If it were a traditional hand-cranked spinning wheel, a single spindle would creak and groan as it turned; even for a skilled worker, spinning half a pound of yarn a day was the absolute limit. But now, these eight spindles were voraciously devouring the raw material being fed into them.
Xu Youde cranked faster and faster, his face turning a deep shade of purple. Sweat soaked through the back of his silk robe. He seemed to have fallen into a state of frenzy, the wooden handle in his hand transformed into a key to a mountain of gold.
A basket of aged cotton, weighing a full five pounds.
In less than fifteen minutes, it hit rock bottom.
"Master! Stop! We’re out of material!" Jenny Huang shrieked, terrified that the friction from idling would burn out the bearings.
Xu Youde didn't hear her. Momentum carried him through several more rotations until the resistance vanished completely and the machine let out a hollow, whirring moan. Only then did he jerk to a halt.
Eight spindles, plump and full, were wrapped in tight, uniform cotton thread.
A deathly silence fell over the room, broken only by Xu Youde’s heavy, ragged breathing, which sounded like a bellows stretched to its limit.
"Weight," Xu Youde squeezed the word out from between his teeth.
Snapping out of his daze, Li Sheng hurriedly stepped forward with a small steelyard scale to remove the eight spindles. His hands shook so violently he nearly dropped the scale on the floor.
A moment later, Li Sheng’s voice cracked. "Master... this batch... after subtracting the weight of the bobbins, it’s one and a quarter pounds."
Clang!
Xu Youde suddenly pulled his ever-present gold abacus from his breast pocket and slammed it down onto the oil-stained workbench.
He didn't even bother to wipe the machine oil from his hands. The speed at which his fingers flicked the abacus beads was somehow even faster than the spinning machine had been.
Click-clack, click-clack.
The crisp sounds of impact exploded in the confined room—the sound of silver falling into a purse.
"One and a quarter pounds in fifteen minutes... that’s five pounds an hour..." Xu Youde muttered to himself, his eyes gleaming with a manic light. "Calculating by a five-hour workday, that’s twenty-five pounds! Even if the machine needs to rest and the worker needs to rest, even with a discount, we're looking at at least twenty pounds a day!"
He slammed the abacus beads upward again.
"A skilled weaver spins half a pound of yarn a day at most, yet her monthly wage is two taels of silver. This machine... this single machine is worth eighty weavers!"
"The monthly wages for eighty weavers would be one hundred and sixty taels! And that’s just the output of one machine in a single day! What if we build ten? A hundred?"
Xu Youde snapped his head up, his eyes bloodshot as he looked at Xu Qinghuan. "Daughter, this isn't spinning thread; this is printing money! Those bastards at the Jiangning Weaving Department couldn't match the monthly output of ten machines in our Liuyuan Garden in a whole year!"
"I’m going to tear down every scrap of peeling paint in this garden and replace it with gold bricks!"
The air in the room was so hot it was suffocating.
Li Sheng and Xu Wuwei were dazed, crushed by the weight of those numbers. An eighty-fold gap in labor productivity meant absolute annihilation in an era where labor was cheap but efficiency was abysmal.
It meant costs could be lowered until they were negligible. It meant they could use rock-bottom prices to crush every cloth merchant on the market.
Xu Qinghuan remained silent.
She walked to the machine and reached out to pick up a spindle of the newly spun cotton thread. The twist was a bit coarse due to the poor quality of the aged cotton, but it was strong.
She gave it a sharp tug.
Snap.
The thread broke.
"Father, your calculations are correct." Xu Qinghuan tossed the broken thread back into the basket, her voice as steady and chilling as a bucket of ice water. "But this machine is a gold-devouring beast. It eats too fast."
The abacus in Xu Youde’s hand went still. "What do you mean?"
"How much cotton do we have left in the warehouse?" Xu Qinghuan looked at Li Sheng.
Li Sheng froze, his face turning pale. "Miss... not much. We weren't in the cloth business to begin with. This aged cotton was just leftover stock for making winter padding. That fifteen-minute run just now nearly exhausted our entire inventory."
"This machine eats five pounds of cotton every fifteen minutes. That’s twenty pounds a day. Ten machines would be two hundred pounds." Xu Qinghuan turned to look at the gloomy sky outside the window. "Jiangning is wealthy, but we don't have cocoons, we don't have raw silk, and now we don't even have much cotton."
Xu Youde’s enthusiasm instantly cooled by half.
He was a veteran businessman; he grasped the crux of the problem immediately.
The weaving industry in Jiangnan was the domain of silk.
The Wang, Zhao, and Xie families—the three great clans—controlled the mulberry orchards, the reeling mills, and the weaving bureaus. The moment a cocoon hit the ground, they snatched it up. The Xu family was currently a public enemy; forget buying cocoons, no one would even dare sell them silkworm droppings.
Without raw materials, no matter how fast this "Jenny" turned, it was just a pile of junk wood.
"The Silk Road is blocked for us." Xu Youde tossed the abacus onto the table and slumped back into his chair, dejected. "Those clans have been guarding against us for a long time. The moment we try to buy silk, they’ll double the market price of cocoons or cut off the supply entirely."
The atmosphere in the room turned oppressive.
To possess a dragon-slaying blade but have no dragon to hunt was a frustration worse than having no blade at all.
Xu Qinghuan walked over to the pile of discarded cotton scraps and bent down to pick up a ball of greyish-white fluff. She rubbed it between her fingertips, feeling the coarse but warm texture.
"Who said we were going to weave silk?"
Xu Qinghuan turned around, holding the cotton ball high. In the dim light, the unremarkable fluff lacked the luster of silk, but it possessed a sense of honest utility.
"Silk is for the nobility. It’s light, delicate, and a single garment costs several taels of silver."
She held the cotton ball in front of Xu Youde.
"Father, in this world, are there more people wearing silks and satins, or more people wearing coarse cloth and hemp?"
Xu Youde blinked, answering instinctively, "Naturally, there are more people like us wearing plain cloth. Commoners can't afford silk."
"Since the silk road is blocked, we will walk the path no one else is taking."
Xu Qinghuan’s gaze traveled beyond the room, as if she could see the vast cotton fields of the north and the trade routes stretching into the northwest.
"Jiangnan doesn't produce cotton because they only have eyes for the profits of mulberry and silkworms. But the North produces it. The Northwest produces it. In those places, 'white-stack' cotton covers the mountains and plains, and the price is as cheap as weeds. The great clans look down on it, thinking it’s only fit for the poor."
"We won't fight them for their tiny plots of mulberry orchards."
Xu Qinghuan slammed the cotton ball onto the table, the force making Xu Youde’s abacus jump.
"Ultimately, we can't rush this."
"However, starting today, we will go north to buy cotton and bring it back by river. The more, the better. We need to stockpile it first. Even with the shipping costs, the profit margins will still be massive!"
Xu Youde stared at the cotton ball, then at the ferocious machine beside it.
He picked up his abacus once more.
"The profit in this..." Xu Youde squeezed the words out, "is even greater than silk! If we get the volume up, we can sell cloth cheaper than rice! Though, the raw material really is the issue."
