Soap
Soap.
In the military, hygiene is something you can never pry free of.
Grown Korean men who spent their days at home scratching their bellies suddenly start smelling of softener the moment they enlist — that is hygiene management. When the morning sun rises like it has lost its mind and everyone pours outside to sun-dry their gear, that too is hygiene management.
And even that regulation cut — three centimeters on the front and crown, one on the sides and back — all of it is, somehow, hygiene management.
That, however, is the hopeful side of the story.
Once you drop into the despair edition, hygiene management climbs into the miraculous realm of “is this even possible?”
Saffron? Fabric softener?
Those are for ordinary folk. True elite warriors, the unshakable hardcases, can solve anything with nothing but soap and toothpaste.
No — they have to be able to.
These days shampoo and softener come as issue items, but back in the old forward units, where the water was clear and the air was clean, the only initial supply was soap.
Remembering those days—washing face, body, and hair with the same bar, then grinding more of it against the back of the soap dish right there on the spot to finish the laundry—memories come hanging off in clusters until my hands and feet start to tremble.
Anyway.
I should make that multipurpose miracle.
Soap.
Naturally, it did not exist in this medieval world.
So I asked how people managed hygiene here at all —
And that, too, split into polar extremes.
In a world without science, the nobility and anyone above them actually handled hygiene more easily than people in a scientific worldview. They leaned on the miracle of magic: one low-tier spell called Clean and every film of grime on the body vanished in a minute, as if it had been scrubbed with industrial cleaner.
The problem was the lower classes who never received that blessing. Their situation was truly wretched — as the cooks had said, they scrubbed themselves raw with lye water or steeped certain plants that worked a little like soapwort.
In a way, those are just the minor-league versions of soap.
Fortunately, I knew how to make the real thing.
I had learned it during community service at a welfare center, at a one-day soap-making event. I never imagined it would prove useful here.
"All right — is everyone here?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Good. Then follow the steps exactly as I say them."
According to the scrap of science I had picked up at the welfare center, soap is basically the sodium salt of fatty acids. Add caustic soda to oil and the fat hydrolyzes, forming fatty-acid sodium salts — and that is soap. Chemically the process is called saponification, and the word soap itself comes from it.
So what does any of that actually mean?
Hell if I know. I just memorized it.
On the twenty-first-century Korean Peninsula, memorization technique meant: even if you do not understand a word, shut up and drill it in. I could not afford to look like an idiot in front of the soldiers on community service, so I learned whatever they told me by heart and roughly memorized the principles even without grasping them.
Anyway.
Soap made this way acts as a surfactant, forcing two layers that refuse to mix — water and oil — into one. Greasy filth that will not wash off suddenly rinses away, and it carries serious sterilizing power.
The principle for making it is simple. First you completely burn seaweed such as kelp until you have white ash. Pack the ash in cloth and pour water through it; the minerals dissolve out, and that liquid is lye. Lye itself is already an alkaline solution that eats grease and grime. Stir it into oil or fat and soap is born.
Heat makes it form faster.
In my case I had watched the neighborhood women's association go door to door collecting waste cooking oil, then make soap with the elderly at the welfare center. Of course there was no cooking oil in the North, so I planned to substitute animal fat rendered from monster and beast carcasses.
Around here, fat was the one thing we had in surplus.
"Like this — keep stirring slowly in one direction."
"Ohh, it's getting sticky!"
"It's turning into dough!"
The cooks watched the saponification with open wonder. There were refinements — adding crushed roasted clam shells, or a little salt — but anything hard to obtain on short notice I left out. Clams lived almost everywhere; I would fold those details into later batches.
Once the saponification was finished, we poured the mixture into molds to set. After about three days we took it out, cut it into workable sizes, and left it to dry in a well-ventilated shade —
"Done. This is soap."
Properly it should cure for a full month, but this alone already produced usable soap. When I handed the bars out to the cooks, they were skeptical at first.
"The texture is strange…"
"It's kind of slippery…"
"Something's clinging to my hands…"
That was only before they wet it. I took the ones whose bare hands were still greasy from butchering monster carcasses and told them to wash.
"How is this possible?! It doesn't even compare to lye water!!!"
"Grease comes off this easily?!"
"I used to scrub for more than ten minutes until the skin peeled off my hands…!!"
They had stepped into a new world; their eyes went round.
Soap may be old-fashioned, but its ability to kill bacteria ranks near the top among hygiene products.
Solid bars, at least, out-sterilize wet wipes and hand sanitizer. Add a little scented wax for fragrance and we would have a hygiene tool this era had never seen.
"So — is it useful enough?"
"Useful? Far more than that!"
"Not only for supply to The Great Wall — I want to take some home!"
"Exactly! At this quality you could charge money for it."
Charge money…
No need to inflate it that far…
Huh? Wait a second. Thinking about it… is there any reason not to sell this?
I had started making soap only because I needed something for the contest and something that would help maintain combat power along The Great Wall. In other words, it was meant as an internal-use item.
But if we develop a specialty product from byproducts harvested at The Great Wall, sell it, and send the profits back up to the Wall, that still maintains combat power, doesn't it?
I turned at once to Max, who was waiting nearby.
"Butler. Does this have commercial potential?"
Max considered the question with careful gravity, then slowly nodded.
"There is more than enough possibility. This soap — the unit cost is not especially high, I take it?"
"I would imagine not."
Soap would be mass-produced in cauldrons from monster fat the North had in abundance and from kelp that multiplied so aggressively people called it the devil's plant. We could set the unit price wherever we liked, but there was no need to aim high.
"Then the main targets would be commoners, mercenaries, or the army… this could prove an enormous help."
"Commoners I understand — but why mercenaries or the army?"
Surely soap-universalism had not already infected them too?
"Their personal hygiene matters, of course, but this soap's true value will shine when maintaining personal equipment. Even in my younger days, cleaning monster grease off a blade was no small chore."
"Ah."
Right — this was a world where you actually had to grab spear and sword and cut monsters down yourself. I had only thought as far as washing hands and laundry; Max's remark that one could even do the dishes with soap elevated me from a mere civilian and wrung honest admiration from me.
And I newly realized one more fact.
"This is actually pretty good, isn't it?"
Those monster bastards — turns out there was nothing on them worth throwing away.
Once a thought lands, you have to act on it at once.
Going to the gym is the same: if you keep saying "I'll go, I'll go" and put it off, lunch becomes evening, evening becomes tomorrow morning, and tomorrow morning slides into the next postponement — an endless loop.
At first I had only meant to make prototypes for the cooks. The moment the path swung toward selling the stuff, I summoned Kim Cheolsu of Cheolsu Distribution on the spot.
"Oh my — you called for me, Young Master!"
And Kim Cheolsu… no, Zeros, master of the Zeros Merchant Group, who had never learned a scrap of magic, came flying as if he had mastered earth-shrinking steps. He truly reached my residence at that speed.
"…Well, I shouldn't be the one to say this, but is it really all right to arrive this fast?"
A man who was, on paper, a merchant-group owner, rocketing over just because I called. Aren't you supposed to be running a business?
When I asked with that look in my eyes, he answered with a delighted grin.
"I am doing business right now, am I not?"
"What?"
"Ninety-nine percent of our group's trade takes place inside the Wintershield Grand Duchy. And the one who oversees that trade is none other than you, Young Master. If the Young Master calls, I drop whatever urgent matter I have and come running!"
Ah. So that was how it worked.
I thought he was laying the flattery on thick, yet it made a certain sense, so I nodded and went straight to the point.
"Fine. Then let's add one more item to the sales list."
"What? Has the Grand Ducal House conducted a subjugation recently?"
Ordinarily the Zeros Merchant Group and the others visited the North on the fifteenth of every month. There was a limit to the grain they could haul, and specialty goods needed time to accumulate through hunting. Sometimes, when the Grand Ducal House mounted a large-scale subjugation, they summoned the merchants to process the spoils; this case was similar in outline yet different in nature.
"Not that. Our house has developed a new specialty product. Here it is."
I set the commercialized soap in front of him.
For the record, we had prepared two models for sale: a premium version scented with candle wax for commoners who had a little money to spare, and a budget version intended for scouring weapons and armor. Having actively taken Max's idea on board, Zeros tested the bars under my direction — and his eyes went round.
"What in the world is this?!"
Even to Zeros, the power of surfactant soap was overwhelming.
"Even this small amount lasts one person a solid two weeks without trouble. Grease on weapons and armor washes off cleanly as well. Every household could keep one, but if you supply mercenary bands or military units, wouldn't you still pocket a handsome margin?"
"Th-that's right!!"
After all, the best contracts are military contracts. Once you open the sales channel, the rest is simply a fight over how much pure margin you can skim. Knowing that perfectly well, Zeros's eyes spun as he pressed the question.
"The unit price — what's the unit price?!"
How much?
Why are you asking me.
"Haha. Price is something the buyer knows, not the seller."
"What?"
"How much were you prepared to offer?"
Opening bid.
Don't you know that's the golden rule of this trade?