Every time Wi Sagyun saw that inscrutable smile, the fine hairs on the back of his neck rose in a strangely unsettling way.
Wi Sagyun could not understand his younger brother, who had grown distant at some point he couldn’t place. At least during their childhood, Wi Saheon’s anger had been readable enough to make out the direction of it.
But now it was not like that at all. He looked to be smiling, and yet it felt as though murderous intent was coiled within it. He seemed to be silent, and yet his conclusion was already drawn.
Looking into those cold, desolate eyes that condensed a hatred without end or bottom, Wi Sagyun felt instead as though it was himself who had been placed on the examination block.
“I see not. Then why won’t you kill Yunbaek?”
“You still look to him first.”
“…….”
“Not to the Mumyeongdan. To Yunbaek.”
The end of Wi Saheon’s words carried a subtle lift. As though the remark had been thrown out as a test.
“Yunbaek and I have no connection whatsoever. Not so much as a speck of dust was found when you searched.”
The Dark Bureau being the highest-level surveillance organ, it could not be investigated from the outside. Instead, personnel from the Inner Guard Bureau and the Dark Bureau had cooperated to conduct a probe into Wi Saheon as an individual.
Documents and reports from his office, sealed document cases, and even his personal seal were confiscated, and every record was cross-referenced without a single line omitted. The time gaps between documents and the flow of approvals were traced back in reverse.
Wi Saheon’s sleeping quarters were no exception. Floorboards were lifted and the interior of wardrobes was emptied out completely.
The Dark Bureau personnel wore expressions pinched with dread even in Wi Saheon’s absence. The Inner Guard Bureau’s special inspection unit had moved only after extracting a promise from the Senior Inspector — several times over — that there would be no repercussions afterward.
In the end, no material evidence was found to establish a connection to the Mumyeongdan, and the final conclusion reached on Wi Saheon was one of no grounds for suspicion.
Even so, Wi Sagyun could not fully put his suspicions to rest.
“Perhaps you’re keeping him alive because you’ve extracted something unofficially. Any such information would need to be shared with the Inner Guard Bureau without fail.”
“If I’m that suspect to you, it would be faster for the Inner Guard Bureau to conduct a reinvestigation.”
“…….”
Wi Sagyun quietly closed his mouth. He always chose not to receive Wi Saheon’s attacks head-on. The virtue he considered befitting an elder, he put into practice only when they were alone together.
“Sogun. Do not let yourself be driven by private sentiment. That man Yunbaek committed treason.”
Wi Saheon laughed through his nose, as though asking who didn’t know that. A short, cold laugh.
“So then. Is it that you wish to settle it yourself, Imperial Brother?”
Wi Saheon asked, tilting his head slightly downward.
“What do you mean by that.”
Wi Sagyun’s brow twitched.
“The one who needs Yunbaek dead and gone for it to truly be over—”
Wi Saheon looked Wi Sagyun over slowly. It was the gaze of someone who could see through to the wound crouching inside a person.
“—seems to be not me, but you, Imperial Brother.”
“…Sogun.”
Wi Sagyun’s jaw went rigid. He was being interrogated right now — not about the Mumyeongdan, but about himself.
“What’s needed now is selection. The ones to be killed have been decided — it’s only a matter of sorting out who to keep. Yunbaek doesn’t yet meet that standard.”
Wi Saheon hooked one hand at his hip, and as though the conversation bored him, he tipped his head slowly back. Perhaps because of his long limbs and straight shoulders, even his carelessly idle posture drew the eye. The dignity of imperial blood and the danger of a predator coexisted in a single body in a strangely unsettling way.
“The Yunbaek you knew no longer exists, Imperial Brother. That man has become a monster.”
Having said his piece, Wi Saheon gave a brief bow and took his leave.
Wi Sagyun, left behind in the passageway, did not withdraw his gaze until Wi Saheon’s back — with the Shadow Guards layering behind him one after another — disappeared at the end of the corridor.
At last he let out a long exhale and called Yunbaek’s face to mind.
It was through Yunbaek that Wi Sagyun first learned that the word “pure” could suit a man.
When he came to know, through information a eunuch had secretly obtained, that Yunbaek was a Yin Person — Wi Sagyun had thought that fate was smiling upon him.
The fact that Yunbaek came from the Palace Guard didn’t matter. He was soon to become emperor, and with that overwhelming power he could simply reorganize the order and dispose of any noise.
But at the fact that he was already a married man, his chest ached as though an old wound had been touched.
Most of all — Yunbaek’s gaze had always been directed somewhere else.
……
Looking back, it had been a doomed connection from the very beginning.
Just as Wi Saheon had said, the Yunbaek he remembered might no longer exist.
But that fact could not completely carry away the lingering attachment along with it.
A guard delivered news of Three to Shin Yigyeom loudly enough to make sure he heard.
“We gave him electrical torture and he pissed himself. The flesh carved out of his arms was crawling with maggots and stinking of rot, I heard.”
Shin Yigyeom didn’t so much as snort.
Whether what the guard said was true was unknowable. It could simply be a shallow trick meant to unsettle him.
But if those words were true, he at least hoped Three would not die before him.
Though it was wretched, the news of Three’s condition gave Shin Yigyeom — enduring the time alone, cut off from everything — a sad and distant comfort: that he was not the only one bearing a suffering without depth or end.
“Hey, get out here!”
The solitary cell door flew open without warning.
After the day Wi Saheon had suppressed his Chunheunggi, Shin Yigyeom had been moved from the shared holding cell into a solitary cell enclosed on all sides by stone walls.
Every guard who came and went kept a peculiar distance from Shin Yigyeom — the faint but cold metallic scent surrounding him had instilled in the men of Gamsimwon an instinctive aversion.
“Why can’t you just get up already.”
The guard gave Shin Yigyeom’s thigh a light kick. Even seeing plainly that he was in no condition to move quickly, they showed no care. He was a high-priority prisoner for whom there was no reason to.
Once the pain from the branded hand had subsided and the Chunheunggi passed, Shin Yigyeom truly felt it in his body — that he could no longer use his left hand. It was a time when an already cold dread had been sinking quietly within him.
“No, why is this bastard taking so long to—”
“I said don’t touch him.”
Shin Yigyeom, whose defiance had built to its limit, crawled quickly on his elbows and bit down on the guard’s military boot, only to be kicked away.
Shin Yigyeom was escorted with shackles on both wrists and ankles. They did not kindly tell him where they were going, and Shin Yigyeom did not bother to ask.
They passed through a corridor and climbed a long flight of stairs to arrive in front of an iron door bearing a plaque that read Administration Office.
When the iron door opened, glass lamps hanging beneath a stone-vaulted ceiling lit the interior brightly. The excessively orderly space felt as though it were made up entirely of straight lines.
Beyond a long-sided writing desk on which various documents were neatly arranged, Wi Saheon sat with his legs crossed.
“…….”
The moment Shin Yigyeom registered his presence, his senses responded first.
The dry scent of kindling burning, and the smell of refined iron.
The eyes he had looked into from a distance close enough for their breath to meet had been soft — and yet without a single tremor. A gaze that had neither pressed forward nor retreated.
When he sensed his ki-scent, he had felt certain it couldn’t be the first time. His body had responded that way. Muscles that had released before he could even raise his guard, and an energy he had received wholly rather than rejected.
It hadn’t been forcibly crushed or violently subdued. Not too much, not too little — pressed down only as much as was needed, and released only as much as was needed.
The process by which the fever cooled, the breathing evened, and his body’s responses returned to normal had been far too seamless.
A Yang Person capable of controlling their ki-scent to that degree was rare. No — it was accurate to say there was none. Normally one would leave traces in one way or another.
Wi Saheon’s light did not spread by scorching everything around it — it burned slowly and deeply, like a furnace. That restrained heat was what made it harder, not easier, to breathe.
That day, he had never let the heat burn through to the end.
Shin Yigyeom reached up to brush his own nape. The heat had already faded from there, but the body scent remained. A feeling of familiarity… somehow.
At that moment, Shin Yigyeom’s eyes stilled.
That makes no sense. It couldn’t be familiar. There was no way he wouldn’t know someone who had been involved with him this deeply.
Could it be that his memory had broken away.
He tried to piece the thoughts together, but the middle was entirely empty. And yet the conclusion converged on one point regardless: this was neither coincidence nor a first.
What kind of relationship had Wi Saheon and he been….
“What are you doing?”
The deep irises of Wi Saheon — who carried within them a secret story Shin Yigyeom did not know — held a quiet light.
“Sit.”
Wi Saheon, arms folded, tilted his chin expressionlessly.
Shin Yigyeom was shoved down into the seat by a guard’s hand pressing on his shoulder.
Wi Saheon looked with interest at Shin Yigyeom’s composed face — composed enough that the Chunheunggi of before seemed like something that had never happened.
Wet eyes. Heat showing through beneath the skin, and breathing tangled into disarray. Even for a Yin Person, the state had been quite a spectacle — enough to make one come running in heat.
The Shin Yigyeom before him now was quiet as someone with no relation to the Chunheunggi whatsoever. His color was poor and his body lean, but even his lips — gone violet from the cold — were pressed shut without trembling.
“Sign this.”
Wi Saheon slid one of the documents he had been habitually aligning on his desk over toward Shin Yigyeom.
