Iron Rush (2)
I swore before I even realized it.
But how could I not?
My dad's the Fourth Hokage and I can't even inherit?
There was no way something like this happened without an embezzlement gene sitting somewhere in the middle.
An embezzlement gene, in my little North?!
I would never forgive an embezzlement gene.
"Wh…at the fuck? What is that supposed to mean?"
"Ah. Just an interjection."
Thankfully I'd spat that savory modern curse in my mother tongue, so Bearwolf hadn't understood a word of it. But that wasn't the point.
"We have mines and we can't dig them? What does that even mean?"
What was this, Hong Gildong?
Bearwolf answered.
"Three things are missing. Technicians to build the mines, miners to work the veins, and soldiers to guard the whole operation. In short—we don't have the people."
"Are the veins… buried particularly deep?"
"Most of them lie deep in remote mountain country."
His explanation boiled down cleanly enough.
So there are veins buried deep in the mountains, but those same mountains are stuffed full of monsters, not just ore.
To dig a mine you needed technicians, laborers, and soldiers all together, and the North was simply too busy bleeding from every other crisis to spare that kind of manpower. Mining only paid off after a long stretch of steady work—and there was never any time for that stretch.
"But if we had barbed wire, we could cut a serious number of soldiers out of the garrison requirement."
"Same goes for the technicians building the mines."
"Ah."
Mining was a high-skill industry, the pure distillation of precision excavation and civil engineering. A cave-in meant game over, so seasoned technicians had to be on site from day one—and while they worked, the defenses against monster raids had to be built just as solid. In Sir Bearwolf's judgment, barbed wire would shine exactly there.
"Holding a mine for the long term will still be impossible. But with barbed wire, I believe we can shave a great deal of time off the process. Even then, continuous occupation won't be feasible. Build the mine, string barbed wire every time we go in, clear out whatever monsters have nested during the downtime, then resume digging. Done that way, I think we can still pull real productivity out of it."
Hence the Iron Ore Transport Operation.
It had a logic of its own.
This isn't as simple as just pouring concrete walls.
No matter how strong a concrete wall was, it only projected that strength if people stood behind it. And with the North's catastrophic population numbers, you couldn't just peel laborers out of thin air.
You need people living there permanently, holding the place, or none of the defenses mean a damn thing.
T/O overflowing, and no one left to fill the slots. That flavor was painfully familiar.
Population cliff hits here too—outside of a GOP or a GP, most posts never get filled.
Sir Bearwolf's tearful struggle to plug holes with bodies he didn't have hit me even harder, because that had been my job in the modern world.
"If that's all you need, use as much as you want. I'll speak to the engineer battalion—take whatever you require."
"Thank you, Young Master."
I slammed my seal down on the approval papers, and Bearwolf practically skipped out of the room, beaming. All that joy over a few coils of barbed wire. Truly—Northmen, every last one of them, reeked of salt and thrift.
"…Just get back to work."
Modern-era PTSD was starting to crawl up my spine for no good reason, so I dragged my eyes back to the mountain of paperwork. The work was piled high enough to bury me.
"Report on increased catch volumes… that's good news."
"Defenses held thanks to the concrete walls. Of course—cement is the rice of the construction industry."
"Request for hanok construction? Well, once people taste something good, everyone wants it."
As I chewed through the incoming reports, the corners of my mouth kept twitching upward. Spreading rice and gukbap had fixed the Northmen's dinner tables; distributing concrete walls had raised their survival rate—and now reports of better fishing and hunting hauls were rolling in from every direction. Higher survival rates for the people of the North. From a manager's seat, those were the kind of headlines that filled your stomach even when you skipped a meal.
But the world never handed out nothing but good news.
"The people of Maron Village abandoned their homes and sought shelter in another settlement… tsk. And not just them. Three more villages shut their doors in the meantime."
According to the stacked reports, residents of three villages had left their hometowns behind. Not because monsters or wild beasts had driven them out—for the opposite reason entirely.
"What the three villages share is that they were actually safe from monster and beast raids… and so they had no real source of income."
The North was a harsh land. Monsters and beasts poured in because of that harshness—but that same harshness also let people hunt those creatures and sell them, propping up a twisted little ecosystem. A village without even that had nothing to live on, and eventually its people abandoned it for somewhere else. Social friction followed, of course.
"The newcomers caused a riot… the ringleaders have been tied up and locked in the village chief's storehouse, but the rest of the refugees are watching closely."
Corner people hard enough and they start making trouble. Whether you were the ones who fled or the ones who took them in, the North was still the North—and reports of social problems were rising. Incidents like this had always existed, but back then people were dying so fast that the priority sank. Now that life was just barely livable, the issues were surging to the surface.
Not sure whether to call this progress or not.
Standard procedure was to summon anyone locked in a village chief's storehouse to the Grand Duchy. Leave them there and other refugee groups might stir up fresh trouble—and simply keeping them locked up burned food. In the original's memories, chiefs who didn't feed their prisoners until they starved to death were far from rare.
"We'll have them stand trial at the Grand Duchy and then find them work, or… wait."
I was still turning over what to do with them when it hit me.
"No villages? No jobs? But the people are still here?"
This was exactly—
There it is. The thread through the gap.
I shot to my feet and shouted.
"Max!!!"
You haven't gone home yet, right?!
"You mean to build a village in the mountains?"
Max nearly choked when he heard the plan.
"A mining town, more precisely. Dig the ore and guard the mine at the same time. I intend to take the Northmen who fled their homes for lack of a livelihood and build a settlement around them."
I meant to put those refugees to work operating the iron mines Bearwolf had been dreaming of. An entire village dedicated to mining—the kind of structure that had once been common in the Korea I'd lived in.
These days technology has advanced enough that the mines closed and the towns vanished with them, but there was a time when plenty of cities lived and died by the colliery.
Mining might be a skilled trade, but at its core it was still a system where you dug a hole in the ground and money came out—and that could feed a lot of mouths. Coal use had declined, mine pollution—waste rock, leachate, dust—had piled up, and alternative energy had turned the whole industry into a sunset trade. But by the standards of this medieval world, mining was cutting-edge industry.
"Hah… I've heard that down south they run mines with penal battalions, but building an entire residential settlement for Northmen… is that even possible?"
"It won't be easy. But I believe it's doable."
We weren't throwing a village onto flat farmland. We were planting one in the middle of a mountain ravine. The difficulty would climb exponentially—that much was obvious. But the recent changes across the Grand Duchy had pushed the idea firmly into the realm of the possible.
"First thing we'll need is bridges linking the mountain ridges. Building a village takes a mountain of materials. And that part just got far easier with the Cat Tribe joining us. Have them haul the bridge materials, and once the spans are up, our Northmen can handle the rest of the work."
"The logic… does seem sound. Once a site is chosen, we throw a wide perimeter with barbed wire, raise concrete walls inside it, and a village takes shape. Station people there to help the technicians open the mine; once the specialists pull out, the villagers take over the mining work and dig the resources the North needs. And that—what did you call it, the Toll Road Guild? If we run the haulage along the roads they've opened, I can see a town with a character all its own taking root."
As the North's finest all-rounder, Max clearly had a solid grip on comparative advantage. His first reaction had been pure revulsion at the idea of building a village in a mountain gorge—but the moment he saw it might actually work, the profit potential started tugging at him.
"Hmm… looked at this way, it really isn't bad at all. We're always short on iron. Until now we've imported it from the Empire, but if the North can dig its own, both the quality and quantity of supplies we send to the Great Barrier will rise."
Max closed his eyes and murmured, his voice dropping so low I couldn't tell whether he was talking to me or to himself. Abacus beads were clearly flying behind those lids.
And then—
"…Perhaps there really is a chance."
His eyes snapped open, bright with sudden light.
"Right?"
"Yes. Whether it works or not, we have to try. That much is certain."
Leave it to Max, the Great Barrier's number-one devotee. Nothing scored higher points with him than the prospect of more supplies headed for that wall.
"I'll send word at once to the chiefs of every village still holding refugees. Promise to compensate them for the food they've spent, and we should be able to take custody of the displaced without much trouble."
"Good."
He really did read my mind.
Max left to gather the people who would become the Samcheok residents of our medieval world, and I put my own feet to work, shifting to a different room. Unfortunately, the original's memories held nothing useful about the ore veins.
Did they write the whole thing off as unprofitable and give up early?
The fact that no one had even tried was a shame, but it hardly mattered. The original's head wasn't the only place I could dig for knowledge.
If I rummage through there, I'll find a way.
I reached my destination and, as luck would have it, ran straight into the man already inside.
"Little brother? What brings you here?"
"Brother."
Darius Wintershield. In place of our absent Grand Duke, the man holding the family seat blinked at me with both eyes. I told him what I needed.
"I'd like to look through the records of the previous Grand Dukes."
"The Grand Dukes' records?"
"Yes."
The North's misery was a proud, multi-generational tradition. Which meant—
Surely at least one of our ancestors tried digging a hole in the ground.
In a medieval world, an ore vein was a lottery ticket. Hit a gold mine and the whole territory was set for life. Among that long line of ancestors, I was certain at least one of them had scratched a lottery ticket.
When people get desperate enough, the first thing they buy is a lottery ticket.
And then—
"…Is this for real?"
The results hit me like a truck.
Too few veins?
No.
"Why—why are there so many?!"
There were simply far too many. Sir Bearwolf had said there were a lot, so I'd braced myself for a respectable number. This blew past every estimate I had.
"…I thought this place was Cheorwon. Turns out it was Alaska."