Golden Fleece Merchant Company, head merchant’s office.
Ayla was humming as she sorted through the mountain of gold-coin promissory notes and wholesale pre-order contracts piled on her desk.
The plain cotton fabrics being spat out by the Carnoble factory were devouring markets at a terrifying pace, reaching beyond Fellua and into neighboring countries.
“Elpanso, look at this. A merchant house from the Southern Union contacted us, saying they want to sign for next year’s volume too, with an advance payment on top. Even if we expand our warehouses tenfold, it still won’t be enough!”
Her emerald eyes sparkled with delight.
Even the profits from the golden age of Grand Merchant Theodore Carnoble, once a legend of Fellua, seemed shabby compared to the immense wealth she and Elpanso were now raking in.
I lay stretched out on the sofa, testing the tensile strength of a freshly woven cotton fabric sample, and answered indifferently.
“Why expand the warehouses? We can just load the goods onto the wholesalers’ wagons as soon as they come out. Inventory is a waste of fixed costs. It comes in, gets woven, and goes out. As long as we maintain that perfect three-beat rhythm, we’ll make money just by breathing.”
“I know, I know! At this rate, we might be able to buy the chairman’s seat on the Fellua Commercial Council within a month!”
Just as Ayla shouted boldly and reached for a bottle of champagne—
Bang!
The heavy oak door of the office flew open as if it would shatter, and the Golden Fleece Merchant Company’s logistics manager and procurement officer rushed in, their faces deathly pale.
“Head Merchant! Grand Head Merchant! T-terrible news!”
“How exactly are you opening doors around here?! What is it that has you making such a fuss?”
Ayla snapped with a frown, but the two officers were trembling with fear.
“The cotton… The cotton supply has been cut off!”
“What? What are you talking about? We clearly paid the southern plantation owners in advance yesterday at twice the price for this month’s raw materials!”
“Th-that is…”
The procurement officer swallowed dryly and held out a sheet of parchment with trembling hands.
“Last night, someone went around to every major southern plantation owner and paid cash at ‘five times’ the purchase price we offered, buying up every bit of cotton to be harvested this year! They even said they would cover all the penalties and unilaterally broke their contracts with us!”
“Five times?! Are they insane?! They bought raw materials for more than the retail price of the cotton fabric? What madman would take such a loss—!”
The moment Ayla snatched the document and checked the sender’s seal—
Her voice cut off.
Her emerald eyes widened as if they would split, and the color drained from her cheeks in an instant.
“…Obsidian.”
A despairing word slipped from Ayla’s lips.
“Obsidian? Who’s that?”
When I sat up and asked, Ayla answered, her hand shaking as she held the document.
“Valerius… A true monster who controls the trade routes and capital not only of Fellua, but of the entire southern continent. Someone incomparable to Muller. The man who reigned as the king of Fellua after your father’s death.”
No sooner had Ayla finished speaking than the logistics manager fell flat on the floor and cried out.
“It isn’t just the materials! This morning, hundreds of wagons from wholesalers who were supposed to take goods from our factory out to the continent are all turning back at the borders and major checkpoints!”
“Why?! The goods are guaranteed, so why can’t they cross the border?!”
“The foreign lords and border guards controlling the checkpoints suddenly raised the tolls. Only for wagons bearing the Carnoble mark, they’re demanding ‘twenty times’ the existing toll!”
“T-twenty times…?”
“The wholesalers say the belly has grown bigger than the boat, and that the numbers don’t work at all anymore. They’re flooding to our factory demanding refunds, and they’re on the verge of rioting! This too is all the result of the Obsidian Merchant Company pouring enormous political funds into foreign lords and sealing the borders!”
Silence.
An icy stillness descended upon the luxurious office.
The head of Obsidian, Valerius.
He did not play petty games with flimsy administrative regulations or fire inspections like Muller had.
Overwhelming capital.
With a tower of gold coins so massive and violent it was almost brutish, he had crushed the logic of the market itself.
“Hah, ha…”
Ayla staggered and braced herself against the desk.
As a merchant, the catastrophe this situation meant was all too clear in her mind.
“Elpanso… We’re finished.”
She muttered in a hollow voice.
“If raw material procurement is cut off? In three days, every machine in the factory stops. If the machines stop, the wages for hundreds of workers vanish.”
“…”
“And the exit is blocked too. Tens of thousands of bolts of cotton fabric we’ve already made can’t pass through the checkpoints and are piling up like mountains in our warehouses. The wholesalers are demanding refunds, and storage fees are increasing exponentially. Goods are overflowing, but the cash we can use right now is drying up like blood being drained from our veins!”
So-called “Black Bankruptcy.”
The gears of the factory had been perfectly crushed between the jaws of a giant predator.
A beast with its mouth blocked and its outlet sealed would ultimately be unable to bear its own bulk and die with its belly burst open.
“Right now… We need to send someone to Valerius right now! Ask him to arrange negotiations, even if I have to kneel—”
Just as Ayla shouted in panic—
“K-khup…”
A sound like air leaking out escaped from between my lips, which had been silent until then.
It soon turned into a low chuckle.
“Kahahahaha! Ahahahahahahat!”
In the end, I clutched my stomach and burst into mad laughter loud enough to shake the office.
The bewildered Ayla and the two managers stared at me as if they had seen a ghost.
“Hey, Elpanso! Have you lost your mind?! You’re laughing right now? The blade of the guillotine just fell on our necks!”
“Ahaha… Kh, sorry. No, it’s just too perfect.”
I wiped away the tears at the corners of my eyes and slowly rose from the sofa.
Fear? Despair?
The emotion boiling up in my chest was not something so shallow.
Rather, it was a terrible joy and thrill, like what a starving beast felt when it finally discovered true prey.
“This is exactly what I was waiting for.”
When my eyes began to gleam a fierce blue, Ayla flinched and stepped back.
“W-waiting? You were waiting for your leash to be cut?”
“Leash? Ayla, I’ll admit that this Valerius or whatever he is is a truly clever merchant. He perfectly understands the principles of capitalist monopoly and market cornering.”
I walked to the window and looked down at the dusty continental trade road that stretched endlessly beyond Fellua.
“But he made one fatal mistake. He tried to judge ‘engineering’ by a merchant’s yardstick.”
“Engineering…?”
“That’s right. He blocked our raw materials and choked off the checkpoints, severing the existing ‘overland trade routes,’ didn’t he? Then the answer is very simple.”
I turned back and smiled like a beast.
“We just don’t step on the land they’re guarding.”
“What do you mean, don’t step on the land?! Are the wagons going to fly through the sky or something?! The continent’s gates and roads are already tied to the lords and Valerius’s purse strings—”
“Who said anything about using wagons? A lord’s territory? Border gates? We can ignore all of that and take that ‘Rene River’ flowing beside our factory out to sea, then break straight through to the free trade port.”
“Go out to sea by river? Are you insane? Drifting downstream is one thing, but we’d have to carry that massive cargo through rough currents and headwinds! With sailboats or galleys rowed by slaves, it’s a brutal waterway that could never be crossed with that scale of cargo in time!”
“Sails? Oars?”
Ayla, do you visit those kinds of sites?
I snorted and walked over to my personal safe in the corner of the office.
The heavy iron door opened, and from inside, I pulled out a bundle of parchments I had secretly spent night after night covering with ink over the past few months.
Flutter!
The blueprint unfurled from my hands and covered Ayla’s desk.
Ayla’s emerald eyes froze when she saw it.
“Wh-what is all this? Some huge iron barrel… And what are these giant waterwheels attached to both sides of the ship?”
“I told you before. I was going to create a monster that spits steel and fire.”
A steam engine.
Why did I intend to create it?
What was the greatest improvement the Industrial Revolution brought to humanity?
It was this.
“Ah! The steam engine you mentioned! But that goes into a ship? This can be the solution?”
A logistics revolution.
Through the development of the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution, humanity experienced the miracle of a world as vast as the universe suddenly shrinking in an instant.
It was like a warp revolution had occurred for modern people, bringing the distances between planets closer.
Britain and France were neighboring countries, but Britain and Qing China might as well have been races from alien planets on a completely different dimension.
But because of the steam engine, they met.
This blueprint.
A cross-section of a bizarre and overwhelming ship mechanism that common sense in another world could never understand.
A cylindrical boiler.
Fire tubes filling its interior.
A heavy crankshaft that converted the pistons’ linear motion into rotational motion to turn the waterwheels on both sides of the hull.
And a massive hull to carry all that cast iron and cleave through the current.
The absolute power that propelled human civilization into an entirely different dimension.
The miracle of converting thermal energy into mechanical energy.
It was a [steamboat].
I pointed with my finger at the core of the blueprint for the dazed Ayla.
“Listen carefully. If you boil water, it becomes steam, right? Steam has an explosive nature, trying to expand to as much as 1,700 times the original volume of water. I’m going to trap the explosive force of that boiling water inside this steel cylinder, and use that power to spin the giant waterwheels on both sides of the ship like mad.”
“You’re going to… boil water to move a ship? It’s not even a mage’s wind magic. Is that possible?!”
“It’s a ‘law of physics,’ far greater and more honest than magic.”
I planted both hands on the desk and declared in a thunderous voice to the three people before me.
“Wind is fickle, and sailors who row oars get tired. If the wind doesn’t blow, you have to sit still in the middle of the sea for days.”
In my mind, the great inventions of the age of steel and steam that I had learned of as Kang Woojin were blazing.
“But this thing I’m going to make, this ‘iron ship,’ doesn’t care what the wind thinks! Whether there’s a storm or the current is running against it, it will simply devour pitch-black coal, drink water, spew endless fire and steam, crush nature underfoot, and move forward!”
Ayla’s jaw trembled as she looked down at the blueprint.
Her merchant’s instincts were warning her that the bizarre scribbles before her eyes were a devil’s scripture that would overturn the world’s trade paradigm from its very roots.
“This monster won’t run on the old dirt roads controlled by Valerius. Who cares if the lords collect taxes at the borders! We’ll load goods from the riverbank in front of the factory, tear across the sea against the wind, and shoot straight to the free trade port!”
“Th-then… how much cargo can it carry?”
The logistics manager swallowed dryly and asked in a stammer.
I grinned and spread my fingers wide.
“Five large sailing ships’ worth? Ten?”
“No. We’ll sweep hundreds of wagonloads of cotton fabric into one big ship, and cross a sea route that used to take days in just half a day.”
“Hundreds of wagonloads at once… in half a day…?!”
A breathless silence.
Into the minds of those who had been on the brink of suffocation, crushed beneath Valerius’s colossal capital, the image of a steel beast tearing apart all those nooses with overwhelming force and racing upstream along the Rene River and the sea was branded with searing intensity.
“Ayla.”
I extended my hand toward the frozen Ayla.
“If the enemy predator has cut off the land-based lifeline, then we’ll simply dominate the ecosystem of the waterways itself and create the next level. A commercial war? No. From this moment on, this is a revolution.”
“Ha… Haha.”
From Ayla’s lips, which had been submerged in the abyss of despair, a crazed, hollow laugh soon leaked out.
She rubbed her face with both hands, then looked up at me with her eyes filled with vicious venom and greed.
“Fine. Let’s do it, then. That mad old Valerius tried to strangle me? Good. While he spends his whole life breathing dust and guarding tollgates, we’ll pass by covering the sea in black smoke!”
Ayla slammed her fist down and shouted to the two managers.
“Shut down thirty percent of the factory’s weaving lines immediately! Divert every bit of labor and maintenance cost saved there into implementing Elpanso’s design! Bring every engineer from the Fellua shipyards and every dwarven blacksmith from the northern mountains to the banks of the Rene River, with mercenary escorts attached! Buy up the entire supply of those cheap black stones rolling around the market!”
“B-but Head Merchant! We’re short on cash right now…”
“Start with my personal mansion, then the company’s wagons, furniture, and even the necklace around my neck—shove it all into pawnshops and turn it into cash!! Before Valerius starves us to death, we’re going to put this steel ship on the water!”
At the command of the woman gripped by madness, the two managers hurriedly fled the office.
I looked out the window behind me, where Fellua’s red sunset was sinking.
Somewhere far to the south, Valerius was surely holding a cup of victory wine, waiting for me to crawl over on my knees.
“Wait for me, Valerius.”
In my head, the rough blast of a ship’s horn, vividly remaining in Kang Woojin’s memories, was already beginning to strike my eardrums.
“I’ll show you what a real monster is, as I come charging into your very sea, spewing black smoke.”