Episode 2
There is nothing in my life to take pleasure in.
Why did the Birth Goddess ever bother to grant me to this world? Did she mean for me to live a worthless life, shoved around and crushed from every side? The Birth Goddess is a damned old crone too.
But the innocent eyes of Mother grow damp.
“Even so, it’s thanks to your father that we live in such luxury. When your belly is full and your back is warm, you should be grateful! A head of the household has done his duty well enough simply by not letting his family go hungry. Don’t resent your father!”
“So if my belly is full and my back is warm, I have to be grateful no matter what? Do people live on food alone? Do people live on sleep alone?”
“Eating and sleeping is living, isn’t it? That’s how one gets by! What more could you want? You’ve never known hardship and have lived in comfort all this time, so you have no idea how hard the world is!”
Mother wasn’t entirely wrong. I couldn’t deny the fact that I had been raised in comfort.
I had lived at ease without letting a single drop of water touch my hands. An ignorant, selfish girl who knew nothing of the world and cared only about her own troubles, that was me.
Do people with full bellies and warm backs have no right to long for greater happiness? I think they do.
Everyone has the right to be even happier, and the right to be loved.
“……Are you happy, Mother?”
“Why wouldn’t I be? I am happy. I’m perfectly content with my life. So you should be satisfied with this much too. A person mustn’t be greedy for more.”
“……”
“Do you know how many children in the capital are starving? Have you ever once gone hungry in your whole life? No, you haven’t. That’s why yours is a happy life.”
Mother’s words sounded as if she were forcing me to be happy.
That felt so unpleasant that I kicked off the blanket with a thump. My rebelliousness only grows with each passing day.
“Your father is the richest man in the capital. You’re the apple of that family’s eye. How many people would give anything to live your life, and yet you carry on like this.”
“The richest man in the capital is the Emperor. Why would it be my father?”
“Is His Majesty the Emperor your friend? Use his proper title! And His Majesty is not someone to bring up in a place like this. He lives in a different world from ours.”
“What’s so different about it? Does His Majesty live in heaven or something? He walks on the same ground as the rest of us, and he’s not a god……”
“Don’t say such things anywhere else. Your head could fly off your shoulders and the family could be ruined. If you want to die, die alone. Don’t bring harm to the Yu family.”
“Are you a Yu, Mother? Someone who isn’t even a Yu is scolding me not to bring harm to the Yu family, when I’m the Yu here and I only want to speak my mind.”
My father, Yu Hanshin, is the Left Vice Chancellor of the Secretariat, Senior Second Rank, an enormously high-ranking official even among officials.
He passed the civil service examination in his early teens, and with his outstanding ability and exceptional mind, he won the Emperor’s favor.
For a man so great and accomplished, all he does is serve as his concubine’s foot-wiping rag, but if he’s happy living that way, who’s going to stop him?
He isn’t the sort to listen even if someone tried, and the higher a man rises, the fewer people dare speak plainly to him.
Everyone only knows how to flatter and coddle, and no one helps him see reality squarely. Superiors surely prefer sweet whispers to unwelcome words, so it isn’t as though I can’t understand that.
Maybe that’s why the Emperor too is surrounded by swarms of treacherous courtiers.
I don’t know in any detail how Father conducts himself at court. I do at least know that the face a man wears at home can differ from the face he wears outside.
Even so, I can guess. How that man survived, what sort of smile he wore as he bowed his head.
‘He must be a treacherous courtier. Before the Emperor, he’d be as soft and pliant as a tongue in a mouth, making sure the Emperor swallowed only pleasant words. The kind who changes shape with the circumstances and spits out his convictions like spit if need be.’
Father had always had a talent for such things. He is a shrewd, quick-witted, foxlike man.
A man who can sniff out other people’s weaknesses with uncanny skill, yet never lets his own heart be seen. He is more than capable of all of it. That is what makes him even more revolting.
Damn it. The fact that I share his blood sometimes feels like it’s staining me, and I clench my teeth.
I wish the Emperor would hurry up and see through Father. See the scheming hidden within that glossy talk, the poison stinger behind that smile.
“Try some of the perilla seed porridge.”
“No thanks, I don’t feel like it.”
“Your mother made it herself.”
“Am I Father? Why would I want something you made by hand brought to me? I like food made by the servants much better. So don’t you dare lay a hand on my meals.”
I hate seeing Mother toil. I wish all the good people in the world could live without hardship.
My mother is so kind that she’s foolish, but I at least want her body to be at ease.
Who do you think suffers most, with a heart rotting away? It isn’t as though I don’t know.
The bond between parent and child is heaven’s decree and cannot be cut, but a marriage is hardly something you could call heaven’s decree, is it? Women who devote themselves until they’re cast aside like worn-out sandals, first wives who are thrown away, are all too common.
It would be hard for Father to abandon me, but he could cast Mother out if he chose. So I think I understand why she trembles so. How frightening it must be.
Mother and Father’s marriage was arranged for political reasons, but they say that for the first half year after the wedding, they were very close. Back then, rumor had it all over the capital that they were a pair of mandarin ducks.
Come to think of it, maybe it was precisely this rumor about the mandarin duck couple that made Father take a concubine. After all, mandarin ducks are said to keep several females.
* * *
The side of the Son of Heaven, the Emperor, always teems with people. It is a place so crowded there’s no time to catch one’s breath.
The Emperor is born and raised amid it, and in the end he is trained by the clamor and the stares. At first he endures it, soon grows used to it, and finally comes to enjoy the noise.
When he eats, when he sleeps, even in the moments he catches his breath, someone is always by his side.
Familiar faces and new ones surge in together, and each surging day is filled with other people’s expectations and desires.
The Emperor does not go out of his way to wield a blade.
Without a drop of blood on his hands, he saves some and pushes others toward death. Kneading other people’s lives like dough, he reigns over all under heaven.
Even so, and precisely because of that, he is the Emperor. No, only if he is so can he be the Emperor.
Ryu Ryang, the current Emperor of the Nakbyeon Empire, was likewise a living embodiment of absolute power. This Ryu Ryang had several children.
The princesses were bound to marry into other families once they came of age, so though he doted on them, they were not very important to him.
What mattered were the princes. The princes were, after all, the future of the empire. Ryu Ryang had a total of fifteen precious princes.
But though it is true that none of one’s ten fingers can be bitten without pain, there is always one finger destined for the ring.
And even among them, the one who would be given the most precious ring had already been decided.
The finger onto which he longed to slip the most precious ring was Ryu Ryang’s eighth son, Prince Hye (憓王), Ryu Hyeok.
That Ryu Ryang had chosen Ryu Hyeok as the next Emperor was already an open secret that wasn’t quite a secret at all.
Moreover, Prince Hye, Ryu Hyeok, was the first son born to the Empress, who had suffered miscarriage after miscarriage over many years without bearing a child, and had at last conceived him after untold hardship.
Prince Hye was the only child of the Empress within the palace, which made him a precious legitimate son.
It was not only the Empress who couldn’t hide her joy at this hard-won legitimate son.
<You have borne much, Empress. You are a great blessing to this nation. Let all the people know of the birth of this most precious legitimate heir!>
The Emperor, who doted on the Empress beyond measure, was likewise overjoyed at the birth of Prince Hye.
He held a festival celebrating the birth throughout the entire capital for a full week.
However, in the Nakbyeon Empire there was no law that the eldest legitimate son must inherit the throne.
The favor of inheriting the throne depended entirely on the Emperor’s will. In other words, one didn’t inherit it as a matter of course simply for being the eldest son or a legitimate son.
With things as they were, blood winds blew through the imperial palace at all times. How many women of the inner court were there, frantic to make their own sons the next Emperor by any means?
That was why the concubines and the sons born of them never let go of hope. As long as there was hope, a person could always rise again.
But what trampled their hopes mercilessly was Ryu Hyeok’s own conduct. Ryu Hyeok lacked nothing at all.
He possessed the qualities of a perfect sovereign, without the slightest shortcoming. The other princes could not help but lose heart.
First of all, Ryu Hyeok was gifted in letters (literary talent). When Ryu Hyeok was around five years old, the Emperor said the following:
<I recognized it when my legitimate son Hyeok read texts without stumbling at the age of three, but his brilliance is no ordinary thing. A five-year-old child looks at ancient books that leave even scholars racking their brains, picks out the meaning of the sentences clearly, and explains them with ease. Is that not truly something to astonish all under heaven?>
Ryu Hyeok was also remarkably handsome.
So much so that among the Emperor’s concubines, there was one who was dragged away for casting flirtatious glances at Ryu Hyeok. He was handsome enough that merely looking at him made one’s chest tremble.
His skin was like silk, and his hair, black as though ground ink had been brushed on, flowed glossy and sleep. He was truly a beauty to topple a kingdom.
Even renowned courtesans lost their luster before Ryu Hyeok and had no choice but to acknowledge him as the most beautiful in all the land.
And what of his spirit and bearing? He was tall enough to look down on most grown men, and his shoulders were broad. He handled an enormous spear that others couldn’t even lift as lightly as if he were swinging a toothpick.
In this world there is a marvelous power called spirit energy, which strengthens the human body and grants superhuman stamina.
Those born with this spirit energy are extremely rare, one in a hundred thousand, and Ryu Hyeok was born with it as well.
And he was not merely born with it. He was born holding an enormous amount, so great that he was called the foremost even among those who possessed it.
Everyone said in unison that Heaven had raised its hand in favor of the Empress, who had suffered so for want of a child.
He was a man whose very existence was a miracle, one who had never been before and would never be again.
The Emperor and Empress raised this Ryu Hyeok with fretful devotion, afraid he would freeze if snow fell, melt if rain fell, or be blown away if the wind blew.
Though raised so preciously, he never went astray and was obedient to his parents, so from a parent’s standpoint, he was a child more lovely than any could wish.
Now the Emperor of Nakbyeon, Ryu Ryang, was racking his brains over what sort of wife to match with such a son.
Because his son lacked nothing, he was reluctant to give him away to anyone, but a wedding had to be held.
“Hyeok.”
“Yes, Father.”
“What sort of woman should I give you?”
“Whichever woman you arrange for me, Father, I will gratefully welcome her.”
“What a commendable thing to say.”
Three years had already passed in agonizing over this weighty matter. He still could not easily decide which match would suit his son.
This family seemed lacking, and that one seemed lacking too. No matter which noble family’s daughter he held up, she fell short of being worthy of Ryu Hyeok.
Ryu Hyeok felt just as frustrated by his father’s indecision.
His brothers had already married and had wives and children, and even his younger brother had started a family. Watching the Emperor still dithering, Ryu Hyeok too felt his patience reaching its limit.
Even so, he never let out a single word of complaint.
It was not out of fear of losing the Emperor’s favor, but simply because he believed there must be a course ordained by Heaven, and that waiting was the right thing to do.
