Honestly, I hadn’t meant to do this.

If we could communicate, there’d be no need to use a method like this.

But that’s just how these poison-dart-frog friends tend to be.

How to put it?

They’ve got the personality of an “eyes-look-down-on-all” tyrant general—arrogant and heedless.

Amphibians are terrifying predators that eat insects, but they’re also prime prey for friends like herons and raptors.

They’re housebound warlords only when it’s limited to tiny insects; once they meet the bird brothers, they turn into wimps.

So most of them are nocturnal, and if they sense even the slightest presence nearby, they bolt.

They boast great power over insects, but before birds, predators higher than themselves, they can’t even resist and just get eaten.

An exception would be toads who know they’re poisonous.

Those fellows know they carry venom, so even {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} when threatened by something far too big to handle, they puff up to intimidate the other side.

They’ve got size and poison, so they sternly warn that touching them won’t be fun.

But there’s a kind of frog that’s insane even compared to those toads: the poison-dart frog.

Toads at least are big, but poison-dart frogs are usually one to four centimeters long.

Little things no bigger than one or two finger joints act absolutely high-and-mighty in a rainforest teeming with predators.

A toad, when threatened, warns, “I’m dangerous,” but these guys don’t do that.

Even if something comes and prods them, they just leisurely keep doing their thing.

They coolly go their own way.

“Don’t bother me because it’s a pain. Just move along. What? You confident? If you are, try eating me.”

That kind of vibe.

On top of that, they’re diurnal, so they go around in flashy colors advertising, “Here I am,” to the whole neighborhood.

In the wild, bright colors mean danger and death—but that only applies to friends who know what that means.

Snakes without experience and certain predators put their mouths on a poison-dart frog and have a very harsh time of it.

Harsh enough to risk their lives.

That poison-dart-frog personality seemed to have carried over into Hongbi.

-Kwaaak. “You bastard! You call running away after saying you’d make me submit your ‘subjugation’!? Stop right there!”

“No, I’m saying your poison is scary.”

Hongbi chased me, screeching at the top of his lungs.

Space around where he moved was being carved away, and after he’d chased for twenty or thirty meters, he stopped dead.

Poison-dart frogs aren’t all that great at jumping to begin with.

So after not chasing for long—whether he gave up or got tired—he just stopped there.

When a corpse grasshopper came from somewhere, brushed me, and flew on past, he checked the scene he’d erased and let out a big sigh.

-Kwaa... “Haa...”

Then Hongbi turned his head and threatened me.

-Kwaaak! “Just try coming back! I’ll give you a thrashing.”

He shrank his aura and then turned his steps.

Leisurely, he headed back to his nest.

But curiously, before heading home he started washing his body clean in the water.

Every nook and cranny—as if a person bathing.

Watching him rotate those short forelegs to scrub his back, I got the feeling he cared about hygiene.

Then the red auras around his body vanished completely.

It seemed his poison was a miasma exuded from the skin that erased whatever existed around it, living or not, and the water washed it away completely.

After he disappeared toward his nest, I checked the stream.

“Are the aquatic animals okay?”

Given the place he washed or along the stream, I expected fish and aquatic creatures to be floating up dead—but strangely, everything looked fine.

Considering his poisonous miasma, it wouldn’t be odd if this channel had turned into a river of death.

Hye-rin, too, seemed to think it was clearly odd.

“Strange. With that miasma of his, I thought the river would be dyed pitch-black.”

“Right?”

I went over to the spot where he’d washed, and there were fish swimming there too.

“Looks like once it mixes with water, the miasma disappears?”

“Is there a poison like that?”

“It’s my first time seeing it, but I guess so.”

One of the most common wrong clichés about poison in comics and novels is the idea that adding a lot of water to poison lowers its toxicity.

Dilution.

Ordinary people assume poison diluted in water becomes less toxic—but that’s a poison-illiterate’s notion; there are almost no cases where adding water makes the poison itself non-toxic.

Say there’s a poison with an LD50 of 2 nanograms.

If you dissolve that 2 nanograms into 200 milliliters of water and drink 100 milliliters, you ingest 1 nanogram.

Does the toxicity vanish then?

Absolutely not.

Even if you dilute the poison with lots of water and drink below the LD50, the toxicity of the substance itself hasn’t changed, so it acts on the body as poison just the same.

LD50 is the amount at which half the test mice die when they ingest it.

Depending on the person, some can’t withstand even less than that and could die.

The poison’s inherent toxicity hasn’t vanished.

But this didn’t feel like that wrongheaded setup—this felt like the toxicity had disappeared completely.

A poison only loses its toxicity when decomposition, oxidation, calcination, etc., are used to transform its constituents completely.

I was marveling as I checked the water when—

Something in the water flashed in the moonlight.

I reached in, carefully pulled it out, and found a jet-black pebble.

A pebble the size of a pinky nail.

“Huh, this?”

“Looks similar to what we saw in the burrow.”

It was the same material we’d seen on the surface of the tunnel Hongbi had bored.

A smooth, porcelain-like black crystal.

“So it doesn’t dissolve in water and disappear—the poison turns into a hard crystal like this.”

His poison is originally red, but, apparently, upon meeting moisture, it becomes a black crystal like this.

I immediately checked the path behind us, where the terrain had been erased while he chased us.

Starting from the areas closer to the water, places where the red aura lingered were turning black. I picked up a branch and poked it into a red zone—it vanished.

“Wow, that’s terrifying.”

“My hair stands on end.”

But in the areas that had turned black, the branch did not disappear.

“Originally it’s red, but when it meets water, it crystallizes black and the toxicity disappears.”

“But wasn’t that ‘Myeolse’ poison clearly toxic even when black?”

Just as Hye-rin said, the “Myeolse” poison those Five Venoms bastards used was black.

They must’ve done something to it.

“That’s probably because the Five Venoms goons added something to heighten its toxicity.”

“Mmm. That makes sense.”

It was clear the World-Destroying Golden Toad’s poison had a trait of crystallizing and losing toxicity upon meeting water, and that actually felt in line with natural law.

After all, if the World-Destroying Golden Toad’s poison didn’t lose toxicity even left alone, the mere fact that it lived here would turn this whole region into dead land.

When its range keeps expanding like that, wouldn’t it be only a matter of time before the entire Central Plains is contaminated?

Spirit beasts live long lives.

I nodded as I organized what we’d learned in my head.

Then came Gun Hye-rin’s question.

“Master, are we done here for today?”

She was asking if it ended here since he’d gotten angry and gone back. I grinned.

“No way. We’re just getting started.”

***

-Kwaaak! “You fly-like brat! Come here!”

Hongbi, chasing me, was detonating a baleful aura.

Somehow, even though two days had passed, the radius of the aura he exuded had grown larger.

What had been about one meter centered on him was now nearly one and a half meters.

In answer to his “come to me,” I pulled a smug face and replied.

“No. If I go, I’ll melt.”

-Kwaa-aa! “Yeeeee!”

He trembled with rage.

I really don’t want to do this, but I reminded him that he was the one who proposed it first.

“Don’t get mad. You said it yourself—‘Try to make me submit.’”

-Kwaa! “How is this submission! How is this submission!? Making a frog angry is submission!? Running away is submission!?”

“Give it a little time and you’ll understand. You won’t get it now, though.”

-Kwaa! “UgyAAAA!”

It sounded like a lion’s roar, but in reality it was an adorable cry. He spun around and started off again.

He was ambling back home.

He must’ve decided he couldn’t catch me anyway.

We’d repeated this scene several times already.

Landing beside me, Hye-rin watched his twitching rump and said:

“He’s leaving again, Master.”

“Yeah. He threw a fit, so I guess he’s going back to sleep.”

Maybe he doesn’t eat every day—he hadn’t gone for termites yesterday or today.

Even ordinary frogs don’t like to eat before they digest what’s already in their belly, and it looked like the termites I’d handed him two days ago weren’t fully digested yet.

Which means my job is to get him to spend his internal poison quickly.

I was teasing him, little by little.

I wouldn’t let him get zero sleep—that might make him sick—so I let him sleep.

But right before he fell asleep, and once or twice in the middle, I made him angry.

I was about to follow him and be a nuisance again when Hye-rin asked:

“Master, you didn’t notice just now?”

“Just now?”

“This time he didn’t come very far.”

“Oh... you’re right.”

Where he stopped when chasing me had been almost fixed—the same place he’d first stopped.

It was across the stream, but this time he hadn’t even crossed the water.

“Maybe he’s just too annoyed to bother?”

I didn’t think much of it.

He might just be tired of following by now.

But Hye-rin pointed behind him and said:

“Look there.”

“Where?”

I looked where she pointed. In a pit formed by his poison, a beetle had fallen in and couldn’t crawl back out.

Since it was near the water, the surface had turned smooth and slick.

When I confirmed the beetle, Hye-rin explained:

“Thinking back, the first time he stopped chasing us, it was definitely because he saw a grasshopper.”

“A grasshopper?”

Right, now that she mentioned it, I remembered a grasshopper flying from somewhere when he stopped.

“Oh... don’t tell me?”

His twitching rump was still in view, and I couldn’t help but smile.

“He must have a soft heart.”

At Hye-rin’s words, I slowly nodded.

I darted after him and, keeping pace, tapped the back of his head with a pebble.

-Tok.

-Kwaa. “Don’t.”

Very, very lightly, so as not to hurt him.

Just enough to be annoying.

-Tok tok.

-Kwaaak. “I said don’t.”

-Tok tok tok.

-KwaaAAAA! “Didn’t I tell you not to!? When a frog speaks, listen! You’ll melt if you keep that up!”

I just grinned, then tossed another pebble.

-Tok tok.

-Pwhoom!

This time, the miasma that rose from his body was less than half its usual size.

If one point five meters had been him wringing out the maximum, then now it didn’t even cover fifty centimeters around him.

It definitely felt reduced.

He lunged at me.

-Kwaaak. “Let’s end this today!”

Flaming with anger, he declared we’d finish it today.

I pretended to flee by a hairbreadth, then faked a fall right at the water’s edge.

“Whoops!”

“M-Master!”

But instead of charging in to melt me on the spot, he started and braked hard right in front of me.

He stopped so close that the tips of my shoes melted away and the wind slipped in around my toes.

He minimized his miasma and stammered:

-Kwaa... “There’s no point punishing someone who’s fallen. I’ll forgive you this once, so just go. I’ll even rescind my offer to let you try to make me submit.”

At that, I turned around, met his gaze at eye level, and said:

“Liar. You don’t want to melt anyone at all, do you?”

At my words, Hongbi’s eyes flew wide.