This Overlord Doesn't Care About Anything

Book 3: Chapter 8: The Beginning of the Industrial Era……?



Why is it the first ‘half-year plan’?

First listen to my reasoning.

When I newly arrived in this world, I was still considering whether or not I should engage in some thermal or hydroelectric power generation, whether I should run around this world mining coal useless to this world, oil, natural gas, or if I should make some gunpowder. The result? After gaining first-hand experience of Felita’s magical “machine gun” bombardment, I abandoned my plans since I discovered that unless I made a strategic missile, I might as well explode enemies with magic.

Then apart from its astonishing destructive force, what other marvelous application does magic have?

Let’s take for example, when I was younger, I had a quite stupid idea. Since water naturally flows downwards, thus converting potential energy to kinetic energy, then if I were able to connect the lowest point of the stream with the highest point using Doraem*n’s 4D pocket, the lowest point would flow back to the highest point, thus creating a cycle of potential and kinetic energy that would continue flowing. If resistance wasn’t considered, then the water would speed up indefinitely. After I came to this world, I discovered that space magic truly could accomplish this task. And so, if I installed such a system to a hydroelectric machine, wouldn’t I be able to create an unprecedented perpetual motion machine……

Perpetual motion machine my ***!

How could using space magic not consume magic power!

Energy can’t be created out of nothing; the only thing that changed was that the source became magic power.

In the final analysis, I believe magic power is merely another form of energy. But this form of energy is highly efficient and even more unfathomable. On a whole, it seems like I should still preserve the ‘conservation of energy’ principle.

To put it more simply, not everything can be solved with magic nor is it to say that an entire city’s construction speed will rapidly progress with the usage of magic, like a ‘swish swish swish’ and the entire city is built. No, it’s just that the construction speed with magic is just much greater than without magic. In addition to this, this world’s denizens have much stronger physical bodies than the humans of my previous world.

Why is that, you ask? According to my observations, even people who aren’t able to use magic have some magic power within their bodies. If they have the will to become stronger, then their physical strength will become greater. If they were thrown into my previous world, they would be much farther ahead of ordinary people in terms of physical labor.

In summary, I believe that if we want to fully develop, half a year would suffice.

First, I spoke about some modern management methods to Moon.

In a nutshell, it’s about splitting people into groups and making each group in charge of one part before coming back into a whole. This is one of those clichéd problems. First, it prevents a single person from mastering an entire advanced technology and suddenly turn traitor. Second, if everyone is just in charge of one part, then their proficiency in doing their part will keep rising until the point where someone begins mocks them:

“Why are you so skilled!”

“Because I’ve been concentrated on my task from start to finish.”

After Moon heard my analysis, he deeply felt that my words were correct, to the point of even peeking a glance at me, appearing to ask ‘how can such a slag of society like you think up such a method’.

Hey, I’m also a bit lacking in the confidence department.

But things weren’t as smooth as I hoped it to be. After Moon assessed the method a little, he raised a very realistic issue:

“The method that you spoke of is indeed feasible. But that requires every worker at every part of the process to create products perfectly to the point of it being the template. This way, it’s unlikely that any issues will pop up when assembling the final product. For example, with regards to a master-worker, he alone can take responsibility for the entire process, so even if one of the parts has a bit of error, he can fine-tune the other parts to ensure a usable final product. But if everyone is in charge of one component, then a whole lot of errors are bound to emerge and there will ultimately be a ton of rubbish.”

The issue that Moon raised was very realistic.

Because this wasn’t the Industrial Era, it was still the era of manual labor where all kinds of goods were produced depending on people.

At the moment, it’s still not a problem to discuss these rough concepts, but once precision parts are manufactured in the future and everyone isn’t able to guarantee production of exactly the same parts, then there truly will be all sorts of problems popping up when putting them together.

Therefore, I handed over a blueprint of thermal power generation.

A person might not be able to ensure production of carbon copy parts that will fit together seamlessly, but machines can. The era of mechanical production is one that is bound to come, all I’m doing is accelerating the process of introducing this era. In the eyes of people from this world, a factory is equal to magic for processing materials. As long as materials were thrown in, then there would be a steady stream of end-products flowing out.

The only problem that I was worrying about before was an energy supply, but this problem solved itself with the joining of Felita. Obviously, it was due to the magic power that I mentioned earlier. In terms of destruction, magic is the most efficient method since sorcerers are able to change the form of their magic into various elements. Some examples are wind, fire, lightning and so on. Direct transformation into electricity may seem much more efficient, but it’s much harder to control. The problem is that the electric current is too big and its destructive property is more similar to that of sky-rending thunder and lightning. If a machine tries to receive such an energy, it will definitely go “poof” and the entire thing will go up in flames.

Wind is also out of question since it’s too hard to gather.

The sole useful element is fire. On one hand, generating fire element is relatively simple and crude, and on the other, Felita’s fire element magic is a genuine clean power source. The flames created don’t produce any sort of exhaust gas, unlike conventional thermal energy production that uses fuel. Since there isn’t any sort of exhaust gas created during the combustion process, there isn’t any problem in terms of pollution.

“Felita, the generator is out of energy, throw in a fireball to start it.”

“Okay.”

Aaand, settled.

In my opinion, magic power is the highest quality power source, but it cannot be directly used as a power source for machine production. I once fantasized about whether or not I could somehow create a miraculous machine that would automatically convert raw magic power into a stable power source, but I ultimately found that it wasn’t possible. Lightning element magic is about as close as I can get to my concept in mind, but it’s too erratic and hard to control.

Once a machine that can indirectly transform magic power into motive power is built, Felita’s power can be put to much better use. This is because Felita’s magic power is limited. She does naturally recover her magic power every day, but she’ll never recover past her “mana pool.” Besides, it’s not like there’s a war going on every day, so her magic power is usually maintained at its maximum capacity during peacetime. It’s like playing a mobile game that has an energy requirement for certain actions, but never logging on and using the energy, so it’s being wasted. In the future, she can throw some fireballs into the generator occasionally and maintain her magic power at a sufficient state without wastage.

I gave a brief explanation of the blueprint to Moon. Moon still didn’t understand anything about the composition of the generator, but still remembered the blueprint using his amazing memory, saying that he would study it with several outstanding craftsmen after we recruited some.

In a world forced on personal power and dominated by magic and martial skills, what is the greatest extent that industrialization will develop to?

Even though I had an estimation in my mind, I wasn’t wholly sure that it would go smoothly and didn’t have much assurance……



Tip: You can use left, right, A and D keyboard keys to browse between chapters.