The Hunting Dog of the Prestigious Family Has Returned Chapter 68

The contaminated zone spreading across the northern reaches of the Northeast Frontier was the monsters’ land.

Black membranes, and veins of corruption running between them.

Buildings coated in monster filth, and the toxic substances seeping out from within.

A place where even breathing carelessly was forbidden. It was, in every sense, fit to be called a hell made manifest on earth.

And yet, even on this desolate ground, people lived.

The low, droning rumble of armored vehicle engines.

Dozens of armored vehicles arranged in a circle, and inside the vast tent built using those vehicles as supports, air purifiers worked at a furious pace.

A temporary tent modeled after the ger of Mongolia, a civilization long since fallen and gone.

It was the mobile dwelling that the nomadic Jurchen of the twenty-third century had devised.

“An urgent summons at this hour. Something is off. Chieftain, I really think going in person…”

“I’m going precisely because something is off. I need to see for myself what that old fox has up his sleeve.”

The door of the armored vehicle parked outside the tent opened, and Jurchen chieftain Aisin-Gioro Tuowen stepped out with a heavy stride.

His expression made no effort to conceal his reluctance.

The reason was that Defense Commander Seong Ryeoun of the Northeast Frontier, their long-standing trade partner, had suddenly requested an urgent meeting.

‘The tribute for this quarter was sent long ago, and he’s never been the one to propose a meeting first. What in the world is going on?’

Tuowen frowned as he stared out at the harsh landscape through the vehicle window. Dust scattered on the wind and disappeared, and beyond the desolate terrain lay the factory district of an old city, abandoned like ruins.

The remnants of a Central Plains civilization that had once shone brilliantly.

A place trampled by monsters centuries ago, now serving as the rendezvous point between the Jurchen and Joseon.

Clang.

The vehicles came to a stop at the agreed location, and Tuowen stepped out.

With the headlights off, they waited, and before long another armored vehicle arrived at the abandoned factory grounds.

“That’s not the usual vehicle.”

Not a luxury sedan but an armored vehicle, no different from their own.

The door opened, and the figure who appeared before Tuowen was far from what he had expected.

“Ugh, I’m so stiff. Can’t you drive a little smoother? I thought I was going to die on the way here.”

“Don’t complain to me, Young Master. We were driving off-road from the start. What did you expect me to do?”

Stepping out of the armored vehicle with those grumbles was a young man who looked young at a glance.

A face that was barely more than a boy’s, and a casual manner of speech.

But Tuowen and his men reacted in an instant.

Chk-chk-chk-!

In a flash, gun muzzles swung to aim as one at his head.

“Who are you. Where is the Defense Commander?”

“Who am I?”

The young man smiled lightly.

Light. Yet beneath it, a smile that stirred an unease with no clear cause.

He reached into his chest and drew out an object, finely carved.

“W, wait. Is that, by any chance…?”

“What the hell…!”

A royal warrant, issued by the Joseon Administration.

Recognizing it, Haun, the staff officer standing beside him, drew a sharp breath.

“What is that?”

He himself was a warrior. He had no way of knowing.

He asked Haun, whose face had gone pale, and the man slowly opened his mouth.

“A Joseon official. More specifically, a Secret Royal Inspector personally appointed by Left State Councilor Kim Jungheon! He’s a figure on a completely different level from someone like Seong Ryeoun…!”

“…….”

Tuowen’s brow twitched.

He had heard of such things.

Hanseong, the heart of Joseon.

That from within its towering fortress walls, the Administration would sometimes dispatch officials to the regions.

An inspector entrusted with the full authority of the Administration.

For someone like that to come to this frontier, seeking him out, there could only be one reason.

‘Seong Ryeoun. So you’ve finally been caught.’

Tuowen clicked his tongue inwardly, but he feigned ignorance and addressed Changwoon.

“What business does a Joseon aristocrat have with us?”

Changwoon slipped the royal warrant back into his chest pocket and began walking slowly toward him.

“You work with the Defense Commander, don’t you. The roadside raids too, that’s part of it.”

Tuowen’s face hardened.

Admitting it freely meant death.

He thought for a moment before speaking.

“……I have heard that some tribe members make a living that way. But I don’t know the precise details…”

“Some? Make a living? Are you joking?”

Changwoon gave a short, contemptuous laugh.

“You’re running organized raids with military-grade equipment and vehicles. You didn’t know because it was just some tribe members? If your people had that kind of slack to spare, you’d have marched out and unified the Central Plains continent you lost long ago.”

“……!”

“Am I wrong?”

Words thick with mockery. Tuowen ground his teeth.

The Jurchen.

Descendants of the Qing, who had once ruled the Central Plains.

But the glory of the past had long since faded.

The Great Rift that had erupted across Manchuria and the Central Plains, and the monsters that poured out from it.

The Qing imperial house, rotted through with corruption and incompetence, could not hold it back, and collapsed together with hundreds of millions of dead.

The great Qing Empire, which had once pacified the Central Plains, was shattered into fragments.

Centuries later, they were nothing more than wandering hunters, drifting through no-man’s-land and contaminated zones, scraping by on monster kills.

“State your business.”

“My business? Should I ask you to admit the arrangement you had with the Defense Commander and hand over the evidence?”

Tuowen’s voice had gone rigid, but Changwoon’s tone remained as light as if this were some game.

“Sorry to say, I didn’t come all the way out here to the Northeast Frontier just to catch a small fry like that.”

“Then what in the world are you…!”

“The Rift Incident that broke out in Hanseong recently. And the experimental monsters that accelerated it.”

The blunt remark, dropped without preamble, shattered the composure Tuowen had been carefully holding together.

As if watching the spectacle with amusement, Changwoon kept his expression full of malice and spoke.

“Your side distributed those, didn’t you.”

“……!”

Tuowen’s eyes wavered.

The Jurchen’s operational territory was the Manchurian region.

Land covered in monster contamination and membranes.

Their primary income, accordingly, was raiding supply vehicles or hunting monsters and selling the by-products.

Which meant the monsters brought into Joseon for research purposes had, by and large, been supplied by them.

“The important people in the Administration are having quite a trying time lately.”

Changwoon took one step closer.

“One of Joseon’s most prestigious noble families just set off a scandal that outraged the whole country. The public mood is in turmoil, and the nobles spend every day tearing each other apart over who’s to blame…. My liege, Lord Kim Jungheon, is in a very disagreeable mood.”

“…….”

“And then, what do we have here? The ones who distributed those monsters happen to be right in front of me? The Jurchen, coiled up in Manchuria, are the ones who triggered the Rift in Hanseong? If I file a report like that…. from our perspective, it would make things considerably more convenient, wouldn’t it?”

“You speak nonsense with remarkable composure.”

With no one else daring to open their mouths, Tuowen answered, fist clenched.

“You’d make us criminals on nothing but circumstantial evidence and conjecture? That’s no different from telling us to die on the spot as scapegoats for your political games. Did you think that by showing up out of nowhere and threatening us like this, we’d tremble in fear?”

“Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

Changwoon answered without hesitation, hands shoved in his pockets, watching Tuowen.

“Because if not, I could bring the Training Command’s regular forces right now and wipe all of you out.”

At that cold remark, the faces of the tribe members around them went white in an instant.

The atmosphere froze solid.

Standing at the center of it, Changwoon continued.

“You seem to be under some misapprehension. I have no particular intention of conducting a fair and impartial investigation. Perpetrator, evidence, plan, charges. If I put my mind to it, I can fabricate all of them.”

“……!”

“No crime? So what. Treason, insurrection, invasion, plunder. Once I write it in the report, the Royal Investigative Bureau agents will get the confessions on their own.”

If I report to the Royal Investigative Bureau that you are criminals, you become criminals from that day forward.

And since a few of those charges would be things they had actually done, the matter would be even simpler.

It was, in every sense, an act of lawless tyranny.

“So you’d do well to think carefully before you answer. Even if you don’t care about yourselves, the families living together in Sector 21 need to survive. Isn’t that right?”

Threats flowing one after another, effortless, and a manner of speaking that commanded the atmosphere around him.

Tuowen’s eyes narrowed.

The youthful appearance and the casual speech were nothing but a mask.

This man was practiced at this kind of threat.

“This little…!”

One of the tribe members stepped forward, seething, but Tuowen raised a hand and stopped him.

“…One question.”

“What?”

“What is the reason you went to the trouble of coming to find me? If you intended from the start to make us the culprits, the Administration could simply have drawn its own conclusion and sent soldiers to kill us all.”

The Changwoon standing before him said nothing.

Answering with silence.

The tension that had held Tuowen’s face rigid eased, just slightly.

“And yet you came here, met with us, and are threatening us by invoking crimes that don’t exist. It doesn’t add up.”

“And so?”

“My read is this: your coming to find me is not the Administration’s will.”

A voice that seemed to press for an answer.

Tuowen’s eyes sharpened with a new keenness.

‘I’ve struck the mark.’

Say what one might, he was the man who led a single tribe.

He was the one who had rallied the Jurchen, no better than nomads, built a settlement, and raised them to their current standing.

A government official.

If he let himself be played by a schemer like that, how could he protect his suffering people?

“On the contrary, the Administration would not have targeted us, nor cooked up a scheme like this. What you’re describing is nothing more than an empty threat to gain the upper hand. Or at most, a foundation for some private scheme you’re constructing.”

“…….”

“How is that. Am I wrong?”

At those confident words, Changwoon was silent for a moment.

But only for a moment.

“All right. Well done.”

The expression on Changwoon’s face, which had been nothing but contemptuous amusement all this time, took on a different quality.

A man who, even when authority and threat bore down on him, kept his composure and found the gap between them.

“Then let’s do business.”

For a big task, you need people like this.

---

Tuowen stroked his chin and said quietly.

“In other words, you intend to cut Seong Ryeoun out of the Iron Tiger Army?”

“You catch on quickly.”

I answered with an easy smile, and Tuowen nodded slowly, as if persuaded.

“It’s true that someone like Seong Ryeoun, skimming the army’s supplies, is a cancer. From your side, the sooner you pull him out by the roots the better.”

But he looked at me with a puzzled expression.

“Then there’s no need to involve us. Couldn’t you simply arrest him? Using the authority of a Secret Royal Inspector would be straightforward enough, wouldn’t it?”

“If it were that simple, I wouldn’t have come to meet you.”

I shook my head slowly and replied.

“Say I use my authority as Secret Royal Inspector to remove Seong Ryeoun. What happens inside Iron Tiger Fortress?”

“……There’d be internal chaos. Especially the personnel at the 3rd Base who supported the Defense Commander, they’d start acting up even more.”

“If that situation continues, it could mean the defense line we barely managed to hold would collapse. And the result…”

I looked slowly around at my surroundings.

A pale mist lay in every direction, and the sound of machinery drifting from somewhere in the distance filled the ruined space.

Between collapsed buildings, broken vehicles rusted away, and the still night air created a stifling silence.

This was already a dead land.

“It might end up like where we’re standing right now. Nothing but ruins.”

“…….”

Tuowen fell silent.

‘Iron Tiger Fortress is virtually the only city in this desolate land. If it falls, there’s nothing in it for us either.’

He considered it for a moment, then finally spoke.

“As you ask, I’ll cooperate in capturing the Defense Commander. I’ll take the appropriate measures to ensure your presence is not exposed.”

“Discarding a hat the moment its cord snaps. Wise.”

“But in return.”

A sudden deal and negotiation, but one that made it possible to settle many things at once.

“We’ll set our own conditions.”

“I’ll hear them. Go ahead.”

Tuowen’s eyes lit up.

“Our trading partners are diverse: noble families, Japanese military contractors, Chinese warlords, and others. But the stability is poor, by the same measure. We are, in the end, displaced people with no protection. The weak.”

I listened with a smile.

“They fabricate every excuse to cheat us of goods, slash prices, and don’t hesitate to threaten and extort. The Defense Commander was no different.”

“So what are you getting at?”

“We want to trade formally with the Iron Tiger Army.”

Tuowen spoke without hesitation.

“None of Seong Ryeoun’s dealings, no tribute payments. Broker an official contract between us and Iron Tiger Fortress, the same way you deal with the traveling merchants or the Central Plains warlords. And…”

Tuowen continued slowly.

“Iron Tiger General Yoo Sanghyeon. Arrange a meeting with the Tiger of the North.”

Yoo Sanghyeon.

The reason that name had come up was simple.

“You want a reliable negotiator you can trust, since I’m only passing through?”

“Is that not possible?”

“Hmm….”

It’s not impossible, but it’s getting a bit complicated.

Because I haven’t even met that man yet.

‘First thing after meeting him, I’ll have to go to him with something I need.’

But thanks to this, I now have something to talk about with him.

I looked at Tuowen squarely and spoke.

“Fine. But if you want to include a special clause like that, I’ll need to add one condition of my own.”

Tuowen’s eyes sharpened again.

“Speak.”

“The Great Manchurian Rift.”

The time had finally come to bring out the real reason I had come here.

After breathing in slowly, I spoke with a meaningful smile.

“The coordinates of the entrance to that vast chasm. Ground Zero.”

At that moment, a heavy silence fell over everything, pressing down on the air.

Tuowen and his tribe members exchanged glances, but I paid them no mind and took one step forward.

“Your Jurchen have wandered this land longer than anyone, living by killing monsters. So even if others don’t know, you do.”

I continued slowly.

“Where the Great Rift first appeared. Where the monsters first came pouring out. What lies at the center of it all.”

I looked straight at Tuowen, whose eyes had gone wide.

This was where the real negotiation began.