Chapter 3

Pyo Wol hurriedly brought the plate to his face.

An unidentifiable smell assaulted his nostrils. He couldn’t tell what kind of food it was. It was a mixture of various things, clearly a collection of leftovers.

Still, it would be more delicious than the moss Pyo Wol had been scraping off and eating until now. In fact, as soon as he smelled the food, saliva began to pool ceaselessly in Pyo Wol’s mouth.

But Pyo Wol did not rashly eat the food.

It was food given by the one who had imprisoned him here. He couldn’t know what was inside.

If it contained poison, he was a dead man.

If he had no choice, like when he ate the moss, he would have had to eat it without question, but the situation was different now.

He had the option of moss, and there was still quite a bit of it left. So, even if he didn’t eat this food right now, he could hold out for a while.

He couldn’t stop the saliva from pooling in his mouth, but he still had plenty of time to think.

He needed to get information about the food.

In the darkness where not a single speck of light entered, the means of obtaining information were extremely limited.

Since he couldn’t use his sight, the most convenient means of getting information, he had to mobilize his next most developed sense: smell.

“Hooo!”

Pyo Wol inhaled the scent deeply, practically burying his nose in the plate. A multitude of smells mixed together as they entered his nostrils.

It was a mixture of various scents, as if garbage had been gathered in one place. Some gave off a foul stench, while others smelled edible enough.

The Pyo Wol of the past would not have been able to distinguish the jumbled scents.

Before being trapped here, Pyo Wol had been nothing more than an ordinary boy.

He was just a child with nothing special about him, no outstanding talents. But while trapped here, a great change had occurred within him.

He had come to doubt and be wary of everything.

Even if it was something trivial.

Having been trapped in an underground space without a single speck of light for a long time, Pyo Wol’s sense of smell had become as sensitive as a hunting dog’s.

Pyo Wol broke down and distinguished each scent, smells he could never have discerned when he was outside.

Pyo Wol compared the distinguished scents with the smells remaining in his memory.

‘This is the smell of rotten fish, and tea leaves are mixed in. This is the debris left after boiling pork bones.’

The variety of food contained in the small plate was unbelievably diverse.

It was to the point that Pyo Wol himself couldn’t believe he could distinguish all these smells.

There was nothing mixed in that he suspected to be poison.

It was all just the dregs of food someone had left uneaten.

To some, it might be nothing more than foul-smelling food waste, but to Pyo Wol, it was precious data that provided a lot of information.

Pyo Wol had identified more than five types of food.

This meant that there were at least enough people here to eat five different kinds of dishes.

‘Right! I thought it wouldn’t be just one person.’

He didn’t think a single person could have created an underground space of three zhang on all sides. To prepare such a space, a considerable amount of funds and manpower would be needed.

It meant this was not a space that could be created out of an individual’s deviation or obsession.

If there were five types of food, there was a high probability that more than five people had eaten them.

The fact that the degree of decay was different for each food meant that the time they were eaten was different. In other words, several people had eaten at different times. The amount of dregs was also too much to be the leftovers of just one or two people.

Above all, each food carried a different person’s Body Scent. Pyo Wol had identified five Body Scents alone.

It was clear that a group of more than five people had imprisoned him here for some purpose.

‘No, it’s probably not just me.’

Pyo Wol thought there must be others trapped besides himself.

It was too inefficient to use a space like this to imprison just one person like him.

Pyo Wol organized his thoughts.

‘The number of people managing this place is at least five, and the number of those in the same situation as me is at least that many, or more.’

One thought led to another.

‘The ones who imprisoned us must have created this place for some purpose. The problem is, what is that purpose…’

He couldn’t yet guess the purpose of those who had imprisoned him here. There was too little information to infer from just one unidentifiable dish mixed with food waste.

But Pyo Wol wasn’t worried.

He had a lot of time left.

There was nothing else to do here anyway.

The best way to pass the time was to think.

If he thought endlessly, and thought again, he would surely be able to approach the truth someday.

Fortunately, he didn’t detect any smell he suspected to be poison from the unidentifiable food.

Pyo Wol cautiously began to eat the food.

This too was a gamble.

To recover his stamina and strength, he needed nutrients other than moss. Even if it was a mix of garbage.

Having organized all his thoughts, Pyo Wol began to eat the unidentifiable food on the plate with his hands.

Slurp! Slurp!

The sound of him eating echoed in the darkness.

The food tasted terrible, but it was still more edible than the moss.

The food was supplied once a day at the same time.

It wasn’t exact. It was just a guess based on Pyo Wol’s intuition.

An amount just enough for one person to endure a day was given.

The taste of the food was different every day.

This was because different kinds of food were mixed in daily. But there were foods and spices that were always mixed in without fail.

They were pork scraps and spicy seasonings.

No matter what food was mixed in, these two were always included.

That meant that the people here had easy access to pork and spicy seasonings.

‘A place where pork and spicy seasonings are abundant.’

There were only a few such places in All Under Heaven.

Pyo Wol had wandered All Under Heaven alone since he was young. Thanks to that, he had picked up more information than his peers.

One of them was Sichuan Province.

Within the closed-off terrain, like a jar, existed a wide Basin. Because of this, it was famous for raising a lot of livestock that ate a tremendous amount of grass, like pigs and sheep. And due to the characteristic of being a Basin trapped by high mountain ranges, an unbearable heat persisted in the summer, and people sought out spicy food to overcome the heat.

Spicy food using pork or lamb was known as a symbol of Sichuan Province.

Pyo Wol thought this place was somewhere within Sichuan Province. He couldn’t know the exact place name, but he had a feeling that it wouldn’t be far from Sichuan Province.

‘Sichuan Province is a place famous for its unique seclusion.’

The word seclusion also meant that it was a place where it was easy to avoid the surveillance of others.

In other words, the group that had imprisoned Pyo Wol here was plotting something while avoiding the eyes of others, and it was clear that they had chosen a certain location in Sichuan Province as the place for it.

If they were plotting something while avoiding the eyes of others like this, it would never be a good thing.

‘Then again, people who do good things wouldn’t commit such an inhuman act.’

Pyo Wol bit his lip.

Blood burst and wet the corner of his mouth, but he felt no pain.

He had become accustomed to such extreme pain that this level of pain was nothing.

Pyo Wol felt a great anger towards those who had imprisoned him here.

Not only him, but anyone who was trapped in such a space without reason and treated worse than a beast would surely be just as angry.

Pyo Wol suppressed his fiery anger.

In this situation, anger was not beneficial.

He had to hide his anger and become even more cold-headed.

He had to grasp as much information as possible and use it to his advantage.

Though no one had taught him, Pyo Wol was mastering his own method of survival in the darkness.

Time flowed on.

From the amount of food he had eaten, Pyo Wol guessed that he had been trapped here for at least four months.

The person who gave him food never said a word to Pyo Wol.

They just mechanically opened the small window once a day and supplied the food.

Having been isolated in a space of pure darkness for a full four months without speaking a single word to another person, Pyo Wol also felt the limits of his mental strength.

The time he spent talking to himself kept increasing.

He would ask himself questions and answer them, and he wondered if his mind would split apart. But each time, Pyo Wol tenaciously held onto his sanity and endured.

It was as if time had stopped in this place.

Maintaining one’s sanity in a place like this was by no means an easy task. Especially if one just stared blankly without doing anything, it was easy to go mad. So what Pyo Wol chose to do was to move.

He walked along the walls of the narrow space, three zhang on all sides.

He walked, and walked again, and walked until he collapsed from exhaustion.

He circled the same space like a squirrel on a wheel.

Calluses formed on the soles of his feet, and muscles slowly began to form on his legs.

When he was still, the hunger was bearable, but once he started moving, an extreme sense of emptiness tormented him.

The food given once a day was not enough. So he scraped off and ate the moss.

While shuddering at the hellish taste that paralyzed his tongue, he chose to eat the moss to endure the day.

“Hoo! Hoo!”

Pyo Wol’s entire body was drenched in sweat.

He had eaten moss and circled the narrow space all day long.

Thanks to that, his legs now had some muscle. He was still gaunt due to the lack of nutrients, but he was no longer as precarious as if he would break with a poke of a finger.

Once his leg muscles had developed to a certain extent, Pyo Wol considered upper body exercises.

The only upper body exercise he could do was push-ups.

Pyo Wol split his walking time to do push-ups.

Push-ups brought him as much pain as when he first started walking.

At first, just doing ten made him breathless. But as he endured the pain and continued to try, the number increased day by day.

Several more months passed like that.

Although he couldn’t see it with his eyes, Pyo Wol felt that his body had changed quite a bit.

He was still thin, but it was no longer just skin stretched over flesh; solid muscle now existed beneath his skin.

To get to this point, Pyo Wol had to make a bloody effort.

He fought endlessly not with someone else, but with himself, and comforted himself when he was about to break down.

It was a different kind of pain from the initial hunger.

Pyo Wol thus taught himself how to endure pain.

That was not the only thing he learned. He began to perceive the flow of time through his internal bodily reactions.

His bowel movement cycle, the time when his mind became clear, and through various other bodily changes, he became able to gauge the approximate flow of time.

There was another change.

It was his eyes.

His eyes had begun to adapt to the intense darkness.

He didn’t know when it started, but little by little, the surrounding scenery came into his view. It was only enough to distinguish shapes and lines, but that alone was great progress.

Pyo Wol was satisfied just to have escaped the state of being a blind man with open eyes.

The underground space, confirmed with his eyes, was even more desolate than he had imagined.

In the rectangular space, there was not a single piece of furniture. On one side, the feces and urine Pyo Wol had excreted over time were piled up, emitting a foul stench. And to eat the feces and urine, unidentifiable insects had gathered.

It was surprising that so many insects lived in a dark space where not a single speck of light existed.

Pyo Wol watched the swarm of insects from a distance.

If he had seen such a sight before coming here, he would have said it was disgusting or scary, but now he felt no emotion at all.

The isolation in the darkness had worn away his emotions and seemed to have killed the feeling of fear.

Just then, his wrist suddenly stung.

Startled by the pain, like being pricked by a needle, Pyo Wol looked and saw a small snake biting his wrist.

It was a small snake whose eyes had degenerated like the other insects.

The snake, biting down hard, was wrapping its whole body around Pyo Wol’s wrist.

“This…”

Pyo Wol quickly tried to pull the snake off. But at that moment, his vision suddenly turned completely red, and a searing heat filled his head.

‘Poison?’

That was the last thought Pyo Wol had.

Pyo Wol lost consciousness. Then the snake that had been biting his wrist fell off.

The snake dropped from Pyo Wol and crawled towards the insects.

In the deep underground, the food a snake could eat was extremely limited. For the small snake, insects were the only source of food.

It was a coincidence that Pyo Wol was bitten by the snake, which had been drawn to this place by the swarm of insects.

The snake ignored the collapsed Pyo Wol and enjoyed its feast.

Pyo Wol lay collapsed on the floor, unable to move a muscle.

His whole body felt like a hot ball of fire.

The poison of the nameless little snake was truly vicious.

The poison flowed along Pyo Wol’s blood vessels and attacked his entire body.

His nerves and internal organs were attacked by the Poison Qi.

Despite the gut-wrenching pain, Pyo Wol couldn’t even scream once. His whole body was stiff, and he couldn’t even stir.

In the extreme pain, Pyo Wol’s eyes shot wide open.

The capillaries in his eyes had all burst, and they were so red it looked as if they would gush blood at any moment.

As the Poison Qi attacked his whole body, a searing heat surged up.

Pyo Wol couldn’t even scream and had to endure the pain as it was.

It would have been less painful if he had lost consciousness, but perhaps due to the poison’s influence, his mind was instead crystal clear. So he had to feel that vicious pain vividly with a clear mind.

Three days passed in excruciating pain.

To Pyo Wol, these recent three days felt more painful and longer than all the time he had been trapped in the underground space until now.

Pyo Wol’s teeth were chipped in places from gritting them and enduring the pain with a clear mind.

The paralysis broke around the time the third day was almost over.

As if by a lie, the paralysis that had bound his body was released, and the heat inside his body disappeared.

In the end, he had won the fight against the poison.

Although his life was saved, Pyo Wol could not get up easily.

He had overcome the Poison Qi, but his internal organs, muscles, and nerves were damaged. They would recover to their original state with time, but right now he had no energy to move. But he had to move.

Pyo Wol crawled towards the only door that led to the outside.

In front of the iron door was a plate with food on it.

His mouth was so dry that he couldn’t taste anything, but to live, he had to eat something.

Pyo Wol crawled like the snake that had poisoned him.

After crawling for a long time, Pyo Wol finally reached the iron door and buried his face in the plate.

Licking the food, Pyo Wol muttered.

“I will not die. Never!”

In the darkness, his eyes glowed with a red light.