"You... aren't leaving?"
Chil-sung set the basin down on the stone floor, walked to the table, took a clean cloth, folded it with care, and wiped the remaining blood from Yeon Hak's chin.
"The Old Master is shaken. He might act rashly if he stays," Chil-sung answered flatly, his face carrying no excess expression. "And someone needs to make sure you don't choke on your own tongue if the paralysis locks your airway in the next hour, Young Master."
Yeon Hak studied the young man in silence. No panic on Chil-sung's face. No string of stupid questions about what had just happened.
"Since when did you know I let the poison in deliberately?"
"Since you knew exactly where the red-sealed ceramic bottle was." Chil-sung's hands paused mid-fold on the soiled cloth. "You have never once walked down the third shelf corridor in the five years I have worked here." He turned the cloth in his hands. "Madmen act without pattern. They throw things, they scream. You just demonstrated precise calculation. You accounted for the timing of the poison's paralysis effect."
Sharp, Yeon Hak noted. For a young man with no detectable cultivation level, this observation carried weight.
"Then the person lying in front of me..." Chil-sung continued. "...is not the same one who woke up yesterday morning, is he?"
Yeon Hak did not smile. "Tell me, Chil-sung. Do you care who is behind these eyes, as long as that person stops being an embarrassment to this clan?"
Chil-sung's eyes widened slightly. When he met Yeon Hak's gaze, there was a new steadiness in them.
"No, Young Master," Chil-sung said. "I only care that the person lying in front of me knows how to not die tomorrow."
"Good." Yeon Hak cut him off. "Take the small cushion from that chair. Prop it under my neck. Thirty-degree angle. It will keep my airway clear when the remaining Black Castor compresses my thorax in about an hour."
Chil-sung nodded without asking anything. He carried out the instruction immediately.
---
Meanwhile, outside the pharmacy wing.
A cold night wind swept across the stone courtyard, but Yeon Tae-joo felt his own body temperature running colder than the air around him.
The middle-aged man stood beneath the shadow of a wooden pillar, eyes narrowed at the pharmacy door Physician Yeon had just pulled shut.
Tae-joo's hand moved on reflex to his right ribs. A sharp pain throbbed from beneath his robe.
What Yeon Hak had said kept cycling through his head. The injury on the right ribs. The expired condensation pill. That was not delirious rambling. That was high-level qi diagnosis, the kind only a master from the Alchemist Bureau could perform, or a martial artist one step from the Core Formation realm. How could a mentally disabled child who had never once lit a spark of qi in his entire life know all of that just from watching the way a man stood?
"Something is wrong with that boy," Tae-joo muttered to himself.
Clan Yeon stood at the edge of collapse. Next month, envoys from Clan Baek would arrive for their inspection. Everyone knew it was not a simple inspection. It was the opening legal move to seize the assets of a clan that had failed to pay its debts. Tae-joo had spent months keeping what remained of this clan from triggering any incident that Clan Baek could use as grounds to accelerate the annexation.
And now, the chief physician's son had woken from a coma with the eyes of a hired killer and the knowledge of an alchemy elder.
"Yeon Chun," Tae-joo said quietly.
From the far end of the dark corridor, a sixteen-year-old boy stepped out quickly. "Yes, Senior Tae-joo," he said, bowing.
"Starting tonight, you are posted in the courtyard of the medical wing," Tae-joo ordered. "Watch Physician Yeon and his son. If the idiot suddenly walks, or if Physician Yeon tries to move him out of the clan, report to me immediately. Do not let either of them make unilateral decisions."
"Understood, Senior. I will watch them." Yeon Chun gave a quick nod and stepped back into the shadows.
Tae-joo drew a long breath, pressed his ribs once more, and turned to leave. He did not believe in coincidences, and he would not let a single anomaly bring down what remained of this clan.
---
He closed his eyes and pulled his awareness inward, redrawing the anatomy of this body inside his mind.
The Black Castor Seed extract had done its work perfectly, consuming the residual pure qi his father had forced in. But now the thick black fluid pooled at the base of his dantian. Wild, raw, radiating corrosive energy that had killed every motor nerve in reach.
This poison is my fuel, Yeon Hak thought. It didn't reject me. It just has nowhere to go.
---
Dawn light began pushing through the gaps in the pharmacy's wooden shutters when the first sensation hit.
Thousands of nerves that had been numbed by the poison fired back to life all at once.
He ground his teeth, swallowing the groan behind a locked jaw.
Move, he told his body.
Stiffly, Yeon Hak pressed both palms to the wooden table and pushed himself upright.
Chil-sung, who had been dozing against the wall, jerked awake immediately. The young man stepped forward to help, but Yeon Hak raised his still-trembling left hand and stopped him.
He attempted to draw the toxic energy upward into the Tae-yeon meridian.
BZZT.
A sharp pain tore through his chest and nearly made him choke on his own blood. The poison rejected the orthodox method. It pushed back, slamming against the walls of his dantian as though threatened.
Yeon Hak opened his eyes, gasping. He stopped forcing it immediately.
If he couldn't force it through old methods, he would have to listen to where this energy wanted to go on its own. Yeon Hak loosened his mental defenses and let the poison move freely, without guidance.
And in that moment, he understood.
The pooled toxic energy inside his dantian was not still. It was not spreading randomly. It moved in one slow, constant direction. Downward. Through the floor. Toward the depths of the earth beneath Clan Yeon.
Something was down there.
If this body had been born with reversed meridians that responded to energy beneath the clan's ground, then the clan's ancestors had to have known why. That literature had to exist somewhere.
Yeon Hak turned his head slowly toward Pyo Chil-sung, who stood waiting for orders.
"Chil-sung." Yeon Hak's voice was still hoarse. "Where does this clan keep its oldest records? A place that's locked, ignored, or considered useless because no one can read them anymore?"
Chil-sung went quiet for a few seconds, processing the profile of the place Yeon Hak was describing.
"In the old building wing, Young Master," Chil-sung answered. "At the end of the corridor, there is a room Physician Yeon keeps permanently padlocked. Nothing inside but rotting parchment and ancestral medical records no one considers relevant anymore."
Yeon Hak lowered his legs from the table.
A thin smile formed at the corner of his lips, carrying no warmth at all.
"Good. Take me there."