The Big Heist - 9
"My Dark Steel Ingot! My Dark Steel Ingooot!"
At the mansion from which the Shadowless Divine Thief had made off with his prized Dark Steel Ingot only days before, the Provincial Governor—who had lain collapsed for days on end—finally forced himself upright.
"How long do you intend to go on grieving like this, my lord? It is time to shake it off and rise."
The Chief Steward spoke with a look of deep concern.
"Do you have any idea what that was, telling me to shake it off?! That was my lifeline! It was the price I paid to bury the corruption charges—one of the Dark Steel Ingots I lost! What am I supposed to do about this!"
"What can be done about what is lost? One simply makes do with something else. I hear the black-market merchants are combing every underground den in the land, but the Ingot's whereabouts remain a mystery."
"Shadowless Divine Thief!!! Why in heaven's name can you not catch that wretched thief?! Why does the state leave such a menace to fester?!"
"My lord Governor! We have a crisis!"
While the nation's great thief mourned his stolen fortune, a guard posted at the gate came rushing in, his face white with panic.
"Crisis? What crisis! What in the world could be graver than having my Dark Steel Ingot stolen!"
His fury was already boiling past the point of containment. What fresh source of outrage could this possibly be?
Before the guard could answer the Governor's question, a horde of bailiffs came crashing through the gates.
"As it happens, something bigger. Quite possibly the biggest thing of your entire life."
Right in the midst of the bailiffs who had stormed in without warning, a face the Governor knew all too well pushed through and lifted its head.
"Jeong Munwon? What business does an Imperial Inspector have here?"
Jeong Munwon barely smothered the urge to sink his fist straight into the Governor's face. Instead, he drew a scroll from inside his robe and bellowed.
"Criminal Yang Gyegwang! Come out at once and accept the royal summons!"
"..."
At the Inspector's utterly absurd proclamation, a beat of stunned silence swept the mansion.
"Pfahaha. The Inspector says the Governor is to receive a royal summons."
"A royal summons? Why don't you go home and 'serve' your own wife a summons instead."
"Kekeheheh."
"Hey! Lord Inspector, sir! Did that beating last time not knock any sense into you? Do you even know whose door you're darkening?"
"You curs!!! How dare you speak to the Imperial Inspector—"
"'How dare' we speak to him? A mere junior Inspector dares! What insolence, kicking up a storm at the residence of a fourth-rank Provincial Governor!"
The household's reaction was only natural.
Jeong Munwon's original accusation had long since been dismissed as false—and hadn't he very nearly been stripped of office over charges that he'd slandered the Governor?
To anyone not in the know, this looked like nothing more than a newly appointed Inspector returning out of wounded pride.
"Jeong Munwon!!! I have had quite enough of your slander! Was the punishment you took at court not lesson enough!"
The Governor's tirade struck home against Inspector Jeong Munwon.
"Slander? Did you just say slander?!"
"It is the Emperor's favor that keeps your head on your shoulders even now! Kick up trouble again and do you truly believe your post—and your neck—will both survive it!"
Once could be forgiven as the overzealous blunder of a rookie Inspector. A second accusation was unmistakably personal spite. Not even the Emperor could shield him from that.
This time he would see the thorn in his side stripped of office once and for all. The Governor's fury over being robbed by the Shadowless Divine Thief swung around onto the Inspector.
"The one who ought to worry about his neck, Governor, is you."
The Inspector's reply was ice-cold.
"What was that?"
As though even a moment spent waiting for the Governor's reaction were a waste, Jeong Munwon drew out a second scroll and cried out to everyone assembled in the mansion.
"The crimes of Provincial Governor Yang Gyegwang stand exposed beyond all dispute! Inspector Jeong Munwon is commanded to bind the criminal and deliver him to the capital!"
"Wh-who could have given such an order?"
Something was slipping badly out of joint.
He had threatened the man, and yet the Inspector stood there defiant. Surely this wasn't something the Inspector had arranged all on his own? The Governor's voice shook with a creeping premonition.
"It is the command of the Surveillance Commissioner, the master who presides over the inspection and punishment of every official in Hubei Province."
The Imperial Inspector belonged to the throne's Censorate—but the central government was not the only arm that watched for official corruption.
The blessing of the Surveillance Commissioner—the highest office in Hubei's inspection apparatus—meant that everything was already finished.
"Th-the Surveillance Commissioner? That's impossible!"
"There was an informant. A certain someone made me a gift of this secret ledger, recording the criminal's every misdeed down to the last detail. It made persuading the Commissioner simplicity itself."
A smile wreathed Jeong Munwon's whole face as he held up a single battered ledger before the Governor.
"H-how did that end up in your hands?! The ledger, that day, was surely... wait."
"What is it? Care to guess who the informant was?"
"It couldn't be! Th-the Shadowless Divine Thief?! You took that thief's hand?!"
"To catch a nation's great thief, one must now and then take the hand of a petty one."
"Jeong Munwon!!! Shadowless Divine Thief!!! You wreeeeeeeetches!"
Jeong Munwon looked upon the nation's great thief with eyes cold as frost.
He sounded like a pig under the butcher's knife. A pig grown fat drinking the people's tears of blood, sinking greedy teeth into the common folk.
"I will say it one last time."
There was only one thing left to say to that pig.
"This can't be! This cannot be!"
"Seize the criminal Yang Gyegwang! Everyone connected is to be escorted to the capital!"
"Why did you turn him down?"
In the mansion's inner garden, Lady Ha Yeon put the question to me as I stood on the grass.
"I don't make a habit of strolling through hell's gates of my own free will."
That Inspector happens to be on close terms with the Princess. Whether I perform well or badly this time, cleanup duty after Her Highness down the road is already a certainty.
"I'm sorry?"
"Nothing. Working under the Inspector isn't going to buy me an official post, is it? Grind away at the job and the best I'd land is something like a bottom-rung clerkship."
A man could win office through patronage even without passing the civil examinations—but while that might work for the high and mighty, it was beyond a rookie Inspector like Jeong Munwon.
Would Jeong Munwon vouch for this bailiff? Absolutely. But a guarantee only means I'd have to earn merit enough to match it—and by the time I had, hell's gates would already be standing right in front of me.
"Work hard enough and even a bottom-rung post can't be out of reach, can it? The world is crawling with men who'd leap at a scribe's job even at forty."
Even in a world where murim walked the earth, this remained a society that prized official station above everything, so she wasn't entirely wrong. Even a starveling minor official could make a moneyed merchant bow his head.
"It wouldn't be a post won by examination—I'd be a minor functionary for life. And office work would force me to neglect both my writing and my businesses. But most decisively of all, there is a reason I must not."
"And what reason is that?"
I made a point of meeting Lady Ha Yeon's eyes with a look brimming with affection, then offered my little confession.
"A man with as many people to take responsibility for as I have needs to live free of any worry over his next three meals, doesn't he?"
"Nngh."
She had taken the blow flush, and Lady Ha Yeon hid her burning face behind an elbow.
"Once this affair is over, Lady Ha Yeon will be helping me plenty. There's Daseogak to expand, and the inn venture to keep growing, isn't there?"
Striving to become an official would be pure overinvestment.
Trailing the Inspector might indeed be one of the few chances I would ever get to become entangled with the Princess. The problem was whether the Princess was a true heroine at all.
If she wasn't, I risked missing my meeting with the real one.
And if meeting the Princess truly became necessary, I could manage it just as well while stacking up reputation as Hopil.
"I-I'll work hard too. But if that's the plan, wouldn't it be better to at least ask for some sort of reward for handing over that secret ledger?"
"A rumor that the famed bailiff keeps some unspecified tie to the Shadowless Divine Thief? That costs me. Word spreading that a black-haired bailiff had a hand in exposing a great lord's corruption? That costs me too. For now, we concern ourselves with Lady Ha Yeon's reputation alone."
For now, the Shadowless Divine Thief's fame was the only fame that mattered.
Because my own name getting out would be nothing but a loss.
"Thank you for your hard work, everyone!"
"This is only the beginning. There's a mountain of reports due today, so I'll be needing everyone's best."
Jeong Munwon had watched to the very end as the Governor was hauled off to prison, bawling tears and snot in equal measure. A weight ten years heavy had settled from his chest—yet none of it showed as he issued orders to his junior officials.
"Shall we see to your meal first, sir?"
"Too much work awaits for me to go out dining. Pick up something simple to nibble on your way back."
Jeong Munwon felt no need for rice, wine, or sleep—but even so, he could not skip meals if he was to have the strength to report the Governor's crimes in full.
"A Wungi Inn branch opened up near the government offices a few days ago. I was going to place a delivery order through their Giosugu pigeons—shall I order for you as well?"
"The Wungi Inn—you mean the inn run by Bailiff Kang? Put it on me. Order whatever you like."
"One family-size sweet and sour pork. And I'll have the jjambbong spicy noodles for you, Inspector."
"Have you ever once seen me eat spicy food?"
Jeong Munwon's eyes narrowed to slits.
"M-my apologies, sir! Jjajang noodles, then."
"We're working late tonight. Food that could stain my robes is less than ideal."
"Fried rice! I'll order fried rice!"
"We're regulars there, so tell them to be generous with the jjajang sauce and a good portion of jjambbong broth on the side with the fried rice."
"Today's actually our first ever ord... Understood, sir."
If he's going to be like that, he should order it himself. And last time he went off with my copy of Tale of the Wind and Cloud Chivalric Hero, too. The muttered complaints trailed away down the hall, but Jeong Munwon was the sort of official who let a subordinate's grumbling slide right past him.
When the sweet and sour pork arrives, I shall simply have to pour the sauce over it.
Jeong Munwon allowed himself a brief image of the pained face his clerk would make, and took his seat.
"The memorial for His Majesty has already been drafted in full."
Within it lay the Governor's extortion of the people, his itemized lists of bribes—countless crimes recorded in merciless detail.
The moment this memorial reached the throne, even the court ministers stuffed with his bribes would find that shielding the Governor meant forfeiting their own survival.
Joining hands with the Shadowless Divine Thief had been the right choice. And yet...
One thing still snagged in Jeong Munwon's chest.
Having resolved to clasp a petty thief's hand in order to destroy the nation's great thief, he could hardly recoil now from further dealings with thieves. It was something else entirely.
Kang Yunho had, in the end, gained nothing at all.
It made him covet the man.
Covet him beyond all measure.
To ask no compensation whatsoever for a deed like this. To think such talent lay moldering in the wilderness.
Even the bailiff's post, the man claimed, was something he had taken up only because the Shadowless Divine Thief had appeared in Wuhan and needed help for a time—and once the affair concluded, he would lay that down as well.
And that same man intended to remain nothing more than a merchant?
He did say, plainly enough, that he had no wish to see his name made known through this affair. Even so...
Kang Yunho had taken the measure of Jeong Munwon's character and talked him around masterfully. But one fact had escaped him.
Namely this: the Inspector's devotion to his Emperor ran far deeper than Kang Yunho could ever have guessed.
Jeong Munwon took up his brush.
"Your humble servant Jeong Munwon submits: the exposure of the Governor's corruption was not accomplished by this official's strength alone. In truth, one exceptionally capable black-haired bailiff bore a most crucial part in—"
For it was ever a scholar's virtue—and an act of loyalty to the throne—to report talent buried in obscurity.
All without Kang Yunho ever knowing—
one small wheel of fate had begun to turn.