Too Much to Worry About!
There was far too much to keep track of these days!
China was forever splitting apart and fighting civil wars with itself. Strangest of all, the Han dynasty, which had been doing perfectly fine out west, had abruptly turned into the Song dynasty, while the southeast had shattered into dozens of pieces and plunged into yet another civil war — apparently some warlords had gone to war over who was the most impressive.
"Good for them, I suppose? I wonder how they managed to unify beyond those mountains?"
It was a genuine mystery. No matter how she looked at it, the terrain between the southeast and the west was nothing but winding mountain trails — not a single pass an army could realistically march through.
"How do they even intend to govern it?"
"An official can ride through on horseback with one or two escorts, sure — but for real governance, you need an army that can move back and forth quickly. They must have pulled some trick or other."
Emperor Yang of Sui had wrecked his dynasty with canals; maybe someone here had dug their dynasty's grave with mountain roads that didn't exist in any history book?
"Wouldn't the bandits multiply terribly, though? It's not like there's just one or two roads — it's winding mountain paths for miles."
Oh? The bandits we made fashionable? Apparently there were still plenty of them around?
"Well, they'll manage. It's not our country. Let's just hold our walls and watch how it plays out."
They'd holed up in the mountains where we could hardly reach them anyway — best to cut down on the headaches while we could.
"Is Iwami still producing silver?"
"Does that lead really come out in such quantities?"
"It's a lead mine, that place. Think of it as lead with silver mixed right in. Perfect for making bullets, no?"
And once you can make bullets, you keep making them right up into the modern era, don't you?
"And that place they're calling a gold mine — it yields even more silver, apparently?"
Ah, the newly acquired mine south of Mount Fuji.
"That's gold mixed with silver. Send it to the chemists and have them separate it."
And it wouldn't stop at gold and silver, either — there'd be a staggering amount of metals jumbled together like that.
"Oh? They're mixed together?"
"Even the silver and gold we already hold can be purified into pure silver and pure gold through chemistry."
"My goodness..."
This is exactly why chemistry matters. Do some studying, for heaven's sake.
"You do know pure gold and pure silver fetch higher prices?"
"Yes, of course."
"Then when we buy from foreign lands, hand over the slightly inferior silver and gold."
Until they figured it out, we'd be slipping them a little lead and copper along with it. That was just how the game was played.
"They don't really have anywhere else to spend it, though."
"Still, there are times we're buying from them, aren't there?"
"We can just pay them in currency."
"I honestly don't know what they'd even need it for, but if they'll take it, fine. Do you know why paper money is so brilliant?"
It's easy to produce — so as long as counterfeiting stays under control, it's an absolute gold mine.
"It's light, and easy to carry around?"
"There's something even more important than that."
"Hmm? What would that be?"
"The moment it catches fire, it vanishes — poof."
"Why would that matter?"
She clearly didn't follow.
"When it vanishes like that, all that money flows right back into our nation's pockets, you see? And then we don't have to dig out any gold to exchange it for."
"Wow..."
So she was genuinely impressed. And that, everyone, is why the whole world makes its money out of paper!
"That's truly wicked."
"..."
Excuse me? I was just about to feel deliciously evil about it, too?
"I'm sorry!"
"Hmph..."
Whew...
"What's the status of the Shinju relocation plan?"
"Word of Shinju has spread, and people are flooding in faster than we can count them."
"You're aware there are far too many people crowded around Sinsi, yes?"
"Yes!"
Even now, a full fifth of the population remained clustered around Sinsi and its orbit — Bukju, Moda, and the settlements between. If that vast land was to be developed properly, the population needed to spread out.
"That said, thanks to the trains, more and more people travel out, fall in love with a place, and settle there permanently."
"Good. Remind every city mayor to make their cities pleasant to live in, too. That's how you draw people in."
Given how fast the population was growing, honestly, the faster they streamed outward, the better. A little disappointing, really.
"How are the guns coming along?"
"Rifling the barrels is more or less complete — now we're searching for a way to use machines to mass-produce them quickly."
This, too, had been a nightmare. You can't cut steel with steel at the high speeds used on softer exteriors, so the machinists had been suffering terribly — until someone finally realized that only the cutting edge itself needed to be hard. So she'd whittled down just the front blade, the way you'd forge a knife, and handed a few over. The craftsmen had nearly wept with gratitude.
Metalworking had come breathtakingly far. Lathework especially — gun barrels were no longer cast by pouring molten metal into tubes and spinning them, but machined and carved into shape.
"As for the primers you mentioned, the chemists are working out a safe production method — they're asking for a little more time."
"They know the basic principles, so it shouldn't take long."
If they wanted to manufacture primers for general distribution rather than the tiny batches they made now, they'd need serious volume, and the chemists were laboring over it. Without electrical equipment, holding a steady temperature was brutally difficult.
They seemed to have jury-rigged something like a thermometer — set it beside the apparatus and watch whether it stayed under a certain mark. Crude, but it appeared to work well enough.
And next, they needed electricity.
"Why on earth did she summon all of us here?"
"No idea. Apparently if we don't show, she cuts off our research materials."
"We only have to sit through it for a moment..."
"There's so much I could be experimenting on..."
In a mountain valley in northern Haseo stood the concentrated might of Daehan — every research institute and university facility the empire possessed, gathered in one place. Scholars who had once studied at the university in Mudo had emigrated to Daehan in droves.
They had come hungry for knowledge that existed only within Daehan's borders. Europeans, Middle Easterners, even people from the Eastern Continent — a truly staggering variety of peoples had poured through the gates.
With their arrival, Daehan's sciences had advanced by leaps and bounds. For so long, many of Daehan's own scholars had studied because they were made to. These newcomers studied because not knowing drove them insane.
"What in the world is she planning to do?"
"They say it will become important research?"
"What could it possibly be?"
"Maybe something to do with that thing set up on the table up there?"
On the experiment table before them, an absurd length of what looked like copper wire was wound around a spool; on the opposite side stood an iron rod wrapped in yet more copper, and a short distance away, a thin iron plate had been fixed in place.
"It looks rather shabby, doesn't it?"
"Is this not a chemistry demonstration?"
Creeeak.
"Oh my..."
"..."
"Wow..."
The audience was overwhelmingly male — though there were women present, too.
The moment Haneul pushed open the door and stepped inside, every last one of them — men and women alike — went quiet as the dead.
"She's beautiful..."
"..."
"My goodness..."
Tap. Tap.
For once, she wasn't wearing her usual clothes. Today she had dressed exactly like them — in a laboratory coat. It was a full-body anti-dust suit, more or less, but there was no hiding natural-born beauty.
Clap, clap.
"Good morning, everyone. I'm Shin Ha-eun, and I'll be conducting today's experiment. A pleasure to meet you all."
"..."
"..."
No welcoming response. No reaction at all. A very cold lecture hall indeed.
"Now, the experiment itself is simple. It'll be over in a moment, so keep your eyes fixed on that iron plate next to the iron rod."
Creeeak, creeeak.
And with that, Haneul began turning the wheel beside the spool. The magnet suspended from a string began to glide back and forth through the copper-wound coil.
"Can everyone see it?"
Each time the magnet swept through the coil, the thin iron plate was tugged toward the iron rod on the far side.
"Good heavens!"
"What is that thing?!"
"Sorcery!"
They did say that science insufficiently understood was indistinguishable from magic.
And now here were actual scientists, shouting the word magic.
"Marvelous, isn't it?"
"What is the principle behind it?!"
"Why does it behave that way?"
In an instant, the lecture hall had become a fish market. Haneul's beauty had long since been forgotten. Remarkable people, truly.
"It's called electromagnetic induction — as for the underlying principle and how to put it to use, I'll leave that to all of you to discover."
"What?! You don't even know why it does that yet?"
Haneul probably genuinely didn't. She wasn't exactly a physics or electromagnetism major.
"It's outside my field of expertise, so I honestly don't know. Which is precisely why I'm entrusting it to you."
"Gah!"
"Then I'll take it on!"
"No, I want to do it!"
Volunteers came pouring out of the woodwork, each clamoring to claim the project for himself. As expected — the answers to real scholarship had to be sought from outside Daehan.
"Work on it together, all of you. This is not a simple field of study."
"Right! Something like that won't be solved by one or two discoveries!"
"May we try operating it ourselves?"
"I want to try it too!"
As the crowd surged forward, Haneul quietly stepped back, waving them on.
"Go right ahead. I'm leaving it here with you — it's your turn to bring it to light now."
Whoosh—
"Move!"
"Careful with it!"
"If it breaks, we're finished!"
They crowded around the apparatus, checking its basic construction first. Before long, every one of them would go home and build one of their own.
It really wasn't such a difficult device. And the moment somebody managed to forge a stronger permanent magnet, they would have generators — and with generators, the telegraph.
"I'm counting on all of you, so do work hard."
Electromagnetism was no easy discipline, after all. Haneul strolled out with a smile, and the scientists behind her never even noticed she was gone.
"I'd love to teach you more, truly — it's just that I don't know any more. Hehe."
There was a reason she'd built nothing beyond an elementary-school science lab's worth of equipment. This was the very edge of her own knowledge.
"At least build us the generator. The telegraph is easy once we have that."
Back home from the electromagnetism demonstration, she sat in her room and turned the problem over — and realized the headaches didn't stop there.
"Anyway, the generator's been outsourced. But how exactly are we making the wire?"
The kids were probably digging through South America for it at this very moment. She had sent them off with orders to find rubber trees, after all.
They could come back half-dead and wobbly — as long as they made it to the World Tree alive, they'd pull through. Like those pepper plants, way back when. Everyone had been certain those four limp little sprouts were done for, and look at them now — the pepper harvests were downright obscene!
"Even if they find it, I'll still worry..."
Raw natural rubber couldn't be used as-is. Well, it could — but used exactly as-is, it was garbage. They'd need vulcanized rubber, and the question was whether people could actually make it. They had clocks; if the thermometers were accurate enough, maybe...
Crude as the thermometers were, perhaps enough trial and error would get them roughly there. But if the quality was too poor, the wire would snap every other day and be completely useless — and that was exactly what worried her.
She'd buried the telegraph conduits generously along the rail lines while laying the iron rails, deep and secure. The infrastructure was ready and waiting.
"Nothing for it, then. We'll brute-force it with manpower."
No wonder everything took forever to build. She'd simply have to wait until the kids found a proper manufacturing method.
"The moment we have generators and wire, we have the telegraph! And then we'll get news from the borders instantly!"
Her eternal nightmare was this: war breaking out at some distant frontier, the news crawling home too late, the walls falling — and only then marching off to take them back.
Hang in there, kids. Just push through until the telegraph!
These days, honestly, there was far too much demanding her attention.
They were developing a silver mine and a gold mine in Japan simultaneously, and the meddling had grown unbearable. The Fujiwara noble who'd kept throwing obstacles in their way had finally fallen from power, and she'd briefly allowed herself to breathe — and now the Emperor and the retired Emperor, father and son, were at each other's throats, both whining at her for military funds.
And the scientists, bypassing every channel, were in an uproar demanding to see her because they had questions even their peers couldn't answer.
"Um... they say there's another rebellion in the Song dynasty?"
"Why is it always them."
"Word is the mining is unendurable and peasant uprisings keep erupting?"
"Which is exactly why all those mountains make the place ungovernable — why crawl in there and reap the consequences?"
Insane! They were all insane!
As if that weren't enough, out west in Mudo, the Muslims and the Christians had apparently gone at each other with blades — full-blown chaos.
Our mercenary-nation friends in Fraise were complaining they were exhausted and asking for help. Help with what, exactly? It's their own backyard.
"Ah... so this is the weight of being a great power?"
"What's the matter?"
"There's simply too much to keep track of, isn't there?"
"Shall we just eliminate it all?"
Ah. These children are a problem too. The fanatics among them outnumber all reasonable estimates. The Islamic zealots, especially — away with them.
'Haneul is great! Haneul is God!' — she could just picture them charging in suicide vests while screaming it.
"No. If I ever turn you loose, the Earth itself might end."
Without a single nuclear weapon, the apocalypse was still a foregone conclusion. Everyone would burn, and everyone would die in the blasts.
"Why us, though?"
"Because you're all far too good."
"Pardon?"
Too obedient, that's why. You little rascals.
"If war ever breaks out over there, ship a generous supply of Fist Potatoes to Fraise. With those alone, they can hold against anyone who comes."
In an era where combat was almost entirely close-quarters, the might of a good hand grenade — a Fist Potato, as the army called it — was tremendous. Throw one and run, and dozens of the enemy died in the blast. For defensive warfare, there was simply nothing better.
"You no longer patrol our own territory yourself — is it really all right to hand so much away?"
These days the desert patrols were handled by the Uyghurs and the Tibetans over there, so it was a fair question to ask.
Thwip.
She spread out several copies of the world map, revised again and again over the years.
"Look at the map. This western region, and down below it here in the center."
"Yes."
"The nations there have changed constantly, haven't they? Borders shifting over and over?"
"Oh... now that you mention it, yes?"
"Their role is to plug the gap between the two — to make sure nothing ever touches us directly. That matters far more than any patrol."
"So they're a kind of shield, then?"
Well, who knows — Genghis Khan's parents are still alive somewhere, and the moment he's born he might go howling about world conquest.
"Wars will flare in the western regions constantly. It's best that we never share a border with them face-to-face."
"I understand!"
"And besides, we have the Eastern Continent, don't we? Let's not waste our strength anywhere else."
"Yes, Haneul-nim!"
With a magnificent continent like America sitting in their lap, there was no sense bleeding strength into the old world's quarrels.