Locust Preparedness (1)
Locusts—huangchong—or flying locusts, feihuang.
The words simply meant a swarm of grasshoppers.
U Seong-sik foresaw it through years of farming experience. Lee Jinmyeong foresaw it through decades of records. And Ye-eun foresaw it through an intuition she could not explain. All three knew a locust plague was coming.
Yet even with the same prediction, each of them moved differently.
U Seong-sik stood looking over fields where the harvest still was not finished and calculated how much grain would fill the storehouses.
"With this much, the Tang family's dependents will make it safely through next year—and we'll even have enough left to open relief stores across Sichuan."
He regarded locusts as a natural disaster no one could stop, and simply measured whether the family could weather the damage.
"…Of all times for this, right after we ordered pesticide development."
Ye-eun glanced back and forth between the western sky and the half-harvested fields, let out a quiet sigh, and turned her eyes toward Hwiyeom's quarters.
"Coincidence… or did he see even this coming?"
She shook her head once, then turned on her heel and headed for the Minjeongwon.
"We'll need to start rumors about stockpiling grain. That locusts are coming. I have to rush the proposal."
She was already mapping out, within the scope of her own duties, exactly what the family needed from her.
And Lee Jinmyeong—
"Young Family Head! Young Family Head! Please spare me a moment!"
"Oh, Secretary Lee. What is it? If you're here to ask for leave, just turn around and go back."
"This is no time for jokes, Young Family Head. Look at these records!"
Instead of deciding on his own, he went straight to Hwiyeom and reported everything he had found.
"While reviewing agricultural yield records for the past hundred years, I found three cases that match this year's conditions exactly."
"Let me see."
Hwiyeom took the report Lee Jinmyeong held out, ran a finger down the page, and read the passages marked in red.
"…So what you're saying is," Hwiyeom said, "when an unusually good harvest coincides with dry, warm weather lasting deep into late autumn, the odds of a massive locust swarm jump?"
"Yes."
"Hmm."
Hwiyeom cast his mind back to something he had only half-noticed in an environmental documentary in his previous life.
Grasshoppers lay their eggs in autumn. After gorging on grain and grass during harvest season, they bury their eggs in the soil. The eggs overwinter underground and, when the earth thaws in spring, hatch and climb out as new grasshoppers.
But when a bumper crop, a warm autumn, and a warm winter all arrive together, the entire cycle shifts.
First, abundant food in autumn leaves the grasshoppers well-nourished. If late autumn stays warm, insects that should already have died of cold keep mating furiously and lay far more eggs than usual—three times the normal clutch, sometimes as much as ten times, according to the records.
Then if the winter itself stays mild, eggs that ought to freeze and die simply survive in huge numbers.
Where a normal year might see a thousand eggs laid and a hundred of them hatch, now ten thousand eggs are laid and nearly all of them live.
When spring comes, that enormous clutch hatches all at once. The new generation immediately faces a local food shortage, secretes a special pheromone, and undergoes a physical transformation: legs shorten, wings lengthen, and their appetite turns savage. They begin mass migrations along any green corridor, devouring everything in their path—and that is the swarm people call huangchong or feihuang.
"The most recent records are from thirty-three years ago, then fifty, then eighty-nine. And the conditions then look almost identical to what we're seeing now."
The landlord-branch families led by U Seong-sik's elders had been wealthy farmers rooted in Sichuan for centuries; they kept such records with meticulous care.
Hwiyeom compared the ledgers against both his past-life knowledge and the present weather, then reached his conclusion.
"If winter stays warm as well, the probability is high."
"We need countermeasures."
"We developed Guchung-po not long ago. Even ordinary autumn grasshoppers die before they can finish a single rice leaf. If we mass-produce and distribute the foam, shouldn't that be enough?"
Lee Jinmyeong shook his head.
"I'm no farmer either, so I can't be certain—but according to the records, a true locust swarm is on another scale entirely. In plain terms, tens or hundreds of millions of insects could arrive, eat one leaf each, get wiped out by the Guchung-po… and still leave every field ruined."
He was right. Guchung-po had been formulated for ordinary pests, not for a natural disaster of this magnitude.
Locusts. Even in the twenty-first century, when pesticides were routine, the damage they caused was no joke.
Records spoke of swarms numbering twelve and a half trillion individuals. Even in Korea there had been outbreaks estimated in the tens of billions that stripped farms bare.
"What countermeasures do you have in mind, Secretary Lee?"
"I've drafted a preliminary plan…."
Lee Jinmyeong handed over a report titled "Response Plan for Minimizing Locust Damage."
"Stockpiling grain, purchasing from other regions, distributing relief… is that the best we can do? Is there no way to reduce the outbreak itself?"
"If there were, wouldn't we all rejoice? Floods can be met with dikes, droughts with reservoirs—but locusts? There is no defense!"
"Hmm."
Hwiyeom thought for a moment, then spoke.
"Call U Seong-sik, Ye-eun, Bak Chang-eon, Jin Cheong, and… who is the most influential elder left among the textile branch?"
"At present… Elder Kwon Oh-jung."
"Kwon Oh-jung. And the Master of the Poison Hall as well."
"Yes!"
Lee Jinmyeong answered with vigor, then glared at the junior secretary standing half-asleep beside him. The boy yelped, "Y-yes, sir!" and bolted.
Hwiyeom watched him go and gave a short laugh.
"Lee Jinmyeong, you're starting to sound like middle management."
"…Yes. All thanks to a certain someone."
"Must be an outstanding person, whoever that is."
"…"
Lee Jinmyeong only sighed softly at Hwiyeom's words.
A short while later, people gathered in Hwiyeom's office in the Innovation Hall.
Among the core personnel who now steered the Sichuan Dang Family—and who would form its future backbone—Elder Kwon Oh-jung, who belonged neither to the Family Head's faction nor to any great power base, found himself shrinking without meaning to.
"Elder Kwon, any idea why you were summoned?"
"…I truly don't know myself…."
When Bak Chang-eon asked, Kwon Oh-jung shook his head with a faintly aggrieved look. He felt as though he were being treated like a criminal even though he had committed no crime.
Then Hwiyeom appeared.
"Thank you all for coming. I gathered you busy people in one place today so we can prepare measures to minimize the damage from a disaster that may strike next year."
At those words U Seong-sik nodded deeply, as if he already understood; the other elders merely tilted their heads.
Hwiyeom glanced at Ye-eun's unchanging expression and at U Seong-sik's look of quiet admiration, then smiled.
"Elder U seems to have roughly predicted it already?"
"Dare I ask… are you speaking of a locust plague?"
"A locust plague?!"
Jin Cheong's mouth fell open as though lightning had struck him in his sleep; Hwiyeom only smiled wider.
"Truly the elder who represents the landlord branch. How did you foresee it?"
"I'm a farmer who lives by digging the earth, am I not? I've been worrying about the possibility already."
"For the benefit of the other elders who still don't know the situation, would Elder U kindly explain?"
"Gladly."
U Seong-sik cleared his throat and described how the present conditions were ideal for a locust outbreak.
After listening, Jin Cheong voiced his doubts.
"But mild autumns and winters aren't exactly rare. To claim that a little extra warmth alone can trigger something like this…."
"These materials should make it clearer."
Lee Jinmyeong arrived with copies of the data and continued the explanation.
"Here you can compare the usual timing of rice ripening and the first frost against the years that preceded locust outbreaks. In an ordinary year the interval from sprouting to harvestable grain varies by only a week to a fortnight. In the years before a swarm, that gap stretches to a full month or more."
"…Come to think of it, this year was already warm from the third month."
The elders' faces grew steadily graver.
Hwiyeom spoke again.
"We are not saying we must stop the locusts right here and now. For the moment this is still only a forecast; the swarm may never come. But we cannot simply pray to heaven with no plan at all—that is why I called you."
"Elder U Seong-sik. Once the harvest is finished, how much grain can we reserve for next year?"
"I will need the final figures, of course, but a rough estimate already shows this year's yield—thanks to fertilizer and weather—is four times a normal year. That quantity will feed every dependent of the Tang family and still leave a great deal for relief throughout Sichuan."
"Hasten the harvest and report the exact numbers as soon as it is done. I want to know precisely how many bags of surplus we will have."
"Yes."
"Master of the Poison Hall."
"You called?"
Dang So-cheon—Dang Un-sang's cousin and Hwiyeom's fifth-degree uncle—answered with a bright smile.
"Is it possible to develop a pesticide capable of destroying a large-scale locust swarm? Something that works by fumigation—like a poisonous cloud laid over the fields—so we can protect large tracts at once."
"That part is not difficult. The real problem is that the toxin must remain harmless to humans and livestock. And the volume required will be enormous."
"So it is possible, then."
"If the Poison Hall of the Tang family cannot produce a poison, the name of the Poison Clan of Sichuan would weep. We will put our backs into it through the winter."
"I will leave it in your hands, Master. Meanwhile I will look into devices that can fumigate that poison on a massive scale."
"Oh-ho. That sounds most promising."
"Next—Elder Jin Cheong."
"No."
"…I haven't even told you what I want yet."
"You were about to tell me to increase Agricultural Cooperative memberships and push disaster-insurance subscriptions, weren't you?"
"Oh…."
Hwiyeom smiled.
"I'm delighted to see Elder Jin's thinking growing more and more like mine."
"Don't smile—it's unnerving! You know perfectly well that under these conditions we would take enormous losses. Why do it?"
"You already know the answer. Precisely because of the danger, this is a golden chance to expand our influence among the farmers."
Next year a locust plague will come. Therefore join the Agricultural Cooperative and take out insurance; if your fields are ruined, we will compensate you.
On the surface it looked like pure madness that would only cost the Tang family money. Hwiyeom was looking at a different point entirely.
"From a pure financial company's standpoint it is something to avoid at all costs… but from the Tang family's standpoint it is different."
"Meaning?"
"If the Tang family is to remain a respected great house of Sichuan, we will have to open relief stores whether people hold insurance or not, will we not?"
"Ah!"
"The money will be spent anyway. Instead of merely looking generous and walking away, let us use it to pull in the cooperative members who have been so slow to join. You've been struggling lately, haven't you?"
"Ugh…."
Ever since Jin Cheong had taken charge of Hwiyeom Comprehensive Finance and the Sichuan Farmers' Cooperative, he had been recruiting members among the peasantry with far less success than hoped. Only after the fertilizer's effects became visible with their own eyes had a brief surge of applicants formed a line; most farmers still remained lukewarm. They had farmed and lived perfectly well without such things—why pay dues to join?
After clicking the beads of his mental abacus for a moment, Jin Cheong finally nodded.
"Understood."
"And…."
Hwiyeom's gaze turned to Elder Kwon Oh-jung, who until then had been sitting like a sack of barley left out to dry.
"I have a question for Elder Kwon Oh-jung."
"…What is it?"
"Do you still intend to oppose the Family Head's Hall?"
"Not in the slightest. Hong Ilgon abandoned us and fled, so…."
"Then will you come under me?"
"If you will accept me, what reason would I have to refuse? I simply lacked the face to speak first and have been fretting ever since."
At Kwon Oh-jung's words, every pair of eyes around the table went wide.
The Elder Council's authority was already effectively dismantled, and no one inside the family could stand against Hwiyeom any longer. Still, for Hwiyeom to demand submission so bluntly—and for Kwon Oh-jung to prostrate himself so readily—was shocking.
Even so, is it really proper to treat an elder who was an enemy only yesterday as though he were a dried persimmon pulled out of a wardrobe?
Ironically, most of the elders who had not yet joined Hwiyeom felt exactly as Kwon Oh-jung did. The board had tilted so far that the Elder Council was on the verge of dissolution; there was nothing left they could do. Those who stood with Hwiyeom grew stronger by the day, while the rest clung to businesses that might collapse at any moment and fretted. Yet their pride still forbade them from crawling first to a fourteen-year-old Young Family Head and begging for a place. That Kwon Oh-jung seized the chance and accepted the seat was only natural.
"Good. Elder Kwon Oh-jung, I wish to entrust the textile branch with an important task."
"What is it?"
What the elders still did not understand was that entering Hwiyeom's service was not always a blessing.
"I want you to produce insect screens. Enormous ones—on a scale beyond imagination—and in vast quantities."
Kwon Oh-jung stared blankly for a moment, then stammered,
"Insect… what?"