#004.
The nights of the trade city Pellua were always dazzling.
Especially in the finest banquet hall of the First Commercial District, where the continent’s wealth gathered.
The Golden Chalice.
Tonight, too, it was bright as day, thronged with people.
The heads of the great families who held Pellua in the palms of their hands, and the head merchants of trading companies.
Dressed to the nines in brilliant silk gowns and tailcoats embroidered with gold thread, they gathered in clusters of three and five, clinking crystal glasses.
Though most of them had been born commoners, those who had seized immense wealth were wont to imitate the elegant banquets of the nobility.
Amid the strains of a classical string quartet, the true delicacy they enjoyed most at such banquets was laid upon the table.
After all, when it came to strengthening bonds, there was no finer ingredient than chewing someone to pieces behind their back.
And in Pellua, the finest prey to chew on had long since been decided.
“Hahaha! Have you heard the story? About that foolish young master of the former Carnoble Trading Company.”
The head merchant of the Muller Trading Company, whose belly jutted out like a mountain, opened the topic with a sneering laugh.
At once, the eyes of the merchants gathered around him gleamed with interest.
“Ah, you mean that legendary wastrel, Elpanso? How could we not know?”
“Who could forget the great achievement of driving one of the continent’s foremost trading companies into the gutter in a single year? They say that as soon as his father died, he sold off the company’s mining rights to the backers of gambling dens for next to nothing.”
“And is that all? When a few third-rate mercenaries off the street flattered him with ‘Great Head Merchant, sir,’ he was so pleased that he scattered a hundred gold coins on a single night’s drinking bill. I’m certain he had shit in place of brains.”
Mocking laughter burst out from every side.
The Carnoble Trading Company, once the great mountain range that had dominated Pellua.
The stupidity with which Elpanso had brought down the impregnable fortress his father had built through blood and sweat was already legend among merchants.
“He’s truly a disgrace to merchants. Isn’t he the perfect example of pearls before swine?”
“When he couldn’t even read the hidden clauses in a contract and got stripped of an entire fleet of prime merchant ships by swindlers, I thought I’d laugh my belly button clean off. Tsk, tsk.”
“Exactly. If he had blackened his father’s name that badly, shouldn’t he have bitten off his tongue and died out of shame? From what I hear, he recently crawled under someone and is working for pocket change. The bastard won’t even just die. He’s got the vitality of a cockroach.”
The merchants were cackling and gulping down wine when one of them, after gauging the mood, raised his voice toward a red-haired woman quietly tipping a glass of champagne in one corner of the banquet hall.
“Ah, now that I think of it, Head Merchant Ayla of the Golden Fleece Trading Company! There are rumors everywhere that you took in that cockroach. Is it true?”
In an instant, everyone’s gaze turned to her.
Ayla Winchester, the young rising power who had lately been advancing most fiercely in Pellua.
She languidly rolled her emerald eyes and lightly swirled her champagne glass.
“Ah, you mean that man?”
With an enchanting smile on her red lips, Ayla sighed very naturally and gave her excuse.
“What could I do? No matter how much of a piece of trash he may be, he was still a childhood friend I played with since we were snot-nosed little children. I couldn’t bear to watch him starve to death in the street, so I tossed him a job in a corner of the warehouse as an act of charity.”
“Ooh! As expected of Head Merchant Ayla!”
“To take in that unrivaled wastrel—you are as saintly in heart as you are in beauty!”
“But do be careful. His stupidity may infect your trading company. Hahaha!”
The merchants praised Ayla’s benevolence and once again poured out their contempt toward Elpanso.
Ayla lifted her glass with a suitable smile, as though humoring them.
However.
Hidden behind the crystal glass, Ayla’s eyes had sunk colder than ever.
‘These idiots. Their mouths are certainly good at flapping.’
Ayla clicked her tongue.
Outwardly, she played along with their tune, but inwardly, she could not stop laughing in disbelief.
A fool? A cockroach?
Do you even know whom you’re evaluating right now?
In Ayla’s mind, the events that had taken place over the past few days in the underground workshop of her trading company vividly flashed by.
After receiving the investment funds she had given him, Elpanso immediately hired the best blacksmiths in Pellua and shut himself inside the secret workshop.
His eyes as he hammered and shaved down lumps of metal like a madman, his face smeared with black grease—
The murky eyes once steeped in dissipation were nowhere to be found. Only ruthless conviction and cold reason shone fiercely there.
And just a few days ago.
The bizarre mechanical device Elpanso had summoned her to the workshop to show her.
‘He called it a loom, didn’t he?’
[Now, look, Ayla. This is the first machine that will change the world.]
As power was transmitted by water, the machine began to move on its own with a loud grinding noise.
Dozens of spindles spun madly at once, spewing out high-quality thread.
And the shuttle that a person should have had to throw by hand darted left and right like lightning, weaving dense fabric before her eyes.
Ayla still could not forget the chills she had felt then.
The amount of work that dozens of skilled artisans would have had to labor over for an entire day was being produced by a single prototype Elpanso had made in just one hour.
‘From cost calculations to the streamlining of the production process, that man’s head is full of monstrous knowledge.’
He was not a fool.
No, rather, he was a genius looking down at the board from a place far higher than every merchant swaggering around this banquet hall, herself included, put together.
“Excuse me, Head Merchant Muller. I heard you purchased a large quantity of the finest cotton from the south this time. Might you be able to spare some for our company…”
“Goodness, that would be difficult. These days, we barely have enough to run our own workshops.”
Watching the merchants before her bicker over petty margins, Ayla secretly twisted up the corner of her mouth.
Pitiful, ignorant fools.
Once Elpanso’s spinning machines and power looms began operating in earnest?
The handwork workshops and expensive textiles they were so proud of would become no better than scraps of paper.
The price defense line of the cotton textile market would collapse, and immense wealth would come pouring down to Elpanso and the Golden Fleece Trading Company.
No, to beneath her feet.
‘Yes, laugh all you want for now.’
Ayla drained the rest of her champagne in one breath.
‘Because the day these idiots end up on the streets, crawling as they beg that cockroach to save them… is truly not far off now.’
*
The underground secret workshop owned by the Golden Fleece Trading Company.
The loud noise of machinery filled the sealed space.
Clank! Swish! Clank! Swish!
With my arms crossed, I stared gravely at the prototype power loom as it fired its shuttle like mad and wove fabric.
‘We have a problem.’
It wasn’t that the machine wouldn’t operate.
On the contrary, its performance was too good.
Far better than I had expected.
“This is far beyond my calculations.”
The projected output of the power loom I had designed by mobilizing all of Kang Woojin’s knowledge was clearly equivalent to that of twenty or thirty weavers.
But this monster turning before my eyes was spewing out enough cloth for a full fifty.
What was the cause?
I rested my chin on my hand and carefully observed the gears transmitting power and the friction points of the shafts carved from metal.
‘The physical laws of Earth and the physical laws of this place don’t match perfectly. That’s the only explanation.’
This was a fantasy world where sword aura cleaved the air and magic existed.
The energy known as the minute traces of mana scattered through the atmosphere was clearly exerting some kind of interference on the strength of metals or the friction coefficient between components.
The energy loss rate during power transmission was abnormally low, and rotational inertia was maintained with an unnaturally smooth consistency.
At first glance, one might think that improved efficiency was cause for celebration, but from an engineer’s perspective, it was the worst possible situation.
Screeeeech—! Clang!
“Damn it!”
Sure enough, one of the core gears, unable to withstand the overload, sprang out and slammed into the wall.
At the same time, the power loom let out a shrill scream and came to a halt.
The machine’s speed and output had far exceeded the durability of its frame.
If I insisted on maintaining one hundred percent efficiency like this, it was obvious that within a day of operating the factory, the parts would shatter and workers would be killed by flying fragments.
“I need to kill the speed. Intentionally cut down the efficiency.”
I rolled up my sleeves and picked up a spanner.
A machine whose safety cannot be guaranteed is nothing but a weapon.
To secure stability to the utmost limit, I modified the gear ratios of the cogs and attached an artificial resistor to the power shaft, drastically reducing the rotational speed.
Only after forcibly dragging the efficiency down to Earth’s standards did the machine stop its metallic shrieking and begin weaving cloth in a smooth, stable rhythm.
“Phew. Now it’s finally somewhat acceptable.”
Just as I wiped the grease from my face and breathed a sigh of relief, the tightly shut workshop door opened, and Ayla appeared.
“Elpanso. Is the machine running well… Oh my heavens.”
Ayla could not finish her sentence and gaped.
During the few hours I had spent modifying the machine, a mountain of the finest cotton fabric, already as tall as a grown man, had piled up beneath the power loom.
“You’re here? Perfect timing.”
I set down the spanner and smiled at her.
“This is the amount it produced in just a few hours? And this dense weave… It’s far more precise than the work of a skilled master artisan!”
Ayla stroked the fabric with trembling hands, unable to hide her astonishment.
I lightly tapped her shoulder and brought up the practical matter.
“You can be impressed later. Let’s get to the point. The machine’s stability test is over. Now it’s time to expand the game in earnest.”
“Expand the game?”
“Of course. Did you think I made a machine like this just to run a few prototypes? Increase the investment funds.”
“What?!”
At my brazen demand, Ayla’s eyes sharply lifted at the corners.
‘Why are you pretending to be surprised?’
She already knew, didn’t she?
That I wasn’t going to run only one or two.
To begin with, how would it make any sense to swallow up the continental market with just one?
“I’m going to run hundreds each of these spinning machines and power looms. Buy a huge factory site on the outskirts of Pellua. And hire workers to fill it. The machines will be doing the work anyway, so there’s no need for skilled laborers. Cheap, unskilled workers will be enough. The first product we’ll manufacture right away will be plain cotton fabric, something even commoners can easily open their wallets for.”
I recited the next steps without hesitation.
When the tide comes in, you row.
What we needed was not to introduce machines little by little, but to launch a bombardment that would seize the continent’s cotton textile market all at once through overwhelming capital and productive power.
“We need land, a large workforce, and bulk purchases of raw materials. So hand over the money.”
Give me money, money.
All the financier needs to do is provide the funds.