The Real Thing
These days, the Second Imperial Princess Sienna had exactly two things that amused her.
The first was the Academy.
The Empire was hardly limited to a single academy, but when people said the Academy, they meant the Imperial Academy in the Imperial Capital — the institution charged with turning out the elite who would lead the Empire in every field of society.
Something interesting was unfolding there.
I'd only looked into it on the off chance.
It had started with the disgrace of Leon the addict. Watching that spectacle, a perfectly reasonable suspicion had occurred to her — there was no way that man was the only wreck — and so she had begun making inquiries.
It was not a difficult matter. Plenty of the Academy faculty were already scrambling to attach themselves to Sienna's faction.
The reality among the students, however, exceeded her expectations. Not their zeal for academic achievement. The sheer degeneracy of a certain few.
"Your Highness, the Second Princess? It's a matter the Academy has been keeping quiet, but absences among the students housed in Dormitory Two have been climbing of late. We conducted a discreet survey yesterday and found a group gathering among themselves to smoke opium."
Word of students skipping class to smoke opium.
Nine of them, she was told, had turned a dormitory room into an opium den. One student, buried in the smoke, had been sipping tea brewed from health syrup.
Horrified, the Academy had slapped them with disciplinary action and instituted roll call. They had been doing it in the dormitories, after all. Shock was only natural.
As if that could ever stop it.
Sienna was confident enough to be certain. The crackdown would fail. Far from containing the habit, it would only grow more fashionable by the day. Give it a month, and they would no longer be able to hush it up.
Perhaps it would not be professors who came next, but the military police. She could not quite have explained why, but Sienna knew perfectly well that opium possessed that kind of power.
And it was not only students indulging.
"There are students in the Magic Department whose spending has suddenly grown lavish. They don't come from particularly wealthy houses, yet they're throwing lump sums around and even dragging students from other departments about as their crews. Ask them the secret and they just laugh it off."
So there were Magic Department students who had grown rich overnight.
She did not know the particulars, but she hardly needed to. They were earning pocket money selling the stuff — syrup, opium, whatever it was. Where there were people taking it, there were people selling it. That was only natural.
"They've built an ecosystem all on their own, these children."
Sienna was genuinely impressed.
Even the upperclassmen, the third-years, were only nineteen — the same age as Sienna herself — and at that age they had launched a new enterprise. No one had put them up to it. They had done it on their own. An achievement well worth rating highly. Lives would be ruined in droves because of it, but Sienna was not the one ruining them, so it was no concern of hers.
Part of her wanted to step in and make trouble, just for the pleasure of it.
She decided to restrain herself. There was a better spectacle on offer than the Academy students' little game. The Academy side would need to ripen a while longer before there was any room for her to involve herself. Until then, what mattered was keeping an eye on her partner, Allan.
"Is Allan still shut up in the manufacturing room?"
"Yes, Your Highness."
The maid she had sent to find out bowed as she answered.
"Don't tell me he's taking his meals and his sleep in there as well."
"Worse than that, they say. He isn't sleeping at all. Only the staff assisting him work in shifts. Sir Allan himself seems to be working without a pause. He never comes out, so no one can tell what he's doing."
Allan, manufacturing drugs day and night.
The eccentricity had begun the moment he returned from meeting Victoria.
Honestly, at first she had meant to give him a piece of her mind. He had conferred with Victoria and settled something without so much as agreeing it with her beforehand, and then failed to report it properly even after the fact. That had irritated her.
A few days on, the irritation was long gone. What had taken its place was suspicion.
"What on earth is he making?"
"That, even I—"
"I was talking to myself. You don't need to answer."
It was certainly not the morphine they had been producing before.
The raw materials were different to begin with. On top of the slaked lime and ammonium chloride used for morphine, he had been sweeping up other ingredients by the cartload — wood vinegar, sulfur, spirits. At the rate he was going, he looked ready to burn through every coin the morphine had earned.
He's making something. I can find out what later.
More important than the kind was the purpose. What was he planning, to manufacture so urgently, and in such quantity?
She could simply go to him, or summon him, and ask. However mad he was for manufacturing narcotics, he would not ignore a princess's call.
But Sienna decided to work it out herself. To divine Allan's intentions, and through that to sound out his reaction. That, too, was one of her important hobbies. Taking pleasure in such a thing was a little strange, but there it was. The drawback, if there was one, was that she had grown hard-pressed to find interest in anything other than Allan and his enterprise.
Nothing to be done. It happened before I noticed.
Sienna let out a dry little laugh and set her mind to scheming.
Fortunately, the answer came quickly.
Working through the night at mechanical, repetitive labor, a memory of my previous life surfaced unbidden. More precisely, a memory of the first job I ever held.
It had been a startup based in a special deregulation zone, a company granted approval for a pilot project to extract CBD from hemp and sell it as an active pharmaceutical ingredient. Honestly, it was a firm with a two-year death sentence, but I had joined on the bet that if the relevant laws were revised within that window, there might be a future in it.
It was not that I harbored any ambition to be a standard-bearer for cannabis legalization. Thanks to the swindler Choi Heejun, my identity had been pinned to the wall, and decent places to work were hard to come by.
It wasn't bad.
The salary was practically nonexistent. Still, the work itself had been interesting enough. I had even hoped that if things kept on like that, I could bury myself in the countryside and live quietly. In the end I quit, after the people who had lost their fortunes because of my father — people firmly convinced I was the man's treasurer — tracked me down at the workplace and made a scene.
I was not dredging up that dark chapter for nothing. There was a reason.
How many hours have I been at this miserable work?
I had been making the solvents required for narcotics manufacture myself, fifty-five hours straight.
In my previous life it was something I could have bought for pocket change, about eight thousand won a liter, and producing it by hand was honestly no easy thing. Then there was the cost of the raw materials on top of that.
Even so, I could not teach anyone else.
The drug I meant to manufacture was not all that difficult to make, if one poured in money and time. In places like Afghanistan or Myanmar, unlettered technicians who had learned it over someone's shoulder could produce the stuff. I had no intention of sharing the method, though. The plan in my head was only possible because I alone could supply the real thing, exclusively.
If everyone and their cousin started manufacturing, my side would lose its grip on control. Then it would not be only the Great Forest pickled in narcotics — the Empire itself would begin to crumble, little by little. That was not chaos a seventeenth-century administrative apparatus could handle. And in the middle of it, my own value would plummet. Obvious enough.
Better that I suffer through it myself.
Muttering that, I worked on for several hours more. Only when the final stage was nearly upon me did I spare a moment to step outside the manufacturing room.
For some reason, the silver-haired shareholder was sitting out there. Plain clothes. No attendants.
"When did you arrive?"
Sienna stared straight at me.
Up to this point, it was much like the first time I had made morphine. There was a difference, though. Sienna had that small face of hers covered with a mask. She must have known what kind of smell drug manufacture gave off. The low-ranking staff, busy splitting raw opium, showed no sign of having recognized her.
"President Allan, might we speak for a moment?"
When she put it that way, I took the hint and followed her out.
Come to think of it, I've never explained the concrete plan to her.
Every business decision at Madoff Pharmaceuticals was mine alone. Still, as a courtesy to my shareholder, I always explained things in detail. It was the price of using the palace staff as I pleased and borrowing Sienna's influence on top of it.
The moment we stepped onto the open balcony, Sienna slid the mask down. She did not look angry. Instead she put a peculiar question to me.
"Allan. Do you happen to need money?"
"What do you mean?"
"Looking at the quantity of materials you bought this time, I doubt even everything you've earned so far will cover it. Far from paying me a dividend, you may need additional investment. I'm not being sarcastic, so don't misunderstand."
Not sarcastic, sure. But she did not seem to be protesting the reckless spending either. Sienna's interest in the narcotics business was not about an immediate dividend.
Instead of launching into excuses, I decided to meet her halfway.
"It seems you have a guess. Before I apologize, I'll hear it."
"It's clearly something nastier you're making. The main ingredient will be opium again, I imagine."
"It is."
"And it doesn't look as if you're making it to circulate in the Empire. Even morphine, with its side effects, we supply only to the military, and only in limited quantities, don't we? Who could handle something stronger than that? If it's more toxic than morphine, it might actually kill people."
"That is also true."
"So in the end you mean to sell it to people it doesn't matter if they die or come to harm. Or perhaps not to people at all."
She had figured the whole thing out by herself.
Given Sienna's tenacity, it was nothing. Once, when the words I think I know what slaked lime is used for had come out of her mouth, even I had flinched. It felt as if someday she would be able to make morphine herself.
"You didn't drag Sister Victoria in for nothing, did you? This is going to get bigger than I thought."
The assessment she offered only after a long pause. A quiet awe clung to the look she gave me. Even so — this far? seemed written across her face.
A situation in which even Sienna treated me as an object of awe. I had no complaints. Because it really was that sort of thing.
"Good. Then carry on."
Curiosity satisfied, Sienna vanished with a light step. I watched her go, then returned to the manufacturing room.
The work ran on through the rest of the night.
When morning came, the result lay before me. A powder the Bono brothers and the rest of the staff were weighing out in hundred-gram portions and wrapping in paper.
It was heroin.