Chapter 1
It had been eighteen years since I was reincarnated in Joseon.
When I first reincarnated, I was so furious at being ripped away from my previous life that I was ready to explode, and it was incredibly inconvenient not having things like refrigerators or smartphones, which anyone in the modern era takes for granted.
No, all I did was refute the nonsense the head mod on the gallery spouted about King Sejong being an economic expert with a long, logically structured rebuttal of about 5,700 characters.
Then, all of a sudden, my computer shut off and my consciousness faded.
When I finally came to and opened my eyes, I found myself born into a noble Joseon family, of all things.
Whoever reincarnated me must have had at least a shred of conscience left, because the Gimhae Kim clan I was born into was, without any official post to its name, a true silver-spoon family.
If I had been born into an ordinary commoner family...
Just thinking about it is horrifying.
"What on earth are you thinking about so intently, Young Master? Even someone like you gets nervous at the palace examination before His Majesty?"
"I'm not especially nervous or anything. I've already passed both the preliminary and secondary rounds of the higher civil service exam; all that's left is the final test, where the rank you receive just depends on your placement. I just think I need to do my best and write down answers to whatever His Majesty asks."
"If you listen to the servants who attend the men who passed the exams in other noble households in our district, they all said their masters were biting their nails and couldn't hide their nerves the day before the palace exam... As expected, Young Master, you are truly bold."
"Bold, my foot. I just think I should do the best I can, that's all."
The time I had come to take the civil service exam was the early years of King Sejong's reign.
You could call it a peaceful era, the period often regarded as Joseon's most powerful time.
It was Joseon's golden age: no major wars like the ones at the end of Goryeo, expanding territory, lower taxes, and even the creation of the all-important Hunminjeongeum.
At the same time, for the ministers it was a hellish era of endless late nights, overtime, and brutally high standards of work. Talents like Hwang Hui, Maeng Sa-seong, and Jang Yeong-sil were ground down so badly it was heartbreaking to see...
As someone who knew history, I had absolutely no intention of suffering the same abuse they did.
Why would I be crazy enough to live like Hwang Hui, asking to resign only to be rejected every time? Not a chance.
"Still, I'm expecting Young Master to place first. Weren't you always called a prodigy in Yanggu?"
"I'd wager there's not a single person who passes the exams without being called a prodigy in their hometown at least once."
"I don't know about the prodigies from other districts, but I have a feeling Young Master will definitely win top honors."
Top honors, my ass! I'm just planning to scribble down whatever I feel like saying, hand it in quickly, and get out.
If King Sejong singles you out, you won't even get to retire normally—you'll just be worked to the bone. But if you think about how much wealth our family already has... is there really any need to scramble for an official post just to gain more property and power?
We can just be satisfied with what we have and live comfortably.
Even if I don't pass with a high rank, I'll still have passed, so no one will call me a "jobless bum." And if I say I don't take office because I "don't want any part of that rotten political scene," the scholars in town will give me a thumbs-up and love it.
Because this is Joseon, the land of the scholar-officials.
This is a country where if you keep submitting loyal remonstrances to the king—say, a painstaking 5,700-character rebuttal—and they aren't accepted, you can still be praised just for saying, "I'm a loyal subject, but the king won't appoint me, so the world is truly in chaos."
"There are so many talented people in the country. There's no way a guy like me would place first."
"If someone like Young Master, who treats even a slave like me so well, became a prime minister, I think he'd become a great pillar of this nation."
I had lived in Joseon for eighteen years and had become a proper young master of a noble house. Even so, I simply couldn't bring myself to mistreat slaves, beat them, or look down on them.
But since Joseon is a Confucian country, treating slaves well isn't really considered a flaw...
Even within the household, I make sure our slaves' rights are protected as much as possible.
That's why Dolsoe can speak to me so casually like this.
While we were continuing our conversation, there was a knock at the door.
"Young Master, I've brought dinner. But I am truly sorry to ask, but I have one request. Would you be willing to share the room with another scholar?"
Even though my family was fairly wealthy, we didn't have a house in Hanyang.
We didn't have any relatives there that we knew of, so we were staying and eating at a commoner's house for pay...
Since it was exam season and people were flooding into Hanyang, it seemed there were more people like us relying on private homes for lodging. We had already paid for our room and board first, so even if we refused, it wouldn't really be a problem...
In any case, I wasn't planning to cram for the palace exam, and I didn't need a quiet room for studying, so what harm would there be in taking in one more person to share the room?
If we got along and could at least have someone to talk to, how nice would that be?
"...... I suppose I have no choice."
"Thank you so much, sir."
Once I gave my permission, two scholars came into the room.
One looked about my age and was rather plump, while the other looked like a natural-born general.
"Thank you for allowing us to share the room. I am Lee Wonjeong, here from Jeonju. The scholar beside me is Lee Manri; he came up from Jeonju with me to take the military examination."
But the scholar named Lee Wonjeong somehow looked familiar.
Was it because he was plump and seemed like a nice person? That thought crossed my mind, and then King Sejong's face from the ten-thousand-won bill suddenly overlapped with his. Still, well, they must just look alike.
If you look at it historically, King Sejong was exactly that age range at this point...
If he's a Jeonju Yi, then he would be a Jeonju Yi... no, maybe not—unless this were after the mid-Joseon period.
In early Joseon, anyone belonging to the Jeonju Yi clan was royalty.
Why would royalty come all the way up here from Jeonju? He must be someone from a different clan branch than that lookalike Jeonju Yi. There are plenty of people in the world with similar faces.
They say "better safe than sorry" can save a life, but the chance of something like that actually happening is almost nonexistent.
"What is your courtesy name?"
In Joseon, yangban never addressed one another by their given names.
In extreme cases, they even introduce themselves using only their courtesy names.
Only the king, one's father, and one's teacher are allowed to use a person's real name. For anyone else to bring up someone's given name is considered as rude as slapping them across the face.
So instead, they call each other by their courtesy names, which are basically nicknames.
"My courtesy name is Jangheon, and this one here is Wonjeong."
"And your courtesy name is..."
"Jukheon."
"How did Lord Jukheon come to Hanyang?"
"If you were born a scholar, shouldn't you pass the civil service exam, become a prime minister, and rise all the way to the post of Chief State Councilor, standing above all others?"
"You have a big dream."
"If you aim to draw a tiger, you'll at least end up drawing a cat. With the resolve to become a prime minister and devote myself to loyalty and patriotism for the country, I applied myself to my studies. And somehow, I managed to make it to the palace exam."
At the word "palace exam," Lee Wonjeong—the plump scholar—let his eyes shine.
"That's truly impressive. You look about my age, and yet you've already made it to the palace exam. You've succeeded in making your name and securing your place in the world."
"You're too kind."
"Since the palace exam is basically just a matter of rank determining your official grade, may I ask Lord Jukheon, who will be entering official service before me, one question?"
"Ask me anything."
I had agreed to share the room so we could pass the time with some idle chatter.
In a world without TVs, computers, or smartphones, talking to other people is the most entertaining thing there is.
"Right now Joseon has toppled rotten Goryeo and is moving toward a peaceful age. Thanks to Your Majesty's grace, the people are eating their fill, and the nation's granaries are growing full. There's still a long way to go, but isn't this enough to say the king is doing a good job?"
Joseon is a land overflowing with scholars and loyal remonstrance. Loyalty to the king is a given, but if a policy is wrong, criticizing it is accepted as "loyal remonstrance."
Though it was during King Myeongjong's reign, there was even a lunatic named Nammyung Jo Sik who told the king, "Your Majesty is an orphan, and the queen mother is a widow." And even that was deemed to fall within the bounds of "loyal remonstrance," enough that scholars praised the story.
So as long as you don't say something like the king should be replaced, almost any kind of remonstrance is tolerated.
In other words, I could speak my mind without any problem.
"The court's granaries may be full, but right now the people are suffering terribly because of a flawed tax system."
"What do you mean by that?"
"The current tax system only benefits the yangban and landowners with lots of property; for Joseon's poor commoners, it's a system that eats them alive. And yet the court ministers don't realize the system is flawed, nor do they offer remonstrance, thereby obscuring His Majesty's royal grace... how lamentable is that?"
Joseon's tax system in this era is naturally better than Goryeo's.
During the time when the powerful aristocratic clans ruled, the tax burden on Goryeo's farmers could rise as high as 90%... but once the nation changed and Confucian Joseon was established, the tax system improved a great deal.
Yes, it was definitely much better than Goryeo.
Even so, the way the tax system actually functioned was a complete mess.
Joseon only collected taxes for the central government's expenses and didn't levy local taxes, so... it took part of the taxes collected in each county and moved them to the local government office for use there.
It's the early Joseon period now, so the corruption isn't too severe yet, but just wait until the mid-Joseon era—it'll be a total disaster.
"In present-day Joseon, the rich pay little tax, while poor commoners pay a great deal."
"What are you saying?"
"...... Do you truly not see the loopholes in the system?"
"No, isn't the system perfect? It's a tax policy designed by the nation's ministers and His Majesty after much deliberation. To make it so the poor pay as little as possible, each household was divided into janho and janjanho..."
"The janho aren't the problem; it's the janjanho."
The current tax assessment method in Joseon is as follows: households are graded according to the property and land they hold, and they pay taxes accordingly.
Just hearing that, you'd think it was something like grouping together people who earn ten million won a month or one hundred million won a month and making them each pay twenty million won a year in taxes.
That's right. The problem is the janjanho! To put it simply, the way taxes are imposed on the "common people" is insane.
"As far as I know, don't they bundle three janjanho together and treat them as one soho for tax collection? Then their tax burden would..."
"A soho is someone rich enough to own as much as five gyeol of land, harvesting dozens of seom of rice every year. On the other hand, janjanho mostly don't even have a single majigi of land, and most of them survive only by farming as tenants. How could three households of tenant farmers possibly compare to a soho's income?"
In other words, soho are rich people with annual incomes of at least two to three hundred million won. And janjanho are poor folks making around twenty or thirty million a year.
Even if you pool the income of three such janjanho households together, can it possibly compare to a soho's income? And yet the tax imposed is the same, so isn't this basically a system telling janjanho to hang themselves and die?
In fact, if you look at the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty, there are even records saying that when a magistrate collected taxes strictly by this flawed law, the townspeople would die off, but if there was a magistrate who took a bit more from the wealthy instead, the district became livable.
"......"
"I'm not saying we should stop collecting taxes or exempt people from military service. That's not what I mean. Taxes need to be collected according to circumstances. And we can't leave out the discussion of tribute payments either, because that system is just as much of a mess."
Whenever you study Joseon history, the subject that always comes up is the "Daedong Law."
It's the story that once the Daedong Law began, the people who had suffered under tribute payments suddenly found life bearable. The Daedong Law is often portrayed like some kind of magic spell... and that depiction really isn't wrong.
Because producing special goods for tribute really was a system that tormented the common people to death.
"It's one thing to tell someone who only grows rice to provide apples because they've been designated as the district specialty, but then they order people to procure valuable things like ginseng or shiitake mushrooms. The commoners have no way to get them, so in the end they have to go through Buddhist temples to handle bangnap, and everyone's backs are being broken by it."
I'm not such a good person that I'd sacrifice myself for someone else.
So although I know about these contradictions, I have absolutely no intention of jumping into the mud to solve the problem.
If you want to solve this problem completely, you'd have to declare war on Joseon's entrenched interests.
Even if Sejong helped me succeed, it would be obvious that I'd end up ground down and working myself to death like Hwang Hui.
'That's nonsense.'
"If I were one of the common people, this is what I'd be thinking. Is this really a peaceful age, or is it just another age of chaos and hell?"
"...Then is there a way to fix it?"
A number of things came to mind.
Some of it I'd picked up while hanging around the gallery, and a lot of it I'd learned from reading countless alternate-history novels.
To put it bluntly, even if you just implemented the Daedong Law roughly, tax burdens would drop massively, the budget would be secured, and the market would run smoothly too.
"There is a way, but I don't think His Majesty would accept it even if I reported it. Good medicine tastes bitter, and loyal remonstrance is hard to hear. If someone as insignificant as me, merely a lowly scholar, passes the exam and climbs to some minor post to submit a memorial, would the Office of Royal Secretaries even pass it on to His Majesty?"
The moment I said that, Wonjeong—the plump scholar—jumped to his feet, said something had come up and he had to leave first, and hurried out.
The scholar who had come with him left as well.
"...... Where is everyone going without even eating?"
In the end, I had to eat alone.
**
The plump scholar Wonjeong, who had spoken with Kim Daebung—no, Joseon's King Sejong Yi Do—was feeling conflicted.
His heart was so heavy that even when he looked at the meal table he encountered during a secret outing he had only managed to go on by pestering the retired king, Yi Bang-won, his appetite vanished completely.
So he immediately made his way to Gyeongbokgung to find Yi Bang-won.
"Father, I have returned."
"...... Why have you returned so quickly?"
Sejong hesitated for a moment, wondering where to begin.
Then he told him everything he had heard from the scholar who had come to take the exam.
Yi Bang-won was first extremely displeased to hear that the tax policy he had painstakingly devised was being called wrong, but...
Once he realized there was nothing wrong with what the scholar Kim Daebung had said, he quickly sighed in regret.
"...... My heart is heavy at the thought that I have not looked deeply enough into the people's circumstances."
"Yes, this son felt the same way, Father. That is why, even when I sat before the meal table, I had no desire to eat and came here at once to see you. Right now, even if you brought me beef, I wouldn't want to eat it."
Sejong was the kind of person who couldn't eat a meal without meat.
He loved meat so much that even King Taejong Yi Bang-won's dying will said Sejong had to be allowed to eat meat even during the mourning period.
The fact that the meat-loving prince had no appetite for meat alone showed how troubled Sejong felt.
"...... Even so, this is truly a relief."
"What is a relief?"
"Isn't this Kim Daebung fellow taking the palace exam this time? If we select him and listen to his loyal remonstrance, we should be able to tend to the people's lives."
A smile bloomed on Sejong's face.
Yes. If there were a minister who would point out flawed policies, wouldn't we be able to improve the people's lives?
"As expected of Father."
The worry that had clouded Sejong's face was wiped away completely.
King Taejong Yi Bang-won looked at his son with a pleased smile.
"A loyal subject must be made to give his utmost."
If Kim Daebung had heard those words himself, he would have tried to run away somehow.
Because gyeonmajiro is a pledge of loyalty meaning a retainer will work for the king like Hwang Hui, and for the king to write those words himself means...
it's a sentence condemning you to be worked to death.
But Kim Daebung, oblivious to all this even in his dreams, entered the civil service examination hall in high spirits.