Aftermath
Negotiations with Ha Tae-ryong, the King of the Yangtze, were finished.
Just as with the King of the Green Forest, nothing remained in writing that anyone could later hold up as evidence.
Ha Tae-ryong, however, clearly understood the road that would let him live. He was the first to send a token of trust.
It was a map and a dossier, meticulously detailing the locations of four strongholds among the Eighteen Yangtze Water Fortresses chosen to serve as sacrificial lambs—along with approaches, troop strengths, and methods of assault.
Those documents reached Hwi-yeom of the Sichuan Dang Family, who passed them on to Sima Geol, the Provincial Military Commander of Hubei.
For Hwi-yeom the middleman’s role was a nuisance, but he had every reason to take it. Only then would the Yangtze water fortresses grasp that the Hubei Provincial Military Commander stood behind the Dang Family—and feel the weight of that pressure.
Especially when this was not a one-off transaction, but the opening move in a relationship that would have to continue, that kind of channel-clearing was indispensable.
“Well then. Begin the purification.”
“Understood.”
The Hubei Regional Military Commission launched a pirate-suppression campaign of a scale never before seen.
Commander Sima Geol’s targets were the four great water strongholds whose secrets Ha Tae-ryong had handed over.
The first to be hit was the Twin-Headed Serpent Stronghold. Its chief, Jang Ryeong, was thunderstruck.
“Damn it all! How the hell did they find our main base when it hasn’t been discovered in over ten years?!”
Gritting his teeth, he beheaded several hapless pirate officers he suspected of betrayal and immediately ordered a stand.
The strongholds sat tucked into the folds of the winding river and its hidden valleys, ringed by stout wooden palisades and crowded with boats. The men knew every current and bend of the water as if it were their own breath; against government troops clumsy on the river, they were confident they would not be swept aside so easily.
But the government army had never intended to fight the pirates on the water.
The logic was simple. No matter how much like mermaids the pirates moved beneath the surface, no matter how deftly they handled their small craft—so long as they were human, the strongholds they lived in had to stand on dry land.
Watching the government columns advance in proper formation along the mountain paths and open fields, the pirates went blank with despair.
“What kind of numbers are those…?”
“Loose!”
At a single shout from the vanguard commander, thousands of fire arrows rose like a cloud and came down like rain.
Large as the Twin-Headed Serpent Stronghold was, its fighting strength still numbered only in the hundreds.
Unable even to dream of answering the storm of fire arrows, the pirates huddled like turtles inside their buildings—but the arrows turned the log-built stronghold into a sea of flame.
They tried to leap into the familiar river and flee.
The moment they fought upstream, more government troops were waiting in formation.
Arrows from both banks filled the channel. The pirates never made it out. They bobbed to the surface bristling with shafts.
“I’ll kill you all…!!”
Jang Ryeong, chief of the Twin-Headed Serpent Stronghold, slashed the raining arrows aside with his broadsword and charged the government lines—but before he could close on the enemy commander, he became a hedgehog of arrows and sank to his knees.
It was a hollow end, so easy it scarcely seemed real.
Had the government forces not secured the King of the Yangtze’s cooperation, the fight could never have finished so bloodlessly—and that only deepened the pirates’ confusion.
They were not even granted the time to suspect Ha Tae-ryong’s betrayal and cry it out loud. Sima Geol’s army was already trampling the next stronghold.
The Yangtze ran red.
And once the strongholds led by the chiefs who had “challenged his authority” had been wiped out, Ha Tae-ryong gathered the remaining chiefs and convened an emergency council as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“The tribute meant for the Emperor was hit. The Imperial House has decided to finish this properly. At this rate, none of us will escape a mass slaughter.”
At the very moment fury and despair lit every eye, Ha Tae-ryong raised a hand—before his subordinates could turn their resentment on him.
“But a path has opened. A path for all of us to live.”
At his signal someone entered from outside, and the chiefs’ faces twisted into peculiar expressions.
“A girl?”
“Chief of Chiefs, what kind of game is this?”
The person who walked in was none other than Hwi-yeom’s right hand—his First Secretary, Han Ye-eun.
One of the chiefs studying her with a look of pure disbelief suddenly contorted his features.
“Wait! Look at the green house-mark on that bitch’s arm! She’s a Dang woman!”
A green circle, and inside it a dragon coiled so that it swallowed its own tail—the crest of the Sichuan Dang Family. The chiefs shot to their feet.
“Ha Tae-ryong, you bastard! You sold us to the Dang?!”
“I knew the government troops were moving wrong! You betrayed us!”
As killing intent thickened through the room, Ha Tae-ryong fixed the chiefs with a freezing stare, then poured inner force into his voice and roared.
“Silence—!!!”
The shout cracked through the chamber.
The chiefs, stunned and cowed by the sheer blue steel of Ha Tae-ryong’s presence—utterly unashamed of his own guilt—hesitated. He pressed on at once.
“This is how all of us survive. Without this, we would all have died together under the government blades, nice and neat!”
“And what changes if we do this?”
“Everything. At the very least, the lives of everyone in this room—and the lives of the people under us—are guaranteed.”
At that, the chiefs’ expressions eased a fraction.
Still half-doubtful, yet with the first frost of hope settling in, one of them asked,
“Is that true?”
“By Hebo, the River Lord, I swear it is the truth.”
An oath sworn on Hebo was the highest vow a river pirate could make—men who lived by the river’s grace.
Only then did the confusion among the chiefs begin to settle. They asked,
“So what happens now?”
“I’ll explain that part.”
Ye-eun looked over the pirates with her characteristic blank expression and spoke.
“Officially, every pirate on the Yangtze is being suppressed. You will cast off the status of pirates and become employees of the Angang Water Transport Safety Management Corporation.”
As with Nokshan before, the “corporation” here was not a public utility, but a company that took on contracted work. The name Angang—“Peaceful River”—carried more meaning than it seemed.
As the chiefs sat in blank confusion, Ye-eun walked them through the Nokshan precedent and laid out the work that would be required of them. Their mouths slowly fell open.
“I-Is that really possible?”
“All our crimes washed away into the Yangtze with the dead pirates’ names, and new identities as commoners?”
What kind of dream was this?
In some lights it was a thing that deserved condemnation.
But the one who handed down judgment was not a private individual named Hwi-yeom. That role belonged to the sovereign—Emperor Sungui.
You’re really going to forgive those vicious animals like that?
At Lee Jinmyeong’s question, thick with disgust, Hwi-yeom gave a short laugh.
If it bothers you so much, why don’t you be emperor for a while?
Th-That’s absolutely out of the question!
In truth, Hwi-yeom’s proposal to “recycle” the personnel of the Eighteen Yangtze Water Fortresses had never been about finding the men lovable and granting them a second chance.
Wipe them out and hang them all? New pirates would simply take their place.
But keep these ones alive and make them the administrators of the Yangtze?
When other pirates appeared, these men would deal with them.
A snake knows a snake’s paths. It was far more effective than raising a navy to handle the problem.
And if a navy grew too large, the provincial forces would swell to a size that made an emperor nervous. Recycling pirates who could be exposed and discarded the moment the “truth” became inconvenient was, from the throne’s point of view, a tidy arrangement in more ways than one.
It was precisely because this was the only way to use them to buy lasting peace on the Yangtze that the plan had been made—and that was that.
To put it bluntly, that last reason had been the largest of all.
Whatever the real motives, the carrot the Emperor held out was more than enough to wash the pirates’ terror away and let them dream soft dreams of the future.
Confirming that the chiefs’ anger and bewilderment were ebbing, replaced by the first green shoots of expectation, Ye-eun cleared her throat lightly.
“I will now announce the duties you will perform going forward for the Eighteen Yangtze Water Fortresses—no. For Angang. Please listen carefully.”
Just as she did at the Dang Family, Ye-eun set up a scroll stand, hung a flip-scroll of explanatory text upon it, and continued her briefing as she turned the leaves.
“First. Every former base of the Eighteen Yangtze Water Fortresses will be burned to the ground.”
A purge had to be carried out in name as well as fact; it was the natural order of things.
“Second. Once you have received the identity plaques and statuses prepared by His Majesty the Emperor, you will found the Angang Water Transport Safety Management Corporation.
At that time, the president will be Great Hero Ha Tae-ryong, and the directors will be assigned from among the current chiefs.”
That, too, was a necessary formality—an administrative procedure that had to be observed.
The real work began from here.
“Officially, the Imperial House will expand piers and harbors along the Yangtze as a public project to revitalize river transport, and will launch a scheduled steamer service along those routes.
‘Angang’ is the private company that will bid for and win the rights to that national project.
In other words, your first task begins with building the landings, docks, and harbors where the ships will berth.”
“You’re telling us to do construction labor?”
“More precisely, you will take part in the construction project as well.”
To the bristling chief, Ye-eun continued her explanation in her trademark mechanical monotone, without rise or fall.
The pirates had no capacity to run large-scale construction in any case.
The work would be carried out by laborers sent by the Hubei Provincial Administration, by the Sichuan Dang Family’s Hwi-eon Comprehensive Construction, and by workers dispatched from the Sima Clan.
The pirates’ role was not so much to dig and haul earth as to contribute their deep, hard-won knowledge of the Yangtze’s terrain and the river’s nature to the project.
“Sites best suited for docks and landings. Places to moor patrol craft and run sweeps against pirates. The most airtight patrol methods and schedules. Concepts for choke points.
The primary task is to establish strategies and tactics for suppressing small- and large-scale pirate outbreaks when they occur.”
On the Yangtze, in river combat, these men were the best on the continent.
Even a veteran navy admiral, if forced to fight the pirates on the Yangtze under equal conditions rather than superior equipment and numbers, would lose.
That experience and knowledge were worth buying at any price in gold—so that even if these men later changed their minds and returned to piracy, they would never again be able to set foot on the Yangtze as masters of it.
“Once construction of the docks and patrol bases is complete, the next phase is the actual work of river patrol. That will account for roughly half of Angang’s core operations.”
Regular runs up and down the Yangtze, patrolling assigned sectors.
Watching the movements of passing vessels, boarding and inspecting anything suspicious, and—if the other party proved to be pirates—driving them off.
In return for that security service, ships would pay a Safe Passage Fee.
“At the same time, the fine-grained management the government offices cannot handle will become a tidy source of income.”
“Specifically?”
“You will be permitted to run small-boat transport services, ship-provisioning businesses, and lodging and dining at the anchorages.”
“Small-boat transport and ship provisioning… what are those, exactly?”
“……”
Ye-eun explained with patience.
In short, small-boat transport was not the heavy shipping of large merchant vessels, but small-scale river carriage with modest craft—ferrying passengers from landing to landing, or moving people from an upstream anchorage or a day’s berth to another. A kind of taxi-and-courier service on the river.
Ship provisioning, for its part, meant intermediate resupply for the large merchantmen plying the river: delivering food and fresh water from the docks, and collecting payment for the service.
The chiefs listening wore blank faces.
One of them muttered,
“…There’s this much work to be done along the river, and we spent our lives shaking people down for tolls…”
“Ignorance is a sin…”
No. You’re the ones who are evil. Ignorance isn’t a crime—don’t hang that cowardly excuse on your wickedness.
Ye-eun did not say it.
Either way, with these men in place, transport on the Yangtze would advance by leaps.
If we’re going to talk about evil, we’d have to start with the caste system of humans ruling humans, with wars where people slaughter one another, and with the very existence of the state that sets it all in motion.
To Ye-eun’s eye, human beings were, every last one of them, simply foolish.
However it turns out, it’s none of my concern.
She had a promise to keep with an old friend.
So long as the prosperity of the Dang Family was assured, that was enough for her.