Secret Research Facility, and Trust
There was not much time.
The Emperor would certainly dispatch an inspector to the Dang Family to keep the Sichuan Dang under watch. The Innovation Hall could not be shielded from that inspector. Doing so would shatter the trust between them and the throne.
Therefore, he would leave the Innovation Hall as camouflage and establish an entirely new research organ.
If I’m going to build it, better to put it inside the Poison Hall.
The Poison Hall was where every variety of toxin and acid was handled—the most secret place in the entire Dang Family. In other words, the vault that held the clan’s innermost secret arts. Even an imperial envoy would have a solid pretext for refusing to open it. After all, what the Emperor cared about was preventing a Sichuan Dang armed with black powder and powder weapons from stockpiling the strength to rebel. He would not go so far as to monitor the Poison Hall itself.
Besides, the Poison Hall already possessed nitric acid, sulfuric acid, acetic acid, ammonia, and the production facilities needed for next-generation gunpowder.
Connect the basements of the Poison Hall and the Innovation Hall with tunnels. Then make certain the Emperor’s inspectors never notice they exist.
Concrete plans began to move from Hui-yeom’s mind onto paper: ventilation systems for the underground research facilities and methods to conceal them; orders for the construction of the subterranean tunnels; orders to prepare a large-scale black-powder manufacturing plant aboveground at the Innovation Hall as a decoy; orders transferring Dang Un-hwa and other core personnel from the Innovation Hall to the Poison Hall; and, to camouflage the true use of guano as nothing more than fertilizer production, orders to establish vast saltpeter fields on unclaimed forest land.
This last part is especially critical. The quantity of gunpowder ultimately comes down to the quantity of saltpeter. Sulfur can be diverted under any number of excuses—medicine, poison, whatever—but saltpeter cannot. So the Emperor will try to estimate our total powder output by watching how much saltpeter we produce. He has no idea it can be made from guano. I have to steer him into that assumption. If he discovers everything about every resource, the game stops being fun.
To slip free of the Emperor’s grasp as the man tried to peer into his true intentions, Hui-yeom sketched the future. Of course, as a precaution against the plan leaking midway, he never once wrote a word about deceiving the Emperor. To anyone who did not know the circumstances, the documents were nothing more than instructions for expanding and renovating research facilities. Even if the orders fell into the Emperor’s hands, he was confident he could talk his way out of them.
Don’t take it personally, Emperor Sungui. This is merely how the weak survive. As long as you do not cross the line first, neither will we.
Having drafted the thick sheaf of directives—nearly the thickness of a martial arts manual—in a single night, Hui-yeom hesitated a moment, then consulted Dang Su-jeong.
“I need to send urgent instructions back to the main house. What would be best? Waiting until we arrive would be far too late.”
“Well, if you think about it normally, you’d send a messenger pigeon or a messenger hawk, wouldn’t you?”
“Messenger hawk?”
As a man of the twenty-first century, Hui-yeom momentarily looked blank. Dang Su-jeong snorted as if she could not believe him.
“For a clever kid, you sometimes act like you don’t know the first thing about the world. You tie a letter to a trained pigeon and send it off. Pigeons have a homing instinct.”
Ah. Now that she mentioned it, that had been a thing—before modern communications.
“Uh… the volume is a bit large. About one full manual’s worth?”
“Hmm. In that case a pigeon’s out of the question. A trained hawk for messenger work would be better. Expensive, though. There’s a problem, though. Whether pigeon or hawk, those birds are raised by specific factions for their own use, so you’d have to ask someone… and there’s the risk of secrets leaking.”
“Doesn’t our Dang Family have its own messenger hawks?”
“In Sichuan we have dedicated mews all over the place, but this is Beijing. We have no foundation here at all. Why not ask the Sama Clan instead?”
“The Sama Clan…”
“They’re your in-laws, aren’t they? Weren’t we supposed to be bound together as a community of fate? Or what—you can’t even trust the Sama Clan?”
Dang Su-jeong’s eyes grew careful.
“Don’t tell me you’re even weighing the possibility that the Sama Clan might betray us?”
“…That would be overthinking it, wouldn’t it?”
“Honestly, you. Believing no one but me is a model mindset for surviving the ruthless jianghu… but still.”
She pressed her fingers to her forehead as if to say a kid ought to act a little more like a kid.
“Never let Yun see that look on your face. It would leave a scar for life.”
“…Yes.”
“The people of the Sama Clan are sharp. There’s a reason they’re called Heaven-Penetrating Sama in opposition to the Divine-Skill Zhuge. If they understood the new stature and capabilities of the Sichuan Dang, and the value of the person who made it all happen—you—and still miscalculated badly enough to betray the Dang Family, we wouldn’t call them Heaven-Penetrating. We’d call them Heaven-Idiots.”
“Ah, well. If they have any sense, they wouldn’t betray someone like me. If they have sense…”
The end of his previous life flashed through his mind, and his teeth ground together of their own accord. Greedy for a few percentage points of company stock, they had murdered the genius who was leading humanity’s progress. Creatures with less brain capacity than maggots.
“…That mighty ego and self-confidence that just accepts it without question is almost admirable. I grant you’ve earned the right. Anyway, go consult Yun. What kind of husband doesn’t trust his wife—who else is he going to trust?”
“We aren’t married yet—”
“Tsk…”
Dang Su-jeong’s brows inverted into a furious V. She actually started to draw her Hagyeongchong before Hui-yeom threw both hands up, at which she clicked her tongue.
Sama Yun, then.
Hui-yeom paused to call her to mind, trying to recall how much sincerity had lived in the way she looked at him. Then he reached a conclusion.
I don’t know. I don’t know—but.
A sigh escaped him.
She isn’t enough of a fool to shoulder the risk of betraying me.
For a man who still carried the wounds of betrayal, that was the only answer he could give himself: a shabby reassurance mortgaged on his own competence. He knew full well how pathetic and miserable that conclusion was, yet for now it was the best he had.
…And even if I am betrayed, I suspect I would have no choice but to forgive her. The same way I forgave Ye-eun.
He might as well admit it. It was not her beauty. It was the unwavering goodwill and trust she had shown him that had moved his heart. Was there any guarantee it was not hypocrisy and lies? None. Yet in the realm of feeling rather than reason, in the time they had piled up rather than cold calculation, he told himself he had read her heart, and he hardened his resolve.
He went to Sama Yun’s room.
“Oh my. I was just thinking of coming to find you for a cup of tea.”
Sama Yun opened the door with a soft, bright smile and welcomed him. They shared ordinary talk over tea and sweets until Hui-yeom drew a thick volume of orders from his robes.
“Read this.”
“…All right.”
Sensing the gravity of the atmosphere, Sama Yun began to read the directives he had handed her. Her pupils widened, then began to tremble violently. Again and again she looked from the orders to Hui-yeom and back. At last, having finished the final page, she closed her eyes for a moment of thought, then spoke.
“…I understand.”
“I want this sent to the main house. As fast as possible.”
“I’ll have it carried by the messenger hawks our house keeps. But there’s something that needs fixing first.”
“Fixing?”
Sama Yun opened the orders again. She snapped the binding thread, then pulled out only the pages that held design drawings and calculated figures. Those she set aside on the table. Everything else she tossed into the brazier.
“What are you doing?”
Hui-yeom neither widened his eyes nor raised his voice. The belief that she had a reason for acting this way kept him cold and steady. And Sama Yun turned to him with a gentle smile.
“This letter is the ‘trust’ Young Master Dang has shown me, itself.”
Hui-yeom did not commit the foolishness of demanding why she called the orders a letter.
“To me it is a promise of trust more certain than any proposal of marriage—a vow that you will entrust the rest of your life to me.”
Moisture had already gathered in Sama Yun’s eyes. This was a document of plans to stockpile power in secret against imperial surveillance. Imagining the consequences if it became known was not difficult. She was far too clever not to understand why he had shared those orders with her. With a lovely smile she let a single tear roll free.
“How could I ever forget even a single stroke, a single dot?”
—I have memorized every last line with my mind.—
“I burned it because I want to keep it as a memory only the two of us share, so that no matter who discovers it, they can never learn the contents of this love letter.”
“But then you won’t be able to look at it again when you want to.”
“I’ll write it out again later. In a place only I know, in a cipher only I know.”
—There is a risk of leakage in transit, so I will encrypt it and send it again.—
Hui-yeom understood the words she had hidden and nodded. Indeed, even if someone obtained only those design drawings with all the surrounding text gone, they would never know what the plans were for.
“Young Master Dang, I—I—I’m so moved…”
Sama Yun finally began to sob. Dang Hui-yeom felt a little awkward. At first he had thought she was putting on a performance in case someone was listening outside; now she was actually shedding tears.
Is it acting, or isn’t it?
In the end he stepped close, wrapped an arm around her slender shoulders, and whispered,
“Don’t cry.”
“Thank you for believing in me. Thank you for accepting me as family, Young Master Dang. I will never, ever disappoint you.”
“No—there’s no need to go this far… Just how cold-blooded do you think I—”
Still bent and sobbing, Sama Yun lifted her head just a little. The tears had already dried. A pink tongue peeked out. Hui-yeom felt the back of his skull go numb.
…Did she trick me? Was this all an act?
Sama Yun threw herself against his chest, clung to him, and whispered against his ear,
“That’s your punishment for not telling me this secret from the start, for hesitating over whether to tell me at all.”
“……”
They said women were demons. For the first time, Hui-yeom felt as if someone had completely played him.
“Of course…”
She pressed herself tight against him and spoke in a voice only he could hear.
—To me, it was the most romantic proposal in the world.—
Sama Yun divided Hui-yeom’s orders into thirty pieces and rewrote them as cipher text.
“First I’ll scatter decoy cipher messages by messenger pigeon. Those are false reports meant to be intercepted.”
“What will they say?”
“That a secret pact has been struck with the imperial house, so powder production must be increased. That expansion of the saltpeter fields must be hurried. Other suitable chatter.”
“Good. And then?”
“The real contents go out by messenger hawk. But Beijing has too many eyes and ears, so only after we leave the city.”
She lowered her voice.
“I’ll have someone carrying the cipher travel with a funeral procession headed for Beiman Mountain. Beyond the mountain there is a grave-keeper and a cremation-yard laborer—a family that has served the Sama Clan for generations. That man handles the crow-post.”
“Crow-post?”
“Because Beiman is thick with crows, we use the crows the way others use messenger pigeons. No one knows. Imperial surveillance doesn’t reach as far as a lowly grave-keeper.”
“Impressive. You can feel the depth of the Sama Clan’s resources.”
“Not at all. Crows are extremely intelligent birds, and in a flock they can even stand against birds of prey. Better than pigeons.”
“And once they’re sent, that’s the end of it?”
“No. The crow-post will arrive at a secret mews some distance from here. From there the documents will be sent on to both the Dang Family and our main house. I’ll share the locations of all the mews our house maintains across the country soon.”
“That’s major classified information. Thank you.”
“Of course. We’re betrothed.”
Sama Yun smiled brilliantly. Seeing that smile, Hui-yeom smiled brightly in return.
Trusting people had become far harder than it once was. Binding someone with a contract was as easy as breathing; catching a weakness or steering them with profit felt as natural as moving his own hands and feet. After two betrayals, however, believing in anyone at all had become terribly difficult for him.
Even so—
One by one, they’re increasing.
Dang Un-sang, Eun Seol-ran, Ye-eun, Bak Chang-eon, Dang Su-jeong, Dang Un-hwa, Lee Jin-myeong, and now Sama Yun. Hui-yeom pictured the faces of the precious people he had newly gained, and lightly took Sama Yun’s hand.
“Yes. Let’s go together.”
The great road of glory he meant to walk was too long and too wide to travel alone.