The King of Venoms (simplified: 毒手药王, traditional: 毒手药王, pinyin: Dúshǒu Yàowáng, jyutping: duk6 sau2 joek6 wong4) is the jianghu’s name for the most feared poisoner of the age, in truth the monk Great Master Wuchen (无嗔大师), who lived by Dongting Lake and taught four disciples, the last of them Cheng Lingsu. He is dead when he enters the story; after his death his old fellow disciple Shi Wanchen took the title for himself (SIDE ch. 9, 10, 18, 20). In Flying Fox of the Snowy Mountain the title appears once, rendered “Poisoned Hand Medicine King”: Tao Baisui says he later heard that the poison ointment Tian Guinong had had smeared on the weapons for the Cangzhou duel contained a drug of the King’s (ch. 7).
Biography
The name
The King of Venoms was said to live at White Horse Temple (白马寺), a town by Dongting Lake, and jianghu men went in fear of the name. Many had seen him, yet no one agreed on what he looked like: some said a lean, refined scholar, some a thickset man like a butcher, some an old monk nearly a hundred, and one respected witness a hunchbacked, lame woman. Any strange poisoning anywhere was laid at his door (SIDE ch. 9). The explanation was that Wuchen forbade his disciples to reveal their names, so that Wuchen himself and his disciples Murong Jingyue, Jiang Tieshan and Xue Que were all taken for the King of Venoms (SIDE ch. 10). Wuchen disliked the title: he said he used poison to cure illness and protested that the monk Wuchen did not kill at random (SIDE ch. 10).
Wuchen
As a young man he learnt the use of poison under the same shifu as Shi Wanchen. Their shifu expelled Shi for using poison without restraint and harming good people. Over the following decades Wuchen and Shi fought several times, poisoner against poisoner; Wuchen won every time and, mindful of their bond as fellow disciples, spared him, until in their last contest Broken Gut Grass (断肠草) blinded Shi (SIDE ch. 20).
Wuchen came to regret having harmed so many people with poison and became a monk to atone (SIDE ch. 20). His religious names followed his temper. Violent-tempered when he took his vows, he was called Dachen (大嗔, “great anger”); as he mastered himself he became Yichen (一嗔, “one anger”); when he took Cheng Lingsu as his disciple he was Ouchen (偶嗔, “occasional anger”); and three years before Cheng Lingsu tells the story, he became Wuchen (无嗔, “no anger”) (SIDE ch. 11).
As Yichen he quarrelled with Miao Renfeng, who suspected that the poison that killed Hu Yidao had come from him (SIDE ch. 20). Miao cut two fingers from his left hand with a jian. The next day Wuchen sent Miao an iron box with a message daring him to open it; a small, deadly snake inside bit Miao’s hand, but the box also held snake medicine. Cheng Lingsu later told Miao that under his earlier name, Dachen, there would have been no antidote in the box (SIDE ch. 11).
Disciples
He took three disciples, Murong Jingyue, Jiang Tieshan and Xue Que. Xue Que, in love with Murong, poisoned his wife; Murong secretly poisoned Xue Que, leaving her hunchbacked and lame while Wuchen was away gathering herbs in Tibet; Jiang Tieshan married her; and the three feuded for years. Wuchen could not reconcile them, and fearing that after his death no one could restrain them, he took Cheng Lingsu late in life as his fourth and last disciple (SIDE ch. 10). He had never meant to take more disciples, and the three thought he favoured her (SIDE ch. 9, 10).
Death and legacy
Wuchen died before the story begins; Cheng Lingsu carried his last letters, written in his customary alum-water ink that shows only when heated. To the three elder disciples he wrote that they must stop harming one another and carry on his work. To her he wrote that she should show his book to any of them who grieved for him, and that any who did not were no longer his disciples. None of them did (SIDE ch. 9, 10).
His book, which he titled Wuchen’s Record of Medicine (无嗔医药录) and which his disciples called the Divine Treatise of the Medicine King (药王神篇), passed to Cheng Lingsu. More than nine parts in ten of it concern healing; of poisons it says chiefly how to cure them, for in his last years he regretted the name his poisons had earned him (SIDE ch. 10, 20). Shi Wanchen, finding it a book of medicine rather than a manual of poisons, cast it aside (SIDE ch. 20).
After Wuchen’s death, Shi Wanchen turned on his disciples. Murong Jingyue and Xue Que went over to him, and he killed Jiang Tieshan. At Fuk’anggan’s Grand Assembly of Zhangmen under Heaven Murong introduced Shi as the King of Venoms; the Shaolin abbot Dazhi asked Shi how he was related to the monk Wuchen, and Shi claimed not to know the name (SIDE ch. 18, 20). Cheng Lingsu, calling Shi an impostor, broke up the assembly, and her last trap killed Murong and Xue Que and blinded Shi (SIDE ch. 19, 20).
Personality
In his youth Wuchen was hot-tempered and harmed many with poison; in later life he repented and, by Cheng Lingsu’s account, reached a state beyond anger or joy (SIDE ch. 11, 20). Shi Wanchen called him a hypocrite whose victims’ families did not accept that they deserved to die (SIDE ch. 20).
Relationships
- Shi Wanchen (Fellow disciple): Expelled by their shifu; Wuchen repeatedly defeated and spared him, and blinded him in their last contest (SIDE ch. 20).
- Murong Jingyue, Jiang Tieshan and Xue Que (Disciples): Their feuding drove him to take a last disciple (SIDE ch. 10).
- Cheng Lingsu (Disciple): His last and most gifted pupil, heir to his book (SIDE ch. 9, 10).
- Miao Renfeng: They fought when Miao suspected him of supplying the poison that killed Hu Yidao (SIDE ch. 11, 20).
Skills
Wuchen was a master of medicine and poison. Cheng Lingsu says that his true feats were surgery: opening the chest and belly and rejoining severed limbs (SIDE ch. 10). He made the Life-Renewing Pill of Creation (生生造化丹), each of which adds three years to a poisoned man’s life (SIDE ch. 20). His school’s rules, as Cheng Lingsu keeps them, forbid raising gu and using nine poisons that have no antidote (SIDE ch. 10, 20). His disciples all trained in the Poisonous Sand Palm (SIDE ch. 10).
Behind the scenes
In his afterword Jin Yong urges anyone adapting the novel not to add scenes of Wuchen and Shi Wanchen duelling with poisons (SIDE afterword).