North White Chef (2)
Koreans live on rice.
I had never given the proposition any particularly deep thought, yet after sitting down to a proper northern full-course spread and watching my revulsion for medieval dining climb to the absolute limit, I once again understood exactly where my roots lay.
I can't live on this.
Of course, the people responsible for my own table were among the few high-class chefs this barren North possessed, so I myself would never have to survive on that sort of fare. Even so, the average northern breakfast table was a catastrophe of eye-watering proportions.
I thought that installing an agungi while we were putting in the ondol would at least leave things in better shape… That was my arrogance.
In the North, survival alone was the supreme priority. In a place where anything that could be shoved into a mouth was considered acceptable, there was never going to be room for the art of cuisine to bloom. Failing to account for that had been a clear miscalculation on my part.
But that doesn't mean it's a problem I can solve overnight, either.
Even as a reincarnator packing twenty-first-century modern intelligence, I could not simply snap my fingers and resolve every issue under the sun. I was a trained soldier, not a trained chef. If I had even a little experience as a supply officer, there might have been some angle to work with, but…
"This is a bit much."
What could I do? Clinging to something that simply would not yield would not make the problem go away. Besides, the difficulties piled in front of me were hardly limited to reforming food culture; how could I pour every scrap of attention into that one corner alone? After resolving that I would deal with the matter someday, I decided to handle the work that needed doing first.
"Young Master. The Engineering Battalion's preparations for their expedition are complete."
Max, who had by now practically become my adjutant, brought word of the Engineering Battalion I had entrusted to him not long before. The battalion was, of course, made up of the builders who had played the starring role in redeveloping Jemili Village into a proper hanok settlement.
As I had said before, I had no intention of laying ondol only in Jemili Village and calling it finished. I meant to spread ondol across the entire North. With its arrival, firewood efficiency would rise and the number of people freezing to death would fall; there was no reason to hoard something this good.
So I had taken those original technicians—the builders—and founded a unit to carry ondol culture throughout the territory: the Engineering Battalion. Now their monumental first expedition date had been set.
"Is that so? I'll go out and see them."
At a unit founding ceremony, the highest-ranking person stepping forward for the ribbon-cutting was simply the golden rule. In truth the founding itself had finished long ago and this was more of a send-off, yet when I considered that these men would become the light that illuminated the North going forward, it was only natural that I attend even for this.
"The Young Master is coming out!"
At the cry of a servant under Max announcing the commander's entrance, the builders—no, the Engineering Battalion members—waiting at the Grand Castle's northern gate all snapped into crisp postures, eyes gleaming.
"All hands! Toward the Young Master—!"
"No, that's enough."
I stopped them as they tried to launch into razor-sharp drill. I was not some old man obsessed with formal reviews, and I had no intention of demanding a show from men about to set out on a long journey. Instead I strode straight over and stood face-to-face with the senior construction technician at the very front—the Engineering Battalion Commander I had appointed myself.
"Roman, was it?"
"Yes, sir! That's correct!"
Roman, the Engineering Battalion Commander, shouted like a fresh recruit who had just discovered military spirit. He might look like this now, but his years of service as a builder were longer than the original owner of this body had even been alive, and still he presented such a disciplined front. And that was not solely because of my family's prestige.
"I will not begin with some pedantic, boring speech about 'for the sake of the North…' After all, being kicked out of a warm heated floor when you are already freezing half to death so you can go tramping through a snow-whipped tundra cannot be a pleasant business."
"Not at all!!!"
"Don't give me that."
What truly moved these people was something far more intuitive and clear.
"I promise you. The accounting will be exact, the rewards generous. The farther you travel, and the more northerners you gift with warmth, the more travel pay and additional incentives I will provide!"
"Waaaaaaaah!!!"
"Ooooooooh!!"
"Incentives!!!"
What moves people is sure reward. Clear rewards and punishments are the whip that keeps a great organization from stalling and the carrot that drives it forward.
"You all know I shook down the continental merchant groups not long ago. So my pockets are still plenty deep—deep enough to pay every one of you substantial performance bonuses!"
I presented them with a blank check, blazing hot. Write whatever number you like according to your results.
And these people have already tasted money once.
This was no empty promise without a guarantee. I had already calculated and paid them their performance bonuses for the Jemili Village development down to the last coin. For men who, even when working overtime as castle affiliates, had only ever received their fixed monthly salary, it was a sum that made eyes pop. With wallets fattened, their voices naturally rose higher when they went home, and their motivation for the work was inevitably stirred up.
"The future of the North rests on your shoulders!!"
"Wooooaaaah!!"
"Wooooaaaah!!"
Money and honor. Able to seize both at once, the Engineering Battalion departed toward the northern snowfields with their heads held high. I watched their receding figures for a long while, then nodded and turned back.
After sending the Engineering Battalion off into the North, I returned once more to my office.
In truth, even with my original status as Second Young Master, the duties entrusted to me had never been all that numerous.
Fundamentally, the more responsibilities you took on from the position of Second Young Master, the more weighty authority came with them. And in a medieval world, that current could naturally warp into a power dynamic affecting the succession—which quickly grew exhausting.
Fortunately or not, however, the North was the place where people were the most precious. No one cared about such "trivial" matters, and as long as the work got done, it was good no matter who did it.
On top of that, the North itself being the land of fundamental barbarians meant that people who could handle paperwork the way the original body could were extremely few, which also played a part.
So Logwell Wintershield had never operated within a fixed scope of responsibility, but rather stuck his nose into anything he could reach—a division of labor not much different from mine now.
Put nicely, high freedom in the work. Put poorly, no system at all.
Yes. That was the real problem. This damn North was such a mess of a system that I wondered how it had even lasted a thousand years.
"I've improved trade with the merchant groups, but somehow there's still no one proper to deal with regarding this?"
There were working-level staff in the North. These thick reports piling up on my desk had been written and submitted by them, after all. But when I examined them one by one, it was truly five minutes to total chaos.
"Don't these people even have presentation slides or something?"
They were scraping together numbers haphazardly and reporting them, yet because nothing was consolidated into a single whole, the entire thing was all over the place. Even though I had narrowed the imperial merchant groups coming this time down from dozens to five, their reports on the quantities and types of goods those groups would bring for trade remained far too messy.
At this point I even had the reasonable suspicion that they intended merely to record things and dump all the actual processing onto me to handle myself.
"Even if the quantities themselves have increased, if the companies distributing them have decreased, shouldn't they organize things a bit more cleanly before putting them on the boss's desk?"
In the modern world, reports like this would have been rejected across the board, but I could not expect that much from these innate barbarians. I wondered how the original owner of this body had managed to work with these people at all. If it had been me, I might have collapsed from pure frustration long ago…
Ah. He already collapsed multiple times, didn't he.
Perhaps the original's frequent blackouts had been overwork issues built up from dealing with these people. The thought that I might face the same future sent a cold shiver of dread through me. As I was grinding through the paperwork with those thoughts running,
"Hm?"
My eyes fell on the list of imported goods written in a report that had just come up. More precisely, their sale goods.
"This is…"
What the merchant groups visiting from the Empire mainly handled was grain. Food resources being scarce in the North was nothing new, so the structure was mostly selling beast hides, spirit cores, byproducts and the like in order to buy grain—and that grain was mostly wheat and barley.
That was because this world I had reincarnated into was closer to a Western medieval setting, and of course their staple was bread. What I had been served when I visited Jemili Village had been bread… or rather something closer to a blunt weapon, but anyway.
Yet the grains coming up now were not only in tremendous quantity but also quite diverse. There would be several reasons I could guess.
First, the unit price per village went up, so to make up for the reduced profit margin they would increase quantity for volume sales.
The unit price per village had risen, yet through monopoly trade the number of villages trading had also increased, which would contribute to the rise in quantity as well. Plus they had expanded trade significantly again to make up for the shortfall from the bribe—I mean, the Northern Development Fund—they had offered me this time, so nothing strange there.
This isn't something that can be solved simply by increasing trade quantity, so they would have expanded the product lineup itself too.
The reason the northern staff's reports were all over the place was clearly that unfamiliar things had suddenly started arriving in bulk. They had checked them once and then reported what they saw as-is to me because everything was new to them. And this was a stroke of good fortune I had not even imagined.
"Butler."
"Yes, Young Master."
"Do you know what this is?"
I held out to Max the catalog that had come up along with the trade goods report. They had probably enclosed it for guidance since it would be the first time northerners were seeing the item. Max also skimmed it and tilted his head.
"Hmm… I'm not sure. Even this old man is seeing it for the first time."
As expected, even the experienced Max had never heard of it. That made it all the more curious to me that it had arrived here at all.
"Reading the enclosed description, it seems similar to barley or wheat. But it is clearly different. Well now—having to peel the husk from the grains is similar to those, yet even after milling it is not easy to make into bread? Then how exactly are we supposed to eat this?"
"They're probably just trying to maximize the trade quantity."
"Even if they increase the trade quantity, should they not at least bring something edible? Are they telling us to simply chew these grains whole when they cannot even be made into bread? These bastards—even after receiving a lesson from Young Master, they still have not come to their senses. Trying to slight the North again…"
But Max, judging this to be some prank by the merchant-group bastards, let his anger show. Certainly, from the perspective of a Westerner seeing this "grain" for the first time, it amounted to playing games with food itself.
"At least they still have some conscience—the unit price is far cheaper compared to barley or wheat—but if it cannot be made into bread, what is the point? Are they telling us to make stew with it? At this rate, perhaps we should simply buy it up within the duchy and turn it into combat rations…"
"Combat rations, you say."
Well, that did not sound bad either. Anyone who had been through the military would have eaten combat rations made from this at least once. But it was far too precious to simply consume as combat rations alone. No—it was more than that.
"That certainly would not be bad either… but I have a different idea."
"Yes? What do you mean by that…"
"The way I see it, this grain is going to become the staple food of the northern people from now on."
The Zeros Merchant Group, was it? Looking at what they had brought, I could not help but smile.
With this alone, I could overturn the disgust-filled tables of the northern people!