Chapter 571 — Expansion

Inside a manor south of Carroll City, the great shed that had once served as a warehouse blazed with light.

This was the property of the great merchant Corde. The shed and the several buildings around it had all been warehouses, used to store fodder for the horse caravans and goods passing through in temporary transit. But since the spring of this year, the warehouses had changed purpose—the great merchant had bought five magic-drive vehicles in one go and assembled a new-style fleet. The original horse-drawn freight wagons had been cut by half at a stroke, and the remaining carts were reassigned to itinerant traders in the countryside. Fewer carts meant less fodder needed, and so the old warehouses had been converted into new facilities—workshops and laboratories.

Corde walked into the great shed, his thin coat buttoned and his hair combed to the last strand. The magic-crystal lamps hung from the shed's roof poured out a brilliant radiance that made the interior bright as day. The shed's broad space was divided by chest-high low walls into several sections, and in each section the newly purchased simple machine tools hummed along merrily. The clatter of metal parts mingled with the buzz of magical mechanisms, and threaded through it all was the peculiar smell of lubricating grease—the great merchant passed through these sounds and smells and went straight to the compartment at the end of the aisle.

Several young people in short robes were busy at the workbenches. Seeing Corde appear, they all turned to bow in greeting, but Corde hastily waved his hand. "No need for ceremony—just go on with what you were doing."

The young people returned to their work, and Corde came to the side of the workbench and watched them bustle about.

These were mage apprentices and rune craftsmen he had recruited at high prices—apprentices and craftsmen were not in themselves expensive employees, but they had studied at the academy run by the Ministry of Administration, and had moreover passed the examination for a magic-drive technician's certificate, which was enough to multiply their worth several times over.

Hiring these people had cost no small sum, but in the great merchant's view the role they played was worth every coin.

On the workbench, a once-whole magic-drive device had been broken down into a pile of parts. Several rune base plates and a series of control, power-supply, and linkage mechanisms lay spread out in neat order, each part tagged with a label noting its function. And to one side of the workbench were piled great quantities of draft paper and scrolls, covered densely with calculations and records—an ordinary person, after a single glance, would likely have fainted away.

"Sir, we have completely disassembled the M-2 general-purpose magic-drive terminal and worked out the function of every rune base plate," said a young magic-drive technician with a mop of short, messy hair. "Right now we're using rune logic to calculate the power and interference coefficients of the ice-spike base plate inside it. We believe that with a proper adjustment of its projection field, plus a casing with decent insulation, it would be entirely feasible to build a container that can preserve food..."

"Very good, very good," Corde said, nodding again and again. "Any difficulties?"

Another young man spoke up. "We need a more stable mana source—the magic-net units we had before were all secondhand goods we'd bought up, and some of them have already started to fail. They're really not fit for use."

"Rest easy. I've already sent Parr to purchase new magic-net units. No more secondhand goods this time—all of them brand new."

"Then there's no problem."

The technicians returned to their work, and Corde stayed where he was by the workbench, watching them busy themselves around heaps of runes, draft paper, and formulas.

He could understand only a small part of it, but that did not stop him from being utterly absorbed.

Since the winter, the attempt to market Carroll's local products through "advertising" had met with great success; after tasting the sweetness of it, the local merchants had become champions of the magic-drive industry and its by-products. And the "Corde Household Conveniences" company he had founded this spring was his second venture in this new age.

It looked as though this venture, too, would meet with great success.

The rise of the magic-drive industry had changed the means of production, and as a successful great merchant, what Corde saw in its spread was not merely a change in the means of production. After buying his first magic-drive vehicle, after experiencing for himself the power and efficiency of that vehicle, he had realized just how great a use this incredible thing could be put to—an ordinary man, an ordinary man like himself, could grip those levers and control a machine of inexhaustible strength. What an unimaginable thing that was.

For Corde, the greatest shock of buying magic-drive vehicles from the lord was not how much strength those vehicles had, but the fact itself: that "magic could truly belong to ordinary people."

It opened up his thinking, and moreover he saw a business opportunity in the price of the magic-drive vehicles.

Magic-drive vehicles, magic-net communications, great machines... these things were beyond his ability to copy or produce. But the smaller ones? The simpler ones?

The officials of the Ministry of Administration had not forbidden him to do so, and so it could be done.

His method was simple—so simple that in the eyes of a true magic-drive technician it verged on the comical. He bought a general-purpose magic-drive terminal from a shop run directly by the Ministry of Administration, then took it apart, and using his extremely limited knowledge of runes, checking against the basic courses taught in the academy textbooks, he cobbled together the scorching rune set, the energy set, and a recessed iron plate, then set a pot on that iron plate and boiled up a pot of half-raw vegetable soup.

That vegetable soup was the most unpalatable thing he had ever eaten in his life, but that clumsily shaped "heating plate" filled him with boundless pride.

Then he registered the Corde Household Conveniences company.

He could not rely on buying magic-drive terminals from shops and stripping them for parts to make his own products—that would only lose money. So he ran through every department of the Ministry of Administration and bought a rune stamping machine that had been half scrapped from overloading it with production.

With no technicians, he went to the school and copied out the entire set of basic courses in rune logic and mechanics (printed books were still scarce in those days, and the textbooks in the schools could not be bought at all), then gathered the literate young people of his family and his guild and studied them for a fortnight, and repaired the scrapped machine tool.

Using his prestige and connections, and spending a large sum besides, he hired several young people holding magic-drive technician licenses—the very ones before his eyes now.

He bought a great pile of magic-drive devices—devices produced by the Cecil Mechanical Works and the Magic-Drive Technology Research Institute, everything from general-purpose magic-drive terminals to agricultural water pumps and machinery, even expensive magic-net communicators—but he took them all apart into their components.

He built his own "new-style factory," built his own "laboratory," and he even built a crude little machine tool together with his workers—driven by a cast-off piston-type magic-energy engine, it could only drill holes in metal plates, but its efficiency was already higher than human labor by a factor no one could reckon.