Lee Jinmyeong Draws His Sword (2)
A good business always begins with something the masses need—or something they need without yet realizing it.
Lee Jinmyeong was convinced that a transport venture built around the Mongolian horses he had encountered on his travels would find no shortage of demand.
But when you weigh the profit margins against the social impact, simply catering to a handful of wealthy clients is the worst possible approach.
Throwing a few carriages onto the market for rich men to hire once or twice would never create the kind of seismic shift that mattered. It might look similar to the Angang Personal Boat service on the surface, yet those boats were never meant as mere private taxis. They were a single cog in a vast machine that already linked river logistics, Suzhou tourism, and the future Lasubaegasu project.
“In that case, the smartest and fastest way forward is to make my own venture another cog in the Young Master’s grand design.”
Having watched Huiyeom sketch the big picture of his enterprises longer and closer than anyone else, Jinmyeong understood the single current running through every project the man poured into Sichuan.
The core is the creation and circulation of value.
Bring into existence something the world has never seen. Then let that something meet the world as quickly and smoothly as possible. Except for the weapons development meant to shield the family, every one of Huiyeom’s businesses began from that same philosophy.
Circulation. The circulation of goods. The fine-grained logistics that railways alone can never reach—the kind that snakes into every last corner. And now, something that can move people as well.
So the business Jinmyeong envisioned was not a taxi service. It was closer to a bus network.
Station carriages on fixed routes that ran at regular intervals, cheap enough for ordinary people to ride, and place freight wagons on the same circuits to haul cargo.
Would it make money? Would people actually pay to ride such carriages?
Honestly, Jinmyeong doubted it.
And yet the brief, almost offhand remarks Huiyeom had once made about the concept had clearly carried exactly that meaning.
The Young Master saw something I still cannot. So I have to trust him.
Mass transit was viable. Twenty-first-century transportation had already proved it. The real obstacle was that mass transit only became profitable after society itself changed shape. In a pre-modern world where people spent their entire lives on the soil they were born to—sometimes never leaving their own village—public carriages would struggle to turn a profit.
Several conditions had to be met first.
1. A reason to move.
Whether for work or for pleasure, people needed a reason to climb aboard.
And the reason… already exists!
Jinmyeong realized at once that Sichuan and Yunnan had already created those reasons.
The Dang family’s subsidiaries and the countless company buildings that belong to them. People are already walking to and from work every day.
Sichuan had become so thoroughly a Dang city that enormous numbers of its residents earned their living through Dang trading houses and enterprises. It was nothing like the old days when the province had lived on farming, mining, and silk. Without exaggeration, every other household owed its rice to the Dang clan.
Company buildings had multiplied accordingly. Even Hwi-eon Trading alone kept its headquarters in Seongdo and a branch office in every county-level city across the province. Workers commuting to the Second State-run Ironworks—itself deliberately sited far from any city—sometimes rode the coal-hauling railway during the deliberately empty slots in the timetable. Miss those slots and they walked more than ten li along the Min River. People from outlying counties and villages who could not afford housing inside Seongdo regularly crossed district borders just to reach their jobs. Hadn’t Korean schoolchildren once walked ten li every morning before roads and private cars became common?
Stagecoaches that move whole shifts of workers at once. Keep those coaches circulating on short headways.
Business demand already overflowed. And the groundwork for leisure travel was forming as well. Travel was something people only contemplated once their bellies were full and their purses a little heavy. Right now even Sichuan’s commoners carried fuller purses than ever before. The motive to visit other regions was already there.
We could link the service to new tourist sites developed inside Sichuan… or use it simply to ferry people to the starting points of Angang river transport on the Min.
Fire kindled in Jinmyeong’s eyes as he drafted the proposal.
The real problem is securing enough Mongolian horses and trained riders…
Even if he pooled every horse Ahbayar and the survivors still owned, the total barely reached a dozen. That was nowhere near enough to blanket Sichuan, let alone cover the streets of Seongdo itself.
But how was he supposed to bring Mongolian horses in?
Could we negotiate with the Chagatai Khanate for a supply?
These were the same Chagatai who had once invaded the Central Plains. How did one even open talks with them? And the commodity he wanted was horses—the single most vital strategic asset any state possessed. Given the nomads’ legendary obsession with their mounts, the request would never be simple. Worse, the moment Beijing caught wind of the news, the Sichuan Dang Family would almost certainly be branded traitors colluding with a foreign enemy and buried under political warfare.
The hand that had been racing across the page froze. Jinmyeong raked his fingers through his hair.
There has to be a way… Is there any way?
Could we bring them in through Ibn al-Nasir? How would we even set the price?
While he was still grinding his teeth over the problem, someone knocked on the office door.
“Secretary Lee, it’s Secretary Hwang.”
“Come in.”
Hwang Ji-su, the timid young woman who had entered through the junior-secretary recruitment drive and somehow become Jinmyeong’s right hand, stepped inside with her habitual apologetic expression and held out a thick sheaf of papers.
“What’s this? Something for me to approve?”
“No, sir. First Secretary Ye-eun asked me to deliver it.”
“From Secretary Han?”
Wondering what new mountain of work had arrived, Jinmyeong took the documents, opened them—and froze solid.
A lump rose in his throat. Even without a single word of praise, the care Ye-eun had poured into the dossier was unmistakable. Jinmyeong felt his chest tighten of its own accord.
“When did she even find the time… Thank you, Senior.”
He bowed once toward the direction of Ye-eun’s office, then sank back into the work with renewed focus.
The present state of Chagatai could be summed up in four words: postwar desolation.
The brief relief of returning to the Mongolian steppe after the war had barely settled before Adiya Khan received the enormous war-indemnity bill presented by Emperor Sungui. He had no choice but to accept it, weeping or not. Refuse, and the Gyeong Empire would simply resume the war—and the Empire had suffered almost no real damage in the first place.
The trouble was that even the most rational decision still required a scapegoat for defeat. The highest seat of power, after all, is a place where success earns you nothing and failure turns you into the punching bag. The noyan who had beaten the war drums hardest before the campaign now dumped every ounce of blame onto Adiya Khan, hoping to wash the tribes’ fury off their own backs. Civil war followed almost at once.
Adiya Khan proved he had not won the title of Great Khan by drawing lots; he vented the rage of his Central Plains humiliation by grinding the rebel armies into dust. Yet the price was the near-total collapse of central control. The khanate shattered into ragged pieces. To keep his throne, Adiya Khan had paid far too high a cost.
The greatest crisis of all was food.
Chagatai had never been rich in grain. The Mongolian plateau was never suited to farming; that was precisely why the nomads lived there. The original plan to invade the Central Plains had been to seize its fertile lands, turn their harvest into a logistical base, and then drive west into Asia and Europe. Defeat had made famine inevitable.
It was at that moment that an envoy from the Sichuan Dang Family arrived before Adiya Khan.
“…The Dang clan? Those bastards I would gladly chew up and spit out are sending me an envoy?”
Everything about it felt wrong. They were not even on speaking terms, and if any envoy were to come it should have come from the Gyeong court itself. What possible reason did a single family have for dispatching a diplomat?
Adiya Khan almost had the man thrown out. What stopped him was pure instinct—an unshakable gut feeling that sending this envoy away would be something he would regret forever.
And he was right. The identity of the man who finally stood before him was nothing he had expected.
“It is an honor to meet the Great Khan, master of the steppe. This humble one is Lee Jinmyeong, left hand of the Young Master of the Sichuan Dang Family.”
Adiya Khan’s eyes narrowed to slits at the sight of a man who claimed to be the left hand of the Sleeping Dragon of Sichuan.
“Give me one reason I should not roll the left arm of that hated enemy into a carpet and trample him under my horses’ hooves.”
“Because keeping me alive will prove far more satisfying to the Great Khan than killing me.”
“Keeping you alive will be satisfying?”
“Yes. I am a merchant. Merchants stake their lives on good deals.”
Jinmyeong smiled faintly.
“I am reasonably well informed about the current state of the Chagatai Khanate. You are desperately short of grain and iron goods. Autumn is almost upon you; almost no crops were planted, and whatever livestock products you still have will be stripped away as war indemnity. Even the silver you once stockpiled is… not abundant.”
“You had better spit out that reason before my patience snaps. Looking at your shameless face is already testing me to the limit simply by letting you live—”
“Grain and iron farming tools. Enough of both to silence the common people’s discontent in a single stroke. We will send them.”
That was, without question, an offer potent enough to cool even Adiya Khan’s fury. Yet nothing in the world was free, least of all when the man across the carpet came from a house that was practically a blood enemy.
The Great Khan folded his arms.
“The price?”
“Three thousand Mongolian horses.”
“Are you insane—?!”
Adiya Khan shot to his feet. Of every demand Emperor Sungui had listed in the indemnity, the tribute of Mongolian horses was the single clause he had refused to accept—even at the risk of renewed war. Those horses were Chagatai’s most critical strategic asset. They were not something one simply handed over on request.
His face flushed crimson; the order to cut the envoy’s throat was already forming on his tongue—when Jinmyeong spoke again.
“Hear me out to the end. I am certain this will become an offer you cannot refuse.”
The smile he wore was the exact same smile Huiyeom used to wear.