Spring in Liaodong, Spring in Luoyang (3)
The Shandong Peninsula across the sea was steeped in an increasingly ominous atmosphere, but Liaodong, shielded by both ocean and mountains, remained peaceful. Let them fight their wars. You, blessed Liaodong, rejoice. Haps hara. That wasn’t quite it… What was it again? I can’t remember. It’s been thirty years since I was born into this body, so it’s about time my memories started to blur.
Anyway, Liaodong was at peace.
“My lord, is it really that important to grow so many dandelions?”
“They’re pretty, aren’t they?”
“Well, yes, but…”
It was an experiment, after all. I’d once heard from a Russian mercenary that during World War II, they extracted sap from dandelions to make rubber. Something about boiling the sap with a bit of sulfur. Sulfur was already one of the ingredients for gunpowder, and it was also used as medicine or a bleaching agent for white dyes, so it wasn’t hard to obtain. Since I had no idea where rubber trees originally grew, I’d told the researchers at the Yan Research Institute to give it a try.
What would we use the rubber for? Obviously, pressure cookers. We were finally getting proper rice this year, weren’t we? Who wouldn’t want to make nurungji from freshly cooked, steaming hot rice? What, are you some kind of Westerner?
I had no clue how much sap these dandelions would produce, how much latex it actually contained, or what the quality of that latex would be like, so we were simply testing it out. Of course, if real rubber did appear, there would be countless uses for it, but as a practical proof-of-concept model to determine whether the rubber was even viable, nothing beat a pressure cooker. Since I only planned to make one, if it failed I could just melt it down and buy a new one.
Beyond all that, the field of dandelions covering one corner of my personal farmland was simply beautiful to look at. Once the flowers withered, I planned to pull them all up and extract the sap, but for now they were nothing more than a vibrant flower garden.
“Pretty, right?”
“…Yes, they are pretty.”
After all, even though she was adopted, I was still raising a daughter. I hadn’t been able to play the role of a proper father for most of her life, and since nearly all her playmates came from military households, she had grown somewhat stiff. Still, that was no reason to let her childhood become a life stained with darkness, blood, and gold—like a German flag.
“Wouldn’t it be more useful to grow crops in this space instead?”
“Speak comfortably.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“You can call me Father, too.”
See? After not seeing my face for a few years, she’d gone back to calling me “my lord.”
“Y-yes… F-Father.”
She sounded incredibly awkward… This was exactly why I hadn’t wanted to stay too long in Luoyang. We were already approaching our fifth year of marriage, yet we still hadn’t made a single child. What the hell was I even doing?
“First of all, the common people like flowers too. Looking at them lifts the mood.”
“Is that so?”
Besides the goal of obtaining rubber, liking beautiful things was simply human nature. The dandelions that filled one corner of the flower garden created quite a spectacle all on their own. In fact, some farmers would make time to come flower-viewing with their families.
“And people need time to relieve their mental fatigue… or stress, I suppose.”
To squeeze the maximum efficiency out of people, you needed truly excellent leisure activities. Sports like baseball or soccer were good. Entertainment like movies, comics, or music was good too. The important thing was that providing outlets for people to escape their difficult lives and enjoy themselves without worry turned out to be one of the most crucial duties of a ruler. Even that Schicklgruber fellow had planned the Olympics brilliantly. The reason the Olympics became a global festival started from that time. Their side tried to tie the Olympic fervor to ideology and do something grandiose, which put them on a different path from me, but the core idea that providing entertainment was important was correct.
Probably. I’m not entirely sure. After all, I was a soldier, not a politician. I’d learned a few things from nameless predecessors… but it was nothing more than the bare minimum I’d picked up during civil affairs operations so I wouldn’t get shot. Naturally, I couldn’t compare to true politicians like Yuan Shao.
In any case, we were already growing enough grain to store, and all I’d done was scatter dandelion seeds across the idle land that remained. It was a luxury only possible in an era when there was still more untilled land than people.
Along the nearby riverbank, I could see farmers panning for gold dust as a side job and a bit of recreation, while children played further upstream. It was the same peaceful scene as always—the one I had always longed for.
I played with my daughter Yun for several hours, then, dredging up hazy memories of how to do it, I made her a small flower crown and placed it on her head. I held her hand tightly and walked her all the way home. Leaving behind the sight of her chattering away with Lady Jinjeong like any other child her age, I turned my steps back toward the Yan Research Institute.
Since there had been no one among the people I knew who used the word “research,” this building—simply called the research institute—was the world’s first R&D facility owned by the Gongsun family. Honestly, in an era with virtually no foundational science, it was a space filled with stories that made my chest feel tight just listening to them. Still, the people working here were probably smarter than a mere soldier like me.
No, recently they’d even made gan doufu. Tofu itself wasn’t that impressive—just coagulate soy milk with bittern, a byproduct of the salt fields. But creating a facility that could dry it without letting it spoil was an entirely different matter. In this era where hunting animals was quite difficult, beans were an excellent source of protein, and the tofu made from leftover bittern was a rather decent side dish even by the standards of the time. The idea of scooping it carefully, drying it, and using it as jerky… Hmm… It was such an innovative idea that I, who had even eaten malatang in my previous life, felt genuinely shocked that I hadn’t thought of it myself.
The primitive threshing machine, which in the original history would only be developed more than fifteen hundred years from now, was scheduled to enter mass production this year thanks to the intervention of a modern man and the research of the locals. Lately, the institute had been studying methods to extract rubber from dandelion sap and ways to produce higher-quality iron.
“We must first standardize weights and measures! The cheokgwan system is familiar, of course, but the correlation between length, weight, and volume is far too weak! It’s even in the problem book!”
“Nonsense! Standardizing weights and measures is hardly something that can be done in a day or two! Unless our lord is the First Emperor of Qin, it’s nothing but a pipe dream!”
“…Then just do it!”
What the hell, you bastard?
“My lord, the Central Plains are in complete chaos anyway. Why don’t you just become emperor yourself?”
I slapped my forehead with a loud smack and let out a long sigh. This wasn’t good. These guys… If I didn’t do something about them soon…
After not visiting Liaodong for a few years, these bastards were gradually running wild. Look at them, openly spouting things like “Shall we commit treason?”—words I never imagined hearing from the mouths of people from this era.
Of course, it was true that Liaodong was a good place to live. The Goguryeo friends were excellent business partners, and the salt business we ran with them was a clear high-value industry at this point. Our yields had dropped a bit because we had to pay proper wages to our horse-riding friends, but the cheap salt fields that used genuine slaves… Hmm… If they liquidated all their money, they could probably buy up half of Saryeju territory outright. Naturally, since it was mixed with currency from many countries besides Han, some laundering would be necessary, but since we had mostly collected precious metals, there wasn’t a big problem.
However, claiming the title of emperor was an entirely different matter.
“If anyone’s going to do it, it should be the Administrator of Liaodong. Why would I become emperor? Besides… I am a loyal subject of the Han. How dare you suggest I commit treason against Heaven? And even if I did, how exactly do you plan to stop the millions of troops from the imperial Han family?”
“My lord, you are the one who broke through a million Yellow Turbans and struck down Zhang Jue. Who would dare invade us?”
“You little shit, Munya. Stop talking nonsense and just do the work I assigned you… No, for daring to utter such treacherous words, I hereby sentence you to two years of daily overtime as punishment.”
“M-My lord?!”
“If anyone else had heard you, it would have been grounds for exterminating your entire clan. Spend the next two years solving problem books and reflecting on what you’ve done.”
“But I got married just a few days ago?”
“You idiot, that’s exactly the kind of talk that could get your entire family killed. What, shall I make you personally realize what kind of thing you just said?”
Tsk… I let them get too comfortable and now they’re really crossing the line… Come to think of it, I also need to go gather more saltpeter, but I don’t have the time.
The Jincheonroe was my secret weapon. Honestly, due to the limitations of this era’s metallurgy and gunpowder technology, its destructive power wasn’t all that impressive. At best, the lethal radius might reach five meters? Against people wearing armor, the power would drop sharply if they were even three meters away. Instead, it produced a tremendous roar, flash, and flames never seen in this era, so I had been using it for its visual and psychological impact… Hmm… Honestly, shooting arrows was probably more effective.
There was no rush. The special effects were the main feature anyway, with lethality as a secondary benefit. Having just a few for my personal use was enough.
The “graduate students” at the institute knew nothing about gunpowder. In truth, the researchers’ main task was solving “problem books.” The contents were things I, as a modern person, roughly knew—calculating pi, creating a standardized system of weights and measures that could be used identically anywhere in the world with clear correlations between weight, length, and volume, along with more practical questions like finding ways to make furnaces produce stronger heat. I had organized everything that came to mind.
As was typical for the educated class of this period, they tended to study whatever interested them across many fields. Rather than focusing on a single research topic, they organized whatever occurred to them, gradually filling the bookshelves along one wall of the institute. Lately, they had also begun classifying the plants, animals, insects, and stones found near Liaodong.
There was plenty of work, and there were quite a few members of the educated class to throw at it. Once again, this was China. Even in ancient times, there were so many people they practically tripped over them. The horse-riding friends had captured many haughty scholars as slaves, and I had taken them in exchange for salt, letting them continue the studies they loved. Whether they actually enjoyed the studies I assigned them, I wasn’t sure, but wasn’t studying all the same anyway? I didn’t know.
No, there was no way that people who casually suggested I become emperor could be proper scholars. Therefore, I—who was reforming these charlatan scholars and turning them into useful researchers for the future—was a far better Confucian scholar than they were. As expected, I was a disciple who would not shame my teacher.