C92- Half a Year (1)

Half a year passed since the end of the Siege of Anfre. Summer and fall passed by as fast as a blink, while at the same time, it was the longest half a year in their lives for a lot of people. The reason for this weird pace may be the tense atmosphere of the Empire, or the fast paced changes that were happening everywhere.

After the war, most nobles realized something. Using the new weapons in the war was a huge advantage, but it was much more expensive as well.

The Empire was by no means a poor state.

Being one of the biggest powers in not just the continent it was on, but also in the whole of Kaweck, the Empire naturally also had one of the biggest economies as well.

But, the Empire, like most land powers, had an economy that relied mostly on farming, mining and other jobs related to them. Most of the people were poorly educated, since no one had to know more than basic writing and reading to farm or mine in villages. The education of commoners in cities was a bit higher because their jobs were more about crafting, but there were also much less people in these jobs because of less demand.

Since it was a relatively new thing, no state including the Empire, had an industrialized economy. And since they weren't, their economies also weren't strong enough to afford spending hundreds of thousands of bullets, which were an industrial good, during wars.

That's why, most nobles of the Empire started industrializing the economy of their territories.

In half a year, machines started to appear everywhere. A big wave of change swept across the Empire ,as new factories started construction. Waves of people left the villages and went to cities because there was a big demand of construction workers to build the many new projects started by the nobles and merchants.

Starting with the opening of the first commoner school in the Margravate, the nobles started opening schools that were affordable by most commoners. These schools didn't give advanced education like at the Institute, but a more basic education that was still enough to work at the new jobs that were going to be needed in the newly industrializing economy of the Empire.

The only village in the Empire where the young people didn't leave for a city to work in was the Tarlen village. The situation was much different in this unusual village. The reason was Corvin, the new owner of the area.

While every noble was building factories and workshops, Corvin didn't stop as well. When he returned from the Siege of Anfre, he was given a week to rest at school by the orders of the Emperor.

At first, he was thinking of how to deal with his unusual amount of absence at classes, but just decided to leave it be. He had more important matters to think about. Like how he forgot to tell his mother that he became a knight and also technically participated in a war.

But, telling Sally about these wasn't a big problem. Like a responsible master, Felyp had already contacted Sally about her son's great achievements and how he earned the title of a knight.

That's why, the only difficult thing he had to do was to appease his mother's anger.

Obviously, no mom would want her son to put his life in danger, so he had to endure the punishment of not being allowed to play with his sister Luna for the week. He tried to complain to his master about this matter, since he couldn't play with his cute little sister because of Felyp, but Felyp said he couldn't help him since he knows from experience how scary mothers could be when their sons are involved in battles.

So instead, Corvin decided to spend his time at the village with the project he had prepared before.

He talked with the elders at the village, and arranged a place to build a workshop for him. The workshop was his own design. The building was basically a boring rectangle, but with a lot of space inside of it, along with a separate building which was meant to test generator designs that used solid fuel.

This was the first part of his project that tried to integrate electricity into day to day life, but the workshop also included a laboratory for Amy, who was going to be employed as a researcher after she graduated this year.

They were already using machines that worked with electricity back at the rifle factory in Alaturb.

That factory had also changed a lot, since there were now workers sent from the Margravate to work at the factory, which gave Corvin a lot more free time, since he no longer had to use the machines with his magic anymore.

That wasn't the only changes in the Novaeta Company, however.

Noah had recently started the construction of a massive machine parts factory in the Margravate, which was planned to also include electrical parts production as well. The project wasn't just the factory only. Since the factory was so big, it had to be placed cleverly for best efficiency. 

A flatland near the coast to the south of Ilkos was chosen. A new city was planned around the massive factory, which was a project never done in history. The project cost almost all the profit Novaeta had made during the war, but they didn't need much money anyways, since they still had a couple of years before they were expected to earn money on their own.

While Noah and Corvin were working on massive investments in their free time, and Amy was focusing on successfully graduating, Clair was also working on a lot of experiments and theories with her father whenever she had free time. 

She and her father had published a book that included their theories.

In the six months, the Electron Theory turned into the Atomic Theory, and was accepted as the current best answer to what matter was by most scholars.

They discovered and named 26 new elements, and properly classified known materials as elements and compounds. As a result, they created a list of 60 elements and seperated them into groups depending on their various characteristics, which were then merged into a unified table with the help of a bit more data.

After the publishing of their theories, Dion started a new education program in his territories. This program wasn't general education like the Institute or the newly widespread commoner schools. This was a highly advanced program only focused on chemistry based on the new Atomic Theory. Dion also offered Amy and Clair to join the program as students once they graduated from the Institute.

In just half a year, the Empire saw unprecedented change in such a short amount of time. Factories that were planned to produce goods at speeds never seen before were getting built, and advanced research, once only conducted by mages for the sake of having better magic, was now being conducted for the sake of research.

Books, which were used to be luxury items that nobles used to pay enormous amounts of money to buy before, were now printed en masse, allowing the printing of more and different books which was bringing cultural changes in the Empire as well. Literary arts were gaining popularity, especially since most commoners could afford to buy books now.

As the Empire started to change massively, there were three people who were leading the wave of change. The most famous couple of the noble youth, Noah and Clair, and their friend and guard Corvin, who was currently back in his hometown, the Tarlen village, watching the completion of the construction project he had started in the village.

"Place that there... Right. Oh, that's the last one! Place it next to the table there. Great. Thank you, everyone!"

After he thanked everyone who were getting out of the building after completing the interior construction, he looked at the workshop with a satisfied gaze. The massive building had two rooms, a smaller one for storing books and working on papers in silence, and the rest of the building that was basically a giant workshop filled with machines to design and test his proects.

"I am exhausted... I want to play with Luna...", said Corvin as he exited the workshop.

He and his friends hadn't spent time together much, except the lunch at school and meetings about business. During this busy half a year, his only way of relaxing his mind was by playing with Luna whenever he was back at the village every couple of weekends.

'Maybe we all should take a break together..?'