Do you think weavers make a lot of money?
Of course, skilled and artistic weavers earned plenty, but in reality, the vast majority of weavers made only enough to barely keep food in their mouths.
‘A mere double is hardly a burdensome price.’
But to them?
Old Giles’s jaw trembled.
To think that he, who had spent his whole life suffering through labor no different from construction drudgery, would obtain a position where he could earn twice the money without physical agony, using only his experience and instincts.
I turned my head and looked at Thompson, the sturdy young weaver who had fallen for Barton’s agitation and stood at the front holding a pitchfork.
I had listened to and remembered the conversations I’d heard while eating chicken with them.
“You’re strong, but your weave is rough, so you always had to sell your cloth for a pittance, right? And you’re behind on your daughter’s medicine costs.”
“Th-that’s true, but…”
“Perfect. I’ll pay you twice what you earn as well. Report to the factory starting tomorrow. Your job will be assisting with machine maintenance—oiling the main shaft and gears, and using your strength to pull and reconnect broken belts. You’ll also carry heavy cotton bins. I’ll pay your weekly wages in advance, so go right now and get your daughter her medicine.”
Thick tears fell from Thompson’s eyes.
“Sir!”
He sobbed as if he might drop to the ground and kiss the tips of my shoes then and there.
I spread my arms wide toward the bewildered weavers.
“I did not destroy your tradition and cut off your work. On the contrary, I am liberating you, who had no choice but to work like beasts, and allowing you to take on far more valuable and safer work suited to your precious experience and individual strengths!”
This was not charity given out of pity.
I had perfectly overlaid each weaver’s artisan instincts and physical traits onto the factory’s automated line.
The moment the overwhelming productivity of machinery combined with the craftsmen’s obsessive quality control…
This factory would evolve into a monster that no one could touch.
“Thank you, Chief Merchant! I’ll report to work tomorrow as soon as the first bell of the clock tower rings!”
“No, I’ll be here before the first rooster crows!”
The mob that had come with torches and pitchforks to smash the factory was now bowing to me and pledging loyalty.
“Y-you fools! Don’t be deceived!”
The desperate agitator Barton, his face flushed bright red, pushed his way out from the crowd.
Thinking of the enormous bribe he had received from the Mueller Merchant Company, he had to shatter this peaceful atmosphere by any means necessary.
But by now, he had completely run out of logic or justification to offer.
In the end, he began forcing the issue.
“To fall for a few pieces of greasy meat and sweet wordplay—have you no pride?! What about tradition! What about the noble sweat you shed in front of your looms! That bastard is a demon corrupting your artisan spirit with a few paltry coins!”
Unaware that the weavers’ gazes were turning cold, Barton huffed and pointed at the cauldron boiling behind me.
“And this, this chicken! Yes, this fried meat is insane too! It must be drugged, or made from rotten, diseased chickens! Otherwise, how could meat be this crispy on the outside and moist and delicious on the inside… No, how could it bewitch people like this! This is evil black-magic food that gnaws away at the souls of Pelua’s weavers!”
It was a forced incitement bordering on utter nonsense.
For a moment, a deathly silence descended over the factory yard.
“…”
“…”
And in the next moment.
“Ptoo.”
Old white-haired Giles, the first to have torn into a chicken leg, spat the bone onto the ground and sneered.
“Shut your mouth. A slick bastard who’s never once sat at a loom and bent his back in his life, and you’re going on about noble sweat?”
“S-sir? What are you…!”
The flustered Barton’s nape was seized in a large hand by Thompson, the sturdy young weaver.
“Now that I look at you, you bastard. From earlier, while we were bleeding tears, you were the only one excitedly running your mouth, weren’t you?”
“Th-Thompson! What are you doing! We’re brothers in the same boat…!”
“Brothers, my ass! My daughter’s about to end up on the streets because I can’t even afford her medicine, and you wanted us to keep starving in poverty? You want me to kick away this miraculous job and chicken the Chief Merchant gave me?!”
A terrifying murderous intent poured from Thompson’s eyes.
The other weavers also set down the chicken legs in their hands and began to surround Barton in a circle.
“That’s right! That bastard was suspicious! He’s the one who’s been lurking around the back alleys of the Mueller Merchant Company since before!”
“He incited us just so he could pick up crumbs falling from Mueller’s money chest, whether we starved to death or not!”
“You dare insult the Chief Merchant, who will feed our families starting tomorrow?!”
Realizing that the situation had completely reversed, Barton’s face turned pale.
“I-it’s a misunderstanding! Listen to me for a… Aaaagh!”
Thud! Thwack! Crash!
“You rat of an infiltrator!”
“How dare you insult the Chief Merchant’s sacred grace! Stomp him! Stomp him harder!”
“Aaagh! Spare me, spare me! My bones! My bones are being friiiied!”
In the end, that night…
The mob that had come with torches and pitchforks to smash the factory beat the agitator Barton to a pulp, kneading him like dough, then bowed to me at a ninety-degree angle and pledged their loyalty.
“Chief Merchant! Then we’ll see you tomorrow!”
“I’ll take this precious meat home and feed some to my wife and children. I won’t forget this lifelong grace!”
With the leftover chicken carefully wrapped in their arms, both hands full, the weavers scattered in all directions, humming with the happiest faces in the world.
On the dirt ground of the factory yard they left behind, only Barton remained sprawled out like a tattered rag, both eyes bruised blue and nose streaming blood, his mouth hanging open.
*
A few days later, at the Pelua Council headquarters.
It was an emergency hearing convened due to the weavers’ guild’s fierce petition.
“The Carnoble Factory is destroying tradition and driving countless weavers to their deaths! This factory’s operation must be completely halted!”
As the guildmaster cried out with veins bulging, the council members nodded with grave expressions.
I called forward, one by one, the people sitting in the witness seats.
They were the former weavers who were supposedly starving to death after being dismissed.
Old Giles, his hair completely white, stepped before the council podium in stiff, luxurious work clothes.
“Councilmen. In the past, I sat alone at a loom all day, breaking my back to weave a single bolt. My fingers bled, and I lived with a cough because of the dust.”
The guildmaster smiled triumphantly.
But Giles’s next words dropped a bomb on the council.
“But now it’s different. I inspect the machine line with my eyes and fingertips, catching only defects in the weave. And yet I earn twice as much as before, and after work, I still have enough strength in my back to hold my grandson! Chief Merchant Carnoble didn’t cut off our hands—he treated us as true craftsmen!”
Murmur, murmur.
The council chamber shook with shock.
I stepped up to the podium and drove in the wedge.
“Tradition? Good. It’s wonderful. But a starving tradition becomes nothing more than a monument. On top of that, our factory has even prepared a simple training center beside the site. For workers who cannot read, we teach them the machine symbols, and we promote skilled weavers to managers.”
The Weavers’ Guild and the Mueller Merchant Company had tried to paint us as a “heartless factory of iron.”
But the result was the exact opposite.
With the scent of chicken, I erased their hostility, and with an overwhelming system and rational manpower allocation, I completely tore apart their logic.
That afternoon, the council instead officially announced a recommendation recognizing machine factory workers as a formal new occupation in Pelua and encouraging the retraining and reemployment of former weavers.
“Puhahahaha!”
The Golden Fleece Merchant Company’s office.
Reading the council’s results report, Aila slapped the desk and burst into laughter, clutching her stomach.
“Hey, this is insane! That Mueller pig bastard threw a rock to kill us, and you used it to pave an entirely new road? Now every weaver in Pelua is lining up, begging to be hired at your factory!”
Aila, laughing so hard that tears pricked her eyes, looked at me and raised her thumb.
“Exactly. He’s a very grateful fellow.”
Resting my chin on my hand, I smiled as I gazed out the window at the Mueller Merchant Company’s building.
The fire inspection, the incitement of the weavers’ guild…
Every card he played had failed, and instead, he had only spread the perfection and social reputation of our factory across the continent.
“Now there’s only one card left for him.”
At my murmur, Aila also wiped the smile from her face and let her eyes sharpen.
The most vicious, most clingy administrative bombardment.
“Right. A special tax audit under the mayor’s direct authority. Their last desperate struggle remains.”
*
The first to fly in was a light attack, like a jab.
A notice from the River Management Bureau under the lord’s castle, announcing a reexamination of our water-use rights.
“What’s this now? Are they saying we dried up the entire river?”
Aila fluttered the document in disbelief.
In short, it was a complaint claiming that the massive waterwheel and intake facilities of the factory built along the Rene River were excessively blocking the flow, causing severe drought damage to the farms downstream.
Even from the Mueller Merchant Company’s perspective, they probably did not think this attack would be a fatal blow that shut down our factory.
It was nothing more than a shallow poke meant to annoy us by mobilizing administrative power, drag things out, and pad their numbers.
But even that shallow trick did not work on me.
“Do they think I just slapped up a waterwheel and called it a day when I built the factory?”
A few days later, a stern-faced river management officer was dispatched to the lower reaches of the Rene River for an on-site investigation.
Having pocketed a hefty bribe from Mueller, he was determined to find any pretext to strip us of our water-use rights.
And yet…
“Huh…?”
As soon as the river management officer arrived at the downstream farmland, he had to rub his eyes.
The farmland that should have been parched and withered had clear river water gushing along its channels, and the wheat fields were waving greener than in any other year.
“H-how did this happen? Far from being blocked, the water…”
“Ah, sir officer! You’ve come!”
Just then, nearby farmers wearing straw hats came rushing over.
The officer cleared his throat and asked sternly.
“Ahem! Are those Carnoble Factory bastards upstream not blocking the waterways and interfering with your farming? Speak honestly. I’ll break down their sluice gate at once.”
But the farmers’ reaction completely defied the officer’s expectations.
“Interfering? Goodness, not at all! Chief Merchant Carnoble is the benefactor of us farmers!”
“That’s right! In the past, whenever the rainy season came, the river would overflow and ruin all the crops we’d worked so hard to grow, but once the factory was built, he repaired the embankments so sturdily that this year, our flood worries vanished entirely!”
“And during droughts, they adjust the factory’s sluice gates to provide a steady flow of water, so farming has actually become a hundred times easier!”
From the moment I designed the factory, I had perfectly calculated the Rene River’s flow rate and water pressure based on fluid dynamics.
Beyond drawing water into the factory, I had dug massive sluice gates and bypass channels, neatly organizing even the flow at points that used to overflow during the rainy season.
Rather than a selfish intake for the factory, I had made it also serve as a multipurpose dam encompassing the entire region.
After inspecting the site, the river management officer forgot he had even taken a bribe and muttered in a dazed voice.
“My word… Since this factory was built, flooding damage to the downstream farmland has disappeared entirely. The efficiency of these waterways is better than that of the civil engineers at the lord’s castle.”
In the end, the fake complaint instigated by Mueller was buried without a trace beneath the fervent petitions of nearby farmers praising the factory.
Rather than declare that a reexamination was impossible with awkward faces, City Hall handed us an even larger and more beautiful gift in order to appease the angry farmers.
[Ten-year guarantee of exclusive management rights over the Rene River power water-use rights and surrounding embankments.]
“Puhaha! They missed again!”
Aila hummed as she accepted the certificate.