Corpse of King Korin III

King Korin III, the last king of Hongmark, was laid to rest in a traditional royal tomb alongside his son and daughter who had tragically perished in the great flooding of Mendu. History recorded his death of being "heartbreak" caused by his loss, and his last act was to sign his kingdom over to the Keizon Empire.   Two hundred years later, the tomb was breached by robbers, and archaeologists were tasked with establishing what had been taken. During this process, the cause of Korin's death was questioned based on examination of the corpse. The day after an official report had been issued to the Hongmark State Governor, copied to the Keizornan Senate, the corpse was discovered to be missing.   The following investigation was initiated by the Senate and the details were kept under strict secrecy. The eventual conclusion was that the robbers had come back to snatch the body, and once identified, they were prosecuted under Hongmark's old treason laws and executed. However all of them protested their innocence in the case of the corpse. The body, supposedly recovered from their hideout, was returned to its sarcophagus and the tomb re-sealed. However, the archaologist who had first questioned the dead king's cause of death now questioned the identity of the recovered body, claiming it was not the same one.   The man in question, along with a number of people whom he convinced of a cover-up, were prosecuted under the Diplomatic and Public Goodwill Sensitivity Act, with treason added to his own charge. As a result he was very quietly executed. A handful of associates also targeted by the charges disappeared, thought to have fled across the east border into Kimark.   All rumours that the Empire had been involved in falsifying anything to do with King Korin's death were effectively silenced. If those who escaped into Kimark still believed it, they did not make any efforts to persuade anybody else, and have managed to evade detection ever since.   According to the original report--all evidence of which was quickly destroyed--the king's remains showed clear signs of having been poisoned, by the venom of a particular breed of snake indigenous to the Echel-Chelf region of Keizorna--the very heart of the Empire. The symptoms of the toxin are chest pains, sore throat and watery eyes, all of which Korin was famously recorded to have suffered in the last hours of his life, and which had been put down as the effects of grief. At the time of his death, there had been no way to identify the venom in human remains, but technology invented since then made it possible to determine. However after the alleged recovery of the body, the signs that the archaeologist claimed to have seen were not present.   Had King Korin III of Hongmark been revealed to have actually died from the venom of a snake found only in the heart of the Empire, the potential consequences to the territory's geopolitical stability would have been great. Hongmark's people are some of the most loyal to the Empire, seeing it as their saving grace after the deaths of the last king's heirs and a potential war with Rupendu they would have stood no chance at winning on their own. The perceived murder of the prince and princess by Rupendu, still firmly denied today with no proof of its truth, still made Rupendu the biggest enemy of Hongmark for centuries. If evidence that the Empire had in fact played any hand in the tragic circumstances which led to Hongmark's occupation were to be exposed, the people of Hongmark would face a crisis of loyalty, and the Empire could have another conflict territory on their hands.