[MLV] 37. The Elephant in the Room (Patreon)

The matter of Alicia’s competition with Concordia was favorably settled, for now.

The day after meeting the Concordian ambassador, Alicia had Lyra, Vittorio, and Vikar on duty documenting where people went to get their food. Somehow, even with the Concordians deciding to distribute larger rations of better quality—they apparently sent a telegram to their homeland asking for more shipments to make up the shortfall—Volosian citizens still went for the kitchen Alicia had personally set up.

Unfortunately for Alfred and his henchmen, most Vaelrin citizens wouldn’t easily forget how the rest of the world treated them. It was thus no surprise that when given the option between being fed by a foreigner and by their own kin, most people in Volos chose the latter. As a result, Alicia substantially benefited from this.

Her worries about the Concordian strategy of winning Vael’s hearts and minds to get a firmer foothold here were now abated. Their influence would be very limited indeed, as without public support, they wouldn’t even be able to realistically twist the arm of the directory in every matter.

As such, her main strategic objective of limiting Concordian influence in her country to protect its independence was achieved. The downside was the fact that most Vaelrin hated the Concordians, and this was clearer than ever. While Alicia wanted to limit Concordia’s influence in Vael, she still wished to work with them.

At the end of the day, they needed allies and trade partners. Not in the sense that Alicia needed a military power to protect her people—she could do that herself—but she needed official access to a massive market in order to expedite Vael’s economic recovery and eventual growth. The people rejecting and hating them would make such a process way too bumpy, and it would introduce the risk of the Concordians being frustrated at the lack of their progress here.

If that happened, they might forgo their soft power approach and instead subject Vael to hard power to force it to align with Concordia’s interests. Even if Alicia could easily win a direct confrontation like that, it would essentially mean that she wouldn’t be able to develop ties with Concordia.

It would be a massive blow to Vael’s future if it ever happened.

She simply sighed as she watched their embassy from her office at the directory’s headquarters as she sipped her morning coffee. While far away, her enhanced vision meant that she could see their flag from here very clearly. She wondered how Alfred was doing right now, because last time she conducted close observations of him, he was routinely whining to that fox-girl maid of his.

Poor Ling.

At the very least, Alicia gave Alfred Jade Moonleaf tea, both because she wanted to make a good impression on him and so his temper would be more subdued. That way, he wouldn’t randomly act too rashly, even when Alicia was directly hampering his efforts.

Soon, a knock distracted her.

“Come in,” she loudly said, moving to her desk.

She wanted to sneak in another toast, as she wasn’t done having breakfast yet, but she instead quickly fixed her table and made herself presentable. Right then, Lyra entered, followed by Max. Both of them were holding piles of papers in their hands.

“Good morning, Lady Alicia,” Lyra brightly greeted.

“Good morning, Your Grace,” Max followed up from behind, bowing slightly.

Alicia just nodded at the two. “Good morning too. Is that the census report?”

“Yes!” Lyra said. “It’s finally finished. The one we have on hand right now is the condensed version. I’ve made sure to pick the people I believe you’ll be interested in hiring.”

“Wonderful. And the rest?”

“We left it at the directory’s archives.”

Alicia began scanning the condensed report.

As she had suspected, Volos’ population was enormous.

Around sixty thousand people called Volos home, with Max adding an estimated ten to twenty thousand unaccounted for since they avoided conducting the census in the town’s more dangerous areas. Of the sixty thousand confirmed citizens residing in Volos, only half had ‘proper shelter.’ The rest were either in hastily built tents, shacks, and other unstable homes that would no doubt collapse if a severe storm arrived or were straight up homeless.

Volos’ workforce figures were no less depressing. Since many of the new arrivals were women and children, refugees from far-away places affected by the last war, these people weren’t in the workforce or were probably surviving informally. Thus, only around twelve thousand residents had proper, official jobs, mostly middle-aged craftsmen, laborers, and artisans.

Thousands of young men were completely without jobs too if they weren’t pulled into the directory’s military. A good chunk of them weren’t free peasants or city dwellers but former serfs, so searching for a job and getting hired wasn’t something they were used to, though at the very least, the directory’s efforts of repurposing land left behind by vanquished nobles meant that they were slowly being moved out of the city to work in the countryside.

Still, the speed of these efforts left much to be desired. Someone else would have to fill the gap in the meantime.

As for the dependents, Lyra lamented that many of them were in an even worse situation since they couldn’t find proper jobs for themselves at all. Apparently, during the last invasion, many captured villages had their men and even boys massacred by Levedi and Thopian troops to prevent them from becoming future soldiers or rebels. Thus, many of the women and children refugees had no one to support them.

Lyra told Alicia that, naturally, as a result, many were now in less than dignified positions in the city just to feed themselves. This was the most unfortunate problem, as the directory had absolutely zero plan to address this. When pressed, Max was completely dismissive.

“Even if you order us to do something about this, what can we do?” Max asked. “Our resources are stretched thin at reviving our farms and rebuilding our armies. We can’t do everything all at once.”

“I understand.” Alicia massaged her temples. “I guess this problem falls on my lap too.”

“You don’t have to shoulder all of Vael’s problems alone all at once either,” Max retorted. “You’ve done enough.”

“Thanks for the compliment, but it’s not enough.”

Alicia looked down at the papers she read and discussed with the two.

“You can go now, Max,” Alicia said to him. “Lyra, you stay.”

Max bowed and immediately left, while Lyra straightened herself.

Once the door closed, Alicia looked up at Lyra.

“So, what do you think?” Alicia asked. “While the government here realistically doesn’t have that many options, you know that you and I can’t just sit here doing nothing.”

Lyra visibly steeled herself, then firmly declared her plan.

“We need to start building our planned textile factories, Lady Alicia. Not just that, but expand the planned build-up too,” Lyra said. “We can employ thousands of these women if we build one, no, two or three of them in Orevogorsk!”

“My plan is roughly the same…”

“More importantly, the winters here are harsh. We need to sell as many clothes as we can at a cheap price to every place in Vael,” Lyra said. “As for the rest of the people here, since we plan to continue building up our greenhouse and normal farms anyway, you can send them there to work the land.”

Alicia sighed to herself.

“This is less than optimal, though," Alicia murmured to herself.

She was hoping that the people they would take from Volos would be employed in her steel mill and furniture factory. Since Maxim and Alicia were now manufacturing enchanted steel tools, selling them to the Alsatian market made the bulk of their profits. She doubted selling clothes would sell that well.

Her cash flow to secure industrial expansion in Orevogorsk mainly came from the steel mill, the glass factory, the furniture factory, and, of course, the monster cores from Lucille. All three gave her roughly enough money to continue all of her construction projects, but she would need more if she wanted to build facilities for textile production, and creating textile production in Orevogorsk wouldn’t pay that investment back quickly.

Building the greenhouse farms with Maxim was also rather resource-intensive with less-than-optimal returns. It required such a ridiculous amount of glass just to construct enough farms to barely feed Orevogorsk’s growing population. Even with their progress, the results relative to the costs were so anemic that her practical side wasn’t actually that enthusiastic about diverting too many resources and capital here.

Luckily, her emotional side was far too invested into feeding everyone, so she wasn’t going to back down from doing her part at reviving agricultural output. Though, realistically, her best bet here was to help the directory at restoring the farms on the more fertile and warmer areas of Vael, which was more suited to traditional agriculture.

At best, Orevogorsk’s food production should only be supplementary, and she had roughly the same opinion about its lighter industries. This was why her original projects planned to produce textiles and food and weren’t that ambitious compared to what Lyra was suggesting.

This was because the resources available near Orevogorsk weren’t suited for producing clothes at scale. Cotton, wool, silk, leather, dyes, and other necessary inputs for producing textiles would have to come from somewhere else compared to iron, coal, silica sand, limestone, soda ash, lumber, and other raw materials gathered in great abundance from Orevogorsk’s mines and its surrounding dense forest, ready to be thrown to her existing industries.

Unfortunately, Orevogorsk’s economy is fated to be based on heavy industry, Alicia thought. Everything else is less efficient to do there.

Food production and light industry were something that other places should be doing, not Orevogorsk. Unfortunately for Alicia, her options were limited. Her control in the directory wasn’t secure yet, so investing too much here was risky, and her people still needed food and clothing to live.

On the bright side, a textile and clothes factory could definitely secure her a decent amount of Vaelrin gold and silver to trade with either Concordia or Alsatia, all while securing low-skilled employment for so many destitute refugees here. It wasn’t entirely impractical in financial terms. It was just less optimal.

Alicia thought about Lyra’s proposal for a few more moments.

Then, with a smile, she nodded.

“Alright,” Alicia said. “I’ll begin preparations. While I have reservations about this, I imagine if we can produce so many clothes, eventually, we might have a chance to sell well to Concordia too once our trade agreement with them is finalized.”

Alicia smiled smugly as she looked at the ceiling.

“Maybe in the future, those pompous Concordians will be wearing ‘made in Vael’ jackets, pants, and shirts.”

“Ehehe,” Lyra laughed awkwardly. “Maybe we should focus first on making sure our people are all wearing ‘made in Vael’ clothes to stay warm.”

“Of course. Though, you must remember that our main target is, first and foremost, securing foreign capital. It’s the only way to build up in the first place, so everything else is secondary.”

Lyra nodded enthusiastically, having already been schooled in Alicia’s theories on Vael’s industrial development strategy.

Later that day, Alicia began drafting up her preliminary plans for Orevogorsk’s next stage of expansion. She calculated cost estimates mainly for the machinery and construction materials for building a full production complex with two textile manufacturing facilities for producing yarns and threads from both wool and cotton, alongside two integrated production facilities to turn them into finished garments.

Then, she took out her books that detailed everything she knew about businesses in Alsatia, what they produced, what they sold, and how long they usually took to do so. She had a wealth of information here already, as her access to the Oracle Network meant that all she literally had to do most of the time was ask and pay, so she had a rough estimate about the costs she would need from the potential contacts listed in her books.

That’s a lot of money again…

Alicia gently tapped her finger on the table as she read pages upon pages of her calculations. A headache began to form as she tried to consider how she would exactly finance all of this without disrupting her ongoing commitments to expand Orevogorsk’s heavy industry. As she had envisioned earlier, going with Lyra’s plan might mean that she would have to divert capital from her more profitable projects.

Unless she secured more capital…

An image began to form in her head. That image being the smiling radiant crown princess of Alsatia, her most precious golden goose. Already, Alicia began imagining about ways to get her close friend again to cough up some money for Vael’s bright future, every method she generated no less greedy than the last.

Until her mind remembered a certain detail about the princess she picked up from the Oracle Network, that being her strange interest in the black dungeons in her homeland.

Now that I’m thinking about it, they’re suffering a lot from it too, don’t they?

That might become a problem one day, Alicia realized. Considering how extremely dependent she was on her unofficial trade relations with Alsatia, if their black dungeon problem exploded, wouldn’t it eventually affect her too? More importantly, if Lucille needed someone’s help with her homeland’s black dungeon problem, could Alicia perhaps one day offer her service in exchange for money?

I wonder if I can talk to Kullervo about this too, if he has any useful insights. My memories about how he turned the capital into a black dungeon are too vague and fragmented. I should have probably looked deeper into that too when I read his mind...

Alicia then immediately shook her head, revulsed by that stray thought.

Nope, nope. I don’t want too much of someone else’s memories, ever.

She stood up, picked up her things, and went straight to Kullervo’s office. This time, instead of going there normally, she thought about testing out the new [Warp Gate] she set up. She hadn’t told him about this, so he was understandably surprised when she suddenly appeared. The same could be said to his friend Simo, who was also in his office.

Their eyes were wide and tense as they stared at Alicia, frozen.

Then they quickly stood up to bow stiffly in an instant.

“Your Grace, what is the reason for this unannounced visit?” Kullervo asked as Alicia approached his desk, finding her seat on a chair placed in front of it.

“I just have a few questions to ask.” Her eyes then fell to the chessboard. Simo was about to say something defensive, so she just raised her hand to stop him. “It’s already afternoon. I don’t mind the two of you having a break.”

Both of them eased up a bit and took their respective seats.

“So,” Alicia cautiously started as she looked at Kullervo. “Do you remember how you turned the royal capital into ruins by corrupting the dungeon beneath?”

“...Yes,” Kullervo nodded. “Why are you asking me about this?”

“I’ve been looking back a lot into your memories, or at least, the fragments of them that I remembered, and… I’ve been wondering. How did the ritual work? Naturally, if I know how a black dungeon is made, maybe I’ll figure out how to reverse it or manage it, at the very least.”

“You don’t know?”

“Why would I know? I didn’t look too deep in this part of your memory. I only saw fragments of it, and now, it’s nothing but a vague recollection.”

Kullervo sighed.

“I told you to read my memories,” Kullervo said before answering her question. “It wasn’t a ‘ritual.’ All we did was burn the magic crystals sourced from the capital’s dungeon or from the mines near it.”

“...What?” Alicia frowned. “You mean to tell me that they weren’t used to power a distinct ritual or spell? You just burned them?”

“Yes. I remember the heat on the fields when all of those refined crystals burned all at once. They burned bright and hot for many, many weeks. Even after the battle ended, after the capital was destroyed.”

Both Simo and Kullervo grew silent, their mood dropping. But Alicia wasn’t satisfied by this. In fact, her burning questions only intensified.

“Explain,” Alicia demanded.

“Very well. While I do not know why this happens, ever since we began trying to refine mana ores into magic crystals to copy mankind, I have noticed that burning them to produce immense heat or using them to power spells through various equipment does not release mana afterward at all. It is dissimilar to the natural use of magecraft, where the mana we use naturally returns to the world in ways we can detect. Alongside that, I have noticed in my routine expeditions to clear out the capital dungeon that a strange unholy energy began forming deep within it, roughly growing at the rate of our magic crystal consumption.”

“...That ‘unholy energy’ is miasma, is it not?”

“Yes. Precisely. It is undetectable for most, but ritualists like me who are accustomed to sensing the world’s mana flow can sense it well. It is unnerving, oppressive, chaotic, and dangerous, hence its name. Everything it touches, it distorts and corrupts.”

Alicia's tone began to turn cold.

“Are you telling me that magic crystals are the root cause of their existence?” Alicia asked. “That by using them, not only are we destroying mana completely, we are replacing it with miasma?”

Kullervo could only shake his head.

“I don’t know. I am not even sure of the connection when I tried the ritual. It was a gamble and a last resort. I didn’t know that I would destroy the whole city and the enemy’s army. In fact, I was hoping for a more controlled detonation. Alas…”

Alicia’s lips formed a thin line as she realized what was happening.

“The rest of mankind is powering the machines that enriches them by killing off magic, and we’re about to do the same,” Alicia said, frowning. “Worse, we’ll kill the world with it too.”

“Yes,” Kullervo said.

Alicia stood up.

“We need to take action now to manage this,” Alicia declared.

“Manage what? We haven’t even fully industrialized yet. The factories you built in Orevogorsk don’t even consume a quarter of the magic crystals we burned in one day in a full year. Are we supposed to lock ourselves from wealth while mankind freely destroys the world and magic to get rich?”

Kullervo sounded utterly cynical as he said that.

“This isn’t a problem today, Your Grace. It’s a problem tomorrow. The royal capital is a separate issue. It was intentional destruction on my part. Developing industries might not lead to its repeat, at least not immediately. It will take years for it to become a problem. If you’re thinking of ending your plans for Orevogorsk and the rest of Vael, then I am strongly opposed—”

“I have no plans of stopping Vael’s or Orevogorsk’s development, Sir Kullervo,” Alicia said. “I will find a way out of this. There must be alternatives, and since we’re still in the early days of industrial development, we are well positioned to make a pivot today.”

“I would rather not gamble our wealth…”

“And I will not gamble the safety of our people. You’ve seen how destructive those black dungeons are. What if we have two, three, or goodness, four of them in our border?”

Alicia shuddered to imagine that. Considering even the great powers spent a great deal of resources just to contain them, if Vael followed their footsteps, her nation would be much, much worse off. Their territory was too small, their people poor and weak. The situation at the capital was already bad enough.

Any more than that, and Vael, already barely clinging to a tree branch, would truly fall off and perish. She would not allow that to happen, especially if her ambitious projects became the reason for it.

“...I won’t let that happen,” Alicia said. “I’ll develop a plan with my associates. There are alternatives out there. I’m sure of it, and I’ll figure it out.” 

Both wendigoes remained silent as Alicia finished her speech. As for herself, she was further unnerved by all of this. Considering that even her crown seemed to have a whiff of miasma when she made use of it, she was worried that even the item that was fully attached to her person might have a connection to it too.

Damn it. Do I have to figure this all out alone?

She cursed her luck. But Alicia wasn’t someone who simply stood by and whined to herself. Well, she whined a lot when too much work was thrown at her, but as she had already consistently demonstrated, Alicia was a woman of action and results.

“We’re planning to build new textile factories in Orevogorsk,” Alicia said. “I’m going to use them as experimental test beds for building them based on magic crystal alternatives. That way, if we fully confirm that magic crystal usage is the cause for the corruption of our dungeons, then we can simply follow their model and replicate it.”

“But won’t this be a risky test?” Kullervo asked. “Wouldn’t it cost you more to build them this way?”

“Of course, yes. But I should be able to figure this one out. I just need some support. I’m going to Alsatia soon to acquire the materials needed for this project. I might need some of our reserve gold and silver.”

“...I suppose that can be arranged.”

Kullervo seemed reluctant, but it seemed like he wasn’t interested in meaningfully opposing Alicia’s decision. In fact, he seemed like he wanted this with his tone. After all, he probably held a lot of guilt at detonating the capital like a nuke. Surely, he would like to figure out too how to avoid that going forward.

Simo then spoke up.

“When are you going to the royal capital, though?”

“Next week, I believe,” Alicia said. “I need to hammer out the details with my chief industrialists. Come up with a concrete plan. And there’s a lot to do when I’m at Alsatia too. In fact, I would have to warn a good friend of mine about this as well…” Alicia frowned. She wondered if Lucille and Alsatia knew about this. “Hm, yes. I suppose I’ll be gone for a while.”

She then eyed both of them warily.

“You two will behave like good leaders,” Alicia warned. “No funny business.”

They both looked down at their chessboard, and then they both nodded uneasily.

“...That is allowed,” Alicia reiterated, but she was staring at them in a way that told them to absolutely not try anything against her.

“This place will be as orderly as you left it,” Kullervo said, placing a fist on his chest as if sealing a promise.

“We will not disappoint, Your Grace,” Simo followed up.

“Good.”

Soon, she turned around and left. Then, she teleported straight back to Wintervale.

It was time to give Maxim a visit.

+++

A/N

Hope you enjoyed this one!