Free Web NovelChapter 411: Chapter 408: Superstition Can Also Be a Shortcut
Ten days after the project began, Andre reported to Rorschach:
"Within the last ten days, three Mechanical Bodies have malfunctioned, but there were no leaks of Living Water Body Bacteria. One unit encountered a Wild Boar while tilling the soil. It successfully killed the boar, and the meat was divided among the villagers."
Spring was the season when wild boars grew restless. They needed to forage before and after mating, and as the clearing of land encroached upon their habitats, the conflict between humans and boars intensified, with more and more of them appearing in the fields.
One unlucky boar had gone berserk for some reason. After entering a field, it was chased by villagers right up to a Mechanical Body. Like a spider capturing its prey, the Mechanical Body used its specially-made plow to run the boar clean through.
Rorschach nodded. "Excellent. Make sure to heavily publicize this. Buy a prominent spot in all the Bayern newspapers to feature the story."
"Understood. Oh, and the villagers gave me its tusks. They insisted I deliver them to you." Andre took out a pair of large, gleaming yellow tusks that had already been cleaned.
Wow. They were quite large and heavy. Rorschach hefted them for a moment before setting them back on the table. "Take them home for your younger siblings to play with."
Andre didn’t stand on ceremony. He thanked Rorschach and put them away.
In truth, the rollout faced other difficulties. For example, Bart and Rorschach’s promotional tour had been a little too effective. One person tried to use fertilizer meant for three acres all on a single acre, only relenting after a great deal of persuasion from the Agricultural and Commercial Society.
Others fed the fertilizer to their pigs and cows, thinking it was some kind of universal growth stimulant. This turned out to be a surprisingly common practice, a fact the Agricultural and Commercial Society only discovered when a child drank a concoction of water and fertilizer and went into acute kidney failure.
It was all because Rorschach and the Agricultural and Commercial Society, despite their meticulous planning, had forgotten one crucial detail: to warn people not to eat it. ’After all, it smells so foul. Who the hell knows how they managed to drink it!’
After Rorschach stepped in and miraculously brought the child back from the brink of death, new rumors began to circulate. The fertilizer was "the devil’s salt," they said, and anyone or anything that consumed it would be possessed. According to the rumor, Rorschach himself was the one behind it all, and he only performed an "exorcism" on the child because his plot had been exposed.
’Motherfucker...’ For the first time in a long while, Rorschach used Balan’s Pearl to find the source of the malicious rumors: a Manor Lord who not only refused to buy the new farm tools and fertilizer but also forbade his villagers from having any contact with the Agricultural and Commercial Society.
The Autonomous Committee moved at once to deal with the village tyrant. Bart led a squad of soldiers, dragged the man out of his cellar, and had him publicly flogged before being thrown into the coal mines.
The idea was to make him personally gather the raw materials for fertilizer, so he could experience for himself that no devils were involved in its production, from start to finish.
And this was just the trouble caused by the fertilizer. Rorschach dreaded to think what kind of problems would arise with the upcoming pesticides.
Rorschach was beginning to understand why religion was so advanced in ancient times. The best way to make the unruly masses obey was to first establish a religious system, complete with a Heaven above and a Hell below, and then issue administrative orders as divine edicts.
Convincing everyone to bathe and practice good hygiene was an incredibly difficult task. Promoting it would consume immense administrative resources, with no guarantee of compliance. Even when people had the means to bathe, laziness often got in the way.
But you could tell your congregation that they must worship the Divine Spirit every ten days, and that before worship, they must bathe and change their clothes to show piety. That way, the practice could be implemented without expending much manpower or establishing any real system of reward and punishment.
In an era where the king’s authority didn’t extend to the countryside, religious authority could control the daily lives of the masses. From that perspective, for certain periods of history, religion was astonishingly advanced.
So, if Rorschach wanted to save himself the trouble, he shouldn’t have started the Agricultural and Commercial Society. Instead, he should have borrowed Deryats’s head... er, his banner, and established something like a New Druid Sect or a New Agricultural Sect.
Then he could sanctify the fertilizers and pesticides, call the Mechanical Body farm tools Divine Beasts or Angels, turn the new farming methods into sacred rituals, and roll them out quickly and precisely. Any User who broke the rules could be sent straight to the burning stake.
The Holy Trinity of Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium. How great, how glorious! Amen!
There was just one problem: adapting to local conditions would become extremely difficult. If technicians tried to develop new methods for places with different soil or climate, they would likely be branded as heretics by the more thoroughly brainwashed believers.
If the New Agricultural Sect grew large enough, it wasn’t out of the question that two factions of believers, wielding sickles and hoes and piloting Mechanical Body farm implements, would engage in a doctrinal debate backed by firepower, arguing over whether "the ratio of N-type Holy Salt (nitrogen fertilizer) to P-type Holy Salt (phosphorus fertilizer) applied during the wheat growing season should be 3:1 or 4:1."
Before battle, they would have to perform maintenance on their Mechanical Bodies as instructed by scripture—a process they would, of course, call "appeasing the machine spirit."
’Holy crap, is the Golden Throne beckoning to me?’ Lost in his fantasy, Rorschach suddenly felt his butt getting warm and quickly stood up to stretch his legs.
From Andre’s perspective, his teacher had simply zoned out for a moment, then suddenly stood up to move around. He was used to it by now. Rorschach often did this in front of him and Caroline.
Soon, Rorschach seemed to pull his thoughts back to the office. He then asked, "What’s the R&D progress on the harvester model?"
"Gao Pei’s Refining Factory has submitted a prototype, but the Agricultural and Commercial Society says it needs more testing. The previous plow model had a lot of problems in the field and went through several revisions. Now they’re being more cautious about implementing new designs."
That was a good thing. A lesson learned from a setback. Rorschach didn’t press the matter.
The Mechanical Body farm tools were efficient enough to till and plow 24 hours a day, but the purchase price was astronomical even for large landowners. Smaller households could only afford to rent them.
The Mechanical Bodies were rented by the day, but many families only needed one for a day and a half, or two and a half. Others felt that paying the rental fee, even after the harvest, was too big a risk.
So, the Agricultural and Commercial Society proposed a solution: several small households with adjacent fields could rent a machine together and split the cost internally based on their acreage.
To simplify the accounting, the Agricultural and Commercial Society’s sales agents suggested these joint-renting farmers register as small commercial associations at the City Hall or in town. Thus, with the villagers still in a state of befuddlement and the Society handling all the arrangements, collective production units began to form one after another.
For displaced people, this system was introduced as standard procedure; they were all registered into formal production teams.
Neither Rorschach nor the Autonomous Committee forced any farmers to join or leave, but within each of these production units, there were bound to be clever individuals who discovered the advantages of this kind of organization.
They would persuade others in their team to start a side business, to get rich together. Every village had one or two of these sharp-minded "go-getters."
It was foreseeable that as food production increased and the agricultural off-season grew longer, township enterprises would begin to sprout, with these production teams as their basic building blocks.
The first person to discover, observe, and make predictions about these small units was a newspaper intern named Martin.
He began writing a long-form report after noticing an increase in handmade goods like pottery cups, woven straw products, and barrels at the village and town markets.
Compared to the wares made by town artisans, these were cruder and, naturally, cheaper. Some barrel merchants even began sourcing their stock from the villages, passing off the inferior products as high-quality goods to sell to vintners.
Martin visited these newly formed collective producers, comparing these groups of organized villagers to the artisan workshops of old.
Unfortunately, the article, which he had poured his heart and soul into, was never published. The good news was that his work was not without value; it was repurposed as an internal report that landed on the desks of the Autonomous Committee members and Rorschach himself.
"As for these little commercial associations... whether they’ll go bankrupt, be absorbed by larger corporations, or transform from collective ownership into family-owned businesses... it’s impossible to know," Rorschach muttered to himself, setting the report down.
