Chapter 219 — The New Business

In this land ruled by the Cecil family, Amber was probably one of the few who dared question Gawain's decisions. Though for the most part this half-elf lady's bold challenges came simply from having no filter on her mouth, Gawain was still glad to see that not everyone here would blindly submit to him—it meant independent thinking existed... well, where Amber was concerned it might not necessarily be independent thinking; she just had a sharp tongue.

It was hard for Gawain to explain all his thoughts to Amber in a short time. He could only give her a rough account of the composition of the industrial structure and the concept of technological gaps, while the deeper economic and political interests, the long-term control over the Leslie domain—none of that did he speak aloud.

But regardless of what was said, Amber still conscientiously carried out Gawain's orders. The very next day she set out, and in her capacity as special envoy of the Cecil domain, delivered Duke Gawain Cecil's handwritten letter into the castle of that Viscount Andrew.

And Viscount Andrew's response came faster than Gawain had imagined—he gladly accepted the invitation on the spot, and on the third day after Amber's return to the domain, the viscount arrived by fast ship at the Cecil domain's docks.

The last time Gawain had seen this viscount, the man had still been in a weakened state, eroded by dark magic. But after a period of rest and recuperation, Andrew Leslie had recovered his health. He wore a thick, warm dark-red coat; his hair was combed back without a single strand out of place; a newly hired steward followed at his side. He had also brought a ten-man guard squad and the domain's commercial advisor—the advisor, naturally, for the "business" mentioned in Gawain's handwritten letter, and the soldier escort as the necessary pomp of a nobleman.

He saw a new Cecil domain utterly different from what he had imagined.

Both the brand-new, orderly houses and the commoners walking the streets left a deep impression on him. He was especially curious about how, wherever he looked, there were only citizens' homes—so where did the domain's serfs and lower classes live? But compared with Padrick, who had no noble blood, this viscount was in the end far more composed and placid. From the moment he disembarked to the moment he was led into the lord's residence, he maintained the calmest, most elegant bearing throughout, and even when seated in Gawain Cecil's reception hall, he betrayed none of the excessive curiosity or fussing of a rustic bumpkin noble.

And then Betty poured a whole water pitcher's worth of tea down him.

The southern marches had honest folk—everyone was straightforward, and more importantly, it seemed everyone suffered from the habit of overthinking. Viscount Andrew, like Padrick, spent the first half-pitcher trying to guess what deep meaning lay behind Gawain's arranging for a maid to keep filling a guest's cup...

Betty, standing dumbly in the reception hall hugging a large water pitcher, had no idea she had already been stamped with the role of some unfathomable figure. She was merely gazing off into the distance at the decorative swords and blades hung on the wall, silently reciting the vocabulary and grammar she had recently learned, while devoting part of her attention to watching when the guest's teacup would need refilling. By the time she had gone through her word list a second time, Gawain appeared.

"Viscount Andrew, glad to see you've recovered your health," Gawain said, greeting him warmly the moment he entered. "I hear Tamsen Town has fully restored order—that is truly good news."

"It is all thanks to your help. Without your large ore orders, I fear I could not even have repaired the great hole in my castle this winter," Viscount Andrew said with a rather exaggerated spread of his hands and a smile. "So when I heard you wished to discuss a new business deal with me in person, I came at once."

"It is indeed a new business deal, but it would be hard to discuss it properly here. If you don't mind, would you care to come with me and take a look at the Cecil domain's mines?"

"The mines?" Viscount Andrew frowned. "You mentioned in your letter that you had some new mining equipment for sale, but the Leslie family has mined for generations, and I am familiar with all manner of mining tools... hic... ah, forgive me, how rude of me."

"Not at all, not at all," Gawain said, waving his hand quickly, while privately wondering why the viscount's hiccups now seemed to come with an echo. Then he explained with a smile, "Seeing it with your own eyes is still quite necessary, because what I mean to sell, I'm afraid you have truly never seen before."

Since Gawain had put it that way, Viscount Andrew of course would not persist in being obtuse. He gladly agreed to the invitation to tour the mine, and took the opportunity to inquire in which direction the privy lay.

The Cecil mine lay to the east of the domain. At the very beginning it had been but a small excavation site, but with the domain's rapid development and the ever-growing demand for ore, the mine became the place second only to the central district of "Xuanyao City" in construction effort. Great quantities of manpower, materials, and advanced machinery were transported there, and it slowly grew from an excavation site of a few tents into a village of a dozen-odd houses, and from a village toward a town. Now it had newly built brick-and-tile houses, orderly roads paved with slag and cement, and a broad main road connecting the mining town to Xuanyao City, ensuring the flow of people and goods between the two.

Thanks to the convenient transport, Gawain led his guest by carriage to the mining town in less than two hours.

Viscount Andrew maintained his calm and composed air all the way to the final stop of the journey. Whether it was the mana-crystal lamps seen everywhere in the domain, the straight and level roads, the domain folk still busy at work in winter, or those "factories" at the town's edge emitting strange sounds—he tried hard not to be too astonished. For though these things exceeded his expectations, they did not exceed his imagination. He was amazed that the Cecil family, once so declined that it nearly had to sell its title to survive, could in so short a time build such a domain; but he could still attach a reasonable explanation to everything he saw. So long as one understood it all as "Gawain Cecil dug up the coffin-savings he buried back then and piled up this place with money," then everything remained comprehensible.

Until he saw something he could not understand at all, could not explain, could not even have imagined.

"This... what is this thing?!"

Before Viscount Andrew, a massive machine was driving a winch with astonishing power, hauling several carts of heavy ore—ore that would likely have needed dozens of slave laborers to push—out of the deep mine shaft. The machine gave off a low, deep sound like the roar of a giant; the huge disc structure at its side turned relentlessly with an unstoppable momentum; every one of its components seemed forged of steel, yet these lifeless things ran on and on as though alive—without feeling, without cease, immensely powerful, even carrying a strange majesty born of steel.

Only after standing dumbstruck for several seconds did Viscount Andrew finally glimpse, at the machine's core, a glimmer of shining magical light. His power of speech at last returned somewhat: "Is this... a magic device? Some kind of hybrid of magical mechanism and mechanical engineering?"

"You could put it that way," Gawain said with a smile. "This is what I mean to sell you—but it is only one of them. Walk on a little further and you will see more machines. In the Cecil domain, more than half the heavy labor in the mines is done by these machines."