Why Do You All Linger in Front of My House?
Why does everyone keep hovering around in front of my house?
Sometimes it honestly feels like the whole world revolves around Daehan.
So that's how the Chinese ended up soaked in Sinocentrism, huh?
Except this time, it doesn't seem like just a feeling.
“So you're asking me to designate a city south of Daedo and Seonnam as an official trade city?”
“Yes, Your Holiness. An enormous volume of trade is already flowing through the region.”
Something like a massive international metropolis was quietly taking shape. At the western edge of it, commerce flowed with Europe, while Southeast Asia and the Middle East all came flocking to Daedo. They traded in goods that were ours, sure — but they bought and sold among themselves just as much.
“Why does everyone set up shop right on someone else's doorstep?”
“Because the goods are simply the best?”
More to the point, wouldn't it be easier to just have them delivered?
“If they come and buy in person, that's fine by us... but honestly, it's baffling.”
In the original flow of history, East and West were supposed to exchange culture through China at the center — and now look at this sorry state of affairs.
No help at all! Honestly. Good grief...
The truly funny part was that all the neighboring countries walked right up along our fortress walls to come and go beyond them. Even the Tang Dynasty fools did it. Our walls were going to wear down to nothing at this rate.
“Prices haven't gotten expensive out west yet?”
“The merchants say it's still worth it regardless. What can you do?”
“Fair enough...”
Rail had been laid, but the goods still had to be hauled the last stretch by wagon, so the volume stayed modest and each trip took roughly two months.
The reason any of this was possible at all: this very year, the two-hundred-eightieth year of the project, the great continental railway was finally complete.
The line to Seonnam had been finished long ago, but extending it onward to the international city meant the last stretch only got laid down recently.
Ignoring the fact that the locals, finding it useful, would no doubt keep laying more track on their own — the thing ran a full one thousand one hundred thirty-one li.
By rough reckoning, that was like crossing Siberia by train twice, round trip.
Come to think of it, these people had completely lost their minds, hadn't they?
“How's the steam locomotive coming along?”
“It rolls, but something must be wrong with it — they keep tinkering with it constantly.”
The output's still not there? Wait, hold on — weren't they using steam engines at the blacksmith workshop? Those were plenty powerful.
“What's the problem, supposedly?”
“They're looking for a way to use water more efficiently. Apparently water runs out before the fuel does, so the distance it can travel in one go is short.”
Isn't there some other way around that?
“Then just build the water tank bigger?”
“It's already enormous, though?”
What on earth had they built? The first prototype had been such a charming little thing, hadn't it?
“If the train's huge but the power's weak, it won't be able to pull any cargo.”
“They rolled it out briefly and said it wasn't bad.”
“Not bad” presumably meant it wasn't good yet either. Would it be ready to ride soon?
“If water's the issue, why not just run a second car behind it and load that one with water and fuel?”
“...Oh?”
They hadn't thought of that?
“Huh. That should work!”
Of course it would. In my memory, there had been trains exactly like that.
“And try that out too — you might even use it to plow fields.”
“Won't it be too heavy? Wouldn't it just sink into the soil instead of pushing forward?”
Wouldn't simply increasing the ground contact area fix that?
“Are you an idiot? Just make the wheels wide.”
“...!”
Apparently even his brain had turned into pure muscle...
“It could plow through enormous paddies and fields in a single pass.”
There were limits to working small, and with a proper base weight behind it, the thing would just carve through everything in one mighty sweep.
Was mechanized agriculture about to bloom a few thousand years early?
“They're still refining it — fix one thing, another breaks, apparently.”
Of course. Everything always sounds like it'll be done in a jiffy, and every last one of them is like that.
A thought had struck me recently: what on earth did these people use for fertilizer? There was no way crops grew this well without any.
“Something useful will turn up as you keep at it, I suppose. Anyway, one thing I'm curious about — how do you fertilize your fields?”
“We grind up potatoes and spread them.”
I'm sorry, what?
“Why?”
“Well, we've always had potatoes left over in abundance, haven't we?”
“True.”
“And wherever they'd been left to rot, the grass always grew back thicker, didn't it? So we put two and two together.”
Our potatoes really were something special. The protein content must have been high — and since fertilizer is, at its core, nitrogen, anything protein-rich would make excellent fertilizer.
“So ever since then, we crush the leftover potatoes and mix them into the grass in a pile somewhere. Once it's mostly rotted, we haul it out and use it. This is knowledge over a thousand years old, mind you...”
Though they wouldn't know the finer details...
So that explained it — the kids thrived on a diet of nothing but potatoes because the protein content was high.
Weren't crops supposed to be almost pure carbohydrate? Eh, who cares. There was an impossible tree standing in the middle of the temple; potatoes being miraculous was hardly a stretch.
“Well, glad it's working so well.”
“That's why in practically every region, there are potato fields ringing every tree.”
They were using it as a nearly infinite power source! Potatoes served as a staple food and as fertilizer for everything else they grew?
“Oh, right — you remember what I mentioned before, don't you? The ingredients for gunpowder.”
“Yes, there was something like that.”
I'd told them to import saltpeter and send out people to sniff around for it.
“Well, there are rumors that somewhere in a certain desert, such a thing exists?”
“Whoa? Why would it be there?”
I'd only thrown the question out casually, since deserts stretched wide even on this continent.
“I wouldn't know, Your Holiness.”
“Right! So where is it?”
“North of a country called Tubo, deep in the middle of a desert. Apparently no one holds claim to it — only the occasional nomad passes through.”
That seemed awfully far from our territory, though?
“Is it really necessary?”
“For a few centuries from now, yes?”
“Ah...”
“In any case, it's far from our lands, so occupying it outright would be difficult, wouldn't it?”
“Exactly. We couldn't manage it properly. No one would even want to go.”
This was exactly the time to send proxies!
“Then send mercenaries instead. Have them build a fortress in the region and hold it. We'll supply all the provisions.”
“Will they do a good job?”
“It doesn't have to be right this second...”
By the time it mattered, steam locomotives would be crisscrossing the continent in every direction — would it even be needed by then? We could always just slam one out and take it by force...
“No. Marking your spot in advance is always an advantage, whatever it is. And don't fight anyone over it — get friendly, keep the peace, offer what they need, and try to just buy the place.”
Being a desert, they'd be short on all sorts of supplies. We'd simply give them a little of what they lacked.
“I'm not sure transporting goods that far will be easy, though.”
“Then offer even more, and tell them to come collect it in person. They're nomads — they'll come running at the chance, I'd wager.”
Roughly somewhere along the old Silk Road, then! Somewhere around the middle, at least.
“No — first things first. Confirm it's actually the right stuff. Bring some back and try making gunpowder with it.”
“Yes, Your Holiness!”
Keeping this vast land defended would take an enormous amount of gunpowder — that had been worrying me, so this was a relief. Assuming it was the real thing, of course.
It was so far away that even a single round trip by messenger took months.
They'd said they would try making gunpowder today from what had been gathered on-site, so all that remained was to wait for the results.
The door burst open.
“It's the real thing!”
“Amazing!”
“And when we got there — some of it was just lying on the surface of the ground, and apparently you can gather plenty quickly just by digging a little.”
“Good. Leave it as confirmed for now, but keep up the imports too. It's far too distant from the homeland.”
Even in the Middle Ages they'd be running thug tactics, apparently. I'd been worrying that we'd have to keep loosing arrows forever.
Then again, early gunpowder was worse than a bow, wasn't it? And besides, we fired rockets. Fit an assist rig on a bow and you could draw it like a crossbow — no extra training required, even.
No need to abandon the bow just yet, then.
“Plan a rail line out there eventually.”
“Finding water sources across the desert will be the hard part.”
“Yes! And understand — that's exactly how important it is.”
“We'll ask the locals nearby and look into ways of finding it.”
At this rate, we were going to have rail thieves on our hands, weren't we?
“People will steal the tracks, won't they?”
“If we set regular patrols, they'll be caught red-handed hauling it off.”
“Is it very heavy?”
“Very. We've been making the rails long and unwieldy precisely because thieves kept appearing — to make them hard to carry off.”
Right — if you make them heavy and long, they'd have to cut them on-site, and the sun would come up before they finished. Wait, this is already happening?
“It happens domestically too?”
“From time to time.”
“There's nowhere near enough track to go around — why would anyone steal it?”
Why? They haul it off, cut it, hammer it, and rework it into something else — wouldn't it just be easier to buy the stuff, which practically pours off the production line?
“They steal it to lay track in their own villages first.”
“Ah... they really do run the whole gamut.”
Stealing it to install it... everything about these people exceeds the imagination! Nothing can be predicted!
“If this keeps up, something catastrophic will happen eventually — so put an absolute stop to it!”
“Yes, Your Holiness!”
People could die in truly catastrophic numbers over this, these fools...
I'd have to round up every last one of them and lock them away in the Temple. Domestically, that could work — but abroad was another matter...
“Let's put up watchtowers along the line here and there and hand the duty to the mercenaries as contract work.”
“Yes, excellent idea! Hmm...? Mercenaries really do come in handy at every turn, don't they?”
Don't ask me — I never expected things to turn out this way either. But for getting work done overseas, nothing beat them.
That trade city out west was being guarded by those Western fellows of an unknown race, after all.
The place seemed to be turning into a proper medieval city, bit by bit. Someday it might become something like a grand neutral trading nation bridging East and West!
“And all of this is thanks to the gunpowder ingredients, isn't it?”
“Yes. Isn't it?”
“Do we really need that much?”
Wouldn't we? Guns were going to devour gunpowder by the ton.
“Give it a little more time, and wars will be fought with the stuff.”
“Oh? That will become a weapon?”
That's only because you lot don't know how to use it yet. They were still employing the stuff as nothing more than fire-starting compound.
I didn't know the fine details myself, so I'd left them to develop it on their own — though we might end up having to steal the technology from another country, at that.
“It could bring down even our own fortress walls, you know.”
Their thickness meant it wouldn't be easy, and they'd have to bombard for quite a while — but still.
“Should we... build the walls even thicker, then?”
“That's pointless. Just hit one spot twice as hard and knock it down. Besides, the cost of the gunpowder to breach a wall is less than a hundredth of what it takes to build one, isn't it?”
“Ah. True...”
Cost-efficiency, my friend. You have to think in cost-efficiency. The fortress walls hadn't vanished from history for nothing, buddy. Trenches and bunkers had taken their place.
“We'll discuss methods with the others.”
“Gather as much of the raw materials as you can and stockpile them. They keep well enough in storage.”
“Yes. We store them in clay jars, buried underground.”
“For now, get a firm handle on how much you can produce at once, and on which combinations work best for which purposes. Keep it all secret.”
Time was still needed — at minimum, until steam locomotives ran the entire nation end to end. Once comparable weapons existed everywhere, it would become a pure war of numbers.
Up until now, the side with more people and greater momentum had won its wars. In the coming age of gunpowder, it would be the side with deeper coffers.
Not that population could be dismissed entirely — hadn't Germany, with all its technical brilliance, been stopped dead by the Soviet Union? Granted, the Soviets had bled their manhood dry in the process...
“So what have you been making lately?”
The properties just changed with the mixing ratios — it hardly seemed difficult at all?
“They're probably racking their brains over how to economize on the hard-to-make ingredient.”
“Nope. Not happening. That's the main ingredient. Developing a way to produce more of it would be far faster.”
So this was what they'd been up to — trying to make gunpowder while skimping on saltpeter. Dream big, why don't you.
“Oh? Is it not allowed?”
“No. It has to go in in quantity. Even I don't have a way around that.”
There hadn't been one in the modern era either, had there? Which meant it was simply impossible.
“All that effort wasted, then...”
“Right — tell them to drop that line of work, and quickly.”
“Still, the flames come out in different colors. Quite pretty, actually.”
Hm? They put color into the flames?
“Oh? Now that's useful. Couldn't that serve as a signal flare at night?”
“Oh! You're right, that would be brilliant!”
“When you build something, think about how to actually use it...”
I would never understand why these kids charged ahead staring only at what was in front of them. Glance to the side now and then. Look behind you once in a while.
“They'd be perfect to station at the relay posts for emergency signaling. A signal would arrive in the blink of an eye, wouldn't it?”
So they'd never even had the concept of a signal beacon? If a rebellion had ever broken out, the whole country would have fallen before anyone noticed.