A week had passed since the negotiation.
With my debt cleared and a new business partner secured, I began importing goods relentlessly, fueled by the generous twenty percent profit share from the sale of my inventions. Making Lady Valeria my ally had indeed been the right decision.
Now I stood atop a small hill near one of my villages, just outside the city walls, my eyes gazing upon the scene below. Farmers worked their fields amid the gentle snowfall, their movements slow but steady, breath fogging the cold air as winter quietly settled over the land.
They were planting winter barley across the plots of land, while other farmhands spread the newly acquired animal manure over the soil so the nutrients could settle in before spring arrived.
The sight before me brought a warm smile to my face. When harvest season finally rolled around, people's stomachs might at last be filled.
But I wasn't here for simple sightseeing or a leisurely stroll. Quite the opposite, really. I was here to do work that only I, and a selected few, could do.
Prospecting.
I turned my eyes back down to the foot of the hill I currently stood upon and saw an entourage of my bodyguards and workers examining the rock and soil around its base.
Beneath the thin layer of snow lay a reddish-brown boulder, its surface marked by a blood-red streak, caused by my prospecting method, aka hitting it very hard with a pickaxe. Simple, but effective. It's clearly an iron ore, specifically hematite.
And around the same area are black dusty yet dense soil covers in black streaks which are currently burning in a calm and controlled manner by my bodyguards who're currently carrying a torch and a bucket of water. It's clearly a coal, specifically bituminous coal.
Coal and iron, the two main ingredients needed to kick-start an industrial revolution, were just lying around my fiefdom. And this wasn't the only source I had found. After prospecting for an entire week, two other nearby hills revealed the same riches, all within the lands my family controlled.
That meant my city might be sitting atop a terrifying amount of coal and iron veins, like a beast asleep, waiting for someone to unlock its true potential. A beast my family had been too ignorant to see. My condolences to them for choosing to stick with lumbering.
"All the same?" I shouted loudly, asking my workers about the appearance and behavior of the rock and soil below.
"All the same, milord!" the workers and knights shouted back in unison.
Three hills full of coal and iron. Lady Luck truly blessed me.
But this wasn't today's main event, I thought, as I looked up at the cloudy, snowy afternoon sky before signaling my workers and bodyguards that today's work was done.
---
After the prospecting work was done, I rode my newly acquired carriage, a token of friendship gifted by Valeria, back to Vindia City with the windows wide open, greeted by the warm welcome of the townsfolk.
They bowed, they waved, and most importantly, they smiled at my presence. That alone was a clear indicator that my public relations campaign—distributing food, improving infrastructure, and simply being the most approachable and down-to-earth noble one could meet—had paid off very well.
After a while, I arrived at my destination.
It was an old pinewood warehouse that had been under renovation for quite some time. Now the work was finished, and its interior had been transformed into the true foundation of the modern world.
Printing House.
It was basically a workshop that housed, as the name suggested, a printing press—an ingenious invention of Johann Gutenberg.
As I strolled through the building, whistling down its wooden halls, a bearded man in a leather apron full of ink stains, the supervisor of the workshop, came to greet me with a concerned look, clearly suggesting that a problem had occurred.
This was neither the first time nor the last.
"Sir! The press has a problem again," he said.
"What is it this time?" I asked, followed by a small sigh. It was the third time I had come to check on it, and every damn time some problem had halted the entire production line.
Last time it was a loose screw. Before that, it was letter misalignment.
"We just need the last page, but the ink is thickening due to the cold, sire!" he answered while bowing his head for reasons unbeknownst to me. The weather clearly wasn't his fault.
"Lead me to it," I commanded with a warm yet authoritative voice.
He instantly turned and led me to the wooden machine I had created with my own two hands (and a lot of helpers).
A heavy wooden contraption made of imported oak and iron stood like a wooden heart of the workshop, its frame thick and square, built like a workhorse to endure abuse. A broad screw press rose from its center, darkened by oil and ink, while neatly arranged rows of metal type rested in trays beneath the press bed. Ink-stained rollers and levers protruded from its sides; every surface bore the marks of labor and the pride of a machine that kick-started the true enlightenment of humankind, or at least, in my opinion.
Around it stood a group of laborers I had hired off the streets, promised the prospect of a better life. Now they simply hovered around the machine and a tin bucket of ink, somehow unable to solve something as simple as thickened ink.
I watched them for a moment, half-expecting one of them to figure it out on their own. That seemed unlikely. As usual, I would have to solve it myself.
I walked in, picked up the ink bucket, and placed it beside the fire brazier.
The ink naturally thinned as the temperature rose.
The supervisor and the workers thanked me before returning to finish their first task.
From the press came something humble: an elementary school-level English book.
I aimed for literacy before anything else, for I could never build any truly advanced industry if most of the city's population couldn't even read.
They presented the end product to me, and my hands and eyes quickly performed a quality check.
No major defects.
"Good. Continue printing," I said in an authoritative tone, though my face radiated happiness.
The supervisor and workers nodded in response and immediately returned to work, perhaps encouraged by the extra bonus pay I had promised for both the quantity and quality of their labor.
"With this, I could finally begin drafting plans for an education system", I thought, returning to my carriage while waving goodbye to the workers who were already back at their tasks.
---
I was riding in my carriage again, this time back to the mansion.
But I hadn't come here to rest or seek respite. Despite the concerns of both my servants and subordinates, I pressed on.
I still have work to do, I thought as I climbed the mansion stairs, entered my bedroom, and dropped into the chair.
The same chair.The same table.
The very place where, a month ago, I had drafted my first domestic reform plans after transmigrating into this world.
"Education first," I whispered to myself. "Then hygiene. Then the military. Then....."
My thoughts unraveled into a list without end as my quill slashed ink across parchment after parchment.
I thought.
I wrote.
I drew.
The sun bled red across the horizon, yet my work did not stop. Only when the twin moons rose into the night sky did I finally pause, their pale glow spilling through the window and pulling my gaze upward.
As I looked outside, the memory of the image that had first made me fall in love with history surfaced clearly in my mind.
A grainy image.Black and white.A man in a bulky suit stepping down onto an alien world.
A single footprint pressed into pale dust.
Voices crackling through static, carried across an impossible distance, announcing humanity's arrival on the Moon. Not with conquest or fire, but with quiet awe.
Back then, nations had competed, ideologies had clashed, and yet all of that had faded before that single moment. For a brief instant, the whole world had looked upward together.
Humanity, fragile and divided, had still reached beyond its cradle.
One small step.
It hadn't even happened in my lifetime, and yet it had left a deeper mark on me than anything else ever had.
I exhaled slowly, my gaze drifting from the twin moons back to the ink-stained desk.
If mankind could do it back in my world, then it had no excuse not to do it here.
I dipped the quill back into the ink.
And the work continued, my face tired—yet smiling.