Goyongbo and Park Seong-jin faced each other.
Goyongbo was the first to realize there was no room for mercy.
Fear of death surged over him all at once.
His breathing jammed, his tongue stiffened.
He had driven countless people into death, but he had never imagined his own.
That blankness crashed down in a single wave.
Park Seong-jin asked a few things.
Who had ordered it.
Where the Empress was.
What plan had been prepared next.
Goyongbo, gasping, told everything he knew.
The more words piled up, the more only emptiness remained.
What he had wanted was a single thing: Park Seong-jin's death.
It was violence mediated through power—nothing else.
There was no will to change the country, no banner of order or legitimacy.
Only the repeated choice to remove the threat in front of him and keep his position.
Park Seong-jin asked no more.
His face said he had heard enough.
As death drew near, even the form of resistance fell away.
The limits of what one human could extract from another were laid bare.
Park Seong-jin turned.
As he turned away, he kicked the floor.
A single zimo-hwan pellet sprang up and flew on a low arc.
It struck Goyongbo in the belly.
The impact was dull.
There was no sound of flesh being pierced.
Instead, a sensation spread—something inside shattering into fragments.
Breath cut off.
Air would not come in.
His organs twisted; something deep within collapsed.
Goyongbo slid down without being able to brace on the wall.
He fell, but did not die at once.
He could not tell what had been damaged, or how.
The more he tried to breathe, the deeper the pain dug.
As time passed, something inside him continued to break down.
A physician was summoned.
He checked the pulse and pressed the abdomen, then only shook his head.
The external wound was minor.
The internal organs were severely damaged.
Goyongbo endured for a long time.
Consciousness returned and vanished.
Breath thinned, then resumed.
And very slowly—painfully—he died.
Park Seong-jin was not there.
He did not look back.
The Empress's quarters.
Park Seong-jin immediately asked for the Empress's location and went.
The one who came to meet him was So-eun.
She held herself in a restrained, unexaggerated courtesy.
Without a word she turned, and Park Seong-jin followed behind.
The palace paths rose and fell.
Halls climbed toward the sky; corridors ran long and straight.
Pillars repeated at fixed intervals, and the scenery changed only in small degrees.
There seemed to be variation, yet the structure kept repeating.
Leave a corridor and a courtyard appeared.
Packed earth—space where sound sank away.
Then corridors again.
Then halls again.
The farther they went, the fewer the ornaments, the paler the colors.
Height remained; splendor was tidied away.
What stayed was order.
Countless decisions and sacrifices had hardened into the shape of space.
So-eun spoke in a low voice.
"This is the Empress's residence."
That was enough explanation.
A moment later she added,
"It could be dangerous."
"By her side there is a warrior beyond the ordinary."
There was care in her tone.
She neither inflated the threat nor forced fear onto him.
Park Seong-jin nodded.
He understood that the point where a heart begins to tilt often starts from such care.
So-eun stepped back.
From here, he had to go in alone.
Park Seong-jin stopped before the hall.
The doors were tall and closed, but not oppressive.
Only the weight of long maintenance could be felt.
He steadied his breath,
and stepped into the Empress's hall.
The Empress and Park Seong-jin faced each other.
When the doors opened, the woman who appeared was so beautiful that she did not fit the blood-soaked road he had walked.
Her composed posture and unwavering gaze tidied the air of the hall before anything was said.
It was hard to believe that the repeated assassination attempts had come from her.
That very disbelief, however, was the way of this palace.
The Empress already knew that Goyongbo's attempt had been broken.
Even so, she stepped forward.
There was no retreat on her face.
"I—"
Her voice was calm, and edged.
"I do not want to live under the same sky as those who killed my brother."
Her gaze stabbed into Park Seong-jin.
"Why do you avert your eyes from the fact that they tried to kill me."
It was a protest, a fury, a grievance pressed down for a long time.
The more words passed, the deeper the gulf between them became.
Park Seong-jin did not raise emotion.
He built an explanation.
The three-way balance in the south, and the military deterrence built upon it.
If one side collapsed, war would begin again, and in the end Yuan would be pushed southward in reality.
He stated, calmly, that the road he had chosen was not a short-term victory but a design for long-term restraint.
Calm held firmness inside it.
The Empress fell silent.
That silence was not ignorance.
It was calculation.
After a moment she nodded.
"Without that judgment," she admitted,
"Yuan would already have been driven back to Shangdu."
It was the concession of a master of politics.
But her eyes never softened.
"I know it was right," she said low.
"But to tell me to lay down even the hatred for those who killed my blood—
that is cruel to me."
The language of politics reached her.
Human emotion could not cross that line.
Park Seong-jin said nothing more.
He already knew there were regions persuasion could not reach.
The conversation ran to the end, and no conclusion stood.
They confirmed each other's logic.
Their feelings hardened.
A line existed where the language of politics could not touch.
When Park Seong-jin left the hall, someone blocked his way.
A warrior kept by the Empress.
Breath low, quiet.
His mere stance made the air around him feel arranged.
No words.
Intent showed first.
The first move was sharp.
Each step pressed the earth hard, and his momentum cut toward him through space.
It was condensed martial skill stacked over decades.
If it had been anywhere else, anyone would have been driven back.
Park Seong-jin took one step back, then turned his angle.
He left the hall and came out into the front courtyard of the Kwonjeon.
A wide-open space—nothing to hide behind, nothing to evade into.
The warrior followed.
His confidence held.
From that moment, the difference became clear.
Park Seong-jin did not hurry.
He did not raise his sword high.
He did not exaggerate presence.
With every movement, he made the opponent's accumulated calculations meaningless.
Where the warrior believed he had blocked, there was already empty space.
Where he believed Park Seong-jin had dodged into, he had already passed through.
A few exchanges.
In a short span, dozens of moves overlapped—
and the overlap became futility.
The warrior was the Empress's supreme private swordsman.
A man of orthodox lineage, a man who had walked one path only.
His sword hand had no hesitation; restraint lived in his footwork.
He released every talent he had.
The blade flashed, chaining feints upon feints.
The tip scattered like flower petals through the air, and the next feint deceived the eye.
It seemed to cut, then it thrust.
It seemed to thrust, then it spun and cut again.
Waist, shoulder, wrist moved at once, creating the illusion that multiple swords were bursting from a single body.
Air rang.
Sword-wind layered.
The shadows of corridor pillars trembled.
Anyone meeting that sword for the first time would have fallen without even knowing where it ended.
Pressure pressed the courtyard with a density that felt like it could sever breath.
Park Seong-jin kept stillness even inside that density.
His sword was clean.
No ornament.
No large arc.
The more the dazzling tip scattered, the more Park Seong-jin's blade held the center.
His waistline, the axis of his feet, the length of his breath—
all connected as a single line.
When Ju-won's sword poured like a downpour,
Park Seong-jin's sword moved through the gaps between raindrops.
Steel rang as blades met.
Park Seong-jin did not give ground.
He did not fling it away—he received it.
The instant one brilliant feint was stopped, the next move was already late.
Park Seong-jin's sword did not chase the glamorous trajectory.
He went by the shortest road toward the human center.
Ju-won clenched his teeth.
He poured out all remaining strength.
Spins, leaps, continuous cuts—his advanced sword arts unfolded like a dance of smoke.
Park Seong-jin moved only one step.
A simple shift avoided the storm.
That one step made every trajectory miss.
Then a short motion followed.
The sword did not swing big.
No flash of light.
It was simply drawn precisely.
The tip brushed Ju-won's side.
The wound was shallow—
and in that instant Ju-won's center collapsed.
His foot was half a beat late; his breath broke.
The follow-up restraint was matter-of-fact.
He pressed the shoulder, severing the center.
He struck the wrist, knocking the sword away.
Then he shoved the chest.
Ju-won staggered back and dropped to his knees in the Kwonjeon courtyard.
He tried to rise, but his legs would not obey.
His body was intact.
The road to fight again was cut.
Park Seong-jin sheathed his sword.
All dazzle had been displayed.
Cleanliness ended it in a single sequence.
In the front courtyard lay the Empress's highest warrior.
That scene was clearer than words.
It left the result: further attempts were meaningless.
Ju-won had been born into an orthodox martial bloodline.
A family that had held swords for generations, a clan that treated martial skill as the Way.
He grew under teachings that the sword was not a tool for fighting, but a vessel for refining body and mind.
From childhood his eye for balance was quick.
The angle of an opponent's toes, the minute twitch of a shoulder, the moment breath breaks—he read them by instinct.
So even before he learned the sword, he understood the structure of combat.
What he learned first was not brute technique, but footwork.
Position, weight transfer, the method of not losing center.
He repeated the same motions hundreds of times a day, and spent years removing needless force.
Only then did he take up the blade.
His sword art held depth before brilliance.
As his level rose, feints layered onto composure.
Waist, shoulder, wrist became one flow, and the sword tip appeared from outside the opponent's vision.
At last his sword gained the outer skin of dazzling technique.
People saw it and called it beautiful.
That beauty was not decoration.
It was the byproduct of skill honed to an extreme.
Movement possible only where useless motion had been erased.
A stage where the boundary between attack and defense blurred.
Ju-won was a peak warrior.
He never lost center on any battlefield, and most experts could not endure more than a handful of exchanges.
He chose fights he would not lose, rather than fights he would win.
So the Empress kept him close.
Not a warrior for display, but the last line that must hold.
Ju-won knew, himself, that his martial skill still belonged to the human realm.
The layer beyond that boundary he had encountered only as theory.
In the Kwonjeon courtyard that theory became reality.
His intricacy and brilliance ended before a single clean line.
Through defeat, he confirmed the end of his road.
Park Seong-jin did not look at him any longer.
He turned his gaze toward the hall.
There the Empress watched down in silence.
Her eyes showed no emotion.
Shock and rage were concealed.
Only the silence of confirming reality remained.
Park Seong-jin did not raise his voice.
He did not stretch out explanation.
"To do anything to me—"
a pause,
"is no longer possible."
That was all.
Choices that once could have been forced forward became meaningless.
Moving people, blocking roads, removing targets—
those methods broke here.
"From now on," Park Seong-jin added,
"do not waste effort on useless things."
The Empress stayed silent.
Result was clearer than logic.
No rebuttal remained, and no choice could be taken back.
Park Seong-jin sheathed his sword.
He said nothing more and turned away.
He left.