A Fair World
A fair world.
Tap, tap, tap.
Maria, who had been through an ordeal today, was heading home early. She walked in a daze, and one phrase kept surfacing in her mind over and over.
There are no nobles in Daehan.
Clunk, creak.
Arriving home, she opened the door and stepped inside.
"Oh? Maria, you said you'd be late today. What brings you home so early?"
The moment she entered the warm house, her considerate husband Mario greeted her.
"I… yeah. I got off a little early. Some things came up."
Maria gave a vague answer, unable to bring herself to tell him what had happened that day.
"Well, go change and rest. Sounds like you've had a rough one. Your hair's a complete mess."
"Yeah…."
She kept her mouth shut, knowing how upset he would be if she told him about it. She'd been helped before disaster struck, and she hadn't taken much money, had she? That was enough, she told herself.
"Let's go to bed early tonight."
"Okay."
After adding more firewood to the hearth, the couple lay down side by side.
"I met the lord today."
"Huh? I heard a big ship docked a while back. So the lord actually came, did he?"
The people living around Pyeong'an Naru were all refugees who had fled from every corner of Europe. Serfs, a handful of scholars, and widows had gathered together and built the village.
"That's what I heard today. There are no nobles in Daehan — that's what he said, right before he stripped the noble who caused a scene at the hotel and threw him out."
"What? Your jokes have gotten a lot better. Hahaha."
Mario thought she was joking.
"I'm serious."
"…."
Mario was a Puritan whose grandfather had fled England to escape persecution. His grandfather, who had attended Cambridge, brought his books with him, and from those and others acquired here, Mario had built a study — learning first from his grandfather, then from his father. A farmer, yes, but a clever man.
And his thoughts were growing deeper by the moment.
"Haha. What a remarkable man. Shall we sleep?"
"Mm. I'm sleepy…."
"…."
Maria drifted off first, while Mario lay awake all night, turning thoughts over in his head.
Everyone in Pyeong'an Naru farmed or worked the harbor, but there were quite a few intellectuals among them. They were all people whose grandparents or parents had left their homelands behind. Loving to study and think, they had founded their own university, gathering to learn and debate together.
Clunk, creak.
"Good day to you."
"Ah, Mario, is it? You've been coming by often these days."
The dean, who kept the books in order and recorded the conversations of the scholars, welcomed him warmly.
"Yes. I've had a lot on my mind lately."
"Good. Thinking is one of those things that only gets better the more you do it."
Clatter.
The dean set out Daehan tea. It was the kind of thing that would fetch an astronomical price if sold to any noble — yet anyone working at the harbor could get their hands on it without much trouble. Outside of it, there was nowhere to sell or use it, and they had no way of obtaining books otherwise, so they simply drank it themselves.
"Dean, there's something I'd like to discuss with you."
"Of course. Go ahead."
"What kind of country is Daehan, really?"
"Hmm. Well, hardly anything is known about it, is there?"
Information about Daehan was always cut off. It was difficult to sneak in and find anything out, and high-ranking nobles and royalty deliberately blocked what did slip through. If a country truly existed the way the rumors described — where everyone lived well — the common folk would all want to go there. For the privileged to maintain their position, the commoners were absolutely essential.
"I heard an amusing story recently."
"Oh?"
"Maria heard it working at the hotel. Apparently, in front of an entire assembly of nobles, the lord of Daehan declared that there are no nobles in his country — then humiliated one and threw him out."
On the surface, it was the kind of story one could chuckle at — he tormented people and got what was coming to him — and let pass.
"Heh heh heh."
"But the more I think about it, the more I wonder: what exactly is the difference between a noble and a commoner?"
"Ho…."
It was an enormous question that could not easily be brushed aside. The world had seen countless peasant revolts, but the heart of every one of them had been lower our taxes or give us more to eat. Never once had people risen up because they all wanted to become nobles or kings. Those who wanted thrones had simply staged rebellions.
"Mario…."
"That's why my thoughts are running wild. Nobles and kings were farmers once too, weren't they?"
Every person in the world had begun as a hunter or a farmer. Kings and nobles were no different — people who didn't live any longer or possess any greater strength.
All except one: Haneul.
"In a world where the overwhelming majority are peasants, I cannot understand why a small handful of nobles should live in comfort."
"You're not wrong, but your thinking is far too dangerous…."
The dean was old, and as a scholar he had lived quite well before leaving his homeland. But farming here, he had come to feel that nobles and kings were, in the end, no different from peasants who happened to be literate. Still, it was a thought far too dangerous for this world to accept.
"Keep that thought tucked away safely…."
"But…."
"It is still too soon…."
There was nothing bad in Mario's thinking. But if this ideology spread among peasants — people who, as things stood, had never received any education at all? People who couldn't tell right from wrong were terribly easy prey for agitators. They would be used by other, more cynical intellectuals, nothing more.
That was why the dean called it too soon. The liberal philosophy was something that could only function properly in a world where every person received at least a basic education.
"May I write it as a book?"
"By all means. Perhaps the day will come when its meaning spreads to our descendants."
The dean and Mario saw only its promising side — but in the wrong hands, it could drive the world into an abyss deeper than any it had known. It would have to be approached with the utmost care.
"Thank you."
"I'll join you."
"Dean!"
"Why so startled? I've had such thoughts myself, you know."
"Ah…."
For Mario, it felt as though he had found a companion for his life — the first since his wife. To learn that someone else shared his thoughts.
Head to head, debating through the nights, the two of them wrote the book together.
A Fair World — Mario & John Locke
"You've worked hard."
"As have you."
"It still needs plenty of refining."
"This is only the beginning, heh heh."
Having produced their book after months of labor, they continued debating, and their gathering steadily grew.
And because they lived here, they wrote it in the Daehan language — but they had not forgotten the tongues of their homelands.
"What if we simply don't translate this book?"
"Why would you say that?"
"I'm afraid its meaning will be corrupted…."
It was terrifying to imagine how it might change if even a single word, a single turn of phrase, were altered. In the worst case, couldn't it be rewritten into a call to overturn the world and drag down nobles and kings?
"In that case, how about we also make textbooks that teach the Daehan language in other countries' languages? Easy for anyone to learn?"
"Hm? Would that work?"
They assumed peasants would never lay eyes on the book anyway. Only intellectuals with a genuine interest would read it — so they would simply create easy Daehan-language learning materials.
And so, book by book, the work spread in the shadows, from the underworld to the underworld.
The problem was that a surprising number of commoners could read. Those who ran errands for noble households, or sorted their documents…
"Everyone is equal?"
"They say even nobles and kings are no different from us…."
Among the common people, egalitarianism began to spread — the belief that kings and nobles were all just the same kind of human beings. And the foundation beneath it quietly vanished: the book's insistence that no one should disregard or steal what the wealthy, the nobles, or the scholars had earned through their own effort.
The book that had argued for fairness — that a person could claim in proportion to what they had worked for — was gradually twisted into something else entirely. Into the idea that nobles, kings, and commoners alike must all be divided equally among everyone.
And then the nobles' crackdown began.
"This is dangerous!"
"Declare it a banned book!"
"Anyone found in possession of it shall face the gravest punishment!"
The book never came out into the light of day, because the nobles and kings had convulsed at it and torn the world apart trying to stamp it out. But the Daehan script was simply too easy to learn.
"Ah-ya. Eo-yeo. O-yo. U-yu. Eu-i."
"Ga-gya. Geo-gyeo. Go-gyo…."
Villages where people farmed by day and studied by evening multiplied across the land. After all, being able to write — in any country's language — made life easier in countless ways. Even just jotting down notes about something important, for instance. Commoners who didn't know their mother tongue's letters but knew the Daehan script kept growing in number.
"Here — I copied this one out myself."
"Oh, thank you. If I find another book, I'll bring it your way."
Daehan ground up entire forests to churn out mountains of cheap paper and sell it off, so paper had become remarkably easy to come by in Europe as well. It leaked out of Pyeong'an Naru, and if servants in noble households pocketed a sheet or two at a time, nobody ever noticed. From paper gathered this way, books were bound and circulated.
Plenty of them were frivolous novels people read for amusement, but serious works of theory grew numerous as well.
A Fair World? What's this?
But there were just as many half-baked Fair Worlds as honest ones.
And so, across Europe, the corrupted egalitarianism began to spread like wildfire.
At night, lamps burned in farmhouses where people bent over their studies. Commoners serving in castles gathered in whispering clusters. And the nobles of several nations sensed something foul in the air — the instinctive nose one must have to hold on to privilege.
"What are we to do about this?"
"A lord burned to death in his own castle, you say?"
"Yes…."
Recently, for reasons no one could explain, lords' castles had been going up in flames, entire families dying in the accidents.
"Could it be because of those seditious books? That A Fair World?"
"Share everything with everyone? The very idea is laughable."
With so many castles still built of stone, disasters severe enough to burn everyone alive were rare. The nobles who noticed something wrong grew uneasy.
"We must search every commoner's house."
"Is that even possible?"
"We must catch the ringleaders all the same. We can hardly just leave them be."
The nobles launched a full-scale suppression, mobilizing their soldiers. Houses were ransacked indiscriminately, one after another, in search of seditious books.
And in nearly every house, there were books.
"Books here, sir!"
"Aaagh!"
"Kyaaaa!"
"Those are just novels I read for fun!"
Alongside the treatises there were plenty of simple entertainment novels — Don Quixote and the like. But the soldiers and knights dispatched on the raids could barely read themselves. So they simply began dragging people off at random the moment they laid eyes on any book at all.
Those arrested amounted to roughly ten percent of the entire population.
"Hmm? That's quite a lot of people…. Should we gather them up and put them to work farming?"
"Oh? Then whatever they harvest goes to us, yes?"
"Heh heh heh."
Assembled together, the peasants were truly numerous.
Across Europe, camps doubling as collective farms began to rise. People were penned behind fences and put to work like beasts.
"*Sob.* Is this my punishment for barely learning to read?!"
"God-damned bastards!"
Ninety-nine percent of those arrested were genuinely innocent — some had been taken simply because they could read. And then, driven by the one percent, the corrupted egalitarianism began spreading even faster.
"With what they've stolen from us, they sit by warm fires gnawing meat every single day!"
"That's right! I worked in the lord's castle and saw it with my own eyes — they throw meat away!"
"God-damned bastards!"
The arrested were wronged, and so they fell headlong into the agitators' sermons. What had been less than a tenth of a percent swelled past ten percent in the blink of an eye.
By the time the news from Europe wound its way back to Pyeong'an, it was already far too late.
"Dean…."
"What is it?"
"Our A Fair World has spread far too widely across Europe…."
"Isn't that a good thing?"
The dean could not understand Mario's tear-streaked face.
"A corrupted ideology is spreading…."
"What did you say?!"
It was the very thing they had feared most. Wasn't that exactly why they had refused to translate it?
"Most of them are saying the world must drag down kings and nobles and be rebuilt so that everything is divided equally among all."
"Ho…."
The equality they had wanted was equality of opportunity. The book spreading through the world had insisted that what the wealthy, the nobles, and the kings had built with their own hands must never be ignored or taken from them.
Say a merchant charted new trade routes and made an enormous fortune. The egalitarians of today wanted only to divide the result equally — while ignoring every coin and every ounce of sweat the merchant had poured into charting those routes.
How, in any sense, was that a fair world?
"*Sob*…."
"This will end in disaster…."
There was no fixing it on their own. A great upheaval was closing in on Europe.