The Inspection Corps' Purpose

One thing had been on my mind, so I asked about it.

“By the way — did the White Tiger Corps and the Inspection Corps set out from the Murim Alliance on a joint operation from the beginning?”

Wang Cheong shook their head.

“We had intelligence and were pursuing a Demonic Cult band, and partway along we joined up with the Inspection Corps, which was on its way to Hefei. It was not that we marched out on a joint operation from the first.”

I had taken it that the White Tiger Corps had been sent out to support the Inspection Corps. That the two had marched out for altogether different purposes and merely fallen in with one another along the way made me tilt my head.

There was a little discontent in their voice when they spoke again.

“We came out to catch Demonic Cult rabble, and now it looks as though we shall be waiting on the Inspection Corps.”

The White Tiger Corps was one of the Murim Alliance’s Six Great Battle Corps, and nothing about the Inspection Corps’ authority obliged it to give ground.

“Mm. An order must have come down from the Murim Alliance’s highest councils.”

The highest councils meant the Elders’ Council.

Wang Cheong had something they wanted to say; their mouth worked and stayed silent, perhaps for fear that whatever they let out would be a curse.

All the while I talked with Wang Cheong I was watching the girl called Ye-won. Nobody was taking any measures on her account, and that made me certain: none of them knew she was the Ice Sacred Body.

The White Tiger Corps only marched out at word that a Demonic Cult band had appeared, and came tracking them with nothing else in mind. They don’t even know what those people are after.

Wang Cheong’s eyes went for a moment to where Jong So-bin and Hwa-yeong were.

“I had heard there was a shift of power in the North Sea Ice Palace, but to think the Young Palace Lord should be reduced to running. By our intelligence it seems the Elder Faction has taken hold of the Ice Palace — whether they can hold off the Blood Cult’s or the Demonic Cult’s ambitions is another matter. Looking at those people, I find myself thinking of our own Murim Alliance.”

They muttered it as though it made no difference whether I heard. In the Murim Alliance too, the Alliance Leader’s faction and the Elder Faction had been grinding hard against one another for a long time, and by now the Elder Faction had grown strong enough to sway the Alliance as it pleased. A lament like theirs came out of that.

Wang Cheong, done talking to themself, turned their eyes back to me.

“Do you remember me, Master Scholar Cheon?”

The men who had lost their office at my hands in the Murim Alliance were more than a few. In my Inspection Corps days alone I had turned up graft and corruption and carried the audit through in several dozen cases. But of Wang Cheong, Corps Chief of the White Tiger Corps, I had no memory at all.

“Have I had some dealing with the Corps Chief?”

“None. Do you by any chance remember Corps Chief Jang Ho-jin of the Azure Dragon Corps?¹”

“Yes. Of course I remember.”

A report of corruption on Corps Chief Jang Ho-jin’s part had come in once, and I took the investigation. The moment I opened the inspection I caught the marks of a charge falsely laid, and I had it lifted. Digging further afterward, I found that the Black Tortoise Corps’ own Corps Chief had worked the trick in order to drive Jang Ho-jin out. I hung on to the end of it, and that Corps Chief retired in disgrace and left the Murim Alliance.

“The truth is, Corps Chief Jang Ho-jin and I were the closest of friends. When the false charge was laid and prison was a real possibility, I could do nothing at all to help. It was Master Scholar Cheon’s help then that got the charge lifted. I was truly grateful at the time. Let me thank you for it even now.”

“So you were friends with Corps Chief Jang. Is Corps Chief Jang well?”

Since then I had sat over a cup with Corps Chief Jang two or three times.

“That friend of mine has always been a passionate sort, and is getting on splendidly. When I said I was marching out for Hefei, I was asked to call on Master Scholar Cheon and pass on a greeting.”

I called Corps Chief Jang Ho-jin’s weighty, dignified face to mind and smiled. An open, big-hearted sort, and one of the very few people in the whole Murim Alliance I felt any liking for. We got on well enough that during the investigation into Elder Gal U-heon’s corruption I had quietly taken help from that quarter.

“The Inspection Corps’ Second Seat Inspector will be here in two hours.”

Coming into the safe house, I had assumed the White Tiger Corps and the Inspection Corps would be here together.

“The Inspection Corps is busy, it seems?”

“They have come by intelligence that the Jeongryong Sect has been in communication with the Demonic Cult, and are inspecting it.”

“The Jeongryong Sect?”

I frowned.

The Jeongryong Sect was of the orthodox faction, seated in Hefei, and held its membership in the Murim Alliance. First among the city’s martial houses stood the Namgung Clan, and after it came two more, the Jeongryong Sect and the Ha Family Estate.

The Jeongryong Sect is in communication with the Demonic Cult, and the inspection falls just now?

My instinct told me there was a foul smell about it, and a strong one.

The trouble is that the energy I mean to take back is in that very place.

The one bearer of a Seven Stars energy I had managed to turn up was inside the Jeongryong Sect.

Things have fallen out awkwardly.

If I let Yi Mak-seong, the only son of the Jeongryong Sect, slip through my fingers, there was no telling when or where I would find another who carried a Seven Stars energy. People carrying a Seven Stars energy were not common. In my term with the Murim Alliance Inspection Corps I met a great many hellions, and Paeng So-un was the only one who had become a hellion because of a Seven Stars energy. The rest had become hellions because their natures were genuinely bad.

“I had better go and have a look at the Jeongryong Sect.”

I had muttered it to myself, but Wang Cheong answered.

“Is it a place you know well?”

“No. It is only that by what I looked into before, the Jeongryong Sect seemed to have no reason to be in communication with the Demonic Cult.”

“The Second Seat Inspector is said to be bringing the Jeongryong Sect’s sect leader and the son to the safe house, so let us wait and see.”

Small sect or not, hearing that they were bringing a sect leader and the son to a safe house gave me the measure of the Murim Alliance Inspection Corps’ standing. One slip and they could be driven in with the Demonic Cult crowd and wiped out to the last, so no doubt they meant to explain themselves by whatever means they could.

It had a fair strength of power even when I was there, but the authority seems to have climbed higher still now.

I asked Wang Cheong.

“Has the Inspection Corps’ Corps Chief been changed?”

“I understand it was changed, most likely, just after Master Scholar Cheon left the Murim Alliance.”

Replaced with a man of the Elders’ Council, no doubt. When I was there the Corps Chief was of the Alliance Leader’s faction, and the Elders’ Council put a great many constraints on us.

Gu Jin-ha looked to be working to some organized design, and I wanted to get hold of the affair.

“Would there happen to be documents concerning the Jeongryong Sect?”

Wang Cheong answered with an awkward look on their face.

“I have documents the Inspection Corps gave me as well. I must know this affair myself, after all. But Master Scholar Cheon is not on Inspection Corps duty at present, so…”

Documents lay on the table Wang Cheong kept glancing toward, and I tilted my head.

Why do they keep looking over there?

They saw where I was looking, and went on.

“It is not a thing that ought to be done, but while I am busy about other business, if someone should take a quiet look, there is nothing I can do about that either, is there?”

I fell in with them.

“Just so. How should Corps Chief Wang know anything of it?”

“Just so. I expect it will take me about a quarter of an hour to take the reports on the movements of the Demonic Cult and Blood Cult crowds and set them in order.”

They left me with words they had no need whatsoever to say, then rose and were gone.

Perhaps they too have felt that something is out of joint. Otherwise someone who stands so on rule and principle would never show me documents.

What I doubted came down to a single thing. They had come out to catch the Blood Cult and Demonic Cult crowds, and now, of all things, they were running an inspection on the Jeongryong Sect. I could make no sense of it.

That is why they know nothing of the Ice Sacred Body. Had they come knowing of it, the White Tiger Corps’ course, or the Inspection Corps’, would have been different.

Which meant that what Gu Jin-ha was after lay somewhere else.

I perched on a chair and leafed through the documents. A quarter of an hour or so of running my eye down the papers, and I understood what Gu Jin-ha intended.

So in the end Gal U-heon’s ghost has followed me even here?

My fight with Elder Gal U-heon had been a case where both sides came off wounded. Gal U-heon had had to lay down the post of Murim Alliance Elder, and I had had to go out on rotating assignment.

Gal U-heon’s corruption ran wide enough that there was hardly a place it failed to reach, but I had not thought its roots stretched as far as Hefei. And the Jeongryong Sect, at that.

By the papers, the Jeongryong Sect was in a quarrel with a sect Elder Gal had been backing. The Chao Lake Faction, they called it, and it kept its base on Chao Lake, the great freshwater lake.

Chao Lake seethed the year round with pleasure-travelers, and trade there flourished on the back of them. The Namgung Clan held about a third of the trading rights on the lake, and the rest were divided up among other factions. Of late the Chao Lake Faction had taken the backing of the Gal Sect of Jiangxi, where Elder Gal U-heon was seated, and widened its reach.

The Jeongryong Sect, with a history behind it, naturally held a share of the lake’s trading rights too, and the quarrel had begun when the Chao Lake Faction encroached even into its ground. Gal U-heon threw the weight of a Murim Alliance Elder’s post behind the Chao Lake Faction, and the Jeongryong Sect was pressed into a corner. Then Gal U-heon gave the Elder’s post up, and the Jeongryong Sect took its trading rights back again.

Look behind the papers and you can see that Gal U-heon leased Murim Alliance martial artists out to the Chao Lake Faction for a time, in the name of supporting a faction belonging to the Alliance, and pocketed an enormous sum for it.

But that was evidence visible to my eye alone; nobody else would turn it up. And yet, once the Murim Alliance’s martial artists withdrew, the Jeongryong Sect’s momentum pushed the Chao Lake Faction back to what it had been.

And now the game is to pin a false charge on the Jeongryong Sect — that it has been in communication with the Demonic Cult — and cut the Jeongryong Sect down to size.

The last of the papers held a report that Yi Mak-seong, the only son of Yi Ung, sect leader of the Jeongryong Sect, had been in communication with the Demonic Cult.

Yi Mak-seong may be a hellion, but he has not been in communication with the Demonic Cult.

That much I knew, because I had looked into it together with Namgung Mu-baek.

It looks as though they mean to drive him this way because he is a hellion.

He had done a great deal of harm and a great many wicked things to those around him, so there would be nobody to speak for him, which left him made to order for a false charge.

I crossed to where Wang Cheong stood, some way off, and asked.

“Does the White Tiger Corps no longer pursue the Demonic Cult and Blood Cult crowds now?”

“Apart from the Inspection Corps’ business, three squads are carrying the pursuit on quietly. Are we not the Murim Alliance’s only battle corps that specializes in pursuit? We can hardly neglect our own trade.”

Wang Cheong, Corps Chief of the White Tiger Corps, laid weight on that point.

“The Inspection Corps’ business can be carried out with ten corps members or so, so there is no difficulty.”

I asked a few things more, then let out what had been troubling me, something I could say only because they liked me.

“Looking over the papers, the report on the Jeongryong Sect may be a false charge.”

They heard it and swallowed a low sound in their throat. They had caught that the situation might turn on whatever they said next.

“I do not know whether I ought to say this, but the truth is that the Jeongryong Sect is a faction with a connection to the Alliance Leader.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“This will be a fact not well known even to the Inspection Corps. I once came escorting the Alliance Leader. I understand that the Jeongryong Sect’s sect leader is a younger half-sibling of the Alliance Leader.”

“Ah!”

The more I heard, the more of it fell into place.

At a glance it can be taken for a struggle for power between the Chao Lake Faction and the Jeongryong Sect, but behind it is hidden the friction between the Alliance Leader’s faction and the Elder Faction.

Gu Jin-ha had taken Gal U-heon’s side from the very first, back in the days when I was still fighting Gal U-heon.

With the Inspection Corps’ Corps Chief changed, they push Gu Jin-ha forward to press the Alliance Leader. So there was a reason Gu Jin-ha climbed so fast.

With that, every word and act of Gu Jin-ha’s came clear to me.

“But is it all right for you to tell me a secret like that?”

“It is a fact that everyone in the command who ought to know knows already. Adding Master Scholar Cheon to their number will do no harm.”

Wang Cheong said such things with some expectation behind them, I thought, but I had no mind to involve myself in the affair.

So far as I know, Corps Chief Wang is a neutral.

The Elder Faction and the Alliance Leader’s faction had both tried to draw Wang Cheong into their own camp, and Wang Cheong professed neutrality and put their weight behind neither. Which was why, of the Murim Alliance’s Six Great Battle Corps, two belonged to the Elder Faction and two to the Alliance Leader. Two battle corps were neutral.

Still nothing but a trial of strength.

The state the Alliance was running in struck me as a sorry thing, and I shook my head.

It was then.

The safe house door opened and the Inspection Corps came in. They had two people with them, one old and one young, and at a glance the arrangement looked like an escort. Looked at closely, the men had ringed the two so that they could not flee.

Wang Cheong spoke quietly from behind me.

“That will be Yi Ung, sect leader of the Jeongryong Sect, and the son, Yi Mak-seong.”

Gu Jin-ha was nowhere to be seen. The Inspector who had come with him recognized me, crossed over and made a greeting.

“So this is where you were. Inspector Cheon. Are you well?”

Scholar Yu Hyeon had been dispatched from the Inspection Corps along with Gu Jin-ha this time. A scholar of the standard mould, with no close ties to Gu Jin-ha to speak of, which made it the stranger that Gu Jin-ha had brought them along.

“I am on rotating assignment at present, so the name of Inspector sits uneasily with me.”

Scholars belonging to the Inspection Corps laid down the office of Inspector while they were away from the Murim Alliance, and so were called by the name of scholar.

“Why is Inspector Gu not to be seen?”

“Ah — Second Seat Gu said he had something to ask Master Scholar Cheon, and that he would look in at the Namgung Clan a moment and come back. Not knowing you were here.”

Hearing that, I felt a disquiet with nothing much behind it.

He won’t go to my quarters, surely? He’ll only ask after where I am, and come away when I am not there.

I hoped Gu Jin-ha would not come face to face with Cheon Yeo-seol. His ability at the work was nothing much, but he was uncannily quick to read a situation, and that was the thing that made me uneasy.