A New Weapon for the Ministry
"Are you telling the wife of a nobleman to engage in trade?!"
"It is not mere trade, but the acquisition of prime assets at a bargain. At yesterday's royal audience, I had all the directors of the Daedong Merchant Group—the ones who held Hanyang's commerce in the palm of their hands—sent into exile."
"The... the Daedong Merchant Group?!"
"Indeed. Since their leadership committed crimes akin to high treason, their personal estates and grand tile-roofed houses will be confiscated by the state treasury within days. However, the empty shell of the merchant group itself, along with the massive debts they accumulated across the market to fund their operations, will remain entirely in circulation."
At my words, my wife's eyes wavered slightly. I reached into the chest, picked up a silver ingot, and placed it in her soft hand. Her shoulders flinched at the cold touch of the metal.
"When the sun rises tomorrow, the brokers who fear they will never see their money again will dump the merchant group's debt documents onto the market for pennies. I want you to buy up every single one of those debt certificates using this silver. You can register the ownership under your father's name, or perhaps a relative's."
"Buy up... debt documents?"
"Exactly. You will become the Daedong Merchant Group's largest creditor. Then, in exchange for forgiving their debts, you will legally seize their warehouses and distribution networks."
My wife stared blankly down at the silver ingot in her hand. I had half-expected her to wave her hands in refusal, citing the dignity of the gentry. Instead, her brilliant mind seemed to already be spinning. Her eyes gleamed with a sharp, calculating light, as if dozens of business ventures utilizing this massive capital and the Daedong distribution network were flashing through her head.
"Once that is done, countless goods and pieces of information from Hanyang—and indeed, all eight provinces of Joseon—will pass through your hands. I need a perfect, trustworthy gatekeeper of our treasury to quietly launder those funds into cash through the Daedong Merchant Group, circulate them back into the market, and grow our family's private reserves. I want you to become the chief director of the merchant group and pull the strings from behind the scenes."
"...So you wish for me to swallow another's well-tilled field whole and reap the harvest. If so, what should I do with the profits we generate?"
"Whether you buy grand tile-roofed estates, dress in the finest silks, or expand the merchant group's reach—do as you please. The choice is entirely yours."
At my unprecedented delegation of authority, a faint but unprecedentedly vibrant smile spread across her lips.
"Did you truly think I would be satisfied with a few tile-roofed houses and silk dresses, husband?"
She gripped the cold silver ingot tightly, a fierce ambition flashing across her elegant features—a look that seemed entirely at odds with her refined demeanor.
"Since you have provided such immense seed capital... I shall dare to bring half of all commerce in Joseon's eight provinces under our family's feet."
"Hahaha! Splendid. With you watching my back, I shall never have to look over my shoulder."
I laughed heartily and rose from my seat.
The next morning, on the Avenue of Six Ministries outside the palace. It was early, and the thick fog that had settled overnight had not yet cleared. My steps toward the Gungigam ground to a halt at a commotion ahead.
"Tsk, tsk. What use is such a grand stature? The fellow has nothing in his head and fails every single exam."
"He calls himself the son of a noble family, yet he casts aside poetry and the classics to carry around those dusty military manuals day in and day out. I heard he failed the provincial exam yet again."
A group of passing elderly scholars clicked their tongues, openly mocking someone. Naturally, my gaze drifted toward the man they were ridiculing.
A chronic failure, they say... but what a massive build.
Contrary to the scholars' sneers, the man's appearance was remarkably striking. One would usually picture a pathetic, haggard creature when imagining a scholar who failed repeatedly, but the youth standing before me was tall, broad-shouldered, and physically imposing.
The man walked on with an utterly dry, indifferent expression, seemingly entirely unfazed by the old scholars' mockery.
Then, thud. Jostled by the crowd, a worn book slipped from his robes and fell to the ground. It landed right at my feet.
I instinctively bent down and picked it up. It was not the Analects or the Mencius that a civil service candidate would normally carry. On the cover of the tattered book, the characters for the Zuo Zhuan—the chronicle of political intrigue and warfare—were clearly inscribed.
"Excuse me. You dropped this."
As I held out the book, the man stopped in his tracks and looked up. In that instant, our gazes locked in the misty air.
Was he barely twenty? Up close, his face still held the traces of youth.
"......Thank you."
The man politely accepted the book. Yet, in the fleeting moment our eyes met, the brilliance in his gaze was far too sharp to belong to a chronic failure. No, it went beyond mere intelligence—there was a peculiar, piercing keenness flashing within them.
Clear and sharp.
After the man silently tucked the book away and vanished into the fog, Jincheol, standing beside me, tilted his head and muttered.
"Brother. Is something wrong?"
"No... It's just that he dropped his book."
Just as I gave a casual reply and prepared to walk on, I noticed a small object lying on the damp, foggy ground where the man had stood. It must have slipped from his robes along with the book.
I bent down to pick it up. It was a small, crudely carved wooden piece, about the size of two finger joints.
"What is that? A chess piece?"
At Jincheol's question, I rolled the wooden piece in my palm. It was shaped differently from a standard Korean chess piece. This was a military tactical marker, used to map out and simulate troop formations on a map.
A scholar preparing for the civil exams carrying hand-carved tactical markers instead of brushes and inkstones...
No wonder he failed every exam testing the standard Four Books and Three Classics. Letting out a soft chuckle, I slipped the smooth wooden piece into my robes.
"Well, that's enough of a morning stroll. Let's get moving."
"Brother, are we finally heading to the Gungigam?"
Jincheol's eyes gleamed as he toyed with the sword at his waist, but I smirked and turned my steps not toward the Gungigam, but toward the Ministry of Taxation headquarters.
"No."
"Pardon? Didn't you win over Master Jang Yeong-sil yesterday? If we march in right now and expose the ledgers..."
"Exposing the falsified ledgers is easy. But what truly matters is where the twenty thousand catties of embezzled copper are hidden right now."
Jincheol paused.
"Do you think they sold it on the market?"
"That is highly likely. But to transform such a massive amount of copper into untraceable stolen goods, they would have had to use the secret warehouses and trade routes of a major merchant group that dominates Hanyang's commerce. If we want to trace the path they used to smuggle the copper and present undeniable proof, we need a massive net of our own."
I stared intently through the fog toward Unjong-ga, the heart of Hanyang's commerce.
Inside the Ministry of Taxation headquarters.
In a corner of my office, Gaetdong-i and several elderly accountants were huddled on the floor, groaning. Piled high before them were mountains of the Gungigam's expense ledgers and handwritten records for the year, freshly retrieved from the ministry's archives.
"Aigoo, Assistant Minister! How are we supposed to calculate all of this?"
Gaetdong-i whined, frantically arranging hundreds of bamboo counting rods, the sangaji. With those rods, even the most skilled accountant would take at least ten full days to tally and cross-verify such a mountain of ledgers.
Just then, the door burst open.
"Assistant Minister, are you in?!"
Jang Yeong-sil, covered in black soot, strode in. As the king's favored commander entered, the elderly accountants scrambled to their feet.
"Ah, you have arrived."
"I barely have enough time to melt iron for His Majesty, yet you order me around like a common carpenter. You are truly a ruthless man, Assistant Minister. Here, this is what you requested yesterday."
Though Jang Yeong-sil grumbled bluntly, his eyes shone with a strange excitement as he pulled a cloth bundle from his robes and unwrapped it on the table.
Revealed inside was an object with a frame crafted from premium ebony, holding rows of smooth beads carved from dense animal bone.
Based on the blueprint I had drawn for him yesterday, Joseon's greatest genius had hand-carved a modern abacus, a jupan, in a single night.
"I had quite a difficult time aligning the frame and ensuring the beads slide without catching."
"You have done well. As expected of Joseon's finest craftsman."
At my praise, Jang Yeong-sil stroked his beard, his eyes sparkling.
"But... when I studied abroad in the Ming Dynasty, I saw their merchants flicking a similar device called a suanpan. How does an Assistant Minister like yourself know of such merchant tools? Furthermore, the blueprint you gave me has a far more precise ratio of upper and lower beads than the Ming version, making it much easier to manipulate."
At Jang Yeong-sil's sharp inquiry, I merely smirked and picked up the jupan.
It is incomparable to the crude suanpan used by Ming merchants. This is the pinnacle of modern commercial accounting, perfected over centuries of refinement.
In my past life, the foundation of my mathematical sense had begun at an abacus academy on the second floor of a local commercial building. Memories of my childhood, carrying a yellow backpack and obsessing over certification exams, rushed back vividly as my fingertips brushed the smooth beads.
"This is no mere merchant's toy. This is the Ministry of Taxation's new weapon. But enough of that—what of the Gungigam matter I entrusted to you yesterday?"
At my question, Jang Yeong-sil snorted loudly and raised his voice.
"The messy ledgers are one thing, but as someone who has spent his entire life melting metal, what truly astounds me is their clumsy lies."
"Lies?"
"Assistant Minister. As you know, copper is not a docile material that melts like taffy the moment you put it over a fire. To boil twenty thousand catties of copper and pour it into cannon molds, the furnace's heat must be raised to the temperature of hellfire. To achieve that, high-grade oak charcoal free of impurities must be used, weighing at least three, if not four times the weight of the copper."
Jang Yeong-sil's beard trembled with excitement as he continued.
"I dug up their ash pits, and it wasn't that they hadn't burned any charcoal at all. However, there was only a pitiful amount of ash, barely enough to cast one or two cannons."
"One or two?"
"Indeed, Assistant Minister. If they had melted twenty thousand catties of copper to cast dozens of cannons, the hill behind the Gungigam should have been piled high with a small mountain of white charcoal ash and black copper slag. Yet, the ash pits were laughably small."
Jang Yeong-sil's eyes gleamed like a tiger's.
"They merely put on a show of lighting the furnaces. To deceive His Majesty and the court, they roughly melted a small amount of metal to stamp out a few dummy cannons for show."
Bingo.
This was the decisive, undeniable testimony proving that the ledgers they had submitted to secure their budget were entirely fabricated.