The great merchants, their eyes overturned with greed, shoved Muller off the platform without mercy and began rushing like madmen toward Aila’s carriage.
“Now, now, form a line, a line! Don’t push! We’ll have just as much stock pouring out tomorrow, so no fighting!”
With her cheeks flushed, Aila wore the most beautiful smile in the world as she frantically swept up the flood of gold-coin pouches and order forms. Before her, a mountain of gold was piling up in an instant.
The platform emptied in the blink of an eye.
Left alone atop it, Muller’s trembling hand went slack, and the crystal wineglass slipped from his grasp.
Crash!
Even the sharp sound of glass shards scattering was swallowed by the merchants’ fervent cheers and vanished without a trace.
“Ah, aaah……”
Muller collapsed onto the platform, his face as pale as a sheet of paper, without a single drop of blood in it.
In a single day—no, in a mere ten minutes—he had lost every last customer.
The raw materials he had procured at exorbitant prices, the massive wages he would have to pay the weavers who catered to his whims, and the dreadful dead stock in his warehouses that had, in an instant, become worth less than manure and fit only to be used as firewood.
At this rate, bankruptcy was as clear as day.
No, he was destined to be buried in debt and driven out of the territory.
Thud.
With all strength gone from his legs, Muller dropped to his knees in disgrace on the cold stone floor.
His empty eyes stared blankly at Aila and me, shining radiantly in the middle of the square beneath a golden rain.
I slowly stepped down from the carriage and walked up to Muller, who was sprawled on the ground.
Beneath the sole of my shoe, the scraps of the three-year exclusive contract he had drawn up were trampled miserably.
“The… the Muller Trading Company’s…… my precious goods……”
Looking down at Muller as he muttered with unfocused eyes, half out of his mind, I bent my knee and quietly leaned in close to his greasy ear.
Then, in the most merciless, coldest voice in the world, I whispered.
“When I tried to buy land before, you got in my way and said something like this, didn’t you? That you hoped my name would never be heard on the streets of Felua.”
Muller’s fat shoulders flinched, trembling like an aspen.
I lightly tapped the collar of the man who was shaking uncontrollably and continued.
“You said a bug crawling on the ground had to be thoroughly crushed the moment it showed any promise. Didn’t you?”
“El, Elpanso…… you devilish…… monster bastard……!”
As he cursed me in a hoarse voice, I returned the arrogance he had once shown me in full, with plenty of interest, and let out a faint laugh.
“But what are we to do, Muller?”
My cold eyes flashed, taking in the entirety of his despair.
“Right now, you look exactly like a bug beneath my foot, just one step away from being crushed.”
*
Felua’s cotton textile market had completely collapsed.
No—to be precise, it had been perfectly swallowed into the grasp of Elpanso Carnoble and Aila Winchester.
Until just a month ago, Felua’s textile street had been a place where trading companies competed over the value of their names.
Now, when people bought cloth, they no longer asked the name of the trading company.
It did not matter who the shopkeeper was, nor which workshop it came from.
They checked only one thing.
The dark blue emblem stamped clearly onto the end of the pure white undyed cotton fabric.
The Carnoble mark.
“Hey, shopkeeper. Are you kidding me? I told you to bring me one with the Carnoble mark!”
“Oh, customer! This was woven by the finest craftsman in the North! Just look at the weave!”
“I’m not looking! The width is uneven, and the threads are tangled in the middle. The price is about the same, so why would I buy this junk? If I just go down that alley, Carnoble cloth is everywhere!”
Such words burst out all over the market.
Once people had used cotton fabric stamped with the Carnoble mark, they could never return to the old handmade cloth.
The width was consistent, there was no trickery in the length, and the weave was astonishingly uniform.
It shrank less when washed, and it felt softer to the touch.
Most of all, the price was overwhelmingly cheap.
Because the quality of the product could be trusted completely, merchants and consumers no longer had to tear the goods apart with their eyes and haggle over them.
Trust itself had become the most powerful commodity.
And the name of that great trust was the name of the great merchant house that had once commanded Felua.
The resurrected “Carnoble.”
*
“We, we barely managed to cover this month’s bill, Master.”
Felua’s First Commercial District, the luxurious office of the Muller Trading Company.
The chief clerk reported while turning the pages of a ledger slashed all over with red lines, his hands trembling.
“How did you cover it?”
“We sold the southern third and fourth warehouses to the merchant association, and we put up one of the carriage routes to the North as collateral with the bank. We also notified more than half of the workshop weavers of their dismissal…… Thanks to that, we have managed to keep ourselves breathing for the moment, but……”
“You call that handling it?”
Muller slammed the table.
“You call carving away my own flesh and bones and shoving them into the mouths of creditors handling it? That’s being half bankrupt!”
His greasy face flushed crimson.
In truth, that was exactly the case.
He had barely dealt with it.
To be exact, he had merely prolonged the trading company’s life by cutting off pieces of its own body so it would not collapse completely.
He sold warehouses, pledged carriages as collateral, drove out workers, and disposed of stock at bargain-bin prices.
He had survived.
But the spine of the Muller Trading Company was already broken.
And yet the nightmare was not over.
Outside the window, on the market street.
Every time a cart bearing the flag of the Golden Fleece passed by loaded with white cotton fabric, Felua’s merchants and customers swarmed toward it like a pack of starving dogs.
The damned dark blue emblem engraved on the ends of the cloth loaded onto the cart was clearly visible even from Muller’s office.
The Carnoble mark.
Carnoble. Carnoble. Carnoble!
Muller’s temple twitched.
“That damned mark—are you telling me it’s some kind of magic that bewitches people?”
“I, it does not seem to be magic. It is simply that the quality is consistent, there is no deception in the length, and the wholesalers have already begun setting prices based on that mark……”
“Shut up! I didn’t call you here to listen to that nonsense!”
Muller grabbed the ledger and hurled it.
With a smack, the ink bottle shattered, and parchments scattered all over the office floor like falling snow.
“Tonight.”
Muller’s voice sank low.
“Set fire to the factory.”
In that instant, the air in the office froze.
The chief clerk and the back-alley fixers only glanced at one another.
No one could open their mouth.
“Did you not hear me?”
Muller ground his teeth.
“That red-brick factory by the Rene River. The scraps of machinery inside it, and those fucking cotton fabrics too—turn every last bit of it into ash!”
The burliest fixer gulped.
“Th, that…… cannot be done, Master.”
“What? Cannot be done? After all the gold coins I’ve poured into you bastards, you say it cannot be done?!”
“The legal punishment is one thing…… but what is even more frightening are the private soldiers of the Golden Fleece Trading Company guarding that factory right now.”
There was unmistakable fear in the fixer captain’s voice.
“I don’t know how much money Guildmaster Aila fed them, but they are not some third-rate mercenaries. A real mercenary band, men who rolled through the Northern Front, has the factory surrounded day and night like an iron wall. Their shifts are strict, and they’ve even built watchtowers on all sides. It is impossible even to approach.”
Another man quickly chimed in.
“Even if we did set it on fire, it would be obvious who the culprit was. What trading company has treated that factory like a mortal enemy recently? Suspicion would fall on us immediately.”
“……”
Muller’s face twisted.
They were right.
The one in Felua who hated Elpanso the most right now.
That was, openly, Muller himself.
On top of that, the Golden Fleece’s private soldiers were on a different level from third-rate mercenaries who swung swords for money.
Since Aila had personally selected them, their mouths were heavy and their hands were quick.
There was a greater chance that anyone who went to set a fire would end up dumped in the river instead.
“Ha, haha……”
Muller let out a warped laugh.
Soon, that laughter transformed into a blue-tinged malice.
“Fine. If a blade won’t work, I’ll strangle him with seals.”
A snake-like cunning flashed through his murky eyes.
“I’ll dry him up perfectly within the system.”
*
“They’ve arrived.”
The Golden Fleece Trading Company, Aila’s office.
Before me lay a heap of official documents stamped with seals.
Aila unfolded them one by one, her brow furrowed.
“A request for a city hall fire safety inspection.”
“A notice of reexamination of water rights from the River Management Bureau under the lord’s castle.”
“A petition from the Felua Handicraft Weavers’ Guild accusing us of illegal production.”
“A special tax audit from the Tax Bureau directly under the mayor.”
“And even an emergency summons to appear before the Commercial Council the day after tomorrow.”
Thud.
Aila threw the last parchment in front of me and ground her teeth.
“That potbellied pig bastard has really made up his mind. I don’t know how much he stuffed into the mayor, the officials, and those senile guild masters, but every administrative institution in Felua is rushing at us all at once, trying to bite us to pieces!”
I flipped through the parchments and laughed softly.
“Now he’s finally acting like a merchant. He should have done this from the start.”
“You can laugh right now? That bastard is coming at us with public authority and the system, trying to cut our throats?!”
“Of course it’s funny.”
Leaning back in my chair, I answered leisurely.
“When an industry grows bloated and begins monopolizing the market, the declining vested interests don’t stupidly pick up blades. They always thrust regulations and law books at you first. Historically, it’s always been that way.”
Aila narrowed her eyes.
“……Don’t tell me you expected this too?”
“You think I didn’t?”
I pointed to the bundles of ledgers and sample cloth I had organized on one side of the desk.
“That’s why I didn’t take a single coin of profit from the first month and instead overhauled the factory system. Look here. Every time a bolt of cotton fabric is produced, the production date, work line number, length, width, and even the cotton blending record are all stamped in. The Carnoble mark released into the market isn’t some decorative emblem. It’s a perfectly traceable quality certificate.”
The ISO quality management system that any modern engineering student knew in their bones.
Beyond merely churning out goods, I had transplanted into this world’s factory an overwhelming management system that could prove their quality through documentation.
Aila’s expression turned strange.
“Hey, wait a second. Then the reason you cut down on sleep to make those awful piles of documents and forced the workers to write work logs was all……”
“Prevention.”
Before running the machines, you had to prepare the documents.
The most frightening thing in operating a factory was not a lump of iron, but the seal of a government office.
I knew that very well.
Even if I was the foolish heir of Carnoble.
“Good.”
Aila crossed her arms and snorted.
“Let’s see, then. Whether you can beat down Felua’s officials and those old guild bastards too with that big brain of yours.”
“You’re better at beating people down than I am.”
“All mouth, aren’t you?”
Aila grinned.
“This time, I’ll crush them to death with paperwork.”