WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: LilGuyBlastoise
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ The Economics of an Alchemist ◈
Chapter 10
──────
Jaeha admired the completed Aegis Case.
A swelling emotion rose from deep in his chest, different from when his younger sister Seo-yun passed the CPA exam or when the youngest, Jaeseong, got into Korea University.
A moment later, he slapped both cheeks with both hands to shift his mood.
‘It’s not over yet.’
It looked perfect, but there was no telling what problems might arise during impact testing.
Jaeha opened the box beneath the workbench.
It was full of A-phones bought cheaply for parts and damaged devices. He took out an A-phone 4 with an intact exterior and fitted it with the Aegis Case.
‘Let’s start the test.’
First came a drop from one meter, waist height, where screens most commonly broke. Jaeha let the phone fall.
Clack!
The phone rolled across the floor with a crisp sound.
Jaeha watched through the All-Seeing Eye. The moment the case touched the ground, he saw sturdy, spiderweb-like carbon chains dispersing the impact.
The phone was fine. Not a single scratch.
‘It should at least handle this much.’
Even an ordinary jelly case protected a phone fairly well from a one-meter drop.
It easily passed the next stage at two meters, so Jaeha immediately moved on to the three-meter impact test. He climbed onto a chair and dropped the phone.
Thud!
The phone struck the concrete floor on its corner first. With a slightly tense expression, Jaeha picked up the phone, its back facing up.
‘It held!’
The A-phone 4 inside the Aegis Case still had a smooth screen and an uncracked body.
Among smartphone cases on the market, the Outbox Defender was known for its extreme protection.
Its brutish design even covered the front screen and made the phone nearly three times as thick. Some users said it turned their phones into tanks.
Even the Outbox Defender often failed to protect the A-phone 4, with glass on both front and back, when it fell from three meters.
Yet the A-phone 4 in the Aegis Case had survived a three-meter impact test without a problem.
And it had landed on its corner first.
Carried away by the result, Jaeha climbed a folding ladder. Five meters, about the height of a second-floor railing.
Thud!
Even the sound of the fall was different this time.
Jaeha climbed down and checked the phone. His eyes widened.
‘...It held?’
He tested it again.
Thud!
This time, it broke. Spiderweb-like cracks spread across the back glass of the A-phone 4, starting from one corner.
Even so, Jaeha’s lips curved upward.
In his view, performance could be too excessive as well. What if the Aegis Case showed unbelievable performance, protecting a phone even when struck with a hammer?
Agents in black suits and sunglasses from an intelligence agency like the NIS or CIA might come and drag him away.
The sample size was small, but judging from the results so far, the Aegis Case’s protection was on the level of the Outbox Defender.
‘This is just right.’
A jelly case that did not spoil the design of the A-phone 4, a phone recognized as a luxury item for its looks alone, with protection on par with the Outbox Defender?
It would sell like crazy.
Honestly, Jaeha wondered whether even its current performance was a little too much.
‘First, I’ll increase the sample size and get reliable data.’
Jaeha headed toward the box of dummy phones to replace the broken A-phone 4. It looked as though he would have to sleep in the workshop again today.
* * *
Chirp chirp.
Sunlight filtered through the crack in the window alongside the sound of sparrows, making Jaeha frown.
“Mm...”
He rose from the old sofa in one corner of the workshop and rubbed his stiff neck. His whole body screamed from sleeping curled up all night, but his mood was as light as if he could fly.
After washing his face and roughly filling his stomach with a cup of instant noodles, Jaeha immediately sat before the workbench.
Piles of A-phone 4s broken during the night lay on the workbench. Beside them was a notebook densely covered in numbers. They were the results of repeating impact tests all night.
He had dropped phones one hundred times from each height.
Five-meter drop survival rate: 20%.
Three-meter drop survival rate: 70%.
Two-meter drop survival rate: 98%.
One-meter drop survival rate: 99%.
The reason the survival rate from everyday drops of two meters or less was not 100% was clear.
There were unlucky cases where the front, which the case did not cover, struck a slight protrusion on the floor directly.
If a pointed impact struck the screen on an uneven floor, even an excellent Aegis Case was useless.
A solution quickly came to mind.
‘Could I reinforce the front protective film too?’
The protective films commonly used on the market were also made from urethane-based elastic plastic, just like the Aegis Case.
The shape had merely been flattened from a curved 3D form into a thin 2D plane. Their fundamental molecular structure was the same.
Since the base material was the same, producing prototypes would be overwhelmingly faster than making cases.
The problem was performance.
Even if he strengthened a thin urethane film with alchemy, he was unsure how much point impact from a protruding part of the floor it could absorb.
‘Not for now. I’ll focus on the case first.’
He needed to create a sense of lack in the market first.
Human anxiety was strange. If 98% was perfect, people tended to become more obsessed with the remaining 2% weakness.
When the Aegis Case launched, users around the world would be astonished by the brutal protection offered by a thin jelly case.
But they would inevitably feel disappointed by unlucky cases where the screen struck the ground head-on.
That was the right timing. Presenting the solution when consumers first felt the need for it and wanted it.
The public would endlessly praise the company for accepting user feedback, even over a weakness they had once criticized as a flaw.
Having organized this basic premise of the business, Jaeha pushed thoughts of protective film deep into his mind without regret.
Jaeha reviewed the funds spent developing the Aegis Case so far.
Including fixed monthly expenses such as loan principal and interest, workshop rent, living costs, and all R&D expenses for alchemy experiments, he had spent around 70 million won.
The investment limit he had set for alchemy was 100 million won.
It was a line he had imposed on himself so that he would not spend his entire fortune on research with no promise of success.
Jaeha decided he could remove that shackle now. The situation had changed now that he had a prototype.
The risky R&D stage was over. From now on, it was the stage of mass production, where he would reap the rewards.
To get the business on track, it was essential to pour in the remaining capital and establish a mass-production system.
Jaeha began by calculating the cost.
A case bought wholesale in bulk cost 1,000 won each. Including high-purity silver ink for the Transmutation Array and electricity, the unit cost of an Aegis Case came to around 2,000 won.
‘The retail price... 19,900 won.’
Ordinary manufacturers set their costs at 30 to 40% of the retail price. Compared to that, this was an overwhelming margin.
As far as Jaeha knew, there were two blessed fields that made more than ten times their costs.
Luxury goods and pharmaceuticals.
In his view, the Aegis Case was no different from a luxury good.
Customers could get protection comparable to the Outbox Defender for less than half its price of over 50,000 won?
Jaeha believed consumers would gladly open their wallets.
And if he was wrong?
Even if he cut the price by 50% and sold it for 9,900 won, the margin would still be five times the cost.
‘The problem is the production method...’
The prototype had been 100% handmade.
No matter how good the margin was, if he sat in the workshop and transmuted each case by hand, there would be a limit to production. It was obvious he would wear himself out as well.
He needed to create a semi-automated process.
He had been considering a method using a conveyor-type UV curing machine.
He would install a black box inside the chamber containing the ultraviolet lamps, the heart of the machine that exposed the cases to light.
From the outside, it would look like a meaningless process where the cases were exposed to light. But on closer inspection, a miracle would occur. Powerful ultraviolet light would pour down while energy waves created by the Transmutation Array hidden inside the black box transformed the molecular structure of ordinary jelly cases.
‘I’ll make the black box as a cartridge that slides into place.’
He would densely draw the Transmutation Array circuit onto a black ceramic substrate. He would make it connect to the power cables inside the UV curing machine, then seal the board completely.
The reason for the cartridge design was simple.
A Transmutation Array was not permanent once created. As high-voltage current continued to flow, it damaged the conductive ink that formed the circuit.
He would have to make one first to know its exact lifespan.
He also needed to include a basic trick that would burn the inside without a trace if anyone tried to open the black box.
There was no need to use alchemy for that.
The moment someone touched the black box without following the designated release procedure, high-voltage current could flow backward into the substrate and turn the Transmutation Array into a black lump of charcoal in 0.1 seconds.
‘No. Just in case, I’ll use alchemy to install a second self-destruct system too.’
Once the semi-automated process was complete, he could also explain the special process used to make the Aegis Case convincingly.
He could say that exposing urethane to light of a specific wavelength inside a specially configured black box rearranged its carbon molecular bonds into a new nanotube lattice structure.
The global industrial world had recently gone crazy for the magic phrase “new nanomaterials.”
The public would be fooled by Jaeha’s plausible story, use their own imagination, and nod along.
‘Simply shining light on it may not be enough of a disguise...’
After thinking for a moment, Jaeha decided to install a special nozzle at the start of the process to spray carbon nano-dispersion.
However, even if it was just an outward disguise, it could be fatal to workers’ health if finely sprayed nanoparticles scattered through the air and entered their respiratory systems.
‘I’ll seal the nozzle area with a thick barrier and install a negative-pressure dust-collection filter beneath it to suck in the remaining dust within 0.1 seconds.’
On the surface, it would look like a cutting-edge high-tech coating process. In truth, it would be a kind of offering to help alchemy work smoothly, as well as a perfect cover.
Once he had organized his thoughts on the production line, he naturally reached a conclusion about patents as well.
‘I won’t patent it. I’ll do it like Poca-Cola.’
Just as Poca-Cola had hidden the secret of its concentrate for more than a hundred years, the “optical circuits inside the black box chamber” that formed the nanotube lattice would have to remain an airtight trade secret forever.
It was the perfect scenario: an ordinary clear jelly case transformed into an advanced nanotube material.
But even Jaeha’s seemingly perfect plan had a downside.
‘It’s a shame I won’t be able to get even a penny in start-up funding, but it can’t be helped.’
Government support like youth start-up funding was always beneficial if he could get it.
But to receive that free money, filing a patent was essential. He would have to explain every detail of the technology’s core principles before strict evaluators.
What if the evaluation team came to inspect the workshop and said they wanted to open the black box to verify the technology?
Just imagining it was terrifying.
It was painful to have funding right before his eyes and be unable to take it, but it was nothing compared to exposing alchemy.
Jaeha opened the mini fridge and took out a can of cola. It felt like his blood sugar had dropped from thinking so much.
Click, hiss!
As he drank the cold cola, Jaeha looked around the sparse workshop. A blueprint for the production line naturally took shape in his head.
He put on his coat, went outside, and started his car.
His destination was the Guro Machinery and Tool Market.
It was a place where seasoned craftsmen, their hands greasy from decades of work, could supposedly make even missiles from a single blueprint.
Once he visited the precision milling shops and control panel makers there, ordered the parts, and assembled them, an alchemy mass-production machine unlike anything else in the world would be complete.
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried