The Second Test - 2
"Did I make the wrong choice after all?"
Back at the estate with the Impossible Ledger in hand, I muttered to myself, the task looming over me all over again.
"Hey! Kang Yunho! Are you trying to make me nervous?"
Jeon Gilsan. I told him not to follow me. And of course he tagged along anyway, just to give me an earful.
"The difficulty is simply absurd, that's all."
"You didn't pick it because you had some kind of plan?"
"...It's not that I have nothing in mind. But I chose the Impossible Ledger for a different reason."
It wasn't that I was confident I could get the money back no matter what.
"What?! You're telling me you didn't have a way to solve it?!"
Oh, don't be so dramatic. I gave Gilsan a wry smile and waved the ledger.
"Because I could see the Mangeum Lord's intent."
I would prove myself.
Just because I'd said it in front of the Mangeum Lord didn't mean I was indulging in empty bravado. There was, naturally, a perfectly rational reason to choose the hardest difficulty of all.
"Grandfather had an intent?"
"When I first looked at the ledger, all I could think was, 'A Prefectural Magistrate?! That's far too much for a black-haired barbarian!' I was about to give up and move on to the other ledgers when—like a bolt of lightning—the truth of the situation hit me."
To be precise, I realized it the moment our eyes met. A look tinged with disappointment flashed across his face, and then descended a gaze I knew all too well.
The gaze of a man whose carefully laid scheme was unfolding exactly as he had envisioned.
The Mangeum Lord had something hidden up his sleeve.
"What kind of scheme?"
"The hourglass. Didn't it seem far too tight for going through all those ledgers?"
The hourglass set before us to impose a time limit on our choice of ledger. The trick had been sitting right in front of my eyes.
"Isn't that just because a Mangeum Lord needs quick judgment?"
I shook my head at Gilsan's guess without a moment's hesitation.
"Quite the opposite. One of the surest ways to keep a person from thinking straight is to slap a time limit on them. Make a tempting offer, then insist that if they don't buy now, they never will—decide quickly! Before long, the heart is fretting itself sick."
"Grandfather deliberately clouded our judgment? Why?"
"Because even in that moment, Lord Jang was looming over our heads."
A time limit it shall be. Now all of you will move as I intend.
A method straddling the border between con artistry and sharp business. With a single hourglass, everyone who passed the test was transformed, in an instant, into a plump mark serving the Mangeum Lord's design.
What a truly formidable elder.
The one consolation was that I happened to have a small talent in that very field myself.
"What other meaning could he possibly have had?"
"Barely grasping his intent is only step one. Next, I have to read the situation. When was it the Chief Steward said the test would begin?"
So I've been set down on a game board the Mangeum Lord designed.
When you realize something is a swindle, the best move is to pull your feet out at once. But if you can't walk away, then you must read the situation carefully, so as not to fall into the trap your opponent has laid.
"When the ledgers were first handed out."
"And the hourglass was set exactly when?"
"Right after the Impossible Ledger was handed over. Huh?"
Finally noticed something off, did you?
"Exactly. The earlier ledgers each came with a reasonable stretch of time. But the Impossible Ledger got its hourglass almost the instant it touched our hands. Why the difference?"
"Uh... to make our brains freeze up the moment we looked at it?"
Student Jeon Gilsan—you pass!
I gave him a small round of applause. That's me, Kang Yunho, for you—actually getting through to this guy. The knack I had for tutoring back in my university days hadn't rusted one bit.
"Exactly. The moment you open the Impossible Ledger, a Prefectural Magistrate is staring back at you. Faced with a problem that offers no hope, the head naturally turns toward the one that looks solvable. And the ledgers we'd been given all the time in the world to study? Those looked easy by comparison."
It was like sitting down for the math section of the college entrance exam and finding the final, hardest problem first thing. Your stomach drops. Of course your eyes drift back to the easy questions you saw when your judgment was still intact.
"There's nothing wrong with browsing the other ledgers, though, is there?"
"The hourglass had more than one job. It also kept us from ever circling back to the problem we were actually meant to solve."
Time was tight enough just for skimming the ledgers. Naturally, any chance to chew over the real question vanished along with it.
"What question?"
"The Chief Steward said it plainly before we began. The ledgers had been sorted by difficulty—for the young masters' sake."
"For the young masters? What difference does that make?"
"The difficulty tiers were created for this test from the very start. No amount of staring turns a Toxic ledger into a Dangerous one, or into an Impossible one. Once you grasp that, the next step is to recall one particular thing the Mangeum Lord said."
There had been no need to agonize over the other tiers. All anyone could do was look at the easy problems and admire how easy they were.
Choosing Normal mode or Hard mode in a game is simply a matter of taste, after all.
"Something he said? Oh!"
That's it. The words you heard from the back, too.
Mix a little falsehood into the truth. Or better yet, speak nothing but the truth—and let the listener believe only the part they want to believe.
It was my field of expertise. That alone was why I managed to catch it.
What if the Mangeum Lord's words had never meant 'examine all three ledgers'—but meant something else entirely?
"The difficulty of the other ledgers was settled before we even began. If Lord Jang's words are taken as they stand, then what is it I'm actually meant to judge?"
"Just the one."
I nodded.
An hourglass far too short for three ledgers. Yet ample time for a single one.
The difficulty of the rest had already been fixed.
Just as the Mangeum Lord said—look upon the borrower's face and judge whether I could bring the money home. And the ledger demanding that judgment was exactly one.
"The Impossible Ledger. Would I choose it, or refuse it? From the very beginning, choosing any other ledger was never an option."
Our Mangeum Hall has judged these debts impossible. If you would be our heir, then solve what we call impossible and bring the money back.
If I wished to become the Mangeum Lord's successor—
then from the start, the only choice on the table was the resolve to see it done, whatever it took.
"Y-Young Master Kang..."
"So one of the three was bound to pick the Impossible tier no matter what. If I'd taken that test, I'd have failed it."
Lady Jegal and Jeon Gilsan stared at me, wide-eyed.
"So recovering the money from the Impossible Ledger is the real test, then."
"Impressive and all, but the Impossible Ledger is genuinely impossible. You actually have a way to collect?"
A fair point. I had cleared only the first gate. Even with the correct answer, the problem of collection still remained.
"I do have a method the other young masters couldn't use."
Not that I hadn't already worked out my approach.
"What, kick up a fuss with your bailiff's badge? That won't be a walk in the park."
"Against the market merchants, maybe. Try that on high-ranking officials and I'd lose more than my post—I'd lose my head."
Debt collection wasn't strictly a bailiff's duty, but the authority of the state could still carry weight. The only trouble was that authority is always blocked by a greater authority.
'Greetings! I'm a bailiff. Time to repay your debt, Lord Magistrate.' And just like that, I'd be dismissed from the force and hauled off to jail on some charge or other.
"Young Master Kang... what about the Imperial Inspectooor?"
As I answered with a troubled look, Lady Jegal, who had been listening quietly to our exchange, spoke up.
"A truly tempting offer—but an official's corruption is one thing. A request touching a private debt might cost even an Imperial Inspector his post."
Huh? Why, you little... Misusing an office appointed directly by His Majesty the Emperor for private gain? That kind of talk would definitely get around.
It was much the same as how a junior-grade prosecutor can strip an official's corruption bare, yet the moment they reach into private affairs, trouble follows.
"And what would you even use it for?"
"Time to use every method, honest and underhanded alike. I do have a few names on my shortlist, but let's start with the first one I'm targeting. Deokbae!"
It was time to field my newly hired general-affairs staff.
"Yes, sir. I made it big enough to hang on the wall."
Deokbae hung a large sheet of paper on the wall, the ledger's contents copied out in bold strokes.
My first target. On it was everything I had learned about the man I'd settled on after long deliberation.
"The Three-Eyed Sword, Jo Cheol?! No way. He was in the ledger?"
Gilsan jolted upright the moment he read the name.
"You know him?"
Why the shock?
"You don't know him? He's a famous master—one of those wandering swordsmen. They say he has an eye in the back of his head, hence the Three-Eyed Sword! What was Grandfather thinking? Handing a man like that..."
So he was a bigger name in the martial world than I'd realized. Still, there was no reason to change my target.
"Take a closer look at the paper."
There was a reason I'd made the Three-Eyed Sword my first target.
"Black hair? He's Joseon? Then this'll be a breeze! Yes!"
"Read the part below that too. The part I marked as important."
"Gray eyes? Ah, damn it. So much for that. Not Joseon, then! Place of loan: the Hyeongmun branch of Mangeum Hall? Not even in Wuhan? Special notes: absconded with the money?! What is any of this supposed to mean?"
Gilsan stared at me as if I had lost my mind.
"While reading through the Impossible Ledger, I found something rather interesting."
We had to recover money that had been lent out. Certainly a list of the steepest difficulty. And yet it was not without hope.
"Hey! Save the roundabout talk for when you're flirting with Hyang. This is suffocating—out with it already!"
Gilsan thumped his chest and scowled at me. Where's the fire? You have no eye for the pleasures of good conversation. I'll let it slide—someone here has to be the adult.
I'll be sure to tell your mother later that Gilsan is here.
"Anyway. Setting the Prefectural Magistrate aside, the difficulty was fairly uniform."
"Uniform how?"
"Call the Prefectural Magistrate the ceiling. These ledgers were crafted for the test on purpose. Impossible for us candidates—not impossible for Mangeum Hall itself."
In other words, it wasn't the cooking-show kind of impossible—the sort that asks you to make an omelet out of the dragon heart and dragon whiskers 'in your fridge.'
"I see."
"And the Impossible tier had one more intriguing thing in common. Lady Jegal, do you by any chance remember the names in this ledger?"
I opened the ledger and showed Lady Jegal a few familiar names.
"Wha—?! These people?"
She too froze at the names, eyes snapping up to meet mine.
"That's right. Every one of them is an official currently in Wuhan. Some are here even though Wuhan isn't their assigned post at all."
Whose house shall I strike tonight? Unto whom shall I bring sorrow? For months I had roamed in search of officials whose wicked hearts knew no end of greed.
Thanks to that, I could recite the names of every official in Wuhan from memory.
"Yes, that's right. These people are familiar to me as well."
The ones Lady Jegal pointed to were all in Wuhan too.
"The second test lasts one month. Naturally, they would only set problems that could be solved within that time. Which makes for a rather interesting hypothesis."
"Interesting how?"
Gilsan wedged himself into our conversation. Seriously, this guy. Weren't you supposed to be flirting with Lady Jegal?
"Take the Three-Eyed Sword. He holds no office and belongs to no sect, so the crux of his problem is simply tracking down where he's vanished to."
And what if the examiner's intent were baked into every single problem?
"You don't mean...?"
A strange flush of excitement colored both Lady Jegal's face and Gilsan's.
"The Three-Eyed Sword is black-haired. Hubei is inland—a black-haired man draws eyes wherever he goes. Lady Jegal. If he were on the run without repaying, where in Hubei would he have to hide?"
"Ah, th-that... to hide a tree, you hide it in the forest, riiiight?"
The city home to the most Joseon people in all of Hubei.
"The Three-Eyed Sword is in Wuhan?"
"That's right. The Three-Eyed Sword is most likely here in Wuhan."
The Impossible Ledger was, in essence, a list of bad debts. And bad debts arise for many reasons—death, prison, flight.
What if Mangeum Hall already had a fair idea of where the Three-Eyed Sword had fled? What if the intent behind his problem was simply to watch how we would hunt down a man in hiding?
Then I would be the student who saw through the examiner's intent and found the solution at a glance.
"But how could anyone find one man hiding in a city this vast..."
Granted, there was a catch.
Wuhan was the provincial capital of Hubei. Even knowing he was somewhere in this sprawling city, no one could hope to find a fugitive within a month.
No one except me.
"In Wuhan, there happens to be a certain group that will invite any black-haired person they spot on the street to come join their gathering."
"...!"
Why is everyone staring at me like that? It's only natural.
"Mansik! Chunsam! Deokbae!"
The Joseon Hometown Association.
"Yes, sir! Awaiting your orders!"
"I'll give you one day. Find him."
It was time to put my hands and feet to work.