Bookstore - 5
Do you think making other people's money is easy?
It's a line you hear every so often while earning a living—whether from a part-time job all the way up to full-time office work. Making money through honest labor is hard enough in the modern world or in this one, so how much worse must it be when you're dealing with a business's debts?
Could anyone just trust their glib tongue, prepare nothing, and still stand up on that platform? Some people maybe. Not me.
"What was it we really needed to walk away with today?" I asked Dang Hwarin, a faint smile on my lips.
"Gain the green forest, lose the chains?"
"No... that's the Hwalbindang."
This woman really could get us all killed if the wrong ears overheard that.
"Heh. Wrong? Then getting the creditors to acknowledge the bookstore inheritance and only half the debt?"
She laughed when she saw me flinch at her joke, looking thoroughly pleased with herself. The successful end to today's business must have put her in a good mood.
"Still wrong."
I shook my head lightly, dismissing her guess.
"Then what?"
"Today our goal was to get their seals on the debt documents."
"Isn't that the same thing?"
"Not even close. Words of 'acknowledgment' can be spoken and changed whenever they feel like it. What we needed was paper that held unbreakable responsibility and a promise that could never be altered."
Verbal contracts can be rewritten at will. "That wasn't what I meant. You must have misheard. I never said that." Or: "No, Chief, when did I ever say that? Why are you getting angry at me over a misunderstanding? Let me talk to the manager." The moment something is only spoken, people can shamelessly deny every word they ever uttered.
No take-backs once the seal is stamped.
In any era, pressing a seal to a document means you are sealing off every escape route and accepting infinite liability for whatever is written there. Today we had to collect every single one of those seals from the creditors to lock in Dang Hwarin's inheritance of the bookstore and her obligation to pay only half the debt.
There was just one problem.
Asking them to look at the papers and stamp them on the spot.
Even in the modern world, with all its legal safety nets, stamping a relative's blank promissory note is enough to get you roasted online. In this era? Far worse.
That was why today's groundwork had been necessary.
"Hwarin. If you try to repay this debt with what the bookstore earns, how many years do you think it'd take?"
I threw her a deliberately heavy question.
"For... ever?"
She answered in a small, weak voice.
"Exactly a hundred and fifty years. I ran the numbers on the net profit—that's about what it comes to. So you'd better train hard. You'll need to live a very long time to pay it all off."
"Tch. Rubbing it in because it's not your problem?"
Her lips pushed out in a pout at my teasing tone.
"Assuming the ledgers are accurate, of course."
"Wait. Did you mess with the books? Plant fake records?"
Her lips snapped shut, eyes wide, mouth slightly open as she stared at me.
"No. Everything written in there was copied straight from the original ledgers."
The simplified booklet we made didn't contain a single newly invented false entry.
"Then how?"
"I adjusted the net profit."
"Net profit?"
"Net profit is just what you earn minus what you spend. Even the biggest shop can look worse than a tiny one that carefully watches its costs if the expenses are high enough."
"You didn't write fake entries, so how did you touch the net profit?"
"Your maternal grandfather ran a lot of businesses, but he kept everything in a single ledger. When the head steward said we'd have to split the books by business for the sales, a brilliant idea hit me."
"What idea?"
"A way to leave every other business's income and expenses completely alone while massively inflating the bookstore's spending."
We needed to dangle debt repayment in front of the creditors like bait so that what they were giving up would look small by comparison. By making the bookstore's ledger show pathetic yearly earnings, we could sell them on that idea.
The catch was that every other business was being sold off, ledgers and all. If we simply pretended the bookstore had covered other shops' expenses, or if fake records were discovered later, it could explode into a much bigger problem.
"So what was it?"
Hwarin pressed, curiosity plain on her face.
Hwarin, it just came to me. A way to slash the bookstore's net profit using nothing but the existing ledger entries.
"Your grandfather's good works."
I revealed the heart of the scheme.
"Good works...? Ah!"
She let out a little gasp of realization. Quick on the uptake—I liked that.
"Exactly. Donations, patronage, temple offerings. All the money he spent doing good. None of it belonged to any particular business, but it still sat there on the ledgers as expenses. I asked the head steward to move those costs over to the bookstore's books."
"Brilliant idea!" the head steward had exclaimed, nodding. "If we quietly divide the charitable outlays and slip them into the bookstore without drawing notice, the net profit will plummet. Of course, hiding them properly will take a true expert grinding away a great deal of time and effort..."
"Then I'll leave it in your capable hands."
"Ah..."
As expected of a steward with decades of experience—he was almost too good at his job. The creditors never noticed the carefully massaged accounting. And once we simplified those books even further into a thin booklet, even a specialist would have a hard time spotting anything.
"So that's how you did it."
Hwarin stared at me with widened eyes, startled by the maneuver.
Too early to be impressed. There was still one more piece.
"The real problem was getting them to stamp the seals before anyone looking at the booklet got suspicious."
If they sensed something off and demanded the original ledgers, the whole thing could unravel. Stamping those seals fast was everything.
"But Yunho, you talked them into it with that silver tongue of yours."
"Talking well doesn't make money-mad bastards stamp a seal."
I looked at her with an expression that openly admitted prior scheming.
"Coming from the man who started a revolution, that sounds a little rich... What did you do?"
She gave me an incredulous look. Under that stare I glanced aside for a second, then laid out the second bit of groundwork I'd laid that day.
"I hired shills."
"Shills? The only people there were creditors and bodyguards."
"I turned some of the creditors into shills."
"H-how?"
"Not every creditor carries the same grudge or rage. Through introductions I approached a few merchants who'd kept good relations with the family for decades. I promised them priority repayment and asked them to play along."
That was the second scheme.
Turn a handful of creditors to our side. Let them sit in their rightful seats and act as shills without anyone suspecting a thing.
"Groveling on the floor wouldn't even be enough! How dare a debtor wench stand there so brazenly! Someone drag that bitch over by the hair!"
We goaded the ones who enjoyed roughing up debtors, clapped along, and when the auction came up we let them pick fights with each other. I dangled the bait of maybe shouldering the debt, maybe not, stirring their sense of crisis. The shills kept the room so chaotic the others never had time for deep thought.
In the end the creditors lost any chance to scrutinize the ledgers carefully.
"I'll stamp it!"
Once they stamped, the shills' job was done.
My heart had dropped when Elder Jang of the Man-Geum Money House still noticed something even in that mess, but luckily he had been Grandfather's close friend. He ended up playing the decisive shill role that got every last seal on every last document.
"Roughly twenty years. Live frugally and you can clear it in that time. If you take on broker work like I mentioned before, it could shrink even more. A hell of a lot better than ending up on the street, right?"
Broker work.
The Baek family's businesses would vanish, but the Baek family's personal network would remain. Buying a new fabric shop didn't mean the silk contracts automatically transferred. Using her status as the sole heir, she could introduce people and take commissions, chipping away at the debt even faster.
In a world where people take out thirty-year mortgages with every scrap of credit just to buy an apartment, picking up a building on the main street in exchange for a repayable debt was a genuine bargain.
Far better for Hwarin to keep the building and a manageable debt than to dump everything on her vanished mother, lose the bookstore, and end up sleeping in the gutter.
"You really are..."
After hearing the full story, Hwarin's eyes trembled as she looked at me.
Pretty moving, right? Perfect solution, don't you think? So hire me already.
I stepped closer, took one of her hands in mine, and covered it with my other hand.
"Glad you didn't give up in despair and decided to reach out instead, right?"
"Y-yeah."
Why was she avoiding my eyes? Was she about to cry? Hwarin lowered her head, ducking my gaze.
"I'll keep helping from now on. Let's do well together."
In a gentle voice I nudged her toward stamping the seal on an imaginary employment contract.
"H-how long are you going to help?"
"For the time being?"
"...For twenty years?"
No. First we need to get famous, don't we? Don't you have the confidence to pay off the debt?
"What, scared you won't be able to pay it back?"
"N-no, it's not that."
"I won't set a limit. I'll keep helping as long as it takes. And if things get unexpectedly worse, we can just drop everything and run away together overnight."
If time passed and debt repayment proved harder than expected, we could always flee together. Keep writing hard, use the printing press to mass-produce fame, and something was bound to stick. Once we reached that point, I could make Hwarin my bodyguard and tour the world if I wanted.
"...Do you even know what you're saying right now?"
"Did I say something wrong?"
I'll help with everything I've got, so help me with my fame-making novels. Was the wording too hard?
"Haa. No. You'd never mean it that way. Just my own ridiculous delusions again."
When Hwarin lifted her head, her eyes no longer trembled. Instead she looked at me with a complicated, bittersweet expression.
What's with her?
"Heh. Yunho."
She gave a small laugh at my blank face and called my name.
"Yeah?"
"Thank you. Truly. I'll keep repaying this kindness for a long time."
Hwarin placed her free hand over the back of mine and gripped our joined hands tightly. On her face I saw none of the despair or defeat from a few days ago—only hope for the road ahead.
"Not sleeping?"
In the cleaned-up bookstore attic, Hwarin lay on the bed and called out to me as I sat at the desk.
"You go first."
I answered while grinding ink.
"What are you doing?"
"Thinking of writing a novel."
"A book? Don't tell me it's The Tale of Hong Gildong?!"
She hurriedly flung the blanket off and sat up.
"No. Just trying to write some storybooks that might actually sell."
"Hmm... We start work tomorrow, so don't overdo it. Get some sleep."
Having lost interest the moment she learned it wasn't Hong Gildong, she pulled the covers back up and lay down again.
I set the inkstone aside and began wetting the brush.
It had been a long road getting here.
The incident was finally settled. From now on I only needed to run the bookstore and keep writing.
What should I write?
If fame was the goal, starting with a popular genre made sense. So what should it be? This world did have a genre that sold especially well commercially.
Erotica.
Should I write erotica, then? Dive straight into the modern brand of raw, stimulating smut?
No.
I, Kang Yunho, still hadn't forgotten the day I wrote Tale of the Wind-Cloud Hero. I still remembered howling at the world that day. Without a printing press I might have no choice, but I refused to completely abandon writing wuxia in this world.
So should I write wuxia?
Was stubbornly challenging a genre doomed to fail the true spirit of a writer?
No. A real writer writes something that satisfies both himself and the readers of this world.
I already had a genre I'd been mulling over for months. That was what I would write.
Erotica that wasn't quite erotica, wuxia that wasn't quite wuxia—
Exactly this.
Let's write smut-wuxia.