Not a Problem—A Lottery
“Please, come inside first.”
Hui-yeom ushered Bak Chang-eon in, seated him in the place of honor, and steeped the tea with his own hands. It was partly a show of respect for a meritorious elder—an insurance policy against any change of heart—but he also needed a moment to gather his thoughts.
“So, what problem has arisen? From the reports I received, the enterprise seemed to be progressing smoothly enough.”
To keep word of their coal-mine acquisitions from leaking, Hui-yeom and Bak Chang-eon had established a trading house called Hwi-eon General Trading Company and, under its name, been quietly buying up the wooded hills known to hold coal deposits. It was a classic twenty-first-century shell-company and money-laundering technique, designed so that neither the Elders’ Council nor any other power broker in Sichuan would realize the Dang Family was stockpiling coal fields.
Hui-yeom was the true owner of Hwi-eon General Trading Company, yet on paper the proprietor was a fictional person named Jeong Pansu. Using seals carved in Jeong Pansu’s name, they had converted the business rights into negotiable securities, had them notarized by the authorities, and then transferred those securities to Dang Hui-yeom. Anyone who dug into Hwi-eon General Trading Company would learn only that its owner was Jeong Pansu—someone impossible to find—and would never discover that the true master of the enterprise was Hui-yeom.
In the twenty-first century such a laundering scheme would have been transparent to any tax office that wasn’t staffed by complete idiots. In this age, however, it was not. So the Elders’ Council could not possibly have sniffed it out and come knocking… could they?
Hui-yeom tilted his head. Bak Chang-eon answered.
“The Elders’ Council knows nothing. The difficulty is that our purchases of the coal fields have hit a snag.”
“The landowners refuse to sell their hills at the price we’re offering?”
Hui-yeom cocked his head. The Dang Family was already mass-producing cosmetics and Hogol-go as flagship products; the single crucible furnace they had begun with had grown to four, all pouring out Mugyeol-jeonggang for sale. Cash was plentiful. Hui-yeom’s own purse was correspondingly fat. If a seller would not yield to money, he was prepared to ask himself whether the problem was simply not enough money—and then double the bid. Their finances were that comfortable. Naturally he wondered why no one was demanding more gold.
Bak Chang-eon waved a hand.
“If it were only that, I would have raised the offer a little and settled the matter. The problem is not the price. It is the location of the coal deposits.”
“Where are they? Ancestral burial grounds?”
“Hills belonging to the Qingcheng Sect and the Emei Sect.”
“Ah.”
Only then did Hui-yeom understand. The Qingcheng Sect and the Emei Sect were pillars of the Nine Sects and One Gang, the very heart of the orthodox martial world. They were also the long-standing partners and rivals of the Sichuan Dang Family, the undisputed local powers of the province. One could not negotiate with them the way one negotiated with ordinary gentry, local magnates, or merchants. Unlike people who might still be reasoned with, martial sects could simply refuse on principle—“We cannot sell land handed down through the generations”—and that would be the end of it.
“We have already sent agents several times to open talks, but we never even reached the negotiating table…”
“If the agents are of the sort we can casually dispatch, those two sects would never grant an audience in the first place.”
Within Sichuan, the prestige of Qingcheng and Emei was no small thing. They could not, of course, withstand the emperor’s million-strong army, so they obeyed the throne’s commands; yet unless the petitioner were a high-ranking official, forcing anything upon either sect was all but impossible.
At the end of the day they’re just regional gangsters…
Having lived through the great crackdowns on organized crime in the 1980s and 1990s, Hui-yeom tended to underrate the martial sects as little more than street thugs. He was careful not to show it. The present reality remained: neither Emei nor Qingcheng was an opponent to take lightly.
“…What if we declared our intention to purchase the land in the name of the Sichuan Dang Family rather than Hwi-eon General Trading Company?”
“Then we risk the Elders’ Council—or the iron-bound outsiders beyond the family—learning that we are buying up coal fields, do we not?”
“Naturally we would conceal the true purpose. Is there any other plausible use for the land you have been looking at, besides the coal?”
“Hmm… well…”
Bak Chang-eon thought for a moment, then brightened.
“Now that I think of it, the deposit on Mount Qingcheng is thick with paulownia trees. We could claim we need a timber concession for lumber. As for the deposit on Mount Emei, there are hot springs nearby; we could say we are buying the land for the springs…”
“Hot springs, you said?”
Hui-yeom forgot all courtesy and leaned forward, eyes gleaming. Startled by the sudden intensity, Bak Chang-eon nodded.
“Yes. Most of them reek of rotten eggs and are unfit for bathing, but a few have decent water and little odor, and are already used as hot springs. The nuns of Emei do not bathe there themselves, yet they allow the villagers nearby to use them.”
“That’s it!”
Hui-yeom shot to his feet.
“Elder Bak, leave the Emei hot-spring site to me. I will see it through. Please calculate every tael of capital we can mobilize and have it ready!”
“What—so suddenly?”
“I must go see my father!”
Hui-yeom dashed out in a state of high excitement, leaving Bak Chang-eon alone in the empty room. The elder gave a bewildered little laugh and shook his head.
“He’s cooking up another one of his brilliant schemes, I suppose…”
Meanwhile, the face of Hui-yeom as he raced toward Dang Un-sang shone with pure delight.
Hot springs that smell of rotten eggs! Sulfur! Yes—even in my old world the hot springs of Mount Emei were sulfur springs. One of the two essential ingredients for gunpowder, handed to me this easily!
He remembered the spring he had visited years ago on a business trip to Sichuan, when hosts had entertained him there. And the memory did not stop there.
There was Huanglong Valley too—Sichuan’s greatest limestone producer. Looking at the karst terraces, people used to say it reminded them of the Uyuni salt flats and get all excited. If I buy limestone there in bulk and use the iron-oxide-rich slag from our furnaces as a substitute for volcanic ash, I can make Roman cement! Oh, I can hear it already—the sound of a booming business! You idiot, why didn’t you remember this sooner!
Dang Un-sang watched his son come flying in, eyes sparkling, and then launch into an excited, rambling monologue utterly out of character. The family head could only laugh in disbelief.
“I was just thinking how nice it was to see you act like a boy your age for once… and it turns out it’s more business talk?”
“What could be better news than a thriving business, Father?”
“Hah.”
Speechless, Dang Un-sang shook his head.
“So you want to acquire the hot-spring land held by the Emei Sect?”
“Yes! I absolutely must.”
“Hmm…”
After a moment’s thought, Dang Un-sang spoke again.
“I understand the public story: we are buying the hot-spring land to conceal the coal purchases. But I see no reason why Emei would sell land they already own.”
“Father, even if we cannot monopolize every coal seam in the Central Plains, we must at least monopolize the coal inside Sichuan. Only then can we completely shut out any competitors who try to catch up.”
The Emei Sect possessed none of the iron-smelting or weapons-forging expertise of the Sichuan Dang Family. Yet once it became known that crucible furnaces required coal and coking coal, Emei would begin selling those resources to the Dang Family’s rivals. Those rivals would then reverse-engineer the crucible process and produce steel of their own.
“From Emei’s point of view, if we monopolize all the steel, iron prices will rise and they will have to watch our faces. So they will invent every excuse under the sun to sell coal outside. We will be forced into pointless cutthroat competition: the price of coal will climb, the price of steel will fall, and our margins will shrink.”
“Hmm. That is true enough.”
“The Qingcheng coal fields are tempting as well, and in the end we should aim to acquire them too… but if we must set priorities, Mount Emei comes first. The hot springs there smell of rotten eggs. Father, you know what that means, do you not?”
“Sulfur.”
As a clan that dealt in every poison and medicinal herb, the Dang Family was naturally well acquainted with sulfur and its uses.
“But the sulfur we need for the poisons we already use is in perfectly adequate supply.”
“No. From now on, no amount of sulfur will ever be enough.”
“Why?”
The question, full of honest puzzlement, cooled Hui-yeom’s racing thoughts at once. No one in this world knew of black powder. If he suddenly claimed to have discovered gunpowder made from sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal, would his father simply accept it?
He considered how to explain, then decided to hang the whole story on the Western Regions so there would be no later complications.
“Father, I wish to discuss a matter of the utmost secrecy. Would you raise a qi barrier?”
“Mm?”
Seeing the unaccustomed gravity on his son’s face, Dang Un-sang did not hesitate. He drew up his inner energy.
A low hum vibrated through the air. Hui-yeom’s ears felt as though he had plunged into deep water. Dang Un-sang spoke.
“No sound from here will escape. Now then—what is this story that requires so much ceremony?”
“Among the books I once read merely to pass the time, there was a record of the merchandise of the Western Regions written when Temujin of the former Yuan Empire conquered the Khwarezm Empire.”
Having already studied the history of the Jing Dynasty and its neighbors, Hui-yeom knew that this world, too, had once possessed a Mongol Empire and a Genghis Khan. He could speak with confidence. A faint unease still lingered in one corner of his mind, however. The Yuan had existed—yet the dynasty that followed was not Ming, but Jing. Why?
“Oh? Such a precious book existed? And then?”
The fleeting doubt vanished at his father’s question. Hui-yeom continued his carefully constructed tale.
“In the Western Regions there is a kind of earth that burns. Bring a spark near it and it flares violently or explodes, wounding people. The Khwarezm Empire packed this burning earth into iron tubes, loaded lead balls inside, and ignited it so that the balls would be hurled forth. They called the weapon a ‘fire cannon.’ Temujin’s cavalry suffered considerable losses because of it.”
A lie, of course. Even on Earth, matchlocks did not appear until the fifteenth century. In the twelfth century, when Genghis Khan crushed Khwarezm, no such weapons existed. Had they existed, the Yuan Empire could never have expanded so far.
“Badly shaken, Temujin tortured the Khwarezm artisans until he learned how to make the burning earth. The ingredients, it turned out, were sulfur, saltpeter, and the ash of charcoal.”
Dang Un-sang’s eyes widened.
“Such a weapon truly exists?”
“Yes, Father. That weapon is exactly what I intend to create.”
Hui-yeom thought of the late Chairman Chung Ju-yung, who had walked into the office of shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis with nothing but a five-hundred-won bill bearing a picture of a turtle ship and walked out with a contract for an entire shipyard. He spoke with the same absolute conviction.
“I give you my word: the modern firearms I will produce with that powder will become the ultimate hidden weapon of the Sichuan Dang Family—and the treasure that will raise our house to the strongest position in the Central Plains.”