Normalizing the North (4)
Zeros, guildmaster of the Zeros Merchant Group, had blown his ultimate for nothing.
The man staggered like someone who'd just taken a Smite straight to the skull.
"Well, it might not be so bad after all? You people have to trade with us either way, don't you? From what I hear, the margins you skim off the North are enormous. You can't afford to abandon this market. Even if you take a loss on everything you brought this year, pack up, and come back next year hoping we'll somehow open the market again—you still won't be able to do proper business. Just like you said, half the villages that would have bought those hides will be gone."
"Wh-what…"
"Hahaha. I did a little studying before I came out here. Supply and demand, was it? When supply drops, demand rises. Fewer hunters means less game, and prices climb accordingly. Naturally that leads to higher tax revenue."
Heh heh heh.
A top-one-percent noble let out a hearty laugh.
Zeros had already lost control of his expression. He looked like a man who had never in his life met a lunatic quite like this one. He didn't even dare to ask how tax revenue could possibly rise when the supply itself had collapsed.
Think about it. Would a mad noble who would let most of his own people starve to death just to pad his own record—a man whose attitude was basically "Not my problem. I'm not the one dying"—ever listen to something as logical as that?
"W-wait… let me think…"
Zeros swayed in a way that was easy to read. Having wasted his ultimate for free, he was now getting his health bar shredded in the actual objective fight and retreating without even seeing the objective's shadow.
So. What to do from here?
Should I finish the objective?
No. Wrong move.
This was the moment to chase the fleeing enemies and beat them even harder. The dragon could wait until after that.
"What's there to think about? It's not as if I'm refusing to leave you a way out."
"Y-yes? Excuse me?"
I had been free with the whip. Now it was time for the carrot.
"I told you at the start. I asked how much you'd looked into before coming. What do you think that meant?"
"That would be the commis— ahem…"
He had been about to say "the money that goes into your back pocket," then cleared his throat instead. Bribes were supposed to be delivered with quiet grandeur. It was already far too late for that, of course, but I still let out a soft chuckle in front of him.
"That money is only what you're supposed to pay in the first place. I'm telling you to paint on a bigger canvas."
"A bigger canvas…?"
"I don't care who it is, as long as they fill my performance targets. So I studied a little and found something called economies of scale. That sort of thing."
"Economies of scale…? What is that?"
Ah. So the term didn't exist here yet.
Fair enough. Economies of scale only entered the world in the modern era. In this still-medieval setting, the phrase simply couldn't exist.
"Simply put, it means the more you trade at once, the more profit you keep."
"Well, that much is…"
Even without knowing the formal name, any merchant could grasp the principle. A large caravan was bound to eat better than a small one.
To a man like that, I dangled a mouth-watering lure.
"Then doesn't that mean if you run a caravan in the North on a larger scale than now, you'll earn that much more? Say, for example, if a single merchant group monopolized the entire North and covered everything alone."
"…!!"
Zeros's eyes flew wide enough to tear. He hastily checked every corner of the room, confirmed they were alone, and only then opened his mouth.
"By that… do you mean you would grant us exclusive rights?"
"Exactly. You skim a little less per deal, but you end up skimming far more overall. Even if you only keep twenty-five shillings where you used to keep fifty, if the number of deals multiplies by several dozen, the profit multiplies by several dozen as well. What's the problem?"
"Th-that is true, but…"
This was the big deal.
Zeros could not recover from a bargain he had never even imagined. Still, being a merchant, he desperately clung to the last thread of his sanity.
"This… isn't as simple as it sounds. The North is no ordinary size. Even if our group pulled every person we have circulating in other regions, it still wouldn't be enough to cover everything. We would need to hire more people, and our budget has limits…"
He was stalling for time any way he could. The bait was so enormous he couldn't tell whether it would even fit in his mouth, or whether his belly would burst the moment he managed to swallow it.
But did I have any reason to wait for him?
"Ah. So you can't do it?"
"Y-yes? What?"
"Then leave. Oh, and on your way out, tell the next person to come in."
"We can!!! We can, we can do it!!"
The moment I shifted my stance as if to cancel the deal and stand up, Zeros lunged forward and clung to my pant leg.
Let me say it again: this was not a matter of me simply losing money and being done with it. Me losing money was one thing. The man standing next to me would make a killing. Could a merchant sit still for that?
Sure, some merchants could. A great merchant with superhuman patience. But the real great merchants never even took a number ticket for this line in the first place.
I had checked which merchant groups pulled numbers after I issued the northern closure order. Most were mid-tier houses, with a few small ones gambling that they had nothing to lose. But none of the groups that could truly be called "the real thing" had shown up. They had already realized the truth: the moment you bit, you were a hooked fish that could only thrash on the line.
"You said you couldn't."
"We can! No—even if we can't, we'll make it possible no matter what!"
"Haha, excellent. A real man needs that kind of fighting spirit."
I immediately pulled out the contract.
"Here. Read it and sign."
"What? Right now?"
"If you don't like it, leave."
"No, that isn't what I—"
With trembling eyes Zeros began reading the contract. At certain passages—clauses such as "In every transaction, offer purchase prices at four times and sale prices at twice the previous rate," or "Provide fifty thousand shillings as an advance contribution to the initial Northern Development Fund," or "Out of personal admiration for the Second Young Master's outstanding leadership, donate five thousand shillings as a private gift"—his body flinched and shuddered.
But the door out was always open, and the door in was open to everyone. He could only tremble; he raised not a single objection.
In the end Zeros signed with a limp hand.
I clapped him heartily on the back and encouraged him at full volume.
"Haha, well done! At this rate we can call our guildmaster an honorary northern man. No—given how much you've contributed to the North's development, it's only natural, isn't it?"
"H-haha… th-thank you… B-but… about this clause… may I ask what it means when it says caravan routes must follow periods and paths designated by the Grand Duchy…?"
"Ah, nothing major. I need a few achievements to my name. I plan to use the funds Guildmaster Zeros has so generously pledged for the North to build roads, and if people keep wandering around during construction it tends to get in the way, doesn't it?"
"Road… construction…?"
The look on his face clearly asked whether that was even possible, but I answered without caring.
"Haha, I can only be grateful to you in so many ways. Thanks to you, my list of accomplishments is about to grow quite nicely."
Ah, I'm going to bury your money in the snowfields—faced with that implication, Zeros could say nothing at all. He simply trudged back to the well like a man returning from the dead.
"…Magnificent."
After Zeros left, old Max, who had been hiding, stepped out. A veteran of a hundred battles and a seasoned hunter, Max was also skilled at concealing his presence.
"From that single deal just now, the projected rise in the North's tax revenue is…!"
He had hidden his presence, but he could not hide his emotion. I only smiled faintly.
"It is merely the rightful share the North should have been receiving all along."
Purchase at four times, sell at twice? Even that was still wildly profitable compared to how they used to buy at ten times and sell at three. Inflate the scale on top of that and they would skim even more. Merchants only moved when there was profit to be had; that was the only reason the arrangement worked.
"Hah… to think such a solution existed… This old man never dared imagine it…"
Max looked ready to shed tears. Truly, this miracle negotiation—enough to make even Kim Doo-han weep—was the product of sheer luck layered with techniques only a twenty-first-century modern man, steeped in humanity's millennia of chaos, could pull off.
What made it possible was, first and foremost, that my identity had never been exposed.
To merchants who tried to hold the North's lifeline hostage, I had simply flipped the script and said, "Sure, if everyone dies, that's fine by me~." Other heirs of the Grand Ducal house could never have done the same. From childhood the blood of successive Grand Dukes was born with powerful bodies; they spent their youth ranging across the North, piling up monster-hunting merit and the fame that came with it. But this body—Logwell Wintershield—was too frail for any of that. Merchants who lived and died by information had been able to dig up nothing on me. My official debut was happening right now, so I could drop the most outrageous bluff imaginable.
The next biggest factor was twenty-first-century knowledge.
Originally the structure had been the North versus the continental merchant houses. That structure was hopelessly stacked against us. The moment a fight began they would unite, and we would instantly be outnumbered.
So what then?
There was no need for us to fight them at all.
I knew the most effective response for moments like this. That response was divide and rule—better known as driving a wedge, turning the merchants against one another.
Divide-and-rule is a deep-rooted mechanism of political engineering that has been refined since the days of ancient Greece.
Men and women. Old and young. Nation against nation. Religion against the irreligious. And the military. This all-purpose secret art that splits everything that can be split is practically a politician's signature skill; almost no modern person of the twenty-first century is unaware of it. And yet everyone still falls for it. Knowing about it does not mean you can stop it—it is that kind of unstoppable technique. Could medieval people possibly block it?
If the North fights the merchant houses, the weight class difference is hopeless. But if I make the merchant houses fight each other, the North never has to lift a finger.
You might ask how that could work… but as I said, I had watched it to the point of nausea. Take healthy young men in their twenties—people who, by global standards, had completed excellent basic education, some even from elite universities—throw them together as a group, toss a single small interest into their midst, and watch how viciously they tear into one another. Knowledge of economies of scale large enough to persuade them was just the bonus.
"But Young Master, I have a question."
"What is it?"
"Do you truly believe they will be able to raise the funds you demanded within the deadline? Fifty thousand shillings is an enormous sum. Most of their capital has already been converted into grain… will it even be possible…?"
"Ah, that?"
I answered Max's concern as if it were nothing.
"That's none of our business, is it?"
"…Pardon?"
"They're the ones who have to figure out how."
Why should we worry about it? Whether they took out loan-shark debt or turned to alchemy, scraping the money together was their problem to solve. And if they failed?
Then they paid the penalty.
Either way, the North lost nothing.
"Heh heh… heh… magnificent. Truly magnificent."
"Thank you. But save the praise for later. I still have to do the exact same thing four more times."
"…What? Four more times?"
"I have to sign contracts with the other merchant groups as well."
If I only contracted with the Zeros group, what was I supposed to do with all the other houses waiting outside?
"What?! Are you allowed to do that?!"
"Why wouldn't I be?"
"It was clearly an exclusive contract…!"
"Ah, exclusive. Correct. That's why I wrote it down—for designated periods, along designated routes."
For those periods, at least, it truly was exclusive. Only that particular group would be allowed to run caravans.
"Th-this is fraud! What on earth do you plan to do when this comes out?! No matter how many secrecy clauses there are, time will eventually reveal everything!"
"Exactly. When time passes."
I didn't know precisely how long that time would be, but I was certain it would not be this year. Just fulfilling the contract's requirements would keep them frantically circulating capital and expanding for the rest of the year. And once that expansion was complete—
Their entire revenue structure would have no choice but to depend on the North.
Until now the North had been entirely dependent on those merchant houses. From this point on, the story would change.
"They say even the full moon wanes. It's about time the master-servant relationship between the North and the continental merchant houses flipped as well."
That was the normalization of the North.