Chapter 1075: Chapter 1018: Changes in Shuimi Town

Michelle stood on the pier walkway of Shuimi Town’s dock, feeling the planks spring under his soles with every step.

He followed behind Horn, who was striding ahead, yet his own eyes couldn’t help but dart around.

While Horn was chatting idly with the local Priest-in-Charge from the Town Hall, Michelle looked straight at the little town before him.

The stone mooring posts used to tie up the boats were still worn silky-smooth by the rubbing of ropes, and the stone-brick houses of the town still had walls decorated with quartz sand.

But when he lifted his head, the sky was veiled with gauzy grayish-white smoke, and every now and then yellow fumes coiled around the white like venomous snakes.

The smell of cooking smoke and fish had vanished from his nose; all that remained was the scorched fragrance of European Beech charcoal mixed with the cloying sweetness of molten glass.

"Well? Do you still recognize your own home?" Horn asked with a smile, boots on the cobbled avenue.

Michelle shook his head, then nodded.

"Then keep looking."

Stepping on the fine dust of quartz sand underfoot, Michelle followed Horn out of the residential quarter and into the outer glass workshop district.

On both sides of the road in the workshop district, shards of colored glass lay scattered, reflecting strange, iridescent lights.

On one side of the glass fragments sat the remains of crucibles.

They looked like charred honeycombs, still clinging with crystalline patches of glass glaze.

These waste materials were lined up with unusual neatness; clearly someone cleaned them regularly.

This was usually the first job for unskilled refugees and laborers from outside.

Only, the pasture where Michelle had grazed sheep as a child, the few rotten shacks outside the walls, and the little ponds—all of it was gone.

Perhaps next time he came back, he wouldn’t even be able to find the road home.

Michelle could not help but feel melancholy.

Horn, however, was quite excited, because glasscraft was driving a very important scientific industry—optics.

More precisely, glass lens technology: high-precision telescopes, microscopes, and measuring instruments.

Right now the scrap rate of parts from Horn’s lathes was very high, because the lathe dials were atrocious and the parts’ precision was low.

The mainspring barrels usually had to be hand-finished by old Dwarf Artisans; if precision could be raised and the output of steel and mountain copper increased,

then Horn could finally phase out that bunch of useless Dwarf masters who drank every day and skipped work.

Not to mention that the standardized production of all kinds of later machinery would all rest on the demands of precision instruments.

Not every Artisan’s eyes and hands had a master’s level of fine feel, so one could only rely on tools for assistance.

On top of that came the packaging revolution and logistics revolution brought by mechanized glassware production, and even in Alchemy and pharmacy it played a role that could not be ignored.

In the mechanized preparation of potions and in water-based Alchemy, it likewise had an irreplaceable role.

You had to know, Pharmacists and Alchemists had previously used copper vessels for making water-based alchemical potions.

The prosperity of the potion industry in Flanlaya and other places was largely because they possessed mature techniques for making transparent glass, allowing them to observe changes in potions with the naked eye.

Thus they could precisely control the production processes.

Potions in this world were by no means backward; one could even say that potions were this world’s chemical industry.

Important industrial raw materials such as soda and alum were all produced through potion-like workflows.

Horn, Hilov, and the others had long dimly sensed that potions and Alchemy were essentially one and the same.

The former simply used purely physical means to trigger the so‑called alchemical reactions, while the latter used Mana as a catalyst.

For example, in the transparent glass process provided by the Falan Kingdom, one proof of success was that a key step was the soda ash formed by the reaction between soda and European Beech ash.

Apart from that, one needed high-quality quartz sand and flint.

Horn reached into the raw-material pile and grabbed a handful of quartz sand; feeling the shimmering powder trickle through his fingers, he turned his head and said to the workshop supervisor, "I’ll trouble you for an introduction."

"Yes, Your Grace, please look: glass firing is divided into three kiln chambers—the melting chamber, the annealing chamber, and the preheating chamber..."

The main furnace-kiln lay across the high-walled workshop like a black whale; sealed crucibles made from hollow clay residue were being passed into the kiln by bare-chested kiln workers.

That hollow clay residue in fact contained small amounts of Mithril, but the cost of extraction was far too high.

For some reason, however, it was extraordinarily refractory, and in the end it had been turned into these crucibles.

Pressing up to the peep-hole, Michelle could see the molten glass inside the crucible, like a liquid sunset; from the orange-red vortex, golden sparks occasionally spat out.

The kiln workers’ naked backs were lit bronze by the firelight; sweat slid down their muscle lines and rose as tiny white mists from the floor.

They were wholly absorbed in their work, paying not the slightest attention to the arrival of Horn and the others.

A blowing master from Falan held a blowpipe of about one point four meters.

He inserted the blowpipe into the crucible; the glass gathered on the iron pipe’s tip flowed like lava, rapidly congealing in the air into amber-colored teardrops.

"Press, quickly!" Leia’s tongue sounded out with a thick Falan accent, and the helpers immediately rolled and pressed the rough blank on an iron plate.

The next second brought the rasp of iron pipe on metal, the brittle crack of breaking glass.

"No good, not ready yet, needs more firing."

Though the apprentice helpers couldn’t hear any difference, as an old hand he could clearly tell from the sound that it wasn’t done yet.

Glass like this, once formed and placed in the annealing kiln to cool slowly, would still be very brittle and not clear enough.

Moving on, by the annealing kiln, the women workers were polishing freshly fired goblets with oil-soaked leather.

Their aprons were dusted with quartz powder, as though sprinkled with frost.

Michelle had meant to keep walking, but when his gaze brushed past those women workers, his steps halted.

Among the women wiping the goblets, there was a quite young girl.

Like this little town itself, Michelle found her both unfamiliar and familiar.

He was just about to ask Horn for leave to go speak to her when his lifting foot suddenly drew back hard.

Because on the girl’s head was a kerchief worn only by married women, and on her ring finger sat an iron ring set with a bit of colored glass.

"Michelle, what did you want to say?"

"Nothing." Michelle glanced in that direction. "Is the pay for working here good?"

"Depends. The high-paid blowers can earn ninety Dinar a month, kiln workers get sixty Dinar, and even those women over there get twenty Dinar a month."

"That’s not a low wage."

"Not low at all. Our workshop can produce two hundred pieces of glassware a day..."

Chatting with the workshop supervisor, they headed out together.

Only, among those women who both wiped and incidentally inspected the goblets, one suddenly lifted her head and glanced outside.

Why did that voice sound so familiar?

Once they exited the glass workshop, Michelle saw the fishing port they had passed earlier.

Now it was stacked with bundles of European Beech logs and baskets of charcoal; carters were adjusting the loads with iron hooks, women walked by carrying buckets.

Wooden wheels ground over quartz sand with a soft crunch, while the washing workers poured the sand into settling ponds to rinse away dirt and impurities.

Michelle stroked the stump of a felled European Beech tree. "It’s not the same anymore."

"What’s different?" Horn asked back with a smile.

"Everything’s different. There are more people than before, it’s livelier than before, there’s more money being made—but there are fewer woods and pastures." Michelle paused, looking at the little fishing port under demolition, then suddenly laughed. "People are different, too."

"Oh?" Horn was about to ask further when the Town Mayor hurried over, eyes shining.

According to the procedure, Horn was now supposed to cast the final net, marking the complete demolition of the fishing port and its relocation elsewhere.

Of course, Horn was not going to actually cast for fish—the net had already been thrown; all he had to do was give it a pull.

Coming to the last remaining stretch of pier, with many kiln workers and former fishermen watching, Horn reached out and took hold of the net.

As he pulled, perch after perch leapt within the mesh; they would be bidding farewell to the fishermen who had caught them for generations, to be taken downstream by new fishermen.

In the setting sun, the perch scales flashed with silver light, and the melancholy in Michelle’s heart gradually dispersed.

Regardless of how these changes looked, weren’t people living better than before?

Wasn’t this the very aspiration he’d sworn to when he marched with the army?

Breathing out a long, turbid breath, Michelle was just about to turn away and rejoin the ranks when he saw a black, sooty something amid the silver gleam.

It looked like some kind of bronze vessel, and quite a large one at that.

"No, that’s not right." The more Michelle stared at the thing, the more familiar it seemed—how could it look so much like the Holy Cabinet from the church murals?

"Your Grace! Look at that!"