Chương 11: Auditor of Mortality

There were only two sounds in the Lower Laboratory that night – the constant drip, drip, plink of melting ice falling into the corner basins, and the heavy breathing of a young Inspector who was about to come face to face with a corpse for the second time in her life. The dead assassin didn't count; he at least had the decency to wear a veil. Chae-ha slowly walked up to one of the granite slabs, trying to gather her courage as she did.

Before her lay the "inventory" she had purchased: a middle-aged man, his skin pallid and textured like damp silk. The medical students had been thorough; incisions had been made all over the body, and small wooden tags were pinned to various muscle groups like bookmarks in a grisly text. A few of the incisions on the legs had been sutured back together, with an obvious trend that showcased slowly improving skill. The young girl set her tools out next to the specimen with deliberate precision.

She opened her copy of The Taxonomy of Vital Pathways and placed it down, fixing the page with a small stone. Next to it, she positioned her own manual – the new Cham-jeom-sul. Finally, a small roll of felt containing twenty steel bookbinding needles joined the other objects, their sharp triangular heads pointed almost menacingly towards the body. Chae-ha took a deep, steadying breath, the cold air shocking her system as it entered her lungs.

Far from bothering her, the feeling provided a welcome distraction from the morbidness of what she was about to attempt. She began reviewing the first section of her manual. Striking Nerve Clusters 神 (Sin) – 經 (Gyeong) – 點 (Jeom) Near the top of the cadaver, the students had peeled back the dermis around the neck and exposed some strange-looking yellow cords. She consulted the Taxonomy to try and understand what she was looking at, ultimately identifying the structure as part of the brachial plexus.

Chae-ha picked up a needle and held it between her thumb and forefinger. In theory, a strike to this nerve cluster could paralyze the arm. But how much resistance would there be? And how would it differ when it was covered with skin? The young girl steadied herself before flicking the needle forward, using the same wrist motion she normally used to pierce leather book bindings. Thwick. With alarming ease, the needle buried itself partially into the nerve cluster.

The dead flesh closed all around it like a spongy vise, loosely gripping the steel and holding it in place. She pushed a little harder and felt a sudden pop as one of the nerves severed, right before the needle finally reached bone. The breath Chae-ha had been holding slowly whistled out from between her teeth. After taking another moment to settle herself, the young girl unpinned the flaps of skin from around the neck and folded them back into place.

She practiced trying to find the nerve cluster without being able to see it, by pushing the needle through the dermis. When she felt her understanding of the underlying anatomy had begun to sharpen, Chae-ha moved on to the next section of her manual. Pinning Tendons 筋 (Geun) – 脈 (Maek) – 點 (Jeom) Her focus switched to the cadaver's forearm. Chae-ha looked back and forth between the Taxonomy and her own notes, just to triple check that her understanding was correct.

Then she forced herself to grip the corpse's cold, stiff hand. If she could pin the flexor tendons to the bone beneath, the hand would no longer be able to close. She located the sheath containing the tendons, aided by the helpful wooden tags the students had left. With a sharp, downwards thrust, she drove a needle into the sheath, hoping to strike one of the fibrous lines of tissue inside. One of the corpse's fingers suddenly twitched, startling her and making her almost fall out of her seat.

Thankfully, no one was around to see how close she'd come to screaming. Piercing Vascular Gaps 血 (Hyeol) – 管 (Gwan) – 點 (Jeom) Chae-ha did her best to reset herself, before moving on to the next part of her manual. She leaned over the femoral artery, located in the thigh. In a living person, it would be large, pulsing, and full of blood. But what she found inside the corpse looked more like a stiff, translucent tube. She held the leg steady with one hand while trying to aim a needle with the other.

Despite knowing where the target was, her first several stabs missed. The artery moved around unpredictably as her grip on the muscle mass shifted. When she finally pierced it, she felt a distinct resistance from the thick, muscular wall before the needle finally burst through into the empty space within. There was no blood; the vessel had emptied out its contents long ago. But the sensation was unmistakable.

In a living person, that puncture would have been followed by a fountain of red – and could potentially lead to someone bleeding out. This kind of strike wouldn't be immediately debilitating, but it could be one of her best ways to actually end a fight. Chae-ha tried a few more times, hoping to get a feel for how the artery moved around and how she could identify its position. Once she started to feel a little more comfortable with the behavior, she moved on to the final section.

Locking Joint Capsules You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. 關 (Gwan) – 節 (Jeol) – 點 (Jeom) She turned the cadaver's arm over, exposing the elbow. The young girl looked closely at the joint, trying to determine where the spaces between the bones should be. When she was sure she'd found the right spot, she positioned a needle above it. With a precise forwards flick, she pushed the needle deep into the gap within the joint.

Then she made the mistake of trying to bend the cadaver's arm. Chink. The arm moved less than a finger's width before abruptly stopping. The sound of metal on bone was jarring, causing Chae-ha to gasp in surprise. The limb was now permanently stuck in an extended state; the needle acted like a steel wall, interrupting the internal machinery of the elbow.

She winced as she imagined the damage it would do if someone ever flexed hard enough to break the needle, resulting in multiple pieces of shrapnel that would continue to grind inside the joint. The young girl stood up and stepped back, her body shaking with a mixture of exhaustion and dark triumph. She cleaned her hands, picked up her brush, and began to write in her manual. The body is a machine made of reins, gears, pulleys, and pipes. There are more ways to break it than just cutting it in half.

You can snatch the reins, jam the gears, sever the pulleys, or pierce the pipes. This is the essence of the Art of the Penetrating Point. After finishing, she looked at the cadaver again, and a grim thought crossed her mind. It seemed she'd received another promotion. Chae-ha was no longer just an Inspector of the living; she was now also officially an auditor of the dead. As another week passed by, the young girl's life began to fall into a daily rhythm.

From early morning to mid-afternoon, she focused primarily on her work as an Inspector – diligently auditing the sect's account books in search of corruption. Each afternoon, she sparred with Mu-cheon for several hours in the secluded courtyard. And in the evenings, the Lower Laboratory awaited her. The Great Bell tolled to announce the arrival of the morning sun, and Chae-ha was hungry to start a new day. The feeling of finally making real progress towards her goals was addicting.

She still had debts to repay, and it finally felt like she was saving up some of the necessary currency. The dull pain from the welts Mu-cheon's strikes had left on her body felt like victory. But first, there was work to do. Today, the young Inspector would be visiting the Treasury again. For the last several days, she'd been carefully vetting their records, cross-checking accounts against each other, and verifying the actual inventory held in storage. So far, everything she'd found had been normal.

There had been some small errors, but they were all within expected tolerances. The grain inventory roughly matched the reports, commodities like wood and iron were where they were supposed to be, and all the silver seemed to be meticulously accounted for. As Chae-ha walked across the stone pathway to her destination, she saw the Disciplinary Court in the distance and shuddered.

It seemed no progress had been made in their attempts to force a confession, despite the muffled screams she sometimes heard coming from the building. Mu-cheon's warning of a purge rang loudly in her ears. The young girl arrived at the building, a squat but functional stone compound containing a variety of poorly lit storage rooms. Within was a treasure trove of commodities – literally everything the sect needed for its daily operations.

Dry goods were kept on the ground level, while underground cellars kept safe anything that required temperature control. The records were updated and maintained in a large filing room at the back of the complex; that was Chae-ha's current destination. Normally, people were required to enter the room in pairs… but as an official Inspector, she was an exception. A well-muscled clerk stood before the large double door that marked the entrance to the structure, looking bored.

Chae-ha showed him her Inspector's seal, causing the man to immediately stand aside and bow. She quickly tucked it back into her robes for safekeeping and entered the building, making her way through the claustrophobic corridors to reach her target in the back. As she entered the musty filing room, the young girl started to relax. The scents of ink and dust filled her nostrils, old friends that felt like home.

She began retrieving large gatherings from the shelves, each secured by a stiff, brown, persimmon-washed cover. These were the working documents the clerks at the Treasury used. At the end of the quarter, they would all be bundled up and sent to the Archives for review, binding, and long-term storage. Charcoal, wood, iron, oil, millet, rice – if it was dispensed daily to anyone in the sect, the most recent transactions would be recorded here.

Chae-ha opened up the first folder, the pages inside only loosely stitched to the cover. It contained dozens of ledger pages documenting the status of the sect's barley stocks. She began to sum up the dense lists of incoming and outgoing values in her head, while making note of particularly large transactions to follow up on later. After processing the records of several other commodities, the young girl pulled down another gathering, this one for seed oils.

She opened the volume and began processing it, exactly like she had the others. As she worked her way through the entries, a familiar but unexpected earthy scent wafted up, teasing her palate with the promise of sweetness. Chae-ha's mouth watered almost instinctively. As a lover of acorn jelly, she would know that smell anywhere.

"Perilla oil…? Why…?" She held the book and the page she was inspecting up to the candlelight. The soft glow illuminated several dried, greasy dots that seemed out of place. She had seen a thousand smudges in a thousand ledgers before, but normally they were made from ink, not oil. She turned the page a few times and found another one, and then eventually another, and finally another. The occasional drips of dried oil reoccurred periodically, each time separated by a few clean sheets.

The stains were all but invisible unless one was either looking for them – or had a sweet tooth. Chae-ha sat back in her chair, slightly confused for a moment. Her eyes slowly widened as realization dawned. Tracing paper. Someone had used tracing paper to copy all the entries for the previous two months, leaving occasional evidence of their theft behind.

She checked for indentations on each of the otherwise clean pages, and her suspicions were confirmed when she found marks on all of them, confirming they had all been copied. It was an old archivist's trick; if someone was in a hurry to make a duplicate of something, the fastest way to do so was to take a thin sheet of paper and smear it with oil, turning it transparent. The translucent sheet could then be overlayed on another page, allowing the data to be copied relatively quickly by tracing over the original.

In this manner, a clerk in a rush could trace two or three pages in the time it would normally take to transcribe one. But who would want to make an illicit copy of seed oil dispensations, and why? The only thing it was really used for was fueling lanterns, but most of the sect relied on candles. Lanterns were really only carried around by the night watchmen… A cold chill of understanding washed over her. Chae-ha stood up and backed away from the table, staring down at the book with mounting horror.

With access to the withdrawal data, and some basic knowledge about oil burn rates, someone could figure out how many guards were assigned each night… and with what frequency they were completing their rounds. In short: it would be possible to recreate the guard rotation schedule. The traitor wasn't some high-level official in the Disciplinary Court; they were here – in the Treasury. Elder Noh was trying to extract a confession from innocent men, with methods that were becoming increasingly desperate.

And it was only a matter of time until he succeeded. Chae-ha's heart began beating rapidly in sudden panic. She needed to warn the Obsidian Palace, immediately! Before the elder successfully tortured a confession from an innocent man… … and the real culprit, who was somewhere in this building with her, got away.