For Zhang Tie, the weekend flew by. His father still had to work on Saturday, so Zhang Tie spent the day at home helping his mother make rice wine. Their little shop sold about five or six jars a week. It wasn't much income, but for the Zhang Family, who had always pinched pennies, every little bit helped.
Rice wine was a traditional Hua Clan delicacy, and it wasn't difficult to make. Its main ingredient was rice, and the process was simple: first, wash the rice and boil it until it was about seventy percent cooked. Scoop it out and let it dry, then steam it until fully cooked and let it dry again. Pack it tightly into earthenware jars, mixing in sugar and honey as you go, then sprinkle it with the starter liquid—yeast broth. Seal the jars and leave them to ferment naturally. A month later, they would be ready to eat. The finished rice wine retained the rice's sweet, soft, sticky texture. It was nutritious, with a pleasant sweetness; it could fill your stomach, and its smooth, refreshing alcoholic kick never got you drunk. It cooled you down in summer, soothed the stomach and spleen, and tasted wonderful. Zhang Tie and his older brother had grown up eating their mother's homemade rice wine.
Although making rice wine was simple, every step demanded a keen sense of proportion and timing. The Zhang Family's rice wine had earned a good reputation among nearby residents and longtime customers over more than a decade of diligent work.
After a full day's work on Saturday, they had made seven jars of rice wine. Once they had carried the jars to the storeroom behind the shop, Zhang Tie took the family's modified little cargo tricycle out for two trips. First, he went to the rice shop to buy rice. The family's rice jar was nearly empty every time they finished making rice wine, so Zhang Tie had to make a trip to the shop every weekend. After buying rice, he also picked up two jin of sugar. This time, he noticed that the price of rice had gone up. Last week, a 25-kilogram sack of ordinary rice had cost four silver coins and forty-five copper coins. Today, a sack had quietly risen to four silver coins and fifty-eight copper coins. In just one week, the price had climbed nearly three percent.
Zhang Tie was startled. Ordinary people like them were keenly sensitive to changes in the prices of basic necessities. He remembered that rice prices in Black Flame City hadn't changed in the three years since he started middle school. When he'd come by last week, a sack had still cost four silver coins and forty-five copper coins. How had the price jumped so much in just one week?
"Ah, Zhang Tie, there's nothing we can do about it. The price went up when we restocked the day before yesterday, so we had to raise ours too. We can't exactly sell at a loss!" The rice shop owner was an old acquaintance. At the mention of rice prices, he began pouring out his woes to Zhang Tie. "Seventy percent of Black Flame City's rice is hauled in from outside. The farms and growing districts around the city can't come close to supplying enough food for everyone. What can we do? The big merchant groups up top set the prices. It's not just rice, either—flour has gone up these past couple of days. Don't believe me? Go check somewhere else. It's the same everywhere, and some places charge even more..."
The shop owner had been a longtime customer, and Zhang Tie wasn't foolish enough to actually go looking elsewhere. Grain prices were more or less the same throughout Black Flame City. The difference between shops for the same sack of rice was at most one to three copper coins. If the price differed by more than five, it simply wouldn't sell. They had dealt with each other for years, and this shop was run by a hardworking, shrewd Hua Clan businessman. Zhang Tie trusted him.
At four silver coins and fifty-eight copper coins—that is, 458 copper coins—a sack, Zhang Tie bought three sacks, or seventy-five kilograms of rice, and loaded them onto his little tricycle. It had been made by attaching a cargo box and an extra wheel to a secondhand bicycle. It was ugly, to say the least, and could only carry so much. Three sacks of rice plus Zhang Tie himself were about its limit. As he loaded the rice, he carefully checked the stitching and needle holes on the sacks. Only after confirming there were no punctures or signs of resewing did he relax. Some unscrupulous shopkeepers and grain merchants tampered with the weight, swapped in inferior rice, or did even worse and mixed sand into the grain. To do that, they had to undo and resew the sacks, so a careful look at the needle holes and stitching could show whether someone had tampered with the rice. A poor man's child learned to manage a household early. That was the experience Zhang Tie had gained from years of buying rice.
After buying the rice, Zhang Tie went to a general store not far from the rice shop and bought two jin of sugar. Then he rode his tricycle home. Just as he'd expected, the sugar price had gone up too, following the three-percent rise in rice. It had climbed even more sharply, though: last week, coarse sugar had cost ninety-one copper coins per kilogram; this time, it was a whole silver coin per kilogram. After checking a few nearby shops and finding the same price, Zhang Tie bought two jin. He put the sugar in a cloth bag and hung it from the handlebars. Then he wobbled home on the ugly, modified secondhand tricycle.
When he got home, Zhang Tie told his mother about the increase in rice and sugar prices. He handed over every last copper coin of the money left from shopping. His mother took it, then thought for a moment before counting out ten copper coins for Zhang Tie to spend.
Zhang Tie beamed at her and said, "Thanks, Mom!" His mother had been especially generous today. Usually, she gave him at most five copper coins.
His mother sighed and furrowed her brow. "The prices of rice and sugar have both gone up. I'm afraid we'll have to raise the price of our rice wine too. The profit is already thin; if we don't raise the price, we won't be able to keep the business going. But if we do, we might lose some of our regular customers. Sigh..."
Seeing his mother's furrowed brow, Zhang Tie's feelings surged, and the words slipped out before he could stop them. "Mom, don't worry. I'll make sure you and Dad have a good life one day. I'm not the same as I used to be!"
"Mom knows. Our little Guoguo has grown up, of course you're not the same as before!" His mother smiled and reached out to pat Zhang Tie's head.
Hearing the other meaning behind the word "grown-up" in her voice, Zhang Tie immediately grew flustered. "Mom, that's not what you think. I mean, I..."
"All right, all right. Mom knows our Guoguo has grown up and become a good, filial boy. Enough of that. Hurry and take this rice soup to Mother Theresa's place. If you leave too late, you won't make it today!"
His mother cut him off, and Zhang Tie didn't get to finish what he'd been saying. Head bowed, he carried the few jars of rice soup left at home onto the ugly pedal tricycle. A little glum, he rode off toward another part of town. Thinking about how he'd almost blurted out, in a moment of impulse, that he had the strange Black Iron Castle, he felt a little annoyed with himself for being so rash. If his family learned the secret now, it would only make his parents worry and bring all sorts of unforeseeable risks. Zhang Tie couldn't think of any good it would do for them. Riding along, he silently resolved to bury the secret deep in his heart. If he became capable enough, he could simply let his family enjoy the benefits Black Iron Castle brought him. There was no need to make them worry about it. For his sake and for his family's, the fewer people who knew Black Iron Castle's secret, the better.
Black Flame City was a thriving industrial city with little history behind it. One advantage of a new city was that its planners had given plenty of thought to convenient transportation. Many roads were broad, especially the main thoroughfares, where the sidewalks, bike lanes, and motor vehicle lanes were clearly separated. Ringing his bell, Zhang Tie pedaled his modified secondhand tricycle swiftly along the bike lanes. He envied the cars that occasionally sped by on the road beside him, dreaming that one day he might get a car of his own and take his family—or a beautiful woman like Teacher Daina—for a drive around the city.
Before the Great Cataclysm, steam engines had already been obsolete for nearly several hundred years. He'd heard that people back then had invented all kinds of advanced machinery and technology, then tossed steam engines onto the scrap heap of history, never to think of them again. Some of those technologies sounded like myths to Zhang Tie: all sorts of machines that could fly through the sky; ships that could run for hundreds of years without refueling; ways to send people among the stars; devices that let people talk easily and see one another across a million miles; and those devilish weapons that could wipe out an entire city, or even a country, by planting a single mushroom. Whenever their teachers talked about things like these, they were full of wonder. Zhang Tie listened with stars in his eyes. Human society before the Great Cataclysm had been almost impossible to imagine. After the Great Cataclysm, humanity lost all that splendor. With no other choice, people dug steam engines back out of history's scrap heap. From the simplest condensing steam vacuum pumps to the most complex high-pressure steam turbines, these once-outdated relics, unearthed from the heaps of history, came back to life. They helped humanity stand again and start running in an age unlike any that had come before—just like the little cars speeding through the city, fitted with compact, precision reciprocating two-stage steam engines.
In Black Flame City, ordinary people got around on foot or by public transit. Some wage earners might buy a bicycle; Zhang Tie's family, for instance, had modified one into an odd-looking secondhand tricycle to make deliveries and shopping easier. But the rich—the wealthy—drove cars. Costing thousands of gold coins apiece, cars were more than simple transportation to their owners; they were symbols of status and power. Even after all these years, Black Flame City had fewer than a thousand privately owned cars. Anyone who rode in one was either rich or powerful. At least at Zhang Tie's school, he had never known a student or teacher whose family could afford one. Even Captain Colin, the most terrifying One-Eyed Dragon in Black Flame City, earned a good salary compared with ordinary people. But if he wanted to buy a car on that salary alone, he might have to go fifty years without eating or drinking.
From the time he was little, nearly everything Zhang Tie had learned about machinery and tools at school had been related to all kinds of steam engines. As a man born with a desire to conquer the world, fifteen-year-old Zhang Tie had once had two greatest dreams for the future: Teacher Daina and a beautiful private car. Combined, these two dreams gave birth to the paradise he longed for—driving around every day with Teacher Daina, then finding some scenic, secluded spot where no one would disturb them, sharing with her the human-piston movements involved in a steam engine, and, while they were at it, testing the car tires and seats for their shock-absorbing performance.
Lost in his secret "ambition," the boy pedaled his tricycle hard as he sped through the city. Thirty minutes later, he finally reached Mother Theresa's Orphanage of Compassion with his cargo before six in the evening.