351
Far behind the Taepyeong front, in the rear camp of Jin Youliang's army, there was a lowly clerk in shabby clothes—neither an official retainer nor a general.
Few people knew his name.
Jin Youliang himself did not bother to learn it.
No one ever summoned him by name.
He carried documents, copied ledgers, melted sealing wax, folded envelopes, and ran errands.
He was a kind of auxiliary archive clerk—
a position that left behind only hands, never a face.
By day, he moved close to the ground.
Even when he spoke, he never raised his eyes.
What people noticed were ranks and merits.
Faceless hands were pushed to the margins of record and memory.
But at night, he took out small scraps of cloth.
Paper drew attention.
It got wet, tore easily, and left traces.
Cloth touched the body and hid.
Oil stains could be wiped away.
Blood dried into ordinary blotches.
Those stains soon became part of daily life.
On that cloth, he wrote—one line at a time—
what he had heard, what he had seen, what he had stolen.
He did not use a brush.
He mixed charcoal dust with saliva
and scratched the words in with his fingernail.
That night, he wrote only three lines.
"The main force behind the frontier skirmishes is Goryeo officer Park Seong-jin."
"He is both commander and martial master."
"He personally roams the front, killing and capturing scouts."
Three lines.
Yet those three lines were as sharp
as a blade meant to sever the momentum of the world.
He folded the cloth
and hid it inside a rice container.
A rice container was a place no one suspected.
The collapse of vigilance always begins
where suspicion never reaches.
That night, there was a brief raid alarm.
A common confusion—scouts from both sides setting fires by the riverbank and vanishing.
Using the chaos, he pretended to carry liquor trays,
pretended to head for the kitchens,
then slipped away and handed the rice container
to a contact from Zhu Yuanzhang's side.
His hands controlled their trembling.
If the fingers shook, exposure opened.
If exposure opened, the end followed.
And that end did not stop with him alone.
He imagined the empty space he would leave behind.
He knew that emptiness would become
someone else's death.
The report reached Zhu Yuanzhang's main camp late at night—
a time when all slept except the lamps.
Only Liu Bowen and a few strategists were awake.
They were turning documents,
comparing blade wounds,
trying to answer one question:
Why are the scouts disappearing?
The moment Zhu Yuanzhang entered the tent,
he unfolded the cloth scrap.
The message was short.
But it froze his face at once.
"Goryeo officer… Park Seong-jin?"
It was a name he already knew well.
In two major battles,
his camp had bled because of that name.
Xu Da.
Chang Yuchun.
Names that had vanished at Park Seong-jin's hands.
Death can remain as words.
But some deaths remain as traces,
and others remain as erasure.
Park Seong-jin's blade belonged to erasure.
Zhu Yuanzhang read the cloth again,
then stopped at the title:
Zhonglang General.
To a great commander, it looked like a light post.
Yet right there, Zhu Yuanzhang sensed something wrong.
"A commander personally roaming the frontier
and cutting down enemy scouts?"
This did not fit any ordinary picture.
A commander should be on the map.
Orders were larger than individuals.
A front did not move by one man's blade alone.
And yet this cloth said otherwise.
Liu Bowen spoke quietly.
"Then it means he is a true martial master."
One of the strategists said, his confidence wavering,
"A general-ranking commander
who hunts elites on the front every night?"
Liu Bowen did not answer at once.
Silence was his habit.
It came only after calculation.
At last, he murmured,
"…Goryeo has always been such a country."
Zhu Yuanzhang snapped,
"Enough evasion.
Tell me how dangerous he is."
Liu Bowen recalled the two corpses.
The severed necks.
The unwavering grain.
The finality of a single stroke.
He raised his head.
"General, it is highly likely that the man
who killed our scouts
is Park Seong-jin himself.
"If he is both commander and martial master,
then he combines tactics, intelligence, and psychology
in a single body."
The strategists' faces turned pale.
"Then those blade marks—"
"Yes. They are Commander Park Seong-jin's blade."
The tent did not merely fall silent—
it felt as if breathing had stopped.
Zhu Yuanzhang inhaled slowly.
"A commander who personally fights on the front…"
He looked down at the map.
The ten-li retreat he had ordered the previous day.
He traced the boundary beyond it with his finger.
A commander's vision was wide.
A man who saw the whole front with that vision,
yet touched it directly with his blade—
In that moment,
he changed the structure of war itself.
A short conclusion fell from Zhu Yuanzhang's lips.
"Pull back thirty li, not twenty."
The strategists looked up.
"General! The front—"
Zhu Yuanzhang cut them off.
"Exposing the battlefield
without understanding such a dangerous man
was my mistake.
"I have already lost to him twice."
Anger and fear mixed in his voice.
The more he suppressed fear,
the sharper his anger became.
"Only now do I realize
that such a monster is a commander."
He clenched his jaw,
then traced the final line on the cloth with his finger.
"He binds captured enemies
and drags them back to his main camp."
Zhu Yuanzhang murmured,
"He gathers information."
That meant Park Seong-jin
was not merely a roaming master of the night.
He was a master who wielded
information warfare, tactical warfare, and psychological warfare together.
One man, moving like a whole unit.
One blade, shaking a war.
The conclusion of the council was simple.
Eliminate him.
Zhu Yuanzhang declared,
"As long as that Goryeo master lives,
we cannot win this war."
Liu Bowen bowed his head.
"I will plant more agents
to track Park Seong-jin's position."
Zhu Yuanzhang waved his hand.
"To kill a master, you need a master.
A warrior kills warriors.
A master kills masters."
He still did not grasp
how far Park Seong-jin's martial authority had reached.
He had not measured the weight of the word pinnacle.
He believed that, with enough elite masters,
one martial man could be slain by another.
What he did not know
was that Park Seong-jin had already crossed the threshold—
and crossed it again.
Perhaps, on this land,
there might no longer be any master of the Hwagyeong realm
other than him.