Before the Garcino the giant left, Chachi met him one last time to discuss what she'd been putting off. Honor demanded vengeance for her father, and she couldn't deny the smoldering rage in her heart. If this Mountain King really sent assassins to murder her father in cold blood, then he had to die. The killers he sent as well, instruments though they were. She didn't have the spite to extend her vengeance to all of this 'King's' people, they would no doubt suffer sufficiently on the way.
She didn't want to focus on vengeance yet. She had to harden her heart and put that aside. Her father would want her to make sure the Clan was secure first, always. But, the giant was a source of information on her father's killer.
They talked outside. The giant performing stretches while he cycled Teotl. It was a strange practice, but Chachi mimicked it all the same. She couldn't feel any benefits.
"The Mountain King killed my father?"
"Yes."
"Tell me about him."
"Strong. Many warriors. Big from walking people. Live in mountain. Trade metal for meat. Good trade. But mean. I think he think if walking people find new trade, no need old trade."
"Are you sure it was him? No doubt?"
"Mountain people warriors. Skin like…" he looked around, finally settling on a bed of flowers in the garden, he pointed at a bright white petal, "many hair. I kill four. Mountain people."
"No chance they were acting without orders?" He looked a bit confused so she rephrased, "You sure Mountain King say to kill?"
"Mountain people no like leave mountain."
"He wasn't afraid of killing someone from the Empire? The Patriarch of a clan? He had to know we'd retaliate."
"I no know he think. But trade man have no Mark. Not from big God. What you do? Garcino more strong than all trade man people. Mountain King have 5 [gibberish]… Like brother but no real. All 5 hard fight for Garcino. I no know I win."
Feel free to ask specific questions about the Mountain King or the beast lands.
---
Chachi met her other brother on the docks. He was plain looking for a cultivator. Black hair, black eyes, an unremarkable face, simple robes in the clan colors. He resembled his older brother, but without the grace and confidence. Nothing about him stood out, except for the sharp, hungry look in his eyes.
"Welcome to Sales dear sister! Sorry I haven't been to meet you, I've been so busy preparing for the great expansion you so wisely ordered. As I'm sure you've already imagined, Sales is spread out. I choose this location to show you the focus of our recent efforts."
Chachi glanced around pleasantly, pretending the docks were an impressive sight. They were the underside of sales, the side customers weren't supposed to see. No glitz and glamor, just utilitarian tools and organized efforts. An efficient stream of her clan's riverboats came in to offload one set of goods and take in another. The clan's production was focused on elixirs, but since they already had a trade network they bought and sold a wider variety of products in markets across the 1000 Rivers. Mortals did the basic work. They were the lowliest of her clan, employees paid near nothing for the strength of their backs. A cultivator could do much more, but a cultivator would demand more than scraps. They had cultivators in Building to oversee the operations, their specialized techniques drove the workers harder, extracting the full value of their labor.
"We've long relied on our riverboats. The 1000 Rivers is well named. We take well-charted routes, protected by the Lords, so our trade has been remarkably safe. A few guards to deter the desperate or fight the very occasional wild beast, and we're fine. As soon as we leave the 1000 Rivers, the danger grows significantly. We'll also need to change to more appropriate vehicles. The plan right now is to secure transition points at the borders of our home region, places where we can park the boats and change to local vehicles: ships in the Turtle Isles, hovercraft in the Swamp, pack animals in the desert. All three introduce new logistical hurdles. I'm worried about the pack animals. We'll need to hire local specialists for them. We'd benefit greatly if you invested in higher quality all-terrain vehicles before we commit to local transport."
Okullin was there, standing off to the side. She split her time disinterestedly scanning for threats and glaring at her brother like he was a maggot in her soup. She huffed with clear irritation as the stream of words continued to pour out of Tetlkoto's mouth. Chachi was glad they had that talk about punching brothers.
"I can speak frankly yes? If I'm being honest, I'm not sure about this expansion. Was it our brother's idea? Yes, yes, you don't need to say. Of course it was. It stinks of his overly cautious thinking. Even as he takes a risk in expanding, he can't help but try to even it out. Diversification. He wants to expand to all three regions at once because he fears one will fail and hopes the others will make up for it. Instead, all three risk failure because he's asking us to do too much at once. You should pick one region and then we can fully invest our efforts there, not half-ass all three," Chachi's brother was articulate, but speaking just a hair faster than was comfortable. If he was talking to a mortal, they'd surely be overwhelmed.
"If it were up to me, and of course it's not but if it were, I would focus on the Turtle Islands," He continued, "There's a lot of demand there. They don't have the native materials to produce most elixirs, it's all imports. Profit isn't great in the main trade hubs, but that's because middle-men are taking a chunk. If we soft expand to the region we'll only be hitting those hubs, selling those elixirs to local traders, who will take them with a bunch of other goods and sell at a huge markups to their little island hoping route. If we go hard on ships we can cut out the local traders entirely."
Chachi shook her head, "they don't have enough purchasing power to justify the investment. Those islanders have no spirit stone mines, the Abyssals steal the essence crystals in the ocean, and they can only harvest so many valuable fish. If we go directly to the islands, we risk making a long journey for nothing. We can make a reliable profit by offloading some elixirs in the trade hubs. Some will go to the small islands in a trickle they can sustain, some will go to ships from more distant regions that use the trade hubs as stopovers."
"You sound like Teo," Tet responded. Chachi grimaced. She did. She was almost quoting what he'd told her last week. Her brother grinned like a hunter who just spotted his prey. With a flourish he brought out a shiny white stone. "Do you know what this is?"
"A spirit stone." Her Art of Evaluation told her it's a spirit stone of excellent quality. It was unusually smooth and had a pearlescent sheen.
"Yes! Exactly! This is money. Not a fish, not a crystal. Straight money. You're right, they don't have mines. They have something better. They have gardens. Gardens of giant clams, natural filtration and distillation of the diffuse power in the sea! Lady Chalchiuhtlicue is very aware of the financial position of her people, she wants to do something about it. She's investing substantial resources into Spirit Pearl gardens. The clams need space to produce the best pearls, so she's spreading them thin throughout the Turtle Islands and letting the local islanders use them as they wish. Our rivals are as blind as Teo, thinking that things in the Islands will be like they've always been."
Chachi kept her face neutral and signaled for her brother to continue his pitch.
"But wait, there's more!" her brother pounced, "The clams belong to her spiritually, so they respond to her will, but their growth can be multiplied again with the right elixirs. Elixirs we have in our warehouses right now. I have it on good authority she'd be willing to buy our entire stock of GREEN 4, 12, and 22 and sign a contract for a lot more if we promised to deliver it directly to her farms. Once the farms are going, the locals will trade Pearls directly for a wider range of elixirs."
Chachi considered the Clan's profile on the Lady. She was grateful that she'd been studying so hard lately, or she'd be lost in this conversation. She was the daughter of Duke Tezcatlipoca. The turtle islands were Abyssal territory, inhabited only by barbarian cultists they tolerated for the land based tributes, until Duke Tezcatlipoca, then Lord Tezcatlipoca raised a titanic navy to take them in the Emperor's name. After a bloody invasion and a long pacification, they became Imperial land. The Lord became a Duke, and he used the new territory to empower his favorite daughter. She was notoriously strapped for cash. The islands just didn't produce enough, and what they did she invested invariably in her navy. The Abyssals remained a constant threat, and the most distant islands still harbored cultists. She didn't even have a palace, she just lived on her enormous flagship, sailing from one skirmish to the next. It was surprisingly wise of her to invest in the long term economic health of her region, but everything they had on her said she couldn't afford their entire stock of GREEN 4, 12, and 22.
"She can afford it?" Chachi asked. She didn't think her brother's grin could get any wider, but it did.
"NO! She can't. So she's willing to sell us something even more valuable: a share."
"A… Share?" Chachi played along. The word was new to her a month ago, but now she knew her family owned a few shares in lesser businesses already. Buying shares was often the precursor to taking over a weaker clan in its moment of crisis. Her clan had never offered any, it was a family business and it would remain so.
"Yes! It's the new big thing! A percentage of the profits from her clam farms. We'd be like Lords ourselves, making wealth directly from natural resources!"
"So… We're giving her the elixirs for free? She's buying them with a promise to share later? What if she just doesn't pay up? Half our debtors are doing that now."
"Ironclad contract, and she's a woman of honor to boot. Her reputation is sterling. But I understand we're a bit poor ourselves at the moment. Maybe you think we can't afford to invest our elixirs for something long term. That's fine, perfectly fine. I know some investors who would be happy to buy the shares off of us for a good price, we'd make more than the market price on those elixirs. It's a perfect deal. Long term growth, a positive relationship with a Lady, and easy liquidity if we need it! What do you say?"
[] Yes!
Wow! How can you say no?
[] No.
But it's a spectacular deal!
[Secret Roll]
Oversight Interrupt!
It sounded too good to be true because it was. The whole thing was cover. The clan archives clearly showed that Lady Chalchiuhtlicue had tried the pearl farm scheme before, but they were too vulnerable to Abyssal raids. She couldn't defend them long term, and so the shares were worthless. She'd been shopping the entire scheme Tet was presenting to every merchant clan in the Empire for decades, and no one was biting anymore.
The real question was, why was he trying to sell Chachi on a notoriously bad deal? No doubt he thought he could get away with it because of her inexperience, but he had to know it was trash. Why sabotage the clan like that? To highlight her incompetence?
No, it was something else. Everyone would know he pushed the deal, it would hurt him as much as her. The answer lay in his preparations. She'd spent most of the last two weeks in disguise, her spirit veiled, inspecting Sales as they prepared for the three region push. He was already focusing more on the Turtle Islands than the other regions, and he was preparing an extraordinary range of goods to sell there. Not just the normal elixirs, or stock that was guaranteed to sell, but a truly impressive range of goods. When Chachi looked deeper she was shocked to find that a lot of what he was preparing were extremely cheap droughts and even raw ingredients. She even found a warehouse stacked with jugs of sealed and chilled mortal blood, useful for basic medicinal transfusions and little else. Her family collected, sealed, and distributed them to hospitals as charity. It barely had value to mortals, it wasn't worth shipping across two whole regions.
Then she looked the stock up in the clan's archives. They had value, but only to one group: The Abyssals, that nightmarish undersea civilization, notorious enemies of the Emperor. In some strange mockery of symbiosis, Imperial cultivators could benefit greatly from Abyssal products, even their bodily fluids were excellent elixir ingredients, and Abyssals reacted similarly to Imperial resources. They could buy each other's garbage and both profit enormously. But they were enemies of the Empire, and the Emperor forbade all trade with them. The punishment was clan extinction.
Tet was planning to use Lady Chalchiuhtlicue's disastrous deal as cover to trade with her most bitter enemies. It gave a perfect pretense to send ships laden with trade goods into the deep sea, and he could clean his dirty money with false reports of solid profits from the worthless pearl farm shares and the anemic island markets, hiding the true source of the income. He couldn't be planning to reveal the secret to all his merchants. Maybe he had some loyalists in on it. Maybe he was using secret cultists among the islanders as intermediaries. Abyssal trade was so monstrously profitable that he could no doubt skim a percentage for his own uses and still make it look like all of Sale's ventures were blessed by Heaven.
1. You caught your brother with your excellent oversight. Now what do you do?
[] Take the deal on your own terms
It's dangerous, but it's also extremely profitable. Let your brother know you know, so he can't embezzle the profits, and use the cover he's developed to trade with the Abyssals. So long as you can keep it secret, the clan's income will skyrocket.
[] Stop it now
Trading with the Abyssals is treason. The Emperor will find out, and he will kill everyone. You haven't broken the law yet, right? Confront Tet and make him see the error of his ways.
[] Fire him
You can't trust Tet at all. Stop this madness now and fire him immediately. You'll need a new head of sales, and a transition in leadership right now could be disastrous for the expansion, but there's no way you can risk Tet being in charge of anything when he's already planned treason under your nose.
[] Imprison him
Fire him and also capture him. You don't actually have a jail, but you could whip something up on the estate.
[] Turn him in
Can you do it to your brother? Maybe, you are a loyal subject of the Emperor. Tet was planning high treason against the Empire of Light. You don't have damning evidence just yet but your word as Matriarch and the mortal blood will be enough to catch his eye, and his agents will divine the truth from there. Hopefully, they will look into your heart and see your purity and loyalty. They could even grant you a boon… If they don't order the clan's execution to be safe.
2. You voted to build infrastructure to help with the expansion. Your efforts are best used in developing new vehicles for your trade caravans. What do you want to make?
[] Airships
Airships are the gold standard in inter-regional trade. They're extremely fast, safe from a wide variety of hazards, and bypass rough terrain. They do come with some disadvantages. They're the most expensive option, even if you build them yourself. They're more limited in how much weight they can carry than the other options, and the sky is not entirely free from dangers. They also need to be powered by a team of cultivators in at least late Hungering using elixirs or they'll fall from the air. I'm focusing on the negatives not to discourage this option, but to show that it's not a slam-dunk. The advantages of flight are numerous and should be self-evident.
$45 for 15 Airships, enough to run moderately sized shipments of high profit goods to distant trade hubs.
[] Landspeeders
You can build large self-propelled wagons. They're cheap to produce and the main cost to operate them is a single cultivator at any level to feed the efficient core. Your security guards are low level cultivators, so it shouldn't be an issue. Your Shade Llama has a beast technique to create level ground wherever it walks, you can reproduce that in a treasure to help the landspeeders cover uneven terrain. They'll still struggle with the widest rivers, the deeper swamps, and mountains, so the routes they take will be somewhat constrained. The vehicles will be vulnerable to attack, but you'll be able to afford some attrition. With many more vehicles than the other options you can send them out to smaller towns.
$10 for 200 Landspeeders, enough to transport small stocks of your goods directly to customers in the border areas of all the regions.
[] Walking Fortresses
Trade speed for size, reliability, and security. You can build extremely long armored vehicles that walk over rough terrain on many legs, like a centipede. Their length would allow them to cross most rivers and portions of swamp. They should be able to plow through small obstacles and over large ones, but they still have some limits on their routes. Weight will be less of a concern, so you can equip them with Formation Weapons, like an Elemental Annihilator. They will be able to carry a huge supply of goods, enough to flood regional trade hubs with each shipment.
$20 for 5 Walking Fortresses, each large enough to fully supply a major city.
In earth terms, do you want cargo planes, a trucking fleet, or trains?
