The Senior Inspector could not quite determine whether the Grand Bureau Chief was asking personal questions or not.
What use was it to remember what people had called you, and what did Mokwa Island have to do with anything?
The question about substances taken regularly also struck him as odd.
“Would you have made the same judgment even if you were not of the Baekah people?”
Baekah people…?
Everyone in the interrogation room except Wi Saheon went rigid.
“I’ll ask from the beginning. Your name.”
“…S… stop…”
“Your name.”
Did he have a name?
Shin Yigyeom struggled to hold onto his fading consciousness and tried to remember it.
The things that had been called in place of a name — Two, deputy commander, palace guard, Yunbaek, and—
“…Yigyeom.”
Shin Yigyeom furrowed his brow at a pain as if his skull were splitting apart.
Wi Saheon confirmed that Shin Yigyeom was no longer in a state capable of answering.
The minute flicker that appeared just now when his name was mentioned resembled the pattern of a severed memory surfacing momentarily — then scattering.
Performing silence and the absence of memory could yield the same result, but the nature of responses under repeated stimulation is never the same.
Wi Saheon distinguished that difference clearly.
“Well. Perhaps nothing would have changed.”
He did not continue with further questions.
He had already obtained the conclusion he needed.
Shin Yigyeom’s memory had been severed somewhere.
When Wi Saheon quietly lifted his hand, Shin Yigyeom’s head pitched forward and dropped.
Having lost consciousness entirely, clear saliva hung from the corner of his mouth like spider silk.
Wi Saheon slowly withdrew his upper body and pulled on the leather gloves he had rested on his thigh.
“That’s enough for today.”
His expression was utterly indifferent — impossible to believe he was the one who had just conducted such a brutal interrogation.
“Yes, sir.”
Without thinking, the Senior Inspector stepped aside and began sorting through his mind what to report to Wi Sagyun.
Even so — how had the Grand Bureau Chief known that Two was of the Baekah people?
Is the Mumyeongdan composed solely of the Baekah, or does it include people of other origins as well?
The Senior Inspector’s gaze followed Wi Saheon’s back as he exited the interrogation room.
The name people called him. His origin. Hwain.
These were questions with no direct connection to the organization known as the Mumyeongdan — yet Wi Saheon offered no explanation.
The interrogation he had conducted looked less like an attempt to extract information and more like a process of verifying a specific possibility.
Just what scheme was the Grand Bureau Chief weaving?
“Palace guard.”
Cherry blossom petals were carried over by the wind.
Petals that had skimmed across the dirt path and scattered beneath the horses’ hooves lifted back into the air.
They drifted between the two of them like slow-falling snow.
Shin Yigyeom absently plucked a petal from his lashes and answered.
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Yunbaek.”
Shin Yigyeom flinched and readjusted his grip on the reins.
His fingers tightened.
“Speak, Your Highness.”
“Shin Yigyeom.”
“…….”
His chest grew inexplicably heavy, and Shin Yigyeom quieted his breathing.
In the end, the hand holding the reins came to a stop.
After a brief silence, he turned his head toward him.
A gentle warm breeze passed through Shin Yigyeom’s hair.
Their eyes met.
Wi Saheon had been watching him all along.
Like someone who had called his name for exactly that reason.
Like someone who had been waiting for the moment he would turn his head.
On his black horse, the hem of Wi Saheon’s spring changpo of black silk flowed long down the horse’s flank.
His profile, bared in the sunlight, was excessively pale and cool.
The pitch-black pupils that seemed to have condensed all the darkness of the world within them held a strangely warm quality.
Whether it was those eyes or the spring light, Shin Yigyeom felt his breath catch.
“Yigyeom.”
“Ah… yes.”
Shin Yigyeom looked off into the distance and gave a dry cough, trying not to let his flushed cheeks be noticed.
Wi Saheon would occasionally call his birth name like this, at moments he could never predict.
After calling it, he would move on as though nothing had happened.
Shin Yigyeom had always been addressed by the courtesy name bestowed at his coming-of-age ceremony, or by his rank.
The courtesy name Yunbaek was the name used in society — the one colleagues, close friends, and even his father used.
A few days prior, Wi Saheon had asked — holding one of Shin Yigyeom’s cheeks in his hand, eyes cast down as he looked at those lips.
Yunbaek, what is your birth name?
“Why are you staring like that?”
Wi Saheon, still looking straight ahead, had one corner of his mouth lifted.
Wi Saheon’s profile was almost excessively composed.
His face was so perfectly proportioned that up close it gave an even more unreal impression.
There was a precision to him that felt less like a person and more like a well-engineered mechanism.
Having lost himself for a moment staring at him, Shin Yigyeom quickly straightened his head.
“It was Your Highness who called me three times.”
“Ah. I was bored.”
Lounging back lazily atop his black horse, Wi Saheon’s long fingers stroked the black mane gently.
They were on different horses.
A distance that could not be bridged even by an outstretched arm.
Yet Shin Yigyeom felt heat all through his body, as though their skin were pressed against each other.
“Calling someone over out of boredom and then doing nothing but yawning. What a trying temperament.”
“You sometimes seem to forget that I am a prince.”
Wi Saheon tilted his head at an angle.
A languid gaze, a languid tone.
Everything about this man was seductive precisely because it held no intent to seduce.
“Your Highness can be quite petty at times.”
“Me?”
“You always bring up being a prince the moment things turn against you.”
“Is that so.”
Wi Saheon laughed softly.
The wind passed slowly between them.
Petals scattered. Sunlight swayed.
“You needn’t mark it out so plainly — my position and allegiance are already perfectly clear to me.”
“Is that so? And where is your allegiance?”
“…….”
Shin Yigyeom readjusted his grip on the reins again and matched the horse’s pace — so that he was riding alongside Wi Saheon.
Yet without going ahead of him, or falling too far behind.
Always, at all times, in a position from which he could guard him.
“I asked where your allegiance lies, Yigyeom.”
His name, called again.
Just like that, so casually…
As the sound of hoofbeats continued at an unhurried rhythm, Shin Yigyeom stole a glance sideways at Wi Saheon’s smile, barely visible at the edges.
Yearning resembles spring.
It resembled all the carefulness and longing and restlessness of spring — when frozen ground thaws, when rock and mountain bird wake from deep sleep, when the wind changes direction and a stream begins to flow.
Because it resembled spring, it was easy to hide within it as well.
And so Shin Yigyeom trusted firmly that the endless rows of cherry trees, rippling like a great pink wave, would dye his heart and his face the same color — and conceal them.
But Wi Saheon was a man skilled at finding what was hidden.
Shin Yigyeom’s efforts were foiled with a ease that was almost embarrassing.
It was a spiteful and useless spring — yet what he witnessed before that defeat was the smile of a prince who claimed to have nothing, wearing the expression of a man who had everything.
It was so dazzling it made his eyes ache.
“…Let us return, Your Highness.”
Shin Yigyeom said, hastily turning the reins.
And he thought: even if I were to go blind from this, it would not matter.
Because you are the sun.
The Imperial Palace Administrative Office, on the upper floors of the State Affairs Bureau adjoining the First Wall of the outer imperial palace, was nominally part of the State Affairs Bureau — but in practice, it was a zone under the Dark Bureau’s surveillance authority.
Beyond the window, the sound of repair work on the collapsed wall section never ceased.
With every gust of wind, lime dust and debris drifted through the air.
That sound and that smell left the illusion that the war had not yet ended.
In a space stripped of unnecessary ornamentation and left with only function, Wi Saheon scanned a report laid open before him.
Gauging only what was missing was a long-standing habit of his — a particular way of handling incomplete information.
From the incense burner, smoke rose in a thread so thin it was barely visible.
The air was excessively dry, stripping away unnecessary sensation and allowing one to focus solely on thought.
It was after the incident of the surprise assault on the imperial palace — yet rather than tracking the remaining forces or confirming the type of explosives used, Wi Saheon was personally reconstructing the entire structure from scratch, centering on what was absent.
Holding a finely crafted metal pipe between his lips, he pressed down on a plain silk map with one hand.
Hazy smoke obscured his features, then slowly withdrew.
The hand visible below his uniform cuff was strikingly clean — not the hand one would expect of someone in a position that dealt in blood.
Yet the moment those fingers pressed against the map, the cleanliness converted instantly into the order to bleed.
Some time later, Wi Saheon set down his pipe and took up a fine brush, dipping it in the inkstone.
The Gold Guard Commander who oversaw the wall’s defense and the Heugnyeongwi’s captain watched in quiet stillness.
