Chapter 25

London.

The square in front of the Palace of Westminster was filled with a commotion that had persisted for days.

The merchants of the City of London, who would normally never have lost their gentlemanly composure, were waving placards with flushed faces and raising their voices.

“A halt to the opium trade! This is sheer suicide!”

“Her Majesty the Queen is threatening the livelihood of India and the merchants!”

“Lift the trade blockade immediately! Lift it!”

There was a sliver of justification to their anger. Due to the abruptly enacted ban on the opium trade, opium lacking any designated origin was rotting away inside the warehouses of numerous merchant houses connected to the East India Company.

The fear of bankruptcy crept insidiously through London’s financial district. That fear was invisible, yet its intangible presence was quietly staining the numbers on the stock exchange, conversations in teahouses, and prayers at dinner tables.

Cold raindrops began to fall one by one, but just as the merchants’ fervor showed no signs of cooling down—

The heavy doors of the parliament building swung open, and a Board of Trade official dashed out in a frantic run.

In his hand was a document whose ink had barely dried.

“Step aside! Make way! Urgent breaking news!”

As the official climbed onto the podium, the protesting merchants’ gazes focused upon him simultaneously until someone shouted out:

“Is it an order to resume trade? Has Her Majesty finally changed her mind?”

“Quiet! Will you all be quiet?!”

Panting heavily, the official unfolded the document, and his voice rang across the square as though amplified by a megaphone.

“I am here to announce the initial results achieved by Sir Staunton, the special envoy returning from Guangzhou, Qing China!”

Qing China.

At the mention of that name, the merchants swallowed dryly of their own accord. That barbaric nation that had confiscated and burned opium. The name they had cursed with the greatest bitterness over the past several months.

What kind of news could possibly have arrived from that country? Curiosity and anxiety blossomed simultaneously across the faces of the crowd.

“Lin Zexu has—!”

The official paused briefly for effect.

“Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu of Qing China has officially requested the British government to resume trade!”

“What did you say? He wants to buy opium again?”

“No! Not opium, but… salicin!”

A silence fell for an instant.

Salicin?

What on earth is that?

As the merchants exchanged bewildered glances with one another, the official raised his voice to the utmost limit and shouted:

“Lin Zexu submitted a memorial to the Emperor of Qing China, stating that he will purchase the salicin manufactured in our Britain! Payment will be made immediately in silver!”

At that moment, a merchant who had supplied provisions every social season cried out:

“S-salicin… is that that willow powder Sir Clark created not long ago?”

“Correct! Furthermore, the Qing side has requested machinery equipment and technical cooperation necessary for the future manufacture of salicin! They even stated they will pay a higher price than for opium!”

“…!”

The square fell as silent as if cold water had been dashed over it.

They would buy that willow powder for a higher price than opium?

“Lies! What kind of tree bark is worth that kind of money!”

Someone shouted with a hint of suspicion from amidst the crowd, but the official drove the point home as though waiting for it.

“Britain holds the monopoly on supplying salicin throughout all of Qing China! Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu himself has officially endorsed it! This is no smuggling ring, but an official trade guaranteed by the Qing government!”

Official Trade.

The moment those two words dropped, the merchants’ expressions began to transform.

Hitherto, the opium trade had relied entirely on smuggling.

Smuggling carried out by bribing Qing officials, paying off tolls to pirates, and crossing the seas while bearing the simultaneous risks of shipwreck and execution.

All those hazard costs would vanish entirely, replaced by trade conducted along a path of legality guaranteed by the Qing government?

Abacuses began clacking frantically inside the merchants’ heads.

Hazard costs: 0.

Bribery costs: 0.

A stable source of supply and a massive market of demand.

The calculations concluded in an instant.

“Waaaaahhhh!”

Cheers erupted, with no one knowing who started first.

A merchant who had been shaking his fist in resentment against the queen just moments before tossed his hat high up into the sky.

“It’s legal! We can make money legally!”

“Long live Her Majesty the Queen! Long live salicin!”

“East India Company stock is going to skyrocket! Run to the exchange right now!”

The square was swallowed by chaos, but this time it was filled not with rage, but with a delirious ecstasy.

One merchant muttered dazedly beneath an umbrella:

“I thought they intended to starve the merchants to death, but had they prepared a larger, cleaner meal all along…?”

“God Save the Queen! God Save the Queen!”

The chorus of praise echoing through the driving rain seemed strong enough to pierce London’s thick fog and reach all the way to Buckingham Palace.

---

At the same time, Brooks’s Club in London.

Sunk deep into a plush leather sofa, Lord Palmerston was smoking a cigar with a furrowed brow.

The cigar smoke drifted slowly upward, thinning against the ceiling. Within the smoke he exhaled, confidence, conviction, and the wreckage of a board he had believed he would win—all of it was slowly scattering away alongside the smoke.

Before him lay a report that had just arrived from Westminster.

[Conclusion of Salicin Trade Agreement with Qing China. Initial Shipment Sold Out. Flood of Additional Orders. Estimated at Minimum Hundreds of Thousands of Pounds.]

“Ha, well now.”

Palmerston let out a hollow laugh.

It was not a laugh born of amusement, but the kind that surfaces when one’s defeat is so absolute that not even the strength to feel angry remains.

“Mere tree bark… selling for more than opium?”

A Whig MP seated beside him asked cautiously.

“Does this make any sense, Lord Palmerston? Salicin is merely a fever and pain reliever. It’s not addictive like opium—why on earth are they going out of their minds over it?”

“They call it an opium cure.”

Palmerston exhaled cigar smoke irritably.

“Even apart from that, they say countless people in Qing China are dying from opium addiction; if salicin can alleviate their suffering and serve as a cure, how could they help but buy it?”

“I-indeed. But how on earth did Her Majesty manage this so exquisitely…”

“Exquisitely?”

Palmerston’s eyes narrowed sharply—the gaze of a hunter who belatedly realizes that the prey he had tracked for so long was a presence vastly greater than himself.

“Not at all. It’s a design, an utterly vicious design.”

“A design, you say?”

Palmerston tapped his cigar lightly against the ashtray. Gray ash fell away. That ash was the trace of time he had burned, yet simultaneously it resembled the footprints of the prey he had pursued.

“Think about it. The moment she ascended the throne, Her Majesty spared no full-scale support for the Royal Society. Particularly in the fields of chemistry and medicine. It was also Her Majesty who badgered Sir Clark into developing a method for mass-refining salicin.”

Palmerston clicked his tongue.

He had considered the young queen merely as a decorative object or a spoiled child.

He had expected her to play the puppet to Lord Melbourne and eventually marry some suitable royal to pop out babies, but looking back now, he felt angry at his own complacency over how thoroughly he had underestimated this young queen for the past three years.

“Banning opium to secure a moral high ground. Just as the merchants rise up in revolt, introducing a substitute called salicin to appease their discontent. On top of that, seizing diplomatic supremacy over Qing China.”

Palmerston recited, ticking off his fingers. Each individual event could be viewed as a coincidence. Yet now that all three fingers were folded, it looked less like coincidence and more like intent.

A long, persistent, meticulous intent.

“Is this… a strategy capable of emerging from the mind of a barely twenty-year-old queen?”

“S-still, in terms of profitability, isn’t it inferior to opium? Salicin is tricky to manufacture as well…”

“Stupid fool!”

Palmerston slammed his table and rose to his feet.

“Opium is a consumable, but salicin is technology! Did the Qing not say they would even buy the machinery? We are no longer merely selling medicine—we can sell machinery, bill for technical maintenance costs, and pocket the labor expenses of the technicians dispatched there besides!”

What was it that Britain, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, did best?

Not selling goods, but selling systems.

Planting not a single commodity, but the entire field where commodities grow within the opponent’s territory, and making the opponent need Britain in order to maintain it.

That was a refined bridle.

And this young queen was attempting to slip that bridle around the neck of Qing China.

Under the gentle guise of benevolence, no less.

“On top of that… look at the subjects’ reaction.”

As Palmerston approached the window and drew back the curtain, the sounds of praising the queen could be heard even from the street outside Brooks’s Club.

“When we earned money through opium, we were cursed as a nation obsessed with money. Yet earning money by selling medicine brings praise. Moral high ground and practical gain. She’s caught both hares at once.”

Palmerston smiled bitterly and stubbed out his cigar in the ashtray.

Ambitious though he was, he had no choice but to admit it.

That he had lost. And lost completely.

Even acknowledging defeat required dignity.

Only one who could face their own defeat possessed the qualification to rise again in the next match.

“Damn it… Gladstone had all the luck.”

He slumped back down into his seat and called the waiter.

“Here, another glass of brandy. Make it strong.”

---

Meanwhile, the East End, where London’s common folk gathered.

A long queue had formed in front of an old chemist and druggist shop nestled in a narrow alley. The line wound along following the alleyway, and the faces within it each carried their own stories. Some held an elderly person’s hand, some cradled a fussing child, and some stood alone.

“Mister! Has the salicin arrived?”

A young woman carrying a child on her back asked frantically.

The face of the fussing child behind her was flushed red with fever, prompting the chemist to wipe away sweat as he handed over a paper packet containing white powder.

“Yes, it has arrived! This batch was specially supplied from the royal direct-controlled factory! It’s been improved even more than last time!”

“Oh, thank goodness. Thank God!”

Tears welled up in her eyes as she accepted the medicine packet.

In truth, until just a few months prior, London mothers would simply feed Godfrey’s Cordial whenever a child fell ill or fussed.

In truth, until just a few months prior, London mothers would simply feed Godfrey’s Cordial whenever a child fell ill or fussed.

Godfrey’s Cordial, made by dissolving opium in alcohol and bearing the terrifying nickname of “Children’s Friend.”

When they took it, the children grew quiet as if by magic, but their faces slowly turned sallow, their bodies wasted away to skin and bones, and they would fade away and die.

They fed it to them while knowing.

That was the hell of poor mothers in this era.

To watch a child suffer, or to slowly kill that child.

The weight of guilt could not be laid down in any confessional booth.

Because it was not a sin that could be confessed.

It was a sin forced by poverty, a sin connived at by society, and a sin of a structural nature that could never be absolved by an individual’s personal penance.

Yet now, the door to escaping that hell was contained within this small paper packet.

Medicine, not poison. A healing that brought true calm, rather than death masquerading as peace.

“Is this the medicine Her Majesty the Queen made with her own hands?”

An elderly woman standing in the back asked.

“Of course it is. Her Majesty the Queen and her Royal Physician, Sir Clark, stayed up nights researching it. They say it’s a miracle medicine that thoroughly strips away toxicity while wiping out pain!”

At the pharmacist’s explanation, the people nodded vigorously.

“No wonder… they say the youngest child at Mr. Thompson’s next door took this and their fever dropped right away.”

“When they gave Godfrey’s Cordial, the child would go limp like a corpse, but once they gave salicin, they ate well and smiled brightly, or so they say.”

The rumors passed from mouth to mouth, spreading with embellishments added.
Stories that the queen herself pulverized the medicine in a laboratory, or that an angel appeared in a dream to point toward the willow tree. Whenever the common folk begin to love their sovereign, that love is always manifested in such a fashion.

Myths blossomed beyond facts, and those myths became the bedrock of a faith stronger than facts.

“Our Queen is the real deal.”

Clasping the medicine packet tightly to her chest, the woman muttered as she patted her child’s back.

“She’s not like those folks sitting up high just collecting taxes. She’s someone trying to keep us alive.”

“That’s right, that’s right.”

The surrounding people chimed in.

“Long live Her Majesty Queen Victoria! Long live Sir Clark!”

The narrow alleyway hummed with hope.

The relief of knowing they no longer had to feed poison to their children out of poverty.

This was serving as a cornerstone propping up the queen’s authority more powerfully than any political propaganda.

And that cornerstone was unpretentious. It was being quietly laid before the old chemist’s shop in a corner of a narrow alley, within the tear-filled eyes of a mother whose name was unknown.

---

Meanwhile, across the sea in France—Paris.

Inside the office of the Tuileries Palace, King Louis-Philippe I, often called the Citizen King, pressed his brow and read through the report once, then read it again. A document not understood on the first read is read twice. A document hard to believe even on the second read is read thrice. Yet when it remains unbelievable even upon the third reading, the issue lies not with the document, but with the reality to which that document points being of an unbelievable variety.

“…So, instead of waging a war, Britain has gone into the pharmaceutical trade?”

As Louis-Philippe asked in disbelief, his Chief Minister Guizot, standing opposite him, replied with a hardened expression.

“Indeed, Your Majesty. This is information cross-verified from both London and Guangzhou.”

Guizot answered calmly.

“When Lin Zexu confiscated the opium, Britain appeared to be preparing for war. Yet they suddenly put forward a new medicine called salicin to win the favor of the Qing court, and consequently secured economic privileges even greater than the opium trade.”

“Ha… look at these devilish fellows.”

Louis-Philippe burst into a hollow laugh. Yet within that hollow laugh mingled not mere disgust, but a certain kind of awe. That complex emotion of abhorring an enemy while simultaneously respecting them—the honest reaction of a leader toward a capable adversary.

“Cultivating opium in India to sicken the people of Qing China, and manufacturing an antidote in London to sell back to the sick? The old saying about giving a disease and selling the remedy was tailor-made for this exact situation!”

“Among our French merchants, reactions mixed with genuine sighs and astonishment are emerging. They are saying, ‘The English are fellows who would go straight to hell and sell ice water to the devil.’”

“Not ice water, but selling firewood and collecting the ashes besides.”

Louis-Philippe shook his head.

Indeed, Britain’s talent for sniffing out the smell of money was peerless, yet this particular case held an uneasy nuance too uncomfortable to dismiss as a mere financial matter.

“However, Guizot.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“At the center of all this plan… is that young queen truly there?”

Louis-Philippe’s gaze grew sharp.

The Victoria he remembered was merely a youthful, inexperienced girl who had ascended the throne not long ago, and in a country where the prime minister and Parliament held and wielded the reins of power, a queen was nothing more than a symbolic entity. Furthermore, that a barely twenty-year-old girl had planned all of this?

Louis-Philippe found it utterly impossible to believe.

As far as he knew, centuries had passed since parliamentary politics took root in Britain, and the queen’s power was weak.

Yet the intelligence reports stated otherwise.

The development of salicin, the order to ban the opium trade, the letter sent to Lin Zexu, and even the declaration of resumed trade timed with exquisite precision.
Everything pointed back to having originated from Buckingham Palace.

“According to the reports… indeed.”

Guizot spoke cautiously.

“Even within the British Parliament, particularly among the Whigs, there was fierce opposition at first, so I am told. Yet the queen pushed it through, and now that the results have emerged this way, the atmosphere across both ruling and opposition parties alike is to praise the queen as a sovereign of profound insight.”

“Profound insight…”

Louis-Philippe rose from his seat and looked out the window.

The streets of Paris appeared peaceful, but the wind blowing from the island nation across the sea felt ominously heavy.

“A merchant chasing mere profit is not frightening, because they are predictable.”

With a bitter aftertaste lingering, Louis-Philippe shook his head.

“Yet a sovereign who dons the mask of morality while perfectly capturing practical gains behind it… is dangerous.”

Morality and conscience were generally the enemies of practical gain, and practical gain generally ignored morality and conscience.

Making the two coexist was a skill bordering on legend among leaders.

That a girl—and an underage young queen of an island nation at that—wielded such a skill was not a mere matter of luck.

“A merchant sells poison, and a queen sells medicine. Thus the nation grows prosperous and the subjects offer reverence…”

A cold shiver ran down Louis-Philippe’s spine.

A consummate art of governance, and a high-degree political calculation difficult for even himself to imitate.

Yet behind that calculation lay one more thing.

Something approaching genuine sincerity, unexplainable by mere calculation alone.
That was what frightened Louis-Philippe.

“We must be vigilant.”

“Pardon?”

“Keep watch on the Queen of Britain. Guardedly observe… what she pulls out next.”

“Yet Your Majesty, the opponent is merely a queen who has barely turned twenty…”

“Which is precisely why we must be all the more careful!”

Louis-Philippe gazed blankly at the portrait of Queen Victoria resting upon his desk.
The queen within the painting smiled elegantly, but that smile felt unusually eerie today.

“Just what… is inside that small head of hers?”

---

At that same time, Buckingham Palace.

I was lying down and rolling about on a plush bed.

“Ah, this is nice.”

My head had been throbbing from various matters anyway, but for now, let’s rest a bit.

Working hard is fine, but one must know how to rest when it’s time to rest.

Besides, the sound of people shouting “God Save the Queen!” could be heard from outside the window, so getting any real work done was out of the question anyway.

With Victoria’s diary unfolded before me, I stared at it blankly and thought.

Aspirin… no, I hadn’t expected salicin to become such a massive blockbuster, but beyond that, I felt a quiet pride in having respected their face and steered the results toward negotiation instead of a clash of might.

I could simply have ended it by blocking the war, and that had been the clear condition, but I couldn’t help wondering if that would truly be enough.

Since we caused such a mess, shouldn’t we fulfill our responsibilities somehow?

Just as I was about to flip to another section of Victoria’s diary, a page appeared that was torn out entirely.

“Who tore this out?”

Surely Victoria’s diary should only be visible to me?

Just as I was wondering, the page with the section torn entirely away slowly began to mend itself, and letters began to surface upon it.

“What?”

Tutorial…?

So, preventing the Opium War was… merely a tutorial?

While I stood still in bafflement and absurdity, the text format shifted and transformed into another sentence.

This familiar tone of voice and teasing attitude.

“That damn!!! Anchor Tap pub owner! Hey! Put it back right now!!!”

Lacking a collar to grab, I instead shook the diary by its cover.

Regardless of my actions, the diary nonchalantly flashed a single line reading “Hello :)” and shifted into other sentences.

“What kind of nonsense is this again? Remaining pages? Just how many are there?”

Right after, a sentence composed of black squares floated at the very top of the diary.

“o…? What kind of sentence is that?”

“So, if I get rid of all those squares there, you’ll send me home?”

Ah.

I see.

I let out a long sigh inwardly.

I wasn’t drinking with a pub owner; I was drinking with some genie of the lamp nonsense.

“Ha… crazy.”

It was absurd, but above all, the claim that restoring all these pages would grant a wish was even more ridiculous.

…No, now that I think about it, it feels doable?

I was the one who had stopped an ugly and filthy conflict like the Opium War.

Now that I could view the future through Victoria’s diary, even if I didn’t know what historical events the remaining pages were connected to, wouldn’t it be manageable?

Besides, that single prospect of bringing back the dead was more than enough reason to leap into this adventure.

“Fine.”

The exact moment I steadied my mind like that.

The tutorial page flashed blue for an instant.

At that moment, a rolled-up scroll of paper popped out from empty space and settled quietly upon my hand.

The paper had worn edges, a yellowish hue, and looked as though it had just awakened after sleeping inside some drawer for ages.

“This is…?”

[An Old Map of the California Gold Rush]

“A California gold rush map? What on earth is this?”