WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

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◈ The Royal Sentinel has a Strange Newspaper

Chapter 4

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The Kingdom Times (1)

Su-ho spent the better part of his lunch break reading through the morning editions of the other papers that had been delivered earlier that day.

Setting aside the sharp rise in drug addicts and the fact that roughly six rebel factions were now scrambling over each other at any given time, it was, as always, a perfectly peaceful kingdom.

And then.

"Hey, little sis. I'm leaving the checkpoint empty this afternoon."

"Huh? Why?"

"Someone's got to deal with the confiscated goods. It's not a small sum, you know. Oh, but if you swear right now that you'll start speaking to me with proper honorifics from here on out, I might be persuaded to hold off on that until after the afternoon shift is done..."

"Drop dead!"

"On the other hand, once I've handled the goods and the money comes in, I'll cut you five percent."

"..."

Through perfectly reasonable means, he had successfully escaped checkpoint duty.

A [Lane Closed] sign went up in front of Su-ho's post.

The merchants who had queued up thinking this was the fastest lane for inspections let out a collective wail, but Su-ho's eardrums did not process that as useful information.

Useful information was the kind of thing that sat right in front of you, like a pile of Crystal Leaves.

"Hmm."

As it happened, the spoils had already been loaded onto a cargo wagon for easy transport, which was convenient.

Handling confiscated goods of this nature was also part of a gatekeeper's job. It was not without reason that his meticulous little sister had let him abandon his post with nothing more than a simple "drop dead."

There was one complication this time around, though. The confiscated items were narcotic herbs, which made things rather delicate. Quite a few veteran gatekeepers had lost their heads, quite literally, for mishandling goods that required careful treatment.

So first, a report.

Su-ho sent a letter to the Baronial house that his clan served.

"Get this delivered quickly, would you?"

"Yes, sir! Hehehe."

There was no need for anything like a phone in this world. Tipping the errand boy who always seemed to be loitering around the city gate like he was on five-minute standby was more than enough to send an urgent message.

About an hour later, a reply arrived from the Baron's house, right on cue.

The reply was a single character: the Chinese character for "Permitted."

Su-ho was mildly surprised. He had expected some steward from the Baron's household to respond at most, but the handwriting was clearly that of his lord, the Baron himself.

"Loyalty."

Su-ho wrote the character for loyalty on the back of the letter. Then he burned it.

Any reasonable question about why he went to the trouble of penning a stylish single-character reply when he was only going to burn it anyway was meaningless to someone like Su-ho, who was a born loyalist by nature.

Now it was time to wait, and wait comfortably at that.

He parked the cargo wagon right out in the open, conspicuously stamped with a [Sealed] mark, then settled into his chair beside the city gate and read the newspaper at his leisure. Like a patient fisherman. Like a spider at the center of its web.

About two hours passed like that.

"Excuse me. Would you mind if I sat here, gatekeeper-nim?"

"By all means. It's shared seating, after all."

A man came over and took the seat across from him.

A faint medicinal smell drifted from the man's deep green robe.

Su-ho sipped his black tea without the slightest change in expression, absorbed in the newspaper as if nothing were the matter, and the man was the first to speak.

"...That cargo on the wagon over there is very interesting."

"It's not mine to claim, though."

"Something tells me you and I are going to get along well, gatekeeper-nim, even though we've only just met."

"People tell me I have a friendly face, so I'm told."

"...I'll get straight to the point, then. I am from the Alchemy Hall. I have documentation here as well, proof that the procedures behind that wagon were entirely legitimate and lawful."

The man held out a set of papers.

Su-ho set down his newspaper and looked them over carefully.

"Then why was the coachman a dissident?"

"We're equally at a loss, gatekeeper-nim. The fault must lie either with whoever we entrusted the delivery to, or with a robbery that occurred somewhere along the route. Our organization will be launching an investigation into the matter without fail."

Of course, the man added.

"That said, we are deeply sorry to have caused such inconvenience to you over this unfortunate business. The Alchemy Hall is prepared to offer a generous remuneration for your trouble. If it would not be too forward of me, I would also like to treat you to a good meal at your convenience today."

"Hmm."

Su-ho lowered the papers. The documents were, without a doubt, genuine.

A brief silence.

Then, without any warning at all, Su-ho abruptly pressed his hands to the floor and bowed deeply toward the portrait of His Majesty the King printed on the back of the newspaper.

"Ah..."

The man was so caught off guard that he completely lost his train of thought. And no wonder. The sight of someone suddenly dropping into a deep bow with absolutely no warning was not something you saw every day, even in a kingdom this uncivilized.

He could plainly see that the momentum of the conversation had shifted to the other side, yet the man had no choice but to ask.

"Um, gatekeeper-nim. What did you just..."

"Ah, I do apologize. I looked up and suddenly found myself face to face with the august visage of His Majesty the King, and an immeasurable wave of reverence and loyalty surged up from deep within my heart."

"Oh.... a-a loyalist, are you..."

"Indeed. And on that note, I've been thinking about that cargo wagon over there. I had been thinking of it as something belonging to Baron-nim, but perhaps, if one considers it further, everything under His Majesty's sky might already be resting in the shade of his grace. There is nowhere under heaven that His Majesty's benevolence does not reach. That thought occurred to me just now, out of the blue."

"..."

"Can a price truly be placed on loyalty? Is even entertaining such a question not a sign of disrespect in itself? It is a genuinely difficult problem. I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter, if you'd be so kind."

"Hmm."

The man had a feeling. This one was not going to be easy.

The negotiation that followed, however, ended very amicably, all things considered.

Of course, "amicably" meant different things to different people. For Su-ho, amicably was simple enough: it meant the satisfying sight of several pouches of gold coins laid out neatly on the table, practically begging to be eaten.

For the Alchemy Hall employee, it meant something along the lines of: [Every attempt at bargaining had bounced right off], [the man was a lowly gatekeeper who knew the going rate for Crystal Leaves far too well], and [the entire budget they had come prepared with had been wrung dry with surgical precision].

"You are remarkably... good at this, gatekeeper-nim."

"I've been known to be."

The man fought to keep his composure while internally shedding tears.

His shins were already starting to ache in anticipation. He knew for a certainty that the moment he returned to headquarters, his senior colleague's affectionate boot would come flying straight at them.

"Normally this would have to go through an auction, but I imagine you'd rather not have too much of a paper trail either."

Su-ho's after-service, however, was impeccable.

"It's cleanest if we process this as a lost item recovered at the checkpoint. I saw from the paperwork earlier that there's a separate client listed as the requestor, so if you just bring me their identification document, I'll handle the rest."

"Oh. Here it is."

"Now that was fast, I appreciate it. And as for the money you're handing me right now, I'll be logging all of it as storage and handling fees. On paper, you'll have come to collect the goods quite a bit later than today. Take the Crystal Leaves and leave the wagon as is."

"..."

The man was somewhat taken aback.

"...Straightforward and clean. He even took on a share of the risk himself. I had expected to have to pencil in at least four days' worth of dinner appointments and grease the wheels with a night at a brothel."

In the man's experience, sentinels as a breed tended to be pompous and moved slower than cold syrup. It was an occupational trait.

"When you factor in the entertainment expenses that would have bled out otherwise, is this actually the cheaper option now? Or is it not?"

In any case, it was a remarkably elegant outcome. And so the man heard himself saying, before he had quite realized it:

"Remarkable, gatekeeper-nim. You must have been run ragged with everything going on with the Ursalite prices crashing. And you still handled this messy business this cleanly."

Su-ho, in the middle of processing the paperwork, looked up.

And stared at the man. With those clear, bright, perfectly guileless eyes of his.

"My family did have quite a bit invested in Ursalite."

Ah.

Only then did the man realize his mistake.

"...Yes, it was quite the disaster, wasn't it? Who could have seen Ursalite crashing that hard, that suddenly. It was all anyone at headquarters could talk about all day today, every time people gathered."

"Funny how that goes, from a distance. Oh, my apologies, though, if you happened to witness it up close yourself."

"Haha..."

"Haha!"

The man's heart was pounding.

A thought flashed across his mind just then, the strange thing the other person had done a moment ago, that sudden deep bow he had pressed toward the portrait of His Majesty the King. What if that had not simply been an eccentricity?

The back of the man's neck went cold.

"Right, then. The paperwork is all done. You can go ahead and collect the Crystal Leaves."

"Ah.... Thank you for your hard work, gatekeeper-nim. I am truly, sincerely grateful for how swiftly you handled this."

"Don't mention it. We'll be seeing each other again, I'm sure."

The man left. His feet moved slowly, but his thoughts were racing. Had Su-ho noticed? Was he already aware? No, surely not.

He was just a lowly gatekeeper, after all.

The man forced himself to push the worry away.

Su-ho was now a wealthy man.

"Whoa! Gold coins! So many gold coins!"

Just looking at the pouches of money laid out so invitingly on the table was enough to make a meal out of. And when you added that on top of the fortune he had doubled just yesterday, good heavens, what did all of this add up to?

Not that Su-ho particularly cared about money.

Which meant, in other words, that he belonged to the most dangerous category of person in the world.

"...You've come into some money, haven't you."

"Little sis. You're coming back from a hard day's labor only to find someone else has struck it rich, and I imagine you're feeling a vague resentment toward the world right now. But that's just life."

"Right, right. Good for you. You half-wit. The adults might lose their minds if they see it, so put it in your bag."

"Call me oppa and I'll cut you a bigger share."

"...Die."

"You hesitated just now, didn't you."

"Please, just die already. Seriously."

Demonstrating the kind of warm sibling bond they always had, Su-ho lazily watched the foot traffic on the way home.

As Si-ah had warned, the family elders were a little more clingy than usual that evening. "Su-ho, you did great work earlier," "the wagon's still out there from what I saw, did you handle it properly," "if it's too much trouble your Second Aunt-nim can help you out with it," and so on and so forth.

If the pouches of money had been staging an outdoor exhibition, the family gathering might have gotten even more cozy.

Fortunately, Su-ho was someone who knew how to take his sister's heartfelt advice to heart. The gold coins inside his leather satchel did not trigger any spontaneous awakening of X-ray vision in his relatives.

Su-ho's clear, unblinking eyes and shamelessly nonchalant demeanor were enough to send all of them scattering, one by one.

Among them, there was one person who had stood apart, his face blank and vacant, who had not even tried to approach Su-ho.

Si-ah shouted out to him.

"Dad! Where are you going, again!"

"..."

"Honestly. He's been out of it all day and now he won't even hear me when I talk to him."

"..."

It was Mun Geum.

The father of the Su-ho and Si-ah siblings.

The man who had managed to blow through most of the family fortune as well as his own dignity as the head of the household, all at once, in one spectacular stroke.

『Mun Geum-ssi of the South Gate Sentinel Clan, Fall Accident in the Waterway! Suspected Suicide!』

He was the family member whose death had been foretold in today's issue of the Prophecy Gazette.

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