Free Web NovelChapter 345: Head Manager Victoria – Part 2
All these factors, and many more, were points Lucas tasked Victoria with finding out regarding just the first step in the sugar making process, and that was for this initial year alone.
In the coming years, Lucas wanted research conducted on creating dedicated groves of lych trees, tending to and nurturing these trees to help them grow faster, creating paths, infrastructure, and equipment to more efficiently harvest sap, etc. etc.
Lucas even thought about introducing the idea of hybridization and selective breeding, specialized fertilizers, and other more advanced agricultural techniques to further enhance both the quantity and quality of the sugar he was aiming to create.
Then, of course, there was a need a optimize the process of turning sap into sugar.
Specialized equipment needed to be designed, cooking temperatures needed to be adjusted, dedicated villages, towns, and factories needed to be built, workers needed to be trained, appropriate compensation needed to be determined...
Post processing and logistics also needed to be taken into consideration.
Lucas could probably sell his new sugar out of a broken-down stall in the poorest of slums and noble lords from all over the Rockwell Kingdom would still come to buy it, but he naturally wasn’t going to be so flippant about what he imagined would be one of his flagship products.
With his wealth of inherited memories, the young entrepreneur was well aware of the impact of marketing on how sustainable and profitable any industry was.
Shops needed to be built, supply chains organized, distribution channels opened, packaging and advertising needed to be designed, pricing plans had to be created...
There was a mountain of questions that needed to be answered, and as the one now in charge of this venture, it was Head Manager Victoria’s job to figure each and every one of these issues out.
She also needed to do this as quickly as possible, to the standards of her extremely meticulous boss, and all while maintaining the highest degree of secrecy possible.
Quite frankly, Victoria felt a headache just thinking about it, but who told her to stick her nose where it didn’t belong and get herself caught in a trap?
With no one to blame but herself for her current predicament, though she grumbled quietly to herself, Victoria still knuckled down and got to work.
With drafts of Lucas’ tapping equipment in hand, Victoria set out to visit Misty City’s blacksmiths.
These were mostly rough sketches, concepts the boy had cobbled together over the last few months but had yet to test. In order to evaluate these designs’ usefulness, Victoria would have to have several different prototypes of the drills and tapping spouts made and then test them in the field.
As for ordering collection buckets and barrels, Victoria handed that task to Laura.
Wooden containers were by far the cheapest option, with ones made from metal seeming a bit excessive, but Lucas had insisted they test every option, so Victoria had tasked her young apprentice with ordering a few thousand of each from the local smiths, carpenters, and woodshops.
While it might have been more efficient for Victoria to order all the metal products, and Laura to order all the wood products, the Head Manager specifically split the task the way she did to obscure their intent.
Wood drills and ’hollow tubes’ could be used for many things, as could buckets and barrels, so no one would question why a large quantity of them were being ordered from different shops around Misty City.
Once she was finished ordering this first set of experimental tapping equipment, Victoria moved on to locating a local testing ground.
As a trade centre and military outpost, much of Misty City’s food and fuel supplies were imported, but that didn’t mean there was no local agriculture or forestry taking place.
To the south and west of Misty City there were significant tracks of farmland that produced a large quantity of grain, vegetables, and fruit. These fields didn’t provide nearly enough food to sustain the city’s 150,000 residents, but they also weren’t small by any means.
That, however, wasn’t of much interest to Victoria; what she cared about were the hills and forests to the city’s north.
These forests were a bit far from Misty City and were somewhat sparse in terms of trees, but they were still sufficient to conduct some initial experiments without having to venture out into one of the surrounding logging towns or villages.
The sugar tapping equipment wasn’t complicated to manufacture, so just days after putting in her orders, Victoria had several hundred sets ready to deploy.
Gathering together a group of workers from Redwood Town and Port Calden, people she knew were loyal and tight-lipped, Victoria hired a local woodcutter for a very, very high price and set out from the northern gates of the city.
About 2 hours later, led by the contracted woodcutter named Ben, Victoria and her team arrived at a less visited part of Misty City’s forests and got to work tapping the trees.
226 Red and 10 Star Lych Trees later, Victoria’s team returned to Misty City to wait for the sap to flow.
Their guide for the day also agreed to not tell another soul what Victoria and the others were up to in the forest.
As a small-time woodcutter with a mere Seventh Step Vein Opening cultivation, Ben had never had such an easy and lucrative job before, nor had he ever worked for such powerful and important people, so he wasn’t planning on running his mouth in the first place as he liked his head being attached to his body.
Very satisfied with Ben’s cooperative mindset, Victoria tipped him another Gold Coin and told him there would be more jobs for him in the future if he remained sensible, something the scruffy middle-aged man happily swore to be.
Over the next half-a-month, Victoria and Laura accepted several more deliveries of equipment and tapped an additional 1,000 or so Lych Trees around Misty City, trying their best to set up their taps in different locations and forest conditions in order to obtain the widest range of data possible.
In this regard, Ben actually proved to be invaluable as he had been working in these forests for over 20 years and knew them like the back of his hand.
Even if there was something he didn’t know, Ben would quickly be able to find someone amongst his associated who had the necessary knowledge.
When these ’outside experts’ provided particularly helpful information, Victoria didn’t hesitate to recruit them for a premium price. As for those who simply provided small bits of knowledge, the Head Manager would send one of her subordinates to pay them a reasonable fee without involving them further.
At the same time, Victoria also quietly bought a small empty building in the north of Misty City and had Laura convert it into a temporary workshop.
To the public, this was nothing more than a charcoal facility, which was why it had several large stoves, constantly released smoke and steam, and regularly received wagons from the northern forests.
In reality, this was a test-lab of sorts, meant to produce the first experimental batch of Maple Sugar from the South-East Province’s forests.
Unfortunately, even after all the work Victoria, Laura, and the rest of their small team put in, the ultimately decider of how much sap they could collect was the weather, and it wasn’t cooperating.
It had been unseasonably warm ever since Victoria had set foot in Misty City, never once dropping below freezing at night, which Lucas had already discovered was the critical factor in being able to harvest sap.
This was a good thing for dealing with thousands of refugees, so no one was complaining, but it did mean their sugar harvesting efforts were temporarily put on hold.
It wasn’t until late-December, almost a full month after their arrival, that the temperature finally dipped low enough on a certain night, then rose high enough during the following day to produce a ’run’ of lych tree sap.
At dawn the next day, Victoria, Laura, and their entire group brought out their wagons and barrels to collect their harvest, only to quickly realize they had woefully underprepared for this moment.
For each of the past 15 days, they had barely brought back a few litres of sap, but on the day of the run, they had to make 10 round trips to the forest, stopping part-way to hurriedly purchase another pair of wagons and several dozen more large barrels.
It was a huge harvest even compared to the one Laura had experienced back in Redwood Town, catching her completely off-guard, a mistake she regretted at the end of the day when their team was slumped over the seventy-three 200-litre barrels of sap they had piled up inside and outside the workshop.
Victoria would have scolded Laura for her carelessness if she wasn’t so exhausted herself, but seeing how contrite her apprentice was, and realizing this really was more of an innocent mistake than a result of incompetence, she decided to let Laura off this time with a warning.
After an hour or so of rest, as dusk was turning to night, Victoria’s team gradually recovered and got back to work, pouring barrels of watery sap into 20 wide pans and boiling it down.
Over the course of the evening, Lucas, Sasha, Eris, Christina and a number of others arrived to help out.
Celestina herself also snuck over at some point, eager to witness this first batch of sugar being produced in her territory.
The Marquess even offered to assist with the cooking, but was quickly and unanimously refused by all the leaders in the workshop as they were well aware of how disastrous Celestina’s skills in the kitchen were.
This might have resulted in the red-headed woman sulking in the corner of the workshop, but there were no official records or witness accounts of that ever happening...
The following morning, despite her hair being a mess and her eyes being bloodshot, Victoria Moore stared at the nearly 300 kg of High-Rank Mortal Grade Tier 2 Red Maple Sugar with pure delight, then turned to the 17 kg of Low-Rank and 1 kg of Mid-Rank Tier 3 Star Maple Sugar and nearly fainted with joy.
The had noted many crude and inefficient points in their process last night, and there were many aspects to improve upon as well as problems to work out, but seeing the tangible results with her own eyes, Head Manager Victoria could practically taste the sweet future that lay ahead of her!
