Unhwa-style Pistol
Hwi-yeom was tormented by the dilemma.
This was a critically important time. Delaying the construction of the Beijing Railway Joint-Stock Company and the opening of the stock exchange any further was simply impossible. Yet he could not leave for Beijing and abandon his wife in the earliest stages of her pregnancy.
After long deliberation, he finally decided they would go up to Beijing together once Sama Yun’s condition had stabilized past the first trimester. In other words, their second child would be born in Beijing.
Eun Seol-ran and the rest of the Dang family were all worried when they heard the plan, but there was no other choice. The attending physician’s opinion was that she had only been pregnant a little over a month, so in roughly two more months she would enter the stable period.
The real problem was Hwi-yeom’s escort.
Dang Su-jeong, who had always guarded him, was now pregnant herself, so someone else would have to take her place. Yet within the Dang family, apart from Dang Un-sang, there was no master who could replace her. Most of the elders of the direct line after Un-sang’s generation had either died or were mediocre in martial arts, and even the leaders of the three great combat units, though formidable, still fell short of the brother-and-sister pair of Dang Un-sang and Dang Su-jeong.
Then an unexpected master appeared.
None other than—
“It’s an explosionnnnnn!!!”
KWA-AAAANG!!
—Dang Un-hwa, who was setting off massive blasts while screaming like a madman.
Yes. Dang Su-jeong’s older brother and Dang Un-sang’s younger brother. The explosion fanatic and military-tech enthusiast had suddenly surged upward in strength.
Having staked his entire life on explosives, he poured every moment outside his primary duties of weapons development into researching the Green Dragon Divine Art’s material transformations—specifically the alchemy of explosives and the creation of Explosive Poison. The result was a rapid enlightenment and an astonishing level of achievement.
Hadn’t Confucius said that no one can defeat a man who truly enjoys what he does?
In terms of form application and real combat experience, Dang Un-hwa was still below even a second-rate martial artist. Yet as Hwi-yeom watched the demonstration, cold sweat ran down his back.
What the hell is going on? How is Dang Un-hwa—who was nothing more than a geeky researcher—displaying combat power that would put the world’s elite special forces to shame?
When it came to synthesizing ignition solvents and explosive solvents through the Green Dragon Divine Art, Un-hwa already had no equal except Hwi-yeom himself. No—watching him run around detonating Explosive Poison and explosives in every direction like that self-proclaimed incompetent colonel from a certain alchemy manga, Hwi-yeom couldn’t help thinking that, with a little exaggeration, Un-hwa might even be able to go a round with Transcendental Peak master Dang Su-jeong. If the focus shifted from one-on-one duels against masters to large-scale slaughter of ordinary fighters, Un-hwa might actually be superior.
What startled Hwi-yeom even more, however, was the weapon Un-hwa had developed in the meantime. After Hwi-yeom had finished the Dreyse needle gun, the rotary Gatling, and the poison-gas weapons, he had paid little further attention to firearms development. Yet Un-hwa had gone and produced something extraordinary.
At the weapons demonstration he casually brought out a magazine-fed automatic pistol of his own design!
When Hwi-yeom received the blueprints beforehand, his mouth fell open of its own accord and he shouted:
“Holy shit! This is an FN M1900!”
“Emi… what?”
“No, I mean—”
Hwi-yeom smacked his own overheating forehead.
This automatic pistol, developed in 1896 by John Moses Browning—the father of modern firearms—was the world’s first pistol equipped with a slide. In other words, it was the progenitor of every modern pistol people picture when they hear the word “handgun”: the kind you load a magazine into and then bang-bang-bang in rapid fire, like the Glock series.
The Dreyse needle gun had been invented in 1836—a breech-loading bolt-action rifle that used paper cartridges. Suddenly an object sixty years further into the future had appeared. Any historian who saw it would grab him by the collar and yell, “Stop screwing around, you little bastard! Where’d you hide the aliens?!” It was a quantum leap in technology.
Well, strictly speaking there were no aliens—just a man from the future—so the accusation wasn’t entirely wrong…
Once Hwi-yeom calmed down and examined the weapon carefully, he found many points where it fell short of the 1896 FN M1900.
“This is entirely made of black iron, isn’t it?”
“That’s right! Even the highest-quality Flawless Steel from our family’s steelworks couldn’t withstand the pressure and heat!”
The Dang family’s steelmaking technology had not advanced noticeably in the interim. Anything further would require electric arc furnaces and various chemical reagents, so the situation was essentially unavoidable. They had already pulled several centuries of progress forward; wanting more would simply be shameless.
A bolt-action rifle like the Dreyse needle gun reloaded and fired quickly enough, yet the family’s steel could still endure the resulting pressure and heat. The real problem had been the beeswax waterproofing on the paper cartridges melting and causing backfires; the barrel itself never burst. An automatic pistol, however, had a far higher rate of fire, and that was where the trouble began.
“Fascinating. Truly fascinating. Would you explain how you came to develop this weapon?”
At Hwi-yeom’s question, Dang Un-hwa smiled naturally and began his account.
“At first I tried changing the cartridge material to stop the wax from melting and causing spontaneous discharges.”
While Hwi-yeom was in Beijing wrestling with high officials and weaving various schemes, Dang Un-hwa had experimented with every conceivable material for the cartridges—paper, bamboo, copper, bronze, tin, gold, silver, iron, lead. The trial and error was endless. Barrels exploding and nearly costing him an eye, one arm left covered in scars—none of it could extinguish his passion.
“It has to be strong enough to contain the pressure so the force pushes the bullet forward instead of leaking in every direction. Ordinary paper cartridges were simply too weak.”
“For the same reason bamboo, tin, gold, silver, and lead were all eliminated. In terms of ease of manufacture and actual power on firing, paper was actually better. Lead was so soft it shattered inside the chamber and clogged the rifling, ruining the gun…”
“Iron cartridges rusted easily in storage and, above all, were heavy…”
“That’s it! Copper and bronze are best! Considering cost, copper is the superior choice!”
Modern people often make the mistake of thinking people of the past were stupid. Given the same quantity of information as a modern person, they will make remarkably similar choices—and Dang Un-hwa was proving it right before their eyes.
Having produced copper cartridges, Un-hwa next turned his mind to devising an automatic feeding mechanism that would supply those cartridges without manual intervention.
“Instead of loading one round at a time and working a bolt like a breech-loading rifle, I want to load several rounds at once and just shoot comfortably… Isn’t there a good way?”
At first he considered a hand-cranked mechanism like the Gatling. The Jegal family’s famous repeating crossbows also used rotary devices of that sort. But that would require both hands. Un-hwa hated the idea.
“Tsk. Just when you need something, it’s never there—of course that Mi-ga bastard is gone…”
At the time Michelangelo was in Beijing under Hwi-yeom’s orders, crafting every kind of artwork for the flagship Caffe the One. So Un-hwa harassed the family’s other blacksmiths and craftsmen while working furiously himself to invent a new loading system.
Yet no matter how hard he tried, the solution would not come.
“Damn it.”
Hitting a wall, Un-hwa went to the explosives testing ground to relieve stress, practicing Explosive Poison and the Green Dragon Divine Art with ferocious intensity and setting off blast after blast. When the research coat he was wearing was reduced to rags, he clicked his tongue and went to a cloth shop for a new one.
There, by pure chance, while he was stripping off his upper garments to change, he saw the shopkeeper’s wife sitting to one side, weaving cloth on the treadle loom Hwi-yeom had once developed.
“….”
Cha-kang—squeak, click, cha-kang—squeak, click.
Each time the weft and warp crossed, she pressed the treadle to move the heddle. As the heddle shifted the warp so the weft could interlace, the woman pulled the handle to send the shuttle back and forth. With a metallic clack the weft crossed the warp; when she pulled the handle again the reed pressed the threads tight, completing one weave.
Lift the threads, shuttle back and forth, press and lock.
Lift, advance and retreat, press and secure.
“Ah!”
Enlightenment spread through Dang Un-hwa’s mind the way a wildfire races through a reed bed. Just as a Peak master would visualize the flow and application of forms inside his head and organize the insight into a mental image, Un-hwa was now seeing the motion of a mechanical device as clearly as a moving picture.
Make a long metal tube the same width as a cartridge. Fix a spring at the bottom, cover it with a thin plate, and make the loading mouth tight enough that inserting a round compresses the spring.
Then insert that tube so it connects to the floor of the chamber.
When the tube is seated in the gun, the topmost round will align with the feed ramp beneath the firing mechanism. Even then the round won’t rise yet, because there’s a lock at the head of the tube.
When the firing mechanism is drawn back, that lock is pulled rearward, clearing the mouth of the tube.
Spring pressure then pushes the uppermost round slightly upward into the chamber.
And when the firing mechanism travels forward again, the angled feed ramp at its base shoves the rear of the cartridge up and chambers it!
The heddle that lifted the warp threads was the spring; the shuttle that moved the weft was the slide; the reed that pressed and locked the weave was the feed ramp.
“I’ve got it!!!”
Like Archimedes shouting “Eureka!”, Dang Un-hwa forgot to finish dressing and sprinted all the way back to the Dang estate half-naked.
“…And so, with the help of the staff of the Hall of Iron Rain and the blacksmiths, I was finally able to complete the design.”
“….”
As Hwi-yeom listened in a daze, Un-hwa’s shoulders slumped a little.
“But… once I had built the automatic reloading system, the strength of the barrel became the problem, and this time even I couldn’t think of a clever solution. In the end I had to replace every single part—from the chamber that receives the cartridge all the way through the barrel that the bullet exits—with black iron before I had something that could stably endure the pressure and heat of continuous fire. So mass production is out of the question; even making a few is difficult. It’s a weapon that has to be crafted stitch by stitch by a master’s hand… using it as the family’s standard issue is impossible. Its value will be as a hidden weapon to save the lives of a small number of martial artists.”
“….”
Hwi-yeom stared blankly at Un-hwa for a moment, then finally spoke.
“…How many people know about this invention?”
“Including myself, no more than ten.”
“Are they all trustworthy?”
“? They are, but—”
“You must keep this an absolute secret, Chief Dang Un-hwa. Treat this secret as a matter of the Dang family’s very survival.”
“?!”
Grasping the startled Un-hwa’s hands tightly, Hwi-yeom smiled.
“Please give this weapon a name. I will record it in the Annals of Heroes. You will leave your name in history.”
“Leave my name in history…”
A blank look crossed Un-hwa’s face for a moment. Then his teeth showed in a full, blooming smile.
“Then I shall call it the Unhwa-style Pistol!”