Free Web NovelChapter 274: Incentivizing the Nobles
As Lucas was putting together his original evacuation plan, he had also taken some time to study the backgrounds of the 4 noble houses he would need as allies in order to make the operation a success.
The information Lucas was able to acquire from various minor nobles and merchants in Herald City was hardly comprehensive, but it did give him a general idea about the strengths and weaknesses of the big families in the South-West Province.
The Moore Viscount Family was well known for two things, its obviously high ambitions, and the thriving shipbuilding industry it had built up in Port Calden.
With clients lining up to buy their river ships from all over the Rockwell Kingdom, the Moore Family had managed to establish business ties with many merchants and minor houses. They even had a few contacts with the upper nobility, though most still looked at them as upstarts and weren’t willing to get too close to them yet.
After meeting with, and confirming that the current Viscount, Victoria Moore, had just as much drive and ambition as her predecessors, Lucas decided to go with the most straight-forward approach he had come up with.
Knowing he would need to sail off into the vast Cerulean Ocean to look for his parents and return Yuki to her mother in the future, Lucas promised to heavily invest in the design and construction of new types of shipyards and ships with the Moore Family being one of his primary contractors.
This would be a lucrative, long-term deal, one that established a deep connection between the Moore and Balfour Families. Although it didn’t provide any immediate funds or relief to the Viscount, the shrewd Victoria had agreed to cooperate fully in the mass-evacuation plan in part because of these future benefits.
Compared to the other heads of the big noble households in the South-West Province, Victoria was very young, which might be why she was willing to take bigger risks, hoping for even greater returns if her bet paid off.
For Lucas’ part, he was well aware that the advancement of technology was no simple matter, even if his inherited memories had a roadmap for development already laid out.
The young boy essentially knew everything that the man he gained his inherited memories from had ever learned, but much of that knowledge was still vague and difficult to recall, and even if he could clearly access it like a searchable database, it was hardly comprehensive.
Take, for example, one of Lucas’ most passionate pursuits, bathing. He knew that simply taking water from a river and using it to wash yourself was unsanitary because of dirt, microbes, bacteria, and other contaminants.
When he was building his bathhouses in Redwood Town, Lucas had solved part of this water purity problem by using natural filters and settlement tanks, two things he knew about from his inherited memories, but the details of which were a complete mystery.
How effective was a rock and gravel filter? How big should the settlement tanks be? How long should he let the water settle for? All of these things required experimentation on Lucas’ part to figure out, because there certainly wasn’t anything like a guide for him to follow.
Lucas’ inherited memories contained several possible methods to treat water for dangerous pathogens, such as using chlorine, ozone, or nanofiltration, but how most of these worked specifically was a big blank in his memories. This either meant the one he inherited his otherworldly knowledge from had completely forgotten these details, or, more likely, had simply never learned them.
As for ancient wooden sailing ship design, the information Lucas currently had access to in his inherited memories was barely better than some general knowledge with a few interesting anecdotes sprinkled in.
Still, for the moment, this was enough.
Understanding he couldn’t just leap from the current sailing or oar-and-sail ships which were common in the Rockwell Kingdom, to the ion-fusion turbine driven supertankers of the other world, Lucas set his sights on something he felt was much more achievable, paddle-wheelers fгeewebnovёl.com
From what he assumed was some kind of documentary his benefactor from the other universe had watched in his spare time, Lucas knew that paddle-wheelers were mostly used on rivers, and the highest-end ones could travel at a sustained speed of up to 40 kph under ideal conditions.
Typical river ships in the Rockwell Kingdom tended to have a cruising speed of around 15 kph, a fact that Lucas had learned about over the past month.
What this meant was, if Lucas and the Moore Family could design and build a feasible paddle-wheeler, they could theoretically double the average speed of river transport in the Rockwell Kingdom.
Not only would this result in a huge leap in productivity on all the nation’s major waterways, it would also lay the groundwork for even more advanced ships to follow.
This would be the first link in a very long chain that would eventually allow Lucas to construct the massive oceangoing vessels he would need in the future. freewebnσvel.cøm
Now, obviously, there were some major issues with trying to build a paddle-wheeler in the Rockwell Kingdom; the lack of anything remotely resembling an engine being the most obvious.
Ever since he first started trying to produce his own soap, Lucas had been planning to slowly introduce more industrial and mechanized inventions to this world.
There tended to be an over-reliance on manual labour to do things in the Rockwell Kingdom, likely a result of seeing cultivation as the solution to every problem. As such, while Spirit Tools brought a semblance of advanced civilization to certain aspects of life, for the most part, Lucas felt everything around him was extremely primitive and underdeveloped.
Of course, Lucas also knew that he had to tread carefully, as too much rapid progress could lead to negative or even dangerous consequences, both for him, and for society as a whole.
Soap was one thing, but engines that relied solely on thermal-mechanical power and not World Qi, were another matter entirely.
That said, even if he threw caution to the wind and barreled ahead without restraint, designing and building a steam engine capable of moving a ship wasn’t something Lucas was going to pull off in a month or two.
Long term, Lucas would surely build far more advanced machines than steam engines, but in order to address his immediate needs, he felt there might be a way around this problem, like substituting some of the more advanced technologies from his inherited memories for the Spirit Engineering of this world.
In order to move a paddle-wheeler, Lucas needed something to spin its wheels; that was it.
How hard would it be to design a Spirit Tool that spun things, Lucas had no idea, but he figured it couldn’t be as difficult as producing a Skyship like the Sunchaser, so it had to at least be possible.
Whether that would be cost effective or not was another issue, but during the experimental phase, it was important to try everything.
Needless to say, the details of this plan had yet to be fully ironed out, and considering the Moore Viscounty had already been emptied of all human residents, Lucas figured he could let Victoria Moore wait a bit longer before he brought a real ship development proposal to her.
To put it bluntly, the Moore Family was already riding along on Lucas’ ship, with no option to get off. Even if he forced them to wait a few months or years, there wasn’t anything they could do about it other than complain.
As long as he made it up to them eventually, it would be fine.
Probably.
Hopefully.
On the other hand, the Carlson Count Family was a real problem Lucas needed to address as quickly as possible.
So far, Supreme Elder Elizabeth and Count Mathias had been beyond gracious and generous, providing not only a base of operations in Iron Rock for Lucas and his team to work out of, but also contributing massive amounts of money and manpower to assist him with whatever he needed.
Lucas understood that the willingness of the Carlson Family to help wasn’t based solely on a sense of duty or altruism; no, they had considered the information at hand, analysed the situation before them, and decided it was to their advantage to cooperate with both him and his Master.
In his various conversations with the leaders of the Carlson Family, Lucas had received several not-so-subtle hints from them that they were expecting him to make this whole endeavour worth their investment, and that if he couldn’t provide at least some initial repayment soon, they may have to scale-back their level of support.
The Carlson Family wouldn’t cut-off all assistance immediately, and they probably wouldn’t make any large-scale demands in the short term, but reallocating manpower and increasing the price of essential supplies was entirely possible.
A 10% increase in the cost of grain that Iron Rock was providing to the refugees from its reserves might not sound like much, but when tens of thousands of Gold Coins worth of grain were being consumed every day, it didn’t take long for a 10% surcharge to add up.
In the near future Lucas could very clearly see this old noble house calling in the ’favours’ they had done for him and the Balfour Family, so he needed to act fast to keep their interests aligned with his own.
Only when the Carlson Family felt that fully supporting Lucas and his endeavours was the most profitable option for them would they continue to invest their resources on such a massive scale.
As luck would have it, though, after talking with Audrey and touring around Iron Rock, visiting a number of the best blacksmith workshops available, Lucas had come up with a way to not only make the Carlson Family a massive amount of money, but also to help with his own goal of advancing the Rockwell Kingdom’s level of social and technological development.
