Il-gyu and the National Intelligence Service he led showed no sign of slowing their charge.
After all, the essence of the National Intelligence Service was information.
Normally they were buried under work, but if they set their minds to it, there was no way to evade their eyes anywhere on Korean soil.
And with all the information they uncovered, Il-gyu exercised the king's authority.
No matter who the target was.
No matter how high or low their position.
No matter how much wealth they possessed.
He dragged them all before his own tribunal and demanded payment for their crimes.
As expected, there was no way this could pass without backlash.
In politics, they immediately denounced Il-gyu's actions as no different from tyranny.
They pressured the National Intelligence Service from every direction and threw everything they had into shrinking its power.
The business world did the same, mobilizing every means at its disposal.
They even used the connections they had built over the years to drag foreign forces into the country, desperately trying to pin down the National Intelligence Service's rampage and Il-gyu, the king.
But—
"Does a person stop eating meat just because livestock bark?"
Ah, there were people these days who even claimed animals had human rights.
But this was even below that.
It was more like a quarantine operation to protect the animal called humanity.
When a plague spread through livestock, the basic principle was to slaughter the entire herd for the sake of the other animals.
By Il-gyu's standards, they were barely human at all, and even then they were diseased ones.
And he wasn't even carefully hunting each one down and killing them on the spot; he was going to the trouble of extracting the karmic debt equal to the sins they had committed.
He was already showing more than enough mercy.
As proof, since the cleaning began, Il-gyu could not remember sleeping more than three hours a day.
From the very fact that he had called their actions a desperate struggle, it was clear their resistance was effectively meaningless.
"This is the law of the jungle you people love so much, isn't it? If you can stop me, then stop me with strength."
The National Intelligence Service was unmatched in Korea.
The only things that could even be compared to it were the Central Security Bureau, established directly under the Blue House to protect politics from the underhanded schemes of the underworld, and the secret security divisions cultivated by Taeseong Group and MH Company, the first and second largest conglomerates.
In Taeseong's case especially, the owner family was the Han clan, one of the few families in Korea that could truly be called a great house, so their underlying strength was considerable.
Even so, that was only comparable.
It still could not reach the National Intelligence Service.
"Confirmed defiance of the king's decree. Sweep them away."
"W-wait... how can you do this to fellow Koreans—"
"If you hate the temple, then the monk should have left. The fact that His Majesty became the king of this land means he became its master. Did you think you could oppose the master's will and pay no price?"
"We never acknowledged that kind of king!"
"Do you think this kind of tyranny can ever be forgiven?!"
Those who resisted the National Intelligence Service agents in every possible way were cut down one by one by Supernatural Team 4, including Choi Hana.
Swish!
"Who do you think you're talking to, saying you acknowledge him or don't? He doesn't need the approval of trash like you. And it's not you who gets to talk about forgiveness—it's us."
The Central Security Bureau surrendered first, and before long.
In the first place, whether it was the National Intelligence Service or the Central Security Bureau, they were both part of the same state.
There had never been any reason for them to clash.
The problem was that the Central Security Bureau was so deeply entangled with politics that, unlike the National Intelligence Service, it had become another kind of rotten stagnant pool.
It was routine for senior officials in the bureau to take under-the-table money from political figures, lend them their power, or handle petty favors.
In particular, it was a group where political influence seeped far too deeply into promotions.
In the end, the heads who had stuffed their pockets were the problem.
Once Il-gyu had dealt with most of them, they crawled before the king on their own.
They begged him to spare their lives, promising they would accept any punishment.
But—
"You're making a very serious mistake."
"Pardon?"
"You didn't seriously think this was some kind of power struggle within Korea, did you? A fight over who gets to hold Korea's hegemony, or something like that."
"......."
"If that were all it was, why would I sit still? I'd just go over there and crush the whole lot of you."
This was judgment.
Condemnation for their karma.
And beyond that, a warning to the people in the supernatural world: live with at least the bare minimum of common sense and decency.
It was nothing more than the process of normalization.
"Surrender? There's no such thing. If your crimes are many, then you pay for many. If they're few, then you pay for few. If you have none, then all the better."
It was simply a procedure called confiscation.
"What you'll be doing is not surrender, but explanation. I'll decide whether there are grounds for leniency."
My justice for you people who have lived outside the law until now.
There are no exceptions.
He had said no matter how high or low their position was.
That applied not only to the "high," but to the "low" as well.
Even the lowest-ranking people who had learned sorcery or awakened supernatural powers were, by ordinary standards, all superhuman.
And just as small grime lodged in cracks is harder to scrape away than a large stain, Il-gyu truly did not make a single exception for anyone as he advanced step by step.
Watching this scene, foreign nations had no choice but to tremble.
They had thought a normal human becoming a god-slayer was strange enough, but Il-gyu was also a Devil King.
They could once again feel just how much of a madman he was.
"All god-slayers are obsessed with one thing."
"The Marquis is obsessed with hunting. The Cult Leader with inaction."
"The Sword King longs for struggle, and the Black Prince cannot hide his curiosity."
"What is the king of Korea obsessed with? Justice?"
"He resembles the Plutocrat, but his nature is different."
The king of America, John Pluto Smith.
He and Il-gyu both hated evil, but the standard by which they judged evil was different.
More precisely, Il-gyu's standard was far stricter.
John executed sorcerers, criminals who used supernatural powers to harm people, and villains.
Il-gyu, on the other hand, naturally dealt with those verminous trash as well.
He even dragged before his tribunal those who pursued unjust private gain and caused indirect harm to innocent others, then demanded payment for their karma.
"In truth, the one who respects order is clearly the king of Korea..."
"Yes. The Plutocrat acts to punish evil, but he himself still stands outside the law."
"But the one shaking order itself is still the king of Korea?"
"A society that develops day by day, and the underworld that still carries the stains of the past. The disorder born from that gap. I think he wants to tear out that gap itself and remake it."
"A dangerous man."
"Not necessarily. He is certainly different from the other Devil Kings. He seems to know how to distinguish right from wrong, and he seems able to look around him too."
As if to prove it, Il-gyu was not focused solely on cleaning.
What he was doing was normalization.
Cleaning was only a part of it, only a process.
Il-gyu was running while recognizing the chaos and damage he himself had caused, and doing his utmost to repair it within the limits of what he could manage.
The reason he could barely sleep three hours a day was, in truth, more because of this than because of the trials.
That was precisely why the National Intelligence Service followed him with such loyalty.
In any case, with the Central Security Bureau lost as a bulwark, politics completely surrendered to Il-gyu.
They had realized resistance itself was meaningless.
And Il-gyu was not so extreme that he thought everyone should be cut down; for those whose crimes were not severe, it was better to pay their dues and at least keep their positions.
He could not purge every worker in the machinery of the state, so for those who had not crossed the line, he punished them appropriately, then allowed them to return to office after they had cleaned up their own mess and apologized.
Of course, those who had crossed that line were all sent straight to hell without exception.
Those who felt the heat under their own feet tried to flee overseas.
They were all caught at airports and harbors and subjected to confiscation, with added punishment for their insolence.
"What about Taeseong and MH?"
"They've taken radically different positions."
"Taeseong seems to have chosen compliance. They're following the investigation and enforcement without any real resistance."
"MH, on the other hand, is resisting fiercely. They must know they have no chance of winning... and yet for some reason, it looks like they're dragging things out."
"In Taeseong's case, I suspect the reason is that the owner family, the Han clan, has its roots in Korea. Even if they shed a great deal of blood, so long as the line survives, they'll have secured a foundation to grow under the king's protection."
"MH is, in truth, only Korean by origin; it's closer to a multinational corporation."
"Taken as a whole, only 23.3 percent of its shares are Korean-owned, and the rest are all foreign-owned. In particular, the shares owned by China and Japan are close to 60 percent."
Strange.
Taeseong, at least, could be understood.
As the saying went, once this storm passed, they would gain a foothold to grow in the land where Il-gyu, a king, had been born.
Besides, no matter how thoroughly they were scrubbed, no one could ever challenge their position as the number one conglomerate in Korea.
Even if they were cut down, the group itself could still use this as an opportunity to rise anew.
And in the first place, they too had suffered from the long-standing evils and abuses.
But MH?
What was that?
It wasn't even really a Korean company?
Then they should be even more relieved.
Like Taeseong, their position as Korea's second-largest conglomerate was untouchable.
And unlike Taeseong, if the true owners of the group were scattered overseas, then all they had to do was take one clean blow, reorganize the house, and be done with it.
If they were going to resist, it would have made more sense for Taeseong, whose owner would have to bleed.
MH had no reason to do so, especially not against a king.
"There's a smell here. Where do you think it's coming from?"
"Japan."
"Most of MH's Japanese holdings belong to the Four Great Families."
"Uhara, Sayanomiya, Nagi, Seishuin... I've been feeling this since before. Am I the only one?"
"No, we share the same opinion."
Those bastards... they have no intention of fighting among themselves.
Unity.
Whatever it was, it seemed they had already formed a bloc among themselves.
They had come to Korea bragging about fierce competition, and now suddenly this?
"Could it be because of me?"
No, the signs had been there before that.
More than anything, they did not even regard Japan's king as a king.
There was no way they would unite under the Japanese king and rise against Korea.
After a brief moment of thought, Il-gyu quickly sorted out his thoughts and spoke.
"I'll go. Let's finish the MH matter quickly and cleanly. We can't give time to people who are trying to buy time."
"Yes!"
"And please look into the situation inside Japan as well. I have a bad feeling about this."
The god-slayer's intuition was no longer something so simple that it could be called mere intuition; it was a supernatural power in itself.
Realizing the seriousness of the situation, the National Intelligence Service immediately began investigating Japan.