The Poison-Bearing Reporter (1)
“Before We began the day’s affairs of state, We read the newspaper,” Emperor Sungui said, a thin smile cutting across his face as the court session opened. He looked down upon the ministers assembled in the imperial audience hall. “And what an entertaining article We found waiting for Us.”
“Minister of Rites. Director of the Hanlin Academy. Have you gentlemen read the papers as well?”
“W-we have, Your Majesty.”
“We have read them, Your Majesty.”
“The civil service examinations are prepared by the Ministry of Rites and administered by the Hanlin Academy. And yet a fraudulently admitted candidate has emerged from those very examinations?”
Emperor Sungui tapped the armrest of the dragon throne with one finger, each soft click ringing through the silence.
“What is more, according to the Dongchang, the handwriting on the submitted answer sheets does not even match that of the so-called successful candidate.”
“….”
“….”
“Just how, precisely, do the Ministry of Rites and the Hanlin Academy manage an examination?”
“Your servants will ensure that such a thing never happens again! We will clamp down without mercy!”
“We shall investigate every person involved and see that guilt is thoroughly assigned!”
“Hmm… I wonder whether that will truly solve anything.”
Having seized an opportunity to grip the high ministers by their weak points, Emperor Sungui had no intention of letting the matter slip by lightly. He smiled the languid, murderous smile of a great tiger toying with its prey.
“That answer only tells Us that until now you have been managing things in the most casual fashion imaginable.”
“We are mortified to have caused Your Majesty such concern!”
“Mortification is one thing. But under these circumstances, We have no choice but to re-examine everything you have done until now.”
He leaned forward slightly.
“How many fraudulent candidates of this sort might there be? Would you not agree, Minister of Justice?”
“Th-that is…”
The Minister of Justice could not answer easily and cast about for cues. To agree would, on a small scale, earn him the lasting enmity of the Ministry of Rites and the Hanlin Academy; on a large scale, it might hand Emperor Sungui the pretext for a massive purge. Exactly the calculation the Emperor had been waiting for.
“Heh. Looking at the Minister of Justice’s face, We understand perfectly. You admit a man who spent the examination day drinking with a courtesan in a brothel, who beat commoners in broad daylight, and then you stamp him a successful jinshi candidate… If this much has already come to light, how many more scandals must still be buried?”
“Had it not been for the Hwiyeom Newspaper, the matter would never have reached Our ears. It would have been smothered and whitewashed by the lower ranks. As, no doubt, countless others have been until now.”
“Y-Your Majesty, We dare to speak, though it fills Us with dread—this was a special case, the foolish misconduct of a single individual…”
“Is that so? Then you are confident that if We personally mobilize the newspaper and the Dongchang to cross-check every successful candidate the Hanlin Academy has produced over the past twenty years—their names, their submitted answer sheets, and their actual handwriting—not a single case of fraud will be discovered?”
The Emperor’s gaze pinned the Director of the Hanlin Academy.
“Director. Will you stake your neck on that claim?”
The Director of the Hanlin Academy, who had been preparing another excuse, swallowed dryly without meaning to. He felt the cold edge of an executioner’s blade graze his throat and could not force another word past his lips. At last he bowed his head.
“We… are overwhelmed with dread…”
Emperor Sungui’s design was perfectly clear.
The newspaper had exposed corruption in the Hanlin Academy and the Ministry of Rites. Of course those offices would not leave the newspaper alone; once the storm passed, they would seek revenge by every means available. And it was not only those two bodies. No high minister would welcome a newspaper that sank its teeth into his vulnerabilities.
Therefore the Emperor intended to forestall retaliation and strengthen the newspaper’s hand by framing it, in the public mind, as both an exposer of corruption and the Emperor’s external organ of oversight. If anyone who challenged the newspaper’s existence could be presumed to have something filthy to hide, the ministers would find themselves short of a clean pretext for reining it in.
The Dongchang is chronically short-handed as it is. Gaining an external means of watching the officials is like wiping one’s nose without lifting a finger.
Emperor Sungui was thoroughly pleased. He was fond enough of Hwiyeom to dote on him. That was why he had gladly bestowed an imperial plaque—calligraphy written by the Emperor’s own hand—upon the newspaper.
Holding the hilt of the blade, he gave the ministers no time to invent new excuses.
“The Censorate and the Dongchang will immediately investigate every successful candidate of the jinshi, the provincial examinations, and the metropolitan examinations administered by the Hanlin Academy and the Ministry of Rites over the past twenty years, and determine whether any fraud occurred. The Hanlin Academy and the Ministry of Rites will cooperate fully. Should they show the slightest reluctance or any sign of destroying evidence, they will be deemed to have defied an imperial order and punished accordingly.”
The meaning was unmistakable:
What powerful man—no, especially a powerful man—had never once accepted an improper request? Even if a high minister himself knew nothing of it, favors traded in his name, under the shadow of his prestige, without his knowledge, could still drag him down in the most unexpected place.
Emperor Sungui would not detonate any of it at once. An arrow is most terrifying before it is loosed. From this day forward the high ministers would have to police their own households in constant dread, never knowing whether the Emperor truly held their secrets—only that at any moment he might choose to strike their heads from their shoulders.
Had the Emperor raised such a matter without a ready-made scandal to lean on, the great and small officials would somehow have united to block him. Even if the pretext defeated them, the working ranks would have colluded to stall the investigation or filed false reports declaring that nothing was amiss. After all, the Censorate itself was staffed by the same breed of bureaucrats; they could not afford to be entirely righteous on this particular case. The only real worry would have been the Emperor’s hunting dog, the Dongchang—and the Dongchang was chronically understaffed and buried in work.
This time, however, everything felt different. Understaffed or not, if the Emperor ground his teeth, the Dongchang would grind people into the work. And once the Dongchang moved with blood in its eyes, the Censorate would have no choice but to stir as well.
We have to stop this…! But we have no pretext…
The situation is far too unfavorable…
Damn it all! All this chaos over the prefect’s worthless son!
Every high minister glared with bloodshot eyes at the empty seat of Han Sang-pil, Prefect of Suncheon. He was currently under investigation by the Censorate and could not attend the court session. Perhaps that was for the best; had he been present, he might have died of a heart attack on the spot.
In any case, there was no way to stop Emperor Sungui while he held so unassailable a moral high ground and pressed the ministers with it. Nor could they rely solely on internal slowdowns and organized obstruction. An external oversight body in all but name—the newspaper—had already come into existence. If they colluded, an article might appear just as it had with the Suncheon Prefect:
And then it would all be over.
In that case… if we simply remove them physically, without a whisper…
A few of the high ministers thought it might be enough to kill the reporters. None of them yet knew what fate had already befallen those who had raced off to harm the journalists of the Hwiyeom Newspaper.
“Who goes there?”
A man who had finished an all-night editing shift at the Hwiyeom Newspaper and was walking home found two shadows falling into step behind him. Reporter Jo Seok-chan sensed the presence and turned. Two men in black martial attire regarded him.
“Reporter Jo Seok-chan of the Hwiyeom Newspaper?”
“I am… but?”
“An elder wishes to see you. Come with us a moment.”
“And who is this elder?”
“That is not for you to know.”
The men in black spoke with formal courtesy laced with open threat. Under ordinary circumstances their sheer pressure of presence would have reduced any commoner to limp compliance. Jo Seok-chan, however, was no ordinary man.
“Then I will not be going. If you have something to say, come to the Hwiyeom Newspaper yourselves.”
“What? This insolent—!”
Never expecting a commoner scrap to refuse them so flatly, the black-clad men drew their swords.
Steel rang.
“Looks like we’ll have to cut a tendon or two before you’ll listen! Refuse to come quietly and we’ll leave you bedridden for life!”
“…So you’ve drawn.”
Jo Seok-chan rummaged inside his robes.
“Then this counts as self-defense.”
The black-clad martial artist clicked his tongue at the man’s utter lack of tension, as though he were merely fishing for a short dagger.
“Bluffing. One look at the way you stand and your martial level is plain as day. Do you think pulling out a little knife will let you resist?”
“A dagger? Why would I need one?”
Jo Seok-chan finished rummaging in his sleeve, then slapped the fabric a few times as if dusting it off.
“A dagger comes later. Not now.”
“You stupid—bluffing without even a dagger, now just come along and—?”
In that instant a sharp, acrid scent brushed the black-clad man’s nose. The world spun. His mouth burned bitter and dry; his throat closed; his body began to shrivel like squid on a hot iron plate. Classic symptoms of a nerve poison.
“Kkeueueuk…”
“Kkrrrk…”
Unable to breathe properly, limbs twitching of their own accord, only four eyes remained, wide with terror, staring up at Jo Seok-chan. Seeing the question and the fear in those gazes, Jo Seok-chan smiled.
“I’m a member of the Tang family, even if only of a branch line. And when you do work this dangerous, it’s only natural to carry a means of protecting yourself.”
He shrugged.
“Don’t worry. It isn’t a lethal poison. Your body is simply paralyzed—including the muscles that work your lungs—so breathing is a little difficult and rather painful, that’s all.”
“P-poison?!”
Indeed. The toxin Jo Seok-chan had released on the wind was a paralysis poison long favored by the Tang family. Watching the black-clad men’s faces blacken with the realization of how badly things had gone, Jo Seok-chan hummed a little tune under his breath.
“I can hardly just kill valuable informants.”
Informants?
The question rose and was immediately forgotten under the agony of breathing. Jo Seok-chan stepped forward, still smiling, slung both men across his shoulders, and continued humming as he spoke.
“I was fretting over tomorrow’s scoop, and look—fresh material rolls right up to my door. Working hard must have earned me the Young Family Head’s blessing.”
“Y-you think… kkrrk… you’ll… walk away from… this…”
The black-clad martial artist managed one last threat. Jo Seok-chan answered with a bright, cheerful smile.
“Before you worry about whether I’ll be all right, perhaps you should worry about yourselves first? Do you have any idea where you’re going or what will be done to you?”
“Bei… jing… mur… der… for… bidden…”
“Ah~ You’re saying that if someone commits murder inside Beijing, how will they handle the aftermath? Hahaha! Well then—why is it allowed for you and not for us? The powerful never seemed to care about such niceties while they were freely doing the same thing all this time.”
It was true. As long as the authorities never found the scene of a killing, it did not matter. Mysterious deaths and disappearances were common enough in Beijing. The man who had always played the role of killer and tormentor, now tasting the role of victim for the first time, broke out in cold sweat as Jo Seok-chan whispered into his ear.
“…Just so you know—I hope you hold out a good long while without talking.”
“…Kkrrk.”
“Reporter work turns out to be full of more irritating nonsense than you’d think. I’ve been bottling it up. Back at the main family I was a promising agent, you know? And now I get treated like a peddler and cursed at by some rich house’s servant… You understand what I’m saying, right?”
Killing intent settled across Jo Seok-chan’s otherwise ordinary, harmless face. Cold sweat poured down the black-clad martial artist in sheets.
“The Tang family has always been famous for its ancient tortures~ Let’s see how many of the seventy-two methods you can endure, starting from number one. Set a record for me. I’ve never seen anyone last past fifteen~”
And so Jo Seok-chan half-carried the black-clad men back into the newspaper office. The next day the following article appeared:
The truth of the affair began to peel open layer by layer.
Watching it all in a daze, Song Jeon-bin—a blue-clad beggar of the Beggars’ Sect—felt his eyes light up. Fighting spirit blazed across his face as he cried out:
“That’s it! This is what a reporter is! Uncovering justice and exposing society’s corruption! It perfectly matches the spirit of our Beggars’ Sect, which holds righteousness above all!”
In that moment, journalism was born in the Central Plains.