I froze with my hand halfway to setting down my glass.
What word had I just heard? Marriage?
All of a sudden? Here?
The reason in my head and the merchant’s calculator began whirring furiously.
Why had that crafty head merchant of Winchester thrown the keyword “marriage” at me now?
‘Aha. I get it.’
I slapped my knee and nodded with an expression full of certainty.
“You’re worried the Commercial Council will try to keep us in check, aren’t you?”
“……What?”
“Once my factory’s exclusive production capacity combines with your Golden Fleece’s distribution network, our market dominance will become too great. There may soon be attempts to forcibly tear our alliance apart. To defend against that, you’re proposing a political marriage and a legal merger into one entity. Right?”
At my flawless logical deduction, Aila’s mouth fell halfway open.
Since I had started, I launched into a passionate explanation.
“But Aila, that’s far too old-fashioned. Even without entering into a contract disguised as marriage, we’re already bound by the sacred Oath of Veritas. Besides, if our assets are combined through marriage, the chance of being hit with inheritance tax or the family tax imposed by City Hall will increase exponentially. From a tax-saving standpoint, it’s the worst possible move.”
Judging that her business insight had briefly clouded over, I added a piece of sincere advice.
“We should strictly maintain a relationship of Party A and Party B, of partners. That is the most efficient way to save on taxes and distribute risk……”
“Y-you……!”
Tremble, tremble.
Before I could even finish speaking, Aila’s shoulders began shaking like an aspen leaf.
Her face, which had been flushed red like a peach just moments ago, had now turned crimson like a seething active volcano.
“What’s wrong? Did I calculate the taxes incorrectly? Or is it because of the equity ratio……”
Bang—!
Aila slammed her crystal glass onto the table hard enough to shatter it, then shot up from her seat.
“You, you really……!”
In her emerald eyes, hurt, anger, and terrible humiliation were all tangled together and exploding.
Aila grabbed the soft bundle of parchment lying on the table and flung it straight at my face.
Flutter!
“Ow! Hey! Why the hell are you suddenly throwing documents at me!”
“You’re the one acting like hell, you mechanical bastard! Taxes? Tax saaavings?!”
“No, you were the one who made a business proposal first……”
“Why are you so dense, you idiooooot!!!”
Aila shrieked loud enough to shake the office, then huffed and puffed as she snatched up her coat and stomped toward the door.
Bang!
Despite it being her own office, Aila slammed the door behind her hard enough to break it and left.
From far down the corridor, her voice echoed as she vented, “Why did I even say anything to that clueless bastard!”
“……”
Amid the scattering scraps of parchment, I was left alone on the sofa.
Scratching my head, I stared blankly at the closed door.
“Why on earth is she angry?”
Was there some other tax benefit I didn’t know about?
Or was it an issue with the internal governance restructuring of the Golden Fleece Merchant Company?
Even after mobilizing all of Kang Woojin’s engineering mathematics and Carnoble’s commercial knowledge, I couldn’t find the exact formula that would derive the reason for her anger.
“How difficult. As expected, the human heart does not operate with precision.”
I shrugged and sipped the remaining liquor.
Well, by tomorrow morning she would smell money again and return to being a perfectly normal head merchant.
What mattered to me right now was not Aila’s fickle mood, but the next blueprint to be launched with this capital.
*
The dampest, filthiest back alley in the trade city of Pelua.
“Hey! There goes that nine-ja two-chi pig bastard!”
“Swindler Mueller! Oink for us! If we measured your belly with a ruler, would even that come up short?”
Stones and rotten vegetable scraps cut through the air and thudded into a man’s back.
“Y-you bastards! Do you know who I am! I am of Pelua’s First Commercial District…… Ugh, my gold coins! My silk clothes!”
Mueller, the great merchant who had once controlled Pelua’s cotton textile market.
But now, his state was worse than that of an animal.
Driven out by the overwhelming standardization of the Carnoble Factory, he had lost all credibility. In paying astronomical fines and penalties, not only his merchant company, but even the mansion he had lived in and the underwear he had been wearing had all been seized.
Having gone half-mad, he was reduced to rummaging through trash bins, groping at empty air with unfocused eyes.
Even when the neighborhood brats jeered at him maliciously, he could not properly fight back and only drooled as he staggered backward.
It was then.
Creeeak—clack.
Tearing through the darkness of the back alley, a huge, heavy black carriage with not even a crest engraved upon it stopped before Mueller.
“Eek! W-who are you! I paid off all my debts! I have nothing left for you to take!”
Mueller shrieked and tried to hide behind a heap of garbage, but two burly men who stepped down from the carriage seized both his arms roughly, handling him like luggage.
“Let go! Let me go!”
“Be quiet, Mueller. The master calls.”
The men forced the struggling Mueller into the carriage and immediately drove toward the highest point of flat Pelua, the district where the absolute powers gathered.
“Ugh……”
Lights so dazzling they blinded the eye.
And upon a top-quality carpet thick enough for one’s feet to sink into, Mueller was thrown down.
It was the office of a luxurious mansion dripping with overwhelming wealth and power, utterly unsuited to Mueller, who gave off a foul stench that stung the nose.
“Tsk, tsk. Even for a loser, you look dreadful, Head Merchant Mueller.”
At the very center of the office, a man seated in an enormous chair lined with red velvet spoke in a languid voice.
A man lightly swirling a crystal glass filled with blood-red wine.
When Mueller recognized his face, his murky eyes widened as if they would split apart.
“G-Great Head Merchant Valerius……!”
Valerius.
The owner of the Obsidian Merchant Company, a company that controlled trade routes not only across Pelua but across the entire continent, and currently held the greatest and most powerful authority in Pelua.
“While I was away for a time, focusing on foreign trade abroad, it seems something rather amusing happened in this cramped little Pelua.”
Valerius took a sip of wine and smiled coldly.
“That stupid bastard whose breath I personally cut off finally crawled out of his coffin and bit into your neck, did he?”
Mueller’s body trembled like an aspen.
Valerius.
In the past, after Great Head Merchant Theodor had died and Elpanso had indulged in debauchery until he ruined the merchant company, Valerius had been the true “predator” who designed and manipulated that entire collapse from behind the scenes.
Mueller, a hardened merchant from Pelua’s back alleys, had more or less sensed that secret, conspiratorial truth.
“There was no easier mark than him. He spent the money his father had gathered through blood and sweat as if it were an inexhaustible spring. So I merely took the liberty of hastening the speed at which that money ran dry.”
Valerius continued at ease, as though reminiscing about pleasant memories of the past.
“Who was it that bribed that old man Barto and made him flee in the dead of night with Carnoble’s core ledgers and seals? Who put money into the hand of the captain of the guards escorting the merchant fleet bound for the southern sea route, and opened the way for him to collude with pirates? And then, the one who laundered and bought up the Carnoble goods those pirates plundered in the most legal manner and at the lowest price—every bit of that was me, in the name of the Obsidian Merchant Company.”
Everything had been carried out thoroughly within the bounds of legality, or else in perfect secrecy.
Elpanso had walked into the swamp of ruin on his own, not even knowing that he was being betrayed.
“That fool must have lamented, even as he was stripped to the bone, that he was simply unlucky or that he had trusted the wrong people. A puppet that danced splendidly on the stage I designed before collapsing.”
Valerius set his glass down on the table and looked down at Mueller with contemptuous eyes.
“But Mueller, just how incompetent are you, to hand over the entire market to that empty shell of an idiot and end up in this state? Frightened by a factory where a few bits of machinery turn, dancing to wordplay about standards and whatnot?”
A mocking sneer.
Ordinarily, Mueller would have been crushed beneath that overwhelming presence and would have smashed his head against the floor, begging to be spared.
But the instant Valerius’s arrogant voice reached the ears of a madman who had lost everything and even let go of the thread of reason—
A bizarre madness began to flash deep within Mueller’s murky eyes.
“Ke, kehehe…… Kahahahaha!”
A beastlike laugh burst from Mueller’s mouth.
As that eerie laughter echoed through the quiet office, Valerius’s brow twisted unpleasantly.
“What is so funny? Have you gone insane?”
“Insane? Hahaha! Yes, to your eyes I must look like a madman! But Valerius, you stupid, arrogant bastard…… you know nothing!”
Mueller braced himself against the floor and staggered as he raised his upper body.
There was no longer any fear of Valerius in his eyes.
There was only the overwhelming terror he had witnessed at the factory on the Rene River, and at the Commercial Council.
“The Elpanso of the past? A puppet? Fine, maybe he was. But the man he is now is not the easy mark you knew! Inside that bastard’s head are devilish calculations meant to put every merchant in Pelua—no, in this world—beneath his feet and trample them!”
“You do ramble on with nonsense.”
“You laughed at Elpanso too, didn’t you? You thought it was just bits of machinery, some petty trickery! But listen carefully, Valerius. Do you know what that bastard whispered in my ear when he crushed me to death?”
Mueller’s voice turned as chilling as a snake.
Without getting a single word wrong, he spat out the cold declaration Elpanso had made while looking down on him, the words that had frozen him to the marrow.
“The ones who take up knives and stab people are nothing but back-alley thugs. Do you know what kind of man truly devours a market?”
Valerius’s gaze wavered faintly.
“The man who first reads the essence of the rules, then builds his own enormous castle atop them. So that his competitors legally suffocate and wither to death while trying to climb those walls!”
Mueller spat bloody saliva onto the carpet and glared straight at Valerius with bloodshot eyes.
“That bastard has already finished building his castle! Pelua’s common sense, its standards, its laws! All of it is turning according to the gears he made! No matter how much you scheme behind the scenes and sharpen your knives, in the end, your neck will be severed by the guillotine of the lawful rules he established! You will become like me! No, you’ll be crushed under iron even more miserably than I was! Uahahahaha!”
A curse filled with madness saturated the office.
But in that moment—
Thud!
A kick from the bodyguard standing like Valerius’s shadow mercilessly struck Mueller in the solar plexus.
“Guh……!”
Mueller screamed like a frog and tumbled backward.
Dark red blood gushed from his mouth.
Valerius slowly rose from his seat and walked over to Mueller, who lay gasping on the floor.
On his face, there was not the slightest trace of agitation—only the cold rage of an absolute ruler.
He lifted a gleaming leather shoe and stomped on Mueller’s face.
With a crack, Mueller’s nasal bone collapsed.
“Kraaaaaagh!”
“Rules? An enormous castle? Truly romantic nonsense.”
Valerius ground Mueller’s face beneath his shoe and whispered in an icy voice.
“The barking of a defeated dog is especially loud. Remember this, Mueller. Before overwhelming capital and power, any rule, any bit of machinery, is nothing more than a toy. Just as I killed that bastard’s father and shoved him to the edge of the cliff, this time I’ll cast him and that damned factory of his into the fires of hell.”
Valerius wiped the blood from his shoe by rubbing it against the carpet, then jerked his chin at the bodyguards.
“Throw this trash out at once. And send a message in my name to that insolent bastard on the Rene River. Tell him the true master of Pelua has returned.”
The sound of Mueller’s mad laughter as he was dragged out of the office gradually faded into the distance.
“Building a castle atop the rules? Insolent brat.”
“In that case, I will shatter the very ground you stand on.”