540.he Ten Great Houses had turned into fear,
By the end of that single day, the collapse of the aristocratic clans was already visible.
The arrogance of the Ten Great Houses had turned into fear,
and that fear had led directly to disintegration.
The time it took for that transformation was exactly one day.
After that day, the atmosphere of Gaegyeong changed completely.
The age of hereditary aristocrats came to a close,
and large-scale military reorganization and land reform stepped out of theory and into reality.
Park Seong-jin processed all of it as if it were just a day's work.
That, more than raw power itself, left the deepest impression.
A human being who wielded overwhelming force as a matter of routine—
that attitude pressed down harder than violence ever could.
Yet that day did not bring the entire affair to a close.
From that point on, the real full-scale struggle began.
After dismantling the Ten Great Houses,
the task facing Park Seong-jin and the court was more exhausting than open combat.
Breaking gates and forcing knees to the ground only had to happen once.
After that came a bloodless war of attrition, repeated day after day.
Wherever Park Seong-jin's group reached, aristocratic land came under investigation.
Encroached estates were separated one by one and absorbed into state ownership.
The farmers who actually worked those fields saw their tax rates adjusted to one or two tenths,
and for the first time in decades, their livelihoods recovered.
At first, the reaction was disbelief.
The news of lower taxes spread first as rumor.
"Is it really one tenth?"
"At two tenths, we can live."
When laughter burst out, some wept.
Some dropped to their knees.
They began to call the king a true sovereign.
As praise grew louder, resentment accumulated alongside it.
Those who had lost land,
the great families who had lost slaves and private armies,
those who watched their clans collapse—
they looked at the new king with sharpened eyes.
"That king cuts down nobles."
"He is turning the world upside down."
Praise and hatred swelled together within the same country.
Such sharp contrast always carried danger.
If peace was built atop someone's tears,
even those who benefited could not affirm it without hesitation.
Park Seong-jin understood that question more clearly than anyone.
So he deliberately kept his distance.
He stayed in the northern palace gardens, quietly observing the flow below.
When he went out to handle a matter, he handed it over to Yun Dam the moment he returned and stepped back.
The leisure he showed on the surface was a thorough disguise.
In truth, he never let go of battlefield tension for a single moment.
Where resistance was beginning to sprout.
Who was passing funds to whom.
Which documents vanished without warning.
Which slaves were being moved in secret.
All of it moved before swords ever did.
Park Seong-jin was a man who had learned that order with his body.
After two of the Samhan armored clans were crushed, the rest knelt on their own.
The direction set by the king and Yun Dam was clear:
no hesitation in enforcement, but always linked back into policy.
The force backing that direction was overwhelmingly sufficient.
In the past, such a moment would have sparked backlash, counterstrikes, and political warfare.
This time, no one dared to move easily.
Most of the practical work thereafter fell to the Office of Land and Population Rectification.
Transfer of land titles.
Verification of ownership changes.
Restoration of status to those forced into slavery.
Examination of certificates submitted by nobles.
Reassignment of former private soldiers.
The process had no visible end.
The problem was that every procedure was difficult.
Places where documents were tangled beyond reason.
Points where testimonies contradicted each other.
Cases where illegality layered itself beneath the shell of legality.
Instances where nobles hid the records themselves.
Each time, the office staff let out deep breaths.
In the end, one name was called.
Park Seong-jin.
When he arrived on site, resistance subsided and documents emerged.
Those who had held out surrendered in turn.
That was the role entrusted to him.
As reform deepened, bribes hurled themselves at officials like spears.
Offers grew blatant.
Words became ever more refined.
Contrary to hopes that the state would grow sturdier,
the intensity of temptation rose by the day.
Officials felt suffocated.
They knew more clearly than anyone that being caught meant losing everything.
"If you look the other way today, we'll give up part of our land."
"The slaves are family. We never took them by force."
"The documents are wrong—it's a mistake, just a small mistake."
Under Park Seong-jin's gaze, no one chose corruption lightly.
His eyes were not those of an inspector, but of a battlefield commander.
A sense that a single small deviation could trigger collapse lay heavy over the ground.
The nobles repeated the same words to the end.
"Our slaves are family."
"We treated them well."
Park Seong-jin left those words as nothing more than their own reasoning.
The seat of a politician,
the seat of an administrator,
the seat of a civil official—
none of those were his place.
He did not cross that line.
He remained only as the one who resolved the most dangerous moments
that the Office of Land and Population Rectification could not bear alone.
An unseen force.
The final resolver.
Not reaching beyond that was the rule he set for himself.
He called it knowing one's place.
Yet that "place" held enough power
to dismantle ten of the greatest houses in a single day.