Off to Strike It Rich
Alright, guys! Let's go make some money!
Pang! Ddang! Pang! Pang!
"Ugh. It won't hit anything if I'm even a little farther away, huh?"
This had become her latest hobby lately, and honestly, the accuracy was enough to bring tears to her eyes. Once, she'd clamped the thing down and fired from a fixed position, and the thing still flew wherever it pleased. The ballistics were an absolute disaster.
"This won't do. This isn't a weapon meant to be actually used."
At this point, it was strictly a close-range weapon, or the kind of thing you fired in bulk and prayed something connected, wasn't it? Weren't medieval gunpowder weapons supposed to be worse than a plain bow? No—she'd have to get clever with this.
Kkung-kgung, pssshhh, pyusi-shik, kkung-kgung.
Moda, which she hadn't visited in a while, had transformed completely. It was practically indistinguishable from a modern industrial complex.
Steam and dust billowed up between the countless brick factories. The smell of industrialization itself!
"The air's cleaner than I expected, though?"
She had told them to space out the factories and plant plenty of trees, but why was it this clean? It felt like a light breeze carrying a bit of sand, nothing more. Curiously, the train left a dusty haze trailing far behind it as it traveled, but the city itself stayed pristine.
"Now this is livable! An industrial city. Mm. Mm. Good. Very good."
Strolling leisurely along, she arrived at the ironworks and foundry—a walled-off, secret space surrounded by a fortress of its own.
"Halt! Stop right there! Who goes there?"
Hm. Good. They should stop people from walking in.
Pass — Ha-eun
"Please check today's visitor list."
"Yes, sir. One moment, please."
The guard went inside to verify it in person? Couldn't they use the electric telegraph for short distances, even with its weak signal? Hm... right! She'd have to think about the telegraph too.
The kids really were in excellent shape. The building was way off in the distance, yet he was already back?
"Confirmed! You may enter."
Oh. Not even breathing hard. Impressive.
"Keep up the good work~"
"Yes, sir!"
That reply was packed with fighting spirit! The goofy grin on his face was a little much, but as long as he guarded his post properly, who cared.
The heart of Moda's industrial district was enclosed by walls, accessible only with a permit. It was practically a prison, but since the people inside had devoted their lives to this work, she'd heard there wasn't much complaint. They got to travel plenty by train and all that. It wasn't like they were locked in!
Among the countless processing workshops, today's visit was to the barrel-making factory.
Kururururung.
Every basic foundry was attached to a blast furnace, and this was one of them.
"Whoa? Something's spinning really fast in there."
"Ah, you've come!"
"Yep! You're the factory manager?"
"That's right!"
Was it because she'd called the place a "factory"? At some point, every place that made things had started calling itself one.
"We pour in molten metal and spin it rapidly to form the cylinders."
Oh? She'd assumed they'd cast them like ordinary moldings.
"Where did you learn to do this?"
"We think it through ourselves, and we dig through the research materials that came over from Mudo. Hahaha!"
"Oh! Impressive!"
"Thank you!"
A fresh-faced young man being praised by a middle-aged factory manager—if a stranger had walked in, they'd have thought he was mocking the man. Still, he seemed genuinely delighted, so it was all well and good.
"This way, please. The machining happens over here."
"Right. Lead on."
And that machining was precisely why she was here today.
Screeeeeech—clank.
Whoa? They rotated the pipe and pressed something sharp against it, and it sliced right off. Was it supposed to work like that?
There was something harder than steel?
"How does that thing cut? Isn't it the same old steel?"
"It is! We just swap in a fresh edge whenever one dulls. Haha!"
So it still manages to cut even like that, huh?
"Here are the tools you requested."
"Thanks!"
She'd ordered two things in advance. The first: a machine that would grip the barrel firmly and push and pull it with perfect consistency. The second: a cutting tool whose edge could be fed out little by little from inside the barrel.
In truth, she'd asked them to cut rifling grooves, but they hadn't quite understood, which was why she'd come all this way. They'd been about to cut them in a straight line.
Once this was done, the new pistols she was planning would finally have proper barrels.
"Huh, you already finished them?"
"Yes, we gave it a try in advance. Does it actually have an effect?"
What kind of effect spin would give a bullet was a question for the scholars to figure out.
"Yep. You'll need bullets matched to that barrel, sure—but from now on, the bullets are going to go wherever you want them to."
"Hm. So we'll need to run all sorts of experiments to match it?"
"It won't happen in a day or two. You'll have plenty of studying to do as well."
"It used to be nice, relaxing work—just shaving metal—but there's more and more to learn every day. Hahaha!"
If only he knew how much a mechanical engineer had to study. This was just the beginning!
Since he'd already practiced cutting on his own, she'd leave him to keep at it.
"As a hint for the bullets: make them expand slightly when the powder detonates, so the force of the blast swells them into the grooves."
"Understood. For now, I'll experiment with the barrel—how many turns, how many grooves."
"Right. Put in the hard work."
It would be lovely to calculate it all mathematically, but they weren't there yet. For now, learning through hands-on trial and error was the best way.
Why had she come here again? Oh, right—it was basically an environmental inspection dressed up as a day trip. She'd worried about fine dust here for ages, so it was a relief it turned out fine.
In the end, her beloved pistol was doomed to remain a short-range toy.
Thanks to her explorers, the world map was growing more accurate by the day.
"How are there so many countries?"
"Sixty or so confirmed, at last count."
Nations were springing up across Europe and Asia at a dizzying pace.
"Wow. That's a lot of customers to sell to."
"Yes. We simply don't have enough stock to sell to them all."
"Still, pace yourselves—flood the market and the price drops."
"We know that much. Heh heh heh."
Selling to half and robbing the other half—how sinister could they get?
"Also, with so many new nations springing up, it seems Prife is under pressure from all directions."
"Why them?"
"There's that trade city, isn't there? They're making an absolutely astronomical amount of money off it."
Toll fees alone would rake in a fortune, she supposed—with foot traffic that enormous.
"So let them use the money to build an army, obviously. What's the problem?"
"They say they're being squeezed by several powers at once. The Muslims and the Christians apparently can't stand each other, above all."
Were the Crusades about to kick off or something? What on earth was going on over there?
"Not like there's anything we can do for them, is there?"
"They seem to want to build fortresses of their own—they keep petitioning us for cement."
As if cement alone would solve anything? They'd need enormous quantities of stone, too.
"Isn't water scarce over there? That'd be tough."
"They want to plug at least one direction in the west. There's a river there, you see."
"We don't pay taxes at the trade city anyway—give them a bit of that and let them build whatever they like."
Shipping them stone and water was out of the question, so that much would have to do. It was far away, sure, but they had trains.
"The other thing is that word has spread, and more and more outsiders are sniffing around anything visible—guns, cannons, the trains."
Bound to happen. Those were hardly ordinary goods.
"Trains are fine—they're so big—but guns and cannons are another matter? If someone set their mind to it, they could just carry one off."
The saving grace was that gunpowder was manufactured here in the capital region, somewhere those people couldn't possibly reach.
"We've ordered individuals to manage their stock rigorously, but it seems a few pieces were stolen in raids."
"Well, I always figured some would leak out, whether as war trophies or plain theft..."
The point was, outsiders still couldn't produce steel on demand, could they?
"The ones who stole them still don't know what they have, right?"
"That's right."
No chemistry to speak of, no precision scales—in this era, reverse-engineering was flatly impossible.
"Selling them back feels a bit off, though..."
"Shall we keep sending the kids in quietly to destroy them, then?"
"You think that'd work?"
"Just blow the whole building sky-high."
Ah. So he was talking about committing terrorism. Hold on—hadn't gunpowder stores always had a habit of going up by accident? It would look perfectly natural!
"Yes. Find everyone who stole from us, and blow them all to kingdom come. Heh heh heh."
"Eh-heh-heh."
And so it was that she, apparently, was the head of an international terrorist organization.
"So, what's the word on Japan?"
"They're curious what we intend to do with that place—mountains from end to end."
"It's nowhere near their capital either. Sweet-talk them thoroughly."
Operation Japan-Fleece, step one. Heh heh heh.
"Right. I like the timber there, so tell them we're taking the wood."
"Yes. And the kids are being readied as well."
"Good. We go in one wave and dig in for good."
"By the way—why do you love gold and silver so much?"
Huh? How would I know? I just do. Why do you ask?
The year 3468. At long last, the moment had arrived.
"Eh-heh-heh. A great fire has broken out at the Japanese imperial palace."
"Hm? What of it?"
"We offered to fund the construction of a new palace in exchange for development rights to the surrounding region. We promised we wouldn't dig up the land—only extract resources—and they finally gave their approval."
That's right—no land needed! Strip the silver mines, that's all! But the palace burned down? Completely? Suspicious, that.
"Was it the kids?"
"Hard to say~"
"Whatever. Whatever we pay them, the profit's all ours."
Time to milk that place dry~
"I taught them how to separate the silver and lead from what I ship over, right?"
"Yes. Lay down some kind of ash and smelt it over that?"
The cupellation method was simpler than she'd expected. And besides, for a people who already ran blast furnaces hot enough to melt steel, it was trivially easy! Naturally, they wouldn't be using those furnaces for it, but still!
"And then?"
"Then you told us to mix it with charcoal and separate out the lead?"
"And then you turn that into bullets!"
Wasn't this what they called a creative economy? And the lead yields would be enormous, too.
"You're quite the thrifty one."
"That place will keep us busy for a while, so if the Prime Minister whines, just call me."
"You did make him Prime Minister, after all."
So that's what he was sore about, this guy? I'm going over there to bring back money, you know!
"I'm just saying, you rascal!"
And where was this? The Silver Harbor!
Nobody even knew the name of the local village. There happened to be a Japanese settlement nearby, so they'd simply moored their ships there and built a port.
And then—
KWOOM! KUGUGUNG!
"KWAHAHAHA!"
That maniac was the man in charge of this whole operation. He was packing the mountainside with gunpowder and blasting the earth loose in sheets, and after each blast the workers would swarm in and carve out roads.
When they hit bedrock, he'd blast that too, build a fortress out of it, and move right along. A thoroughly unhinged individual.
She had no idea how much gunpowder it would take to satisfy him. The saltpeter mine had insurance, so she let him be—but she was a little afraid to play with him.
"Agassi!"
Don't call me that! Don't go around pretending we're friendly! Can't you see the locals over there trembling in terror?
The laborers were being recruited locally, and their reputation in the area was actually decent. Except for that one.
"GYAHAHA! It's blasting beautifully!"
Human, my patience is about to blow.
On the first day, when he'd spotted the exposed silver seam and declared that, since it was so close, they'd cut the road in a dead straight line, she should have stopped him. This wasn't dynamite—who poured gunpowder into construction work like that? Astonishing creatures, these people.
"Yes. Good work. Very good."
"HAHAHA! Thank you!"
Then again, civil engineering projects like this usually left piles of dead workers behind, so arguably this was a step up, all things considered.
And there behind them stood that stolid fortress, and inside it, a whole train standing ready.
They'd brought enough weapons that even if all of Japan rose against them, they could hold out until reinforcements arrived with room to spare.
Once word spread that they were mining silver, greedy invaders were inevitable, after all.
"You do understand the fortress is the most important thing here, right?"
"Of course! Heh heh heh."
"Everything's ready inside for smelting ore too?"
"Yes! We do the work ourselves, but Moda has agreed to dispatch one master craftsman for each department."
Inter-departmental cooperation running smoothly too! Splendid!
"When do you think they'll attack?"
"Hard to say? They're such sly, scheming folk. Everyone needs to stay on guard at all times."
"The kids say the locals smile at them, but there's no telling what's behind it—it puts them on edge."
True. There were strangely many of them with that unsettling air. Even now, the way they kept sneaking glances while pretending not to look was getting on her nerves.
Sly, scheming creatures.