6. The Reversal Opening Ceremony (1)
6. The Reversal Opening Ceremony (1)
A coal mining town nestled in the Appalachia Mountains.
Soaring global coal demand was fueling its rapid, relentless growth.
Everything from factories and power stations to ships, airships, and trains—
in this era, coal was the lifeblood of every industry.
Even in countryside villages with no roads for wagons, people still burned coal to heat their homes.
But supply stubbornly lagged behind the skyrocketing demand.
New mines were opening across the continent, yet workers remained scarce.
Coal mining was dangerous, filthy, and back-breaking labor.
So the price of coal—and a miner's wage—kept climbing with each passing day.
The rumors at the Alchemy Academy summed up the absurdity.
One story went: on a final exam that asked, "What do you need to turn stones into gold?", a student had boldly written "a minecart and a pickaxe." Another went: when students were sent to the mountains to gather alchemical reagents, they all simply collected coal near the mines.
The punchline was always that the first student got an A+, and the second group sold their coal and bought every reagent they needed.
The academy tales were, of course, just exaggerated jokes.
After all, alchemists routinely handled substances worth several tons of coal per flask.
But the fact the jokes spread at all proved what an outsized place coal held in the era.
Between the city and the mine shafts stood the Coal Exchange, the sole designated hub for all outside coal trade.
A large three-story wooden building.
Its clerks updated the selling price on the lobby board every hour—factoring in the latest mining output alongside trading prices and volumes relayed from other regions.
Merchants in the lobby would eye the price, then rush the counter, hesitate, or retreat to watch how things played out.
Those shuttling back and forth to the window watched their money orders vanish while contracts piled up in their hands. Hitting their targets, they'd clutch a bundle of agreements and race for the telegraph office or the airport.
Clients seeking long-term supply contracts were guided to the second floor.
That floor was largely the domain of agents from the great trading companies.
The third floor, by contrast, attracted merchants dealing in something other than coal.
You might ask what else a Coal Exchange would handle—but this commodity was every bit as weighty as coal itself.
Namely, the mining rights, ownership stakes, and management rights of the mines.
Ownership deals were trivial. They required only a few names changed on paper.
Mining rights were more of a headache. They required hauling in every gallery operator and haggling over fees.
Management rights were the gravest of the three, since they directly influenced output and the distribution price.
The ten-year-old girl seated opposite the Coal Exchange director had come to trade in all three.
When she first visited the exchange two weeks ago, the director had briefly wondered if today was April 1st—Kirkeus's Day.
The day jesters honored their Demon God.
Folk tradition held that any prank, any lie, was forgiven on that day.
A machine the size of a calf, surely weighing dozens of kilograms, hauled in by several burly men.
A green-haired girl wearing a metal mask connected to that machine, introducing herself as the agent of one of the most powerful trading companies in the financial world—anyone would have entertained the same doubt.
If the director's secretary hadn't given him the codename "Iron Mask" as he hurried to greet the visitor, he would surely have put his foot in it at that first meeting.
Iron Mask.
Right. He'd heard that name.
The Bergson Trading Company, exhibiting terrifying growth over the past few years.
Rumors swirled that they'd taken on a strategist with a prodigious intellect.
And not long ago, that strategist had been unmasked as the only daughter of Chairman Jeral Bergson.
Anais Bergson.
He'd heard she'd been born with a degenerative lung condition, a girl so frail that she'd depended on a specialized machine to survive since the age of five.
Word of her sharp mind had circulated in the business world for a while.
But that was only because a man like Jeral Bergson spent every waking moment boasting about his daughter the genius.
When a child doodles on the pavement, every parent dares to dream of artistic talent.
No one takes a doting parent's hyperbole at face value.
Yet when the rumors began to produce tangible results, people started paying attention. Even then, most assumed her role was limited to whispering the occasional piece of advice from the sidelines.
The director had assumed the same, looking at the girl across from him.
Ah, Chairman Jeral wanted to give his daughter a bit of real-world experience.
He never imagined she was there to actually handle something important as the company's agent.
The discussion would probably be nothing beyond what the second floor handled.
The kind where he'd get a sense of the Bergson Trading Company's wealth—and a father's desire to encourage his ailing daughter—by tacking a zero or two onto the final sum.
But the moment she started discussing ownership, mining rights, and management rights in earnest, the director's discomfort became impossible to hide.
A ten-year-old girl was talking about mine rights.
Even more disorienting was the nature of the deal she wanted.
She wished to buy the rights to every single coal mine in this city.
A conglomerate of the Bergson scale could certainly afford to purchase the rights to every shaft in town.
But whether they could turn a profit on the deal was an entirely different question.
The tangled interplay of ownership, mining rights, and management rights across dozens of galleries was not something even a grizzled trader could handle with ease.
Some buyers purchased ownership only to discover their deposit was accessible only through a neighboring shaft, forcing them to pay exorbitant transit fees through gritted teeth.
Others bought mining rights only to find the site had already been hollowed out like an empty shell.
Buying management rights and then discovering debts sprouting in every direction, with mountains of unpaid miner wages—these were the common pitfalls of this trade.
And all those rights were knotted together in uniquely complicated ways at each individual mine.
In some, profits were split equally among rights holders; in others, the ratio varied by vertical depth. Some were saddled with maintenance obligations for another mine's cart tracks, while others held the right to directly claim the coal they produced.
The Coal Exchange's very purpose was to unravel that snarled skein.
No matter the specific rights at each mine, the exchange collected, processed, and sold all the coal in a single batch, calculating the costs internally and settling the accounts on its own.
It took its cut as a commission in return.
But here was a girl talking about the rights to every mine in the city.
Did she mean to...?
Did she mean to untangle that entire knotted mess?
The director shook his head.
It was impossible.
Perhaps it might be possible with months of work and a small army of clerks.
Theoretically possible, that is.
But it was a patently unprofitable endeavor.
From the company's perspective, investing those resources and personnel elsewhere was the smarter choice.
The girl radiated nothing but confidence.
Adopting a "let her try" attitude, the director granted her access to the Coal Exchange archives.
A field trip, then.
Gathering a bit of experience.
That's what this was.
But the prediction proved wrong.
Within two weeks of arriving, the girl had effectively torn the Coal Exchange's sign down.
Holed up in her hotel room, she pored over the documents and records she'd carried out of the exchange, and with an almost uncanny finesse, she resolved every single economic and legal entanglement binding those rights together.
She had pulled a single, clean thread from a hopelessly snarled knot.
It was difficult to even track how the dozens of rights had changed hands and at what prices.
The one certainty was that every mine right in this city was now in her grasp.
Just as the rumors had it.
No. Even farther beyond.
The director stared at the girl seated opposite him.
The steady hiss of escaping air, her composed eyes.
Above all, the metal mask covering her nose and mouth made her expression impossible to read.
This was the girl the business world called a prodigy.
He felt awe at her ability.
And a simultaneous despair at his own circumstances.
Because the document she had slid across the desk was a notice of termination—for all of them.
A heavy gloom draped the normally boisterous first floor of the Coal Exchange.
The second floor was no different.
Their skill at extracting value from the tangled knot was no longer needed.
With all rights now unified, Bergson Trading Company employees would likely be dispatched as early as tomorrow. They would operate every mine directly from then on.
"Director, please sign here."
The resonance filtering through the mask.
It had a peculiarly unsettling power.
Iron Mask. Anais.
Gnawing his lip, the director picked up his pen.
Where are we all supposed to go now?
Is there even a place that would take on a mass of laid-off coal exchange employees?
At times like this, I envy the miners.
He was about to sign when the office door suddenly slammed open.
Both the director and Anais turned to look.
There stood a middle-aged man with a ruddy complexion and a full beard.
Anais's eyes flew wide open as she looked at him.
"Uncle Pierre?"
Pierre waved at Anais, then settled into the seat beside her.
"What brings you all the way here, Uncle?"
"To see how well you're doing?"
He said it with a casual shrug.
The director gaped at him, utterly flabbergasted.
He knew exactly who this man was.
Pierre Maupassant.
Vice-Chairman of the Bergson Trading Company.
A man with a reputation in the business world as a sharp operator.
And one of the very people whose decisions had just turned them all into the unemployed.
Why was he suddenly here?
Pierre surveyed the director's office with a sluggish, unhurried air.
He even crossed his legs with a nonchalant click, right in front of the man.
"Ah, that painting is dreadful. Makes me want to tear it right off the wall."
He shook his head at the painting mounted behind the director, then clicked his tongue at a black jade ornament on the desk.
"Dear me, who on earth puts coal on a desk?"
He proceeded to wander about the room, finding fault with everything—the cracks in the solid oak desk, the creases in the curtains, the dust motes on the carpet.
The director's expression grew brittle as he watched.
This was the room he had used as his office for five solid years.
No matter that he was leaving, no matter that the man was a vice-chairman—this kind of insolence was difficult to swallow.
"Ha! To live in a room like this, a man ought to be paid, not pay for the privilege."
"Now see here! What do you—"
"Director."
Pierre leveled a steady gaze at the man.
"How much would you like to receive?"
The director, who had been about to shout at him to stop spouting nonsense, suddenly went still.
It took him a moment to fully digest the question.