90 – War on Crime (5)

One of the most used methods for obtaining information in pre-modern society was torture.

They tried to dig up the facts by inflicting pain through torture, and actually obtained information about numerous rebellions and various crimes through this.

However, in modern society, torture is not used as a method for collecting information based on bioethical ideology.

This is actually a dignified way of saying why we don’t torture, and in reality it’s very different.

First of all, the number one reason not to torture is that it is unethical to obtain information by tearing or breaking a person’s limbs, sometimes digging out the skin and eyes of a person as said.

And if there is another reason, the information obtained through torture is usually unreliable because the other person is forced to say it in order to survive.

If the torturer immediately said that the Duke of Maxburg had done something about this case and offered to put an end to torture, most unwilling criminals would say yes.

Even if the true culprit is Count Petersburg.

So I’m going to dig up the information in a more efficient way that doesn’t involve slicing arms and legs or sexual torture.

There is a musty smell peculiar to rotten water, a chill unique to the basement rises from the floor, and cockroaches and rats are crawling in the room where the sinners are confined.

Upon entering, one of the prisoners had somehow caught a mouse and was eating it alive.

The rat’s blood was dripping from his face and mouth, but he was so hungry that he gnawed at the rat as if he had no time to pay attention.

I was shocked to see a criminal from an executive who ate rats living in an uncooked gutter.

“You bastard, who said you could eat mice here? Can you eat a family while being the same rat? What a spectacle.”

Upon hearing that, he thought the torturer had come, put down the rat he was eating, and knelt down to pray.

“Oh, old man, please give me some bread or porridge… I am very hungry. I am so hungry I feel like dying.”

“It depended on the sincerity you showed me. If you answer me well, I’ll give you meat instead of porridge… but if you don’t answer correctly, I have no choice but to talk to these friends.”

Then I clapped twice, and the torturer behind me brought a sharp stone and a heavy stone for crushing, tongs for pulling out fingers, and a hammer for breaking bones.

All of these instruments were stained with the blood of victims who had already been tortured to death, and it gave me goosebumps even to see them, who had nothing to do with it.

And the sinner who saw the balloon I had brought began to tremble madly at the sight of it.

“Ah, I will tell you everything. So please don’t use them!! Please save me!!!”

The torturer, wearing a black leather mask covering his face, laughed at the prisoner and said,

“That’s a matter for His Excellency the Count to decide. And these are decorations… If you go to the back room, there’s a pretty lady with a lot of thorn stakes and an iron to warmly touch your skin… Oh, of course, there’s also a magic device that makes you taller by lengthening and lengthening your limbs. …”

“Please save me. I’ll blow it all up. I will tell you everything I know. Elderly…”

“Yogeo, yogeo… You are a very pretty friend. Great, how about breaking two toes especially lightly to start? It might hurt a little, but don’t bite your tongue?”

Hearing this, the torturers calmly tried to seat the prisoner on a chair with short iron thorns attached to the back and bottom of the chair.

I raised my hand to stop it and then said.

“Now you seem to be ready to speak, so wait a moment. yes, rat What did you do in the organization by any chance?”

“I mainly played the role of supplying women and alcohol to the aristocratic officers of Blueport while interacting with the district officials under the 5th district chief. And they also kidnapped or sold people from the political families of noble officials.”

“It’s good to be honest. Then, did the subordinates under the head of Area 5 directly help you?”

“no. The district chief said that in this territory, even if people from the lower classes had jobs, even if they told me that they would give a lot of money, they would not participate in betraying Count Creutel… I did it.”

One day, the professor said that the redite movement and communism, which go around destroying machines, are actions that will be buried at the time when people who can live to a certain extent hear about it…

As you said, maybe it’s because of my policies in our territory that we can make a living if we have a job, so few people have participated in this criminal organization.

Well, if it wasn’t for that, there’s no way that a criminal group that has been so generously supported that they’re hoarding hundreds of gold coins in cash would have been caught so quickly.

Even though people like Jang Gil-san and Hong Gil-dong were scum who pretended to be bandits, most of the civilians protected them just because they scattered a little money to survive.

It would have protected the blue mold organization as well.

“Then where do most of the executives in the organization come from?”

“I am from Petersburg… I worked under the direction of the Count of Petersburg, especially Nikolai, who said that if things went well for the Count, he would give him the title of baron…”

The guy who said that seemed to be pouring the whole truth into a tortured atmosphere, but…

I was not fooled because I already knew from Lieutenant Short that Nikolai and the rest of the officers were from Romania, disguised using Northern Union cuisine, culture, and language.

So I smiled and signaled to my advisor to enlist the cooperation of the one in front of me.

Then the torturer made the prisoner kneel on a chair with iron spikes, and then struck the big toe of his right foot with a mace.

The toenail on the stamped toe split into several branches, and the toe’s bone began to show as blood flowed from the toe.

Then, when I tried to scream, the torturers put a rag soaked in rotten water in my mouth to keep the prisoner from screaming, perhaps because they were afraid of hurting my ears.

After about 30 minutes, the guy who was silent and had seizures calmed down a little, and now the torturers removed the towel from the prisoner’s mouth.

“Ah, Ah, I’m really from Petersburg. Trust me… really really Petersburg…”

Further torture here may still be pointless.

At that level, I’ll answer only Petersburg until the moment I die.

“Seriously, truly. It hurts, but it does.”

Hearing that, the sinner broke a toe at me and looked at me with eyes as if he were telling me to calm down.

“Your colleagues have already blown it. So just talk to you and everything is over. And don’t you want to live So now all you have left is your life, and you can no longer keep your loyalty to the organization and your master. Even if I were your lord, how would you know that you alone did not betray when the other guys have already blown up the facts?”

Hearing those words, the boy’s eyes began to tremble as if his resolve had begun to waver.

“So tell me the truth. I’ll feed you just by talking and… I’ll give you a special chance.”

“chance? It’s an opportunity…”

“If you tell me the true enemy of Ciel von Kreuttel… I’ll reward you. Rather than die as a sinner with the pain of having your limbs dismembered or disemboweled. Wouldn’t it be better to live as a free citizen with land in another country?”

Now all that remains is to die without moving, but the desire for life began to burn in the eyes of the guy who had a way to survive.

“If you want to live, blow. Your death will be determined by the value of the information you provided. Whether you will die comfortably in bed, or whether you will face a cruel end that is hard to put into words… the decision is up to you. Then I’ll give you one last chance again. Who sent you?”

And after about five minutes of silence passed, the smell of fragrant meat and bread began to spread from beyond the room where the prisoner was confined.

It smelled so good that even though I had eaten a boxed lunch two hours ago, the smell of meat and bread made me hungry.

If I’m this hungry, how hungry will a guy who’s eaten nothing but a bowl of transparent porridge in a palm-sized bowl for days and water…

I did it on purpose to shake the starving sinner, but I can’t believe the damage came to me…

Ugh, this is bullying over food, in other words, food violence.

“Ah, it seems that the special meals have already been given to those who have already confessed their sins in the other room. It must be delicious. Grilled beef topped with sauce made with lots of sugar, white bread made with lots of wheat, butter and milk, soup made with clams and fish in cream made with fine flour and thick milk… I want to eat it too. How are you? If you speak quickly, it’s yours.”

In fact, that is to shake the sinners in the room where the confession is delayed, and the prison guards tie the sinners up and eat them to stimulate their appetite and harass them.

Well, there’s nothing I can’t give you as a last supper if you provide really valuable information.

After a while, the guy in front of me said with a dejected expression, as if he had given up on everything.

“Nikolai is a bastard who originally belonged to the collateral family of Baron Horshov, a vassal of Count Petersburg. Therefore, when he was young, he was a knight who received 30 estates, but he was banished from the country after committing an affair with Baron Horshoff’s concubine. And a guy under the command of the Duke of Maxburg. Some of our officers are Nikolai’s vassals, and the rest are knights from the borderlands of Romania bordering the Northern Coalition who caused trouble and were sentenced to exile.”

“Let’s keep talking.”

“And until we took on this case, we were the guests of the duchy. Nikolai took on all sorts of chores, receiving one gold coin every month, and the officers receiving five silver coins each month. Then, the Duke called us one day, gave us 3,000 gold coins as we entered the Blue Fort, and ordered us to make a mess here. According to that order, we burned warehouses and kidnapped nobles.”

The information Duke Maxburg still knows about is the trade alliance between Croytel and the king of the Northern Alliance, in which cultural exchanges and various luxury goods are exported.

And from Maxburg’s point of view, he decided that if we had a trade alliance, we would naturally have a marriage alliance, and he was planning to weaken the alliance without starting a war by pretending it was the work of the Count of Petersburg, known as a royal nobleman.

If he had been lured by this meticulous Duke of Maxburg’s god hand, he might have been driven to the point where he would eventually consider going under Maxburg’s command.

Because if you are betrayed by the Northern Alliance, you may find yourself in a situation where you are forced to consider an alliance with Romania. While doing so, he could have rallied the great nobles of Elaine around the county and attacked them.

The reason for this is that my position is the entrance to Elline and at the same time I have a lot of money…

However, fortunately, I knew that it was not the Northern Alliance’s conspiracy, so in the end, Romania was caught by me only for its weaknesses.

If it really comes to this level, heaven helps.

So, enjoying that good fortune, I decided to show one last mercy to the poor fellow in front of me.

So that he can die comfortably, the last meal should be luxurious, and a slow-acting poison should be put into it so that he can die comfortably while enjoying the afterglow of the meal.

If all of that information matches.

“Okay, thank you. As long as your information is correct, I’ll serve you a delicious meal. First of all, eat this to satisfy your hunger.”

And I threw a bundle of rusks the length of two index fingers in my pocket, threw it on the floor, and handed it over.

After receiving it, he started to gnaw on it, not caring about the dirt on it.

If the serfs or poor people in our territory were eating like that, they would have looked pitiful, but since the guy who tried to harm our territory was doing that, it just looked ridiculous.

**

In this way, I handed over the first information I obtained to all the interrogators, and as a result, I succeeded in capturing the outline of the perfect crime that Maxburg was plotting.

After making the outlines, I promised the prisoner I had interrogated myself, he was washed and moved to a luxurious room.

After that, I put Ji Hyo-seong’s poison in the luxurious table I was eating and served it, and after enjoying a luxurious meal in a few days, he lay down in bed and died.

For the rest, the officers were put on a wheel, and the simple participants were put on a cart wheel and their arms and legs were crushed to death.

The prostitutes were acquitted because they were innocent, but some of the torturers and the women who tried to seduce me with their own bodies were charged with reproach and ordered to be confined for one month.

And I began to devise a plan to get rid of the Duke of Maxburg who was trying to eat me.

Since you tried to feed me a big, thick candy, I’ll feed you a bigger, thicker, and tasty Jeolla-do pumpkin candy that doesn’t envy you.