Post by ajk on Feb 11, 2020 23:45:10 GMT -5
QUICK SUMMARY
The king has smallpox. That’s the official word—-but not everybody’s buying it. Someone is putting up posters claiming that the king is dead, and the king’s son isn’t convinced either. But the prince (crown prince, to be clear) can’t even get in to see his father because the second queen has ordered a lockdown and nobody has even seen the king in ten days.
We’re not buying it either. Because when a young man who’s assisting a royal physician tries to push some food into the king’s bedchamber, he’s violently grabbed and pulled inside by...well we’re not sure, we can’t see, we can only hear some very strange and scary growling-—and the assistant's screams echo throughout the palace.
So the prince sneaks into the king’s palace to find out what’s going on. Hiding in a dark room, he hears and even smells what he can only describe as a “monster” roaming the hallway. But he never does find his father.
He does, though, manage to get a look at the king’s medical records the next morning. They refute the smallpox claim but are missing much information. And oddly, they include the name of a physician named Lee Seung-hui, who retired three years ago. He and his guardsman Mu-yeong go out into the city in disguise, and manage to turn up information that Lee is now a physician in Dongnae, more than 200 miles to the south. The prince decides that he’s going to abandon the capital and go to Dongnae to find the real story. He sees no future for himself in the capital and no reason to go back to the palace...
....which turns out to be a very smart move. Because the second queen, her family (the Haewon Cho clan) has all but taken control of the government. Her father Cho Hak-ju, in fact, is chief state councillor. And he’s a pretty nasty character. His daughter is pregnant (she’s much younger than the king), and it’s pretty clear that he’s scheming to get rid of the crown prince so that his family can seize the throne. He’s produced some dubious evidence that Confucian scholars, who he hates and blames for the country’s past weakness that led to two wars, were behind the posters and are somehow conspiring with the crown prince. So he orders the prince arrested. And when no one can find the prince, he correctly figures that the prince is headed for Dongnae, and sends a squad of soldiers on fast horses to capture him.
Oh and that dubious evidence? Turns out the prince did conspire against his father. I did it to live, he tells Mu-yeong, because as soon as the queen has a son, I’ll be murdered.
Meanwhile Doctor Lee has arrived home at his medical clinic, with his assistant’s dead body in tow, to bury at home. The clinic is a depressing place; food is in short supply and the patients all look hungry and unhappy. Everyone is shocked to see the dead body, because this was no death from disease--the body is riddled with wounds that looks like some sort of beast attacked. But the doctor refuses to talk about it.
Later that day, when the nurse Seo-bi returns from gathering herbs in the nearby woods, she’s stunned to find everyone happy and eating delicious food. A young man who’s being treated for an injured arm tells her that he went out and killed a deer and made meat stew for everyone. But that story unravels when Seo-bi finds a thumb in the pot, and deer aren’t known for having thumbs, are they. Turns out, the guy cannibalized the dead assistant’s body. He claims that it's done all the time and it's kept a lot of local people alive during recent hard times. But the arguing about the morals of it all quickly ends when the patients start getting sick from the stuff, and within hours they're all dead. But oh wait--they're not dead. At least, they're up again and starting to eat one of the other nurses.
The king has smallpox. That’s the official word—-but not everybody’s buying it. Someone is putting up posters claiming that the king is dead, and the king’s son isn’t convinced either. But the prince (crown prince, to be clear) can’t even get in to see his father because the second queen has ordered a lockdown and nobody has even seen the king in ten days.
We’re not buying it either. Because when a young man who’s assisting a royal physician tries to push some food into the king’s bedchamber, he’s violently grabbed and pulled inside by...well we’re not sure, we can’t see, we can only hear some very strange and scary growling-—and the assistant's screams echo throughout the palace.
So the prince sneaks into the king’s palace to find out what’s going on. Hiding in a dark room, he hears and even smells what he can only describe as a “monster” roaming the hallway. But he never does find his father.
He does, though, manage to get a look at the king’s medical records the next morning. They refute the smallpox claim but are missing much information. And oddly, they include the name of a physician named Lee Seung-hui, who retired three years ago. He and his guardsman Mu-yeong go out into the city in disguise, and manage to turn up information that Lee is now a physician in Dongnae, more than 200 miles to the south. The prince decides that he’s going to abandon the capital and go to Dongnae to find the real story. He sees no future for himself in the capital and no reason to go back to the palace...
....which turns out to be a very smart move. Because the second queen, her family (the Haewon Cho clan) has all but taken control of the government. Her father Cho Hak-ju, in fact, is chief state councillor. And he’s a pretty nasty character. His daughter is pregnant (she’s much younger than the king), and it’s pretty clear that he’s scheming to get rid of the crown prince so that his family can seize the throne. He’s produced some dubious evidence that Confucian scholars, who he hates and blames for the country’s past weakness that led to two wars, were behind the posters and are somehow conspiring with the crown prince. So he orders the prince arrested. And when no one can find the prince, he correctly figures that the prince is headed for Dongnae, and sends a squad of soldiers on fast horses to capture him.
Oh and that dubious evidence? Turns out the prince did conspire against his father. I did it to live, he tells Mu-yeong, because as soon as the queen has a son, I’ll be murdered.
Meanwhile Doctor Lee has arrived home at his medical clinic, with his assistant’s dead body in tow, to bury at home. The clinic is a depressing place; food is in short supply and the patients all look hungry and unhappy. Everyone is shocked to see the dead body, because this was no death from disease--the body is riddled with wounds that looks like some sort of beast attacked. But the doctor refuses to talk about it.
Later that day, when the nurse Seo-bi returns from gathering herbs in the nearby woods, she’s stunned to find everyone happy and eating delicious food. A young man who’s being treated for an injured arm tells her that he went out and killed a deer and made meat stew for everyone. But that story unravels when Seo-bi finds a thumb in the pot, and deer aren’t known for having thumbs, are they. Turns out, the guy cannibalized the dead assistant’s body. He claims that it's done all the time and it's kept a lot of local people alive during recent hard times. But the arguing about the morals of it all quickly ends when the patients start getting sick from the stuff, and within hours they're all dead. But oh wait--they're not dead. At least, they're up again and starting to eat one of the other nurses.
