WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: LilGuyBlastoise

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ The Economics of an Alchemist ◈

Chapter 6

──────

A military ordnance workshop, thick with the acrid smell of gunpowder and heavy oil.

Generals and officers in uniform, along with alchemists in lab coats, had gathered in a tense atmosphere.

Soot covered the rolled-up sleeves of young Edwin's lab coat. He stared intently at the thick steel plate lying on the floor, torn to shreds.

The ballistic test for the armor intended for a new tank had just ended in disastrous failure.

"It failed again!"

Bang!

The general slammed the table. The sword scar across the left side of his face twitched hideously.

"That's already the third time! If we make it thicker, the tank gets too heavy and loses mobility. If we make it lighter, one shell tears it apart like paper!"

The senior alchemists wiped away cold sweat as they offered excuses.

"We need to increase the density of the armor plate."

"That's right. If we mix in more of the metal recently discovered in the East Mountains, we can create an alloy far stronger than the current one..."

Harder. Rarer materials.

A typical material-first mindset. Edwin, who had listened to that tired argument long enough, finally spoke.

"Increasing the density cannot be the answer."

All eyes turned toward him. He stepped forward.

"Even if we make a stronger alloy from rare materials, it will still break when force is concentrated at a single point. What we need is not hardness, but structure."

Several alchemists bristled.

"That again? You want us to rearrange the armor plate's internal structure into a web, one piece at a time? Do you think we can design a Transmutation Array that warps the very phase of matter overnight?"

"Exactly! What we need is something we can put on a tank right now, not your lofty theories!"

"I'm not talking about theory, but methodology. Like graphite and diamond..."

"Enough! We don't have time for your empty theorizing."

The general's sharp rebuke silenced everyone present, Edwin included.

"At the next demonstration, we must produce armor that those Astol bastards' shells cannot penetrate. You are all dismissed."

The furious general led his subordinates away, and a heavy silence settled over the alchemists.

"For now... I think we should all get some rest."

"Indeed. We've been up for three days straight... Let's get some sleep and gather again."

"I don't know if I'll be able to sleep in this situation."

One by one, they left with heavy steps. Edwin also sighed inwardly and headed for his laboratory.

When he opened the door, he was greeted by flasks filled with various liquids and scattered steel plates.

Instead of going to bed, Edwin approached his workbench. Piles of Transmutation Array blueprints covered it.

"No time? Those old fools haven't even tried it, and they only want the easy way out."

Since the project began and his claims had been mocked, Edwin had carved out every spare moment to study structural phase changes that could be applied to steel plates.

He wanted to prove that he was right. The mountain of dented and twisted failures in one corner of the laboratory showed just how relentless the process had been.

He took a piece of candy from his pocket, tossed it into his mouth, and crunched down on it as he stared at a piece of steel plate.

The All-Seeing Eye opened, and his vision turned upside down.

Before him stretched an endless abyss of space. The microscopic world within the steel plate.

Countless particles of light spun in clusters. Gravitational threads connecting them swirled like the flow of the Milky Way.

Edwin carefully studied the spaces between those clusters and the paths through which energy could flow.

Soon, he withdrew the All-Seeing Eye, popped another candy into his mouth, and picked up his pen.

Geometric shapes and equations spread across the blueprint beneath his steady hand.

It was a precise Transmutation Array design intended to forcibly twist the tangled orbital paths of the stars and scatter external impacts.

Scratch, scribble!

Edwin worked on without noticing time pass. His pen paused only when he examined the steel plate with the All-Seeing Eye.

Then, at last.

"I've got it! This time, it'll work!"

The Transmutation Array design was complete.

Edwin put three candies into his mouth at once, set down the pen he had used for the blueprint, and picked up a fountain pen filled with blue ink.

Glowing blue lines covered the steel plate, and the air trembled faintly. The work required precision, so his hand was careful as he drew the Transmutation Array.

A while later.

"Phew..."

After completing the array, Edwin wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve.

He filled a transparent graduated glass vial with a golden liquid. It was a catalyst to activate the Transmutation Array. He repeatedly removed and added liquid until he had the precise amount.

Once he had finished measuring it, only the final step remained.

"...Please work."

Trickle.

The moment the catalyst touched the heart of the Transmutation Array.

Crackle! Snap, snap!

Blue flames shot through the ink lines of the array like lightning.

The Transmutation Array drawn on the steel plate began to evaporate. It was oxidizing itself after fulfilling its purpose in warping matter's phase.

Edwin watched through the All-Seeing Eye as the stars in the steel plate's microcosm shifted their axes of rotation in unison, following the new paths he had designed.

At the wondrous sight of matter's phase being rearranged, Edwin clenched his fist. The thrill of success raced up his spine.

But his joy did not last long.

"Huh?"

The stars' paths began to twist against his calculations. The channels meant to carry energy away were collapsing under more energy than they could bear.

'It failed!'

Sensing danger instinctively, Edwin immediately slammed down the red emergency lever at the edge of the workbench and stepped back.

Thoom!

Heavy steel bulkheads rose in an instant and enclosed the workbench. At the same time, the Transmutation Arrays densely engraved on their surfaces lit up all at once.

Boom!

A deafening blast shook the entire laboratory as though an earthquake had struck.

#

Jaeha woke and practically crawled into the kitchen.

The dream he had had the night before was far longer and denser than any before it. He felt as if he might black out at any moment.

With trembling hands, he opened the refrigerator, twisted off a bottle of cola, and poured it straight down his throat.

Glug, glug, glug!

It was his secret technique for recovering quickly when hypoglycemic symptoms struck. His body, desperate for sugar, greedily absorbed it.

He sat in a dining chair and rested with his eyes closed for a moment.

'Still, this isn't so bad...'

It was a relief that it was less severe than the dream in which he had opened the All-Seeing Eye. Back then, his nose had bled nonstop. Maybe everything was difficult the first time.

After recovering a little, Jaeha checked the time. It was five in the morning. There was still plenty of time before his younger siblings woke up.

He switched on the kitchen light and pulled over a pen and some scrap paper lying on the table.

Scratch, scribble!

Geometric shapes took form on the paper. Fine, dense bundles of straight and curved lines connected them like a web.

It was the Transmutation Array Edwin had designed, something like a medieval magic circle merged with a modern circuit diagram.

Jaeha reproduced it perfectly, as if he had scanned and copied what he had seen in the dream. Once he drew the final line, he set down his pen.

"..."

When he had opened the All-Seeing Eye, he had realized that Edwin's world was completely different from Earth. This dream had gone beyond confirmation. It had driven the point home decisively.

At this rate, he half expected a white-haired wizard carrying a staff to appear next.

Come to think of it, Edwin's attempt to draw a Transmutation Array on a piece of steel plate and alter its internal structure could have been called magic just as easily as alchemy.

Well, perhaps people in that world would see Earth's modern science as no different from magic.

As Jaeha spun his pen and sank into thought, he began scribbling words in the corner of the scrap paper.

Sodium acetate, diamond's carbon-bond structure, gunpowder...

Then a thought occurred to him.

What if Edwin's world was not an otherworld in another dimension, but a planet somewhere far out in the universe that resembled Earth?

Two different worlds running on the same operating system. Different resources buried in the ground, and humans who had evolved in different directions.

Then...

'Could I use a Transmutation Array on Earth, just like the All-Seeing Eye?'

The moment that thought came to him, lightning struck Jaeha's mind.

Edwin had tried to use a Transmutation Array to change the properties of a piece of steel. It was no different from turning graphite into diamond.

Modern science could do that too, provided one had expensive specialized facilities. Pressure of tens of thousands of atmospheres and heat of thousands of degrees were essential.

Yet Edwin had intended to do it with nothing but a pen, ink, and a small amount of catalyst.

Jaeha still did not know exactly what the ink for the Transmutation Array or the catalyst that activated it were, but their efficiency appeared overwhelmingly superior to modern science. At least on the surface.

'What if I really could use alchemy from that world?'

He thought of Jaeseong's A-phone screen, which had been shattered when they ate out yesterday. Could he make a screen that would remain intact even after falling from an apartment rooftop?

Cheap glass could be transformed into a cutting-edge material. It would be no different from turning copper into gold.

Accomplishing at a desk what major corporations needed to pour hundreds of billions of won in research funds and enormous sums into equipment to create.

Thump! Thump! Thump!

Jaeha's heart began to race abnormally fast. It was not the unpleasant feeling that came when his blood sugar dropped. Adrenaline surged through him as though his veins were on fire.

For the past dozen-plus years, Jaeha had lived like prey hunted by predators.

The daily wage he earned by working himself to the bone was, at most, a hundred and something thousand won. Between loan interest and supporting his younger siblings, he had to account for every last ten-won coin.

Even when he was diagnosed with a terminal illness, instead of grieving, he had converted the value of his remaining life into cash and made a deal with a pharmaceutical company.

He did not merely want to survive. He wanted to become the one who devoured.

That fierce greed burned through Jaeha's mind like a flame.

Jaeha wrote "300 million won" on the scrap paper.

It was the seed money he had earned after dedicating his youth and succeeding at a gamble that had put his life on the line. Ever since leaving the hospital, he had spent much time wondering what to do with it.

Stocks?

An individual investor holding 300 million won was nothing but fat prey for institutions that monopolized huge capital and insider information.

A single scandal involving a chairman he had never even seen, or an interest-rate hike decided by a country across the ocean, could cut the value of what he had earned with his life in half. Then he would have no choice but to wait helplessly for his principal to recover.

Entrusting hard-earned money to variables beyond his control was not his way.

Starting a business?

With 300 million won, he could open a decent franchise.

But even then, he would only be struggling in the bloody ecosystem of capitalism with the head office holding his leash. It was far from the life of a predator.

Even if he started a company with a brilliant idea, a major corporation with overwhelming capital would inevitably create the same copycat, crush it, or reduce it to a subcontractor and suck its blood.

In the end, most businesses merely crawled willingly to the bottom of a food chain dominated by giant capital.

To shatter that gap in capital, he needed a weapon. Technology that no one could even dream of copying, no matter how many tens or hundreds of billions they poured into it.

If he had a proprietary product that could make even giant corporations wag their tails and cling to him, he could rule that game.

'Technology that major corporations can never copy...'

Jaeha's eyes remained fixed on the Transmutation Array drawn on the scrap paper.

The sound that broke the scene, frozen as though time had stopped, was Seo-yun's bedroom door opening with a click.

"Oppa?"

Seo-yun emerged with her hair tousled, rubbing her eyes. Jaeha instinctively hid the scrap paper.

"Why are you up so early?"

"I just woke up early somehow... I'll make toast, so have breakfast before you go."

"Okay. I'll wash up and come out."

Once Seo-yun entered the bathroom, Jaeha tore the scrap paper in his hand into tiny pieces without hesitation and threw them into the trash.

There was no need to keep it. The Transmutation Array had already been etched painfully clearly into every one of his brain cells.

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried