Humanity's Greatest Architect
Ye-eun tilted her head with a look that clearly said, This man is spouting nonsense only he understands again, and withdrew.
A few days later—
Michelangelo, who had been dragged to Sichuan over wedding arrangements for Hui-yeom at the Beijing Caffe the One, only to be immediately thrown back onto the construction of the Second State-run Ironworks and a dozen other frantic schedules, stared blankly at the single-page transfer order thrust into his hands by a Minjeongwon agent of the family.
“What the hell is this?”
“Young Master’s orders, sir. The Great Dam whose design preparations you were making for Guizhou Province is now to be built in Henan Province instead.”
“….”
“For your reference, he said the soil composition, terrain, and riverbed coefficients are completely different, so the core of the design will require considerable revision.”
“….”
Michelangelo stood there, dazed, staring up at the sky long after the messenger had gone. Then, under the worried gazes of his apprentices, he quietly unlocked his desk drawer and fished out his hammer and chisel.
And then—
“Aaaaaaaargh!!! I’m gonna drill a goddamn hole straight through that bastard Dang Hui-yeom’s forehead!!!!”
“S-stop him! Someone stop the Maestro!!”
“Uwaaaaaaaah!!”
Ah. Business as usual for the Dang Family.
To the great misfortune of the enraged Michelangelo, even if he had stormed the main house of the Dang Family, he would never have gotten the chance to ventilate Hui-yeom’s skull. Hui-yeom was already back in Beijing, reporting to Emperor Sungui with the grain supply contract he had signed with the Namgung Clan.
After that, Hui-yeom promptly tossed the entire matter to Lee Jinmyeong.
Jinmyeong, who had just been handed another long-term business trip to Chagatai out of nowhere, bulged his eyes and lodged something that was not quite a protest.
“Excuse me? Me? This? Why?”
“Who was the one who most recently opened successful trade with Chagatai?”
“…That would be me.”
“Exactly. So you go.”
“I’m not trying to take credit, but do you have any idea how hard I worked just to close that deal? I literally risked my life because I wanted to get married. And now you’re sending me again… isn’t this a little much?”
The newlywed Lee Jinmyeong, unwilling to part from his bride, clung on with uncharacteristic tenacity. It made not the slightest impression on Hui-yeom.
Hui-yeom simply laughed heartily and clapped him on the shoulder.
“Perfect! From now on you won’t have to pretend the granaries got raided. You can trade rice for horses fair and square.”
“….”
Hui-yeom’s words almost sounded considerate, but they offered precious little comfort to a man still basking in the honeymoon glow. Jinmyeong grumbled under his breath that he was the Young Master’s uncle-in-law now, yet still had no choice but to bid Dang Su-jeong a tearful farewell.
As the new husband headed for Chagatai with tears in his eyes, his lovely younger bride—suddenly forced into a long separation—opened her eyes in a vicious glare and fixed them on Hui-yeom.
Seeing the pure resentment in her gaze, Hui-yeom gave a small snort of laughter.
“My, for a bodyguard, why are you looking at me like an assassin?”
“Are you seriously asking because you don’t know?”
“Aunt, you know I care for you a great deal, don’t you?”
Hui-yeom produced a small wooden box from his robes and held it out to Dang Su-jeong. She tilted her head with a look that asked, What is this?, and Hui-yeom smiled.
“Open it.”
“Hmph.”
Click.
When she opened the lid, Dang Su-jeong’s eyes went round at the sight of the tiny ruby-red grains packed inside.
“What are these? Eggs?”
“Eggs of the North Sea Iron Shark. Exceptionally effective for a woman’s conception and safe delivery.”
“….”
Dang Su-jeong quietly closed the box, then firmly took Hui-yeom’s hand.
“This aunt loves you very much too, Hui-yeom.”
It was a stance switch so clean even Udyr would have taken notes.
In any case, having efficiently offloaded his leftover work, what did Hui-yeom do with all his free time?
Rest?
No.
He had to go around visiting the regional gentry and martial clans one by one to soothe them. Watching the Namgung Clan get reduced to rubble, it was only a matter of time before the entrenched powers started jumping the gun with talk of “We’re next” and “We have to join forces to stop the Dang Family before that happens.”
Honestly. After all this circling around, what I need most is still people.
Lee Jinmyeong, whom he had raised for ten years, was already vice-president of an entire enterprise; Hui-yeom could no longer treat him like a secretary. Ye-eun was busy running Minjeongwon, so dragging her around as a personal aide was equally impossible. The two of them had handed over the underlings they had been using as junior secretaries to serve as First and Second Secretary, but Hui-yeom still found them thoroughly unreliable.
More than anything, the scope of the businesses he had launched was so vast that more and more of it had to be left in other people’s hands rather than controlled directly. The number of things slipping beyond his personal reach kept growing. And because this world had neither internet networks nor Excel or Word, the gap felt far larger than it had in the twenty-first century.
In the end, the absence of computers, machinery, and communications could only be filled with people—and using people always created two problems.
Variance in ability, and the question of trust.
Trust, especially, had no definitive answer. Even the most loyal retainer of the ages could turn black overnight and betray you; that was simply how the world worked. Moreover, this was the land that had coined the saying “A gentleman’s revenge is never too late even after ten years.” Espionage in the Central Plains operated on a completely different scale. Tales of a steward who had managed a household for three generations turning out to have been a planted agent from the very first day he entered service were, disturbingly, almost ordinary here.
The people of the Dang Family were, by nature, rather closed-off and tightly knit, so they could be considered something of an exception. Even so, as the family expanded its power in earnest and brought in outsiders, it was only reasonable to assume that spies were mixed among them.
So many businesses to run… and the things I have to watch only keep multiplying…
In the middle of his hectic days, Hui-yeom carved out a rare pocket of time to enjoy a quiet tea hour with Sama Yun while looking after U-ju. Watching his daughter beam and giggle at a butterfly, he found himself smiling without meaning to.
“When are you going to grow up and help Daddy, hm?”
“Goodness. Already thinking of putting our only daughter to work? My husband is truly ruthless.”
Sama Yun scolded him playfully, and Hui-yeom sighed and shrugged.
“We’re desperately short on people. Especially people I can trust and lean on.”
“Of course. The more people, the better.”
Sama Yun sidled up to him with a mischievous air and lightly tickled his chest with white fingertips.
“…In that case, shall we add one more to the family?”
“Hm?”
Hui-yeom looked down in sudden fluster. The moment his eyes met Sama Yun’s—gazing up at him with slightly hazy eyes and a shy little smile—his face flushed of its own accord.
They had been married nearly three years and shared a bed all that time, yet every time he saw that expression on her face, his heart short-circuited.
“I-I’ll, uh, wrap up today’s schedule a little early…”
“I’ll put U-ju to bed early…”
Listening to his wife’s honey-sweet voice, Hui-yeom made a resolution.
He would raise more people—many more—so that he could have more free time.
Michelangelo raced to Henan Province, surveyed the local terrain, and let out a long sigh of relief.
“Ha, damn it. Way better than Guizhou. I freaked out for nothing.”
He immediately scraped together every survey report the Construction Department had compiled, examined them with meticulous care, walked the site himself, and then began sketching designs at a rapid clip.
“The whole premise was wrong. This isn’t about piling up some little embankment. This is a large-scale dam. You have to think of it as building an entire mountain fortress and set the scale accordingly.”
“B-but to raise a dike of that size along the river, the budget and time… and the supply of materials—”
“What are you talking about? How the hell am I supposed to build a wall that huge along a riverbank? Am I Qin Shi Huang? You want me to throw up a Great Wall?”
Michelangelo stared at the section chief with an expression that asked, Have you lost your mind? The man merely blinked. Construction Department Manager Gwak Do, who had been watching quietly, furrowed his brow.
“If you’ve got something to say, spit it out clean instead of keeping it to yourself, you bastard Michelangelo.”
“We borrow the power of nature.”
Michelangelo spread the map. With every eye on him, he moved his finger.
“The State-run Ironworks site is going up near the Sui River by Pyeongjeongsan County, right? What’s the name of this mountain next to it—Pyeongjeongsan?”
“Baekgak Mountain. The county is called Pyeongjeongsan because the town itself was built on the flat summit of Baekgak Mountain.”
Ordinarily villages were built on the plains at the foot of a mountain, not on its peak. There had to be a reason for this arrangement. Michelangelo found the answer in the carefully marked riverbed coefficients on the map.
“Below the mountain is pure floodplain. Floods too often to farm. That’s why they built the village on top.”
“And?”
“Isn’t it perfect?”
“? What is?”
“The mountain.”
Michelangelo turned to Gwak Do with a broad grin.
“We use the mountain itself as the wall and make a Great Dam that holds the water. Right?”
“…!!”
Using the surrounding mountain range itself like a folding screen, they would raise a wall and floodgates only at the points where water could escape, turning the entire basin into a dam.
It drastically cut construction costs and time while still allowing a dam of massive scale—exactly why this form of dam was still widely built in the modern world. Commonly called a valley-block dam or gorge dam, and also an arch dam for the shape of its water wall. The famous Hoover Dam (completed 1936) was a classic example of the type; in China, Yunnan’s Xiaowan Dam was renowned as the world’s tallest at 292 meters.
Blocking a valley between mountains inevitably submerged everything inside the basin. Stories of old village sites vanishing beneath dam waters—and the media that told them—were countless.
For reference, the very stretch of Baekgak Mountain that Michelangelo had marked as the perfect dam site was, in the twenty-first-century world Hui-yeom had come from, already occupied by the Baekgak Mountain Dam.
But to the people of this era, a project of this scale was simply unimaginable.
Construction that used a mountain as material?
There was even a proverb—Yugong Moves the Mountains—whose entire point was that the impossible could be achieved through sheer persistence. To the people of the Central Plains, moving a mountain was the textbook definition of the impossible. Telling them to build a dike high and broad enough to seal a valley between mountains sounded exactly the same as telling them to move one.
“Does that even make sense? There’s no way that’s possible…”
“Hey. Have you tried?”
“….”
With a single line that would have made a certain chaebol chairman proud, Michelangelo shut Gwak Do’s mouth and chuckled.
“Tsk tsk. Gwak, you still don’t understand that damn Demon King at all. When that bastard starts something, it looks reckless, but he’s already calculated several moves ahead. You still haven’t figured that out?”
Michelangelo struck a deliberately pompous pose.
“That’s why he sent me here. Because he believed that if it was me, it could be done. This genius—Michelangelo Buonarroti—that is.”
“…So you’re saying a red-haired devil like you can actually design a dike of this insane scale?”
“Hey, Gwak.”
Michelangelo grinned.
“Who am I?”
“Who? A foul-mouthed, rough-handed red-haired idiot, that’s who.”
“You little—?!”
“Gyaaah! I’ve got you now?!”
After Michelangelo and Gwak Do seized each other by the hair and performed a somewhat incomprehensible friendship ritual that looked suspiciously like a Cossack dance, Hui-yeom received the report that Michelangelo had begun designing the colossal valley-sealing dam—and smiled.
And so began the construction of the first super-scale valley dam in the history of the Central Plains… no, of humanity itself.