The Age of Gunpowder
The Qajar western and Middle Eastern expeditions had introduced the world to the Sky Faith and to the very existence of Daehan — but the cruelty of their rule, warped after Temüjin's death, left behind a deeply negative image of the eastern empire.
And it also became the occasion for the knowledge of gunpowder to spread to every corner of the world.
Alchemy was a field in which Europe and the Middle East had long since advanced further than anywhere else. Naturally, they had known the recipe for gunpowder all along — what they had never known was how to use it as a weapon.
In the Khanate, once Daehan's support was cut off, they gathered their alchemists and began researching how to make it themselves, and the truth dawned on everyone at once.
Gunpowder can make a truly terrifying weapon!
Just as Haneul had feared during the Qajar campaign, the West was now spurred onward toward the development of gunpowder weapons.
In Daehan Year 3721, the year Haneul was stranded on a ship by a typhoon and an accidental powder explosion — in a secret workshop of the Holy Roman Empire, a nobleman gazed down at what sat upon the desk and turned to the man beside him.
"So this black powder is the gunpowder?"
"Yes. That is correct."
The man who answered was someone who had once manufactured gunpowder under the rule of the Mongol Khanate.
He had learned the craft in order to drive the heretics out of his homeland, then fled to Germany with the knowledge in hand.
"With this, one can make weapons, I'm told?"
"Yes, though it is still under development."
"Then we, too, can forge arms equal to those of that eastern country, can we not?"
France and Germany had experienced the terror of gunpowder weapons firsthand during the crusades, when they stormed into Mudo. At the time the distance had been too great for them to examine the actual devices, but when they witnessed the Fist Potatoes during the Qajar invasion, they realized what their enemies had been wielding — and began their research.
"Yes. Given enough time for research and enough materials, I believe it is possible."
"Then tell me everything you need."
The master craftsman wanted to shout for joy. That sentence, after all, meant he would be paid handsomely. Anyone in his position would feel like screaming with delight.
"I will do my utmost."
"You must develop these weapons — whatever it takes!"
At that moment, the nobleman's gloomy remark chilled the craftsman's blood to ice. He would earn a great deal of money — but this was also a situation where a single misstep could see him dead without a soul ever knowing what became of him.
Three years after that.
In Daehan Year 3724, while Haneul was stuck in Japan throwing the entire country into an uproar, in France...
"You claim you know how to make gunpowder?"
"Yes! I made it in the Khanate."
The gunpowder master standing here, a Hungarian by birth, had likewise been a weapons-maker in the Khanate.
He had learned the trade, run away, and come all the way to France to make his fortune.
"And can you make weapons with it?"
"I have seen their weapons with my own eyes, but to recreate them exactly, I believe I would need to conduct many experiments."
"Then research it as quickly as possible."
"That will cost a great deal of money, milord..."
His stomach was in knots. To move quickly he would need to hire many workers and expand his workshop considerably — and he worried how much of that expense the nobles would actually tolerate.
How many men out there hand over a pittance, then demand results immediately? Beatings are the least of it; some kill you outright.
"I will fund you as much as it takes."
"Thank you!"
"But it must be done swiftly."
The craftsman who had reached France, and the craftsman in Germany, were in exactly the same position.
It seemed as though they had been guaranteed lives of comfort and safety — but if they failed to produce results quickly, those lives could become no better than living deaths.
Nineteen years after France began its research.
Daehan Year 3743. On a small open field along the Franco-German border, a crowd had gathered in full force.
And there, resting where every eye was fixed, sat a great black lump of iron — narrow at the muzzle, swollen wide at the rear, its shape eerily like a gourd. A cannon.
Unlike the silver cannons of Daehan, this one was jet-black and far more massive in appearance.
A man who looked to be a nobleman sent his shout rolling across the field.
"Begin!"
The men who appeared to be soldiers pried open an oak barrel set beside the cannon and began filling it with gunpowder using bronze shovels.
"Oh? That black powder — that must be the gunpowder!"
"The stuff those savages in the east were using?"
"At last! We have it too!"
While the Westerners could barely contain their joy at possessing a gunpowder weapon at last, every single movement the soldiers made was strung tight with nerves.
Shit. Is this thing going to blow up again?
It'll be fine... right?
The nobles knew nothing of it, but accidents during training — powder going off without warning, men killed and maimed — were hardly rare occurrences anymore.
The hands of the soldiers tamping the powder down with broad wooden paddles trembled almost imperceptibly.
Now we put the cannonball in.
Yeah, let's just press it down enough. It only has to fly, doesn't it?
Afraid the charge might ignite while they tamped it, the soldiers gave it only a token pressing, then carefully fetched the iron ball and rolled it in.
Thud.
"Phew..."
"My hands are shaking so bad I can barely do this job..."
The soldiers exhaled in relief. Mercifully, the iron ball had settled onto the powder without incident.
Tap, tap.
"Gently, gently..."
"Yeah... I don't want to die either..."
Far away, amid the nobles' excited chatter, the two men were preparing for a demonstration with their lives on the line.
"Let's just forget it and fire the damn thing..."
"Agreed! I'm too scared to keep going."
In truth, most of their accidents had been caused by lingering embers inside the barrel during rapid-fire tests — nobody had known to clear them out, and that ignorance was the root of every disaster.
With the analysis so poor, no one knew where the next accident would come from, and the green soldiers could do nothing but shiver.
"Lighting it now!"
"Watch out!"
Sssss-crackle.
Two soldiers lit the fuse seated in the vent and gripped the cannon from behind, gritting their teeth and bracing themselves.
If the recoil shoved the cannon loose and it rolled off and broke, they might well be sentenced to death for it.
BOOM!
With a thunderous roar, the cannon fired — clean, safe, and without accident. The two soldiers breathed silent sighs of relief, as did the spectators standing far off.
"Gyaagh!"
"What the—!"
"What in the world was that sound?!"
Startled by the blast, some people's legs gave out beneath them and they collapsed where they stood.
"Look over there!"
"The stone wall — it's been smashed!"
In place of the target, the heap of stones piled up at a distance had been crushed to nothing.
"Incredible!"
"Now we can finally stand against the heretics!"
People began to marvel at the weapon's power. Surely a thing like this could smash castle walls — smash anything.
"Though doesn't it take terribly long to fire a single shot?"
"With power like that, couldn't we just use it to break gates and walls and be done with it?"
"You think so?"
"And we could simply build many of them and fire them all at once, no?"
Judging by raw power alone, it seemed beyond reproach. But at the level they had just witnessed, at the very least, they should never dream of attacking Daehan with it.
Setting aside any question of effective range, the distance the shot traveled looked to be barely half of what Daehan's cannons achieved.
While the nobles murmured among themselves, their host, the nobleman, smiled and announced that one more demonstration remained.
"Next, we have a second demonstration."
The nobleman felt that this much alone had already made the arms-selling venture a success.
"Oh? There's more?"
"Are they going to fire that thing again?"
"Doesn't look like it. The soldiers are heading over toward where those scarecrows are set up."
The soldiers who had steadied the first cannon now made their way to a different cannon, erected elsewhere.
This time, the target ground bristled with scarecrows dressed in armor.
The soldiers began the loading process as cautiously as before. Packing the powder and tamping it down was identical — but this time, the projectile was different.
"Careful..."
"You think I don't know that? I don't want to die!"
The two men placed several fist-sized iron balls inside, building up layers with wooden paddles. With the cannon loaded two layers deep, the soldiers gingerly took aim.
"Whew. Still all right so far."
"Thank the heavens..."
"So now comes the lighting."
"Yeah... gulp..."
Hissssssss.
As the fuse burned down, the hearts of the two men gripping the cannon began to pound like hammers. With a single shared prayer, they begged the gods for a safe discharge.
KABOOOM!
Once again, a colossal roar, and the shells flew. This volley was somewhat different from the last — it swept away the heaped pile of armored scarecrows entirely.
"Phew... The power is extraordinary, but..."
"Would you actually dare to use something this terrifying?"
"You're telling me..."
The soldiers knew full well how formidable the weapon was — it was just too damn frightening.
Oblivious to the soldiers' feelings, the nobles in the distance stood dumbstruck.
"What in God's name was that just now?"
"Weren't there thirty-odd scarecrows standing there?"
Seeing the entire forest of scarecrows vanish into dust in a single instant struck the crowd like a thunderbolt.
"This thing — used properly on a battlefield, couldn't it sweep away an entire army at once?"
"A truly terrible weapon has been born!"
And there was one man listening closely to all this chatter — the nobleman who had invited them all, the words stretching his mouth from ear to ear.
Every sign pointed to the weapons selling like wildfire.
Crusades, Qajar, Daehan — he could not have cared less about any of them. Wars broke out often, and all he had to do was sell plenty of weapons. That was the entire length and breadth of his philosophy.
"Wait! What is this weapon called? How much for one, and how many can be made?"
"I don't care what it costs! Tell me at once!"
"I want to buy them first — is there any way to arrange that?"
The spectators crowded around the nobleman, each trying to outbid the last. Wielded well, this weapon would clearly be a game-changer.
One had only to look at that eastern land called Qajar — hadn't they built their vast empire with nothing more than fist-sized stones they carried around in their hands?
"The age of the bow is over!"
"That's right! It's the age of the cannon!"
"No — the age of gunpowder!"
"Bwahaha! The time has come to reclaim the Holy Land!"
"In God's name!"
Dreaming of pushing out the heretics, seizing their lands, and raking in the profits, the Westerners were already lost in their visions.
For the sake of their European brethren groaning under oppression — and, of course, for money — it seemed the hour had finally come to cast off the terror of those nomads once and for all.
But wait... what am I going to do? We can barely make any of it yet...
The nobleman was grateful for their enthusiasm, but the problems remained the unit cost and the production volume.
Cannons and cannonballs, at least, could be churned out in quantity through casting.
How on earth did those Qajar fellows manufacture this powder, that they could spend gunpowder weapons like water?
Mass-producing the powder was the real bottleneck. Right now it was scraped together from dust and dirt, and the output was hopelessly inadequate — there was simply no way to make enough of it to actually use in battle.
Could I learn their method from those men?
Regrettably, he was mistaken on that point. The powder hadn't come from Qajar at all — Daehan had manufactured it and supplied it to them.
And the volume of that production was beyond anything these men could even imagine. If they ever learned that Daehan, claiming that old ammunition needed to be used up, fired it off freely at the sea and at game hunts, these people might well faint on the spot.
"Everyone, please, your attention."
"Yes! What is it?"
"Out with it, man!"
"Do you need more money?"
The nobleman struggled to calm the crowd. He needed to share the reality of the situation with them first, after all.
And so a composed explanation began: the weapons themselves could be produced in any quantity, but the difficulty, he told them, lay in the gunpowder, which was extraordinarily hard to make.
"Even if we produce a year's worth of powder, we will struggle to fire the cannons more than twenty times..."
In the end, he had no choice but to go that far.
"What? Then is the thing actually useless?"
"Ha. So we're still a long way off?"
"And the most crucial part doesn't even work?"
The crowd deflated. In truth, this demonstration was partly about selling weapons — but it was also a stage for securing their investment. All this time spent making gunpowder had drained the nobleman's coffers to nothing.
"I am seeking investors. We will pool your money, build a factory, and continue the research — and in return, finished weapons will be distributed in proportion to each man's investment."
At first he had wanted to see it through alone, to the very end. But the money had simply run out, and that was the problem. He had to draw them in somehow.
"How long will it take?"
"Only time will tell precisely."
He could have lied — but a man who deceives his investors is practically begging to be knifed in his bed some midnight. Honesty was the only option.
"Hmm..."
"But, my lords — weapons like these will soon appear on every battlefield. Didn't those eastern savages use them freely? A method exists! We need only find it!"
The merchant's words began to hook the crowd. And so, drawing in his investors one by one, the nobleman threw himself into the development of gunpowder weapons with all his strength.
Seven years later, in Daehan Year 3750, the West at last began producing enough gunpowder to use in actual combat.
It was the first time in eighty-one years, since the Qajar invasion of 3669.