Above the Ground, and Below
Trench fields.
Not trench warfare—the kind of grinding stalemate where two armies face each other across dug-in lines. This was trench fields: the plots of earth left between the trenches themselves.
After reading the report on the Oirat incursion into Aba County, Hwi-yeom concluded that the most likely future enemy would be the horse nomads of Mongolia. For the Dang Family that was, in its way, an opportunity. It gave them a perfect pretext to arm the Noksan Road Traffic Management Corporation—technically under their influence—with gunpowder weapons without openly offending the Emperor’s sensibilities.
Yet the after-action reports made one thing clear: the firepower of the rocket launchers was more than adequate, but rockets alone would never be enough to hold the outposts. Matchlocks would be needed to reinforce them, and trenches would have to be dug to channel and restrict the horses’ approach.
The true strength of a matchlock volley only appeared when fire could be concentrated into a killing net. If the riders simply scattered and came on from every direction, that concentration became impossible. So, everywhere except the main roads administered by Noksan, trenches were excavated at regular intervals—spaced just wide enough that a horse could not easily gather itself for a jump. The spoil was packed into hemp sacks and stacked into walls a man’s height high. On top of those walls sat coils of barbed wire.
Depending on the outpost, the layered trench-walls ran three deep at the least and as many as ten at the most. The result was a barrier more than sufficient to break any cavalry charge.
Only one path remained open: the straight central road. Even there, Noksan had placed wheeled iron cheval-de-frise at measured intervals, sized so that in an emergency they could be rolled across the gap like a gate. Should horsemen drag a battering ram up and smash one of the barriers, the impact simply shattered the wheels; the whole assembly dropped and rooted itself into the ground, becoming a permanent wall. The devices were built as linked X-shaped iron frames. No matter which way they broke, one of the pointed arms drove deep into the earth and locked the obstacle in place. And because several of them stood in series, punching through one was never the end of the problem.
To a horse people it must have looked like a nightmare barrier from hell.
And when the barriers were not needed? A traveler paid the toll and a few strong men simply rolled the wheeled spikes aside. If enemies instead dismounted and dithered about trying to clear them themselves, a generous sprinkling of powder or shot from above finished the conversation.
Yet the same Hwi-yeom who had ordered these vicious defenses suddenly felt a quiet pang of waste. All that empty ground between the trenches—it seemed a shame to leave it idle.
It’s still land. There has to be a way to use it.
The image of hillside potato and sweet-potato plots carved into the mountain slopes of Gangwon Province rose unbidden in his mind, and the thought followed at once:
“If we cultivate the strips between the trenches and plant potatoes and sweet potatoes, couldn’t we ease the food problem a little?”
He set about trying to obtain seed stock through the Sima Family and the merchants of Yunnan. What he learned next was unexpected.
In this era of Asia, the potato does not yet exist. Sweet potatoes, however, are already here under the name ‘gamjeo.’
He had not known it, but the potato’s homeland was the Andes of South America; it would not reach China until the late Ming or early Qing. Even allowing that this was a different world from the one that had held the historical Ming dynasty, the crop still lay roughly a century in the future. Sweet potatoes, by contrast, had already been recorded as cultivated in Guangdong in the early Ming. The specimens Hwi-yeom finally obtained had come from Guangdong as well.
Naturally, the people of Sichuan had never heard of gamjeo.
Hwi-yeom instructed the Noksan crews digging the trenches to lay out sweet-potato beds as well. The men protested at once.
“Eh? We’re mountain wardens, not dirt-grubbing farmers. We still have our pride as men of the jianghu.”
Their section chief, Deok-im, took one look at the performance bonuses Hwi-yeom had written into the order and surrendered to capitalism without a struggle.
“Does pride put rice in the bowl? The whole reason we ended up as greenwood bandits was because we never had fields of our own. Looks like our wish is finally coming true—hahaha!”
Compared with excavating deep trenches, turning soil for sweet potatoes was nothing.
“Winter’s almost here, so we won’t plant this year. Just prepare the ground so we can set seed next spring when the frost leaves: pick the stones out, work in leaf mold and fertilizer, get the soil fertile. That’s all I need for now.”
“And the actual farming? Are we supposed to do that too?”
“You already have a proper job. Separate people will handle the crops.”
“Yes, sir. Those terms suit us fine.”
Thus, while the Noksan outposts of Sichuan were being turned into fortified trench works, the first trench fields came into being.
Hwi-yeom next persuaded the Provincial Administration Commissioner and the Regional Military Commissioner of Yunnan to adopt the same system for the outposts they would establish.
“Think about it. Yunnan needs the trenches more than Sichuan does. Sichuan is a natural fortress ringed by mountains; Yunnan has far more open ground.”
“Hmm…”
“And food has always been one of Yunnan’s chronic headaches. If the trench fields yield sweet potatoes, one long-standing worry is lifted. Why hesitate?”
“But then Sichuan takes a loss, does it not? Yunnan currently buys its grain from the Sichuan Agricultural Cooperative. If a new crop reduces how much Sichuan rice they purchase…”
“If rice consumption falls, so much the better. We can turn the surplus into long-term preserved foods, or into the fine confectionery, malt syrup, and liquor we never had enough rice to attempt before. What matters is that our own Bashu region attain self-sufficiency in food. We can no longer afford to be jerked about by the Central Plains every time grain is scarce.”
“Very well. You shall have our full cooperation.”
Of course, none of this conversation with the Yunnan officials reached the ears of Baek Beon, the imperial inspector sent to watch the Dang Family. Baek Beon reported only that “the Sichuan Dang Family is working closely with local authorities to solve the food problem.” Improving the food supply was good for the empire; there was no reason to interfere. The only thing that still niggled was the growing intimacy between the Dang Family and the provincial power structure—the absence of any mutual check.
…It should be fine. So long as they do not start diverting powder weapons, army rations, or ironware to the local officials, everything remains firmly in the empire’s grasp.
The Type-A multi-rocket launchers now rolling out of the Innovation Hall were already being delivered, bit by bit, to the imperial household guards in Beijing. Once the Emperor’s own troops were armed with gunpowder weapons, any provincial pretensions would be as easy to crush as a child’s wrist.
Baek Beon believed that with complete confidence.
Winter arrived.
Digging frozen ground was brutal work, so construction of both trenches and trench fields halted completely. While the men of the Noksan Road Traffic Management Corporation spent the cold months lounging around braziers in the outposts they had labored so hard to build through summer and autumn, the Sichuan Dang Family remained frantically busy.
The Metallurgy Department mass-produced coils of barbed wire. The Construction Department raced to finish the factory that would produce rubber. The Innovation Hall worked through the entire winter turning out black powder—both the tribute destined for the Emperor and the stocks needed to arm Noksan. And the Inner Hall, which controlled every budget, issued every material, coordinated every demand, kept every record, and drafted every strategy and plan… well, nothing more needed to be said about their workload.
Around this time the Minjeongwon succeeded in seizing complete control of the information channels of both Sichuan and Yunnan. Every rumor that passed among the citizenry reached the bureau through the hired hands of Baekga-jaengsik and the field notes of the staff still working through the rehabilitation proceedings of Hwi-eon Comprehensive Finance. The Minjeongwon refined that torrent of raw intelligence and delivered it to the Dang leadership with almost no delay.
Such speed and specialization rested not only on the growing number of civilian informants but also on the high-grade personnel who had begun to graduate from the Jijuso—the Spider House.
The Jijuso was the educational institution Hwi-yeom had conceived when he was ten: an orphanage that took in the parentless children of Sichuan and raised them into talent fanatically loyal to the Dang Family. It had now entered its seventh year. The children it had trained were already operating in secret as the Minjeongwon’s black operatives.
Ye-eun, head of the Minjeongwon, summed them up with dry simplicity:
“We have done our best to manufacture little Young Masters.”
Average age fifteen—the age of setting one’s will upon learning. Having passed rigorous training, they possessed composure and judgment far beyond their years and had completed every course required for espionage work. These black agents from the Jijuso, known as “little spiders,” were already weaving themselves into every corner of Sichuan and Yunnan society. People rarely paid close attention to children, and the official story—that they were orphans educated on Dang Family scholarships—wrapped them in both pity and goodwill, allowing them to slip into the community without friction.
A few local gentry did eye the phenomenon with alarm: children raised by the Sichuan Dang Family were embedding themselves everywhere. But it was already far too late for such concerns. All of Sichuan belonged to the Dang Family now. The province was as thoroughly addicted to the Dang as if it had been poisoned. Without the jobs the Family created, the iron cash it circulated, the materials it consumed, and the construction and commerce it drove, Sichuan would collapse overnight into the isolated mountain backwater it had been decades earlier—when only the silk merchants were rich. The people of Sichuan had tasted progress; they would never accept going back.
And while the visible Innovation Hall devoted itself to black-powder research, the invisible Innovation Hall deep underground was busy with an entirely new invention.
“Young Master, reporting for work again today?”
“Just squeezing in a little martial practice between tasks. Don’t mind me—carry on.”
These days Hwi-yeom clocked in at the Poison Hall every morning. To Baek Beon he gave the excuse of training in the Nokryong Singong—the Green Dragon Divine Art. Why only in the Poison Hall? Because the art was a poison technique, and its progress was fastest when cultivated in the Hall’s most secret chambers. Baek Beon could hardly object. Demanding that a great jianghu clan reveal the secrets of its martial arts was tantamount to telling them to die, and even he understood that.
They’re already sharing every secret of the powder weapons… it should be fine.
Baek Beon told himself that, and believed it.
Hwi-yeom, once inside the private training chamber prepared for the Young Master’s use, threw himself into the fabrication of the device he had been designing. What he wanted was a carbide lamp.
Secret facilities and passages had been excavated beneath both the Poison Hall and the Innovation Hall, yet the idea of lighting powder-handling areas with torches and oil lamps still made him deeply uneasy. He needed a safer, brighter alternative as soon as possible. Recalling the carbide lamps he had once found in a storage shed as a child, he set about recreating them.
At last—
“…This brightness is enough. Success.”
He held a small lamp that cast a warm, steady light. A carbide lamp works by dripping water onto calcium carbide; the acetylene gas that evolves is then ignited. Unlike an open oil lamp or torch, the flame continues to burn even when enclosed by a glass chimney. And unlike a lamp that must constantly be refilled or a torch whose cloth must be replaced, a carbide lamp will burn for a long time with almost no attention so long as the carbide remains and the water drip is regulated. The light it produces is incomparably brighter than any oil lamp or torch. As an indoor lighting device it was nearly ideal.
I spent ages trying to remember how to make the carbide itself… luckily it wasn’t that hard.
Calcium carbide is produced by heating quicklime mixed with coal or coke to a very high temperature. When water is then dripped onto the resulting carbide, the gasification reaction yields acetylene.
Sichuan-land cheat code, Dang Family cheat code—long live the cheats.
Hwi-yeom muttered the words with a satisfied expression.
“…Next I need glass for the lamp chimneys. Hmm.”
He stood for a long while tilting his head in solitary thought, then murmured carefully:
“If I shove a project proposal for a glassworks under their noses while they’re still building the rubber factory… they’re going to try to kill me, aren’t they?”
A minor worry, really. Of course, worrying was the CEO’s job; actually doing the work was the employees’.
A few days later the Metallurgy Department received three volumes of project proposals. The intelligence report that Han Cheol had climbed onto the roof of the Innovation Hall and howled curses at Hwi-yeom was carefully folded and filed away in Ye-eun’s drawer, never to see the light of day.
Well. If you don’t like it, try being Young Master yourself.
And so, in the end, construction of a glassworks would have to begin as well.