Facility Construction and Spies
News of Huiyeom’s successful construction of the Baekgak Mountain Dam slammed through the whole of Henan Province like a thunderclap.
Sichuan was in a festival mood, and in the taverns and inns of Henan those who had won their bets roared with triumphant cheers.
Those who had lost and been cleaned out of their purses might have felt a little bitter, of course, but that was how such wagers always went: the winners, flushed with victory, would throw down a free round of cheap rice wine “for the house,” and even the losers would find their sour moods dissolving with the first swallow.
“Whoa… it actually worked.”
“So the Crouching Dragon of Sichuan really is the real deal, huh?”
“Damn it, I bet on success…!”
“Keh-heh-heh, any black cows still left who don’t believe in the Young Master?”
“Damn it!”
“Still, free booze, right? Drink up~.”
And so the Central Plains as a whole was lifted into a buoyant, happy atmosphere.
But even amid that festive air, the blacksmiths and construction teams of the Sacheondang Family could not afford to get drunk; they were being worked half to death.
They were carrying out the crushing task of installing the hydraulic power systems for the State-run Ironworks, along with the continuous casting and hot-rolling equipment that would automatically turn molten iron from the blast furnaces into steel plate.
The designs of those machines were secrets of the highest order; outside labor simply could not be used.
Of course, merely refusing outside labor did not solve every problem.
“Who’s that over there?”
“Uh, I-I’m just a guy who came to deliver materials… I was looking for the latrine and got lost…”
“Why would you look for the latrine here? You’re a spy!”
“Damn it!”
“Stop right there!”
A laborer who had been loitering near the rolling-mill installation site, looking every bit the simpleton, was spotted by a member of the Poison Bee Unit charged with Sacheondang surveillance. He bolted with a curse and was promptly seized.
“Caught another one?”
“How many is that already?”
“Idiots. Even if they look, what are they going to understand?”
When a rank-and-file Poison Bee agent sneered at the spy being hauled away, a mid-level squad leader clicked his tongue.
“Is this something to laugh about? The fact that half-baked fools like these keep showing up means there’s a real chance of high-level espionage slipping past our eyes as well. Keep your eyes peeled and watch everything.”
“True enough, Squad Leader, but the entire workforce assigned to the site was brought from Sichuan—people whose identities are guaranteed. There’s no room for outsiders to dig in to begin with.”
“Don’t let your guard down. They can still steal documents, or extract information through bribes or threats. Complacency is forbidden.”
What truly worried them was betrayal and change of heart.
Even in the twenty-first century, with every surveillance and security measure imaginable, industrial espionage had not been eradicated; it had only grown more sophisticated. How much worse, then, in sixteenth-century China?
Huiyeom had drilled that point into the head of the Poison Bee Unit until it stuck, and the squad leaders who had received that gospel kept their nerves stretched taut.
“From the moment the master craftsmen wake up until they fall asleep, we check every single person they meet. No exceptions.”
“Hwaaaah… undercover duty all the way out here…”
They could whine all they liked; it made no difference.
This technology was the secret of secrets that would guarantee the Sacheondang Family’s prosperity. To protect it, a little hardship was nothing.
And the Poison Bee Unit’s invisible efforts bore fruit.
“Bae Jae-ho, the supervisor in charge of Worksite Three, has recently been meeting a relative who arrived from out of province. According to our inquiries, that relative is a disciple of the Taeyangsingung—the Sun Temple.”
“Put him under watch.”
“Foreman Ju Seol-ho at Worksite Two is also acting strangely. He’s been meeting someone from the Namgung Family.”
“What? The Namgung Family? Those bastards still haven’t learned their lesson even after everything that happened—they’re still cracking pumpkin seeds behind our backs? Unbelievable.”
Convinced they had discovered family traitors who were about to turn industrial spy, the Poison Bee Unit laid a trap, determined to seize the whole chain by the tail.
And yet… the results came out a little strange.
For a moment this may sound like a digression, but let us speak of the Taeyangsingung, the Sun Temple.
Situated in the far south of Hainan Island, the Sun Temple had historically taken almost no interest in the affairs of the Central Plains.
Much like the North Sea Ice Palace, it lay so far to the south that the distance alone kept the two sides regarding each other with the indifference of a cow watching a chicken. That was the Sun Temple’s usual posture.
They even mocked the Hainan Sect, which occupied a similar geographical position yet strained every sinew trying to join the Nine Sects and One Gang.
Why bother seeking recognition from those self-important Central Plains folk, they said.
What finally forced them to stop dismissing the Central Plains was none other than the State-run Ironworks.
The Sun Temple’s chief source of revenue was the export of iron ingots to the Central Plains.
The Sun Temple was the holy land of Yang-Strong Martial Arts.
To cultivate techniques that blazed with searing flame and heat, they practiced a unique method of absorbing the heat of roaring fires. People of that bent naturally built massive furnaces that belched intense heat, settled beside them, and in time turned the melting of metal and the forging of metal goods into their livelihood.
One might say they had constructed a peculiar cultivation system in which simply working hard improved their martial arts.
Then, a few years earlier, ironworks capable of mass-producing high-quality steel had appeared in the Central Plains.
At first the Sun Temple paid them little mind.
No matter how much the Central Plains brats boiled a little molten iron, they could never match the quality or quantity of the ingots produced by people who had lived beside blast furnaces since birth. Or so they believed.
And for a while that belief held true. The rising output of the State-run Ironworks merely threatened the livelihoods of the Central Plains’ small and medium foundries and iron shops; it did not greatly affect imports of the Sun Temple’s famous Yang Iron.
But when word came that two, then three more such ironworks would be built, the story changed.
Worse still, according to intelligence the Sun Temple itself had gathered and examined, the quality of the Mugyeol-jeonggang—Flawless Steel—produced by the State-run Ironworks was in no way inferior to their own Yang Iron.
And they were not forging that steel by sweating over a hundred-fold refined billet; they were stamping it out in bulk by the power of river water.
In the end the Sun Temple had no choice but to lift its heavy backside and take an interest in the Central Plains.
That was why a man named Nan Ju-pyeong, born in Hainan Province, had traveled all the way to distant Henan.
He had a distant relative working in the blacksmith division of the Sacheondang Family. Under the pretext of sightseeing at the now-famous Baekgak Mountain Dam of Henan, he was meeting that relative and receiving a guided tour of the province.
Of course that was only the public story.
As a man of the Sun Temple he had come as a spy, intending either to extract the relative or, failing that, to steal the design plans for the machinery of the Second State-run Ironworks.
For days on end Nan Ju-pyeong poured effort into cultivating the distant relative he had never even met before, dangling generous rewards. By the time he handed over a lump of gold as an advance, he was certain Supervisor Bae Jae-ho had more or less taken the bait.
Then, after accepting the gold, he drank the tea the man offered him—and his tongue went stiff while his whole body locked up like a wooden block.
“Ghk!… W-why?!”
Nan Ju-pyeong stared at Bae Jae-ho in panic, trembling. Bae Jae-ho answered with a troubled look.
“Distant relative or not… how could I ever betray the Dang Family? If you are a distant relative, then the Dang Family is my family.”
“Grrgh… then… why change your mind?”
“Change my mind? I never had the slightest intention of falling for that absurd temptation of yours from the very beginning.”
Bae Jae-ho muttered that it was a bitter business, mopped up the spilled tea, brought rope, and bound Nan Ju-pyeong’s limbs while he spoke.
“There’s a saying that a nearby neighbor is better than a distant relative. The Dang Family has given us a great deal. Not only have they freed us from the fear of starving to death; wherever we go, people look at us with envy the moment we say we work for the Sichuan Dang Family.
My son is a student at the Jang School. Unlike his father he’s rather clever; they say he might one day hold a post in one of the Dang Family’s companies.”
“…”
“What use is a lump of gold like this? Inside the ecosystem the Dang Family has built, everything I need is already provided.”
Well, everything except vacation days. If the man had tried to bribe him with holidays he might have been a little tempted, Bae Jae-ho thought with a dry smile, then gave the spy one last piece of advice as kin.
“As a final courtesy between relatives, let me warn you: when the Poison Bee Unit questions you, hide nothing from the start. Tell them the complete truth. The Dang Family’s interrogation methods are famous for a reason.”
“…Ghk!”
Bae Jae-ho slung the bound Nan Ju-pyeong over his shoulder and walked outside—only to startle at the sight of Poison Bee agents standing there like stone statues, their concealment techniques dropped in pure astonishment.
“Oh? On patrol, are you? What are you doing standing there like guardian stones?”
“Uh, n-no, we… well, we are on patrol, yes.”
“Perfect timing. Here—a suspicious person. He tried to pry secrets of the Dang Family out of me, so I fed him a paralysis powder. Take him away.
And these… you may call them evidence: the provisional contract and the gold ingot he paid me as an advance.
That should be enough, yes?”
“Uh… well…”
After a moment of mutual staring, the Poison Bee agents asked Supervisor Bae Jae-ho with extraordinary caution and politeness:
“…Would it be possible for you to accompany us to headquarters and give a statement?”
“Of course.”
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
Well… it had gone well, hadn’t it? Hmm.
Still wearing that bewildered feeling, the agents escorted Bae Jae-ho and the captive Nan Ju-pyeong back—only to gape when they found other spies and their accompanying witnesses already sitting around waiting with the same blank expressions.
“…Is this how a spy-extraction operation is normally supposed to feel?”
“Of course not, you idiot.”
The senior Poison Bee agent clicked his tongue at his dazed junior.
“Hunting spies begins with suspecting everyone, proceeds through torturing someone, then makes you suspect someone else, and that hellish cycle repeats without end.”
“Then what is this situation right now? The people who ought to be under suspicion are tying up the other side’s spies themselves, bringing them in, and volunteering to cooperate with the investigation…?”
“…I don’t know either, but one thing is certain.”
The senior agent gave a short laugh.
“If you get used to handling things this way, you’ll never be able to claim ‘internal security experience’ anywhere else. Do not think this is normal. Understood?”
“Yes…”
Among the various factions that had sent the spies, people were going out of their minds.
Namgung Jin of the Namgung Family clawed at his hair.
“Kh… why?! Why has not a single scrap of information come back, and every last one of them been caught?!”
Even the Namgung Family employed spies, of course.
And although they had publicly reconciled with the Sichuan Dang Family and promised not to interfere further, dispatching spies was another matter entirely.
Ordinarily an operation of this scale, if discovered, could be brushed off with a sheepish “haha… sorry about that”—a mere bit of playful mischief.
Namgung Jin would have wagered both of his own family jewels that the Namgung Family was already thoroughly infiltrated by Sacheondang spies, more than he could count on both hands.
So why shouldn’t he send a few of his own? That had been the thinking… but when every single agent was caught this blatantly, the problem became altogether different.
He accepted the letter that arrived enclosed in a green envelope—Huiyeom’s letter—with eyes full of dread.
No doubt it contained expressions of regret over the detection of the spies, followed by talk of appropriate compensation for damages.
The urge to pretend he had never seen it was only natural.
Yet no amount of looking away would make the letter in front of him melt into thin air.
After a moment’s agony he steeled himself with a grim “Kh!” and tore open the envelope. He read the contents…
…and the color drained from his face.
To the So-gaju of the Namgung Family,
It is most regrettable that certain uninvited guests bearing the scent of the Namgung Family have been discovered at our Henan construction sites. Of course I am prepared to regard this as a minor misunderstanding between friends—provided suitable restitution is made.
As compensation for the inconvenience caused to our State-run Ironworks operations, I must request the temporary secondment of the Namgung Family’s Heavenly Sword Unit to the Sacheondang Family for a period of no less than one year, to be placed under my personal command for security and training duties at the ironworks and dam facilities.
I trust the Heavenly First Family will demonstrate the magnanimity befitting its name.
— Huiyeom of the Sichuan Dang Family
“This—this shameless bastard…! What? Second the Namgung Family’s Heavenly Sword Unit? What the hell is this nonsense?!”