e, the setting sun cast long, slanted shadows over Silver Ridge Station. The tracks shimmered in the twilight like a spine leading to the unknown.
Lin Zhiwan sat behind a rickety mahogany counter.
Spread across the counter was a massive, three-meter-long blueprint. The paper was yellowed but had been meticulously smoothed out. It wasn't a standard map; it was a raw blueprint of the entire administrative and scheduling structure—obtained from Deputy Supervisor Parsons' private safe using methods that were far from honorable, but extremely efficient.
She hadn't touched the glittering gold coins.
To her, currency was merely a medium of exchange, not power itself.
What was truly expensive was paper like this—paper that decided "who is permitted to pass."
"Miss Lin, here is what you asked for..."
Ludwig walked in, cradling a stack of ledgers that nearly buried him, his steps faltering. "All the accounts from the last three years."
His hands were still trembling as he set them down.
In all his life, he had never seen a woman like this.
Faced with such a burned, embezzled, and hollowed-out mess, anyone else's first instinct would be to pray or collapse. But she treated it like a corpse requiring dissection, carving through the complex data with a precision that bordered on the cruel.
"Ludwig."
Lin Zhiwan didn't look up, her Parker pen scratching across the paper with a steady, rasping sound. "Do you know why you'll never be more than a boiler mechanic?"
Ludwig blinked, instinctively shaking his head.
"Because you only look at the machines. You don't look at the desire."
Her pen nib stopped on a red-lined area of the blueprint.
"Four freight trains pass through Silver Ridge daily. The official records show a one-hour stop for each."
She looked up at him. "But in this era, the average efficiency for steam watering and basic loading is forty minutes."
Her voice was strikingly clear in the dim light.
"That extra twenty minutes is a black hole."
"Every second of it is swallowing gold sovereigns."
She tapped the red line lightly.
"This is where we harvest our first profit."
That afternoon, the Dispatch Center.
It was the kind of room that made one want to turn around and leave the moment they stepped inside. The stench of low-grade tobacco was as thick as a wall, and the air was heavy enough to cause a headache.
Five scruffy dispatchers sat around a stove, deep in a card game.
"Who let you in?"
Spike, the head dispatcher, squinted at her, his tone hostile as his hand drifted toward the holster at his waist. "This is a restricted area. Get lost."
Lin Zhiwan didn't respond.
Her high heels clicked as she walked directly to the oil-stained card table.
A second later—
Fwhip!
She snapped the massive statistical chart open like a heavy shroud, covering the chips, cards, and glasses.
The laughter in the room died instantly.
"Spike."
She leaned down, her voice so calm it didn't even sound like an accusation. "Over the last quarter, you've pocketed over four hundred gold sovereigns through inflated coal consumption and unreported empty berths."
Her fingertip slid across the chart.
"I've mapped it out. Every day, every carriage."
The center fell into a tomb-like silence.
Spike's face flashed from flushed red to a sickly iron-grey. He slammed the table as he stood, drawing his gun and chambering a round. The cold muzzle pointed directly at Lin Zhiwan's brow.
"You're looking for a grave!" he roared. "No one talks to me like that at Silver Ridge!"
Lin Zhiwan didn't flinch.
On the contrary, she took a step forward, letting the muzzle press firmly against her forehead.
There was no fear in her eyes—only an unsettling spark of excitement.
"Fire," she whispered. "Kill me."
Spike's pupils contracted violently.
"And then, to keep his own mouth shut, Parsons will have all of you hanging from the telegraph poles by the tracks tomorrow morning."
She didn't speak fast, but every word was razor-sharp. "Because only dead men can't talk to the head office's audit team."
She looked at him as if he were a bad debt about to reach its maturity date.
"Do you think he'd risk his entire career for a few dispatchers?"
Spike's hand began to shake.
He had seen tough men and desperate outlaws, but he had never seen a lunatic who put their life on the negotiating table so casually.
"Put that toy away."
Lin Zhiwan raised her hand and gently pushed the muzzle aside. "I can make you three times that amount."
She pointed to a set of data on the chart.
"Compress the loading process to fifteen minutes. The time we save, I'll fill with my own cargo."
"It's called resource path restructuring."
Spike stood frozen.
To make them truly understand the meaning of "efficiency," Lin Zhiwan took command of the dispatch desk herself.
"Ludwig."
"Steam pressure—increase."
"Track two workers—split into two teams, pull in opposition."
Orders were fired out—short, precise, and without explanation.
The platform, which usually moved like a swamp, was suddenly wound tight like a clockwork spring. Steam roared, ropes tightened, and crates shifted as everything began to move with a rhythm never seen before.
Lin Zhiwan kept her eyes on her pocket watch.
Fifteen minutes later, the last crate was settled onto the platform.
The hand had only just crossed the mark.
The dispatchers were awestruck.
In their world, this wasn't something humanly possible; it was almost a miracle. For the first time, they realized that "management" itself was a form of power.
By that evening, Silver Ridge was in an uproar.
Merchants discovered that high-demand goods, which usually took two weeks to arrive, were appearing at the station the very next day under the "madwoman's" coordination.
Even more shocking: freight costs hadn't risen. Because the process had been compressed, they had actually dropped significantly.
Outside the shop, a line of merchants wanting to meet her stretched to the end of the street.
"Miss Lin."
Ludwig walked in, looking nervous. "Old De is making threats."
"He says he's contacted the mountain bandits—The Black Crows."
"They plan to hijack your cargo on the rail line."
"Those people..." He swallowed hard. "They aren't dispatchers. They kill without blinking."
Lin Zhiwan turned a page in her ledger.
Her finger paused for a moment on the line of figures representing the incoming revenue.
Then, she smiled.
"Hijack my cargo?"
She looked up toward the bottomless darkness of the rainforest outside. "Let him."
"I was just looking for a reason to petition Parsons for independent armed deployment rights."
She closed the ledger and stood up.
The clamor of the merchants outside had become nothing more than background noise for her project's turnover.
"If he wants to escalate," she said softly, "then I'll turn this entire railway—"
"—into my war fortress."
In this wild land of 1896, she had finally found a hunting ground far more interesting and honest than any modern office.