Iron Rush (1)
The reason the idea of a Toll Road Guild had come to me was simple enough.
How does a stretch of land this hopeless manage to have nothing?
The North was a territory with problems in every direction. Listing them one by one would have taken forever. Industry, finance, science and technology—the economic fields were a mess. Welfare, medicine, public safety—the social problems were just as bad. Education, sports, tourism—the cultural side of things was abysmal from top to bottom.
When I asked myself why, plenty of answers jostled for attention, but the first one that always rose to the surface was this: moving across this vast expanse of land was a miserable ordeal.
The whole world being a snowfield is bad enough, but the mountains never end either. You have to loop all the way around them, and just going from one village to the next takes three or four days?
Suddenly I understood exactly how the Egyptians must have felt when they nearly wrecked their country trying to dig a canal. Cut a single road through, and the time saved multiplies several times over. How could anyone not do it?
So the moment I got the chance, I was going to drive a road through.
The gains from building a road were never just about shaving hours off a trip. Sometimes an entire action only becomes possible if you can arrive inside a fixed window of time—which means pulling the impossible into the realm of the possible. The first example that always came to mind was distribution.
Once you have a road, you can move goods along it. Merchant companies, for instance, can start delivering cargo they never could have shipped before.
At a glance, you might wonder whether a place that was basically one giant walk-in freezer even needed help with distribution. Throw something in the back of a wagon without preservatives and it freezes on its own. But this was a world where the mystery of mana existed. Elixirs that boosted a user’s mana, and the spirit pellets and spirit herbs used to make them, came with hard time limits—and the shorter that transit time, the higher the price you could command.
If I put that fact in front of the five merchant houses licensed to trade in the North, they would pay the toll and use the road with their eyes spinning.
That alone would prove the Toll Road Guild’s reason for existing and earn them the funds to stand on their own feet… but that isn’t the end of my real goal.
Foreign currency from continental merchant companies would be a tidy haul in its own right—but was economic activity only ever about expanding overseas? If pure profit growth was the aim, going after foreign markets was the correct move. For a group to sustain itself, though, the opposite mattered more.
Yes. What I was after was the domestic market.
Once the roads are laid, the North might just be able to stand on its own.
There is a theory called the hundred-million domestic market thesis: once a country’s population hits a hundred million, its internal market can sustain itself. Of course it is not a hundred percent true—Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and a pile of other counterexamples exist. But the Korean Peninsula has Japan right next door as living proof of what is possible. In other words, the thing to look at is not raw headcount, but purchasing power—effective consumption.
Building roads means increasing that effective consumption.
The North’s chronic population problem could not be fixed overnight. Even if one more person was born, it took at least fifteen years before that person became an effective consumer—and that was allowing for Northerners, who tended to be hardworking and capable. Mobilizing the Cat Tribe to cut roads through the mountains, on the other hand, would take not fifteen years but fifteen days. That was the real beauty of the plan.
Comparative advantage isn’t limited to the Cat Tribe either. Every village has one of its own.
Villages near the foothills gathered medicinal herbs. Villages near rivers or the sea caught fish. Villages close to wild animal or monster territory harvested hunting byproducts. Villages with none of those things I would turn into industrial towns by teaching them the techniques I had in mind.
Trade those specialties, and everyone exchanged what they held comparative advantage in—a win-win for all. And for any of that to work, we needed roads that could cross those godforsaken mountains.
“Arun’s reaction was pretty good.”
After hearing me out, Arun had gone back saying he would think it over. He could not accept on the spot; the tribe needed to gather and discuss. From the look of him, though, that was only a formality. I expected an easy yes.
“Well, it’s not as if we can start building roads tomorrow anyway.”
Road construction was going to take time. We needed the help of the engineer battalion, which was still busy spreading Korean-style houses across the North. And before they could cut routes between the peaks, I would have to pass on what I knew about modern bridges.
The problem was the knowledge itself.
How much do I really know about bridges? At best, that there are slab bridges, girder bridges, truss bridges, cable-stayed bridges…
Still, the more I thought about it, the more that seemed like enough. When I introduced the ondol, they had researched among themselves and pushed the technology forward at a blistering pace. The engineers were short on knowledge, not on wisdom. I had already given them concrete; if I handed over cables and modern bridge information on top of that, they would probably set the auto-hunt for tech development and evolve it on their own.
I’m counting on you, engineer battalion!
“With that in mind, I’ll let that side take its time.”
Raising the tech tree was one job. Building villages for the Cat Tribe was another. Even with ground already available, housing a population of several hundred required more than one or two villages. Considering that Northern villages were often only a few dozen people, anything short of a deliberately planned large settlement meant I would have to scout five or six ruined villages and dispatch the engineers.
“Back to work, then.”
Introduction, development, conclusion: paperwork. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday.
Reminding myself of this absolute garbage legend of a life of mine, I picked up the pen again—partly to clear the backlog of administrative work. I was just about to throw myself onto my private battlefield and carve through the mountain of documents when—
Knock, knock.
Someone rapped on the office door.
“Young Master. May I come in?”
Huh?
An unexpected visitor.
“Come in.”
“Pardon the intrusion.”
The man who entered was none other than—
“Sir Bearwolf? What brings you here?”
—Bearwolf, Vice Commander of the Wintershield Knights.
For those of you wondering, so who the hell is that, you nerd—Sir Bearwolf was the vice commander of the Wintershield Knights, the order that stood for the North. He was the first person I had faced when I opened my eyes in this world, and together with old Max he was one of the men who had carried me around since I was a child.
If you asked why a man like that was only reappearing after more than a full volume of time had passed—
“Haha. I have not been able to call on you until now, and to arrive so suddenly… I am truly sorry.”
“Not at all. Everyone knows how busy you are, Sir.”
—it was simply because the work piled on him was staggering.
Even First Young Master Darius is out on assignment whenever he gets a free moment. Same for this man.
As vice commander of the Wintershield Knights, Bearwolf lived a legendary life of early departures and late returns, with an overnight expedition every other day. Even in the army, standing watch usually bought you the next day off. The North’s work-life balance was something you could not look at without crying. And still Sir Bearwolf had given decades of silent service to the North without so much as a frown—so dropping by on his day off to see me was genuinely unexpected.
“So what really brings you, Sir?”
“Mm. I came to see you today because I heard what happened at Jangbaek Mountain.”
“Ah—is this about taking in the Cat Tribe?”
Backlash from local factions when outsiders were brought in was always a possibility. I asked just in case, and Sir Bearwolf shook his head with a hearty laugh.
“Haha, no. Butler Max already told me what you said when you accepted them. ‘Under Wintershield’s shield, the North is one,’ was it? Truly the words of a Grand Ducal heir.”
…Excuse me? I said that?
Something had clearly gotten warped in the retelling, but if that was not why he was here, it did not matter.
“Then what did bring you?”
“The outpost you led the construction of at the entrance to Jangbaek Mountain. More precisely—the material wrapped around its outer wall. Something called barbed wire.”
Ah. That.
Thinking about it, it made perfect sense that a military man would care more about military issues than population-and-culture questions like the Cat Tribe.
“I heard from my men that it is cheap to produce, light enough to transport easily, and fast to install—optimized for throwing up temporary positions. Is that correct?”
“Exactly.”
Barbed wire’s greatest strength was its overwhelming cost-effectiveness. The structure was simple; it was not solid iron but twisted wire with barbs, and yet its defensive power was enough that mid-sized monsters could not force their way through easily. That said—
“But what do you intend to use it for? Barbed wire is optimized for field fortifications. For permanent defense, walls are far better.”
Barbed wire was good for positions, not bases. A base was a semi-permanent garrison that stayed put even in wartime; a position was only a military post that assumed unit movement. The Jangbaek Mountain setup had been for a temporary foothold, and as far as I knew, Bearwolf’s operations did not call for long-term occupation either.
When I put that to him, Sir Bearwolf seemed to think for a moment, then spoke.
“Hmm. The truth is, I have had an operation in mind for some time, and barbed wire looks perfectly suited to carrying it out.”
“An operation you’ve been planning? That sounds like something that never existed before…”
“Correct. It is an operation that has lived only in my head until now—the Iron Ore Transport Operation.”
Iron Ore Transport Operation?
Some kind of supply run?
I tilted my head, not quite following, and Sir Bearwolf’s lips moved.
“As you know, the North imports a great deal of iron ore from the continent—on top of its food.”
“That’s because we don’t really have any ore veins of our own, isn’t it?”
“It is. But… that statement is a little misleading. In fact, the North does have ore veins. A great many of them.”
“…What?”
The North was overflowing with resources?
My heart kicked hard for a second. It felt like Naruto finding out the father he thought was an orphan was actually the Fourth Hokage. Wait—was I the youngest son of a chaebol family after all…?
“The problem,” he continued, “is that we cannot mine them.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?!”