Surviving in the City
It goes without saying, of course, but the ones who would end up receiving those delicious Asty-brand apple boxes were never going to be the well-fed, well-to-do noble lords.
Those types were not the sort you could bribe in the first place.
In this suffocatingly hierarchical society, nobles were nobles in the truest sense of the word. Born into privilege from the moment they drew their first breath, they lived out their entire lives as beings of an entirely different caliber from the common folk. They were the uppermost privileged class of this era—the ones for whom the phrase “noble stock” fit perfectly—and against them, a paltry bribe offensive stood no chance of working. Especially not when I didn’t have that much money to begin with.
Granted, the ten thousand florins Rebecca had pressed into my hands was a sum large enough to make anyone’s eyes pop out of their skull. But to noble lords who squeezed hundreds of thousands of subjects dry and maintained standing armies of several thousand men each, it would barely register as a drop in the bucket. Even collecting a single florin from each of those hundreds of thousands would yield hundreds of thousands of florins—so why would they ever be tempted by a mere few thousand?
And if I simply excluded high-ranking nobles of count rank and above from my list of potential targets, the whole idea of courting the nobility would lose all meaning. I couldn’t exactly throw my entire fortune at recruiting one or two local power brokers, could I? Besides, even local power brokers weren’t soft targets. Being a noble meant you at least had the wealth to maintain your own image and status. Even if I poured out every last coin I had, I wouldn’t be able to buy more than a handful of them—and wasting my operating funds just to snag some baron or other would be pure insanity. Especially now that I was stuck in the same boat as Count Montpellier, that budding traitor.
I’m out of time.
And that, in truth, was the biggest problem of all.
As far as I knew, the average lifespan in this era was around forty years. That didn’t mean people keeled over and died of old age the moment they hit forty, of course—it was simply the statistical average formed by harsh living conditions and sky-high infant mortality rates. Still, Count Montpellier had already exceeded that average by a full decade. Unlike Earth, this was a world where mana existed, so knights who trained in martial arts possessed far superior physiques—but that was only true in their youth. A man in his fifties who spent all day hunched over a desk buried in paperwork couldn’t possibly be in good health. On top of that, medical progress was abysmal ever since the Vesta Order had cut off its divine power services.
In other words, Count Montpellier didn’t have many years left in him. He wasn’t about to drop dead overnight, but he was far too old to plant apple-tree seeds while dreaming of some distant future harvest. Therefore, the count’s rebellion would have to begin within five years at the absolute latest. If he dragged things out any longer, he’d die of old age before he ever got to wear a crown. He would absolutely put his treason into action before the retirement-age clock started ticking.
And five years was far too short a time to build a foundation for playing a meaningful role in a civil war. A lord who already commanded his own territory and vassals might manage it, but for someone like me—who had only two people she could freely order around—even getting a single business off the ground and running would be a tight squeeze. If I leisurely waited around for my enterprises to grow and my network of connections to form, I’d end up sitting on my hands sucking my thumb when the civil war finally arrived. That much was obvious.
So who, then, should I target with these apple boxes?
There was only one answer. People I could win over in large numbers for relatively little cost, who wouldn’t take long to befriend, and who could still exert a meaningful influence on the coming chaos of war.
“Grandfather Pates, since you run a library, you must know a couple of trustworthy printers, right?”
“Yes. I contract with reliable and diligent ones to obtain printed copies.”
“Perfect. Next time, please take me along.”
The literate class.
In an age overflowing with people who couldn’t even write their own names, intellectuals of exceptional learning were an invaluable resource. If I buttered them up thoroughly in advance, I wouldn’t have to worry about a shortage of talent when the time came to build my power base. And as it happened, I possessed a secret weapon that would explosively improve the efficiency of the printing press.
Metal movable type.
A technology of the future that our medieval friends had yet to taste.
Sadly, it was impossible for me to just start churning out metal type left and right here. I lacked the magic tool that turned a designer’s half-baked ideas into finished products—the engineer. Moreover, I didn’t have the money to stamp out metal type willy-nilly. Metal type naturally required vast quantities of metal, plus craftsmen skilled enough to process it with precision. Could you even imagine how expensive those two things were in this era?
On top of that, the core of a Gutenberg-style printing press lay in creating raised and recessed surfaces on each individual type piece and modifying a press to stamp letters mechanically. It wasn’t something you could finish just by throwing a single skilled carpenter at it the way you could with a spinning jenny or a loom. If my only goal was lowering the price of books, it might actually be faster to start making K-dak paper instead. That stuff was tough enough to make armor out of, after all. Those ignorant Westerners never realized you could wash and reuse paper. Our ancestors were smart enough to recycle paper at the government level. The mania for the thrift movement we know today actually stretched all the way back to the Joseon era.
But despite all those countless advantages, producing K-dak paper to win over the literate class was next to impossible. Because… I had no idea what tree dak paper was even made from. In an age when a ream of A4 paper cost only a few thousand won, who the hell used hanji? And the mass-production process for hanji was a problem too. Suppose that through trial and error I figured out the raw material for dak paper and bulk-purchased it. Where was I supposed to find the manpower and facilities to run a paper mill? Even if I somehow managed that and started churning out paper, I’d get to watch the magic of demand drying up, my bank account transforming into an empty shell, and the Saintess plummeting into debt.
Because the Vesta Order had collapsed.
Originally, the group that consumed the most paper in medieval Europe was the Catholic Church. They needed to print Bibles, parishioner registers, and indulgences—so of course. The scale of that religious demand was so enormous that even Gutenberg, the father of printing, had periods when he made his living printing indulgences for the Church. But in this neighborhood, the Order that had filled Catholicism’s role had completely collapsed thanks to the Goddess’s escape, and the paper mills and printers had lost the big client who had single-handedly kept the entire industry afloat. Dumping something like dak paper into a market that was already a red ocean would earn me nothing but losses and curses. Even if I introduced modern division of labor and the like to boost productivity, whether I could actually capture the hearts of the literate class remained an open question.
“Oh, Elder Pates! It’s not even delivery day—what brings you here…?”
“Nothing special. A distant relative’s niece wanted to see how you fellows work, so I brought her along.”
“Hello.”
So I decided to fill the printers’ wallets in a more refined manner.
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, might I take a look at the woodblocks?”
“Hmm, that might be a bit…”
“It’ll be fine. She’s a remarkably sharp child—enough to surprise even me. If any problems arise, I’ll cover the damages myself.”
“Well… if the Elder puts it that way…”
Through Grandfather Pates’s connections, I toured a nearby print shop. Just as expected, a basic process of laying paper over woodblocks and pressing with a roller to print the letters. I pretended to ponder something for a moment, then borrowed a pen and dashed off a blueprint in an instant.
“This is a schematic for a mechanical printing press using metal type and a press. And this is both a sponsorship for the future of the publishing industry and a grant to support the production of a prototype mechanical press.”
Then I handed it to the print-shop owner with a few gold coins resting on top of the blueprint.
“Uh, little girl? What kind of money is this?”
Unfortunately, the boss seemed to have fallen prey to that chronic adult disease known as suspicion. I cured his paranoid condition by pulling out the count’s letter of guarantee and various other blueprints from my pocket and showing them to him.
“I was thinking of doing a printing press next after the spinning jenny and the loom, but as you can see, I’m a bit busy. If you have the time, try building one according to the plans.”
Only then did he seem to grasp the situation, his face turning deathly pale. Yeah. I had come on a little strong. But so what? You gonna refuse the money?
“Uh, uh, then what about this money—”
“Use it however you like. Even if you don’t attempt to develop the press, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a small token of goodwill for those who devote themselves to recording and preserving more knowledge.”
The print-shop owner beamed as he accepted the money and the blueprint. Mechanical press or whatever—he’d just come into free cash, so of course he was happy. But I had no intention of letting my money get wasted on entertainment expenses or the like. Nor did I plan to rely on some contract with no actual binding force.
“However, I do have one minor request.”
I disarmed him with a bright, sunny smile and held out a piece of paper I’d prepared in advance. The emblem of a lantern cradling a small flame. The new symbol of the Vesta Order, soon to be gloriously reborn.
“I’d like you to insert this emblem, even if only small, on the final page of every book printed at this shop.”
“How long do I have to keep doing that? The ink and paper costs might get a little burdensome…”
“Don’t worry. Soon every print shop will be sharing this emblem.”
Every print shop would end up engraving the lantern emblem into their books. Which meant the mechanical printing-press blueprints I had drawn would be provided to every printer. It was also a threat: if he just took the money and washed his hands of it, he’d be crushed by competitors who actually built the press and go completely bankrupt. So this guy would have no choice but to diligently throw himself into developing the printing press—spending far more than the modest grant I’d given him, at that.
With this, I had caught both rabbits: cost reduction and winning over the literate class. I’d dumped the entire development and distribution costs of the press onto the printers themselves, while monopolizing the fame of a great inventor and the goodwill of the intellectuals. At this rate, even if Count Montpellier’s treason failed, I should at least be able to save my own neck. Whether I could protect anything else was another question.
“Good. Let’s head to the next print shop.”
“Yes, Saintess.”
I set out on a journey to find new subcontractors, carried on Grandfather Pates’s back. I decided to ignore Rebecca’s gaze, burning with jealousy.