Fertilizer Factory Groundbreaking
The venture Hwi-yeom most wanted to launch next was none other than fertilizer and pesticide production.
I have to raise food output across the whole of Sichuan Province.
Unlike the twenty-first century, where surplus grain was taken for granted, self-sufficiency in food was a matter of life and death in this era.
Especially now, if the Sichuan Dang Family is going to grow beyond a mere martial clan and keep riding the absolute popular support of an entire province, we cannot turn a blind eye to people starving within our borders.
The advent of the State-run Ironworks had already lifted the province’s overall output—its hengsan, its GDP—considerably, yet a major famine, a locust plague, or a flood could still spell disaster.
And so Hwi-yeom chose chemical fertilizer as the next business to pursue.
“Before the population explodes just because people can finally eat, I need to smash the Malthusian trap first.”
He took up his brush, dashed the plan onto paper in a single decisive stroke, and went straight to Dang Un-sang.
“Father, a proposal for a new enterprise.”
“Ah, excellent. Proceed.”
Dang Un-sang approved it without so much as glancing at the document. Hwi-yeom tilted his head.
“Father? About reviewing the plan…”
“You wrote it, so of course it’s fine. Handle it however you see fit.”
“But Father, even so—”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”
Dang Un-sang tore his gaze from the papers with an irritated scowl and began to grumble.
“Enough already! You’re seriously trying to dump more work on me here?! I’m the Family Head, you little brat—the Gaju! At least give me time to train!”
Stacked on his desk was the report Hwi-yeom had left him: Legal Vulnerabilities of the Sichuan Dang Family and Remedial Measures. It was the thickness of several law codes.
Ever since the Legal Affairs Department had been established, the report had catalogued every potential legal problem arising from the family’s internal and external activities over the past hundred years, together with predicted impeachments by political enemies and the corresponding countermeasures. It was less a report than a code of law that judges themselves ought to carry around.
Reading it alone drained a man’s spirit, yet unlike other reports it could not simply be shelved; leave it unattended and legal trouble might explode later.
“What happened to ‘officials and martial artists do not meddle in each other’s affairs’?! Why are you dragging officialdom’s yardstick into a martial house and stirring up storms on flat ground?!”
“Because if we want to make a living we have to make money, and if we want to make money it’s rather important that we don’t break the government’s laws.”
“……”
With both wealth and popular support already in hand, all that remained was to secure means of self-defense against political power and to build military strength. Then, within the borders of Sichuan at least, they would hold authority without limit.
Scrutinizing the law so that the powerful could find no pretext was especially vital. Dang Un-sang, however, saw things differently.
“Yeom-ah… so what you want is for this father of yours to abandon martial arts and become a scholar?”
“…Pardon? No, that isn’t—”
“I can’t even remember the last time I held a hidden weapon. These days I barely have time for circulating my energy; I feel my internal power draining away.”
“……”
“And you still want to pile more work on me? Is what you truly desire to take a man who has lived his whole life as a proud martial artist and turn him, once and for all, into a machine that does nothing but stamp documents?!”
“……”
“If that’s really what you want, fine! I might as well discard this useless dantian I never train anymore! Isn’t that right? Hmm?! Hmmm?!”
In the end Hwi-yeom looked into the resentment pouring from his father’s eyes, bowed his head, and withdrew.
“…This son is deeply sorry.”
“As long as you understand.”
Dang Un-sang sighed and gave a bitter smile.
“More importantly, how is the manpower situation? I received the report that you intend to hire people.”
“For the moment we’ve thrown the practical-class students from Hwieon Academy into the breach, but it’s no better than pissing on a frozen foot. It will still take years before Hwieon Academy and the local offices start producing usable talent. Until then we’ll simply have to endure.”
“Is there no one left among the direct bloodline who can be put to use?”
“…The direct kin are… well… martial artists.”
Being a martial artist did not automatically disqualify a man from scholarly work, yet hand a thick tome to someone who had eaten sword-rice his whole life and he would shake his head before you finished the sentence. Hwi-yeom was already infamous for working people to the bone; none of the family’s martial artists were eager to walk voluntarily into a sulfur pit.
Hwi-yeom shook his head as if to say he would rather die than suffer and continued,
“In any case, we need manpower immediately, so I have come to request authorization to recruit…”
“Authorization? As I said before, I trust you. You’ll have planned it properly, and if I opposed you—would you actually back down? In the end you’d get what you want somehow, so what use is my seal?”
“Ah, Father…”
“Anyway, I am finished with this damned paperwork! From now on you have full authority over everything related to business. Just handle it yourself, all right? Let this father train for once!”
Hwi-yeom wondered whether this was really proper, yet one look at Dang Un-sang half-shrieking left him with nothing to say.
Ah, to hell with it. More authority is better.
“Understood. Having received full authority, I will produce results without fail.”
“Good!”
Hwi-yeom received the Family Head’s seal, withdrew at once, and set about building the facilities for fertilizer production.
The fertilizer-plant project had already been prepared down to the blueprints at the proposal stage; all that remained was to issue orders to the Construction Department under the Innovation Hall.
Gwak Do, who had risen from a mere master carpenter of a branch woodworking shop to become Construction Department Manager, scratched his head as he examined the drawings.
“What brand-new marvel are we building this time?”
“A plant that makes fertilizer.”
“Fertilizer, sir? Isn’t that just a matter of letting night-soil ferment thoroughly, mixing it with leaf mold scraped off the mountains and a bit of straw, then aging it in a sunny spot for about three months?”
That was the common understanding of the age. Hwi-yeom smiled faintly.
“The fertilizer I intend to make will be extraordinary. From the same land we’ll pull ten times the present harvest.”
“Excuse me?”
In the world Hwi-yeom had once lived in, humanity had once faced the Malthusian trap—the theory advanced by the eighteenth-century economist Thomas Malthus.
As food supplies improved and living standards rose, population would increase geometrically while land development and crop yields increased only arithmetically; humanity would therefore confront catastrophic famine and eventual extinction. Birth control was essential lest disaster follow. Even the Republic of Korea in 1962 had once run a campaign under the slogan “Have too many children and you’ll never escape beggarhood.”
Yet, as always, history took an unexpected turn. After Malthus published his trap, Fritz Haber devised a method of fixing nitrogen from the air into nitrogen fertilizer, leaping food production forward geometrically and shattering the theory. The explosion in yields brought by chemical fertilizers and GMO crops had allowed humanity to reach seven billion.
Multinational agricultural corporations in the United States had even reached the point of burying astronomical quantities of corn every year simply to prop up prices, whether or not people starved in Africa.
Introducing GMO crops is still out of the question, but even phosphate fertilizer alone will produce a staggering increase in harvests.
What Hwi-yeom intended to manufacture were two of the relatively simpler chemical fertilizers: phosphate fertilizer and superphosphate of lime.
The process was as follows.
Guano from the mine he controlled, mixed with serpentine (olivine), would be melted in a high-temperature furnace. The old crucible furnaces that were due for retirement after the puddling furnaces arrived could still reach the fifteen hundred degrees needed to melt rock. The molten mass would be poured into cold water for rapid quenching; the solidified slag-like fertilizer would then be scooped out, crushed, and dried—phosphate fertilizer complete.
Superphosphate of lime was simpler still: pulverize the guano and react it with sulfuric acid. That was the entire process.
Without the guano the method would have been impossible; without the Sichuan Dang Family’s resources, sulfuric acid itself would have been unobtainable in this era. No one else could even imitate it.
The plant itself would simply reuse one of the remaining crucible furnaces, add a system for charging guano and running the molten vitreous fertilizer through cold water, and be finished.
“Leave it to me.”
“As always, Manager, I’m counting on you. Will a month be enough?”
“…You’ll have to give me two…”
“I’ll pay a handsome performance bonus if you finish it in one.”
“…If those are the orders, I’ll do it. But is there a reason to rush so hard?”
“We have to complete the plant and start production within the winter so we can spread base fertilizer before spring sowing next year.”
Ordinarily fertilizer had to be on the fields a full week before sowing. For rice, base fertilizer went down around March or April; when the plants had grown somewhat, around July or August, a second top-dressing or ear fertilizer was applied.
Cornered, Gwak Do hung his head.
“…There is still budget left for overtime, right?”
“Come now, would I work people and then refuse to pay? Don’t worry.”
Hwi-yeom laughed; Gwak Do nodded with a somewhat hollow look.
And so the Construction Department once again became a city that never slept. Every craftsman and carpenter worked from early morning until late into the night building the fertilizer plant.
“At this rate the oil for the torches is going to cost more than the wages!”
One carpenter grumbled at the torches planted everywhere to light the site. A foreman laid a pitying hand on his shoulder and shook his head.
“Do you really think the Young Master would grind us like this without having run the numbers?”
“Ah… I just wish I could rest a solid fortnight for once. No use wishing, though.”
“There are fellows who’d quit tomorrow if they could… but they can’t.”
Quitting was difficult because the allowances Hwi-yeom piled on under every possible name were simply too seductive. “Too much money to walk away from” was the only accurate description. It was no exaggeration that the saying “A Dang Family technician is better off than a low-ranking official” had begun to circulate throughout Sichuan.
When direct kin and others fretted, “If we keep pouring out money like this the family will go bankrupt,” Hwi-yeom only laughed and answered,
“If you don’t have the confidence to cover labor costs, you shouldn’t start a business in the first place.”
Beyond the money, the craftsmen who worked for the Dang Family had another reason to fear leaving.
One artisan, catching his breath over a cup of cold water, spoke up.
“Where would you go if you left? The way things are going, in a few years no construction outfit, woodworking shop, or ironworks besides Hwieon Comprehensive Construction will even be able to set foot in Sichuan.”
That was the real problem. Hwi-yeom’s talent for expanding businesses was truly astonishing. He always arrived with some revolutionary technique no one else had imagined, then forced it into reality. From proposal through capital management, interim accounting, and final report, there was never a gap. Of every enterprise he had touched so far, not one had lost money; each time the Dang Family reaped enormous profit.
Even the sewer project, which the elders had claimed would never make a profit and was pure public works, had been turned into cash flow when he introduced the entirely new concept of a waste-disposal subscription service, laughing at the Council of Elders’ criticism.
“You saw what happened to the ironworks and the restaurant trade, right?”
“Mmm…”
The large ironworks that had once smelted their own metal and competed on cost had been unable to match the cheaper, better iron of the State-run Ironworks; most had closed, and the few survivors limped along repairing and making farm tools and kitchen knives. The restaurant trade had fared even worse: aside from a handful of inns still run by the Qingcheng Sect and the Emei Sect, Baekga-jaengsik had long since seized everything. Inns operated by Dang Family branch lines, and restaurants run by outsiders alike, had either changed trades or become franchisees of Baekga-jaengsik.
“Who ever imagined the Dang Family would become like this…”
“Just wait. Hwieon Comprehensive Construction only handles the family’s own building and official contracts for now, so the woodworking shops and builders are still hanging on—but they’re living on borrowed time too.”
“The Council of Elders is already in pieces. Most of them have tucked their tails and crawled under the Young Master’s wing, haven’t they? The elders who fawn on him keep rising; the ones who don’t have all become old men in the back rooms.”
“Anyway, leave here and try somewhere else—you’ll have a hard time finding work, and even if you do, you’ll just circle around and end up under the Young Master again. That’s the fate, unless you leave Sichuan entirely.”
It was tentacle-like expansion and outrageous monopoly, yet this country had no unfair-trade or antitrust laws. With the provincial administration behind them, military strength that ranked among the top in Sichuan, and popular support already won, no one could stop the Dang Family.
The craftsmen finally hung their heads and trudged back to work.
“…Let’s just work hard.”
“Yeah, work hard. That’s how we pocket a fat performance bonus.”
“When I get that bonus I’m heading straight to Sichuan Moon-Fragrance Pavilion to squeeze Aeng-wol’s backside…”
“…Didn’t your wife nearly kill you last time you tried that?”
“Ahem!”
“Keep it up and you won’t die of natural causes.”
“…Let’s just go work!”
The carpenters threw themselves into construction of the fertilizer plant with renewed vigor.
And so, at last, the chemical fertilizer factory that Hwi-yeom had designed—the first not merely in the Central Plains, but in the entire world—took shape in Sichuan.