Season 2 chapter 5
The Bureaucracy of Dirt
The Department of Land in Antrious was a depressing concrete building. The ceiling fan was missing a blade, making a loud clicking noise every time it spun.
They sat across from a government land officer who looked like he hadn't slept in three days.
Malesh slid a stack of standard commercial acquisition forms across the desk.
The officer squinted at the paper, his lips moving silently as he read. Then, he stopped. He rubbed his eyes and read it again.
"You want to buy... forty thousand square kilometers in the deep plains?" the officer asked, his voice cracking. "Do you boys understand basic math? Forty thousand square kilometers is the size of a small country. There is nothing out there but dry grass and wild pigs."
"We like the grass," Kniya said, leaning back in his chair. "We are going to stare at it."
Kniya leaned over to Malesh and lowered his voice. "Bro, are you sure about the 40,000? We aren't going to find iron ore, metallurgical coal, and limestone all stacked on top of each other in the exact same piece of land. Geology doesn't work like a convenience store."
"I know," Malesh whispered back, pointing at a map in his folder. "This 40,000 square kilometers secures the primary iron vein and the majority of the coal. We will need to buy different pieces of land later for the limestone and the water processing. We can't get everything at once, but we need to start the expansion now."
The officer was still staring at the paperwork, hyperventilating slightly.
"And this secondary purchase..." the officer stammered, flipping the page. "You want to buy two thousand square kilometers of land right next to the main Antrious Railway Station? For warehouses? Two thousand square kilometers of warehouses is the size of a capital city! What the fuck are you storing?"
"Dirt," Malesh said with a straight face. "And equipment. Don't worry about it."
"And a private rail line?" the officer asked, his hands actually shaking now. "Thousands of kilometers of private railway connecting the plains to the city? Who is funding this? The Emperor?"
Malesh didn't answer the question. Instead, he reached into his coat and pulled out a thick, heavy envelope. He dropped it onto the desk with a loud thud.
"There is 50,000 credits in that envelope," Malesh stated, looking the officer dead in the eyes. "I am going to call it an 'expedition fee' so you don't go to jail, but we both know it is a bribe. Take the money. Stamp the deeds. And go buy yourself a very nice house far away from here."
The officer looked at the envelope. He looked at the two teenagers asking to buy half his state.
He didn't care what they were doing. 50,000 credits was more money than he would make in ten lifetimes.
Thwack. Thwack. He stamped the deeds so hard the desk shook.
"The land is yours," the clerk mumbled, grabbing the envelope and shoving it into his pants pocket. "Try not to blow up the state."
"No promises," Kniya laughed, standing up.
The Blueprint
They walked out of the Department of Land and back into the hot, dusty streets of Antrious.
Malesh opened his briefcase and placed the freshly stamped deeds inside.
"Phase One is done," Malesh said, looking at the empty horizon. "We own the iron and the coal. We have the space for the warehouses. And we have the legal right to lay down thousands of kilometers of private train tracks."
"So, we dig up the ore, load it onto our own trains, and send it straight to our own massive city-sized warehouses without paying the government a single cent in transport fees," Kniya summarized. He grinned. "That is so illegal, I love it."
"It isn't illegal because we just bought the paperwork that says it's legal," Malesh corrected him. "By the time the other steel companies figure out what we are doing, we will be selling our steel so cheap that they will all go bankrupt."
Kniya stretched his arms, looking around the miserable, dusty town.
"You know, having 100 Billion credits is cool," Kniya said. "But bribing a guy to let us build a private country inside his state is way funnier. What do we do now?"
"Now," Malesh said, walking toward the cab stand. "We go find a construction contractor to build thousands of kilometers of railway. Preferably a guy who likes money and hates asking questions."
"No, no," Kniya said, grabbing Malesh's shoulder and stopping him in the middle of the dusty street. "This is not going to happen."
Malesh turned around, his face blank. "Why? We need the railway built to transport the ore. Hiring a contractor is the most direct method of physical labor acquisition."
"Because contractors have employees," Kniya explained, shaking his head. "Employees have unions. Unions take breaks, and they ask questions about why we are laying track into an empty wasteland. We are not hiring anyone. We are going to start our own construction company."
Malesh processed this for exactly two seconds. "Vertical integration extended to infrastructure. We build the company, we hire desperate laborers, we dictate the exact schedule, and we keep the blueprints completely classified. Logical."
"Exactly," Kniya grinned. "By the way, I didn't look at the final draft you handed to that depressed clerk. How much did we actually spend on all of this land today?"
"Approximately 60 million credits," Malesh stated, adjusting his briefcase. "That covers the 40,000 square kilometers for the mining sector, the 2,000 square kilometers for the warehouse district, and the 50,000 credit bribe."
Kniya stopped walking. He stared at Malesh.
"Sixty million?" Kniya asked, doing the math in his head. "Wait. 60 million credits divided by 42,000 total square kilometers... that is roughly 1,428 credits per square kilometer. Malesh, there are one million square meters in a single square kilometer."
Kniya started laughing. It was a loud, hysterical laugh that echoed down the empty Antrious street.
"Bro!" Kniya shouted, grabbing his own stomach. "We just paid 0.0014 credits per square meter! That is a fraction of a single penny! This much cheap? What the fuck is wrong with this government? We basically robbed them, and they thanked us for it!"
"It is not robbery if they sign the paperwork," Malesh corrected him calmly. "The Sulwai government prices land based on surface agricultural value, which is zero. They do not conduct deep-core geological surveys. Their incompetence is our profit margin."
"This is insane," Kniya wiped a tear from his eye. "Alright, if we are doing this, we need to establish the corporate structure right now. We need a name."
"We need a name that sounds established," Malesh agreed. "Something boring. Something that does not attract regulatory attention."
"Kavilson Steel Limited," Kniya declared. "K-A-V-I-L-S-O-N. It sounds incredibly corporate and completely devoid of personality."
"I approve," Malesh nodded. "Now, regarding the equity distribution. Who is signing the incorporation documents?"
"I am," Kniya said. "I am the founder. Kniya Anderson will hold one hundred percent of the public ownership. You are taking zero percent."
"Obviously," Malesh said, not offended in the slightest. "If the name 'Bulwadi' appears on a single piece of corporate tax paperwork, my father's corporate spies will flag it. My family will try to claim jurisdiction over my assets. I must remain a complete ghost on paper. You take all the legal ownership and the public risk; I handle the internal logistics and the profit distribution."
"This is what we are going to do now," Kniya said, looking out over the dry, flat plains of the acacia wasteland. "We are going to use Kavilson Steel Limited to dig up this entire state. We are going to build the biggest steel company on the continent, and we are going to do it on land we bought for the price of pocket lint."
"Yes," Malesh agreed, walking toward the cab. "But first, we need to buy shovels. A lot of shovels."
The SuliBulli Procurement
Kniya stopped and stared at him, his face completely deadpan.
"Yeah, yeah," Kniya said, his voice dripping with heavy sarcasm. "We are going to survey a forty-thousand-square-kilometer landmass and dig out precise mineral veins with shovels. Actually, Malesh, why don't we just skip hiring people entirely? We can just become the construction workers ourselves. We will become the miners and pull the iron out of the dirt with our bare hands. It will only take us about ten thousand years, but think of the money we will save on payroll."
Malesh stopped and looked back at Kniya, his brow furrowed in genuine annoyance.
"Are you fucking stupid?" Kniya asked flatly. "We need heavy construction machinery for that. It is literally impossible. You cannot mine millions of tons of raw materials with shovels, you idiot. It was a standard industry expression."
"I know it was an expression, you autistic calculator," Malesh laughed, opening the cab door. "We are not using shovels. And we aren't just digging blind holes in forty thousand square kilometers of dirt. We have to pull the old geographical maps from the state archives, cross-reference the topography, and conduct core-drilling experiments to find exactly where the coal, iron, and limestone pockets are actually located before we break ground."
Kniya got in next to him. "Correct. The geological surveys will dictate the factory placements. And for the extraction, we need an industrial fleet."
"Which is why we are going to buy the machinery from SuliBulli Construction Limited," Kniya said as the cab pulled away from the curb.
"SuliBulli? That sounds like a fake company."
"It is a very real company, and their main motive is providing heavy construction machinery," Kniya explained. "I have a friend over there from my old academy days. He owes me a massive favor. He can provide us with the best grade machinery at the lowest possible prices. We will get an entirely mechanized fleet—drills, excavators, dump trucks—for a fraction of the retail cost."
Malesh processed the data. "Acceptable. Securing the hardware at a discount increases our operational efficiency. But the hardware does not run itself. We need to hire survey teams. We need corporate board members so the company can actually begin operations legally. We need to hire thousands of workers, set up the HR logistics, and build the physical factories. Starting a company is not an easy task. It requires an intense expenditure of administrative energy."
Kniya groaned, sinking into the cracked leather seat of the cab, looking exhausted before they even started. "Fuck. I hate this hectic work. I just wanted to ruin the steel market, and now I have to do paperwork and interview middle managers. Being a corporate overlord is just a massive administrative headache."
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