The Empire's Counterattack (4)
We arrived at the Cheonma Sangsa headquarters in Seocho-gu and headed straight to the chairman’s office on the top floor.
Officially it was called the representative director’s office, but Ham Cheon-ho must have gotten a taste for the power game because he asked us to call him chairman instead.
Whether or not it came from his own will or stubborn insistence, we didn’t have to worry about putting our puppet’s situation first anyway.
When I opened the heavy door and stepped inside, Ham Cheon-ho sat in the chair at the very back of the representative director’s office.
The scars from Hong Kong had long since healed completely, and now he was at a level where he could handle daily life without strain.
Of course, we had leaked the story of major surgery to the press and the public as a cover story. It was common sense—when you want to deceive the enemy, you have to deceive your own side as well.
On the same principle, I had already instructed him to keep visiting the hospital regularly for his remaining directors as well.
“O-Oh… you’re here…?”
At the sight of me entering, Ham Cheon-ho shot up from his seat and bowed deeply. It was an overly sensitive reaction, but it actually suited him fine.
“Yeah, I’m here. Move over there a bit.”
I raised him from the chair myself and took the innermost seat that had just been vacated.
It was the famous “Chairman’s Chair,” and it was incredibly plush—really comfortable. Still, it wasn’t on par with the one I kept at the London safehouse, of course.
I ordered that the representative director’s office be provided with additional chairs. Naturally, they were just as plush.
The Cheonma Sangsa staff seated Pavel and Delis in turn. There were four of us, but only three chairs.
Three humans from Britain were lined up on the chairs. The original owner of the representative director’s office knelt on the rug-covered floor instead.
I found this reversal of rank rather pleasing.
The greater the official social standing of the humans I could control at will, the more intense the thrill I felt from being able to do as I pleased with them.
As Elze had said and I had agreed time and again, it was clear that witches somewhere were warped.
I addressed the fallen humans who had once been my puppets.
“We did look into it ourselves, but it seems we couldn’t match what someone based directly here is capable of.”
“What’s got you so worked up? Are you afraid I’ll ask something weird?”
Objectively that might be true, but in a master-servant relationship, what was so shocking about it? I asked without caring.
“Is there plutonium hidden in Pyeong-san? This country’s nuclear weapons are sleeping there?”
Even though the organization had now reached the point of operating on a global stage, it was still true that forcing power in a place with deeply rooted local culture was difficult.
Especially when compared to Europe or North America, East Asia remained the most regionally distinctive place on earth.
Regional distinctiveness meant they had become so tightly bound by unique religion and cultural homogeneity that outsiders were treated as outsiders.
When comparing on a globe that rolled around, the Middle East or Africa would be the closest equivalents.
In other words, the exclusivity East Asians felt toward outsiders was no different from the Islamic fundamentalists or primitive tribal believers.
Of course, after experiencing imperialism, East Asian nations’ Confucian worldviews had also changed.
There had been countries that cried “Leave Asia and enter the West” by viewing the West as civilized and the East as barbaric.
There were nations that locked their borders forever and swore to live by their own order.
And nations that, because of their enormous landmass, were slowly gnawed away by great powers, only to destroy themselves from internal contradictions.
Even though the country’s form had changed, the core had not.
I had infiltrated the Northern Covenant Syndicate into Korea as one of its wings, yet I still strongly expected that only the local collaborators here would have access to certain information.
“Well… I don’t lack connections in the real sector, and after searching extensively, the results looked solid. It wasn’t only in Pyeong-san—there were stockpiles evenly distributed in Gangwon, Gyeonggi, Seoul, Chungcheong, Jeolla, and Gyeongsang as well.”
And my prediction had been correct this time as well. These humans weren’t content to just weaponize the nuclear material—they had stockpiled it in multiple locations.
They were faithfully following the proverb “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” After all, even though these were radioactive eggs that would explode at any moment once critical mass was reached.
“Is it certain?” The Americans seemed to have sensed something, but they’re still deceiving the rest of the world, including the Soviets. And yet you managed to find out this fact so easily, even claiming to have connections in the real sector?”
When running a criminal organization, one of the most essential qualities was “skepticism.”
It wasn’t about distrusting subordinates—I had already eliminated every trace of that when I took the organization over from my father and stabilized it through sheer will and circumstance.
Instead, it was skepticism toward newly acquired information and intelligence.
No matter how plausible or appealing the information might be, you always had to consider the possibility that it was distorted or outright false.
Just like the previous example, it was obviously not that subordinates or local collaborators deliberately lied.
Instead, it was the possibility that the information provider—whether intentionally or not—had thrown us misleading information.
While I tilted my head, Ham Cheon-ho suddenly began talking about something that sounded like a non-sequitur.
“You who have come to live in Britain may not know this, but… to my eyes, the advanced nations like Britain and America look even stranger.”
“What kind of nonsense is that?”
When I asked again in puzzlement, Ham Cheon-ho fired off his usual interpretation like a machine gun.
“The country I belong to is, of course, a backward nation on the list of advanced countries. It’s something I keep forgetting because of the economic crisis until last year, but even so, it’s an OECD member.”
“But I wonder if its core is enough to join the ranks of advanced nations.”
“The war that ended with this country divided north and south hasn’t even passed half a century, and the extremely rapid economic growth has been insufficient time to cultivate mature civic consciousness relative to the bloated economy, so—”
I understood Ham Cheon-ho’s rambling from a mage’s perspective.
Because the regenerative magic inherent in the Cultured Slime had allowed its body to recover as if cancer cells were proliferating, there simply hadn’t been enough time for the soul to fully mature in that part.
Controlling only the purely “physical” portion that lacked a soul was governed solely by the law of the wild. Cells multiplied arbitrarily, and directionless, violent regeneration repeated endlessly.
“Of course, in more professional areas the situation is far better. After all, there are many people who have eaten the so-called foreign products in those fields.”
“But unless the will of the person at the very top changes, it’s probably impossible for this country to become advanced even in its core.”
Paraphrasing Ham Cheon-ho’s unsolicited soliloquy in my own words: “The Koreans are primitive and leave even these secrets lying around. If other countries don’t know about this, it’s because of their unique national exclusivity—they can’t dig in.”
From the perspective of someone who had once been Korean based on a portion of their soul, it was almost impossible to call that entirely wrong.
“Well… it’s only a selective tendency that activates when one feels a sense of ‘same ethnic group’ and when one feels a sense of ‘my line.’ Of course.”
Upon closer inspection, there was a certain resonance with the culture of the nation a little to the west. In the grand scheme of things, guanxi or jeong were essentially similar contexts.
“Yeah, you couldn’t lie to my face anyway. I’ll take that as fact.”
If I accepted Ham Cheon-ho’s claim, my goal of stealing the plutonium and achieving the Empire’s Counterattack grew far larger than I had anticipated.
Those with many things to protect could never allocate all available resources optimally, especially when the location of the strike was unknown.
The most ideal defense would be even distribution, but in that case it would be harder to repel a concentrated attack.
Of course, whether they would even notice my raid was questionable. I had planned to operate entirely within the shadows from the beginning to the end of this operation.
People would be turned into my puppets the moment they met me with magic like Charm, and machines would be scouted to the maximum in advance so that penetration could be carried out.
As I had chewed over before, no matter how advanced the security measures, if the handler was human, it was meaningless.
It was no coincidence that the easiest way to hack a server was to kidnap the server owner.
I felt extremely good, like a child who had received an unexpected gift.
The gift was a cake. It was exactly like worrying about which piece to eat first.