January 9th, 626
Umara and I landed in Wonderland. Sawn was already there to et us, and we got right down to business.
He was ready to cooperate fully with my redesign of company operations. It would cost him a massive amount of money, but in the long run it would make him one of the most powerful people in the world. He would be the leader of what could be considered the upcoming industrial economy as a whole, and the fate of humanity’s military would be in his hands.
Of course, not entirely. I was here and nothing was out of my hands if I didn’t want it to be.
The first thing I had him do was cease manufacturing nearly across the board. It was all hands on deck for this change and not a single sector of the company was going to remain untouched.
After that I went to the lab and started modifying and adding designs on the spot. I had spent many hours thinking about them and I already knew what I was going to put down to the rune. So using Orbs, I quickly put out all of the designs that would revolutionize production as a whole.
Assembly lines and automation for the manufacturing plants. Tools and massive excavation machines for mining. Entire building designs for advanced forges and material processing plants. Safety equipnt for workers. Oversight equipnt and programs for managers.
Singular units of these tools and structures would match or increase output across the board. The mining tools would increase input from hundreds of tons of ore a year to millions of tons a year if scaled correctly. The processing plants would consu all the input and spit out tals and materials at a rate these people couldn’t conceive of and with efficiencies they didn’t yet understand.
The assembly lines would increase vehicle production from one or two a day to dozens a day. Planes, tanks and vehicles, ordnance, and weapons would flood from our plants and fill entire armies with their bulk. The goal was to produce them faster than the Scourge could kill them.
Magic would make this all too easy.
Under normal circumstances I would be delusional to think that I could restructure a company from top to bottom, revamp entire industries, and have their workers adapt fast enough to produce at the scale I wanted. On Earth it would take decades to do sothing like that.
Here? It was just a matter of making the magic.
Everything was so low maintenance that you only had to teach people how to use the tools rather than how to maintain them. There were no engines to fail, no engineering to tamper with. Magic reinforcent ant that even wear and tear was just about null. Warlocks could move tons of earth by themselves in a mine and getting tools to do it with similar magic would simply multiply their output.
The miners needed buckets and diggers, the forges needed more buckets and heat, and the fabrication plants needed precision tools to move away from hand crafting and toward mass production.
I already knew about all the steps a civilization would have to take in order to reach that level. With magic, I could skip most of it and jump straight into the good stuff.
Welding? Magic had that covered. Shaping hot tals? Go grab an Earth Warlock. Moving ten thousand pounds of cold steel to a truck for hauling? Ricky over there was an Authority 6 knight, give him a few minutes.
Too. Fucking. Easy.
It was so easy that it was criminal that this world hadn’t already reached this point. I knew that normal developnt was a thing but I saw no reason why the Kingdom couldn’t have scaled itself to the modern era yet. Earth’s humanity had moved from wood and paper aircraft to landing on the moon in 66 years. People in this world could live for hundreds of years and they were just barely inventing primitive radios.
Maybe I had just co at the perfect ti but these people should be exploring the stars by now. In fact, I saw no reason that in my lifeti here, I wouldn’t be able to go to their moon myself.
One thing at a ti.
I put down the full designs for everything in my vision, using a tank as an example. I knew about everything that went into the production of a full tank from start to finish so I detailed those processes and then created new tools to make those processes better.
For it was straightforward. Most of the tools were super simple, just bigger or better versions of what they already had, especially in the case of mining. But things like the assembly line weren’t so. Building them and getting them started would be the difficult part.
After the initial learning curve we’d be flying high.
During my first day at Wonderland I got every design and enchantnt down, as well as every guide and manual I could think of in regard to these tools and their creation and usage. With Orbs it was easy for to write entire books in minutes and lay down enchantnts in seconds.
After the first day, with everything on the table and the plan in my head, Sawn and I went to work.
All production on normal items including aircraft, Aerials, and all other enchanted items ca to a screeching halt and all efforts were redirected. Sawn had already bought a mining company that owned a few mines, among them an iron mine, so we first had our productive capacity dedicated to building the mining equipnt from my designs.
Sawn also acquired a material processing company so we went and laid the groundwork for a total restructuring of one of their buildings, turning it into a steel plant. It would take so ti to tear everything down and rebuild it back up but we had nothing if not money to get it done.
Finally, we started the process of restructuring all of our own manufacturing warehouses and facilities within Sawn Industries. Sawn had already started following my instructions when I handed them to him upon my return so they were ready to get revamped. They were the places where we’d be laying down assembly lines, and I had an assembly line designed for almost every single product Sawn Industries produced.
One for small enchanted items like Aerials and Mana Engines, one for vehicles like tanks and cars, one for planes, and even facilities for things that took hands like Elental Crystals.
It was only unfortunate that we couldn’t secure our own supply of White Crystals.
Many days passed. The process of just laying the groundwork for each level of industry took a full week. Sawn was often working in the Spire getting his facilities there restructured, and I was working in places like our massive warehouses outside the Capital, the mines, and Wonderland.
Umara was with the whole ti, following around, most often quietly, and just watching or helping if she could.
More importantly, she was learning about the business. I wanted to get her into enchanting and this was the first step toward that.
After the first week, people started getting organized and the project, which seed like it wasn’t moving at all, started showing notable progress. Facilities were getting built, machines were fielded, and on-the-fly training was starting.
The bigger assembly plants, where everything had been torn down, started getting built back up. The second week was spent doing just that, with almost constantly flying around while on my Aerial, constantly answering questions, constantly correcting mistakes, constantly pushing progress.
Thankfully Sawn had trained his summoners and warlocks well. They may not be familiar with the technology but they knew how to follow directions and build things according to specifications. They didn’t have to understand why a machine was built the way it was. They just had to build it correctly. Because of that, I wasn’t spending my ti correcting manufacturing defects and was spending most of it simply teaching people how it would be used.
That was what filled my third and fourth weeks. I taught the miners how to use their new tools, which basically consisted of telling them how to scoop and dig with bigger buckets and bigger pickaxes. One thing I didn’t need to teach was how to carry out explosive mining, which they already knew how to do. With magic, creating explosions to blast away a bunch of rock was simplicity itself and already ingrained in every warlock. They did that shit for fun.
The material processing facilities were the most difficult. After getting barebones logistics sorted, I had to teach them how to operate machines built into entire buildings. Things like operating massive crucibles, making sure you didn’t pour molten iron all over your friends, how to handle and shape tons and tons of red hot steel with huge machines built for that very purpose.
Thankfully it wasn’t too dangerous for them. With my built in safety asures and the inherent resilience of knights and defensive spells of warlocks, I didn’t have to worry too much about mistakes, especially since they were only handling base materials, not yet reinforced or enchanted. Sure, a knight could still get crushed under the weight of 60 thousand pounds of iron, but if powerful enough they could actually survive falling into a crucible full of molten tal so long as it wasn’t enhanced by magic.
Stupid knights.
I just had to make sure that they were processing materials at all. To do that, they had to be taught things, and thankfully summoners learned quickly. I could teach them all at once and then just delegate the managent positions to them. They would make sure everything ran how it should.
The last thing was the assembly lines, and that was more straightforward than material processing.
It was simply following the steps. tals would be shaped into the plates and pieces the assemblers needed to put together, and then one by one each person would handle a single repetitive job. It was almost brainless, and it was what made it such a good system.
One person didn’t have to know the entire design by heart. One person only needed to know the part they were responsible for. One warlock would handle the singular job of welding two certain pieces together, perpetually. They would only receive those two pieces, would only weld those two pieces together, would only hand off that final product. They would do it hundreds of tis in a day. It would be mind numbing. But it would be easy. You could still fuck it up but the chances of that happening were far lower than in any other system and it was easy to spot and correct.
Getting it set up was the hard part, but even that wasn’t difficult with the power of eager summoners desperate for good pay.
Sawn Industries was renowned, a prestigious company that invented and manufactured flight. Everyone wanted to work there because the company was rich and famous. They paid and treated their workers well, and now they were restructuring.
There were thousands of new hires but all of them were motivated to perform their best and make bank.
And when I showed up personally to make sure things got done right? John Cooper was famous and only second to Sawn himself in company authority. He was a genius summoner, a powerful summoner who survived fighting on the frontlines. Nobody would dare disappoint him. Nobody would dare do things any way but his.
Being famous had its perks.
Like that the first month of revolution passed. The machines were built, the workers were roughly taught, the buildings were expanded and filled.
Not everything had been built but that was what the second month was for.
Moving into it, all the problems that cropped up due to operation were stamped out. Again, it was non-stop movent for going from one place to another trying to sort out all the problems that demanded my attention. Thankfully it was always solved about instantly. I knew everything in and out and the power of my mind made obscenely efficient. When a problem was posed I could think of everything that could cause it and then rapidly narrow it down when I either received more information about it or looked at it myself.
I could handle two dozen things at once with this mind. I couldn’t conceive of doing what I did before advancing to Authority 7.
But here I was doing it. I was unstoppable. I provided all the answers. No amount of kinks in the operation could put a stop to my progress.
Everything was in my hands.
After the new gears in my industry were put into place I started to worry more about logistics. Not everything could be flown everywhere so I slated roads to be built that our own cars and trucks would use to transport materials and products from one place to another. Testing grounds for newly built vehicles and tools were set aside, and distribution centers were placed in a few key cities. Our products would be coveted everywhere, so we made sure they could reach every corner of the Kingdom.
Two weeks passed into the second month and it seed like everything was coming together just as I envisioned. With the facilities built they could start pumping out materials and products and through that, they would sort themselves out. If there were any problems, running the production line would expose them and if it couldn’t be solved by the managers, I was there with the answer.
After all, I was too smart to create defects in my designs. I made things as idiot proof as I could and gave them wide tolerances. There was always bound to be a problem but my genius is what allowed to carry out this revolution in the first place.
During that 6th week of revolution though, I finally got the expected letter.
I was personally invited to the King’s Assembly.
An Assembly to determine the course of action for the future of the military and the fight against the Scourge. All high and mid-level nobles were invited as well as almost every General, Marshal, and Sovereign.
I was invited not as a noble or soldier, but as a “Renowned Enchanter of Military Application.”
The Assembly would take place at the Royal Palace on March 1st, giving two weeks to prepare.
I thought about how I would approach this eting. Part of wanted to stay out of trouble and let things continue the way they were. The other part wanted to flip everything upside down and shatter the status quo.
I decided that the compromise would be getting what I wanted. I wanted a tal army and I had a feeling that this would be the perfect ti to set that up. There would be plenty of people there with the pull I needed to get what I wanted. I just needed enticent.
Which I possessed in explosive amounts.
Since Sawn had also received a letter, I had him begin planning for the event. We decided to treat it as another showcase, because what better place to advertise our new weapons than a room full of generals talking about war?
Of course, we needed to make sure to have so for demonstration, but we were already beginning to churn out operational tanks and armored vehicles for testing. We could easily set so aside and drive them into the capital.
It would be a fun little excursion. I’d especially like to see the Third Claw try sothing this ti. If they decided to try and kidnap again, I’d have to conduct an experint to see how well the human body fared against a 120mm high explosive shell.
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