The Darkening of the Dang Family People(?)
The moment the Sichuan Daily’s still-warm papers hit the tables of every Baekga-jaengsik restaurant and government office, diners snatched them up, wondering what fresh miracle had landed today.
“Hah! The Young Master has relieved the starving people of Yunnan!”
“Damn, our Young Master isn’t content with saving Sichuan—he’s out there saving whole other provinces! Just what are you, sir…!”
“What’s it say here? It’s so bright I can’t read a thing!”
“Light. Pure light, heh heh.”
“Wait—the Yunnan Provincial Governor is a complete bastard?! How does a man wear a human face and still… heh! Unbelievable.”
The article about feeding Yunnan’s starving neighbors set the province ablaze with pride. These people knew the terror of locusts and famine in their bones; to have clawed their way back from the brink only to watch a son of Sichuan save the province next door filled them with a heady, unstoppable rush.
“I’m drunk without a drop! Innkeeper! A bowl of rice wine!”
“You just said you were drunk without drinking—why order wine?”
“For the Young Master! How can I not?”
The former Yunnan Provincial Governor’s exposed crimes, however, left every reader clicking their tongues in disgust.
“Still, our Young Master sniffed out the corruption, ran a field investigation, and had the Sichuan Dang Family Legal Affairs Division drag the bastard down!”
“Lord Bang Un must have thrown some weight around!”
“Thank heaven our own Sichuan Provincial Governor is a decent man.”
“Absolutely. More jobs, new roads, running water—life’s gotten a lot better.”
“Hey now, you think that’s the Governor’s doing? He just didn’t block anything the Young Master wanted.”
“Not blocking the Young Master is already high competence!”
By simple comparison with his Yunnan counterpart, the previously quiet Sichuan Provincial Governor’s popularity soared.
And then—
“What? All Yunnan tea belongs to Sichuan now?”
“Not exactly—he secured the monopoly rights.”
“Same thing! From now on every Yunnan tea merchant has to get permission from the Dang Family just to sell!”
“How much money is that even going to bring in?!”
The wealth of Yunnan—famous for its tea-and-pepper cross-border trade despite sitting in the back of beyond—was about to pour straight into Sichuan. Not a single person in the province failed to cheer.
Praise for the Dang Family and Hui-yeom reached fever pitch.
“The Young Master is a god and the Dang Family is his temple—it’s written on the oracle bones of the Zhou Dynasty!”
“If the gods ever combined mercy with competence, they would simply have been called Dang Hui-yeom.”
“Innkeeper! Pull the awning down—we’re staying all day!”
“Innkeeper! Ten bowls of cloudy rice wine!”
“Innkeeper! One steaming hot bowl of rice soup!”
“Innkeeper’s going to work himself to death, you animals!”
While the whole of Sichuan celebrated in carnival mood that early morning, Hui-yeom himself was finishing breakfast with a rice ball and using the free minutes to scan the Sichuan Daily’s latest edition. His expression grew increasingly blank.
The paper sang of how he had predicted the locust plague two years earlier, prepared Sichuan so thoroughly it weathered the crisis, then used the surplus grain to feed neighboring Yunnan—while toppling that province’s corrupt governor and reaffirming friendship with the Southern Savage Beast Palace—all of it written in the exalted tones of a royal eulogy.
Lee Jinmyeong, reading reports over his own rice ball, glanced at the newspaper in Hui-yeom’s hands.
“I asked them to leave out the Gakhaesu matter. Operational security.”
“Good call. Honestly, I can’t tell if I’m holding a newspaper or a propaganda flyer.”
“A what? Non-solder?”
“There’s such a thing.”
Hui-yeom snorted.
“If literacy rates were even a little higher I’d expand the newspaper business aggressively.”
It would have been perfect media leverage once we pushed into the Central Plains.
He swallowed the rest of the thought and smacked his lips in regret. The Sichuan Daily ran at a loss precisely because he wanted a press that could protect the Dang Family. For a newspaper to function as a business you needed readers, and advertisers who noticed those readers; with so few commoners able to read, the whole enterprise was stillborn.
“Better to print an intelligence sheet aimed only at high officials and merchant princes in places like Beijing, Nanjing, Wuhan, Suzhou, or Hangzhou. Targeting ordinary people just isn’t a business yet.”
People had to be able to read before they would buy, after all. Even the Sichuan Daily only got read because free copies were left in restaurants and offices; literate customers flipped through them out of curiosity, then spread the news by word of mouth.
Lee Jinmyeong answered his monologue.
“True enough… but couldn’t it still serve as a knife to clear obstacles during Central Plains expansion? Take the losses, set up papers in every region so at least the literate class reads them, then when someone crosses the Dang Family we use the press to smear them…”
Look at that. Public-opinion warfare and negative campaigning already popping out of his mouth.
People of the past weren’t dumber than modern folk—they just lacked information volume. Hui-yeom grinned and praised him.
“Solid idea, but we’re not in a position to absorb that kind of deficit yet. The concept itself isn’t bad, though. Take your time and research it.”
“…Yes, sir.”
That mouth of his—sitting still and still generating more work. Second Secretary Lee Jinmyeong lowered his head, crestfallen. “Take your time and research it” in Hui-yeom-speak meant “I’ll give you about a year of free time—use it to research and bring me results.” A year was generous in theory; in practice the man was already drowning in nonstop work with no time to breathe. Research? What research?
Whether or not he noticed Jinmyeong’s soul rotting, Hui-yeom stuffed the last of the rice ball into his mouth.
“We had our fun. Back to work, Secretary Lee.”
“Yes, sir.”
When exactly had they “had fun”? Lee Jinmyeong often—no, daily—wondered whether Hui-yeom was even human. The Dang Family had become a living hell that ground people into paste, yet the Yama who ruled that hell—no, the Overwork King himself—had no concept of clocking out.
Did the man even sleep two shichen a day? Jinmyeong had once asked in all seriousness, amazed anyone could function on that little rest. Hui-yeom’s answer had been a masterpiece:
“There are people in the world who don’t even know martial arts and still work on two or three shichen of sleep. You cultivate martial arts and you want two shichen? If you can’t manage that, shut the business down.”
Maybe if he packed his bags right now and climbed Mount Qingcheng the Qingcheng Sect would take him in. Then again, Hui-yeom looked fully prepared to slowly starve the Qingcheng Sect to death, so the idea never quite took root. Besides, the people of Sichuan would probably roll him in a straw mat first.
And Lee Jinmyeong was only human. Exhausting as the work was, every time he watched the Sichuan Dang Family grow and heard the people praise them, a quiet pride and satisfaction welled up that he could not quite suppress.
“Hmm. By the way—”
Hui-yeom rose from his seat.
“Tell Ye-eun: have the Minjeongwon deliverymen start collecting yesterday’s newspapers.”
“Sir? You need old newspapers? People are putting those to good use.”
“We need to start preparing them to pay. Not immediately, but over time we have to drill into their heads that newspapers aren’t free forever, or they’ll balk when we finally charge. And newsprint is a surprisingly valuable resource.”
“What will you use it for?”
“Hidden-weapon manufacturing.”
Hui-yeom’s next stage: once guncotton and nitroglycerin were ready, smokeless powder would follow, and then cartridges that used that powder. Matchlock-style weapons with separate powder and ball had hard limits in the jianghu. He wanted a round that combined bullet and powder into one unit—something you could simply reload and fire. In short, cartridges with casings.
Brass casings still had too many unsolved problems, and copper itself was precious metal. So they would begin with paper cartridges. The British Enfield Arsenal had produced paper cartridges as early as 1859; they were still in use during America’s Civil War. Old newspapers would supply the raw material.
Lee Jinmyeong tilted his head at the idea of paper hidden weapons, but the risk of extra assignments made him execute an immediate evasive maneuver.
“Understood. I’ll pass it to the First Secretary.”
“Good.”
When the order later reached Ye-eun, her brows knitted in a rare show of open irritation.
“That bastard Lee Jinmyeong dares dump work on me?”
Technically the matter sat in a gray zone. Information collection and distribution for the newspaper belonged to Ye-eun’s Minjeongwon; publication fell under Director Lee Gyu-chan’s Hwi-eon Newspaper; overall administration sat under Lee Jinmyeong’s authority. In other words, Jinmyeong could have handled it himself. Of course the order had come directly from Hui-yeom, and Minjeongwon—already fused with Baekga-jaengsik’s delivery network—was the perfect organ for retrieving papers from restaurants. Still, feelings were feelings.
“Just wait.”
Ye-eun rang her bell and summoned her own secretary.
“Secretary Son, find out the daily circulation of Sichuan Daily copies going into Baekga-jaengsik outlets and government offices, then draft a report on how we can recover as many as possible.”
“Ma’am? Waste newspapers? All of a sudden?”
The junior secretary she had finally wrung out of Hui-yeom after endless pleading stared with round eyes. Ye-eun’s voice went cold.
“Do I need to explain the reason behind every single order to you, Secretary Son?”
The normally impassive, businesslike First Secretary’s eyes now burned with icy fire. Secretary Son’s danger sensors fired a beat too late.
I’m screwed!
“I’ll have the report up as fast as humanly possible.”
“Go.”
Secretary Son bolted from the room, then stomped off and called his own subordinate, fuming.
“My plate is already overflowing and now this too—Section Chief Choi!”
“Yes!”
“Clean this up and report.”
“…Pardon?”
“You have a problem?”
“No, sir.”
Somewhere along the way every person under Hui-yeom had acquired the skill of twisting their entire body to fling any unexpected task onto someone else. Of course, dumping the work did not mean walking away free.
“Here! Why are these numbers like this? Do it properly!”
“I’m sorry!”
Inside the Dang Family’s inner compound—a living hell realm of its own—the half-hearted did not survive.
Yet even while they shuddered under the crushing workload, none of them could quit. There was a reason.
“Honey! Thank you—you’re the absolute best!”
“Huh? What are you talking about? Grabbing a man who just got home from overtime with nonsense?”
Section Chief Choi of the Minjeongwon dragged his exhausted body through the door late that night and found his wife beaming like a flower. He stared, bewildered. She laughed, eyes sparkling.
“My mother’s birthday was the other day, remember? Well, the Sichuan Dang Family sent a wreath and a yellow ox—right out where the whole neighborhood could see! And the plaque said:
Thank you for sending such a precious and capable son-in-law to the Dang Family. Thanks to your son-in-law’s labors, our main house thrives.
— Young Master Dang Hui-yeom of the Sichuan Dang Family
“Plus a bundle of six-year ginseng and cash! Thanks to you, Mother is walking on air all over the neighborhood!”
“Uh… uh…”
“You haven’t eaten, have you? Wait right there—I’ll have a hot meal on the table in no time!”
“Y-yeah…”
As his wife vanished into the kitchen, Section Chief Choi stood frozen, then let out a long breath and gave a small, helpless laugh. Life returned to his drained face. He patted the work papers still tucked inside his robe.
“…How am I supposed to not be loyal after this?”
A modern office worker crushed under overtime and performance metrics might have screamed for work-life balance over benefits, but in a Central Plains that still treated laborers like servants, when had anyone ever received treatment like this?
That night the oil lamp in Section Chief Choi’s house never went out.