Chapter 49 of 90
A Miracle Medicine
Nalan Meng's breathing was getting faster.
Short, hard, ragged breaths, dragged in through her teeth. The poison had reached her heart. He could see it in her face—the color draining from her lips, a faint blue-violet shadow creeping in at the corners of her mouth and under her eyes. And the fight had cost her too much. She had burned her bloodline like a torch to try to end it fast, and the fire had carried the Star Marrow Poison through every vessel in her body. She was swaying on her feet now. The golden dragon behind her had faded to a shimmer.
She could not hold out much longer.
"Give it up," said the Poison Emperor. He said it almost kindly. "If you keep fighting like this, the poison will enter your heart, and then even this Emperor won't be able to save you."
"A mere poison-peddler of the rivers and lakes," said Nalan Meng, through her teeth, "and you think I'll beg you?" Her eyes had gone red. "Go to hell!"
The Poison Emperor was smiling. But his forehead was covered in sweat.
In close combat, this girl is even better than I thought. He watched her come up out of her stagger, claws raised, the dragon flickering back into life behind her. And that bloodline. The five-clawed golden dragon. Unique to the royal house. There were only three people alive who carried it. One was the Emperor himself, the Sage on the throne. One was the Third Prince.
And the third was standing in front of him, dying.
He hesitated.
He was very good at poisons. He could hide from almost anyone. But if he killed a princess of the five-clawed blood, he would have the whole royal house hunting him. He would be living in holes for the rest of his life.
Li Yuguo was watching Nalan Meng.
Jun Xue was still in his arms, small and limp and purple, and the mushroom on his head was still growing, pressing down, softening the edges of everything. But he could see Nalan Meng clearly. And he felt something in his chest that he did not have a name for.
Does she really hate me?
He had been so sure. Three years of contempt. The whip. The locked doors. If she hates me so much—why did she come? Alone, into the haze, after him. With a bow and a spear and a thigh full of Star Marrow Poison, and no one to make her.
If he did nothing now, and she died here for him, for nothing—then he was not a man.
He thought.
Fast, with the mushroom eating at the edges of his mind. He went back through his own book, chapter by chapter, the way he used to scroll back through a manuscript at three in the morning looking for a line he knew was there.
And he found it.
A fragment. A scene from much later in the original, two hundred chapters on. Ye Qiong had fallen in with the Medicine Immortal, the old genius doctor in the south. And at one point—Li Yuguo had written it half asleep, it had been a filler arc—Ye Qiong had used the Medicine Immortal's name to talk the Poison Emperor down from killing him. There had been something about the Poison Emperor's health. Something he hid.
It was only a fragment. But it might be enough.
"Wait!" Li Yuguo gasped. "Stop—stop!"
"Yuguo!" Nalan Meng's head turned. And then she stared at him. "What… what's that big thing sticking out of your head?"
Li Yuguo nearly collapsed.
"It's not a thing!" he said. "It's a mushroom! A mushroom!"
Nalan Meng's face went scarlet. She shut her mouth. She had realized, a breath too late, exactly how that had sounded, in front of everyone—the Poison Guards, the King of Thieves, the Poison Emperor himself—and she was suddenly, horribly shy, in the middle of a battle, with poison in her heart.
The Poison Emperor sneered.
"Well. A wise man knows when he can't escape. All of you have only one road left, and it leads to the grave. You may as well accept your fate."
"Hahaha!" Li Yuguo laughed.
He made himself laugh. He forced it up past the rage in his chest and out into the clearing, loud and easy and mocking.
"It's you who should accept your fate," he said. "Lord Poison Emperor."
"What fate is this Emperor supposed to accept?" The Poison Emperor's eyes narrowed to slits. "If you're in such a hurry to die, this Emperor doesn't mind trying another poison on you."
"Let me ask you something," said Li Yuguo, loudly, so that every man in the clearing could hear. "For the past few years, haven't you felt a little… uncomfortable? All over your body? For example—at night. When you and your wife are about to have some fun together. And you find that, down there, things are a bit… unsatisfactory."
The Poison Guards heard it.
One by one, the men in the green robes put their hands up over their gray cloth masks. Their shoulders shook. And one of them—some heartless Poison Guard at the back—did not manage to hold it in, and a snort of laughter burst out of him before he could stop it.
The Poison Emperor's whole face went purple. "You brat. You want to die!"
"I'm asking you," said Li Yuguo, louder. "When you practice, don't you feel your dantian isn't flowing right? Your Qi rises, and gets stuck halfway, and won't go up or down? And when you go to relieve yourself"—he made a small, sad, dribbling motion with his fingers—"you can't get it all out at once? Drip, drip, drip, and you have to stand there forever?"
"You—you're insulting this Emperor!"
But the Poison Emperor's face had changed. Under the purple, it had gone pale.
He had not expected it. He had not expected anyone to know.
He had carried this hidden illness for years. Since it began, his wife had despised him a little more every season. He could not hold his head up in front of anyone. He had not dared to see a doctor. And the most troublesome thing of all was that the greatest doctor in the world—the Medicine Emperor, the Yaoxian, the genius healer of the south—was his sworn nemesis. His oldest rival.
It was utterly impossible for him to go to his rival and ask to be treated. For that. Let alone what it would do to his dignity as a man.
And now this boy—
Some part of him was afraid. And some other part of him, deep down, that he would never have admitted to, had begun to hope. If he knows what it is… maybe he knows what to do about it.
"How do you know?" said the Poison Emperor.
"Pfft—"
The King of Thieves could not hold it any longer. It burst out of him. He doubled over in his cut ropes with his hand over his mouth.
The Poison Emperor's face went red right to his ears. "Old thief! Laugh one more time and this Emperor will deal with you first!"
"Wait—wait, old poison—I'm only coughing—I've got a cough, and when I cough I—ahaha—ah ha—ha ha ha ha ha!" The King of Thieves was laughing so hard that tears were running out of his one eye.
Li Yuguo kept his face perfectly serious.
"That's because you practice your Poison Art the wrong way," he said. "You've always thought that the more poisonous your technique, the better. More poison, more power. But you've overlooked one thing. The body is a container. If you think of the poison as water—a container can only hold so much. And when it can't hold any more, the water overflows. And the overflow goes into the rest of your body."
He let that sink in.
"Right now, it's only the beginning. It's only made your… majesty… a bit less majestic than it used to be. But in a little while, your majesty will be gone completely. Then your beard will fall out. Your voice will go high, like a woman's. And the most terrifying thing of all—" he leaned forward "—the two muscles on your chest will start getting bigger."
Everything he said was to protect them. Every word. He did not know how much of it was true. He only knew it had to sound true.
"Fuck!" The Poison Emperor's hands had gone to his chest without his meaning them to. "You're not a doctor. How could you know what's going on with this Emperor?"
"Haha! Since I know the Thief Emperor," said Li Yuguo, word by word, "why couldn't I know the Medicine Emperor?"
The clearing went completely silent.
Even Nalan Meng was stunned. She stared at him through the haze of poison in her eyes. When did this boy get so good at making friends? One Thief Emperor was already enough to shock anyone. And now he was saying he knew the Medicine Emperor? The Medicine Emperor had the strangest temper in the world. Even her own uncle, the Emperor on his throne, had sent for him once to be treated, and the old man had very nearly refused.
The King of Thieves, though, was moved to tears all over again.
"Brother! As expected of my elder brother! He knows everyone—no one in the world has heard of him and he's met everyone! Brother is truly a dragon and a phoenix among men! The god of making friends! My admiration for my brother is like a waterfall pouring down from the sky—it's like a big man with diarrhea, it just never stops—"
"Empty words prove nothing." The Poison Emperor's eyes had narrowed again, but his voice was not steady. "I don't believe you can help me."
"Here!"
Li Yuguo threw something across the clearing.
The Poison Emperor caught it. It was a pill. Small, diamond-shaped, bright blue, smooth and glossy as a piece of candy.
He had bought it a few moments ago. When he ran into the tent and came out again with Jun Xue in his arms, he had already opened Alimama in his mind and scrolled past the healing pills and the antidotes he could not afford and the ones that would not work on a poison this strong, and found what he was looking for in a section of the catalogue he had never expected to need. Three pills in a little foil card. Strong Brother. The overlord of medicines, the most famous in his old world.
"What is this?" said the Poison Emperor.
"It's a miracle medicine!" said Li Yuguo. "One of three that the God of Medicine gave me personally. This medicine will make your golden spear invincible. You'll fight like a dragon all night long!"
He said it with total confidence. Because in his old world, it really was a powerful medicine. Its name was spoken with respect in every pharmacy in the land.
"And if it's poisonous?" said the Poison Emperor, squinting at it.
Li Yuguo laughed. "Is the Poison Emperor afraid of a mere poison?"
"Humph!"
The Poison Emperor snorted, and tossed the pill into his mouth without hesitating, and swallowed.
The moment it was down, his whole body began to steam.
A thin white vapor rose from his skin, from his shoulders, his chest, the tops of his loose sleeves. And below his belt, under the loose folds of his robe, the thing that had been hanging limp for years began—slowly, then not slowly at all—to rise.
It stood up. And kept standing. Until, beneath the robe, it formed a truly spectacular sight. The silk of his robe tented out in front of him like the pole of a pavilion.
The Poison Emperor stared down at himself.
Then he dropped where he stood and sat cross-legged in the grass and closed his eyes, and began to circulate his Qi.
Everyone watched. Nobody spoke. The vapor rising off him thickened into a cloud. Once around the great circuit of his meridians. Twice. Three times.
On the third, he shouted.
His eyes flew open, and he threw back his head and laughed, a great wild booming laugh that sent birds flying up out of the trees.
"A miracle medicine! It really is a miracle medicine! This Emperor has been stuck at the peak of Martial Soul for years, without moving a hair—and this medicine has carried this Emperor straight from Martial Soul to Martial King!"
Discussion
Comments (0)