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Chapter 53
In this land called Joseon, there was only one path to earn an official position: the state examination.
It was also the only gateway to rise in social rank.
The three hundred people gathered here were those who had survived that murderous competition to reach this place.
They were the chosen few, those who had studied like madmen, driven to exhaustion, to one day become officials of the court.
To become those who would lead the Joseon of the future.
Thud—!
Yet before them now stood something strange, a gleaming black visor that shimmered with an eerie light.
“Uh… Senior?”
“What is this? It looks like something meant to be worn on the face, but…”
The extravagant welcoming ceremony, the kind none of them had ever experienced before, had just ended.
When one of them picked up the helmet laid before him and asked, the official—whom everyone respectfully addressed as “senior”—curled his lips into a crooked smile as he looked around at the newly appointed candidates assembled inside Gyeonghoeru Pavilion.
“You’ve been spouting nonsense since earlier. Calling me your senior and such.”
“P–pardon?”
“S–senior? What are you suddenly saying?”
“I mean exactly what I said. I’m not your senior. Your true seniors... are these people.”
At those words, one of the palace servants—who had been silently attending to them all along—stepped forward.
That servant had been working without uttering a single word, like a machine following preprogrammed instructions.
It was only then that the successful candidates realized something horrifying—
The helmet on that servant’s head was the same as the one in their own hands.
“W–what?”
“Wait, that thing…!”
“Now you’re finally starting to understand?”
The official shook his head slowly and looked down upon the assembled candidates.
“From this moment on, you are assigned to the Department of the Royal Palace! This is your official headgear—the one you’ll wear for life!”
For life.
Before they could even comprehend the weight of those words, the man continued, his tone like a grim verdict.
“Once worn, it will fuse permanently to your head. You will never be able to remove it again. The mechanical system inside will extract your eyes and remove your vocal cords! From this moment forth, you will never speak again—
Nor will you ever see again!”
“……!”
“W–what did you just say?!”
Extract the eyes. Remove the vocal cords.
The horrifying words turned their faces ashen.
“W–why would you do something so monstrous?!”
“That is precisely why you were brought here through the state examination. You’ll understand the details once you wear your headgear.”
Of course, the noblemen watching from the upper floor already knew the reason.
King Yi Cheolheon, who guarded the Geunjeongjeon as a living corpse, surrounded by life-support machines, needed caretakers to maintain both his decaying body and the royal body of His Majesty.
‘The nobles don’t want to spend their lives cleaning corpses. But letting machines handle royal maintenance might risk a hacking incident…’
If they couldn’t entrust such a sacred task to machines, the solution was simple—
Turn people into machines.
For that absurd reason, they mutilated the eyes and voices of Joseon’s brightest minds.
The long-abolished Eunuch Bureau, which King Yi Cheolheon himself had once dissolved, had now returned in its most horrifying form.
“Your mission is simple. Follow the commands projected into your brain. Do only as you’ve been trained! Until the day you die of old age, that will be the only thing you are capable of doing!”
“W–wait! Please, just wait—!”
Unable to bear hearing any more, one of the new officials cried out.
“Speak.”
The overseer looked amused, as though even this desperate outburst was routine.
“What… what is all this? The Department of the Royal Palace—this is what its officials do?!”
“All who are assigned to the Department of the Royal Palace meet this same fate.”
A twisted logic.
For the lower-born, the Department of the Royal Palace was the only division they could ever enter through the state exam.
“Then…!”
They should have been grinding their teeth at the insult of being called “commoners,” but even that seemed impossible in the face of sheer terror.
One candidate, pale-faced and trembling, asked again,
“Then why… why did we take that hellish exam? Why endure that cruel competition?”
“……”
“If all you needed were blind, voiceless slaves—why did we study until our minds broke? Why fight our way here through that inferno of ambition?!”
Even as their words exposed the sheer absurdity of it all—the mutilation of their own bodies, the stripping away of sight and speech—
None of them realized the most tragic truth of all:
It was already far too late.
Those Without Power Are Always the Ones Who Lose Everything.
The official, hands clasped behind his back, spoke curtly.
“Still, even if they’re just servants of the palace, we can’t use illiterates who don’t even know their letters, can we?”
“W–what…?”
“Besides,” he continued, “to master the complex etiquette of the royal court, one must be intelligent. That’s why we deliberately selected you through the state examination and brought you here.”
A suffocating silence fell.
But the official, as if long accustomed to such tension, went on with a faint, mocking smile.
“Or did you think you commoners would sit beside us during royal assemblies and engage in politics? There’s talk in the markets that the lower classes have forgotten their place, truly laughable.”
His voice carried a heavy weariness, his laughter an aimless sneer directed at no one in particular.
With that murky disdain in his eyes, the official looked down upon the candidates.
“You thought that effort alone, regardless of status, could earn you recognition? That you could rise to high office just because you studied hard? You fools actually believed that ‘a dragon could rise from a ditch’? You street-born worms thought such sweet dreams were meant for you? Preposterous!”
He spat out the last word like venom, then declared:
“This country, Joseon, belongs to the noble class!! It is the nobles who preserve it, who prosper it, who rule it according to their will! That is the essence of Joseon! You, without a shred of aura force, are nothing but the common rabble who eat what we allow from above. Do you understand me?”
“……!”
The fiery resolve that had burned among the successful candidates vanished without a trace.
What remained was thick despair—
A suffocating helplessness filled their faces.
“If you cannot accept this,” the official said, settling lazily onto the floor with a sigh, “you may leave the palace right now. I’ll permit that much… but understand this.”
“...”
“If you walk out of here, your success in the state examination will be erased. You’ll return to being the same lowborn drudges you were before.”
“……!”
“The money your parents scraped together by pawning their own bodies just to fund your studies… will be as good as trash.”
To take the state examination required a fortune.
For the poor, parents often mortgaged everything, even their own flesh, just to give their children a chance.
And since there were no second chances after failure, these successful examinees knew better than anyone what had become of those they’d competed against.
“But don’t worry.”
The official’s tone softened slightly as he looked at the bowed heads before him.
“If you wear this helmet and become a palace servant, you will officially become part of the royal bureaucracy. You’ll receive a salary generous enough to repay all your parents’ losses—and far more.”
His voice grew gentle, almost like that of a parent soothing a frightened child.
“Your parents and families will escape their wretched poverty. They’ll live out their later years in comfort and peace. And not only that—your sons will be exempted from military service, and even those of slave origin may, upon review, be freed from bondage.”
“……!”
“If you dedicate your lives, your loved ones will live in safety. I can guarantee at least that much.”
The official’s lips twisted as he spoke his final words to the trembling candidates.
“Now, make your choice.”
The dreadful choice pressed down on them like a physical weight.
“Will you become palace servants—or will you turn away and continue living the life of worms?”
No one knew how much time passed after those words.
Clack.
One by one, and then another, the candidates silently placed the samo on their heads.
With their own hands, they donned the device that would tear out their eyes, deafen their ears, and rip out their voices.
A horrifying yet resolute decision.
The official overseeing the induction watched without a flicker of expression.
It was always the same.
For over three hundred years, not a single person had ever refused this offer.
“Welcome to the palace.”
Crack—!
The palace was filled with the spine-chilling whine of machinery.
“……!”
“……! ………!”
They screamed—but the samo’s voice-control mechanism crushed their cries.
Unable even to scream, the new servants collapsed and writhed in agony.
Watching that sight, I noticed something appear in my visual interface—
The rank assigned for today’s appointment ceremony.
“Sixth Class, Inspector Candidate.”
It was the rank granted to the top scorer of the state examination.
The irony?
Unlike them…
I had never even set foot inside the examination hall.
* * *
“That concludes the induction ceremony.”
The moment the official called out into the air, a group of figures entered from below the banquet hall.
They wore the same black helmets as the unconscious candidates sprawled across the floor.
These were the true “seniors”—the palace servants of the Department of the Royal Palace.
“Take them away. There are more recruits than usual this quarter… you’ll have plenty to do.”
“……”
At his command, they bowed respectfully and began collecting their new subordinates one by one.
They grabbed the convulsing bodies with mechanical precision and shoved them into transport drones, their movements devoid of even a shred of humanity.
Dragged by those cold, gloved hands, the newly “initiated” officials were carried off to some unknown place.
Packed into cargo-lifting drones like discarded freight, the term “collection” felt far more fitting than “assistance.”
Not a single drop of blood was spilled, and that eerie cleanliness only made the entire spectacle more chilling.
“Ah, so this is how officials are produced. My father once mentioned it in passing… but to see it in person, it’s… quite something.”
“Senior,” another voice asked cautiously, “what happens to them now?”
At that question from one of the genuine “junior officials,” the official who had come upstairs replied in a calm tone.
“The first stage of processing is handled by the machinery on their heads. But that alone isn’t perfect. Soon, they’ll be taken to a special training facility within the Department of the Royal Palace. There, they’ll undergo complete conditioning and acquire the technical skills needed to maintain His Majesty’s sacred body.”
“Training, you say?”
“Hmm? Ah, right. I suppose that part’s technically under media restriction.”
He muttered to himself, then continued casually, as if it were nothing of consequence.
“The palace runs a specialized re-education program. Their brains are disassembled down to the cellular level. In place of what’s removed, we implant artificial neurons containing the required knowledge, along with emotion-control systems and cognitive suppression devices.”
“…Ho.”
“Once memory alteration is complete,” he went on lightly, “they probably won’t even recognize their own parents. Not that it matters—they’ll never set foot outside the palace again.”
Just hearing it was enough to make one’s stomach twist, but the noble-born onlookers showed no sign of disgust.
Their only concern was the official ranks they had received that day—
And the wealth and privileges those ranks would soon bring.
But then—
BOOM—!
Someone burst through the crowd of noble youths and lunged at the official, his fist wreathed in pure aura force.
It was Jeong Jihoon.
He swung with all his might, but his fist never connected.
“You must be bold indeed,” said the official, effortlessly catching the attack, “to strike an overseer before the induction ceremony is even over.”
Jihoon’s arm trembled, locked in place by the man’s grip.
While his face contorted with fury, the official remained utterly calm—
As still and composed as stone.
---The End Of The Chapter---
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