Something Terrifying Has Appeared?
Something terrifying just made an appearance?
BANG! BOOM! BANG!
What on earth was that racket? Fireworks.
BANG! BANG! BOOM!
Pretty, sure — but if they keep this up and something catches fire, what then? It seemed like they were shooting them out toward the sea, but hadn't this already gone beyond the experimental stage?
Well, might as well summon the ever-compliant Chancellor.
"Fireworks in the evening?"
"Yeah. Isn't it a bit much?"
"I asked about that too. Apparently production has gone up so much lately that they've got a surplus, so they're just firing them off."
How does gunpowder count as a 'surplus'?
"I should go see for myself. What are they even doing?"
"I'll prepare a carriage."
"Keep it discreet."
"Yes, Your Holiness!"
Unless she said something in advance, she knew perfectly well they'd trot out some gaudy, over-the-top carriage. They kept building the ridiculous things even though she rarely used them.
Clop clop.
"What's gotten into you? A perfectly ordinary carriage?"
"You did ask me to keep things quiet, Your Holiness."
Strange. You understand me just fine even without me raising a fist.
"Good work."
Rrrrrumble.
Whoa? What was that? Wasn't that a tractor?
"Wh-wh-wh-what is that thing rolling over there?!"
"Ah! You mean the Gulleongsoe? It's been a while since you came out this way, so I suppose this is your first time seeing one."
If something like that existed, someone could have mentioned it. In words, perhaps?
Rrrumble. KRAK-CRUNCH.
Weren't those plow-like shovels mounted on the back of the thing, gouging into the earth as it went? And the smoke blanketing the entire neighborhood in haze was just a bonus.
"Ah, those folks are from the gunpowder workshop, actually."
"Them? What are they doing here?"
"They must be working on the sewer improvements these days."
Fine, sure, improving the sewers was good. But was tearing everything up like this really necessary?
"They're working hard."
"Yes. Part of it's because it makes their own lives easier, after all."
But why all this? Weren't they just scooping it straight out of the sewers?
"I don't know exactly how they're doing it, but apparently they've built a separate channel just to carry off the urine."
"Hm. As long as they've solved the clogging problem, it shouldn't be that hard. Clever bunch."
So they collect the urine to make saltpeter.
Still, it was genuinely nice to see heavy machinery finally getting some use.
"Are there many of those Gulleongsoe things around?"
"They belch so much smoke that they mostly use them out on the outskirts."
Hm. Right, they did smoke a lot. A handful of those trundling around a city and everyone would be down with lung disease from the fine dust.
"Why on earth did they name it Gulleongsoe?"
"Nobody had ever really seen one before, so there was no obvious name. I imagine someone just figured, well, it's a big hunk of metal that rolls around — Gulleongsoe. 'Rolling hoop.'"
Not bad, honestly. Though if the tractors of the whole world ended up named "Gulleongsoe," that would be pretty hilarious.
Outside the city blocks of Sinsi, which she hadn't visited in ages, fields and forests stretched out in every direction.
She had ordered that farmland and woodland be tended in proportion to how many people lived in any given area, so the population wouldn't crowd too heavily into one place. An ancient preserve, essentially.
As a result, walk a little down the road and another village would appear; go a bit farther, and yet another one.
But with the wide fields and quiet stretches between settlements, it felt like gazing at the countryside of rural Europe. It was genuinely lovely.
Rrrrrumble.
If only it weren't for that Gulleongsoe off in the distance, churning up fields while belching black smoke.
"Well, well. Those fields are getting plowed nice and deep."
"Thanks to that thing, potato farming has gotten much easier. A good development, I'd say."
Mm, true enough. Since way back, potatoes were plowed in, left to grow, then plowed up again and simply gathered by eye.
Once they invented something like a mesh drag later on, even harvesting would become easy.
"Still, tell them not to overdo it. Maintenance will be harder than they think."
"The craftsmen say the design is so simple that swapping out a few parts fixes it right up."
Had their casting technology improved that much? They must be stamping out parts like nothing now. They did brag about how absurdly long they could roll railway track these days.
Something about rolling sheet iron and stamping it out, or whatever it was.
"The villages dotted about like this really make for a pleasant view."
"Flat land is mostly allocated to farming, so people tend to build their homes on harder ground or in the mountains."
"The people must hate that."
"They love it — it counts as exercise. No need to worry."
These people really are healthy. Healthy all the way up to their brains, which is its own worry — but they do seem to be doing quite well.
It was remarkable that even with so many people living here, the plains and forests held on. She wondered if Korea's problem, back in the day, had simply been that it had too many mountains.
"Hm?"
What was that? Some absolutely colossal structure was visible in the distance.
"Ah, now it comes into view. That's the production facility."
"They even built a building for it?"
"It's enormous — it startled even me."
She'd never seen a pyramid herself, but that thing looked like it would dwarf one.
Mm. And yes, there was definitely a faint whiff of something in the air.
Up close, the place was even more impressive — crude, admittedly, but genuinely being automated. She'd wondered why they were running pipes everywhere, and it turned out they were collecting the urine separately, then pumping it to different spots around the site.
Meanwhile, up top, Gulleongsoe tractors were wandering back and forth, turning the soil over and over.
"Just how big is this place? You've got real talent. Raising a roof over all this must have been a struggle."
"It nearly was, if not for the iron beams Moda forged for us."
It was primitive, granted, but there were cylindrical arches made of rolled sheet iron, the seams still visible, linked together to hold the roof high overhead.
But what happens when a typhoon rolls through with a roof like that?
"One good summer or autumn wind and the whole thing will fly off, won't it?"
"Nothing to be done about it, apparently. Even when it's lashed down tight, if it blows away they just have to repair it again."
"It stinks to high heaven, and the work sounds brutal."
"Even so, apparently it's gotten much easier than before, doing it this way."
The turning and the spreading were back-breaking labor, so cutting it down this far was a genuine feat.
Watching them boil, cool, and skim something out of vats on the far side, it seemed they'd even worked out a recrystallization method.
"Keep turning it, and in about two or three months we can extract the saltpeter!"
"Not one or two years?"
Huh? Something was different here. Hadn't the original process taken much longer?
"Two to three months, Your Holiness."
Mm... right, that must be the World Tree's doing. Anything involving living things, I should just give up trying to understand.
"You're all working yourselves to the bone, so if there's anything you want, ask for plenty."
"Yes. Actually, there is something, heh heh heh..."
"What is it? Why are you laughing in such a creepy way?"
"We lined the floor with some of Your Holiness's cloth. We needed filtration fabric, and everything else rots far too quickly."
"Ah... right... well. Nothing to be done about it."
Why do I suddenly feel like my clothes smell of urine?
"It's certainly vast, but how much does this place actually produce, that they're firing it off like fireworks?"
"I believe I saw that it exceeds twenty-five hundred gwan a year."
Twenty-five hundred gwan? At fifty kilos a gwan, that's... a hundred and twenty-five tons? But is that a lot? Or a little?
"Is that too much?"
"They said you told them you'd need plenty, so they're planning to expand even further."
"By how much?"
"Hard to say. Depends how much more they can collect once the sewer lines are fixed and they're gathering more urine."
Just the sewage around Sinsi alone would add up to plenty. They can't collect all of it, so even rounding generously — call it ten million people?
"Is there any immediate use for all that?"
"I wonder? They said they've stopped stockpiling it because it keeps... bursting."
The Explosive Powder Guild's production hall, in the southeastern quarter of Sinsi.
Grind. Grind. Grind.
"Agh, this is maddening! Why does it have to be something this small?"
A burly man with a squarish face and a thick, shaggy beard stood inside the building, hand-cranking a small wooden barrel, his face set in a sulk.
"Well, if you don't want anyone hurt when it blows, what choice is there?"
"Then couldn't we use a sturdier barrel?"
"Weren't you listening? They switched away from metal barrels precisely because so many of them exploded."
Ever since a building had once been blown clean off its foundations and dozens of men had died, every scrap of metal had been banished from the gunpowder workshops.
And so the bearded man grumbled away, resentfully spinning a little wooden barrel no bigger than two palms wide.
"Whew. I'll be back."
"What are you up to?"
"Just you wait!"
And with that, the bearded man vanished from the workshop. A few days later—
THUD.
He planted a metal barrel as tall as himself in the middle of the workshop yard, jammed iron rods into it this way and that, and began building a support frame.
"Man! Isn't that iron?!"
The colleague who spotted it nearly had a fit. Metal was absolutely, categorically forbidden on the premises, wasn't it? If they were caught, the two of them could be dragged straight to the prayer room together. This was serious business.
"Just wait — it's not iron! Look closely!"
Of course, he knew perfectly well what it was; his real worry was that his colleague might run ahead and report him first.
Clunk-clatter.
The bearded man wedged the cylinder-shaped barrel — open at only one end — into the mounting bracket, then fixed a second wooden barrel inside it.
"There we go! Look! This ought to work, shouldn't it?"
"I don't know... I've got a bad feeling."
"Look — you just put the ingredients inside this wooden barrel, right?"
"Hm. I suppose that's true?"
Even to his colleague, it did look plausible enough. The ingredients went into the wood, after all, didn't they?
"Shall we give it a try, just a little?"
"Will it be all right?"
"Come on, what the hell, let's give it one go!"
Ssssshh. Tap-tap.
And so the two men tipped in powder that looked like black sand, followed by an incredibly fine black dust, giddy with anticipation. Surely this way they could produce far more of it at once.
"Right! Let's begin!"
Gulp.
The tense moment. Explosions always happened during the mixing, didn't they?
Grind. Grind. Grind.
Contrary to his appearance, the man turned the barrel with a delicate, careful hand. When nothing happened, his expression brightened a little more with every turn of the crank.
"Bwahaha! I knew it would work!"
"Our shipment's riding on this!"
"First let's confirm what we've actually got!"
The two of them hurried to finish the batch, then scooped out a small pinch of the finished powder to inspect it.
A smooth, glossy black powder.
"Bwahaha! I told you it'd turn out fine!"
"This is huge!"
"Let's hurry and make some more, then test it!"
"Yes! Let's not dawdle!"
Pleased as they were with the finished product, the two men rushed through the next batch.
Rumble-rumble-rumble.
Perhaps it was the excitement — but the man was spinning the barrel noticeably faster now. His colleague stood by, watching.
How many turns had it been?
KABOOOOOM!
"AAAAH!"
"WHAT WAS THAT?!"
With a thunderous detonation, the powder inside the barrel went up all at once.
By sheer fortune, the support frame held — the metal barrel didn't go flying, but plowed a long, scorched furrow across the yard before grinding to a halt.
"Whooooaaah!"
"That scared the life out of me!"
They'd been doing so well for so long — spinning it fast had been the root of the disaster.
"You all right?"
"Y-yeah! Yeah! We're alive!"
"Hey — this thing works!"
The metal barrel had shielded them, and the fact that they'd both survived the blast sent a rush of pure joy through them. The two men threw their arms around each other and basked in it.
Rumble-rumble.
"Hey! Are you two all right?!"
"This is serious!"
"Tulbo! Are you alive?"
The explosion had been so thunderous that colleagues from all around came sprinting. The men were surely dead — but even so, someone would have to gather the bodies, wouldn't they?
"We're alive, you bastards!"
"Don't bury us before we're dead!"
And when the others arrived, there the two of them stood, alive and entirely unharmed. Surviving a blast like that? What a marvel.
"Say... what's all this, then?"
"Hm?"
Where the crowd of workmates was now staring, the workshop's wall had been torn open, and wooden shrapnel was strewn as far as the eye could see. It was a battlefield.
"Huh? What's this?"
"Hm?"
A dawning feeling spread through the crowd — the sense that they had just laid eyes on something truly terrifying.
"Couldn't we... use this as a weapon?"
"Heh?"
"Clean it up first! If we get caught, it's the prayer room!"
"Gah!"
The traces had to be erased before whoever was destined for the prayer room arrived. One wrong step and the whole lot of them could be hauled off to the Temple together, couldn't they?
Swipe-swipe. Scrub-scrub.
The men tidied the yard and hurriedly rebuilt the wreckage and the shattered wall far off in the distance.
This was not the handiwork of people doing it for the first or second time. Could it be that this sort of thing happened rather often?
"But what is that thing?"
"Ah! That's his new invention, apparently! Says it can produce gunpowder in bulk!"
"It's metal, though?"
"Ah... he just spun it too fast, that's all. Whew... turns out if you go gently, it doesn't blow."
"Oh ho?"
"I'll put in a request, at any rate. Though I've no idea what to write in the report..."
It was magnificent, truly — but he couldn't shake the nagging worry that they had gone and done the very thing they'd been told not to do. Such was the plight of the man they called Tulbo...