forced the poison pouch into Wanjehudu's mouth, and vanished.
When had he come.
How had he slipped in to poison Wanjehudu unnoticed.
By the time she returned, she had already brushed against the poison.
It had happened on her way back after leaving Park Seong-jin's quarters.
In that short window, someone had sprinted in, forced the poison pouch into Wanjehudu's mouth, and vanished.
There was distance.
Too far to cover on foot, not in that time.
So the movement had to be qinggong (輕功).
In the end Wanjehudu fell to the poison he himself had prepared.
He who rises by the blade falls by the blade.
He who uses poison falls by poison.
Could any scene show the self-destructive nature of violence more clearly than this.
Violence strikes outward and returns to the doer as well.
Evil burns its own body to clear a path.
"Evil destroys even itself." (Aristotle)
No one could even open their mouth to complain.
Poison works in a way that does not speak, and the death took a shape that could not be cleanly pinned on any one hand.
The only person who knew the truth—that Park Seong-jin had done it—was So-eun.
Knowing and being able to say were entirely different things.
So-eun kept silent.
Within that silence, the truth hardened further.
The Empress was quick.
There was no way she did not understand what had happened inside the palace.
The source of the poison.
The court lady's route.
The brief meeting that day on the outskirts of Dadu.
Everything linked into a single line.
Yet suspicion did not become a hand.
To touch him now would be like gripping fire.
The Empress left her own palace because she feared poison.
Outwardly it was "rest."
Inside the court, rumors said her vigor had waned.
She moved to a separate palace, but she could not state the reason officially.
The moment she did, more questions would follow.
Silence was both shield and shackle.
That news reached Park Seong-jin as well.
He said nothing.
Only when he was alone, an exceedingly faint smile touched the corner of his mouth.
It was enough that the other side had backed away.
Even without words, the direction of this fight was clear.
In the end this Kurultai would become another battlefield.
Not with swords and armies.
With gazes and silence.
The clash between Empress Ki and Park Seong-jin had already begun.
So-eun's visit had been meant to deliver a message: the Empress wished to see him.
Had it also meant: leave poison behind while you're there.
Park Seong-jin relayed it to the King exactly as it was.
For a while the King did not speak.
Then, faintly, a smile appeared.
It was not surprise.
It was not anticipation.
It was the smile of familiar fatigue.
She still did not know Park Seong-jin.
If she had known even a little, she would have withdrawn without weighing consequences.
No.
She would have fled.
The King did not ask more.
His face said he already knew the answer.
"What are you going to do."
Park Seong-jin bowed his head.
Then, almost as if talking to himself, he said low,
"Right.
I'm not used to this.
She's a woman, an empress, a Goryeo woman, and my enemy who lost her elder brother to my hand.
If I make a move, the peace of the Yuan Empire will not come easily."
The King let out a long breath.
"If I understood all of that, I wouldn't have summoned you in the first place.
She's missing one or two pieces of information, that's all.
If she'd known you were a master of Hwagyŏng—no, of Hyŏn'gyŏng—she would never have tried something as crude as poison."
Park Seong-jin asked,
"So I must not kill her."
The King answered at once.
"In this world, the empress of an empire."
Park Seong-jin continued quietly.
"Even if I only evade her attacks, someone can die.
That someone could be the Empress.
Violence isn't made only of blades and blood."
He explained the circumstances of the attempted poisoning.
So-eun's visit.
The message.
The poison pouch.
Wanjehudu's death.
The King's brows twitched, very slightly.
Park Seong-jin added,
"If the pouch bursts while I'm with her, she dies.
Most people don't calculate that violence can pass through me and rebound."
The King clicked his tongue.
"Sounds like you're giving an example on purpose to get permission.
But I can't allow it."
Park Seong-jin asked,
"What if I do nothing, and she dies anyway."
The King did not answer at once.
For a moment he looked like a man calculating how to handle a young general.
"Can you accept this much.
That there's still a world that needs her."
Park Seong-jin nodded.
"…If you say so, I will take it into account.
But."
The King asked,
"But what."
Park Seong-jin answered,
"If she insists on dying, I won't save her."
The King's face hardened.
"Speak clearly.
Is that not the same as saying you'll kill her."
Park Seong-jin said,
"That way is a cliff.
If you fall, you die.
I mean I won't warn her of that fact."
The King looked straight at him.
"Say it better."
Park Seong-jin drew a breath and said,
"She has already stepped onto a road of death.
Even as Empress.
With the empire able to collapse, why would she choose that road."
The King cut him off.
"Either way, do not lay a hand on her."
Park Seong-jin answered,
"Loyalty."
As he stepped back, the King spoke again.
"Goyongbo will be at her side."
Park Seong-jin repeated,
"Goyongbo."
The King said,
"A Goryeo eunuch.
Her firm backing.
The man who did great service in raising her to the Empress's seat."
Park Seong-jin flinched, just once.
"…May I kill him."
The King snapped,
"Enough.
How can a general have no solution but assassination."
Park Seong-jin bowed.
"My apologies.
I glanced that way for an instant, and it's all like that in that corner.
Only men who deserve to die, swarming.
Black inside, and sly."
The King said shortly,
"That's politics."
Park Seong-jin answered at once,
"That's not politics.
It's scheming."
The King exhaled.
"Still, be careful.
He has many methods."
Park Seong-jin replied,
"Loyalty.
I will be careful."
The corridor was long, and the air was heavy.
The lodgings in Dadu sat a step removed from the palace walls.
They were not overly lavish, and not negligent either.
Wide corridors layered into one another, and blue silk wrapped each pillar.
Even without wind, the tips of the silk trembled faintly.
Before they could finish unpacking, people came and went.
Provincial governors.
They all carried the same question.
How far had Goryeo involved itself.
How far had it withdrawn.
What had it taken from this war, and what had it left behind.
"You've suffered much."
"You've come a long way."
Tea was set down with each formal greeting.
Each time, the King of Goryeo returned to the same account.
"We could not make all of Jiangnan our enemy.
If we could not destroy all three, it was better to raise one and bind it as an ally."
One governor asked carefully,
"Would that not amount to condoning rebellion."
The King answered without softness.
"It is not condoning.
It is redirecting the current."
"The peace we have now holds because of that choice."
The man from the western routes spoke low.
"Then it sounds as though Yuan no longer has the strength to govern Jiangnan."
Silence.
A gust passed once, and the king nodded.
"I do not deny it."
"And that is why we must buy time."
"Do not turn Jiangnan into an enemy."
"Bind at least one power to our side."
"That is the best choice Yuan can still make."
Faces loosened, little by little.
They were confirming what everyone already knew.
The King did not avert their gaze.
"Goryeo's role was to end the war."
"Not to decorate victory, but to prevent the next war."
Some nodded.
Some said nothing.
Between understanding and agreement there was always a gap.
For this room, it was enough.
They withdrew one by one.
The corridors grew quiet again.
Only low breathing remained.
Thus the night in Dadu began.
On the surface, it was calm.
But every footstep through these lodgings was already weighing the Kurultai to come.
Just before the door opened, Park Seong-jin felt the presence first.
Not sound.
Not footsteps, not breathing, not cloth brushing.
It was the sense of the air being pressed once.
As if a thin thread at the end of the corridor had been pulled—
an unseen tension drawn taut.
His gaze shifted, not into the room, but to the shadow beside the door.
Someone stood there.
A eunuch's attire.
Clothes too neat, colors chosen to avoid attention.
The bowed posture was polite, but the angle was too exact.
A body trained into motion.
The face was ordinary.
Eyes, nose, mouth—nothing stood out.
Only the pupils did not move.
They were not eyes that watched people.
They were eyes that measured situations.
No emotion, no curiosity—only calculation remained.
In that instant Park Seong-jin knew.
This man finishes his sums before he speaks.
He did not stare long.
His glance passed like a brush.
Yet in that single moment, they saw each other precisely.
The eunuch's mouth moved, barely.
Not a smile.
A confirmation.
Park Seong-jin tossed the name out like a pebble.
"Goyongbo."
It was short.
A check.
Only then did the eunuch's eyes move.
No surprise, no denial.
As if he had known he would be called.
His gaze arrived slowly at Park Seong-jin.
The corner of his mouth drew the faintest line.
Park Seong-jin turned his head and walked on.
Behind him, Goyongbo's presence thickened by one layer.
Now the air no longer hid the fact that they knew each other.
Where concealment fell away, open hostility remained.
Park Seong-jin felt certainty settle inside.
It's him.
He makes lines, uses people as tools, and rolls poison through the court.
He had no evidence in hand yet.
But the presence spoke.
The smell of someone who knows how to survive—was here.
Park Seong-jin stopped.
At the same time, the breath of the guards around him halted.
Muscles hardened.
Even hidden presences seemed to still.
As though they were one body.
He called softly.
"Goyongbo."
A pause.
From behind, a low voice, threaded with laughter, drifted out.
"It's what I wanted to say. Heh heh heh."
He looked as if he had prepared too carefully to bother hiding the tell any longer.
The board had been set.
Retreat had never been in the plan.
The corridor's air pressed down further.
The Kurultai had not even opened, yet the battlefield had already begun.