Fabre in Sacheon’s Tang

Though it was the first time I’d ever heard the name, the moment Golden-Crowned Serpent King entered my ears, I knew—it was mine.

It was like my soul responded to it.

Well... all venomous creatures kind of do that to me.

Even if this was just wishful thinking, it didn’t matter.

From this moment forward, it was mine.

Just hearing the title Serpent King told me everything I needed to know. This was definitely one of the Ten Deadly Venoms of Murim.

And that meant it was destined to be mine.

I must’ve claimed this thing in a past life. Or maybe a past-past life? Whatever. Every one of the Ten Deadly Venoms already has my name engraved on them.

Among all venomous creatures, the most iconic is the snake.

That slick, scale-covered, sinuous body...

That cold, proud face...

That smooth skin and chilling body temperature...

A cold-blooded elegance.

My dear Cho may have the chiseled body of a knight, but the snake?

The snake is pure refinement.

A silent predator that slithers through the dark and delivers a fatal strike.

Anyway, it was mine now.

I turned to Hwa-eun and asked, “Hwa-eun, what exactly is the Golden-Crowned Serpent King?”

The name alone suggested a crowned ruler of all serpents.

But I needed confirmation.

I waited, my expression hopeful.

She smiled gently, the emotion in her heart clear as day—she’d known I would react this way.

“If it’s called the Serpent King,” she said, “there’s only one it could be, So-ryong. The Golden-Crowned Serpent King. One of the Ten Deadly Venoms. It’s said to wear a golden crown upon its head and is revered as the king of all snakes in Murim.”

“Oooooh! The king of all snakes! And it really wears a golden crown?!”

My heart raced.

Not just a snake—a king snake.

With a golden crown on its head?

Hell yeah... a crown ‘cause it’s a king... maybe it’s got venom wine or something? Doesn’t matter! I’ll take anything!

Maybe it was a horned viper.

In my past life, horned vipers lived mostly in the Sahel region of Africa, the Middle East, or the deserts of America.

They had small horns that helped them regulate heat in scorching environments.

But let’s be real—those horns were short, stubby, and sat on the sides like mascara flicks. Not exactly majestic.

But this one—if it had a golden crown in the shape of horns?

Now that was art.

Like my Yeondu—truly beautiful.

If the gold was bright and radiant, thick enough to look regal—

Nice. Nice!

Riding the high, I turned to Hwa-eun.

“Then let’s hurry and check the Secret Compendium of Venomous Creatures! I’m dying to see what it looks like!”

Somehow, while I was still interrogating the prisoners, Hwa-eun had already half-turned away, one hand gripping my shoulder.

But she stopped and said:

“Even if we check the Compendium, we won’t find a picture.”

“...We won’t?”

“No, So-ryong. For some reason, the Golden-Crowned Serpent King has never been properly recorded. Not even in the Compendium kept by our Tang Clan. All we know is the name—and that it supposedly wears a golden crown.”

What!? Not even in the Compendium?

A groan welled up deep in my soul.

Ohotongjae!

This was sorrow on a cosmic level.

Sure, seeing it in person would be best...

But how could Tang Mun-ryong, our third patriarch and compiler of the Compendium, skip over this?

He said he wrote it to help future generations.

This was blatant negligence!

The Secret Compendium of Venomous Creatures was our Tang Clan’s Fabre’s Field Guide, the holy book of poison beasts.

Obviously not every venomous creature is listed, but one of the Ten Deadly Venoms should definitely be there!

Ugh... it was just getting good...

It was like reaching for toilet paper and /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ only getting the empty cardboard tube.

While I was wallowing in this pit of disappointment, the voices of the two women in the prison broke through.

This translation is the intellectual property of Novelight.

“D-Did our information help you, Lord of Venoms?”

I turned to see them watching me warily.

Their gazes kept darting toward my hand—

More precisely, toward the Parasite-Dissolving Pellet I was holding.

There was still a smudge of desperation in their eyes.

I dragged a chair over to the cell and sat down, then asked:

“Hm... not bad. But tell me—when exactly did you hear about the Serpent King?”

As good as the lead was, it wasn’t time to hand over the pill just yet.

All I had was a name—no context.

I needed to know the situation, the reasoning, everything.

The leader tilted her head as if recalling something, then spoke cautiously:

“They were giving us orders to infiltrate the Central Plains... and on the way out, one of the Five Venoms men muttered something about the Serpent King. I was channeling my internal energy at the time and barely caught that one phrase.”

“Hmmm...”

So they heard just a single word.

No context, no setting, no side comments—nothing.

“Even trivial details are fine. Please try to remember more.”

But no matter how I pressed, the two of them didn’t know anything else.

Their faces twisted with despair.

It was like they’d already given up—and now that they saw a glimmer of hope, it only made the hopelessness worse.

The leader bowed her head again.

“P-please... show mercy...”

At that moment, Hwa-eun looked at them with confusion and asked:

“I’m sorry, but something doesn’t make sense. Can I ask you something?”

“...What is it?”

“So-ryong hasn’t been a martial artist for long. He offered you this deal thinking you’d prefer life over death. But both of you know what it really means to live in disgrace, don’t you?”

She continued calmly, “Even if we spare you and you take the Parasite-Dissolving Pellet, you’ll never use martial arts again. Your meridians will be cut, your energy shattered. To a martial artist of your level... isn’t death better than that?”

“...Is that what this is?”

I was stunned.

She was right.

I’d heard once from Grandfather: when someone in Murim is sentenced, there’s a punishment called energy collapse.

You don’t die, but you lose all ability to fight.

To a martial artist, it’s worse than death.

Thinking back, I realized it was true.

They weren’t acting like people desperate to survive.

More like people who’d already accepted death.

It was the kind of line you’d expect from some captive knight princess: ”Just kill me already!”

Then, the leader looked down at her palms and muttered:

“I used to think... there wasn’t a person in this world I couldn’t crush with these fists...”

“But after meeting Flame Dragon... I realized how small and meaningless human martial arts can be.”

“When all of my comrades were wiped out in an instant—when only this child beside me survived—I finally understood how powerless I was.”

“I hate Murim now. I don’t want revenge. I just want to quietly give birth to a child and live the rest of my life in peace.”

The story dragged a bit, but that was the gist:

She’d been so overwhelmed by the sheer force of power she witnessed, it shattered her world.

She didn’t want revenge. She didn’t want Murim.

She just wanted to disappear.

Was it really that traumatic?

She looked so cute, crouched there trembling.

I glanced at Cho coiled around me, who flicked his antennae at me in response.

As we locked eyes and shared a strange little smirk, Hwa-eun’s voice picked up again.

“If that’s the reason,” Hwa-eun said softly, “then just give it to them. I suppose sparing them isn’t the worst idea. But you must spend the rest of your lives atoning for the people you’ve killed.”

“Th-thank you! Thank you so much!”

I handed each woman a Parasite-Dissolving Pellet, and they accepted it with trembling gratitude.

As I turned to leave—since the Tang Clan would take care of severing their meridians or crippling their qi at a later time—the two women suddenly doubled over in pain.

“Ghhh...”

“Kaah!”

They clutched their heads and began convulsing violently.

“What... what’s happening?!”

Startled, I looked to Hwa-eun—only to find her wearing a deeply troubled expression.

A moment later, she spoke, her voice tinged with bitterness.

“Just because it’s the Tang Clan’s Parasite-Dissolving Pellet doesn’t mean it can kill all parasites. There are some it can’t neutralize. It seems... this is one of them.”

“Th-then what happens?!”

I asked, panicked, wondering if they were going to die on the spot.

Then came the horrifying answer:

“When the pellet fails... the place where the parasite is rooted bursts open.”

“Where the parasite is rooted...?”

When Grandfather had extracted the parasites from the corpses, he’d said they were nestled in the brain.

Which meant—

Their heads were going to explode.

GAHHHHH!

Just the thought of the grotesque scene to come had me screaming internally.

And then it began.

Their eyes rolled back, their bodies trembled like they were in the throes of a seizure, and dark, reddish-black blood started gushing from their noses—thick, jelly-like blood.

Their bodies, pale and trembling, twitched violently.

I had just offered them a second chance, and now they were dying anyway.

“Please... call Grandfather.”

I shouted to the guards, who rushed off to summon him.

When he arrived and inspected them, he shook his head grimly.

“I don’t know if they’ll make it.”

***

The two women, barely clinging to life, were given only the most basic treatment and left to their fates.

They had committed grave crimes—whether they lived or died was their own karma.

The Tang Clan would simply observe and wait.

As for me, I returned to Hwa-eun’s quarters and finally took out the Secret Compendium of Venomous Creatures for the first time in a while.

Hwa-eun had told me there was no illustration, but even so, I wanted to confirm it for myself.

—Flick.

A few pages in, and there it was:

Golden-Crowned Serpent King

And just as she’d said... the illustration space was blank.

Not even a brushstroke.

Next to the title, only a short description:

“The ruler of all snakes. Wears a golden crown upon its head.”

“That’s it? Really no drawing?”

“I told you, So-ryong. I remember clearly because even as a kid, I was so curious why this was the only one without a picture.”

I kept flipping through the book, and sure enough, this was the only one.

Even the laziest entries had at least a rough sketch—except this one.

No ink. No outline. Not even a hint of a brush.

Did they just never see it?

Was this an entry recorded from hearsay rather than direct observation?

I asked, “Could this have been secondhand information? Not something the author actually witnessed?”

But Hwa-eun shook her head.

“No... I don’t think so. This Elder was the one who created the Ten Deadly Venoms classification. And look—doesn’t this sound like someone who personally encountered each one?”

She pointed to the opening passage of the book—the letter to future generations:

“This humble work is titled the Secret Compendium of Venomous Creatures. Every creature within has been personally observed and recorded by this one, including its habitat and unique traits.”

Clearly, he’d claimed to document only what he had seen with his own eyes.

Then... why omit the picture of the Golden-Crowned Serpent King?

People like me, with a deep collector’s instinct, can’t stand missing pieces.

It’s like losing a single tooth—it ruins the whole smile.

I mean, I endured being poisoned by Hwaуang without complaint just to avoid wasting a venom slot.

The Ten Deadly Venoms must be completed.

But now... an illustration missing from the one creature I was most excited about?

Something didn’t add up.

Why didn’t he draw it?

The question gnawed at me.