Road to the Crown

20th October 1574

"And that concludes my report."

Placing down a sheet of papers that contained all the data that he was asked to bring, one of my assistants saluted by raising his two fingers to his temple before leaving the room altogether.

All in all, the chances that I would ever have the time to look through it in any greater detail than what I just listened to, were nigh. 

Standing up form behind my desk to give my brain some time to regenerate, I looked out of one of the very first commercially used windows in the entire world.

Rather than being made up with thousands of multi-colored pieces of glass, it was a simple plane of this strange liquid that was so thick that most people thought it was actually in a solid state. While buying it off the budding market, sparked by my drive for the innovation, could easily amount to a single percent of the total money I was sinking into the hole of the local construction. And with it's scale slowly reaching beyond what a normal person of any time would ever consider to be possible, one could imagine just how much this single window took away from my pockets.

Looking outside, I could tell that a lot of work was done over the last two weeks. By this time, the city barely had any marks that would remind anyone of the fighting that took place here.

Starting with lodging areas, all the people that lost their fortunes during the siege, were granted a comfortable flat there for free. As long as they could prove that they actually had the house where the shells of my military rained, they would get the luxury of living in a place that would soon be equipped with heating system, running water and even proper savage!

Creating the pipe network all over the city was simply impossible. Without destroying the rest of the buildings that somehow managed to get through the demolition spree, it would be impossible to create the tunnels in which the savage could flow. With that said, only the places created on top of the scorched land could ever enjoy this kind of basic luxury.

Knock, knock.

"Come in."

At this point, I was already used to the constant nagging. Every few minutes, someone would knock to my doors, come with some papers, ask for my advice and leave right after receiving it. 

One could say that in the past few days, I turned from a victorious noble that won the right to participate in royal election, to a lone man enclosed in his dwelling, spending his days by helping others!

"Sir, the General report came!"

Bowing right in the doors-frame, this time the message carrier actually held far more important position. Judging from the several ribbons embedded into the shoulder of his uniform, this man actually hailed from the military, moved to the normal logistic effort due to his high confidentiality privileges. 

"Show it to me."

Despite waiting for this piece of paper for nearly the entire day already, I wasn't looking forward to opening it. If all the matters from before could be considered at most annoying, this report would outline all the progress and all the problems that appeared during the construction spree. Opening it, meant that I was willing to go through its entire content, while listening to the couriers explanations for specific codes!

"Eh… I guess the sooner we start, the sooner we will finish…"

Shaking my head in a defeat, I received the small package before carefully opening it up. Inside, a stack of tens of pieces of paper was located, threatening me with just its size alone.

"I guess here goes nothing…"

Pulling out the first paper out of the stack, the first thing I did was inspect the top-right corner of the report. Unless it was marked with the similar ribbons like the ones on the arm of the soldier that didn't dare to move away from the spot, then I could generally ignore it or put it for later, as it didn't require my utmost attention.

"The general logistic node is all but finished, only the parking, in and out-going areas and the tracksplitter are left to be finished. Estimated finishing time, twenty fourth of the october… Seriously?"

Staring down at the paper, I wasn't sure whether I should be angry and disappointed or content and prideful. Within less than two weeks, my people managed to finish everything about around the train and communication areas, leaving only the side taks for the latter?

While the lack of track splitter meant that the speed at which the materials and humans could arrive would remain roughly the same, the fac that the building itself was already mostly finished, would allow me to at least streamline the transportation of the people and products from the main station to the general points of interests!

As for the track splitter thing, it was one of the most important and most complicated elements that would come to exist in the entire damned province. To be honest, I was only capable of giving the idea for it, with its entire execution falling down on the shoulders of my retainers. 

In short, there would be only two tracks that would connect any and every single location to the others. It was made for the sake fo allowing the continuous passage of the trains, no matter which way they would be going. By giving each of the places a dedicated lane, the capacity of either receiving or sending the resources would ultimately end up relying on the capacity of the local stations rather than the train tracks themselves!

The fact that the track changer has yet to be finished, meant that all the materials from New Tarnow had to be transported by train to Ostrog city, from where the light carriages would drive them off into the final destinations!

It didn't take a genius to understand how efficient this kind of system would both in the short, and in the long turn.

As soon as this next step would be done, then by arriving at the Ostrog Main Train Hub, one could choose to either travel further down the eastern road, reaching all the way into the borderlands of the commonwealth and quite likely, in the near future, into the lands of other people. On the other hand, if someone was just a simple worker that had to transport to and from work over a huge distance, he could just go to another track on the station, where the dedicated train would be repeating its course over and over again!

This solution obviously required for the local train-station scheme to be actually replicated into all the key points around the province. The entire idea lied in fact that the single areas without much importance would connect to the local hub, from where the train would change the tracks and travel down towards the higher hierarchy of the hubs, only to change its tracks again and finally arrive at the main hub!

Obviously, as the time would go, most of this unnecessary traveling could be ignored. INstead of going from each and every small area towards the main hub, all the primary processing of the materials could be done in the lowest grade hubs, instantly putting them on the highlighted spot of the development. Once those points would grow to a satisfactory level, the focus would change to the pre-processing in the second grade hubs and later on, basic wares production right beside Ostrog!

With the main storage area of my lands located right beside the city, I could already picture how the original square of the town would soon turn into nothing else but high-income district for soon to be one of the greatest cities in the entire continent!

"Ooh?"

Putting away this paper that caused me to feel a great mixture of different emotions at once, I took the next report, only to realise it's markings in its upper right corner.

"Code XF42, what does that mean?"

After scanning the title of the report and the content of the first, outlining paragraph, I could tell that without the information I asked for, I wouldn't go anywhere.

"It will be "in a near future" sir."

I never learned the way in which those messages were encrypted. Just from the fact that only the absolute elite of my forces could reach the point of being a secret messanger one could realise how hard it was to learn such thing.

From what I understood when my retainers attempted to explain the entire scheme to me, each letter had assigned a commonly used word, while each number meant some kind of action. 

BUt as if that wasn't enough, what was written on the paper and the code that I just spoke about, were actually two different things!

If I were to read from the paper, then the correct code would be 8ld1. Only after translating each letter and number with the help of a special code sheet I had near my hand, I could produce a code that would be understandable for the messenger.

"Oh, that makes sense…"

Contrary to my first expectations, it wasn't that easy to crack this kind of coding. While most of the text was written openly, all the major and important clauses, details or problems were codded down, making it impossible for anyone to ever break this system. With only the highest officers often responsible for several mining sites and industrial towns by themselves, knew how to use the code, and only I had the sheet with the codes.

Even if someone were to catch the messenger, he wouldn't be able to learn anything as messengers themselves were clueless about the way of translating the original code into the real one. 

Yet, when reading that my scouts expects Muscivote raid on my newly acquired lands in a near future, I couldn't help but feel unsettled by it!