The Comic Tea House Under Construction
In the end, it was not until the following morning that Sanwol finally finished vetting every single blueprint.
Naturally, he had not spent the entire night huddled in the drafty conference tent with the architects. Knowing at a single glance that the task would take several hours at minimum, he had bundled up every last sheet and carried them back to his estate. Had it not been for his visual discernment—honed over a lifetime of drawing—and a martial comprehension capable of deciphering profound cultivation manuals in a flash, reviewing that mountain of technical drafts would have taken days.
"I have gone over every design you provided," Sanwol announced, returning to the conference tent in Sogachon with the hefty stack of blueprints tucked under his arm. "And each of them has distinct merits and drawbacks."
Every strength carried an inherent weakness. No one understood this better than the architects who had drafted the schematics and calculated the loads themselves. Indeed, the heated dispute from the previous day had erupted precisely because everyone was stubbornly trying to maximize the advantages of their own proposal while minimizing its flaws.
"So tell me," Sanwol asked, "why hasn't anyone considered combining them?"
"...Excuse me?"
"C-Combine the blueprints?"
To Sanwol, their stubborn factionalism looked like utter foolishness. It was not as though they were forbidden from drafting fresh plans; all they had to do was trim the fat, discard the flaws, and splice together the best elements from each design. Yet the gulf between an expert in the trade and a layman could never be easily bridged. If bridging that gap were effortless, jokes about the eternal divide between humanities and engineering majors wouldn't have been so rampant back in his homeland.
The architects exhaled heavy, patronizing sighs and took turns explaining why such a notion was impossible in the physical world.
"So you're saying," Sanwol summarized, "if we join this section here, the load-bearing supports won't hold?"
"Precisely. And not only that—the entire structure's center of gravity will be thrown off balance."
People who had never built a house rarely appreciated just how intensely architectural construction depended on meticulous calculation. The slightest miscalculation could warp the timber or collapse the framing under its own dead weight. When that happened, whoever lived inside would be crushed in an instant, taking their final journey to the underworld together with their home. No one wanted their roof to become their burial shroud, nor their chimney to serve as their headstone. That was why the first, second, and third most critical factors in construction were always safety, safety, and safety.
"Then can't we just design this portion like this?"
Having listened patiently to their grievances, Sanwol produced an ink brush on the spot and drew several crisp lines across the blueprint.
Traditional architecture in the Central Plains generally relied on the post-and-lintel system. Heavy vertical pillars formed the skeleton of the building, connected by horizontal beams and vertical struts stacked on top of one another to distribute the roof's weight. But the sketch Sanwol laid down adopted an entirely foreign geometry. While it maintained the overarching framework of traditional timber architecture, the internal composition of its load-bearing members was utterly unrecognizable.
"What manner of construction method is this?"
"A truss—er, wait. How should I put this in words?"
Standard columns and beams in this world were made of thick, solid logs or heavy cut timber. Rafters and struts were much the same, fashioned from thick, uniform planks. What Sanwol had sketched, however, was the truss framework from his original world—a structural innovation developed through Western engineering. Rather than relying on solid slabs of wood, it assembled structural members into an interconnected network of rigid triangles.
Not being a civil engineer himself, Sanwol could not recite the exact mathematical formulas behind the distribution of tension and compression. But anyone who had passed through modern South Korea's compulsory education system knew the structure's name and its incredible efficacy.
"Let's call it the Triangular Mesh Method."
Sanwol might not have known the differential equations, but he knew one fact beyond a shadow of a doubt: a truss framework was overwhelmingly sturdier than merely stacking solid timber on top of itself. In his technologically advanced homeland, trusses were among the most ubiquitous structural designs in civil engineering. And no matter the field, whatever method achieved universal adoption always did so for very good reasons.
"A triangular mesh method, you say... Since this is an approach none of us have ever witnessed, would you permit us to test it before making a final decision?"
"Of course."
Having listened closely to Sanwol's brief explanation, the architects' eyes gleamed with professional curiosity. Unable to resist solving an intriguing problem within their own field, they immediately fell into hushed technical debates and summoned a site laborer. Almost as if he had been waiting right outside the canvas flap, a brawny worker stepped inside and received two fresh sketches.
"Shave the timber to these precise lengths and thicknesses, then join them exactly as shown in this diagram."
Clutching the drawings, the laborer sprinted out into the yard, shouting orders at the top of his lungs. Moments later, the clamor of saws and mallets rang through the air. The passing breeze soon carried the scent of fresh sawdust and turned earth into the tent.
"I'm going to grab lunch," Sanwol said, dusting off his robes. "If anything comes up, go find Elder Noh."
"Understood. Enjoy your meal, Young Master."
It was barely two incense sticks of time after Sanwol departed that the entire construction site was turned completely upside down.
Having finished his midday meal, Sanwol strolled back toward the building grounds in Sogachon. Long before he arrived, an immense commotion reached his ears. Fearing that another brawl had broken out, he hurried his steps.
"Who in heaven's name taught you this technique?!"
"Our client did! Young Hero Dokgo Sanwol!"
"Heavens above... His genius isn't confined to martial arts and painting! Had he been born into a carpenter's lineage, he would have shaken the entire realm as a legendary master!"
A dense crowd of architects and master carpenters stood clustered in the open yard, gasping in collective awe. Sanwol slipped through the edge of the throng to see what the fuss was about. Resting in the center of the ring was a structural mock-up built from the triangular mesh blueprints he had sketched before lunch. Just as he wondered why a simple frame was causing such an uproar, an elderly carpenter spotted him and widened his eyes in shock.
"Young Hero Dokgo! How on earth did you conceive such a structure?!"
"Pardon?"
"You called it the Triangular Mesh Method, did you not? All you did was add a single diagonal strut across each rectangular bay, yet the load-bearing capacity of these pillars and beams has increased tenfold!"
Baffled by the explosive reaction, Sanwol glanced around. The other carpenters—and even the skeptical architects who had received his explanation earlier—were nodding vigorously, their eyes ablaze with admiration. Sanwol found their astonishment almost comical, but from their perspective, it was only natural.
He possessed a working knowledge of diverse architectural methods, including trusses and masonry arches, despite never having majored in civil engineering or architecture. If anyone pressed him on how he knew all this, his answer would be disarmingly simple: he had learned it in school.
In his past life, Sanwol had completed the standard South Korean curriculum and graduated from a four-year university. Among his high school electives, he had studied a course called Life and Science with fanatical diligence to boost his GPA, largely because it was far easier to score high marks in it than in calculus or theoretical physics. Yet Life and Science covered an astonishing amount of practical real-world knowledge. Though broad and relatively shallow, its scope was vast. Basic first aid and essential human nutrition were merely the baseline; the curriculum also introduced the scientific principles behind modern engineering and civil structures.
To Sanwol, these concepts were so mundane that he barely thought of them as special knowledge. But to the inhabitants of this ancient, pre-industrial Central Plains, he was nothing short of a visionary pioneer. A polymath who possessed the collective wisdom and engineering breakthroughs of an advanced future civilization—calling him a genius did not even begin to do him justice.
"With this framework, we can begin building this very instant!" the lead architect declared, his voice trembling with excitement. "Every structural dilemma we wracked our brains over has vanished into thin air!"
In designing Sanwol's Comic Tea House, the builders had grappled with three major hurdles.
The first was interior space. Because the establishment was meant to accommodate a massive influx of patrons, it needed expansive, unobstructed open halls. Yet the parcel of land had boundaries, which meant they had to build upward, adding a second and third story to meet the required floor space.
This naturally led to the second problem: vertical load. As the structure grew taller, its mass increased exponentially, placing enormous compressive stress on the ground floor and the foundation. Up to this point, traditional methods could manage by thickening the timber columns and reinforcing the walls.
The real impasse lay in the third requirement.
"In order to regulate temperature and humidity so the manuscripts wouldn't rot, we had to compromise the building's structural density," the architect lamented. "Yet whenever we reinforced the framework to ensure safety, we ended up with an enclosed, stuffy environment where parchment would mold within weeks!"
In Sanwol's homeland, where modern technology flourished, climate control was handled effortlessly by mechanical systems. A flick of a switch or the hum of an air handler regulated humidity and temperature automatically, sparing the architect from sweating over paper preservation. But in this era, keeping books safe for decades required building with obsessive attention to airflow, orientation, and microclimates. The pinnacle of such craftsmanship back home had been the Janggyeong Panjeon at Haeinsa Temple, which had preserved the wooden printing blocks of the Tripitaka Koreana for centuries through genius passive ventilation alone. Whether woodblock or paper, any repository meant to store printed works for the long haul had to be built with supreme environmental finesse.
"Yet this triangular mesh method withstands far more deadweight than any post-and-lintel timber frame we have ever measured!" another architect shouted, cutting in with flushed cheeks. "We can create wide ventilation apertures to preserve the manuscripts without sacrificing an ounce of multi-story structural stability!"
Murmurs of vehement agreement swept through the gathered carpenters and builders, every man nodding in vindicated excitement.
Watching them celebrate like children, Sanwol offered a bright, easy smile.
"Well then... shall we break ground immediately?"
Whatever works, works. At the end of the day, all Sanwol cared about was opening the doors to his Comic Tea House as quickly as humanly possible.