That afternoon the great officers of the court all received the Immortal Dew the Xuan Emperor had granted them.
It very nearly gave a fair number of them heart failure.
Outside the great festivals His Majesty rarely granted wine… and when wine was granted, it was usually the poisoned cup.
Old General Chen had a whole jar. Every other prince and minister was granted only a flask.
More than a few ministers with guilty consciences heard that His Majesty had granted them a flask of wine and were frightened badly enough on the spot to wet a diaper.
They thought His Majesty was granting them death.
Once the reason was clear and they had tasted the nectar of the immortals, there was not one of them who was not astonished by it.
They caught hold of the eunuch who had brought the wine and asked where it came from.
The eunuch told them that Marquis Ning had found this Immortal Dew and presented it to His Majesty… and His Majesty had granted it to them in turn, so that prince and subject might enjoy it together.
Wine that both His Majesty and Marquis Ning had drunk and called good — how could it be anything but good?
And they had drunk it themselves. It was nectar of the immortals, no question.
So every prince and minister who had drunk the Immortal Dew gave orders to his servants at once: be at the Immortal Dew shop early tomorrow and wait, and the moment it opened, buy back as much Immortal Dew as they could.
The next day, in the morning.
To the sound of firecrackers, ten Immortal Dew shops opened at the same hour.
A notice hung at the door of every one of them, saying that the wine took more than ten kinds of grain and better than twenty separate steps to make, and that the output was very small.
Sales were therefore limited to a hundred jars a day.
Beside the notice, at every shop door, hung a poem.
The poem was called Forgetting Sorrow.
Beneath it, the signature: the Idle Marquis.
Common people came up to ask the price, learned that a jar cost ten taels of silver, and could only look at it and sigh. They could not afford it.
But the capital was not short of rich men.
Ten taels of silver was not much to a rich man.
The men sent by the princes and ministers and the great officials had come with orders.
Ten taels a jar, and eight or ten jars came to a hundred-odd taels. To a rich man that was nothing.
What was more, if it had not been expensive they would not have bought it.
What class were the common people, to drink the same wine as they did? Where would the distinction of their rank show then?
So Ning Chen’s whole approach was to leave the poor alone, harvesting only the rich.
The men sent by the great officials opened their mouths and asked for eight or ten jars.
But the people at the Immortal Dew shops told them that no man could buy more than two.
That was Ning Chen’s rule too.
Two jars was twenty taels, which did not feel like much.
Ten jars was a hundred taels, which felt like a lot.
It was like cigarettes. Ten or twenty a pack feels like small change… but a pack a day comes to thousands, even tens of thousands, over a year.
There was a method to harvesting, too. You did not pull them up by the roots. You cut one crop at a time… a thin stream that runs a long way.
The capital held several million people.
Even if the rich were the smallest fraction of them, that was still an enormous number.
So the thousand jars sold out fast.
The Immortal Dew people slammed their doors shut with a bang and left one line behind them… If you want some, come early tomorrow.
Plenty of people got none.
And so, in the space of a single day, Immortal Dew caught fire.
His Majesty had drunk it and called it good.
And Marquis Ning had written a poem for it in his own hand.
Princes and ministers and great officials fought to buy it, and most of them came away with nothing.
The heart of it was that the wine was good — pure and clear, sweet and sharp and full-bodied… To beat iron, you have to be hard yourself.
Quality that could stand up to anything, and the pull of a famous name on top of it… the wine would only catch on harder.
That evening Jin Qingsheng came to bring Ning Chen the good news.
Ning Chen ran the figures. The cost of a jar, plus the workers’ wages and the other expenses, came to about two parts in ten.
A thousand jars a day was ten thousand taels of silver, seven or eight thousand of it clear profit… about two hundred thousand taels in a month.
Wine was a thing people used up. There was no worry about selling it.
Buying up the breweries and the shops at the start had cost a lot of silver.
By that reckoning he would have it all back in three months.
Think of Ning Ziming, who was Minister of Rites his whole life and had squeezed only two hundred thousand taels out of it by the time he died… Ning Chen made more than that in a month.
“Jin Qingsheng. In three months, bring out the twenty-year cellar… fifty jars a day at each shop.”
“And so on from there. A new cellar every three months.”
“One more thing. Leave the fifty-year cellar alone.”
The fifty-year cellar was for the imperial house.
Fifty years, my ass. It was all brewed together.
Jin Qingsheng bowed his head and said respectfully, “Yes!”
With that arranged, Ning Chen waved him out.
Then Ning Chen fetched brush, ink, paper and stone, and began to write and draw.
The next morning Ning Chen rode his beloved Diaochan clopping along to the Ministry of War.
“Greetings to the marquis!”
Ji Mingchen saw Ning Chen and bowed.
Ning Chen raised a hand. “No ceremony, Lord Ji.”
As he said it he leaned in and smelled Ji Mingchen. “How much have you had? You reek of wine.”
Ji Mingchen lifted an arm and smelled it. There was wine on him, sure enough.
“The marquis must not blame me. I sent a man out yesterday to buy two jars of Immortal Dew. I have never drunk anything so clear and so full-bodied, and I could not stop at a few cups.”
Ning Chen smiled. “So Lord Ji has heard of Immortal Dew too?”
Ji Mingchen said, “His Majesty praised it and the marquis wrote a poem for it. Who at court does not know about the Immortal Dew that is like nectar of the immortals?”
Ning Chen laughed to himself where it did not show.
“Lord Ji, Immortal Dew is good, but don’t overdo it… Don’t let it get in the way of the work.”
Ji Mingchen nodded.
Then he changed the subject and asked, “Is there something the marquis wants of me, coming at this hour?”
Ning Chen took several drawings out of his robe and handed them over.
Ji Mingchen looked through them for a while and asked, curious, “This is… a weapon?”
What Ning Chen had drawn was very strange. It looked like a rod, but it had spikes on it.
He had never seen a weapon like it.
Ning Chen nodded slightly. It was rebar, in fact.
Grind the ribs of the rebar to an edge, and one blow on a man would not only break bone and tear sinew — the sharpened ribs would scrape a whole slab of skin and flesh off with it.
Grind one end to a point and it would kill by thrusting. Because the ribs twisted, a wound from it healed as badly as one from a three-sided army spike.
The thing was not hard to make. The trouble was that this world’s tempering was poor. The smiths knew nothing but a thousand hammer blows and a hundred firings, and had no scientific method.
To make hundred-refined steel you had to lay iron ore and charcoal into the furnace in alternating layers and roast them slowly at low heat.
The carbon monoxide from the charcoal reduced the iron oxide in the ore to iron itself… and after that a series of further steps finished the work.
Ning Chen had written the method down in detail.
A weapon like this could smash, could stab, could block… and it was tougher by far than anything else in this world.
It was a weapon of Ning Chen’s own working out and had not been tested, so he told Ji Mingchen to have one made first and try it.
With all that explained, Ning Chen asked, “And the thing I had you make before?”
It was a hand grenade.
That was far easier to make than a musket.
Ji Mingchen said, “They are all made. We just don’t know how to put them together, so we have been waiting for the marquis.”
“Come. Take me to see them!”
Ji Mingchen took Ning Chen to a room by itself and had the finished pieces brought.
In less than a quarter of an hour Ning Chen had several grenades assembled.
Ji Mingchen looked curiously at the thing in Ning Chen’s hand, which was shaped like a club, and could not keep the question in. “My lord marquis, how does this thing work? Do you hit a man over the head with it? Then why not use a rock?”
Ning Chen rolled his eyes. “Is there an open space? I’ll show you.”
(End of Chapter 368)