"Dan Mok-young, the second son of the Dan clan, is hereby enfeoffed as junhou (lord) and granted the rank of empress. Furthermore, he is bound in marriage to Prince Go Hae-gang of Namwi Kingdom — let the wedding rites be held."
The imperial edict came down — addressed to Dan Mok-young, second son of the Dan clan, the Northern Wei general who had swept the heavens and earned brilliant merit. He appeared and vanished like a ghost, and his mere presence made enemy soldiers tremble like aspen leaves; so fierce and ruthless was his might that people called him the "Ghost King." That the Emperor would order such a man among men to wed the neighboring kingdom's prince — the command alone was enough to set the entire marketplace abuzz within three hours.
Dan Mok-young. Only he remained calm and serene amid the uproar.
"Still — for it to be His Majesty's command, isn't this a bit much?" said the man walking beside Mok-young, Ju Gyeong-son. He was the Emperor's half-brother and Mok-young's cousin. The two walked down the main road side by side. Gyeong-son held the rank of "Junwang," so by rights more guards ought to have followed him, but he found escorts a nuisance when meeting his cousin and brought no one along. Mok-young alone was enough.
The dread name "Ghost King" came from more than just his terror on the battlefield. It was the fact that he was the only living master of the ultimate martial art known as the "Hyeong-eum Art" that made him so feared. Even if some master came seeking the life of the Junwang — the Emperor's younger brother — with Mok-young at his side, no one could have been a match for him. Not that a Junwang with no sharp edges to him was likely to have anyone gunning for his life in particular.
"You said it yourself just now. 'His Majesty's command,'" Mok-young said easily to Gyeong-son. By the rules of propriety he ought to have used honorifics with a Junwang, but the retired emperor still lived… and ever since Gyeong-son had been called a prince, he had asked Mok-young not to stand on ceremony with him. Life in the imperial palace was suffocating enough; piling formalities on top would have made it unlivable. When others were present, Mok-young of course observed propriety for the sake of the Junwang's dignity, but alone together they behaved like nothing more than close friends.
"I mean… ugh. You know exactly what I mean, don't you?" Gyeong-son started to retort, then gave up with a frustrated sigh and fell silent. In truth, the Emperor's command had already come down. With the edict issued, it could not be rescinded. Gyeong-son knew well that neither Mok-young nor even he, a Junwang, had the power to overturn it. So his frustration came from that very helplessness. It was a pity close to powerlessness — there was nothing to be done but accept this wedding.
"So… do you know what kind of person Namwi's fifth prince is?" Gyeong-son spoke up again. The imperial command couldn't be helped, fine — but he was curious whether Mok-young knew anything at all about the person he alone was about to marry. Though, knowing Mok-young, he probably hadn't even thought to look into such things.
Mok-young was an exceedingly loyal subject. Moreover, he and the Emperor had been close companions since childhood — practically bosom friends. Which was exactly why Gyeong-son found it all the more incomprehensible. Given how close the two of them were, the Emperor ought to have considered Mok-young's circumstances a little more. And yet here he was, ordered to take a neighboring kingdom's prince as his bride — or his groom. Where was the dignity of a general whose might ranked among the top five in all of Northern Wei supposed to go?
Anyway, such circumstances were precisely what made Mok-young obey the Emperor's word without a murmur, and in obeying the imperial command, who he was marrying didn't matter. There was no point wasting effort on something that couldn't be argued against — he wasn't Sojeong. At times like this, Gyeong-son had no choice but to serve as Mok-young's eyes and ears.
"I… only say this so you don't get a shock later…"
"What — that I'd do better to envy your looks, when I'm only half as handsome as you and can't even talk properly?"
Gyeong-son was fumbling out his words when Mok-young cut his efforts short. More startled by what came out of Mok-young's mouth than by anything that had come before, Gyeong-son's eyes went round as he stared at him.
"No — you knew already?"
At Gyeong-son's question, thrown as if he truly hadn't expected it, Mok-young let out a hollow laugh. There was no feeling in the laughter that settled, like a sigh escaping — "ha."
"I do have ears, you know."
In fact, Mok-young — who spent every day rubbing shoulders with soldiers, unlike a Junwang who rarely had cause to draw near his own person — would have access to far more news. He simply had no interest in the rumors drifting through the markets and never bothered to dig them up; but stories concerning himself, the kind that reached the heavens, he picked up vaguely all the same. And the tales people tried to tell him were, one and all, so lurid that even though he still paid them little mind, they were provocative enough that once heard, they were hard to forget.
Namwi's fifth prince, Go Hae-gang, had turned twenty-seven this year — something of a miracle, they said — and was a man of unsound health. Everyone had said he wouldn't live past twenty, yet he had. Such talk had apparently been going around long before that, too: at twenty-four they said he wouldn't see twenty-four, yet he turned twenty-five. It seemed that ever since the age of ten, for over ten years, he had just barely been hanging on like that.
In short — a prince at death's door, who could hardly be said to function as a person: His Highness the complete invalid. It was a mystery why they would marry off such a person — a neighbor, yes, but into a foreign land — and yet, broken as he was, the rank of prince carried its own duties and responsibilities. For the sake of the nation's fortunes, even if it meant leaving his homeland to meet his death in a foreign land, he had to do as he was told.
The other side had already received its imperial command as well. This was, strictly speaking, a state marriage agreed upon by the courts of both nations.
"…With the aim of stopping this wretched war that torments the people of our two lands and forging peace…"
"So — you know all that and you're still this calm?" Gyeong-son let out a hollow "huh" of a laugh at the end of his words. There was admiration in that laugh. And since Mok-young knew all these circumstances and still uttered not a word of complaint, there was nothing more to be done.
The imperial command had already come down, and there was no undoing it. Even if they had asked around plainly, there wouldn't have been anyone fit to marry the neighboring kingdom's prince. If they had truly set their minds to it they might have dredged up one or two, but the rumors about Namwi's Go Hae-gang were already widespread, and since he wasn't particularly outstanding either, every family with a suitable daughter weighed their child's future and fled, breaking off engagements.
Then they might have turned to eum-in men instead — but that side of things was even more difficult. Eum-in or not, they were still men, so their parents would hardly hand over their sons, producing every manner of excuse. And if they went to the trouble of marrying a son off only for the prince to die soon after, their own child would be left in a wretched state — so resistance was strong.
And so, the one eum-in man who would obediently go through with such a marriage at the Emperor's word was Dan Mok-young, and no one else.
"Just suffer through a couple of years, Mok-young."
The Northern Wei Emperor, Ju Geon-yang, said as much to Mok-young too. The fellow wouldn't live long anyway, so just go through the motions for a while; once he was gone, he promised to personally find Mok-young a truly good match and wed him properly.
Whether Ju Geon-yang was truly the sort to keep his promise after the wedding was doubtful, but Mok-young said nothing about that either. What did it matter how things turned out? Lately Mok-young had not been well in body or spirit, and had no leisure to care about other trifles. His natural indifference only deepened.
Two years, turmoil, or whatever came after . If it was a bond destined to last only that long, there was nothing to cling to.
While everyone, on the eve of the Ghost King's wedding, busied themselves attaching every speculation to the "Ghost King's bride" — who carried an armful of ominous rumors befitting the Ghost King's name — the principals of the wedding themselves were indifferent to it all.
"They say he's fated to die young."
"If he's fated to die young, how's he lived more than ten years? Isn't that a tenacious lifeline?"
"Ah, but he's a prince of a nation, isn't he? Fed all the finest medicines, he can hang on that long."
"Pah… he's a walking corpse, body and all."
"He only lives because he can't die — of course."
"Ugh, gives me chills. Can he even marry, looking like that? He can't even function as a man."
"What… so they're marrying him off, but can he even bear children?"
"What are you on about? Don't you know the General is an eum-in?"
"Tsk — the General was once a man overflowing with yang energy, but all because of that damned pride of his, now he's an eum-in, suffering this humiliation."
"Still, he's the only one to have completed the divine art. They say his yang energy is undiminished."
"Ugh — one's neither man nor eum-in, the other's a living corpse just waiting to die. Talk about—
"Well, it's a meeting of 'ghosts,' you could say. A match made in heaven, truly."
A few middle-aged men who had been silently watching Mok-young walk by with Gyeong-son huddled together, muttering. Their words were terribly irreverent, though not loud enough to reach Mok-young's ears. And since most everyone present was busy gossiping about the same story, the men didn't think there was anything wrong with what they were saying. Still, the only reason they lowered their voices to avoid catching the General's eye was purely that he was "frightening."
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