Empress Ki's campaign against Park Seong-jin ended right there.
At her own base, the force she could muster was broken in an instant.
Many fell inside and outside the palace.
The news leaked out immediately.
Blood could not cross walls, but rumor crossed cities.
The air of that day already carried the rumor of the next.
People did not keep their mouths shut.
They whispered low.
"So it was… the non-action of a single man."
"The Empress overreached."
"She used the same method she'd used to erase rivals, and tried it on a hwagyeong master—how could that end well."
"This will harden the Goryeo king's footing even more."
"Is it true he swept them all away with a single stroke?"
Talk bit talk and spread.
Fact turned to exaggeration.
Exaggeration hardened into legend.
Someone spoke as if they had seen it.
Someone else declared it as if they had heard it firsthand.
But on one point everyone agreed.
In the Empress's palace, calculation lost its power.
After that day, her name was no longer spoken with its old weight.
And the name Park Seong-jin was whispered across Daedo—quietly, but clearly.
He did not speak much.
He left no explanations.
But the rumors spilling from the palace had already become words enough.
The place where the quriltai was held was not the city.
On that day, more people gathered than any city could hold.
In the middle of an endless steppe, tents rose around a gentle hill where the wind's flow converged.
They had been raised overnight, yet their scale reached the size of a royal capital.
At the very center stood the Great Khan's golden pavilion.
Around it, the tents of provincial governors and the quarters of envoys from many states were arranged in circles by rank.
Supplies arrived before people did.
Sacks of grain and horse feed, dried jerky and dairy, silk and fur, silver ingots and spices moved without pause.
Camels and horses carved roads, and carts followed those roads in lines.
A market formed naturally on the grassland.
Merchants' cries mixed with officials calling roll and taking counts.
A separate space had been prepared for the assembly itself.
A wide circular clearing, emptied to hold thousands.
The ground was packed hard, and at the center a low platform stood.
Stand there and all sides were open.
The speaker could be seen by all.
The listeners became witnesses by their mere presence.
The quriltai was not a simple meeting.
Provincial rulers and kings of many lands arrived in turn to bow to the Great Khan.
They lowered their heads, gave their names, and confirmed allegiance and ties.
Gifts always followed.
Horses and falcons, weapons and silk, gold and silver and local treasures.
Gifts were etiquette, and also proof of strength.
Flags snapped in the wind.
The steppe wind knew no borders, but flags made their owners plain.
Cloths of different colors and patterns gathered in one place, laying bare—before the eye—the order and interests knotted into this land.
At night, fires were lit.
Torches and braziers burned in rings, and the whinny of horses and low human talk spread into the dark.
By day, meetings and rites continued.
By night, bargaining and calculation moved.
Official and unofficial gears interlocked without pause.
Here, one person's words could become war, or peace.
That was why the quriltai was the steppe's greatest seat of power.
The Great Khan's name was not merely a title.
It was order.
And this gathering, at its core, was the acknowledgement of defeat.
It was the moment of accepting as reality the new empire that had risen in the south.
That was why the air was heavy.
Silence piled up before speech, and rumor flowed atop that silence.
Who would bow first.
Whose name would vanish from the records.
What price would be paid.
Unconfirmed stories moved like wind.
Between flag and flag, deals moved.
Rites and greetings continued on the surface, but whispers clung in the seams.
The same sentence carried different meanings depending on the mouth.
The same gift was read as a different promise depending on the hand.
Few had come here only for "conference."
Daedo stood where today's Beijing could rightly be imagined.
A massive square wall drew order onto the earth.
The walls were high and straight, the corners sharp.
And inside those walls, the quriltai had been set.
Inside were tiled offices and granaries, permanent structures of stone and timber.
But between them, the steppe remained.
Packed earth and broad open lots ran through the city like breath.
On that breath, nomad tents stood.
The tents looked disorderly at a glance.
In truth, they were arranged by rank.
A life built on movement had entered the walls—the symbol of settlement.
Fixed and fluid overlapped in one landscape.
A market stood here as well.
Camels and horses came and went.
Silk and fur hung.
Grain sacks and weapons lay side by side.
Merchants shouting, interpreters yelling, officials calling roll—everything mixed.
It was not a victory festival.
It was the place where defeat was accepted, and the changing shape of the world was acknowledged.
So this quriltai was a turning ground—calculation instead of cheers, assent instead of declarations, documents instead of blades.
Through this war, the Goryeo king proved what he had valued.
Not victory itself, but peace through a three-way balance.
Not a peace crushed under Yuan's single fist, but a peace maintained in a tense equilibrium among the new southern empire, Yuan, and Goryeo.
He declared that this was the realistic order the age could reach.
His words were not hollow.
Park Seong-jin's force had already made the logic real.
The world was passing beyond the age of catching breath by leaning on Yuan's sole military power.
A phase had reopened where several strong powers checked one another and held balance.
And in the center of it, Goryeo's role was clear.
A tuner.
A mediator that restrained uncoordinated violence and war.
The king pinned that point down.
If Yuan acted rashly, Goryeo could join hands with the southern Daehan and pressure Yuan.
The path to check Daehan was also open.
What mattered was this: Yuan alone could no longer move the board at will.
For an empire that had conquered the Central Plains and the steppe, it was a hard change to swallow.
The era when force could simply push through was over.
But reality had already changed.
The Goryeo king traveled between empires and pressed this logic.
Not the "end of war," but the importance of structures that prevent war.
Not the victory of one side, but a balance everyone could bear as the definition of peace.
Behind his words, Park Seong-jin always stood.
Silent, but unmistakably present.
That pressure was not a threat.
It was proof of reality.
Many nodded not because of rhetorical skill.
They knew that the moment they denied this order, they would face blades again.
So they consented—reluctantly, but clearly.
Because peace had become something maintained not by proclamation, but by balance.
In the Yuan court, the dominant argument had been to raise troops and reconquer the south.
It was the demand of provincial rulers who had lost land there.
In their eyes, defeat was a loss that could be reversed.
But that argument soon collided with structural limits.
Yuan held vast territory, but its administrative hands and feet were thin.
On the surface, a great empire.
Inside, it ran on the cohesion of ulus bonds and the inertia of appanage.
Under the skin of administration, feudal fragmentation still remained.
Within Yuan's provincial system, the Zhongshu Sheng was the organ that oversaw all regions.
At the same time, it also directly administered the capital's surrounding area.
On paper, the chancellor of the Zhongshu Sheng and the chancellors of the branch secretariats stood side by side.
Central and local did not split like a blade.
They lay parallel.
Under the Zhongshu Sheng were the various provinces—Henan-Jiangbei, Jiangzhe, Huguang, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Liaoyang, Gansu, Yunnan, Lingbei, Zhengdong, and others.
But many—Jiangxi, Jiangzhe, Huguang, Yunnan, Jiaozhi—wavered with real control already slipping.
To formalize contraction was to tear face and authority.
The court was not prepared to bear that tear.
So calls for a southern expedition persisted.
Yet after Chancellor Toghto's fall, the axis that could bind those calls into one force had vanished.
The deeper issue was how the empire was actually assembled.
Princes and nobles rewarded with domains during conquest, and warlords absorbed into Yuan during expansion, each held territory and set up their own courts.
The imperial center tried to intervene, but governance always left friction.
Taxation and conscription existed as principle; in practice, operation moved along separate tracks.
It resembled not a centralized state, but a loose federation of autonomous powers.
Even the Zhongshu Sheng's direct territory was no exception.
Domains of princes and aristocrats were packed inside it as well.
It was a result of Kublai Khan purchasing military cooperation—especially to complete the Southern Song conquest—with interests and privileges.
He judged he could control the princes by using the keshig composed of their sons as a kind of hostage.
Reality became banquets and appeasement, and that appeasement became the repetition of stopgaps.
Rebellions and coups surfaced cyclically.
The problem was not mere "looseness."
From the start, Yuan was designed less as an administrative state and more as a collection of princes and lords.
It wore the outer shape of a unified empire, but inside it still held the pre-unification order intact.
That was why reconquest was hard even before the question of raising troops.
Responsibility, cost, and postwar administration—who would carry them—remained a void.
So losing the south was not only a frontline defeat.
It exposed the structural limit of the empire's ability to sustain expansion war.
Not simply "thin administration," but the fact that the empire's bones stood in a federated form.
The princes and lords who had lost southern lands flailed.
For them the south was domain, income, and face.
Their demand to reclaim it was relentless.
But their voices grew isolated.
Those who wanted peace listened to the Goryeo king.
What was needed immediately was not absolute victory, but rest.
There was neither capacity left to wage more war, nor will left to bear the responsibility.
Above all, this imperial logic was convenient.
In a decentralized system, the loss of the south could be framed as the fault of the princes who held it.
It did not have to become the empire's fault.
If the empire was truly "great," the south was land that could be recovered anytime.
It simply was not the time.
And the king's proposal was sweet.
A hundred years of peace.
Time to lower the blade, keep one's domain, continue inheritance.
War replaced by income.
Uncertain conquest replaced by confirmed profit.
The promise struck small greed precisely.
Recognize the southern Daehan and establish diplomatic relations.
No more, no less.
The Yuan elite were not essentially concerned with how Han society in the south lived.
As long as their interests were secured, it changed little if southerners fought among themselves or how they governed.
As a side effect, a kind of laissez-faire local autonomy was allowed.
But they did not know.
They misread the new country rising in the south as something that would resemble them.
They imagined a loose form—princes and warlords dividing rule, with the center merely "arbitrating."
They did not see the opposite direction.
There, a state was forming that revived an integrated administrative system, organized villages tightly, and controlled them strongly.
The country they thought resembled them was not their mirror.
That misjudgment would later return as an irreversible gap and stand again before this empire.
With time, the assembly hall split clearly in two.
The hawks, centered on those who had lost land in the south.
And the doves, who wanted the present order to endure.
The Great Khan sat high in the center.
He said nothing, but his silence told that a conclusion was nearing.
Within the circular ring of tents, flags trembled in the wind.
Cloths of different colors and patterns faced one another.
They were flags of the same empire,
but the faces beneath them were looking at different times.
The hawks moved first.
A prince who had lost southern domain stepped forward.
His voice was rough, his speech slow.
As if a claim repeated too many times—less anger than grievance.
"The south is the empire's land."
He bowed his head to the Great Khan, but did not withdraw his gaze.
"If we retreat now, what do we lose next.
Lost land must be reclaimed.
We must gather troops and strike again."
Behind him, some nodded.
Faces that had grown through war, and gained domain through war.
"If we retreat," he added,
"the empire will look weak."
When he finished, the tent ring murmured.
Then from the doves, a man stepped forward.
An old provincial governor.
Voice low, words slow.
"What we need now is not victory, but time."
He did not look at the hawks.
He addressed the Great Khan directly.
"War is something you do when you have strength.
Now our troops are scattered in every region, and the treasury shows bottom."
"We might win if we fight again."
He paused once, then continued.
"But who will take responsibility for what comes after.
If you call for war, can you truly bring out troops as before.
You are hoping someone else will fight and easily reclaim the old land."
The tone was calm.
The content was cold.
"A hundred years of peace."
He raised a hand to indicate the assembly.
"Time to keep your domains, carry inheritance forward, restore income.
Why reject that proposal."
From the hawks came a low pushback.
"So you mean we simply give up the south."
The dove answered at once.
"If the empire is truly great, the south can be reclaimed anytime.
It is simply not the time."
The air shifted.
A logic that postponed war without "admitting defeat."
The most comfortable words for listeners.
The Great Khan still said nothing.
But his gaze lingered, briefly, on the doves.
In that moment many understood.
This was not emotion.
It was choice.
The hawks wanted back what they had lost.
The doves wanted to keep what they had.
And from the seat where the Great Khan sat, the empire no longer spoke of expansion.
Under the quriltai tents, war was argued, and peace was calculated.
All that remained was a judgment: which side read the empire's exhaustion more accurately.
Above all, there was no wealth left to mobilize hundreds of thousands.
The assets scraped together at founding had already been drained to the bottom.
As the murmuring subsided, the Goryeo king stepped forward.
He did not wear a sword.
Nor did he wear the lavish robes of an envoy.
He carried the calm bearing of someone who had passed through war.
Before he began, he looked around the assembly.
Hawks and doves formed a circle with different hopes and fears on their faces.
"I," the Goryeo king began low,
"have come to seek peace."
A few people smiled faintly.
He did not stop.
"And so I fought in the south.
I fought most fiercely to obtain peace."
His gaze brushed the Great Khan, then returned to the ring.
"What we have obtained is not merely the stopping of a front line."
"The reason we have gathered today is the peace we now hold."
His words were unadorned, his pace slow.
But each sentence carried weight.
"We must know how precious this peace is."
"This is not an accident."
"It did not happen by someone's calculation alone."
"It is a result made by countless choices and sacrifices piled together."
Someone among the hawks tried to speak.
The king raised a hand and quieted him.
"I will not say I do not know the pain of lost land."
"But war is not always a force that restores—
there are times it becomes a force that makes you lose more."
He turned his head toward the doves.
"I understand the desire to hold on to today's peace."
"But peace does not continue if you simply leave it alone."
"It requires an agreement you intend to keep, and an endurance you intend to bear."
Silence fell over the ring.
He looked from one side to the other and continued.
"So today's choice is not the victory of either side."
"It is the wisdom to postpone the day you reclaim what was lost—
and the responsibility to keep what you have, together."
Finally he said it plainly.
"The peace we have now was not obtained by refusing to fight."
"It was obtained by fighting—
and by knowing how to stop."
The Great Khan's gaze stayed on the Goryeo king.
The hawks' anger sank into calculation.
The doves' relief grew heavy with responsibility.
The king did not add more.
His persuasion was already enough.
When he finished, there were no cheers, no roar of approval.
Only the low sound of people nodding to one another.
As the silence lengthened, a man finally burst out from the hawks.
A prince who had lost land in the south.
His face was set; his words were no longer polished.
"If we obtain nothing from this council,"
his voice trembled—less anger than desperation,
"we are finished."
The tents stirred.
"We will be driven back to the northern steppe."
"To land without walls, without markets, without taxes."
"Can you truly accept that reality."
He thrust a hand toward the doves.
Not an accusation—an attempt to pull them in.
"There was failure in the south—failure to gather strength."
"But how is that mine alone."
His voice rose.
"All of us were like that."
"Each calculating his own domain.
Each saving his own troops.
Unable to gather beneath the Great Yuan's banner."
He drew breath, then drove the point deeper.
"That is why we are here."
"Now we are in an age where even gathering beneath that banner is difficult."
The air grew heavy.
His words did not drift off as exaggeration.
He raised his voice again.
"But if we unify our hearts even now, it is not too late."
His eyes flashed.
"If we fight again, we can recover the south."
"We must secure Yunnan, Dali—down to the far southern end again."
He bent a knee toward the Great Khan.
But he kept his head up.
"This time will be different."
"This time, if we fold away private calculation and fight in the empire's name—"
His words caught.
Fear entered his voice.
"If we retreat now, we do not lose land alone."
"We lose even the memory that we were an empire."
A low chorus of agreement rose among the hawks.
Anger, fear, and a last hope mixed together.
But the council remained split in two.
The claim was strong—
and it was also proof that time had run out.
The Great Khan still did not speak.
And within that silence everyone felt it.
This argument was no longer about a war that could be won.
It was sliding into the problem of a reality that could not be returned to.