Pesticide
They decided the fertilizer trials would run on a wide scale—not only across the paddies held by the main Tang bloodline, but also on the branch-family fields under Elder U Seong-sik’s faction.
“Do we need separate sample groups and control groups?”
“The farmers’ fields outside the Tang holdings will serve as the control. No need to force it.”
“Understood.”
Lee Jinmyeong, whose face had finally regained a little color after the crushing work of establishing the Legal Affairs Division wound down, would handle the project together with Elder U Seong-sik.
Ye-eun already has a tight rein on Lee Gyu-chan, and Jinmyeong will keep U Seong-sik in line… hmm…
Bak Chang-eon was already a second Hwiyeom in all but name—passionate about every task and shouldering the heaviest burdens. Jin Cheong and Ma Jeonggu were barely keeping their heads above water with Hwieon Comprehensive Finance and the State-run Ironworks, respectively. The Medical Hall Master remained as neutral as ever. That left only a handful of residual factions: the Textile Branch (the splinter group that had broken from Hong Ilgon’s camp and specialized in Sichuan brocade) and the Escort Agency Branch (Jang Gilyeong’s people).
The agricultural co-op’s loan portfolio will inevitably tangle Jin Cheong, U Seong-sik, and Bak Chang-eon together. Jinmyeong can’t handle a project that size, so of course it becomes my problem too…
Hwiyeom sighed and muttered under his breath before he realized he was speaking aloud.
“The bigger the business grows, the busier the manager gets. Occupational hazard of the trade, I suppose…”
Unlike the other ventures, fertilizer efficacy could not be confirmed overnight. Hwiyeom therefore set a leisurely deadline for autumn harvest and turned his attention elsewhere. In its place he accelerated pesticide research and the push to found the agricultural cooperative.
When Dang Unhwa was summoned for the pesticide team, he threw a full-blown tantrum.
“Why me, Young Master?! Pesticide doesn’t explode!”
Hwiyeom stared at the genuine explosives maniac in pure disbelief.
“Uncle, why are you so obsessed with explosions? You’re the one in the Innovation Hall with the finest mastery of the Nokryong Singong’s material-transformation techniques. I promoted you from senior researcher to project lead in recognition of that talent—so earn your keep!”
“Ghk…!”
Dang Unhwa slammed the table in frustration, then froze. His eyes lit up with the special gleam of a man who has just had a revelation.
“Wait…! What if we flip the concept and make a pesticide that makes the pests explode when they eat it?!”
“You’ll blow the whole paddies to hell, you lunatic!”
“Aagh! Why are you hitting me?!”
“Ugh! And to think I still call this idiot my brother!”
Dang Su-jeong, who had been listening from the side, cracked Unhwa across the back of the head, seized his ear, and dragged him bodily into the laboratory.
Hwiyeom watched them go and let out a short, incredulous laugh.
“He really does manage to turn everything into bombs. Copernican thinking, I guess.”
“Pardon? Copernican what?”
Lee Jinmyeong, who had been lost in a world of paperwork and oblivious to the chaos, looked up with a “Did someone call me?” expression. Hwiyeom waved it off.
“Never mind. Uncle Unhwa’s going to end up with heart demons at this rate.”
It was a polite, martial-world way of saying the man had gone completely insane. Jinmyeong’s reply was pure ice.
“Whether heart demons show up or not, his sanity already exploded a long time ago.”
“…You’re being unusually snippy about Uncle Unhwa.”
“Of course I am!”
Crrrk!
Ghost-fire flickered in Jinmyeong’s eyes as he spoke. The killing intent rolling off him was thick enough that any martial artist who saw it would have muttered, “Not quite Demonic Escape Realm, but he’s flirting with Ultimate Demonic.”
“Do you have any idea how much equipment that man has burned through?! Those premium glass vessels and fire-resistant materials—he treats them like dried persimmons at a village feast… crrrk-crrrk-crrrk…!”
“…Right. Jinmyeong. Let’s get back to work. Your head looks cluttered. Work is the best cure for a cluttered head. Which is why you’re going to go log the pesticide experiments.”
“………….”
Hwiyeom’s casual remark that concentrating on work was the best way to clear the mind pushed Lee Jinmyeong through a sudden wall of enlightenment. The killing intent in his eyes jumped from Ultimate Demonic straight into Demonic Escape. The heart-fire had burned every last scrap of rage-fuel; his pupils, scorched pure white, now leaked a hollow, empty light like flowing malt syrup.
If this had been a comic instead of reality, he would have been the sole monochrome rough sketch in the middle of a full-color page. Or perhaps Munch’s The Scream rendered in oil paint.
The Innovation Hall researchers who witnessed the sight murmured in quiet pity.
A man can age years in a single instant.
Maybe the reason demonic masters who rampage at Ultimate Demonic suddenly become controllable once they hit Demonic Escape is simply because they burned out and hit existential dread…
If Jinmyeong’s face was Munch’s scream, the junior secretaries trailing behind him wore the faces of Tomorrow’s Joe—completely burned white.
The researchers clicked their tongues as they watched the defeated procession shuffle out. Then Hwiyeom turned to them with a bright, sunny smile.
“Aren’t you going too?”
“Pardon?”
They tilted their heads—no separate orders had been issued—but the moment Hwiyeom’s smile deepened, a chill ran down every spine.
“If Project Lead Dang Unhwa has been reassigned, someone has to cover his work, right? The nitroglycerin stabilization tests. The optimal ratio research for black powder. You’re not going? Do I really have to assign every single task myself?”
Cold sweat poured down the forehead of a young researcher who, by clan reckoning, was roughly Hwiyeom’s distant older cousin.
“W-we’ll handle it ourselves! Ourselves!”
“That’s the spirit. Off you go.”
“Yes, Young Master!”
The researchers knew from bitter experience that the moment Hwiyeom personally handed out an assignment, a neighborhood hill of work instantly transformed into the Fourteen Peaks—Everest and the world’s highest mountains. They vanished with supreme light-foot techniques that would not have shamed Kunlun’s Cloud Dragon Eight Forms. The Sichuan Tang Family was not particularly famous for elusive movement arts, but watching the researchers flee in that moment, one might have thought otherwise.
Hwiyeom watched their retreating backs and clicked his tongue softly.
“Honestly, just take initiative and get it done. Salarymen always wait until they’re told what to do… tsk!”
He conveniently ignored the fact that even his own father, the clan head and owner rather than a salaryman, never lifted a finger on tasks he hadn’t been ordered to perform. Perhaps that very habit had been the reason for the betrayal in his previous life.
Pesticides divide broadly into insecticides and herbicides; within each category they further split into agents that kill the target and agents that suppress reproduction. The Tang Family began with insecticides. And the martial artists who inherited the clan’s Poison Sect tradition were masters of the field.
“Killing them is easy. The hard part is not harming the crops.”
“Acids are out. Lead compounds are out.”
“What about sulfur?”
“Sulfur actually helps some crops, but not rice.”
“Heavy-metal toxins leave residues… so it has to be biotoxins.”
“Let’s start with the venoms of natural predators—insect toxins, toad toxins, that sort of thing.”
“The predators that mainly eat planthoppers and locusts, right? Got it.”
The Poison Hall martial artists, thrilled to have meaningful work again after so long, threw themselves into research with such joy that they completely failed to notice the pitying looks from the Innovation Hall researchers watching them.
I can already see them—fresh, lively future slaves.
Stop… please stop…
They’re walking straight into hell of their own free will and don’t even know it…!
Yet the Innovation Hall staff only watched with those sorrowful eyes; they made no effort to stop them.
Of course not! Why would I help them?
Slaves! Fresh slaves!
I’m not dying alone!
After eight years under Hwiyeom’s brand of overwork, the Innovation Hall researchers no longer cared about blood ties. They only prayed that Hwiyeom would abduct more people as quickly as possible and lighten their own loads.
In any case, when the greatest poison masters in the Central Plains all threw themselves at a problem, progress was inevitable. After roughly a month of research, Poison Hall martial artist Dang Sogwi reached a simple conclusion.
“What is a pest, really? With rice, some insects eat the grain, but the greater damage comes from those that chew the leaves and those that suck the sap from the stems until the plant withers.”
“People eat the grains, not the stems and leaves.”
“So if we make only the stems and leaves toxic…”
“And ‘toxic’ doesn’t have to mean stopping the heart, boiling the blood, or melting flesh and bone.”
“Even tiny bubbles can steal an insect’s breath.”
Dang Sogwi immediately mixed a pesticide from the clan’s secret formulae and sprayed it on laboratory rice plants. He then introduced several locusts and planthoppers and encouraged them to feed.
The result?
“Success!”
Once absorbed by the rice, the pesticide worked its way into the leaves and stems. When pests ate the treated tissue, it generated foam. The foam itself was harmless, but it clogged the insects’ respiratory systems with lethal efficiency. Even a ravenous autumn locust collapsed before finishing a single leaf, white foam bubbling from the spiracles along its abdomen.
When the rice matured and was harvested, they fed it to laboratory rats. The rats suffered no ill effects whatsoever.
“Since it kills pests by choking them with foam, I’ll call it Guchung-po—Pest-Repelling Foam.”
Dang Sogwi handed the efficacy records and manufacturing method to Hwiyeom. Hwiyeom was delighted; he immediately registered the formula as a patent and entered Dang Sogwi’s name in the Tang Family Roll of Heroes.
“For something this small? The Hero Roll?”
Dang Sogwi himself looked dubious, but Hwiyeom praised him loudly.
“What are you saying, Cousin? This poison will save more lives than any medicine an imperial physician ever compounded. The toxin you created doesn’t merely injure a handful of people—it kills hunger. It kills mass starvation. How could that not deserve a place on the Roll of Heroes?”
“…Ahem. I shall continue to work diligently.”
At first the clan members thought Hwiyeom was making a fuss over nothing. His extravagant praise gradually changed their minds.
“Hmm. He’s right. A poison that kills hunger… yes, that too is a poison.”
“…Besides rice pests, what else is there?”
“I think I’ll try making a weed-killer.”
The Tang people had always loved researching poisons and taken pride in the work. Once Hwiyeom attached internal honor to it, the Poison Hall blood relatives threw themselves into pesticide research with growing enthusiasm.
Then late autumn arrived, and harvest time finally came. The people of Sichuan were stunned. The yields from the paddies belonging to the Sichuan Tang Family and its branch bloodlines casually doubled or tripled those of every neighboring field.
“How is this even possible?”
Even fields separated by nothing more than a single furrow produced four or five times as many grains per stalk. Farmers hurried over with envy written all over their faces.
“Last year this paddy was no different from ours—why is only this one doing so well this year?!”
The branch-family farmer laughed heartily at the neighbor’s envious question.
“We used the fertilizer the Tang Family made!”
“I used fertilizer too!”
“Oh, that composted manure stuff? Tsk tsk tsk. What century do you think this is, still using that?”
“There’s another kind of fertilizer?”
“Of course! The Tang Family has its own secret formula.”
“That’s the secret to the harvest? Then give me some too—I’ll use it next year.”
“Did I store it for you? Go buy it yourself. There’s a place called the Sichuan Farmers’ Cooperative—run by one of our branch-family elders. You can get it there.”
“Got it!”
The farmer hurried straight to the Sichuan Tang Family. At the main gate he found a long line of other farmers who had heard the same rumor. After a long wait they finally met U Seong-sik and shouted in one voice:
“Can we get the fertilizer here?!”
“Heavens, all of you. Harvest is over—why are you already looking for fertilizer?”
“Something this good will sell out! We have to buy before it’s gone!”
Elder U Seong-sik felt a flicker of greed in the farmers’ eyes and silently clicked his tongue.
So the Young Master foresaw even this.
“The family produces fertilizer in abundance; you can buy as much as you like, and the price is cheap. There’s just one condition: you have to join our Sichuan Farmers’ Cooperative.”
“What’s that?”
“Once you hear the details you’ll understand—it’s genuinely good for every farmer. Let me explain exactly what it is…”
U Seong-sik sat down with the farmers himself and casually walked them through the cooperative system. Without a single exception they joined on the spot, loaded up several sacks of fertilizer, and went home happy.
“Hahaha! A bumper year! Truly a bumper year!”
Looking at the Tang Family’s main gate overflowing with people eager to join the co-op—almost as golden and abundant as the waving rice fields themselves—U Seong-sik smiled brightly.
But the smile did not last. A deep darkness soon began to swirl in his eyes.
“…The real problem is next spring…”
Decades of experience whispered a warning as he watched the late-autumn weather that still refused to turn cold.
And he was not the only one who felt the omen.
“…Hmm?”
Lee Jinmyeong, buried in decades of agricultural records compiled by the Land Management Division and ordered by Hwiyeom to find patterns between bumper years and lean years, found an entry from roughly thirty-three years earlier and muttered without realizing it.
“…Great bumper harvest, hot dry autumn, and then…”
Cold sweat beaded on his forehead.
At that same moment, Ye-eun stood on the hill behind the clan compound, gazing at the distant sky. Her pupils flashed with a strange light, then faded like a mirage. Her petal-soft lips whispered quietly:
“Locusts.”
With cool eyes she lowered her gaze to the farmers cheering in the paddies below the hill and murmured in a cold voice:
“A great locust plague is coming.”