Wuhan - 3
Rather than sink deeper into debt, I would sooner give up Daseogak. I had made it sound like a last stand with my back to the river — but it was a bluff all the same. Daseogak was, after all, a bookstore sitting at the very heart of Yichang's most thriving quarter.
To force a comparison with Korea: perhaps not Seoul, but imagine a flagship bookstore-and-cafe standing in the priciest shopping district of Busan. To abandon Daseogak — rooted in the busy heart of Yichang, the second city of Hubei Province — and start over from scratch would mean a detour far too long to stomach. And yet here was the Mangeum Lord, promising that if I passed his test, every last debt I owed would be wiped clean.
Temptation didn't stand a chance.
"You said this was a test of making money grow?"
The conditions were attractive. Time to ask about the details one more time.
"Every expense must remain within the sum written on that promissory note. You will keep your ledgers with perfect accuracy — and when suspicions are raised, you must be able to account for every coin."
The money on the note was no cheat-code fortune. But it was more than enough capital to launch a small venture.
"So I only need to earn it here in Wuhan?"
"That is so."
In other words: earn enough to leave the man who lent it thoroughly satisfied. To anyone else, that would feel like a straitjacket. For me, there happened to be one easy way.
Open a Daseogak branch in Wuhan and sell Dangga Pungun. Simple as that.
Dangga Pungun was already a guaranteed blockbuster. Thanks to the friendship between the Mangeum Lord and the old Lord of Baek Family Manor, the novel had barely spread through Wuhan at all.
So all I had to do was print Dangga Pungun in Yichang and sell it in Wuhan.
As for the ledger problem — dealings between branches of the same house always invite suspicion — I would simply keep the accounting transparent, handling it as an ordinary transaction between a print shop and a bookstore. Nothing to it.
This was going to be easier than I'd expected.
"With one exception: you will not make your money from novels. And that Dangga Pungun you're so proud of? Most especially not."
The Mangeum Lord spoke as though he could see every thought passing through my head.
"You're telling a writer who owns a bookstore that he can't make money from novels?"
"I have already seen your abilities. What use is there in watching a trick I've already seen?"
Somewhere out there, wasn't there a gadget that wiped memories with a flash of light? I'd gladly wear the sunglasses for it. All he'd need was one quick look.
Earn my fortune with anything but books, he said. It was like being told to play janggi with my chariot and cannon swept off the board.
"Then what are these repayment-review dates written into the documents?"
"The substance of the test is to make the money grow, but your repayment ability will be examined at set intervals. At each examination, I may attach further conditions — or loosen the ones I have just named."
So depending on how things went, he might even open the door to selling Dangga Pungun after all.
"You mean the conditions could grow harsher?"
With offers like this, before you spin the happiness circuit and dream of the upside, you check the fine print for poison pills first.
"I intend it as nothing more than a way of confirming whether you are truly the one to carry on that old Baek fellow's legacy."
The Mangeum Lord spoke with the look of a man appraising a greenhorn junior.
So that was what this test really meant.
Hwarin's maternal grandfather had made his name not only in books but across every field of commerce. From where the Mangeum Lord stood, he simply wished to see for himself whether the one who would inherit his friend's legacy possessed genuine talent.
If I proved worthy, the debt would be discharged; if I fell short, no doubt he intended to put me to work under his own roof.
Considering the size of what I owed, it was a test only the Mangeum Lord could afford to run.
"So: make money in Wuhan, a city where I have no connections, without selling a single book. In other words, start from flat broke and get rich."
I delivered the line feigning despondency, like a perennial exam retaker already convinced he'd botched question one yet again this year.
"Cannot be done?"
I gave no answer. I only watched in silence as disappointment began to settle over the Mangeum Lord's face.
It was stifling.
If only the debt were gone. If only those bastards weren't hauling my money off every single month.
Just when, in what lifetime, was I supposed to save the heroines from their fates and find the true heroine? And yet wishing didn't make the debt I owed vanish.
But what if it did vanish?
I could finally cast off my shackles and move. Plant Daseogak branches all along the Yangtze, expand the business on the offensive, and pile up reputation and fortune alike.
Succeed, and my wings would spread across the entire Central Plains. Fail, and my life would be mortgaged away — a slave to debt.
Was I so afraid of failure that I should walk away? No. My life in the Central Plains had begun without a single coin to my name, wearing nothing but rags.
The fellow who had once run himself ragged just to guard the one slice of bread he owned now stood before the Lord of Mangeum.
I had shouldered risk after risk to survive in this world. If the risk I had to shoulder this time was not for survival — but for flight...
"I'll do it."
I could carry however much it took.
"Did it go well?"
The Mangeum Lord, Jang Noya, asked the question of his Chief Steward while contemplating the bonsai arranged in his garden.
"We confirmed that Young Master Kang has entered the inn where he is staying."
"See that the money reaches him precisely on the disbursement dates written into the note."
"It will be handled fairly, and without a single mistake."
"...Chief Steward."
Watering the most lushly grown bonsai in the garden, the Mangeum Lord called to him.
"Yes, my lord."
"You know what I learned in my old age, raising these bonsai? It's a fascinating thing. Give one too much attention, and its roots rot — or it grows so frail it cannot live unless its master keeps doting on it. And yet this one here, which I scarcely spared a glance... one day I took the shears to it, just a little, and it turned out finer than any bonsai I own."
Jang Noya murmured this as he gazed, fond and unhurried, at the most vigorous plant in his garden.
Having attended the Mangeum Lord for decades, the Chief Steward studied his master's face, read what lay beneath the words, and spoke.
"When I first heard the accounts of Young Master Kang, I confess I did not believe them. That he stood his ground and talked round creditors who were veterans of a hundred battles; that he wrote a book that kept even me up all night; that he built a thing called Daseogak no one else had ever imagined — and that through it all, he never once fell behind on a debt of that magnitude."
"Heh heh heh. That is not the half of it."
"Just so. I could not learn the particulars, but they say that in Sichuan he escaped certain death through prodigious wisdom and courage. And that upon returning to Yichang, he showered good deeds upon the city while expanding his enterprises without pause. For a youth barely past his coming-of-age, it passes all belief."
The Mangeum Lord nodded, satisfied.
"And the intelligence obtained from Sichuan — was it accurate?"
"It was. Young Lady Tang Hwarin, it seems, will require some ten years of recuperation within the Sichuan Tang Clan. The two of them will likely not wed until their thirties."
The Chief Steward had verified the facts by cross-analyzing the reports from Sichuan Province against what could be gleaned through Kang Yunho himself.
"Ten years... For a man meant for great enterprise, is that not far too long to wait without a wife to stand behind him?"
It was a world where women generally married in their teens, and even among murim folk, no later than one's early twenties. A world where a man still unmarried in his thirties was regarded not merely as an old bachelor, but as somehow defective as a human being.
An inexplicable gladness had seeped into the Mangeum Lord's voice.
"Quite so. Even if a man has a woman promised to his future, in the meantime he needs a wife to keep his household — and a household that will provide one."
"Then it is settled."
The bonsai that had thrived on no one's proper care, more alive than anything else in the garden, had at some point come under one person's hands — and was growing more beautiful than any bonsai among them.
"Your daughters' sons are to gather at Mangeum Hall shortly."
The Chief Steward, who had been staring entranced at the bonsai's beauty, hurried on to the matter of his lord's schedule.
"Is that child coming as well?"
"Well, that is..."
That child. The Chief Steward knew exactly whom his lord meant, and a cold sweat broke out over him despite himself.
"Is he coming?"
"He is one who so dislikes setting foot outside... And besides, this gathering is to be attended only by those grandsons judged qualified to attend."
"And you believed that answer would suffice?"
The Mangeum Lord's voice was as cold as the shears that snip away everything useless on a bonsai.
"I-I shall send a letter at once."
"Good. See that there are no mistakes."
Leaving the bonsai behind him, the Mangeum Lord withdrew to his chambers to prepare for the outing.
Inside the carriage bound for Mangeum Hall, Jang Noya let his mind drift back to the past he had shared with a dear friend.
— Baek, old friend. What is this sudden charity? It hardly suits you. I know you lost your wife and your children, but has grief driven you out of your mind?
— I intend to leave behind people, not money.
A wife lost. Children dead — to accident, to illness. The misfortune that had visited his friend without warning was not something even Jang Noya, his dearest friend, could easily console.
And still — good deeds so lavish they began to eat into the business itself?
He fed the starving, sought out the gifted whose circumstances strangled them and bankrolled them, founded orphanages and watched over children who had lost their parents to war or calamity.
However worthy the cause, these were not things a man did lightly. And his friend did them steadily, without pause.
In those days, the Mangeum Lord had pronounced his friend mad and could not begin to understand him.
"Baek, old friend... To think it would take losing a son of my own, just as you did, before I finally understood..."
The regret of old age weighed in the Mangeum Lord's voice.
Had he watered it too much? The one who was to carry on his will — his only son, lost in a single instant.
A son begotten in his twilight years. Even when the boy set marriage aside, saying he must first learn his father's trade, the old man had been nothing but delighted.
Who could have imagined that a healthy son would be carried off by an illness no one could name?
Only then did the Mangeum Lord understand.
If I die, who will carry on my will?
Into a life spent looking at nothing but money, a vicious emptiness began to pour.
The Mangeum Lord called his departed friend to mind once more.
— Handing everything away to other people — how could that possibly leave a person behind?
— Sow, and keep on sowing, and someday a child will sprout who will carry on my will. One is all I need.
He had heard that all of Yichang mourned when his friend passed. But the one to succeed his friend's will never did appear. That was what the Mangeum Lord had believed.
His friend's one tender spot — the child of that scatterbrained daughter. That was what he had believed, right up until the day he laid eyes on his granddaughter's fiancé.
— I intend to leave behind people, not money.
— My conviction, my lord, is that commerce is not about leaving behind profit. It is about leaving behind people.
At those words from Kang Yunho, Jang Noya had, for a moment, found himself unable to speak.
The man before him stood decades removed from that friend — different hair, different face — and yet the two overlapped so completely it hurt to look.
One tree that no one had ever cared for. The bond that began with that tree had drawn up the nourishment his friend had long ago worked into the soil, grown lush and tall — and now reached, of its own accord, for the will he had left behind.
If that old Baek fellow could see it, he would be gazing at his grandson-in-law with more fondness than any grandfather alive.
In the end, the old fool had been right all along.
"Grandfather!"
The Mangeum Lord looked over the grandsons assembled before him and took the seat of honor that had been prepared.
"Take one each, all of you."
At a gesture from the Mangeum Lord, the Chief Steward dealt out the prepared bundles of paper to the grandsons gathered there.
"Grandfather, what's this?"
"Promissory notes? Are you giving us spending money, Grandfather? It's kind of small, isn't it?"
Written on the notes was a sum identical to the one granted to a certain black-haired man.
"It is a test I am setting before you."
"A test?"
"Take that note, and make money grow here in Wuhan."
Up to that point, it was word for word what he had told the black-haired man.
"What's this test even for?"
"What test... Grandfather, can't we just not do it?"
Jang Noya gave no answer. He only swept his gaze across the grandsons assembled there — among them Jeon Gilsan, the one who had kicked up such a storm in Yichang.
A stifling weight pressed on the Mangeum Lord's chest.
Jeon Gilsan was no exception. Not one of them was any different.
Money was nothing more than a means — a stair to be trampled underfoot on the climb upward. He had never wished for them to grow drunk on the wealth they held, rotting soft and weak.
Not a single one of them caught his eye.
He had married every daughter into a fine house — so how was it that this was the blood running in their sons? But they were children of daughters married out of the family; even his grandsons' upbringing lay beyond a grandfather's right to touch.
"Grandfather?"
At his grandson's voice, Jang Noya cut his brooding short.
Even children like these deserved a fair chance.
The Mangeum Lord opened his mouth to deliver a momentous declaration to his descendants.