Chapter 474 — No One Will Stop

Everyone is advancing; no one will ever stop.

Careful not to wake the peacefully sleeping Hedy, Gao Yun rose quietly from his desk. He first draped a garment over her, then walked to the large floor-to-ceiling window of the study and gazed out at the city—in the slowly sinking sunset, Cecil was still busy and vibrant.

This was a city developing rapidly, and with the end of the Integration War, the entire Southern Region would likewise begin to develop at a rapid pace.

But while Cecil developed, others were developing too. On this road of progress, no one would stop to wait for the laggards to catch up.

Tifone's development had been unexpectedly swift, but Gao Yang believed Tifone was not the only one advancing. Even Ansour, which looked decadent and backward, and the Church, which looked stubborn and conservative, surely had development processes of their own—especially with war having broken out, their development would only accelerate.

Yet Gao Yang was not overly worried about the development of Ansour or the Church, because he knew those powers remained trapped by their own backward systems. Their rate of development had a ceiling; unless they underwent an earth-shaking transformation, their pace would forever lag behind Cecil's, and they were simply not worth worrying about.

What was worth worrying about was Tifone—Luo Yan? Augustus was a more dangerous opponent than Gao Yang had anticipated.

He had begun by changing the system, and he had already achieved initial success.

That emperor had spent more than a decade gradually reforming the Empire's aristocratic system and concentrating his own authority, turning Tifone into a more efficient executing machine. In recent years his centralization had become稳固—no, had become firmly established—and the Empire's administrative efficiency had risen to unprecedented heights, so he had soon moved into the next stage: advancing education, loosening the shackles on land, and redistributing the means of production.

It was highly likely he had already recognized the existence and significance of "the productive forces and the relations of production"—or at least grasped some of the principles—and was attempting to push toward deeper reform. And so long as his grip on the Empire did not weaken, those reforms would inevitably advance further in the years to come.

Yet to accomplish such monumental achievements, Emperor Luo Yan could not possibly do it alone—to keep such a vast and ancient empire running, there had to be a great many strategists and assistants around him: perhaps young, progressive aristocratic elites, perhaps enlightened and prestigious old-guard nobles lending their support. In short, Tifone surely did not have only one brilliant emperor; it also had a group of heavy ministers possessed of both wisdom and skill.

And at the same time, Tifone had outstanding technical talent.

Gao Yang had Kamel, Patty, Rebecca, and Jenny under his command—all of them excellent technical talents. But the world was full of talent; it was impossible that all the geniuses happened to be concentrated in Cecil's little patch of land—did other houses have no technical experts?

Of course they did. The only difference was whether they had been given the chance to shine.

Tifone's chief alchemist had discovered the acid-hydrolysis process for burning stone—but did Tifone have only one chief alchemist? Did it have no rune experts? No machinists? No mages? What new things... might these people research?

Gao Yang was certain that there absolutely existed in the world people with greater mathematical talent than Rebecca, greater rune talent than Jenny, and greater theological and natural-history talent than Patty. And according to the distribution patterns of extraordinary individuals in this era, these people were surely gathered among the upper echelons of every nation. They might at any moment achieve astonishing breakthroughs in scholarship—only, depending on the circumstances of the country they lived in, the impact their achievements could produce would differ.

In some places, a new magical technology might merely add a new form of entertainment for the nobility; in others, an alchemical result might be promoted into a tremendous boon for the nation's grain production.

Tifone's technical personnel had clearly caught a good era—and a good emperor.

Cecil's sole advantage was that Gao Yang could be more tolerant than Luo Yan, more far-sighted, and clearer about the laws governing society's next stage of development—and thus more efficiently unleash the dividends brought by technological research.

Gao Yang carefully analyzed the intelligence he had obtained from Daniel, and in the process speculated on Tifone's pace of advance and Emperor Luo Yan's next moves—at one point even entertaining the chilling thought that "Luo Yan? Augustus might just be a transmigrator too," but after some analysis he found that Tifone's development should contain no suspicious anomalies.

First, Luo Yan? Augustus's path of change had not been achieved overnight. He had spent decades of the first half of his life ascending to the throne and consolidating his regime, bit by bit drawing in progressive nobles, dividing his opponents, and gradually transforming Tifone's aristocratic system. It was a normal and lengthy process of accumulation.

Second, Tifone's social transformation had not gone smoothly. In implementing his new policies, Luo Yan? Augustus had displayed many obvious hallmarks of inexperience—and some of those inexperience points could even be described as "mistakes":

He had left behind quite a few hidden dangers rooted in the old aristocratic forces, and for that he had been forced to make more compromises to maintain Tifone's stability;

In promoting literacy education, he had once wasted no small amount of effort for lack of good incentive measures, and had failed to establish a sound educational system—so that even now, the enthusiasm of Tifone's commoners for receiving education could not compare with that of Cecil's people;

Tifone's emancipation of labor clearly lagged behind Cecil's; they still remained at the stage of "taking short-term work in workshops in between farming," with no true professional workers having emerged, and no systematic vocational education or management system whatsoever;

Tifone's "burning stone acid-hydrolysis workshops" still relied on the old-style "alchemists' atelier" system, suffering from numerous problems—small production scale, low efficiency, inconsistent systems, inconsistent standards, disordered management. Although Luo Yan? Augustus had attempted to establish large-scale burning stone acid-hydrolysis production facilities, those were merely enlarged ateliers, with serious waste of manpower and materials...

Gao Yang drew a deep breath. He knew that Tifone's development was the "normal situation."

Groping, hitting walls, improving; groping again, hitting walls again, improving again—countless people paying enormous costs in time, manpower, and materials (sometimes even consuming a generation's youth) to gnaw away at a single field, and in the end their only gain might well be merely the confirmation that "this road is impassable." Tifone was doing exactly this right now, and this was what was normal.

The reason Cecil had developed so rapidly was largely that Gao Yang had directly used his own judgment and experience to preemptively avoid these "impassable roads." He had used the knowledge from his previous life and his observational experience as a satellite spirit to plan the Southern Region, and had thereby saved immense costs in time, manpower, and materials.

At least at this stage, this was Cecil's enormous advantage over Tifone. But viewed from another angle, Tifone had advantages of its own—and advantages that Cecil could not make up for in the short term: