Chapter Seven - Blood in the Water

CHAPTER SEVEN

Blood in the Water

POWER DOESN’T MAKE you safe.
It just makes your enemies harder to spot.

By 2014, Kim Jong Un was no longer a mystery. He was a force. The world stopped joking. The regime stopped blinking. And inside the palace walls, the blood began to rise.

The uncle was just the beginning.

After Jang Song-thaek’s execution, the message was clear: loyalty isn’t inherited. It’s performed. And even then, only temporarily.

Kim didn’t just remove rivals.
He erased them.

One general was executed with anti-aircraft guns. Another allegedly fed to dogs, though that detail may have been myth, Western propaganda in the same style of North Korea’s. But the truth was brutal enough. People vanished. Not just officials, their families. Their friends. Anyone who spoke too loud.

And then… he went after his brother.

Kim Jong Nam had been in exile for years. Gambling poorly. Posting under fake names online. He had no political movement. No known ambitions. But he existed. And in a dynasty built on image, that alone made him dangerous.

On February 13, 2017, in a Malaysian airport, Kim Jong Nam was approached by two women. One covered his eyes with a cloth. The other rubbed something on his face.

It was VX nerve agent, one of the deadliest chemical weapons on Earth.

He died within minutes.

The women claimed they thought they were on a prank show. They said they were paid actors. But the real plot was already obvious. The cameras had captured everything. North Korean agents fled the country immediately.

No trial. No announcement. No apology.

Just another ghost.

The message couldn’t have been louder:
Kim Jong Un does not forgive.
He does not forget.
And blood ties mean nothing if you’re outside the myth.

Inside North Korea, the story was never told. Jong Nam’s name was scrubbed. There was no obituary. No acknowledgement. He simply… never existed. A glitch in the narrative. A brother who died the moment he left the script.

But the rest of the world took note.

The boy who inherited a bomb now had something else:
A body count.

And unlike his father, who ruled with silence and subtlety, Kim Jong Un ruled with certainty. He wasn’t waiting to be tested. He was the test.

There would be no rivals.
There would be no next-in-line.
There would be only him and the silence he enforced.