The Emperor's Blood Kin
Eunuchs were men who had severed the most precious part of their own bodies. In exchange, they gained the right to serve the Son of Heaven at the closest possible range and to oversee the great and small affairs of the imperial household—men of real power.
The twenty-four yamen that housed the palace eunuchs. Among them, Wang Jingong of the Imperial Wardrobe Directorate—the office charged with the emperor’s robes and the silk industry—was at this moment paying a visit to the Eunseong Merchant Group on someone’s orders.
The command he had received was simple.
Destroy one merchant house that had attached itself to the faction of the Third Princess, titled Princess Dohwa.
How dare a pack of nobodies thrust their feet into the murky waters of imperial intrigue? And at a time when the Crown Prince had collapsed from poison and the court was in chaos, no less.
“Ohoho~ So this is the Eun clan, is it?”
The soft, almost womanish lilt of a man who had been cut.
What did it matter if they were one of the ten greatest merchant houses under heaven, their warehouses stuffed with gold and jewels? In the end they were a family that had never produced a single high official. Nothing more than tradesmen who had clawed desperately for an imperial connection and succeeded only in earning the wrath of someone very high up.
“And to grab hold of Princess Dohwa’s sleeve of all people… how utterly foolish.”
Her recent bold moves had made her no small number of enemies. The other princes and princesses were hardly going to sit quietly and watch. And now she meant to snatch the silk industry itself—the very business that raked in money like a clawed rake? Unthinkable. It simply could not be allowed.
“But Director Wang, what if those merchants actually succeed at sericulture?”
“Word is the Eunseong Group has been thrashing about desperately trying this and that…”
Like a drowning man clutching at straws. Rumor had it they had begged help from other houses, even offered to buy the foundational knowledge of silkworm rearing, and had run themselves ragged in the attempt.
The lesser eunuchs trailing Wang Jingong looked faintly worried as they asked. Wang Jingong merely snorted, as if the very idea were absurd.
“That’s why we removed the sericulture masters, isn’t it? Ohoho~”
And they had thoroughly intimidated every house that already ran cocooneries, warning them that leaking imperial knowledge would mean the extreme penalty. Those houses had squeaked and fallen silent. Wang Jingong covered his mouth and tittered at the memory.
Thanks to that, the Eunseong Group had been left groping in the dark like blind men, without a single scrap of information. Wave after wave of setbacks and failures must have crashed over them with every step. Meeting the deadline had been impossible.
“Oh, then the cocoonery must be pure chaos!”
“Succeeding at sericulture would actually be the strange outcome, Director!”
“Exactly! Ohoho~”
That was the truth of it. Cultivated silkworms were finicky insects beyond measure. Crops rooted in the earth at least endured wind and rain and grew tough. These tiny creatures died in droves at the mere hint of a cold draft.
“As expected, His Highness the Second Prince had it all planned.”
“Those Eunseong dogs never showed us the slightest courtesy, trusting only in the princess!”
“Ruffians like that must never be allowed to take the silk industry. Absolutely not!”
A few opinions wandered off the main road, but none of it interfered with carrying out the prince’s order. The merchants would complain that no sericulture master had been sent and that the promised inspection date had been ignored—but what of it? What influence could the likes of them exercise over imperial officials who served the Son of Heaven? And with the Second Prince as their backer, they had nothing to fear.
If they crushed the Eunseong Merchant Group—Princess Dohwa’s new attachment—in this inspection for all to see, His Highness would be thoroughly pleased. He might even raise them high. Perhaps even to the coveted rank of Grand Eunuch, a post they hardly dared hope for!
“Ohoho~!”
Wang Jingong laughed coquettishly. The old saying about learning the Handan walk was true: reach beyond your station and disaster follows. They said the new head of Eunseong was a beauty beyond compare. Meaningless to a eunuch. He would wring tears from that lovely face all the same.
“Come!”
Flushed with anticipation, Wang Jingong flung open the doors of the cocoonery with a sneer.
Bang!
“Wang Jingong of the Imperial Wardrobe Directorate! I have come to inspect the Eunseong Merchant Group’s fitness for the silk industry—!”
A triumphant cry, certain the place would be a shambles. With roughly a week still left on the deadline, the sudden raid left the Eunseong workers visibly flustered. The eunuchs poured inside like an occupying army.
“Hmph, already a mess from the entrance! This Wang Jingong will now point out every single fault one by—hm?”
Drunk on triumph, he had stretched out a finger ready to tear the place apart—and then stopped.
“Wait… this is actually…”
“Far better than expected?”
Every frame was packed with wriggling silkworms. Spinning wheels drew raw silk without pause. A gleaming silk robe hung finished and proud for all to see. There was nothing to tear down. Hard as it was to believe, the operation looked every bit as stable as a mature cocoonery ready for harvest. They could have shouted “Pass!” on the spot.
The eunuchs of the Imperial Wardrobe Directorate turned silent eyes on Wang Jingong that said, What now?
“……”
A brief moment of calculation. Sweat traced a line down his temple at the unexpected scene.
“Bah! If there’s nothing to criticize, we simply invent something!”
No one came out clean if you shook them hard enough. He settled on the simple, brutal answer.
“Oh, brilliant!”
“A scheme with three bolt-holes like the cunning hare!”
Sheer shamelessness. Faces plated with iron.
“You wench! This cocoonery is rotten from top to bottom!”
Eun Hwaran’s insides twisted with pure fury.
A man’s coquettish voice that made the eyebrows knit of their own accord. A face thick with cloying powder and an oily, scheming smile. I stood blankly at the entrance wondering what sort of creatures these were until one of the older workers explained they were eunuchs from the court.
“Ah, those eunuch bastards?”
In history books they had seemed pitiable. Watching them throw their weight around in front of me, that pity evaporated on the spot.
“Ahem!”
The man in blue official robes flinched at the word “eunuch.” When I looked back he was glaring as if he meant to dig a hole through the back of my skull.
What, did I say something wrong?
“Hmph! Far from enough!”
“You dare hold your heads so high with yields this poor!”
“The Biyeong Association nearby was overflowing with frames packed full of worms!”
As if they had rehearsed it, the eunuchs took turns verbally thrashing Eun Hwaran. I wondered if the Ten Attendants who had brought down the Later Han had looked exactly like this.
“We only just began sericulture, so of course—”
“Silence! And what is this foul, filthy cocoonery? Do you not even clean?”
Wang Jingong declared the place filthy by modern standards when it was spotless. He was throwing a tantrum, insisting they could never entrust the silk industry to such an operation.
“These are pure fabrications! As head of the house I personally guarantee the cleanliness of this cocoonery!”
Daily sweeping, mopping, and disinfection had left the place as clean as a certain chicken-and-beer shop I once knew.
“Then what is this dust on my finger?!”
Wang Jingong scraped the window frame with a squeak and thrust out his dirty fingertip as if presenting evidence. It was a scene straight out of a morning soap opera.
“You scraped the outer window, not the inner one. Of course there’s dirt—it’s outside!”
“Tch. All mouth. Other cocooneries manage even that.”
He latched onto every trivial thing, tearing down the cocoonery and its workers without pause. Everyone had worked day and night for this day, only for the very people running the inspection to stage a blatant shakedown.
“Director Wang, we achieved this much without any sericulture masters. At the very least you could acknowledge—”
“Hmph! That is precisely the problem! How did you raise them this far when no one came to teach you? Highly suspicious. Explain yourself in detail!”
When she pointed out they had stood on their own without imperial aid, instead of praise came only interrogation. How had they done it? Even I, standing off to the side, felt my temper rising. Eun Hwaran’s blood must have been boiling backward by now.
“These goddamn eunuch bastards…”
The man in blue flinched again at my muttered curse. Seriously, what was his problem?
“How we raised them…? We simply resolved that if we had no teeth we would chew with our gums, and after countless trials and failures we finally achieved this.”
Her answer came through gritted teeth. Rage at the injustice thickened her voice. She was declaring she would endure even after the teeth were gone—but Wang Jingong, who oversaw the entire silk industry, answered with a contemptuous snort.
“Hmph. If you had truly raised silkworms you would know this is not something gums can manage. Especially these revolving frames and the oiled paper—”
He jabbed a finger into the revolving frames where the worms had spun their cocoons one by one. Then he poked suspiciously at the oiled paper lining the frames and at the water jars set out for washing faces.
“Confess. Which house did you borrow these worms and cocoons from?”
“……What?”
He had finally gone so far as to deny the results themselves. Wang Jingong asked whether they had simply spent money to stage a successful operation so they could scrape through the inspection. Eun Hwaran, of course, exploded with indignation.
“That is a complete misunderstanding! What mad house would leak imperial knowledge and secret methods outside the palace?!”
“My point exactly! Tell me which mad house it was! Afterward I will thrash your house as well!”
“How can you—”
He had decided on guilt from the start and was only hunting for the crime. The words reeked of “there must have been something,” and she shuddered with loathing. When she continued to protest that she could not accept it, Wang Jingong pointed at the hatching racks and pressed on.
“Then answer me this. Why have you arranged the silkworm eggs in that fashion? If you discovered it through trial and error, you should know the reason.”
Round eggs were stacked in neat, orderly piles on the hatching racks. The sudden question left Eun Hwaran’s mouth hanging open for a beat. Wang Jingong and the other eunuchs smirked as if they had caught her red-handed.
Help me.
Eun Hwaran covered her mouth with her fan and mouthed the plea so only I could see, like a ventriloquist. And here I thought my only job was raising silkworms.
“I know the answer.”
I raised my hand and stepped forward. Every eye in the room swung toward me. The eunuchs let out incredulous little laughs at the sight of a child popping up to explain.
“Ha, so the Eunseong Group has truly reached the end of the road.”
“Tsk tsk, bringing a little brat to an occasion this important…”
But the laughter did not last long.
“They are stacked that way so the worm inside can spit out fluid to dissolve the shell and emerge more easily.”
I delivered the explanation in a clear, unflinching voice. The mockery died on their lips.
“While hatching, a silkworm will shrink back if its head bumps into something. If that happens repeatedly it exhausts itself and dies, or the hatch rate plummets. That is why they are stacked carefully like this.”
The flood of specialized knowledge (courtesy of a thorough reading of WoodWiki) left the eunuchs tight-lipped. They immediately looked to Wang Jingong of the Imperial Wardrobe Directorate—the expert among them—expecting him to find some flaw. But there was nothing to pick apart in that answer. Wang Jingong reluctantly nodded and threw out a second question.
“Then why are the cocoons soaked in hot water?”
“First, to kill the silkworms so the product is not ruined. Second, to melt the silk threads enough to give them luster and separate them into single filaments.”
The moment a moth tears free of its cocoon, the commercial value crashes. You had to choose: boil them for silk, or keep them alive for breeding stock.
“Mmm…”
Wang Jingong let out a low groan as every question met a smooth answer. I had proven the cocoonery had climbed from the very bottom without any foul play. Would they now quietly accept it and grant the silk rights?
“……You. Just what are you?”
Wang Jingong’s question veered in a new direction.
“How does a tiny thing know so much? Suspicious.”
“Did you drag in some brat from a smuggled cocoonery?!”
Of course. Everyone in the cocoonery sighed at the same time. Trying to reason with beasts this shameless left only a hollow feeling.
“Still as ugly as ever, Wang Jingong.”
A middle-aged man’s voice rose from behind me. The man in blue official robes stepped forward and openly tore into the Director of the Imperial Wardrobe.
“Who the hell are you to— Cheon Su-gong?”
Apparently he had every reason to be bold. Looking at him now, the uncle I had brought along clearly held a position of his own inside the palace. A eunuch himself, which explained the flinching earlier. I felt a twinge of guilt.
“The imperial inspection exists to select merchant houses of superior productivity and entrust them with sericulture—not to serve as a stage for you to wave your petty authority around.”
He confronted the injustice and unfairness of the inspection head-on. I had no idea what was going on, but it seemed power had attached itself to our side as well.
“Cheon Su-gong! No matter how you thrash about, nothing will change. This body came down today under orders from a member of the imperial clan to ‘make the inspection more thorough’!”
Wang Jingong casually revealed that an imperial relative stood behind him and ordered the other man not to interfere. So this had tangled higher than I thought. I had assumed it was merely a lack of connections or simple pressure from rival houses.
“Wang Jingong, whose orders are you following?”
A young woman’s voice floated from behind me once more. It was beautiful—like jade beads rolling across a silver tray.
“Hmph! And who are you, wench?!”
Wang Jingong snapped irritably at the question about his backer. At the word “wench,” the man called Cheon Su-gong’s face twisted into something demonic and he drew his sword on the spot.
Shiiing!
“Wang Jingong—! Have you truly lost your mind?! Do you know whose presence you are in?!”
The eunuchs stared at Cheon Su-gong with expressions that asked if he had gone mad. The veiled woman stepped forward and lightly tapped the roaring Cheon Su-gong on the shoulder. He immediately bowed his head deep and stepped aside.
Then the veiled woman lifted her veil just enough for the stunned eunuchs alone to see her face. When the veil fell again, Wang Jingong and his subordinates had gone whiter than their own powder. The words they stammered out were enough to freeze the entire cocoonery in shock.
“P-Princess Dohwa…?”
“……!!”
Louis XIV of absolute monarchy once said, “I am the state.” The words made the knees go weak. One human being equaling an entire nation. And a similar place existed here in the Central Plains, where the emperor was called the Son of Heaven, a man sent down by Heaven itself.
“I—I called Your Highness a w-wench only because of a truly terrible misunderstanding…!”
“Wang Jingong. Close that mouth.”
That day I witnessed it with my own eyes.
The absolute, unstoppable power held by an emperor’s daughter in a land of absolute monarchy… and the power that came with it.