The Brush Mightier Than the Blade
Namgung Jin, young master of the Namgung Family, was no fool.
He concluded that the Sacheondang Family would never be reckless enough to provoke an open clash of arms inside Anhui Province—Namgung territory. Their real aim, he decided, was to deploy their forces on either flank, apply psychological pressure, and drag the Namgung Family to the negotiating table.
And so he circulated a proclamation throughout the realm, rallying every faction that might stand against the Sacheondang Family and the orthodox powers that propped them up.
In particular, securing the newly allied Wudang Sect’s Sword Immortal, Boundless True Man, had cost him an enormous price.
A swordsman counted among the Ten Great Masters of the World, said to stand on equal footing with Namgung Hyeok himself, the Namgung Family Head—a man spoken of in the same breath as the Greatest Sword Under Heaven. With the Sword Immortal present, Namgung Jin judged that even if Kunlun’s Dragon King and Shaolin’s Living Buddha arrived, he would have nothing to fear.
Dragon King against Sword King. Living Buddha against Sword Immortal. The board was set.
With this, our trump cards are even.
The rest of the rabble hardly mattered.
Therefore, the idea that the Namgung Family could lose on its home ground in Anhui Province was simply impossible.
…Or so he thought.
What overturned the Namgung Family was not a sword controlled by will, nor a sword-river, nor even a tidal wave of sword-qi.
It was one short, portly official who simply unfolded a single official document and began to read.
His voice carried no special sonic arts—no Dragon’s Roar, no Ghost Valley Cry—yet it upended the whole of Anhui Province.
Because the seal stamped upon that document bore the image of a dragon.
And in all the vast realm, only one man was permitted to use such a seal.
After due consideration of this and that, it would appear the Namgung Family has been gorging itself rather thoroughly. Evidence is attached. The Censorate will be dispatched; if you have nothing to hide, cooperate fully.
And if you do not cooperate—well. You know what comes next.
Imperial Authentic Seal SLAM SLAM
— Emperor Sungui
The single sheet of writing Emperor Sungui had dashed off in one furious stroke summoned a host as vast as any extramundane grimoire—the Snail-City Teachings or the Dream-Record of the Heard Way. The difference was that what it called forth was not tentacled abyssal demons or wandering Dreamland horrors, but bureaucrats in official robes.
Still, those bureaucrats proved every bit as merciless: not a single plea for leniency registered, and no form of resistance made the slightest difference. In that respect, the comparison was uncomfortably apt.
The Namgung Family’s chief steward, watching decades of ledgers being boxed up and carted away by Censorate investigators with a vacant stare, looked for all the world like a mortal who had just gazed upon a Great Old One. Hwiyeom, catching sight of that expression—as if the man were mid–Sanity Check—shuddered with a mild PTSD of his own.
“Whew. Buster Call performance: guaranteed.”
If it was that bad for the spectators, the ones on the receiving end could hardly be expected to keep their wits.
Namgung Jin stared in wild-eyed horror as the government forces swarmed over the estate like a plague of locusts descending on a grain field, and he howled.
“What—what in heaven’s name is this?! By what right do you seize our ledgers and seal our warehouses?!”
As he vented his fury, internal energy rose unbidden and pressed down upon the official. But before the man’s face could even blanch under that pressure, a captain of the escort stepped forward and nullified the force.
“It has been some time, Young Master Namgung.”
Namgung Jin had never intended to crush the man in earnest, yet he had not expected the government forces to field a master capable of receiving his aura. When the man before him casually tipped up his iron-brimmed helmet and met his eyes, Jin’s mouth fell open.
It was none other than a martial artist of the Beijing Yang Family—another of the Nine Great Noble Families.
Recognizing him, Namgung Jin groaned.
“Eight-Ring Divine Spear Yang Cheonhwa… What are you doing here…?”
“Captain of the Eighth Battalion of the Imperial Guard. His Majesty has specially dispatched our Eighth Battalion so that the Censorate may safely investigate the suspicion that the Namgung Family is implicated in this matter.”
“….”
“I regret that we should meet under such circumstances.”
“….”
One hundred Embroidered Uniform Guards. Every last one of them a First-rate master at minimum, and the Eight-Ring Divine Spear standing right in front of him was a master of the Yang Family spear arts who had once traded blows with Namgung Jin on even terms.
Of course, measured against the full depth of the Namgung Family, they were fireflies before the moon…
But the moment those Imperial Guards were subdued by force, the next force to move would be the Imperial Army itself. If the hundred thousand hardened veterans of the White Tiger Banner—already humiliated in the last war—marched down into Anhui Province, even the Namgung Family of the realm could not guarantee victory.
“This… this cannot be….”
Namgung Jin trembled with a helplessness he could not defy. When had he ever tasted such humiliation?
These… these miserable flies…!
Bureaucrats? Mere glance from Namgung Jin should have been enough to make them wet themselves and faint.
And yet—
A traffic officer can stop a carriage with an upraised hand not because he is strong.
Power is the force that social consensus grants. Like air itself, those who live diligently inside the system rarely feel its weight. Only those who step even slightly outside the line suddenly taste its absolute terror.
Against the Censorate investigators, eyes rolled back in their heads at the Emperor’s command, Namgung Jin and the rest of the family’s senior officers tried every avenue of negotiation. Nothing took.
They immediately sought another way out.
All those tokens of goodwill they had so carefully scattered—not only across Anhui Province but throughout the Central Plains, even into the political circles of Beijing—ought to have shone now.
But…
“This office shall consider the proposal never received.”
“I am returning the lost article you left behind when you visited my residence previously.”
Some simply sealed their lips as if they had never accepted a thing. Others went further and returned the bribes they had so thoroughly enjoyed.
Every power-holder in Anhui who had no wish to stand beside the Namgung Family and share the same axe-blow threw themselves into desperate social distancing.
The martial artists watching could only gape, mouths hanging open, unable even to name the bizarre spectacle unfolding before their eyes for the first time in their lives.
“Ah, well… looking at this, it doesn’t seem like a real fight is going to break out… Best if our family heads home.”
The Tiger-Catching Captain of the Hwangbo Family—who had arrived full of bluster after receiving a letter begging for support—scratched the back of his head sheepishly and slipped quietly out of Anhui Province.
That was the signal. The martial factions that had gathered around the Namgung Family—the Nine Great Noble Families, the Nine Sects and One Gang—began quietly reading the room and drifting back to their own home grounds.
Their feelings were obvious enough.
The Emperor was committing a mad act he had never attempted in his life, and the Namgung Family had, unfortunately, been chosen as the demonstration model. No one wanted to stand next to the nail that stuck up and become Case Number Two under the same hammer.
In particular, the Sword Immortal who led the Wudang forces—Namgung Jin’s carefully prepared trump card against Shaolin—offered the empty, floating smile unique to Taoists and spoke:
“We’ve been thoroughly outplayed. The ink-stained clerks of the Zhuge Family seem to have steeled themselves for something truly vicious. We shall withdraw.”
“W-what do you mean by that, Elder Sword Immortal?”
“Think it through. When they overturn a house this thoroughly, it means they are not poking around on mere suspicion—some solid piece of evidence has gone into a secret memorial. There are rumors the Sacheondang Family submitted the memorial, but by what means could the Dang Family gather proof of Namgung corruption in a few months? This is surely the Zhuge Family’s revenge. The Namgung’s true mistake was trusting those black-hearted hypocrites for so long and keeping them close.”
The Zhuge Family and the Wudang Sect had contested supremacy in Hubei for generations; the old grudge made the Sword Immortal’s words especially cutting.
The Zhuge Family would have found it deeply unfair, but to any listener it was more persuasive to blame the faction that had been allies until recently than to claim the Sacheondang Family had been patiently assembling a master plan for years—quietly mapping Namgung corruption through networks of retired officials.
In the end Namgung Jin ground his teeth and roared like a dragon breathing fire.
“Aaaaaargh!! Zhuge Family! You traitors! You shameless, brazen bastards!!!”
If one looked carefully, it was the Namgung Family that had used the Zhuge thoroughly and discarded them first—but what did that matter now?
It had not been Hwiyeom’s intention, yet more than half the Namgung Family’s share of hatred transferred neatly onto the Zhuge Family.
The investigation advanced. The Anhui Provincial Administration Commission came under Censorate scrutiny.
The provincial commissioner was arrested. Under the delicate yet bold investigative techniques of a medieval age that regarded a certain amount of judicial torture as mere technique, he rolled his eyes back and vomited every fact—true and invented.
Given how much he had actually taken from the Namgung Family, he could hardly claim to be entirely wronged.
Falsified harvest ledgers and the resulting tax fraud. Gold, goods, and lavish entertainment accepted in exchange for looking the other way on taxes owed by Anhui grain merchants who sold across the entire nation. The classic specimen of local political-economic collusion—so thorough that even a junior clerk at the Anhui Provincial Administration could supposedly buy a house within three years—left the Censorate investigators clucking their tongues in fury.
“How. On. Earth. Could. Something. Like. This.”
The stilted delivery, as if reading from a textbook, was only to be expected.
Strictly speaking, this had never been a problem only because the Emperor had never made it one—and every other province was doing the same. The investigating censor himself had pockets stuffed with gifts from all sides.
Humanly speaking, one could almost pity the Namgung Family—but what was to be done? If he failed to dance to the Emperor’s blade now, his own neck would be the next to be cut. The censor diligently compiled the findings strictly according to regulation.
And so the result:
Namgung Jin, young master of the Namgung Family, found himself dragged for the first time in his life into a national audit… no, no—into the Censorate’s Great Gyeong Code Violation Judgment Review.
“Young Master, on such-and-such a date in such-and-such a year, you are accused of providing entertainment to Career Official Yi Jinsang of the Anhui Provincial Administration Commission—rank of Principal Sixth Grade—and seven others, in exchange for partial tax exemption on grain sold by the Central Plains Merchant Guild. Do you admit this?”
“Th-this is a misunderstanding! It is true that Steward Ha treated the career officials and responsible clerks of the Provincial Administration to a meal, but that was entirely of his own accord. I gave no such order.”
“So you admit the partial tax exemption itself?”
“I only ever knew what was reported to me about the grain ledgers. If my subordinates kept double books and filed false reports, how was I supposed to know? I was deceived as well!”
“Then we shall add the charge of preparing double ledgers.
Can you prove that you received false reports? When, where, and from whom did you receive the ledgers? What witness can substantiate this? What evidence?”
“Th-there are ledgers bearing my personal seal, are there not? If you look at the quantities of grain recorded there…”
“This office finds the numbers strange. The volume of grain disposed of by the merchant guild in question was approximately ten thousand seok—roughly six hundred tons. That figure was not obtained by formal weighing; it was reverse-calculated from the number of carts counted by officials as they entered and left the city gates. Even allowing for a certain admixture of sand and chaff, the true amount should be around eight thousand seok. Yet the tax actually collected corresponds to only four thousand seok of grain. Is that not an excessive discrepancy?”
“Th-that is… the soldiers must have miscounted the carts…”
“Young Master, answer clearly. We have already arrested the officials of the Provincial Administration Hall as criminals and are conducting separate investigations. Any contradiction in testimony will result in aggravated punishment.”
Being forced to face the truth of one’s wrongdoing imposes a mental burden far heavier than most imagine. Namgung Jin, who had never developed any resistance to such pressure, was hauled into the interrogation chamber until he was in tatters—wishing, by the end, that he had simply become some demonic chieftain hunted by the Heavenly Net.
The questioning stretched past nineteen days and twenty nights. By the final stretch, the pitiful Namgung Jin had become a scarecrow capable of uttering only “Yes,” “I am sorry,” and “I admit it.”
Yet, wretchedly enough, his misfortune did not end there.
“It has been some time, Young Master Namgung.”
Hwiyeom—the very man who had set this entire disaster in motion—spoke with his characteristic gentle smile.
“Shall we begin negotiations?”
In his hand he held the report received from the Censorate’s Chief Censor—the superior of the investigating censors and the highest authority of the Censorate itself: the Great Gyeong Code Violation Judgment Review Report on the Embezzlement and Illegal Acts of the Namgung Family.
Watching the scene from half a step away, Ye-eun gazed up at the heavens and sighed softly.
Unlucky bastard. Of all the venomous snakes in the world, he had to run into this one…
Well.
Still, he did leave them a way to live if they surrendered. Drink to that.