A brief silence fell over the garden.Hae-rak let out a thin laugh.“What, are you going to make poison that pretends to be an elixir and feed it to him?”Sohwa nodded.Hae-rak said nothing more. He only looked at Sohwa with a baffled gaze.Sohwa rose and moved to seek other ingredients. She had no room in her mind to spare.Her steps slowed as she went where the trees grew dense.Near the pavilion the wind was warm, but here a cold wind blew. There were even flowers blooming in frost-crusted rock crevices. It seemed this was where plants that held yin energy grew.Desert, marsh, and snowy field—a strange land where sliced spaces were mixed together. She felt she was beginning to understand the structure of the garden.Sohwa walked among the trees, seeking warmth.Sunlight boring through the leaves occasionally vexed her sight, but she did not lower her gaze and kept searching for fruit.At last, when blue fruit entered her eyes, she stopped.But the fruit did not reach her hand.The moment she rose on tiptoe, her view went dark.Pluck.Hae-rak, plucking the fruit with ease, lowered his gaze.“How many?”“Two.”Without a word, Hae-rak plucked two more large fruits and put them in the basket.Sohwa turned to walk again.She had not expected all the ingredients she needed to be present, but Sohwa realized she had been wrong. The Blood Demon’s garden was full even of strange mushrooms she had only ever seen in books. Thanks to that, Sohwa could gather more materials than she had anticipated.It did take a little time.Before she knew it, a red tint began to creep into the sunlight.Plucking black petals, Sohwa asked Hae-rak,“It doesn’t look like you plan to return to the Central Plains. Are you free?”“Do I look it?”“You don’t look busy.”Hae-rak, wandering nearby, let out a hollow laugh.Hearing footsteps draw near, Sohwa opened her mouth again.“Don’t come this way. It’s a flower used in Hwagolsan (Flesh-and-Bone Dissolving Powder); if you smell it, breathing will be uncomfortable for a while.”But the footsteps drew closer and closer.Sohwa decided it would be faster to pick the flowers herself than to break the Lord of the Red Blood Hall’s stubbornness.Before Hae-rak arrived, she sealed the flowers in a pouch and moved away.“Why not put that in the basket?”“If I keep it with the others, it will spoil the rest.”Hae-rak nodded.Before long, the basket was piled high with ingredients. Glancing at the basket, Sohwa knit her brows. There was a heap of yellow flowers she had not picked. They were the herbs she had stuck to his face.“Why these?”“Since I’m here, I’m going to swipe a bit.”Hae-rak said it with brazen ease.“They work well.”It was not wrong. His deeply cut face had become clean.Since he was a man who paid attention to his appearance to begin with, it was something to covet.It wasn’t her garden anyway, so it did not matter even if she stole all the ingredients here.To empty the full basket, Sohwa turned her steps toward the pavilion.But suddenly her hand went up. Clicking his tongue at whatever she was thinking, Hae-rak took her hand.“A physician who doesn’t know when her own body is being harmed.”Balancing the basket on his head, Hae-rak began to place the yellow flowers on Sohwa’s fingers.Because she had touched a poisonous flower, the skin on her fingers had peeled. But it was already more than half healed. Sohwa found Hae-rak’s manner ridiculous.“It will heal quickly even without this.”“It’s not like you don’t feel pain. Just because you recover well doesn’t mean you don’t feel it.”“…”“You said this is about killing the Blood Demon, didn’t you? I’m adding force to your speed. Work hard and hurry up and make that poison or whatever it is to cut off his breath.”At his playful tone, Sohwa smiled.It seemed Hae-rak did not think she could kill the Blood Demon.“…Why are you smiling?”Sohwa lifted her head. She spoke as if tossing off a light jest.“Did you know? My birth mother’s name was Geumso.”“Really? Sounds like your mother was just as stingy with smiles.”Sohwa nodded.“They say because she did not smile, the attendants called her that, and the Blood Demon also called my mother Geumso.”“If your mother’s name is Geumso, why is the daughter Sohwa? The daughter doesn’t smile either, and yet her name means ‘smile-flower’—odd.”Agreeing with Hae-rak’s words, Sohwa walked with tilted lips.“My father named me. My grandfather told him to name me Juhwa, but he took it from my mother’s name and named me Sohwa.”“Ah, so the Tang Clan Head named you?”Perhaps feeling sorry, Hae-rak feigned distraction.Sohwa let out a small laugh. A sigh was mixed into it.“Even back then, there must have been more than a few Blood Cult men infiltrated into the Tang Clan. Bold, to go around using a name bestowed by the Blood Demon.”Sohwa turned her gaze to Hae-rak.“Was your name given by the Blood Demon, too?”“No.”Hae-rak answered in a voice with not a hint of regret.“In the Blood Cult, those who receive names from the Blood Demon are only those who received his blood, or those he has recognized as believers. Luckily, I’m neither.”“No wonder. Your name has a fine meaning.”Hae-rak let out a hollow laugh.“Didn’t you recoil at first and tell me not to make lewd jokes with my name?”“Since it was you who put ‘Hae-rak’ in your mouth, I thought it was lewd. But if someone else named you, it will have a good meaning. Especially if it was made by family.”Hae-rak stopped walking.Sohwa, stopping as well, turned her body toward him.“If your surname were Min, it might even have been named with a ruler’s name in mind. The meaning fits, doesn’t it.”Hae-rak was silent for a moment.Adjusting his hold on the basket of ingredients, he asked,“What is it you want to say?”A tepid wind flowed along the silence.Sohwa set her voice upon that warm wind.“Do you remember what I asked you? When I asked whether you were the direct line of the Lord of the Great Desert Sun Palace?”“I remember. It hasn’t been long.”“I apologize for asking a foolish question. I didn’t know all of the Sun Palace bloodline within the Blood Cult were the lord’s descendants.”Expression left Hae-rak’s face.“So the one who named you would have been family.”He did not answer.Sohwa spoke slowly, hoping it would sound sincere.“I want to return the territory to the Outland bloodlines.”“Ha ha.”Hae-rak laughed, as if he had not expected it.It was the sound of laughing at a preposterous delusion, but Sohwa did not smile.At her grave mood, Hae-rak narrowed his brows, and Sohwa spoke again.“Thanks to the Blood Demon’s grotesque ‘frame’-making, the lineages and martial arts of the Outland bloodlines seem to have been preserved. I want to help them find their clans again.”Hae-rak studied Sohwa’s face.Realizing she was sincere, Hae-rak let out a hollow laugh.“Why? To set up a battlefield in the Outland so Blood Cult rats can’t cross into the Central Plains?”“Yes.”“You mean to make the Outland the Central Plains’ shield? No—besides all that.”Hae-rak shook his head.“What wind blew that our orthodox young lady has such lofty confidence now? Do you really believe the Blood Demon will die to some poison?”“Perhaps the Blood Demon can be killed very easily.”Sohwa turned her gaze to the garden as she spoke.“It’s after the Blood Demon’s death that the greater problem will arise.”Unlike the Blood Demon, most of the Blood Cult’s believers would be bodies capable of accumulating.So the Blood Demon must have taken note of her far off in the Central Plains and, when he destroyed Sichuan, forced the separation from the Tang Clan. Because she was the only body like his.Those Blood Cult men who could seize others’ inner energy and absorb it as their own were the issue.Members of the Blood Cult with limitless potential for growth.“Mm, did you injure your head? The old man looks like he squeezed your neck, so why is it you came back with a head injury?”But Hae-rak did not think that far. From the start, he did not believe Sohwa could kill the Blood Demon.Hae-rak raised his hand to her head, but Sohwa left him alone and spoke earnestly.“Hae-rak.”“…Hae-rak? Hae-rak, you say? Are you truly ill somewhere?”Whether he was appalled or not, Sohwa asked in a calm voice,“Do you know that the Blood Demon has no dantian?”“What?”Hae-rak let out a scoff.“Don’t spout nonsense. The old man’s dantian is bigger than his body. It must be overflowing to the point it burst. Do you even know how much inner energy the Blood Demon has gobbled up?”“I understand why you say that, because you have watched him plunder others’ inner energy. But paradoxically, the reason the Blood Demon seizes inner energy is also because his body cannot accumulate on its own.”Sohwa reconstructed the Blood Demon’s body in her mind.Uncountable motes of dust-like light were spread through his whole body.It was the inner energy he had plundered from others. Because the Blood Demon could not digest it, he had concealed it within his qi-blood points.Even consuming it once, by opening a single qi-blood point, produced great power—but if he could refine all of it, there was no knowing what kind of monster he would become.Paradoxically, the greedy old man’s body was more beautiful than any martial man’s body she had ever seen.Recalling the gorgeously varicolored lights, Sohwa spoke again.“The Blood Demon holds a powder magazine in his body. Thanks to his innate recovery, even if he forcibly emits unbalanced inner energy, he easily re-stabilizes—but if the inner energy he has hoarded clashes all at once, even the Blood Demon will not be able to keep his life.”Especially if it is ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) at a time when his recovery vanishes.Sohwa understood why the Blood Demon obsessed over the sorcerer of time.He intended to use all his qi-blood points as a dantian and wield infinite power at will.If he failed to achieve that goal, turning back time was a matter of survival for him.The failure he sought to avert even by turning back time—was death.

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