Sword of Dawnbreaker

Chapter 510 - 509: Gawain’s Alternative Plan

After identifying the problem areas, the next steps involve a series of repairs, re-designs, assembly, and testing...

With a super-god level precision lathe like Nicholas Egg in place, everything is proceeding exceptionally quickly—essentially, it only takes one or two minutes for a part to go from design to finished product, ready to be installed in the machinery.

Watching the Mechanical Scholar and Mage Technicians busily retest the whole system around the platform, Aunt Heidi couldn’t help but shake her head and sigh, "This child Rebecca... she’s too impatient. She should have completed thorough testing before reporting to you."

"It was me who asked her to report as soon as a sample was ready," Gawain smiled as he watched Rebecca busily giving commands among the group of technical experts, "Of course, a better-developed testing process and regulations are certainly the direction for the R&D department’s growth, and that will depend on Rebecca’s future work... but for now, she’s doing quite well."

Even Aunt Heidi, who has always been very strict with Rebecca (though it’s not very effective), couldn’t find words to refute; she watched Rebecca, who was immersed in the world of machines, from afar and softly sighed after a while, "Yes... she’s indeed doing well, and she’s managed to bring out so many similarly talented apprentices... If someone had told me two years ago that Rebecca could achieve all this, I would have thought they were trying to scam me."

"There are many talented people in the world, but not everyone can find a place to unleash their talents. Fortunately, Cecil can offer these people opportunities. Therefore, our next step is to attract more capable people to join these projects," Gawain said while asking, "How have the recent talent recruitment and education training efforts progressed?"

"A large number of craftsmen and low-level Transcendents or Transcendent apprentices have responded to the Administrative Office’s recruitment—the fact that the Cecil Clan has unified the southern borders has given these people great confidence. Moreover, the new publicity methods can draw them out from all over, but transforming them into qualified Mechanical Scholars and Mage Technicians may take a long time... Their original skill levels vary greatly, and there’s a lack of standard industrial concepts. Recruiting a thousand apprentices takes just three days, but training them to be factory-ready takes almost half a year, and to prepare them for laboratory work is even trickier, mostly depending on talent, with a pass rate of less than ten percent," Aunt Heidi said with a worried expression, "As you’ve said, to truly resolve the talent gap, we must promote basic education—only schools can produce talent in large quantities, with high quality and standardized uniformity, like a factory produces products."

Gawain understood what Aunt Heidi was going to say next and nodded slightly, "But at the current stage, we don’t have enough schools... nor enough teachers, or even enough Administrative Office personnel to study how the schools should operate, is that right."

"As you said, the gap is so big that it’s despairing—we can work overtime to build houses when there aren’t enough, and we can supplement machinery with manpower, but the training of teachers... that can’t be accelerated," Aunt Heidi frowned, her tone serious, "After the industrial printing press was introduced we barely solved the textbook shortage issue, yet we don’t have enough teachers to teach. The basic knowledge that primary teachers recruited from the public can bring to schools is mostly just spelling and basic arithmetic..."

She paused for a moment and continued, "What we need most at this stage are teachers for four subjects: basic Runology, magic industry essentials, Cecil societal knowledge, and integrated thinking—knowledge in these areas is new, and teachers need to take several months of coursework themselves before they can barely teach others. Moreover, they have to keep updating themselves with new knowledge that is continually emerging."

The issue that Aunt Heidi mentioned is one of the most severe problems faced due to Cecil territory’s expansion, and it is not a problem that can be "quickly solved." Currently, the whole southern border is using four new industrial cities plus Cecil Castle as benchmarks, and constructing numerous General Academies within the radius of the Cross Axis Line. However, every school is facing a severe teacher shortage—The Administrative Office strained its resources to barely recruit enough literacy and arithmetic teachers, but for knowledge slightly more complex...

Apart from those who hail from Cecil Castle, who knows what magical industry entails? Who understands the complete Cecil law? Who knows Runology?

Apart from these seemingly professional courses, societal knowledge is also a significant issue. In most areas beyond Cecil Castle, people don’t even know how to turn on the heater in winter, use magical crystal lamps, irrigate land with water pumps, or thresh grains with threshers...

The first problem encountered when promoting these new things is that the people simply dare not use them, and even if they dare, they don’t know how to use them, and even if they know how, they don’t trust the machines—the Administrative Office needs to send ten people to the fields to install water pumps, and another ten to everywhere to assure the people that water pumps don’t eat people...

And the Administrative Office itself is still lacking in personnel.

Gawain sighed softly.

In this land where everything is in tatters and anyone with a strong fist can establish authority, it is easy to establish a duchy as a founding hero with the biggest fist and authority. However, building this duchy... is not that simple.

He could establish the nation in one year, but governing the nation would take many years...

Yet, although these problems are difficult, they are not unsolvable. The inflexible cost of time may not be compressible, but as slime molds can substitute for rubber, some "alternative solutions" can bypass, or at least partially bypass, the current bottlenecks.

Gawain raised his head and looked at Rebecca, who was happily busy among the crowd, and slowly said, "There is a way to rapidly disseminate knowledge even with a shortage of education personnel."

Aunt Heidi’s eyes lit up instantly: the usually sagacious ancestor indeed did not disappoint; he already had a solution. She immediately asked eagerly, "You mean..."

"Remote education," Gawain said, "using the Magic Web to send knowledge out."

Thanks to the unique development path of Magic Guide Technology, and also thanks to the technological accumulation of this world itself—who would have thought that in a world with a social structure similar to the medieval ages, a remote holographic communication network would appear even earlier than highways?

Aunt Heidi is a smart person; she just hadn’t thought of this direction before. Now, with a slight reminder from Gawain, she instantly understood the ancestor’s intention.

"This really is..." Her breath even quickened, "This method is amazing!!"

"Don’t be too excited, I’m not sure about its exact effectiveness," Gawain calmed Aunt Heidi down, who was slightly excited, "First try adding an ’education’ program in the Magic Web broadcast, live-streaming the courses of the General Academy. Also, organize a group of people—people can be drafted from the General Academy—to compile the basic necessary knowledge of social common sense and use Memory Crystals to record it, broadcasting it periodically in a loop. On the publishing front, we also need to compile books of this type, focusing on how to farm, how to build houses, how to use magic machineries, and publish them throughout the territory."

Currently, the literacy rate of the southern borders might not have reached the level where people can independently learn from these books, and most ordinary people lack the initiative to learn, but until next year’s grain harvest, those who actively learn new knowledge and actively respond to the Administrative Office will truly benefit, and the "benchmark effect" will show its power. Ordinary people’s motivation to learn new knowledge will be greatly enhanced, but if we wait until then to hurry and compile relevant textbooks, it will be too late, inevitably losing at least a year of "golden time," so Gawain has to prepare in advance.

"Yes," Aunt Heidi immediately nodded, "I will ask Mister Godwin and Mr. Santis to organize personnel in this regard."

A series of clanging mechanical noises came from the side, and the conversation between Gawain and Aunt Heidi was paused.

After emergency adjustments by a large group of technical personnel and a simple test by Rebecca, the Magic-guided Vehicle that had just broken down moved again and steadily stopped near Gawain.

"Ancestor sir! Look! It’s moving again!!" Rebecca sat in the simple driver’s seat of the magic car, one hand holding the steering wheel and the other pulling a lever, happily greeting Gawain, "And look, I also had Nicholas Egg add a bell to remind other vehicles and pedestrians..."

Rebecca was saying this while forcefully pulling a lever beside the steering wheel, causing a cylindrical device on the side of the car to roll immediately, emitting loud and noisy sounds of steel sheets colliding.

The sound of these steel sheets colliding was much more irksome than the car’s noise, and Aunt Heidi immediately covered her ears: "Turn off that thing quickly—Did you put that thing on the car just to torment people’s ears?"

However, the young viscountess was evidently very satisfied with her creative abilities: "But this way, the driver doesn’t have to rely on shouting like a carriage driver to get pedestrians to move aside when on the road!"

"I think the sound this car makes when it moves is enough for everyone to know where it is," Aunt Heidi complained while rubbing her aching ears, "My goodness... you managed to come up with a new little torturing machine in just a few tens of minutes..."

"Is it really that noisy?" Rebecca scratched her head, "I thought this thing was very useful, it’s much smaller than similar ones in mechanical clocks..."

Gawain watched the exchange between Aunt Heidi and Rebecca with a mix of laughter and tears. To be honest, he hadn’t previously anticipated that the prototype magic car would lack a car horn—if it weren’t for Rebecca’s quick thinking, the world’s first mechanical car would have had to rely on the driver shouting to alert pedestrians and other vehicles—but on the other hand, he also agreed that this "warning bell" Rebecca invented was indeed a bit too noisy...

"This device is indeed useful, but it’s better if you find a way to optimize its noise later; if all else fails, use a bladder to connect a copper pipe, a whistle would be better than stuffing a bunch of steel sheets and hammers into a cylinder," Gawain looked at Rebecca with a smile on his face, "Why don’t you come down; there’s something I need to tell you."

"Oh," Rebecca quickly jumped off the car, "What is it?"

"We need to teach the basic knowledge of magic machineries to ordinary people," Gawain said, "The most fundamental ones, including what Repulsion mechanisms are, what the Magic-Powered Engine is, how the Magic Furnace works, and other similar knowledge."

Rebecca blinked: "Oh, I know that, the General Academy has courses on this, I’ve even taught them!"

Aunt Heidi stepped forward and tidied up the girl’s messy hair: "But now we’re going to teach these things to more people... so you better wash your hair first!"

(I’m going to recommend a book again! It’s in the supernatural genre, titled "Drinking This Bowl of Meng Po Soup," which I recommended once before. Surprisingly, it’s still surviving today, and lately, it seems to be hitting the shelves, so I’ve thought it over... Recommend it again, because things that don’t die after one promotion often have some substance in the follow-up, and besides, it’s a niche supernatural genre, worth looking forward to 23333.)