Desperate Efforts to Keep Minjeongwon Alive
Elder Lee Gyu-chan of the Sichuan Dang Family's Elder Council had found little enjoyment in life of late.
He could see the Elder Council's authority shrinking with every passing day.
Even the main family's servants, who once could not lift their heads in his presence, now seemed to carry their chins a little higher—and the feeling left him thoroughly unsettled.
"Those non-Dang mongrels, clinging on and playing at being Dang blood! Damn them all!"
Lee Gyu-chan was nursing his anger over a midday drink. He had just been flatly rejected after filing a requisition for medicinal herbs from the Medical Hall and the Herb Storehouse.
He ran a pharmacy called the Four Seas Apothecary. Backed by the name of a Dang Family branch and operating throughout Sichuan, its scale was considerable. But a pharmacy of that size meant endless customers, and the stock of herbs was forever running short.
Whenever supplies dwindled, he had always simply walked into the Sichuan Dang Family's Medical Hall and Herb Storehouse, carried out what he needed, and sold it. The family's obsession with poisons and medicines bordered on the terrifying; they kept the storehouses so full that herbs sometimes rotted on the shelves rather than risk a shortage. To Lee Gyu-chan that was pure waste of money. As an Elder of the Council he had simply waved his authority and siphoned the stock for resale. He did eventually replace what he took when he had the funds, but it was embezzlement pure and simple. Still, the Medical Hall and Herb Storehouse had always obeyed him—because as Elder he held the right to audit and inspect every reserve of medicine and poison they held.
This time even that formidable authority had failed.
When he blustered and demanded the medicines, the senior apothecary had only snapped, "Bring a permit from the Family Head or the Young Master," and thrown him out.
"Those ungrateful bastards! Who do they think puts food on their tables?!"
The Elder Council was growing weak. Gong Duchan's banking enterprises had begun to wobble, and every branch-family venture that had run so smoothly on his capital now creaked and ground. To make matters worse, their spiritual pillar, Elder Hong Ilgon, was likewise powerless. Once he had leaned on the Qingcheng Sect and the Regional Military Commissioner, stringing together high officials and smoothing over every problem for the branch businesses. Now, without money for bribes, his hands were tied.
Meanwhile the Family Head's residence, flush with profits from one booming venture after another, watched the Young Master wear down the thresholds of every high official in Sichuan—including the Governor himself—greasing palms with abandon.
Even tea tasted like gall in Lee Gyu-chan's mouth.
"Damn it. By next month I have to present fifty catties of ten-year white ginseng to the Regional Military Commissioner's wife… and every nearby herb merchant has been cleaned out…"
He knew the Dang storehouses still held white ginseng. He simply could not get at it, and the frustration boiled in his gut.
"No choice. Tomorrow I'll have to go to the Family Head and try to negotiate…"
He drained several more bottles and plates of side dishes to cool his temper, then rose and left.
Not long after he departed, a young waiter clearing the wine table hurried off, slipped out a scrap of paper, and began to write. He jotted down his own name and everything he had overheard, rolled the note into a bamboo tube, and slipped out the inn's back door. Scanning the street, he spotted a Dang Family night-soil collector trudging along under his carrying-frame and greeted him warmly.
The night-soil collectors were the subscription workers who hauled the sealed jars of waste from the flush toilets installed throughout Seongdo to the official sewage depot, emptied them, and returned them. All were subcontractors under Hwiyeon Holdings; the work was far cleaner than the old dung-buckets of the past, and the monthly pay was decent.
"Hey, Jang—how's work?"
"Ah, Hwang. Same as always. Today's load's heavy; should make decent coin."
"Haha. When you're free after this, swing by my place too—the jar in the back room's full."
While he spoke, the waiter, careful of watching eyes, slipped the bamboo tube into Collector Jang's pocket. Jang grinned.
"Got it. I'll come by once the rounds are done."
"Good. Take care."
The waiter returned to the inn. Collector Jang shouldered his frame and walked away—but his steps led not to the sewage depot. They led straight to the Sichuan Dang Family compound.
"Here to empty the Innovation Hall latrines."
The gate guard wordlessly held out a hand. Jang placed the bamboo tube the waiter had given him into the man's palm. The guard said,
"Innovation Hall's busy right now. Come later. I'll pass word inside."
"Yes, sir. I'll take my leave, then."
Jang left with a good-natured smile. The guard, however, headed not for the Innovation Hall but for an office deep inside the Inner Hall. Outside the door he called,
"Secretary, secret report."
"Come in."
At the sound of Second Secretary Lee Jinmyeong's voice the guard entered, bowed politely, handed over the bamboo tube, and withdrew.
Lee Jinmyeong opened the tube, extracted the note, and read.
"Hmm. Lee Gyu-chan needs fifty catties of white ginseng for the Regional Military Commissioner's wife? What for, I wonder?"
He thought for a moment, then set brush to paper. When he finished he rang a small bell. A maid appeared and bowed.
"You called, sir?"
"Investigate the connection between Lee Gyu-chan and the Regional Military Commissioner's wife—and why she wants fifty catties of white ginseng. This is the order for the Sakhpungdae."
"Understood."
The maid bowed and vanished.
"Huuuh."
Lee Jinmyeong tilted his head back and kneaded his stiff neck and shoulders, then gave a dry little laugh.
"I proposed the scheme myself, but I never imagined it would grow into an intelligence apparatus this complete. Of course, it's all thanks to the Young Master's skill and President Jin Cheong's merit…"
Still massaging the ache, he cast his mind back over the past year.
For the past year Lee Jinmyeong had approached every soul in Seongdo still crushed under Yeowangchae debt and linked them to Elder Jin Cheong—no, President Jin Cheong.
The Yeowangchae loan sharks of Seongdo had been wiped out, yet the debts they held over the poor had not vanished. People feared that only the creditor's name had changed—from Yeowangchae to Hwiyeon Comprehensive Finance—and that the same exploitation would continue. The reputation of the prestigious Sichuan Dang Family offered some hope that things would not be as brutal, but the world rarely turned out so kindly.
President Jin Cheong of Hwiyeon Comprehensive Finance made them an offer they had never expected.
"Hwiyeon Comprehensive Finance will take over your debts. We will also slash the interest dramatically."
"H-how much…?"
"We will not calculate interest on the principal. Instead we will take twenty percent of whatever income you earn. That should leave a little breathing room for daily living, yes?"
In modern terms, if a man earning three million a month had borrowed two hundred million, instead of paying forty million a year in interest he would pay only twenty percent of his salary—six hundred thousand a month, or seven million two hundred thousand a year.
"Is that even possible?! Thank you! Thank you!"
The terror of usury is that once interest swells, a man cannot even cover living costs, let alone touch the principal. People are not machines; they cannot work without food or a roof. Where Yeowangchae squeezed water from dried squid by driving debtors to the brink, Hwiyeon Comprehensive Finance opened a breathing hole.
"B-but… won't Hwiyeon take a huge loss?"
It was, in truth, a loss-making structure. Yet the sums the desperate had borrowed were tiny beside Hwiyeon's capital—mere drops in the ocean. To the conscientious debtor fretting over the imbalance, Jin Cheong merely smiled.
"Of course, there is a condition."
The condition was simple: while pursuing their ordinary livelihoods they would become civilian informants, passing along any information they encountered to the Dang Family. A monthly stipend would be set; until the debt was cleared the service would be unpaid, and afterward they would receive the stipend. The amount was pocket change compared with the cost of training and running professional agents. Still, simply saying "pass along whatever you hear" would never work. People are far more passive than one imagines, and any request without teeth sinks to the bottom of the priority list.
So they were required to submit a daily "Record of Observations"—a single sheet summarizing everything they had seen and heard while working, no matter how trivial, as if writing a diary. Whenever an entry contained something of value or use, a bonus was paid.
To people whose lives had been shattered by impossible interest rates, Jin Cheong's proposal was rain in a drought.
When Hwiyeom designed the system he named the private informants after the intelligence agency he remembered from his previous life: Minjeongwon—short for "Civilian Information Processing Office."
The agents of the Minjeongwon were many and varied: beggars who had already lost everything and slept in the streets, waiters in inns and eateries, stable hands, low-ranking courtesans in the pleasure houses, farmers, miners, merchants—every one of them became a living CCTV, feeding information to the Dang Family while going about their daily work. If they were CCTV cameras, the Baekga-jaengsik delivery runners and settlement clerks already in service became the drones and network hubs. Hwiyeom simply folded those temporary assets into the Minjeongwon as well.
Someone had to manage them all.
"Hand them over to the Sakhpungdae?" Dang Un-sang asked, the question perfectly reasonable.
Hwiyeom smiled and shook his head.
"No. I already have someone in mind."
"…Me?"
"Yes."
Suddenly summoned and given an unexpected order, Ye-eun showed a rare flicker of agitation and tried to decline.
"But I am only an uneducated personal maid."
Hwiyeom smiled at her refusal.
"I have watched you all this time. Learning or lack of it is irrelevant. You can do this—better than anyone."
For a moment Ye-eun looked to Dang Un-sang as if begging for rescue. When the Family Head pointedly looked elsewhere she let out a soft sigh.
"…I humbly accept the command."
Her face was unreadable as she bowed.
Minjeongwon agents never needed to move the information themselves. They simply handed notes to a passing Baekga-jaengsik delivery runner or a night-soil collector. Agents, runners, and collectors all became both "informants" and "couriers"; the settlement clerks who gathered the material and delivered it to the family became "managers." And every manager answered to Ye-eun.
Around each fountain plaza a delivery-radius "jurisdiction" took shape. Cell-structured intelligence networks sprang up to cover those jurisdictions, and over them all stood a single controller. These networks were not merely rooted deep in Sichuan society—they were that society. For a martial artist to single them out from ordinary civilians would be impossible. Why? Because the picture would always look like armed jianghu thugs bullying powerless commoners. Face-conscious orthodox sects would never dare. And the unorthodox? Pull that stunt inside orthodox territory and the Martial Alliance Leader would bellow "Punish the wicked!" and open a full-scale righteous-demonic war. Start a war over a handful of suspected informants? Impossible.
Within the borders of Sichuan the Minjeongwon had become the supreme intelligence apparatus—surpassing even the Beggar's Guild, which used only beggars, and outstripping the Haomun, which occupied similar ground. Why? Baekga-jaengsik now controlled nearly every wine house and restaurant; stables remained Haomun territory, yet Baekga-jaengsik delivery men and Hwiyeon Holdings night-soil collectors outnumbered stable hands and carriages many times over. A delivery runner could even claim "food delivery" if caught openly tailing someone.
It was an enormous achievement.
Yet this magnificent intelligence and collection system possessed one crushing flaw…
"There's too much work…!"
Ye-eun stamped her seal on the Record of Observations she had just finished, slipped it into the sorted file, then stared at the mountain still towering on her desk and planted her face on the table.
Unlike the Haomun or the Beggar's Guild, which received only refined intelligence, vacuuming up raw observations from amateurs demanded enormous manpower simply to classify and review.
"I'm supposed to be Hwiyeom's bodyguard! At this rate I'll never even see the face of the person I'm protecting!"
She ground her teeth.
"I can't handle this alone. Someone has to take full charge of receiving, classifying, processing, and recording the Minjeongwon agents' reports!"
At first she had dumped the work on the capable, trustworthy Second Secretary Lee Jinmyeong (once Ye-eun took over the Minjeongwon he naturally fell under her authority for all intelligence matters). Recently, however, Lee Jinmyeong had been forced to drop the Minjeongwon entirely. The flood of "side work" Hwiyeom had shoved onto him had turned his face from sallow to a deathly, ashen gray. When Ye-eun assumed Minjeongwon management, every duty she had previously carried simply transferred onto him.
Nothing remained of the bright-eyed youth who had once dreamed of mastering Qingcheng martial arts and wandering the jianghu as a famous swordsman. All that was left was a pair of eyes blazing with the desperate conviction, I will not die alone!
When Ye-eun finally went to him and asked, "Want to handle just one more job with me?" she never even got a word out before retreating with a sigh.
"The Sakhpungdae already has its own duties and I can't move them as I please, so I'll create a separate organization. People who, unlike the external Minjeongwon agents, will act as my deputies inside the family—controlling the network and sorting the gold from the dross in the information they gather…"
After a moment's thought she lifted her brush and began drafting a proposal.
They say a village dog that hangs around a school for three years can recite poetry. Ye-eun had followed Hwiyeom for at least that long. She had never merely stood and watched. As his First Secretary she had already endured rigorous training; writing a single project proposal was now child's play.
When she laid the "Proposal for the Establishment and Operation of the Shadow Bureau" before Hwiyeom, he grinned.
"Look at this."
"What is it?"
"Secretary Lee's proposal—about expanding the administrative staff of the Inner Hall and how to use them. We can weave it together with the Shadow Bureau you've designed, can't we?"
"…!"
"People really do think alike. The moment you get overwhelmed, you start figuring out how to work someone else."
Having run businesses for years, Hwiyeom knew exactly how hard it was to make salaried employees move of their own free will.
Carrots like performance bonuses alone won't make people move. Pure stick-and-discipline only makes them collapse or quit. The key is to make them feel the necessity themselves. Treat them well—then bury them under so much work they invent ways to lighten their own load. Humans have always invented tools so they don't have to suffer.
The same change was happening to more than just Ye-eun and Lee Jinmyeong. Elder Bak Chang-eon, Chief Blacksmith Han Cheol, and Construction Foreman Gwak Do—constantly assigned tasks and demanded results by Hwiyeom—all wrestled with the same question: how to work more easily and efficiently? They all reached the same conclusion.
"Talent! We need talent!"
"We need experienced new hires!"
"Or at least new hires who can pretend to be experienced!"
Having plunged every mid-level manager and field worker of the Dang Family into a living hell of overtime, Hwiyeom could finally wear the satisfied smile of a true mastermind.
Ah, of course—
"…If I don't do it this way, I'll be the first one to drop dead."
People might curse Hwiyeom, yet they could never truly rebel, because every task they carried was only a fragment of the work that already rested on his shoulders. If the others were laborers conscripted to build the Great Wall, Hwiyeom was Sisyphus of Greek myth—the giant condemned forever to roll a boulder up a mountain only to watch it tumble down the other side and begin again. Even he was only a helpless man before the mountain of paperwork on his own desk. Since he had created every one of these enterprises, he had no one to blame; he merely ground his teeth and waited for his subordinates to evolve faster.
"Damn illiteracy rates! Damn Chinese characters! Freeze-to-death education fever! Aargh!"
This world had its Zhou dynasty and its Mencius—so why was the land of Mencius's mother who moved thrice for her son's education in such a state? Probably because scraping a living left no room for anything else.
Ye-eun, who had been quietly watching him, spoke carefully.
"And there is one more matter to report."
"What?"
"That madm—ah, that is, Director Dang Unhwa appears to have succeeded in materializing Explosive Poison."
"…What did you just say?"
Hwiyeom's mouth fell open.