Normalizing the North (1)
The North is barren.
What little it possesses comes only from game hunted at the risk of life and limb, while what it lacks is endless. In the scramble to fill those gaps, the territory has no choice but to look outward—and the side that lacks is always the weaker party.
So who, then, holds the upper hand?
"Butler, looking at this, most of Asbil Village's income comes from outside merchant caravans arriving from the Empire."
"Pardon? Well, that would stand to reason, would it not? The North can neither produce enough grain nor mint its own currency, so the bulk of all trade is inevitably conducted through external caravans."
Naturally—caravans coming from the Empire.
I skimmed through the ledgers and asked,
"According to these records, a top-grade wolf pelt sold for fifteen shillings, a mid-grade for ten, and a low-grade for five. Butler, do you happen to know what these goods fetch inside the Empire?"
"Hmm… I'm not certain, but depending on the region, wouldn't they trade for two or three times that?"
Yes. That's the realistic answer.
Even Max wasn't a fool. He knew the price of pelts traded in the North differed from those sold in Imperial territory. Merchants, after all, were a breed that lived for profit; there was no reason to trek all the way to this freezing north without a margin to show for it.
But he wouldn't know the exact figures.
Because the North was simply that vast.
The Grand Duke's direct domain alone is larger than the entire Korean Peninsula.
Even if the peninsula was a small scrap of land stuck to the edge of Asia, by ordinary human standards it was still an enormous stretch of territory. Driving a car down a straight highway would take more than a day—and this place had neither proper roads nor anything resembling an automobile.
That meant an absence of transport, and an absence of transport meant a severing of information.
An ordinary northerner had no way of knowing what their pelts sold for beyond the borders.
But while other northerners were busy scraping together each day's living, there was one man who never neglected to learn the full state of the North and gather information on the outside world.
Logwell Wintershield.
The original owner of this body.
A top-grade wolf pelt trades for one hundred fifty shillings outside. Mid-grade, one hundred. Low-grade, fifty. Two or three times? Please. It's more than tenfold.
Sifting through the memories, I found price data on the pelts that were most commonly traded. And the problem didn't end there.
The pelts alone are a tenfold loss—but the real issue is the grain prices stacked on top of that.
Northerners sold their pelts and bought wheat, barley, and the like. People had to eat carbohydrates, whether as bread or rice, to stay alive.
And in the North, a sack of wheat traded for ten shillings—while the same mid-grade sack averaged three shillings in Imperial territory.
No wonder they're poor.
A tenfold loss when selling goods, a threefold loss when buying them. Multiply it out and you get a cumulative deficit of thirty times. If that didn't make you poor, that would be the abnormality.
The original owner of this body must have been tearing his hair out over this.
As the memories surfaced one by one, I could see that Logwell had tracked the problem to its root: the chronic information vacuum among northerners, and the continental merchants who gouged them for it.
But knowing it did him no good. There was nothing Logwell Wintershield could reasonably do about it.
What was he supposed to do? March up to the merchants and demand an explanation?
The title of Second Young Master carried weight in the North. That was why I could get away with something as absurd as showing up at a house of mourning and asking, "Might I have a look at the deceased's ledgers from when he was alive?"
But that authority only went as far as the North. Inland, the northern territories were little more than a remote frontier. Even the Grand Duchy itself was essentially a place where the Grand Duke ran around with a stone axe hunting bears like a barbarian.
In an environment with virtually no influence beyond its borders, what good would "Why are you selling so expensive? Give us a better rate" actually do?
Even if they listened, they'd just drop from a tenfold markup to ninefold. How much would that really help?
And the biggest reason was something else entirely.
On top of everything, I can't even tell the northerners about this.
That was why the Second Young Master had sat alone with this knowledge, fretting in silence. He simply couldn't bring himself to say out loud: You are being fleeced by more than thirty times, and that is why you are poor.
If the northerners ever found out…
These were people who took down bears with bare hands and stone axes. The colder the world outside, the hotter the blood ran under their skin.
They might show restraint before me as the Grand Duke's Second Young Master—but the moment they learned that outside traders had been running a scam, they wouldn't hold back. Their blood would demand it, and those same stone axes that crushed bears would find the merchants' skulls.
And after that?
The merchants would simply stop coming north, and the whole region would take a one-way trip to ruin.
The end result of a dopamine addiction is always destruction. In that moment, I roughly understood why Logwell Wintershield had spent so many days hunched over his desk in his sickroom, grinding his teeth.
This is a checkmate.
It was galling, but situations like this were hardly rare. A memory surfaced from my days as duty officer—something one of the duty soldiers had told me.
"Captain Heo, did you know?"
"Know what?"
"During the Joseon era, our ancestors made a killing as middlemen between the Jurchen and the Ming."
That soldier had been a history buff—someone with an unhealthy obsession for the past.
"Joseon would buy horses from the Jurchen for about fifteen nyang of silver, then flip them to the Ming through tributary trade for a hundred fifty nyang. Nearly a tenfold profit margin!"
He'd gone on about how amazing our ancestors were. At the time, I'd just been stuck on night duty, sleepy and exhausted, and thought it was pure nonsense.
Fuck. I never imagined I'd end up as the Jurchen.
Apparently these kinds of arrangements were common throughout world history. Later on, the Jurchen would build a military machine powerful enough to thrash the Ming—a nation with more than ten times their population—but being played for suckers by information gaps, a barren environment, slow cultural development, and ruined infrastructure was simply the everyday reality of northern peoples.
If this pattern had been repeating itself all over the earth for thousands of years, it wasn't a problem a mere medieval second prince of a grand duchy could solve overnight.
For Logwell Wintershield, it truly was a checkmate.
But—
I'm not him.
My body might have become a medieval second prince, but my brain was still the same. A twenty-first-century modern man already knew the solution to this problem.
And the first step toward that solution was—
"Butler."
"Yes, Young Master."
"Would you call my brother for me?"
Brother!
Help me!
"You called for me, little brother."
Responding to my request, Darius left his construction work mid-swing and strode straight into the village chief's house. Fresh off a live construction site, his upper body was soaked through with sweat, monstrous muscle writhing beneath the skin. Even looking up, all I could see was a pair of furious pectorals, and for a moment I felt myself shrink—but I forced my voice out.
"Yes, Brother. Might I trouble you for a moment of your time?"
"Of course. As much as you need, if you want it."
Ah.
In that instant, a thought I'd raised and then deliberately smothered came rushing back.
This man was pouring affection into me in one direction only. But did I have the right to accept that affection?
I… I'm not the person you knew.
Until the moment I'd called for the man in front of me, I'd been thinking with perfect confidence. But was it right for someone whose shell was the same while the inside was completely different to receive this kind of trust? Could I face him without shame?
The moment that thought struck, I found myself unable to meet Darius's eyes—for an entirely different reason.
Then—
A vast shadow fell across my face.
Darius had covered my head with a hand the size of a pot lid.
"Little brother, you look like you're thinking too hard."
"…Brother?"
"You've always been like that. A strange child—hard to believe you belonged to the Wintershield family at all. Ah, and I don't mean that because we have different mothers."
Suddenly a memory rose in my mind.
Not "mine"—but the memory of the "me" that had been here.
In other words—
Little brother. Don't mind what your body looks like. Don't mind that you think you're different from the rest of us. Whatever you may believe, I think of you as my brother.
A memory left behind in this body.
You are Darius Wintershield's little brother. You are Logwell Wintershield.
Logwell Wintershield's memory.
Born with a frail body unlike the tough physiques of ordinary northerners, Logwell had always felt alone. But the man standing before me now—Darius Wintershield—had been the first to reach out. He had declared, for all time, that he was Logwell's blood brother.
Why…
I didn't know why that particular memory had surfaced now. Until now, memories had only appeared when I deliberately tried to recall something related. This time, the body itself had called the memory up first.
"…"
I thought it through.
Spilled water cannot be put back in the cup. My possession of this body was that kind of thing. It hadn't been by choice, but I had taken someone's life all the same.
Even so, I had no intention of simply wallowing in guilt.
If you can't pour the water back, then at least clean up the mess.
I settled the thought and raised my head. I had to crane my neck almost to the breaking point, but I forced my eyes to meet Darius's.
He grinned.
"That's a fine look in your eyes. You're ready to talk."
"Thanks to you. This will take a while, so would you take a seat?"
"Of course!"
Apparently in high spirits at my expression, Darius cheerfully dragged over a weathered chair and sat down.
Crack.
And promptly destroyed it.
He had simply sat on the chair with pure physical mass and crushed it flat.
"…"
"…"
"…I'll just sit on the floor."
"…As you wish."
In any case, we sat facing each other—Darius on the bare floor, me in an ordinary chair. The funny part was that even then, our eyes met at roughly the same height.
If this was how it was going to go, I should've just told him to sit on the floor from the start.
All I'd managed was the unnecessary destruction of the village chief's furniture.
"…I have something to tell you. And before that, there's something I'd like to ask."
"Ask me anything."
"How much do you trust me, Brother?"
"How much do I trust you…"
Darius folded his arms and tilted his head. He seemed to chew on the question for a moment, then said,
"There's a legend that has been passed down in the North."
"The one about the White Dragon?"
"That's right."
The White Dragon.
A legend about a dragon, as befitting a fantasy world. Unlike the twenty-first century, where dragons existed only in the imagination, here they were a real concept. Naturally they were absurdly powerful, and that power was recorded in history.
"The legend of the White Dragon that destroyed an entire nation in a single night. But if you told me you needed that creature's dragon heart to be fully cured, I would leave tomorrow to hunt it down."
He clenched a fist over his own heart as he spoke. It was a declaration that he would stake even his life.
Faced with that monstrous expression of trust, I managed a bitter smile.
"There's no need to stake your life."
"Well, you get the idea."
When I smiled, Darius smiled back as if to say he'd been joking.
But from here on, there would be no more jokes.
"No need to stake your life. Simply place a lockdown order on the entire North."
"Right, simply… Wait. What did you just say?"
"A lockdown order."
From this moment on, the North was shutting its doors.