Chapter 509 — Gao Song's Alternative Approach

Once they had confirmed where the problem lay, what followed was a whole series of repairs, redesigns, assemblies, and tests...

With Nicholas's Egg—that lathe of god-tier precision—at their disposal, everything proceeded with astonishing speed. Basically, a part could go from design blueprint to finished product in a minute or two and be installed in the machine right away.

Watching the mechanical scholars and arcanotech engineers bustle around the platform retesting the entire system, Hetty shook her head and sighed. "That girl Rebecca... she's far too impetuous. She ought to have run thorough tests before reporting to you."

"I told her to report the moment she had a sample," Gao Yang said, watching Rebecca dart among the technical experts and issue orders to those around her, a smile on his face. "Of course, more rigorous testing procedures and regulations in that regard are certainly the necessary direction for the research department—that'll be Rebecca's job going forward... and from what I can see now, the girl's doing a decent job."

Even Hetty, who had always been strict with Rebecca (though the strictness had never accomplished much), could find nothing to argue with now. She gazed from afar at Rebecca, wholly absorbed in her world of machines, and only after a long while let out a soft sigh. "...Yes... she really is doing well, and she's even trained up so many talented apprentices just like her... If someone had told me two years ago that Rebecca could accomplish all this, I'd have been certain they were out to swindle money."

"There are plenty of capable people in this world, but not everyone can find a place to put their talents to use. Fortunately, Cecil can give these people a chance—so our next step is to draw more capable people into these projects," Gao Cen said, then asked, "How has the talent recruitment and education training been progressing lately?"

"A great many craftsmen and low-tier extraordinary individuals—or extraordinary apprentices—have answered the Civil Administration's call. The fact that the Cecil family has unified the Southern Frontier has given these people considerable confidence, and the new methods of publicity draw them out from all corners. But turning them into qualified mechanical scholars and arcanotech engineers will take a long time, I'm afraid... Their prior skill levels are wildly uneven, their traditions all different, and they lack any concept of standardized industry. Recruiting a thousand apprentices takes only three days; getting them fit for factory work takes half a year; and getting them into the laboratories is even trickier—that's almost entirely down to natural talent, with a pass rate of less than ten percent," Hetty said, her face troubled. "Just as you said, if we truly want to close the talent gap, we have to spread basic education—only schools can train talent in bulk, with high quality and uniform standards, the way a factory turns out its products."

Gao Yu knew what Hetty was about to say and gave a slight nod. "But at this stage we don't have enough schools... nor enough teachers, nor even enough Civil Administration staff to work out how the schools ought to be run. Isn't that right?"

"Just as you say, the gap is simply too vast—so vast it's enough to drive one to despair. If we lack houses, we can work overtime to build them; if we lack machines, we can make up for it with manpower. But training teachers... that cannot be accelerated," Hetty said, frowning, her tone grave. "After the industrial printing press came out we finally managed to solve the shortage of textbooks, yet we still don't have enough teachers to teach them. The knowledge that primary teachers recruited from the general populace can actually put to use in the classroom amounts to little more than spelling and basic arithmetic..."

Here she paused, then went on: "What we lack most at this stage are teachers for four subjects: basic runology, the fundamentals of arcanotech industry, Cecil social studies, and comprehensive ideology. All of these are new fields—teachers have to take half a year of classes themselves before they can barely teach others, and even then they must return for further study even as they teach, because new knowledge keeps emerging."

The problem Hetty described was one of the gravest facing the Cecil territory after its expansion, and one that could not be "solved by acceleration." At present the whole Southern Frontier was using four new industrial cities plus Cecil itself—five cities in all—as base points, laying out large numbers of general schools across a cross-shaped span, but every one of those schools faced a severe shortage of teachers. The Civil Administration had expended enormous manpower and resources just to scrape together enough teachers of literacy and arithmetic—but knowledge even slightly more complex than that...

Apart from people born in Xuanyao City, who even knew what arcanotech industry was? Who knew the full body of Cecil law? Who understood runology?

Beyond these seemingly specialized courses, social studies posed an enormous problem of its own. In most regions outside Xuanyao City, people didn't even know how to turn on the winter heating, how to use a mana-crystal table lamp, how to irrigate fields with a water pump, how to thresh grain with a threshing machine...

The first problem these novelties faced once promoted was that ordinary folk simply dared not use them; if they dared, they didn't know how; and if they knew how, they didn't trust the machines. For every ten people the Civil Administration sent to the fields to install water pumps, it had to send another ten to spread the word that the pumps did not eat people...

And the Civil Administration itself was still short-handed.

Gao Yi gave a faint sigh.

On this land—razed and awaiting renewal, where a big enough fist was all it took to establish authority—as the founding hero whose fist was the biggest and who already possessed authority, building a duchy would be very easy. But building up that duchy... that was another matter entirely.

He could found a nation in a year, but it would take many years to govern it...

Yet difficult as the problem was, it was not without solutions. The hard cost in time might not be compressible, but just as slime monster excrement could serve as a substitute for rubber, certain "alternative approaches" could bypass—or at least partially bypass—the present difficulties.

Gao Yang lifted his head and glanced at Rebecca bustling cheerfully among the crowd, then said slowly, "There is a way to spread knowledge quickly even with a shortage of educators."

Hetty's eyes lit up at once: the ever-brilliant Xuanyuan Sect had, as expected, lived up to their hopes and found a solution so quickly. She asked eagerly, "You mean..."

"Distance education," Gao Dai said. "Use the magic net to send knowledge out."

Thanks be to the peculiar development path of arcanotech, and thanks be to this world's own accumulated technology—who would have thought that in a society with a structure resembling the Middle Ages, a remote holographic communications network could appear earlier than highways?

Hetty was a clever woman. She simply had not thought in this direction before; now, with the slightest prompting from Gao Yang, she grasped the Ancestor's intent in an instant.

"This is truly..." Her breathing even quickened involuntarily. "This method is wonderful!!"