Jeong Jong Gu had a terrible dream.
In the dream, he was walking home after losing a fortune at a gambling house.
As he strolled down the dark night road, a voice suddenly mentioned his late mother.
Outraged, he spun around to see the face of a handsome man floating in the air. He staggered backward in horror, only to see a hand reach out from the void and pull him in.
The g-grim reaper!
He was convinced that the Grim Reaper had come to drag him into hell. His fear overwhelmed him and he fainted on the spot.
The dream ended there.
“Phew, that was a really weird dream…, huh?”
Sweat dripped from his forehead and ran down his face. When he tried to raise his arm to wipe it away, he realized that something was holding him in place, restricting his movement.
“What, what is this?”
That wasn’t the only strange thing. As he struggled to open his heavy eyelids, he found himself unable to see. On closer inspection, it felt as if something was covering his eyes.
Just then, a man’s voice rang out.
“Si… no, Leader. This one’s awake!”
It was an unfamiliar voice he had never heard before.
Jeong Jong Gu quickly began piecing together his situation.
Now that he noticed, his legs were also bound. With his arms and legs tied and his eyes covered, the conclusion was obvious.
I’ve been kidnapped!
At the same time, vivid memories of the scene he had thought was just a dream came rushing back to him.
S-So it wasn’t a dream after all.
He couldn’t figure out what kind of witchcraft it was, but the man whose face had floated in the air was no ghost or Grim Reaper. He was a man.
A human who had come to kidnap him.
Step, step.
The sound of footsteps echoed closer.
“Awake?”
The same man’s voice spoke. It was a rich, deep tone that was almost hypnotic. It was unmistakably the same voice that had mentioned his late mother earlier.
“Wh-Who are you? What’s your purpose in kidnapping me?!”
Jeong Jong Gu wasn’t entirely clueless about the situation.
Could it be… the Tang Clan?
Of all the possibilities, the Tang Clan seemed the most likely. But Jeong Jong Gu had never done anything to warrant being captured by them.
“Are you from the Tang Clan? I haven’t said a word! I’ve been living quietly just as they told me to!”
At this, Baek Woo Jin’s eyes narrowed.
“Sounds like you’ve done plenty of things you shouldn’t have.”
Jeong Jong Gu’s body trembled.
“Wh-Who are you?”
He wasn’t from the Tang Clan. If he were, he wouldn’t be speaking like this.
“If I wanted you to know who I was, do you think I’d have blindfolded you?”
“..…”
He had a point.
“…What do you want from me?”
“The Sichuan Tang Clan.”
Jeong Jong Gu instinctively flinched at the mention of the clan, which was known as a group of fanatics obsessed with repaying debts.
“Start listing everything you’ve done for the Tang Clan up until now.”
The face revealed beneath the blindfold began to turn pale.
“I-I am nothing more than a researcher who developed poisons for the Tang Clan.”
At first, this was indeed the case. The Tang Clan was the only faction among the orthodox sects allowed to use poison legitimately, which gave him a sense of purpose. He poured his heart and soul into creating poisons; he was convinced that there was no greater joy than seeing his creations used by the Clan for justice.
But only at the start. That was before he succumbed to greed before he abandoned his conscience in the pursuit of greater results.
“Alright, then. Start talking about your poison research.”
“Ah…!”
It felt like he couldn’t breathe. Poison research was one of the Tang Clan’s most closely guarded secrets that was known only to an elite few within the clan. But the man standing before him, who was he to know?
While Jeong Jong Gu’s lips trembled in shock, Baek Woo Jin added calmly,
“Oh, and if you’re worried you’ll die at the hands of the Tang Clan for talking, don’t be.”
His confident tone made Jeong Jong Gu perk up his ears.
Come to think of it, the first man called him leader, didn’t he?
Maybe this man belonged to a group with power rivaling the Tang Clan, or perhaps an organization capable of protecting him from their retaliation.
But that hope evaporated the moment the next words reached his ears.
“If you don’t talk, you’ll die by my hands anyway.”
The air itself seemed to sting his skin. The killing intent embedded in that single, short sentence was overwhelming.
He’s not bluffing.
The voice directed at him carried a heavy sense of killing intent. If he kept his mouth shut any longer, he might have to worry about dying at the hands of the man before him long before he needed to fear the Tang Clan.
“If you promise to keep it a secret that I said anything… I’ll answer whatever you want.”
“That much I can do.”
It wasn’t just something Baek Woo Jin could promise; it was easy. All he wanted were the detailed specifics of the poison research and the names of those involved in it.
With at least some sense of safety, Jeong Jong Gu let out a sigh of relief. Then, he asked cautiously,
“What is it you want to know?”
“I heard that after completing your poison research, you conducted an experiment involving an aphrodisiac on the clan leader’s daughter. Is that true?”
The events of that time unfolded vividly in Jeong Jong Gu’s mind.
The sight of a woman crying uncontrollably as her newborn daughter was taken from her by the researchers, and her life came to a tragic end shortly thereafter. The man who had watched it all was powerless to intervene; his face was shadowed with grief and helplessness.
The researchers’ expressions were distorted with madness as they injected tiny, almost imperceptible doses of the drug into the fragile body of the baby lying on the cold laboratory table. Some were even giggling madly as they worked.
And among them, he had been there too. That was the first time he had ever felt the weight of guilt.
“…Yes, it’s true.”
He had slaughtered tens of thousands of animals in the name of research without batting an eye. He had believed that even if it were humans instead, he would continue his experiments without hesitation.
That certainty crumbled at the sound of a newborn’s cries.
For him, it was a memory he could never forget. A burden he would carry for the rest of his life.
“I heard that experiment ended at that time. The reasoning was that it wouldn’t be too late to continue after observing the child’s growth and any potential problems that might arise.”
But.
“That experiment… it didn’t end back then, did it?”
The experiment was stopped to monitor the progress of the Clan Leader’s daughter, Tang Seon Yeong.
At the time, the decision during the meeting was to observe her until she safely reached adulthood and married, but that resolution was broken when Tang Seon Yeong turned ten.
“Ten years later… the experiment resumed.”
During that time, the researchers didn’t just observe Tang Seon Yeong’s progress. They secretly continued their studies on animals and analyzed the changes in her body.
Although their repeated attempts to administer stronger poisons failed, their research was not entirely fruitless.
“And the test subjects?”
“There were ten women. Their ages ranged from early teens to late forties. All of them were orphans who had been working in the Tang clan.”
After years of research, they found a method to inject poison into individuals whose growth had ceased.
It was far easier to get older children or adults than to get newborns. Without hesitation, they launched the second experiment.
“Four died, six survived. Among them, only two were as successful as Tang Seon Yeong.”
“And the four survivors… did they also die?”
“They didn’t die. But… they became crippled.”
The drug caused a severe backlash. Its overwhelming power caused their bodies to break down, and eventually they became permanently crippled.
“What happened to the two who succeeded?”
“I heard they were married off somewhere, to a fairly influential family. The head craftsman handled it personally, so I don’t know the details.”
Out of ten, two succeeded.
A twenty percent success rate.
The research team, led by the head craftsman, continued their experiments several more times. Sometimes they achieved higher success rates, other times lower. Gradually, they became accustomed to the process.
As he quietly listened, Baek Woo Jin asked him a question.
“Doesn’t seem like you ever felt guilty.”
The words struck Baek Woo Jin with a chilling sense of horror. The idea that they could justify killing so many people just to get some research results, and then go on with even more determination.
Could such people even be considered human?
“The head craftsman said at the time that leaving things as failures would only deepen the guilt for those we had already lost. The head craftsman claimed that to atone, even just a little, it was necessary to succeed in the experiment.”
Looking back now, it was utter nonsense. If they had truly wanted to repent, they should have stopped the research then and spent their lives making amends.
“We researchers were completely taken in by this absurd argument. At the time, we were completely out of our minds….”
They accepted it—or rather, it wasn’t as if they were too naive to recognize it as ridiculous. No researcher could be that foolish. They chose to go along with it knowingly.
By then, they couldn’t even begin to fathom how much blood was on their hands. They had sunk so deeply into depravity that they believed failure would drive them truly insane.
“Do you remember the faces of all those who were sacrificed during the experiments?”
“…I remember most of them.”
Baek Woo Jin pulled a mask from his clothes and wrapped it around his face. Then he removed the blindfold covering Jeong Jong Gu’s eyes.
“Ugh…!”
As light poured in brightly, Jeong Jong Gu blinked several times.
Baek Woo Jin took a drawing from his clothes and held it up in front of him. It was a drawing of the maid whose scent had been identical to Tang Seon Yeong’s.
If he remembered the faces of most of the test subjects, he would recognize her.
“Have you seen this face before?”
“……!”
Jeong Jong Gu stared closely at the woman depicted on the paper.
And then—
“Hoo!”
He sucked in a sharp breath. His face twisted in shock as he fell backward in alarm.
Crash!
Even as he fell backward with the chair and took a pretty hard hit, he seemed completely unfazed by the pain. He just stared at the drawing with horror etched into his face.
“H-How… how could you have that crazy woman’s face…?!”
“Crazy woman?”
Baek Woo Jin’s eyes narrowed further. This was a clear sign he had stumbled upon something significant.
“Who is this woman for you to react like this?”
When Baek Woo Jin asked with apparent curiosity, Jeong Jong Gu replied in disbelief.
“You… You know about the poison experiments, yet you don’t recognize her face?!”
Baek Woo Jin had only regarded her as just another test subject. Judging from the way she had attempted to seduce him, he thought she was likely acting under someone’s orders to deliberately approach him.
However, judging by Jeong Jong Gu’s expression, it seemed far more serious than that.
Pointing at the drawing with his bound arms, Jeong Jong Gu shouted in a trembling voice.
“Sh-She’s the head craftsman who started all of this!”
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