But that was as far as her composure went.
Muller’s final arrow.
It was the most dreadful phrase imaginable to the merchants of the trading city of Pelua—practically a death sentence.
[A special tax audit by the Tax Bureau directly under the mayor.]
“Haa…… So it’s finally here. I’ll be honest, even I’m nervous about this one.”
Ayla bit her lip, her face drained of color.
Normally, she would have faced it head-on with confidence, but a tax audit was different.
No matter how well a business was doing, no matter how clean a trading company was, if a venomous tax officer made up his mind to dig through the ledgers, he would inevitably find something to nitpick.
Accounting in this era was sloppy and rule-of-thumb, with the owner’s personal funds and the company’s public funds mixed together, and missing receipts a frequent occurrence.
On top of that, the inspector dispatched this time was a fanatical stickler for rules, known even within Pelua’s Tax Bureau as the “Mad Hound.”
“We need to reconcile the cash flow in the vault immediately. Where did we put the receipt for yesterday’s wholesale payment? Good heavens, how are we supposed to prove the purchase prices of all these machine parts?”
As Ayla floundered in panic amid the pile of documents, I lightly tapped her on the shoulder.
“Calm down. As my partner, you just need to go outside and sell the goods brilliantly. I’ll take care of the housework.”
“What do you mean, you’ll take care of it! The people storming in here are Pelua’s finest accountants!”
The next morning.
The door to the Golden Fleece’s temporary accounting office slammed open, and three tax officers in black suits marched in.
“We are placing the ledgers and vault of the Carnoble Factory under full freeze. If even a single discrepancy is found, we will immediately issue a business suspension on charges of tax evasion.”
The chief tax officer, Gillian—commonly called the “Hound”—flashed his glasses as he set a large abacus and an ink bottle down on the table.
His eyes already blazed with murderous intent, as if he meant to tear this arrogant upstart factory to shreds.
As Ayla swallowed dryly and took a step back behind me, I smiled leisurely and placed five thick leather-bound ledgers in front of them with a thud.
“Welcome, Tax Officer Gillian. Everything you’re looking for should be right here.”
Gillian snorted.
There was no way the accounts of a factory that ran dozens, hundreds of workers and produced astronomical quantities of goods could be organized in a mere five books.
There were surely holes riddled through them somewhere.
“Let us see this grand fraud of Carnoble’s, then.”
And it was obvious that he, Gillian, would be the one to expose that fraud.
He opened the first ledger.
And then, a mere ten minutes later.
Click. Click. Click.
The speed of Gillian’s fingers flicking the abacus beads began to slow.
Deep furrows appeared between his once-fastidious brows, and a bead of cold sweat trickled down his forehead.
“……What is this?”
What he was facing was not the common “single-entry bookkeeping” used by merchants in this fantasy world.
Single-entry bookkeeping merely listed income and expenses.
But Carnoble’s method was different.
Assets and expenses, liabilities and capital, revenues—all perfectly divided left and right, balanced in symmetry. The flower of modern capitalism, an art of mathematics.
Double-entry bookkeeping.
“Revenue, raw cotton purchases, worker wages, depreciation of gears and belt equipment, even the transportation margin incurred when handing goods over to outside wholesalers. Everything is classified by category.”
I explained leisurely, fingers interlaced behind my head.
“And amazingly, the totals on both sides match without even a 0.01 percent discrepancy.”
As if he couldn’t believe it, Gillian frantically flipped through the second and third ledgers.
“What on earth is this line-by-line cost calculation?! Why are the price of three drops of spinning oil used to weave one bolt of cloth and ten minutes’ worth of wages for one worker divided into the cost?!”
“Because that’s how we calculate the exact net profit produced by the factory’s machines. Take a look at the inventory turnover records too. Under the first-in, first-out principle, we’ve reduced the cost of inventory rotting in the warehouse to zero.”
“Then what about the twenty pounds of cotton written off last week because rats gnawed through it in the warehouse! Surely you omitted that from the ledgers!”
“Ah, that? We deducted it as a non-operating loss, then reclassified it as unusable material and recycled it as stuffing for the sofas in the workers’ lounge. The receipt and disposal record are attached at the bottom right of page 72 in volume four. It isn’t subject to taxation.”
“……!”
Gillian’s glasses slipped down the bridge of his nose.
Purchases, sales, loss tracking, the perfect separation of fixed costs and variable costs.
The more the tax officer turned the pages, the more his once-sharp voice gradually sank, intimidated.
To the merchants of this world, these concepts must have seemed as foreign as an alien language. But to me, who had lived obsessed with differential equations and engineering mathematics in modern South Korea, numbers of this level were nothing more than a natural and fundamental weapon.
Because numbers never lie.
“…….”
After a full six hours of auditing.
Tax Officer Gillian weakly set the quill in his hand down on the table.
His eyes were no longer those of a hound.
They were almost reverent, like those of a believer standing before a perfect work of art.
“Tax Officer, is there anything at all you can nitpick? I’m prepared to sign the fine notice.”
At my mischievous question, Gillian rubbed his face dry and let out a deep sigh.
“This is…… a revolution in accounting.”
“Pardon?”
“In all my life—no, since the founding of Pelua’s Tax Bureau…… I have never seen ledgers organized this perfectly. I can see, as transparently as flowing water, where and how every tax is calculated.”
He rose from his seat and bowed to me with utmost courtesy.
It was the complete surrender of the once-arrogant tax officer.
“Acting Chief Merchant Carnoble. I apologize for daring to doubt you. This ledger system is a textbook that every trading company in Pelua should kneel down and learn from.”
Three days later.
An official document arrived from the Tax Office to the Golden Fleece Trading Company and our factory.
Naturally, it was neither a business suspension order nor a notice of fines.
With trembling hands, Ayla read the document bearing a golden seal.
[In the name of the Pelua Commercial Council, we recognize the Carnoble Factory’s accurate bookkeeping and transparent, faithful tax payment. Accordingly, simplified customs verification procedures shall be granted for all large-scale wholesale transactions shipped from said factory hereafter.]
A customs-clearance express pass.
An invincible free pass that a merchant couldn’t buy even with money had dropped into our laps—one that would let us send goods smoothly to other countries without inspection!
Of course, the council had its own calculations in granting this benefit.
The only thing produced at that factory was cotton fabric, and my cotton fabric was ultimately something that had to be sold outside the city.
Still, although there had been a few procedures involved before, even those procedures had now been removed, so it was undeniably a benefit.
Call it compensation for the high-intensity tax investigation.
“Ha, haha…… Hahahaha!”
After reading it, Ayla burst into laughter like someone who had lost her mind, then clutched her forehead and collapsed onto the sofa.
“Hey, Elpanso. At this point, I’m seriously starting to feel sorry for that pig bastard Muller.”
“Why?”
“Why, you ask? The harder that bastard works to torment us, staying up all night and throwing money around…… the more we end up getting a safety certification that says we won’t catch fire, the enthusiastic support of the weavers, a ten-year repair right, and now even benefits from the Tax Bureau! The more he attacks, the crazier thick our walls get!”
Ayla was right.
The trials Muller had thrown at us had instead clad the Carnoble brand in an invincible armor called “absolute trust.”
I lightly fiddled with the clockwork pendant on the desk and chuckled.
“Exactly.”
My gaze had already gone beyond the Muller Trading Company, toward the far greater markets of the continent.
“An ignorant fool who doesn’t even understand the essence of rules and regulations should never swing the blade of the system carelessly. He won’t even realize his own wrist is being cut off.”
*
The massive domed meeting hall of the Commercial Council.
It was right after the series of administrative bombardments instigated by the Muller Trading Company—fire safety, river management, taxation, and petitions from the weavers’ guild—had all been refuted before Elpanso’s flawless system, only proving the factory’s legality instead.
The chairman of the council picked up the gavel with a weary face.
“With this, all charges and complaints against the Carnoble Factory have been concluded to be without basis. If there are no further objections, this hearing shall be……”
“Please wait a moment, Chairman.”
Tap, tap.
Just before the gavel came down.
I, seated at the witness stand, leisurely raised my hand and stood.
The gazes of dozens of commercial council members in the hall, the merchants in the gallery, and Chief Merchant Muller—who had been nervously biting his nails in the corner—all turned to me at once.
“You still have something to say, Acting Chief Merchant Elpanso?”
At the chairman’s question, I bowed politely.
“Yes. Since the Pelua Commercial Council has taken precious time to prove the perfection of our factory, I too would like to propose an important bill for the advancement of Pelua’s commerce.”
“A proposal…… Speak.”
I glanced at Muller in the gallery and smiled.
The defensive battle was over.
From here on, it was time to seize the blade of the system that he had thrust at me, and use it to cut off his neck.
“I strongly request the introduction of a bill mandating [quality and specification labeling] for all cotton fabrics produced and distributed in Pelua.”
In an instant, the meeting hall fell silent, as if cold water had been poured over it.
“The exact length and width of one bolt of cotton fabric, the density of the thread, and even the shrinkage rate upon washing. All figures must be clearly marked on the edge of the cloth, and if the actual specifications differ from those figures, the trading company shall be subject to heavy fines and business suspension.”
Murmur, murmur!
No sooner had I finished my proposal than Pelua’s old-guard merchants rose up in protest.
And at the forefront was Chief Merchant Muller, who had been pale just moments ago, now bursting out with his belly jiggling as he pointed an accusing finger.
“Puhahahaha! He’s insane! That wretched bastard has finally dug his own grave!”
With veins bulging, Muller launched into an impassioned speech to the council members.
“Council members! Since time immemorial, cloth is something shaped by human hands! Depending on the weaver’s skill, the day’s humidity, and the tension of the loom, it is only natural that the length may stretch a little or the width may narrow, is it not!”
“That’s right! Chief Merchant Muller is right!”
The owners of the handicraft trading companies all nodded in agreement at once.
Muller sneered at me triumphantly.
“No matter how fast your machines may be, how could you possibly match the measurements of a piece of cloth without even an inch of error? Business suspension if the numbers are wrong? Ha! Do you intend to shut down every textile trading company in Pelua? Or do you wish to close your own factory first!”
A perfect delusion born of arrogance.
Toward the foolish neck Muller had thrust out before me, I slowly raised the guillotine of mechanical engineering.