Ito Masaru Was Not Satisfied by the Doubled Charcoal Price Report

Ito Masaru was not satisfied by the report that charcoal prices had doubled.

Price was not a result but a mark showing the other side's choices. Eight sacks left in the workshop. Heating for the quarantine quarters and heat treatment for the jig test pieces. Watching which of the two received charcoal first would reveal the line they meant to defend.

The interpreter spoke.

"The Joseon officials call it hoarding."

"They paid in cash first."

"Even civilian heating has run short."

Ito drew a new line under the schedule. Civilian heating loss. He left the number blank for now.

"If things go as planned, the price drops in five days."

"For those five days, the patients will be cold."

"So the other side chooses."

That was true, and it was not enough. The fact that whoever created the options stood outside the cost was not written on the schedule.

Ito's plan was cheaper than destroying the workshop directly. He bought five days' worth of stock from three charcoal huts in cash. He sent no soldiers and broke no seals. If the Joseon side chose to heat the patients, heat treatment would be delayed. If they chose heat treatment, the payment promises for the quarantine list would waver. Either way, their priorities would be exposed.

His aide asked.

"Does our unit use all the remaining charcoal?"

"Only half."

"And the rest?"

"Leave it in storage."

"Even though heating is needed?"

"What is needed and what is used are different things."

The aide asked nothing more. Ito did not record that silence as obedience. He marked the single question beside the cost of the operation.

The first report of the morning did not match his expectation. The workshop had stopped heat treatment and assigned two sacks of charcoal to patient heating. The remaining six sacks went unused, kept under the seals of all three representatives.

"Have they given up on production?" the interpreter asked.

"No. They're waiting for the next charcoal."

"We bought up the surrounding stock."

"They'll make another road, then."

Ito recalled the distributed transport network Yun Haejun had used before his arrest. Block one road and they split the carts. Block the carts and they split the loads among people, each carrying a marker. Direct destruction gave them a clear victim and a clear enemy. Price could instead create different internal choices.

"There are two alternatives," Ito said. "Buy at a higher price, or bring in charcoal from farther away."

The aide asked a third.

"What if they burn wood and make it themselves?"

Ito looked at the mountains around the workshop on the map. There was dry wood, but a charcoal kiln and time were both needed.

"That's also a long road. In time."

Around noon, Han Seorin's public contract was posted at all three charcoal huts. Ito's interpreter brought back a copy.

Seorin had not immediately offered a higher price. She promised to forgive part of the transport debt the charcoal sellers owed to the trading house after the war ended, and to record the quantity and unit price supplied to the workshop today in an open ledger. Ito offered more cash, but her terms tied the seller to their next settlement date.

"Debt forgiveness isn't cash," the interpreter said.

"It's future cash."

"Do they win?"

"It's not about winning or losing. It's about which ledger they choose."

Seorin's contract had limits. The forgiveness applied only to charcoal actually supplied, and the first settlement came three months later even if the war had not ended. She split copies of the contract between the charcoal guild and the workshop so that no hut owner became solely dependent on either the army or the trading house.

Ito read that clause twice. Seorin had avoided the current price war and instead offered postwar debt as collateral. If he had bought five days, she had sold three months.

"Will you buy more?" the aide asked.

Tripling the charcoal price would have secured the first contract. But at that point it would no longer be market pressure, it would become a blockade aimed at civilian heating. The sellers might gain cash but lose their postwar debt relief and local trade ties.

Ito stopped making new purchases.

"We honor only the existing contracts."

"Charcoal goes to the other side."

"If we seize the promised stock, cash paid in advance becomes worthless paper in the next deal."

He guaranteed the hut owners the five days already purchased and the delivery times as agreed. He did not forcibly block the remaining stock at huts that chose the Joseon contract instead. He could not break his own credit by using the market to break the other side's trust.

The first hut kept Ito's contract. The second sold its remaining two sacks to the workshop and received the postwar debt forgiveness. The third sold to neither side and waited for the guild's decision.

The owner of the first hut, while handing charcoal over to Ito's storage, attached a note to the receipt.

"I was told this stock was bought for heating."

The interpreter looked at Ito.

The contract had no stated purpose. Only cash advance, quantity, and delivery time. It needed to be confirmed whether the owner was attaching something he'd heard later as if it were a contract condition, or whether the interpreter had explained it that way during the first negotiation.

"Who told you that?"

"The broker who came at the start."

The broker was not attached to the expeditionary force but was a port merchant. Ito summoned him. The merchant admitted he had explained it as barracks heating, thinking the hut would not sell if told it was meant to block the workshop.

The aide said.

"The contracted quantity and price are correct."

"The purpose was misrepresented."

"It isn't in the document."

"If a signature was obtained through words outside the document, it goes into the cost."

Ito gave the first hut owner the choice again. He could return the advance already received and take back the remaining stock, or keep the contract while recording both the broker's false explanation and the actual intended use on the public receipt.

The hut owner did not return the money. He had no cash on hand to repay it. Instead he marked an objection beside his own name and wrote that he would not sell in future deals unless a use field was included.

Rather than putting the broker on a punishment list, Ito first recorded the omissions in his own contract. Purpose unstated. Broker's explanation unverified. Civilian heating loss uncounted.

That measure did not return the charcoal to the workshop. The patient rooms remained short. Recording a fault and reversing its cost were different things.

The two expected alternatives had grown to three.

Ito did not write this down as a failure. The market did not take a single order the way a soldier did. When the other side returned the choice to the sellers, price alone lost some of its power to split them from within.

He waited for the next report.

Word came that Jo Dokgu had taken charge of a detour transport route connecting a canal and a muddy road. The existing cart road ran close to the huts Ito had bought out. Jo Dokgu planned to bring charcoal down the canal by small boat from the northern kilns, then switch to carts where the water grew shallow.

"Distance?"

"Twelve li longer than the existing road."

"Time?"

"A day and a half, if there's no rain."

"Loss rate?"

"Unknown."

Ito did not strike out the answer of unknown. There was no data on canal depth, mud depth, or horse relay points. He sent scouts but ordered them not to attack the transport directly.

The aide was puzzled.

"We're not stopping it?"

"Watching the road reveals the next bottleneck."

"The charcoal reaches the workshop."

"Once."

Ito wanted to observe the cost of the new road the other side was building. Burning the charcoal or smashing the carts would end that cost with a single military strike. Letting them use the road exposed the horses, the laborers, the guild's internal debts.

That judgment, too, converted civilian losses into information.

Rain began in the afternoon. The canal's water rose, but the mud at the transfer landing deepened as well. The first boat carried ten sacks of charcoal. Each sack bore the hut's name, weight, sale price, and postwar forgiveness amount.

Before the boat reached the landing, Jo Dokgu weighed three of the sacks again. The total was lighter than the original hut's scale had shown. Charcoal exposed to water should have grown heavier, not lighter.

"It leaked somewhere along the way," a laborer said.

There was charcoal dust on the bottoms of the sacks, but no large holes. One of the binding cords was new. There was no way to tell whether it was theft, a wrong reading at the starting scale, or dust that had fallen through the boat's floor.

Jo Dokgu did not hide the shortfall and put it on the record instead. He kept both the departure weight and the landing weight, and decided the workshop would be billed only for what actually arrived. The postwar debt forgiveness was also tied to the received weight rather than the ten sacks that had departed.

The hut owner objected. He had handed over whole sacks, and if the transport loss was also charged to the seller, there would be no reason to choose the new road.

Seorin did not immediately assign the shortfall to either side. The owner of the starting scale, the boatman, and the landing transport representative each sealed their own record, and agreed to cross check the same sacks on the next run. This shortfall was covered temporarily from a transport risk reserve fund.

Ito's scouts reported even this correction. The other side did not hide its losses, but the number of cross checkers and the size of the reserve grew with each run. It was a slow and expensive method. At the same time, it was also a method by which a single leak would not bring down the entire road.

Seorin did not hide the price. In return, even the route itself lay open for Ito's scouts to see clearly.

"They're giving us a map," the aide said.

"Whoever uses a map pays a cost for it too."

Ito had his scouts record cart wheel width and the number of horses. Jo Dokgu had attached five horses. On the first stretch of muddy road, one injured its hoof, and on the second stretch, the cart tilted and two horses were pinned under the yoke.

The transport crew did not abandon the charcoal sacks. The men cut the yoke free, pulled the horses out, and carried the sacks on their own backs, dividing the load among themselves. The expected arrival time slipped by half a day more.

Ito wrote in his report.

Three horses lost. Ten sacks of charcoal preserved. Laborer movement speed halved.

The aide said.

"The efficiency is poor."

"Even so, if it arrives, they'll repeat it."

"What if there are no more horses?"

"The guild will object."

That prediction came true before evening. Two representatives of the charcoal guild demanded that Jo Dokgu halt the next transport. Their reason was that the postwar debt forgiveness could not repay the loss of three horses and the danger to the laborers.

Seorin had to revise the contract. She had avoided the price war, but the transport losses had come back around onto the sellers. The options Ito had created had not disappeared. They had simply come back to life at the other end of the road.

Ito bought no more charcoal. Instead, he obtained a copy of the guild's objection letter and the cost of the horses' treatment.

The interpreter asked.

"Is horse treatment cost also operational intelligence?"

"It is."

"The horses aren't our enemy."

Ito did not answer.

On the schedule, the delay in the workshop's heat treatment, the patients' heating, the three horses, and the guild's objection all sat on the same line.

By now it had already grown too long for him to write that this line lay outside his own operation.