They gathered in the common room to sort through what they had put together. Tian passed around his little timeline, which got grim nods of appreciation from Brother Wang and Sister Su. They came with their own stacks of notes. Sister Su took the floor first.

“We underestimated the importance of salt.”

“We did?” Tian blinked. He had thought “Mortal Food Preservation” was an absolute top tier importance rating already.

“Yes. It turns out that it is necessary for life.” That got amazed looks from around the room. Sister Su pulled yet more notes. “Salt deficiency leads to seizures and other health problems. It can be found in meat, dairy and shellfish, but we will get to that in a moment. It is not found in meaningful quantities in cultivated plants.”

She tapped a neat table on a fresh sheet of paper. “Here- this is a rough statistical survey of the classes of people in the broad sky kingdom. Note it only tracks households and not individuals, so the numbers are approximate. The key information, however, is quite obvious. The overwhelming majority of the subjects of the Broad Sky Kingdom are peasants.”

“Is this right? Ninety percent?” Hong fell back in her chair and slowly rubbed her temple. “I thought it was just around the Mountain.”

“The peasant census is actually the most accurate part of the survey as they also make up the majority of the tax base. While there have been instances of nobles and tax collectors attempting to manipulate the numbers, such short term deviations quickly vanish when the census is examined over a longer period. Peasants engaged in agriculture make up ninety percent of the population of the Broad Sky Kingdom, and a majority of them are engaged in rice farming.”

“And rice doesn’t have salt in it naturally.” Tian nodded.

“Yes. Historically, the kingdom has built cities based on proximity to salt, or the ability to transport sizable amounts of salt. The body doesn’t require large quantities to maintain health, but since the days of the ancients, the importance of salt has been known. Apparently.” Sister Su snorted.

Tian dug out one of his medical textbooks and dug through it. Salt was listed as a vital nutrient. It was way, way down at the bottom of the list. It seemed the author could hardly imagine cultivators who couldn’t get their hands on enough salt. It looked like he was including it for the sake of thoroughness.

“The Redstone Wastes are on the southern border of the Broad Sky Kingdom, and I’m sure it hasn’t been flooding the salt market since the Kingdom’s founding. So how did the Kingdom meet its salt needs historically?” Hong leaned forward, curious.

“There are several places where brine wells can be found. Cities were founded near them. In a feat of quite brilliant mortal ingenuity, they use the flammable gases that rise from the wells to boil iron pans full of brine. This is more labor intensive than you might imagine, and it is apparently a poor, miserable life for the hereditary salt making households. Desertion is common. The reason Brother Wang thought there was no domestic salt production is that those salt producing locations have been reduced to a bare minimum level of production. But Brother Wang will explain more about that.”

“Isn’t that production method exactly what Black Iron Gorge is supposed to be doing?” Tian asked.

“Indeed.”

“So… how is Black Iron Gorge out competing local producers? And why did local producers reduce production down to almost nothing?” Tian asked.

“This is where I come in.” Brother Wang smiled. It was not a pleasant expression. “Roughly a thousand years ago there was a great debate in court. There were two schools of scholars. The first proposed that the state impose a monopoly on the manufacturing, transport and sale of salt. This would both guarantee supply and act an indirect tax, funding the government while minimizing resentment. The other school argued that this was a too-expansive role for the government to play, and it was better handled by merchants who could then be taxed more harshly than the peasants. Merchants being, theoretically, the lowest social class.”

“The merchant side won.” Hong said.

“Yes. The King decided to make the existing practice official policy - peasants would have hereditary rights to produce salt, and had to sell it to approved merchants at a fixed price. Then the merchants sold the salt to the public at a fixed price, and were taxed at a fixed rate. Profits were modest, but extremely stable.”

“Alright…” Tian wasn’t sure where this was going.

“So what happens if you dump thousands of tons of salt produced outside the kingdom into the mix, at prices lower than what the merchants have to pay when they buy it from Kingdom peasants?”

“Peasants die first.” Hong nodded. “Then the salt merchants buy up the salt producing land to choke off even the possibility of competition.”

“Pretty much. Then the big merchants, or the ones with the best supply of Black Iron Gorge salt, start acquiring the smaller salt merchants. Either that, or they force them into other industries. In any case, control of the salt industry is now in the hands of just three or four cartels. The Kingdom hasn’t allowed production, transportation and sale to be combined into one company yet, but the difference in practice is almost nothing.” Brother Wang’s face looked mild, but there was malice in his eyes.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“And those cartels are backed by Ancient Crane Mountain merchant families.” Hong concluded.

“As, by complete coincidence, were the scholars who argued against the creation of the monopoly a millennia ago. I recognize the family names. ‘The path of the dao requires the virtuous sovereign to do the least, giving the most freedom to his subjects. It is by virtuous example and wise forbearance that all calamities may be avoided or overcome.’” The malice in Brother Wang’s eyes became far more justified to Tian.

“You want to create the monopoly system. Close Black Iron Gorge out of the market entirely and break the salt trading merchants.” Tian sat back with a little smile. He didn’t hate that idea one bit.

“No, that’s Sister Su’s idea.” The wheelchair bound cultivator nodded. Brother Wang tapped his broad chest. “I want to integrate the Broad Sky Kingdom and Ancient Crane Mountain into a single entity. Black Iron Gorge is, ultimately, a single city that survives by subterfuge and the internal weakening of their enemies. By unifying the Monastery and the Kingdom, we can purge that corruption and create a better kingdom for everyone. Black Iron Gorge wouldn’t stand a chance against just our sect, never mind the rest of the alliance.”

What followed was two hours of completely unproductive, but wild, conversation. Brother Wang’s thoughts were simple but deep. Monopoly didn’t go far enough. In practice, it would just shift the graft from the merchants to the officials. On the other hand, cultivators as civil servants would alleviate most of these problems. Not enough salt production? A few earth spells should see those brine springs gushing. Not enough transport? A few storage rings and a quick jog by an Outer Court member would guarantee freshness and security of delivery. Heretics causing trouble? Not when the local school was taught by Outer Court disciples.

In such an environment, what use would merchants be? Buy low in one place, sell dear in another? Good luck on the international stage. Domestically, the Divine Kingdom would ensure every subject was fed, housed and educated. The resentment heretics fed on would be choked off. And not a single person with the potential for cultivation would slip past.

“And how would we cultivate?” Hong asked. “Brother Tian is an exception. I, for one, need a quiet place and focused mediation to cultivate.”

“Most people do, but so what? How many hours a day do you cultivate for? You couldn’t squeeze out eight hours to oversee a harvest or guard a border post?” Wang rubbed his big hands together. “We already have the issue of what to do with all the Level Tens. Thanks to Brother Fu, we know they aren’t wastes. They just need more experiences outside of combat! More types of experiences, rather than just doing more of the same things over and over. Well, how about a century of working with the people of the Kingdom? Seeing their lives up close?”

“That is hardly everything Direct Disciple Fu required. Such an idea has been tested in the past, repeatedly, and without meaningful results.” Sister Su’s voice was clipped.

Tian had largely dropped out of the conversation, half closing his eyes as he tried to connect the disparate threads of what he had seen and what he had studied. There were cultivators working for the kingdom and the city lord already. There had to be, or Jin would have been running the city. So it would be fair to assume there were already a few cultivators in key positions throughout the country, though the ones in Burning Flag City clearly weren’t affiliated with Ancient Crane Mountain.

The thing he kept coming back to was that what Brother Wang was describing didn’t sound like cultivators to Tian. They just didn’t. Cultivators had adventures. Cultivators battled bandits and heretics, or delved into ancient ruins looking for treasures. Sure, you got trash like the mercenaries hired by Ji, but Tian took his brothers as his yardstick. The civil-service cultivators Brother Wang was arguing for didn’t measure up.

Tian frowned minutely. He was thinking too casually. There were cultivators who worked as administrators. Auntie Wu and everyone else in the quartermaster division were an obvious example. Brother Zhang was the soul of bureaucracy in the Mission Hall, but still fought like a hero when the array came down. Even in the West Town Temple, someone had to take an inventory of the grain. If only to make sure the mortals weren’t skimming.

“The optimal solution in your system wouldn’t be integration but absorption. A cultivator-king, ruling wisely and justly for centuries or millenia.” Sister Su’s voice was cold. “Or neglecting the kingdom entirely, leaving things to his ‘virtuous ministers’ and we are back where we began.”

It was a good point. If the monastery was using the Kingdom as a resource base, why didn’t they run the country directly? He kept feeling like he was missing something obvious.

“Grandpa?”

Every generation thinks they invented sex and economics. You are on the right track, Tian. Keep going.

The strongest cultivators had the least to do with mortal affairs. They couldn’t be bothered. Nobody had mentioned the existence of the immortals holding down the city. Everyone talked about the army. And the army claimed they basically never ran into evil cultivators. Which was them missing what was right in front of them more than anything else, but it pointed to an assumption that, as a firm rule, Mortals and immortals did not coexist, even if they were geographically mixed together.

There was presumably a reason for that, even if there was a cultivator who pursued the Dao of Administration or Tax Collection or something. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine cultivators that pursued the Dao of Farming. Herb cultivation was something the Outer Court did all the time.

There was something missing. Brother Fu had experienced just about everything a body could, but none of it had been enough to break through. It wasn’t just a question of more life. Tian would coat himself in a savory sauce and throw himself to the wild dogs before he would believe someone like Ku had thought more deeply on the nature of the dao than Brother Fu had. Yet Ku, and who knows how many other ordinary Heavenly realm cultivators, all transcended before him.

He tried to breathe and settle back into cultivation, but his mind was being invaded by these irritating questions. It wasn’t that resolving them wasn’t important. It was vital! It was why the monastery had sent them out in the first place. It was just that once they left concrete things like- “The nomads, the ones right over there, are selling slaves and acting as middlemen for the salt merchants. Get ‘em!” he lost interest.

It had taken the full force of Brother Fu’s moral persuasion, backed up by a variety of threats, to make Tian read those history and ethics books. He was damned if he was going to live them. Find the bleeding, stop the bleeding. See a heretic, kill a heretic. It might not fix the issue on a wide scale, but it was what was right for him. But he was stuck in this damned room, arguing with people as helpless to fix things as he was.

And just like that, his mediation was lost in a spike of irritation. He had to focus to recapture his breathing. His chest was feeling stuffy from all the stopping and starting.

The answer landed on his face like a falling salt block. Mortal air. His lungs craved the breath of immortality, but here he was, squabbling over how to best order the brief lives of peasants. His thoughts were a jumble, jumping from topic to topic, unable to focus or find flow. He was choking on mortal air.