Dang Un-sang Is Having a Hard Time
Guncotton—known in English as gun cotton, or more properly nitrocellulose—was one of the three essential ingredients of smokeless powder.
Nitroglycerin, nitrocellulose, and nitroguanidine. I have to complete the Three Sacred Treasures needed for manufacturing smokeless powder.
In truth, nitroglycerin and nitroguanidine could already be produced whenever they set their minds to it. It was almost comical, really: the Dang Family’s long mastery of poisons meant they were equally adept with acids and a host of other chemical reagents. To put it without too much exaggeration, the chemical capabilities of the Innovation Hall and the Poison Hall were centuries ahead of the age.
They’re already producing sulfuric and nitric acid in-house in this era, after all…
With sulfuric acid, nitric acid, and waste oil on hand, making nitroglycerin was no great challenge. The volume of spent cooking oil generated by the kitchens of the Baekga-jaengsik restaurants scattered across Sichuan was enormous. This was the Central Plains, land of fried food, after all. The moment he decided to produce nitroglycerin, all they needed to do was collect that waste oil, extract the glycerin, and react it with nitric and sulfuric acid.
Nitroguanidine was a little more involved, but hardly impossible. First, dissolve the cheat-key resource—guano—in water, extract the urea solution, and let it undergo microbial fermentation in a dark, cool place to produce ammonia. Dissolve that ammonia in water to make aqueous ammonia, then combine it with the sulfuric and nitric acid stockpiled in the underground chambers of the Poison Hall, and work the process this way and that. The full explanation would run long, so to cut to the facts: with ammonia, nitric acid, and sulfuric acid one could produce ammonium nitrate and ammonium sulfate; recombine those, and—good heavens, what a wonder!—a bit of bat dung and a few reagents later, and the final ingredient of smokeless powder, nitroguanidine, was complete.
Guncotton was even simpler to make. Originally, the German chemist Christian Schönbein had invented it by accident after spilling a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acid during a home experiment, hurriedly wiping it up with his apron—and watching the apron explode. The foundations for producing smokeless powder at will were already in place.
Haste makes waste. I know the road. The materials and infrastructure have been secured step by step. Slow and steady is the way.
Had he built the Baekga-jaengsik food-chain restaurants merely because he wanted to sell meals? Of course not. It had been the groundwork for expanding the intelligence network and for collecting waste oil. Why else charge headlong into the forests of the Southern Savages despite the grumbling, or carefully store the carcasses of the locust swarms in abandoned mine shafts instead of simply burning them? However rich Sichuan’s guano deposits might be, one still had to think of the future. The quality of Southeast Asian phosphate rock was famous, and the enormous mass of locust corpses would serve as insurance decades down the line. Even if the guano mines eventually played out, materials could be brought in from elsewhere. Traditional saltpeter fields alone had their limits.
“Young Master?”
“Ah, forgive me. I was lost in thought for a moment.”
Hui-yeom shook his head after drifting so far alone and issued instructions to Dang Un-hwa.
“The hemp insect-netting we used against the locusts should still be in the Agricultural Cooperative’s stores. Consult with Elder Jin Cheong and take a portion of it. We’ll use the hemp that has lost its usefulness as netting—whether because the locusts chewed it or because of poor storage.”
“Hemp… explodes?”
Dang Un-hwa furrowed his brow with a look that said, What kind of snake oil are you peddling? But Hui-yeom now knew exactly how to handle him.
“Yes. It explodes beautifully—three to six times more powerfully than black powder.”
“I’ll do it!!”
Dang Un-hwa’s mental circuitry seemed capable of moving in only two directions: “Does it explode?” or “Does it not explode?” By comparison, even an insect’s ladder-like nervous system looked like a sophisticated higher organ.
After a few rounds of good-boy-good-boy pats for the now wild-eyed Dang Un-hwa, Hui-yeom left the Innovation Hall thoroughly drained. He almost imagined he could hear the researchers of the Innovation Hall, plunged into overtime hell, cursing behind his back—but that had to be an illusion. The chairman of a world-moving conglomerate did not let himself be swayed by such soft-hearted sentiments.
Having thus sown disaster upon the Elders’ Council and the Innovation Hall, Hui-yeom went straight to the Family Head’s Hall in search of his next victim.
“Father.”
“Right. Go ahead.”
“No.”
At least pretend to listen for a second. Hui-yeom gaped in disbelief. Buried under a mountain of documents, Dang Un-sang creaked his neck vertebrae upward and looked at him.
“If you have any conscience, look at this. I’m already drowning in work and you want me to look at something else? Just approve it yourself and be done with it. Whatever you bring me can’t possibly be strange.”
Was that recognition of his son’s competence, or was it pure work-shirking? Dang Un-sang’s appearance was so spectacular that Hui-yeom was briefly confused.
In truth, while Hui-yeom had been around, Dang Un-sang had rather coasted. He would glance over documents Hui-yeom had already organized, give a roughly solemn nod, and stamp the Family Head’s seal in an “Ah~ I understand perfectly (I understand nothing)” state—and the entire universe would go out and earn money for them.
But the six months after Hui-yeom’s disappearance had turned the Family Head’s Hall into hell. From every direction, elders and senior council members—along with the administrators of every organ and association—came shrieking “Kieeeee!!” and thrusting papers covered in incomprehensible writing under his nose, screaming that the family would collapse if he did not stamp them immediately. So he stamped. Then Bak Chang-eon would drag in both the document and the man who wrote it and declare, “Here is the spy who tried to ruin the family! Hang him!” While watching the poor wretch get stripped to his soul, Dang Un-sang felt as though he himself were being paraded around with a placard reading “The Family Head is such an idiot he stamped even this!”
After that, how could he stamp anything carelessly?
Right. I rose to the Family Head’s seat as a teenager and have held this family together to this day. If I just work hard, mere paperwork is nothing!
There had been a time when Dang Un-sang thought that way. But the difficulty of clinging to a slowly dying business by twisting his entire body, and the difficulty of managing the monster of an enterprise that Hui-yeom had grown by saying “Open wide, here comes the plan!” could not possibly be the same. It was like a man who had once sledded down a backyard hill on a fertilizer sack deciding he would ski the fourteen peaks of the Himalayas.
Every time Hui-yeom had earnestly begged, “Please read the proposals carefully before you stamp them, and ask about anything you don’t understand,” Dang Un-sang had waved it off with “I trust you, son.” He was simply collecting the karmic debt of all that dodging.
Even so, Dang Un-sang worked diligently. If ability fell short, the only answer was to spend more than twice as much time as anyone else. He read documents carefully, fretted late into the night, and stamped with caution. Mistakes decreased—but the workload only snowballed.
After six months of that, despite his formidable internal energy, pitch-black dark circles had descended all the way to his cheekbones. His once-neat hair stuck out in every direction, and his eyes looked like those of a mackerel left out for three days in the midsummer heat. How was anyone supposed to look at this man and see the Family Head of the Sichuan Dang Family, rising like a dragon to seize control of Sichuan?
Hui-yeom felt a sudden twinge from the long-atrophied organ known as “conscience,” then immediately shook his head.
Must be my imagination.
The sight of the Family Head seated and diligently working—how beautiful a spectacle was that? To feel guilt at such a scene was absurd. The flutter in his chest must simply be surging emotion.
Hui-yeom smiled brightly and said,
“You look magnificent. That gallant figure cutting through the Family Head’s duties so efficiently… This son will not let Father’s resolve go to waste—the resolve that even spares the time to hear reports so that he may press bravely onward in his work. I shall grind my bones to bring even more work to the Dang Family.”
Dang Un-sang’s face twisted in genuine horror.
“No! No! That’s not it! Hui-yeom! It’s enough! It’s more than enough! There’s a saying—too much is as bad as too little!”
“But the Dang Family still has a long road ahead. We are still hungry.”
“I’m going to explode from overeating!”
“Haha, Father is quite the joker.”
Is this brat doing it on purpose to torment me?
Feeling as though he were shouting at a wall, Dang Un-sang’s mouth fell open. Then he shook his head and spoke with sudden gravity.
“Young Master Dang Hui-yeom, hear me.”
“Yes, Family Head.”
Hui-yeom answered just as seriously.
Dang Un-sang continued,
“A Family Head must keep the entirety of family affairs within his sight.”
“Yes.”
“Yet as things stand, I am buried in paperwork and cannot oversee the family as a whole.”
“….”
“Therefore, by my authority, I entrust all paperwork to you. Exercise full power and act as you see fit.”
“….”
“….”
“…Father?”
“What.”
“You’re not just dumping this on me, are you…?”
“Hey! I want to train in martial arts too! Am I some official? Some merchant? I’m a martial artist! A martial artist!!”
In the end, Dang Un-sang exploded.
Hui-yeom had no choice but to accept the demand. It was thoroughly galling to watch the man try to escape alone from the work-hell that ground everyone equally—but what could he do? If you didn’t like it, you shouldn’t have been born the son.
Besides, Dang Un-sang had thrown a similar fit once before; if it erupted again, someone might end up holding a funeral.
When the negotiations with Hui-yeom reached a dramatic settlement, Dang Un-sang became positively cheerful. Hui-yeom decided to change the subject and asked,
“Father, there is something this son wishes to ask.”
“What is it?”
“In truth, when I visited the Southern Savage Beast Palace this time, I heard something from the Palace Lord… Is there some matter between our family and the Central Plains that I do not know?”
“Hm?”
Hui-yeom related to Dang Un-sang the doubts about Dang Hyo-seon’s death that Palace Lord Hắc Hổ Hiến Lang had voiced, along with the talk of relations with the Central Plains. Dang Un-sang listened in silence, closed his eyes in serious thought, then finally shook his head.
“I do not know. If Father’s death truly was the work of the Central Plains rather than the Demonic Cult… what could they have hoped to gain by such a deed?
Father was the Dark King, one of the Ten Great Masters Under Heaven, and the Demonic Cult’s power at the time was tremendous. Without him, Sichuan and Yunnan would long since have fallen to the Demonic Cult. There was nothing to gain by killing him. On the contrary, it would have been an act that pushed the Central Plains into danger.”
“Was he strong enough to change the course of a war by himself?”
“He was one of the Ten Great Masters Under Heaven. A master of the Realm of Profundity, a level that has appeared only a handful of times in the history of the Dang Family. Including Diancang, Emei, Qingcheng, the Beast Palace, and our own Dang Family, Father was the only one who could stand against the Heavenly Demon in single combat.”
If that were true, the Central Plains assassination theory only grew more questionable. Assassinate an allied master of the Realm of Profundity while the Demonic Cult was invading and the Heavenly Demon held sway? And before that—was assassination even possible?
Dang Un-sang searched his memory and continued,
“What I remember is this: at the summit of Wolgyeon Peak, Father fought a great battle against the Heavenly Demon together with the Imperial Sword Namgung Chang-cheon, the Five Tigers Saber Emperor Paeng Jun-hyeok, the Taiji Sword Venerable Master Cheongsu, and the Plum Blossom Divine Sword Master Unjeong.
In that battle the Heavenly Demon was wounded and fled. All the orthodox heroes except Father were slain. Father himself had suffered wounds too grave to recover from, and not long afterward he breathed his last.”
“…And those who witnessed the fight?”
“There were none.”
“Hmm….”
Hui-yeom felt a prickling sense that something was fundamentally wrong. At the very least, there did seem to be something suspicious about Dang Hyo-seon’s death.
Instead of directly voicing the possibility he had in mind, he asked carefully, circling around it.
“…The cause of death remaining on Grandfather’s body—that was unmistakably the Heavenly Demon’s martial arts, was it not?”
“Yes. The traces of the cursed Heavenly Demon Divine Art were certain.”
“….”
At least it did not seem to be the worst-case scenario. Hui-yeom kept his silence.
“Might there be any compiled records from the time of the Orthodox-Demonic Great War?”
“Ah, for that there should be records in the All-Knowing Archive of the Family Head’s Hall. Entering requires my personal seal. Do you wish to go in?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. But first prioritize the work that piled up while you were away, and reviewing what people have already done.”
“Yes, of course.”
I don’t know enough yet, so I should investigate the background first. No need to jump to conclusions too quickly.
Hui-yeom resolved to set aside separate time to look into the events of the Orthodox-Demonic Great War, and for now he went to face the mountain of accumulated work.