“A refusal? Unexpected. You looked desperate enough that I thought you would snatch my offer up.”
“To think you considered that, you must know a fair deal about me.”
In truth I do not know much.
I am only acting as though I know much.
I learned even his original given name from his own mouth a moment ago.
The name I know is the Merchant King, Lone Crag.
All I know at present is the course he will take from here and the few scattered words he left with me like fragments.
“How could it be possible to know anyone perfectly? It is all only supposition. Still, I do know roughly what you want. You need someone to put up the money, do you not?”
I dressed it up suitably and moved on.
“Yes.”
“And I am the backer who has felt an appetite for it.”
“That is so.”
“Then why did you refuse? If you knew who I was, you would have been certain I could be a backer satisfying enough.”
“I think it is dangerous money that the man I am now would struggle to bear. It must be funds embezzled while you pose as the second young master of the Golden Manor. I do not wish to involve myself in what may later make me an enemy of the Golden Manor. Through the collusion of certain factions it could even make me a public enemy.”
“Not a wrong word in it.”
This was my mistake.
I had exposed a needless risk myself and made him step back a pace.
Still, the man called Lone Crag whom I know is the sort who would move readily enough if the gain outweighed the loss.
I would wager this was something like his test, a process of judging me.
Through it all I found myself impressed.
“If the deal falls through and I choose to silence you by murder, what then, that you speak so? Having seen my true face, you are a risk to me unless you board the same boat.”
“Then that would be my fate. It is a hundred times better than being dragged about powerlessly with no choices. Above all, you will not be able to kill me.”
“Why?”
“You must already have at your side talents rated more highly than I am. And if you turned them down and went to such trouble to find me, there must be a reason for it. Is time not gold to a merchant? Cutting me down with a single stroke would be a waste to you.”
“A half-formed guarantee becomes arrogance and tightens around your throat, does it not?”
“A conviction with grounds also opens the door to a new opportunity.”
“So what is it you really wish to say to me?”
“It means you will be able neither to influence my course nor to use me like a subordinate. However, if you were to say you would invest in my business rather than in me, and wait until results came, I am willing to accept. It is an opportunity that will not come easily to me either.”
Looking at him.
One of the things the Heavenly Demon had once said drifted through my mind.
What would she have done.
Walking a different road from hers did not mean the things I had learned and followed from her would vanish.
She was the finest master I ever had.
-I am a vessel able to command you even were I not the Heavenly Demon. The Heavenly Demon is merely one of the wings convenient for me to use.
Right, just as the Heavenly Demon did with me.
In this life, commanding someone is my own part and my own capability.
I wish to trust and command the aptitude of Baek Mun-gyu, the childhood of Lone Crag.
But that was my own greed.
Baek Mun-gyu was uneasy and wary of my position, with the business of the Golden Manor not yet cleanly sewn up.
The eyes that see me from outside, anew.
That is, my position came home to me afresh.
Unlike the confident Cheon Yu-wol, I am still lacking.
I realized that placing Baek Mun-gyu under my command was impossible.
Admit what must be admitted, and think about what I can do.
“Very well. I give up cleanly on placing you under my command.”
Baek Mun-gyu's eyebrow twitched slightly.
Whether he was surprised that I accepted it so evenly I do not know, but it was also true that his gaze toward me grew a little stranger.
“However, I too have a condition.”
“Please speak.”
“In place of myself, who cannot stand at the front, I will set up one person. And investing in a single business is far too small a price for what I have seen of your value.”
“…….”
“I believe in your value and I trust in the continuity of the business you will carry out. In that sense, let me make one pledge. The Golden Manor's business I will finish at my own level, and in the meantime I will set another in my place.”
I continued.
“Seol Ha.”
Answering the call, Seol Ha stepped into the room. Seol Ha was looking at me with a stiff expression. She had already heard what was being discussed inside the room.
“My noona. If you need to send word, send a messenger or a carrier pigeon to her. Further.”
Along with Seol Ha, whose eyes kept widening, I went on without hesitation.
“Every contract and division of profit for all the businesses may be settled through her. In exchange you take six tenths of the business profit, and the proportion for reinvestment we will discuss as the need arises. Most of it I will consider favorably.”
“I need to think it over.”
“A few more days will change nothing. I am a busy man myself. Above all, you are not a person so dull to profit and loss as to need a few more days of thought, are you?”
“It is a decision with my life staked on it. I do not know how you see me, but I carry that much weight as well.”
“Then let me make it easier for you. If you do not decide now, I will not board the same boat as you.”
“You said you were giving up on keeping me as a subordinate, and in the end you mean to hold my purse strings in place of my neck, do you not?”
“They say to begin is to be halfway there. I will be putting that half into your hand, so I ought to take that much in return. For a merchant, what bond is surer than a purse string? So long as each is a profit to the other, we will be the best of friends. As business partners.”
Baek Mun-gyu looked back and forth between me and Seol Ha.
“It appears the lady who is your noona had no idea of this choice.”
“Let us tie up the decision first; persuading my noona I will handle afterward, so do not trouble yourself over it. I give you the time it takes to drink a cup of tea, right here.”
I wet my burning throat with another cup of wine.
Frankly, I did not know myself whether he would accept my offer.
Then the man, who had been silent a long while, asked me outright.
“At present, how much can you invest in me? Please speak concretely.”
“Promissory notes of the Yellow Note Exchange, which is under the Golden Manor. The sum these notes can draw will be two thousand five hundred taels of silver, about half a gold chest. Funds of a size that can buy perhaps five hundred pyeong of land on Chengdu's outskirts. That is sufficient, is it not?”
Frankly, he must have been not merely satisfied but startled. No one spends money on this scale on a stranger met for the first time.
“The business I mean to undertake needs as much again as the present sum. At the least, you must make this much more within three months. Will that be possible?”
“Hmm.”
“Once it begins, it cannot be stopped midway. An opportunity is taken the moment you give it an opening. Securing funds enough to drive it through is essential.”
I know nothing of Baek Mun-gyu, that is, of Lone Crag's past, but I know precisely the affair with which he began to act and stand out in earnest under the name Lone Crag.
It was the episode in which he bought up the land of a hidden underground mine as though he knew the future.
Buried within it in great quantity was an ore called Blood Jade Stone, and this was the unprecedented affair that made countless factions learn his name.
And one faction that had invested in him was reborn from a group forever reading the faces of the great powers into a group with strength of its own in a single stroke.
The group called Baek Mun-gyu's right arm.
“Very well. I pledge the additional injection of funds as well. So set the Rogues' Guild aside from your plan for the time being. I will be a better thread than they are.”
At that one remark a strange light flowed into Baek Mun-gyu's eyes.
Unable to take his eyes off me, he let out a dry laugh.
“Astonishing. I had heard that Young Master Geon Gon was a bird in a cage who received no support at all from the Golden Manor and had never brought any talent into bloom…….”
“Not a wrong word, but saying it to my face is rather much.”
“My apologies.”
“No need to scoop up spilled water. In any case, the cage was too small for me, so I broke out of it.”
“Remarkable.”
“If that is sincerity and not flattery, my thanks.”
“Hear it as you wish.”
Laughing shortly, I brought the brief exchange to a close in order to drive in the wedge.
“Now, if you have found no one usable besides me at the Sichuan Dragon and Phoenix Society, take this opportunity. A tea's drinking seems well past by now?”
Baek Mun-gyu nodded carefully.
“As it happens, I had meant to stop looking for a better backer as of this year.”
Inwardly I let out a breath of relief.
A change of plan built of overlapping coincidence had, if anything, tied the knot of my meeting with him.
“That said, do not commit the folly of cutting the Rogues' Guild away as unnecessary. To my eyes as well, joining hands with them would make them good business partners.”
The Rogues' Guild is a gathering of those called lowly and base across the world.
Courtesans, pickpockets, thieves, inn servers; their eyes and ears exist among the common folk one passes by at random.
A cell network linked together for mutual survival, weak in cohesion, but a place from which much support in information and manpower could be had if only a pretext arose.
In later days I mean to leave open the possibility of forming a tie with them as well, through Baek Mun-gyu.
The more usable manpower one commands, the better.
“Why would the son of a noble house seek to join hands with the Rogues' Guild, which is full of the base and the harmful?”
“Where is high and low in making money? If each side can be satisfied, they live together. A man who cannot understand that had better close his shop.”
“…….”
Feeling a fresh sort of satisfaction at his expression, now apparently out of words, I then had Seol Ha take out what I had prepared from the bundle she carried.
“Think of it as a down payment, and I have prepared the deeds that go with it. Simply stamp whatever seal you carry on the mutual agreement. A man out looking for a backer could hardly be without his own seal.”
“Were you certain I would accept the offer?”
“I did not even know you were here. I merely prepared.”
“I have been through fire and water in my own way, and still I cannot match you.”
“Spare me the flattery; let us contract.”
After having the seals stamped at the midpoint of the agreement, we split the tally and each took half.
At last, after all the pushing and pulling, the contract was done.
“Come and find me again around the time spring arrives. The funds pledged for later I will have prepared in promissory notes in advance. I will send them through my noona.”
“Understood.”
“More to the point….”
He pointed at my cup.
“Will you go on drinking alone?”
It seemed he had privately hoped for a cup.
With a hearty laugh I passed my cup across to him.
When I poured, he drank it off as quickly as a crab hides its eyes, let out a deep breath and rose from his seat.
“Before I leave, I will ask just one more thing.”
“Speak.”
“Why was your choice me? Even granting it is a decision following profit and loss, that you chose me, who has proven nothing at all, simply does not persuade.”
“…….”
“Frankly, you do not know my business, do you? I have never shared my business plan with anyone.”
It seemed I had found him a little early.
His question was sharp enough.
Only, I was a man who knew the future.
“Turn it around. A man who is planning, with the drive to act, the very business I had in mind would be a being of considerable insight. There would not be many common men with an eye for one outlying market town that often suffers drought. Especially for the underground mine buried beneath it.”
Baek Mun-gyu could not even answer and trembled finely.
There was no law saying another person could not work out the business he meant to set up.
Of course, not knowing that, he was looking at me as though at some ghost.
“I feel as though my wits will leave me. It is the first time I have felt stripped naked like this.”
“A grand business plan, the drive to act, the connections built up all this while, and now my funds on top of it, so the plan should be brought forward much faster. How long do you see for the return of the investment?”
“I will show it within two years.”
“Bring it forward further.”
“I will keep it to a little over one year.”
“Satisfactory.”
“Thank you for the hospitality.”
“Next time it is your turn. I hope you become not a boulder standing alone and jutting up in a wasteland, but a mountain range that makes forest and earth around it.”
“Then what does the Young Master mean to become?”
“Something higher than that, surely. For instance.”
I rose from my seat and opened the door for him in his place.
“The sky that encompasses mountain ranges?”
I had pledged to show the Heavenly Demon who sent me to the past, after all.
Perhaps thinking it grand bluster, Baek Mun-gyu let out a short laugh.
“I will see you again.”
Before me, as I nodded, Baek Mun-gyu bent at the waist in a posture of the utmost courtesy.
“My lord.”
It was the moment I looked down upon Lone Crag.