jpmschweitzerandClaude Opus 4.6
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Complete Drifter's Guide coverage for the East Reach corridor. 50 new entries from hop 4 (Nová Tržnice) to hop 9 (Xa Vời), plus updated gttr-east.md index with all 54 east systems. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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THE DRIFTER'S GUIDE TO THE REACH — JEONNAM
JEONNAM is named for a southern Korean province known on old Earth for agricultural richness and preserved foods, and the settlement that arrived three hundred years ago did exactly what the name implied: they found a temperate world with long growing seasons, stepped the hillsides into terraced growing pools, and began fermenting things.
The Terraces
The gyeol grain analog grown in Jeonnam's terraced paddy systems is not rice — the biochemistry is completely different — but from the air, the stepped pools following the contour lines of gentle hill country look like terraced paddy systems, and the cultivation practice three centuries of adaptation has produced looks like what it is: farming by a community that knows what it is doing. The gyeol is the staple food for a substantial portion of the east_reach corridor segment between hops 5 and 9, which is the kind of agricultural position that creates real supply chain dependencies regardless of whether the creating system intends it.
The Jeonnam Old Table brand has been established for 120 years. The jang paste family, fermented from gyeol and legume analogs and aged for periods up to three years in ceramic vessels, reaches corridor markets in both directions. The three-year guk-jang is deliberately constrained in production: the aging vessels are made from a specific local clay, and the producers have been refusing to expand extraction rates and refusing to shorten aging periods for a hundred years of commercial pressure. The scarcity is authentic.
The Vessel Count
The ceramic aging vessel inventory that constrains guk-jang production is reported to the council annually in the Producers' Collective's accounts. The actual vessel count, tracked separately in the Collective's internal records, has been declining for twenty years — breakage, deterioration, and a failure to commission new vessels at replacement rate. The public reports have rounded the numbers in ways that obscure this trend.
If the decline continues at its current rate, three-year guk-jang production reaches effective zero within forty years. Not from any decision by anyone. From the attrition of the physical objects the product depends on. A young Collective member has recently been tasked with the annual census.
Practical Information
Jeonnam is eight hops from Gateway with two gate apertures connecting to GJ 27 and Xa Vời. The water-sharing agreement from the founding generation is still cited in contemporary disputes. The transit operations board manages gate facilities alongside local agricultural transport on the same infrastructure. The Jeonnam Old Table products are worth the detour.
Adams of the Guide rates Jeonnam: Genuine. Forty Years of Inventory Remaining.