heaven Academy.
"Old Kang."
"Yes, Young Lady."
"Didn't you say Baek Do-gyeom was a wretch more shameless than any Demonic Cultist?"
She even knew exactly who Baek Do-gyeom was.
Why?
- I have proposed a marriage to the Jiangnan Baek Clan. Go and meet him.
Because he was the very reason she had come here in the first place.
"That is right. Just yesterday he crippled a young man. He is a fool with no aptitude who runs wild on nothing but his family's clout."
Exactly. That was definitely what she had heard. So she had already engraved it in her mind that he was a lowlife she could never have anything to do with.
And meeting him in person had only made it worse.
She had assumed that even if he could not break the Viper Palm she had used, he could at least dodge it.
And yet there he had stood, gawking like a fool. What a sorry sight.
Was she supposed to be crazy enough to marry such a useless, wicked brat?
And yet.
'Just keep him alive, somehow?'
He wanted her to save the very person he had ruined with his own hands.
Not only that.
"Old Kang. Have you ever seen Heaven's Table Ginseng?"
"Isn't that a legendary elixir?"
Yes, exactly.
Heaven's Table Ginseng was not some spirit herb that grew naturally. It was a legendary spirit treasure that grew only on spirit veins.
And he claimed he would bring one back.
"Look into Baek Do-gyeom again, thoroughly. What sort of life he has lived. And what happened yesterday, too."
"Yes, Young Lady."
It was the moment when, in the mind of one of the Two Beauties of the Righteous Heaven Academy, Baek Do-gyeom's name changed from scoundrel to question mark.
***
"Phew."
Once outside, Baek Do-gyeom let out a long sigh of relief.
It couldn't be helped.
"Tang Seo-rin, just like I read."
Because just as she knew him, he knew her too.
"There's no way some backwater doctor could save Kang Woo-jin after the beating he took."
That's right. As it happened, he had come here to meet her, too.
In the original, they were fated to meet for the first time only after he entered the Righteous Heaven Academy, as senior and junior.
And their relationship was an ill-fated bond.
Baek Do-gyeom, eaten up by inferiority, harbored malice toward the true protagonist, Cheon Su-hyeok, and ended up doing things he never should have.
One of them was poisoning his food.
Because of that, Cheon Su-hyeok fell into grave danger, and the senior who showed up to help him was none other than Tang Seo-rin.
That's right. She was one of the heroines.
And her reason for helping was simple, too. She just hated Baek Do-gyeom.
Why?
"Because while Tang Seo-rin was staying here, she would've heard all about my atrocities."
It was also entirely thanks to her that Kang Woo-jin, his limbs twisted, could move at all.
That part of the story was only described very briefly later on, but how much she loathed Baek Do-gyeom came up again and again, to the point of tedium.
"Talk about an ill-fated bond."
In any case, telling her that he would bring back Heaven's Table Ginseng was no empty boast.
"Because Kang Woo-jin didn't spend his whole life a cripple."
What did that mean? It meant that the boy who had lived in pain would later stumble onto a fortuitous encounter. In the mountains near here, no less!
So the answer was simple.
"I find the Heaven's Table Ginseng first. And I fix him before he turns dark."
***
The crazy author really loved fortuitous encounters.
There was a justification for it.
This was the Murim. A place where warriors poured their whole lives into growing stronger.
Inner arts in particular took at least 60 years of accumulation before you could so much as thumb your nose at anyone out there.
And even that required countless experiences and moments of enlightenment.
Yet a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears kids called the Seven Evils were out to destroy the world.
It was the kind of thing that would make the Murim's elders clutch the backs of their necks and keel over.
That was why Chronicle of Villains was full of fortuitous encounters.
Some were elixirs that boosted cultivated power, like the Lesser Return Pill, but there were also things with rather special powers.
Like the Wind God Pearl, which held the energy of the wind and let you move faster.
Or the Dragon Bone Swamp, where spending just a single day in the bog made your bones harder than cast iron.
They were all formed from spirit power flowing out of spirit veins, and collectively they were called spirit treasures.
And the Heaven's Table Ginseng I'd come looking for today was one of those spirit treasures, grown by feeding on spirit power.
"Haah...... It should be somewhere around here."
Panting roughly, I looked around to find a narrow gorge spread out halfway up the mountain.
A place where thick darkness hung between split walls of red rock.
It was exactly as described in the original.
I'd been worried I wouldn't be able to find the way, but I'd worried for nothing.
"One slip, and nobody would even find my body."
When I nudged a pebble over the edge with my foot, I didn't hear a thing. That's how high it was.
The one saving grace was that Baek Do-gyeom's heart stayed calm and steady even now.
"Let me rest a bit first......"
Of course, at this rate, I'd die of breathlessness before anything else got me.
"Okay, let's go."
After catching my breath for a long while, I began crab-walking along the plank path that clung precariously to the side of the cliff.
In the original, Kang Woo-jin climbed this very mountain, Mount Jangak, a few months from now.
The novel never spelled out the exact reason, but I could understand it.
'He probably wanted to end his miserable life.'
Of course he did.
Life was hard enough already, so what else would he have been thinking after months as a cripple with twisted limbs?
But his fate didn't end there. No, it was a new beginning.
"Found it!"
A single luminous flower, lighting the way like a firefly on a dank cliff where the sun never reached.
Because he had obtained this very Heaven's Table Ginseng, which permanently pushed one's recovery to its limit.
"Hmhmhm."
Not bothering to hide my grin, I carefully dug away the soil and slowly pulled it out, root tip and all.
Then, without my even shaking it, every speck of dirt fell away as if it had been rinsed in water.
A spirit treasure really was a spirit treasure.
It felt like picking up a gold nugget off the street.
"I wonder if eating this would fix my body, too."
No, probably not.
According to the crazy author, Baek Do-gyeom wasn't suffering from an illness. The problem was his innate constitution itself.
So even if I ate Heaven's Table Ginseng, all it would do was help me bounce back a little faster from breathlessness and dizzy spells.
Of course, even that alone would be nice......
"I'll give it up. With this, Kang Woo-jin won't have any reason to turn dark anymore."
Then the ill-fated bond between us would vanish too, and above all, he'd never have a reason to come to Mount Jangak.
And that mattered a great deal.
Why?
"Hmhmhm. Heaven's Table Ginseng isn't the only thing Kang Woo-jin got here."
That's right. Even with top-tier aptitude, how could a guy who'd never properly learned martial arts have become the Greatest Assassin Under Heaven?
It all started right here.
Because he'd gained a new power on Mount Jangak.
The greatest of all fortuitous encounters, said to be the hardest of them all to find.
I'm talking about a spirit nexus.
***
In nature, there existed something called qi.
It was the trace of life, the fertilizer from which all things were made, and the net that covered the whole world.
Then what was a spirit nexus?
To borrow the crazy author's words, it had been described as 'the qi center of the natural world.'
Quite literally, the qi flowing through the world gathered in one place and formed a natural crystal.
And it usually lay deep within the earth.
It took root underground, its stems spreading like twigs, forming an entire region known as a spirit vein.
And strange wonders were not uncommon along those spirit veins.
The density of qi was so high that spirit beasts and fell beasts were sometimes born there.
And spirit treasures like Heaven's Table Ginseng or the Wind God Pearl formed there as well.
That was why it was standard practice for prestigious clans or sects to declare such places forbidden grounds and keep them under guard.
But very occasionally, a spirit nexus existed above the ground rather than beneath it.
Mount Jangak was one of those places.
"Is this it?"
Before long, I'd entered a cave between the cliff paths, and I headed deeper inside, lighting the way with the Heaven's Table Ginseng.
And when, after a long while, I stepped into a wide-open space.
"Wow......"
A gasp of wonder escaped my lips on its own.
Because above a mountain of bones from every kind of beast, lines of script like oracle-bone writing drifted through the air in long chains, giving off a soft glow.
And at the very center of it all was that thing.
Vwoooom!
The heart of a spirit vein, floating in midair and rotating like a star.
The greatest fortuitous encounter of all, one of a kind, said to grant aptitude you had never had the moment you touched it.
"Found you, my treasure."
It was a spirit nexus.