Wrecking Fantasy with Technology

The Country of Eruchea:-

Harry woke up in his bed and saw Jeanette sleeping beside him.

However, she was fully clothed, unlike what most people would normally expect.

It had been a week since Harry had proposed to Jeanette.

But the day before was their first night in the same room.

The thing was that Harry’s sudden proposal and everything had left the other servants in a not-so-nice of a mood.

They had been constantly bullying Jeanette ever since she had been rejected by the previous king. (It hadn’t even taken a single day before she got rejected by that meatball.)

And now, she was suddenly proposed by their new king, who had created quite the scene in the process.

They probably either thought that she used some witchcraft or were jealous of her success.

But in the end, the reputations of both Harry and Jeanette had only worsened.

Harry hadn’t thought of the repercussions when he had confessed and went with the flow of his emotions, leading to a huge mess.

That’s why, Jeanette only had decided that though she would shift rooms, she would start properly living together with Harry only after this mess was sorted out.

Other than that, the very night when Harry had made his decision public, Qing and Shin wasted no time in starting to tease the two of them.

This was still continuing after a week.

But unlike the scornful gazes that the maid and even some of the male servants gave to Jeanette, their teasing was completely harmless.

There were many male servants and even some maids who were genuinely happy for Jeanette. However, most of the maids weren’t.

So, Harry had to push aside Qing and Shin and focus on fixing all the hate that they were getting from their servants.

Jeanette’s attempts were pretty useless.

She, being the object of contempt, only seemed to aggravate the negative emotions whenever she tried to help.

That’s why Harry had to take matters into his own hands.

And so, the entire week was full of Harry trying to counsel the palace’s workers to try and remove the hate.

Harry’s free time was also majorly cut down since he had to constantly move back and forth between official paperwork and counselling.

Ironically, Harry’s attempt at trying to spend more time with the person he liked had resulted in him not even having much time for himself.

The counselling also varied in difficulty levels based on who he was talking to.

But majorly, the male servants were easier to deal with and were convinced into accepting Jeanette’s relationship with Harry in the first couple of days after the confession.

The maids, though, were a very hard nut to crack.

Some did agree to accept it.

But the majority didn’t.

Some even took offence to the fact that Harry was trying to make them accept it.

And even though Harry was being very gentle with everyone, those maids felt that he was very forceful and was abusing his royal authority.

In the end, Harry was left with all of the male servants and some maids having accepted his new relationship, a lot of maids who remained neutral about his relationship and some maids who were threatening to quit work due to Harry’s alleged forcefulness and tyranny.

Harry had almost given up on those maids when Jeanette made him realise that getting rid of people from his palace would only lead to the worsening of his image in the eyes of the public.

But since Harry felt that they were beyond hope, he made one last attempt with the last option he could think of.

The thing was that after his proposal, the system had also congratulated him.

But, as if already knowing the mess that would happen, it had given Harry one wish that he could redeem anytime in the near future as a gift for his success.

Harry didn’t think much of the consequences of his actions back then and had planned on using the wish for something big, like getting the knowledge to build some modern things for free.

But now, he was forced to use it for memory editing.

So, he called the ten maids who were completely against him one last time to his office for one last attempt at talking it out.

They were supposed to step in one by one.

And as they walked in, Harry spent about an hour trying to give various explanations and finally applied one of the ten memory modifiers that he had asked from the system.

What that piece of tech did was rewire the neurons along with adding or deleting any required parts of the brain cells.

This resulted in the maids having formed their own scenarios in their heads where Harry managed to convince them.

This way, Harry didn’t have to do too much effort and the maids basically convinced themselves.

This did take about ten hours though.

But now, no one was particularly against his relationship.

There were the maids who were in the neutral group, but Harry figured that if given enough time, they too would come to accept them properly.

So, after about a week of effort, Jeanette had finally moved in with him.

Harry felt like this was his third big success, after having a successful confession and making the others accept their relationship.

But they did decide to not let loose completely, in case some servant took it badly and the entire mess of counselling sessions started again.

Harry had readily accepted this suggestion.

Though it did feel a little sad to him, he still felt quite happy that once everything settled down, his love life was 100% assured.

And Harry was exhausted trying to convince his servants and didn’t want to do it again.

But now came the other thing that was to be done.

The so-called punishment that Harry had planned for all his servants.

But, unlike his initial idea, Harry decided to take things a little slowly and gently.

A few days after his first night together with Jeanette, he declared that everyone in the royal palace would go train with the soldiers.

This was Jeanette’s idea, who declared that even she would start training to be able to stand beside him one day.

Harry had been visiting the barracks pretty regularly to help George, the General, with his activities and also to train the guy to manage the large army.

The examinations that Harry had planned for the military had to be delayed due to the entire confession fiasco.

And George seemed to be barely holding on while somehow managing the fifty captains along with the hundred soldiers under each of them.

But, even so, everyone had grown tremendously with the amount of exercising that they had done.

Even some of the scrawny newer recruits from earlier had started showing some amount of muscle.

And so, one morning, Harry’s group of four people showed up at the barracks with 150 people in tow.

Most of the male servants were excited when they found out that they would be training with the knights, or as their king now called them, “soldiers”.

The maids, however, were pretty reluctant and only went since this was supposed to be their punishment.

They had grown up knowing that regular people can’t become knights and women were even less likely to do so.

This was the common sense in the mortal kingdoms.

Women were weaker than men and were not allowed to do work that men did.

There had been some exceptions in history, but they were very extraordinary people as well as few in number.

So it was quite unusual for these maids to be training with the army in such a patriarchal society.

After discussing everything with George, Harry declared his decision to make the servants also train.

He divided everyone into two groups, one with Harry, Qing, Shin and the soldiers and the other with Jeanette and the servants.

The first group would do the regular military training, which was similar to the One Punch Man routine.

The other group, on the other hand, start from about one-tenth their level.

So, the second groups exercise routine included just 10 pushups, 10 situps, 2 rounds of frog jumps around the field and so on.

But even with a major reduction in the level, the servants wouldn’t have it easy.

Considering how even knights came under a lot of stress after just one round of frog jumps, Harry figured that the palace would not be able to get cleaned for the next few days.

But, even so, this routine was very important for everyone.

After the training started, some of the weaker servants quickly collapsed after a few sets of exercises and had to be taken away.

Some others managed to make it to the frog jumps, the last set of exercises, before collapsing.

Of the remaining servants, about half had collapsed not even halfway through the frog jumps.

Even Jeanette collapsed in a sweaty and exhausted mess after one round of frog jumps.

The remaining few couldn’t take more than a few steps for the second round before dropping to the ground.

In the end, not a single person from the second group could finish the entire course and most people were unable to move for a few weeks.

Even Jeanette was on bed rest for two whole weeks.

Seeing the results, Harry felt like he had been making mistake upon mistake since the past week.

But even so, the servants somehow didn’t mind the punishment.

They just said that they were the ones who were weak and that they were motivated to work harder and get stronger now.

After discussing this with Jeanette, Harry concluded that they got motivated on seeing their king doing something much more difficult alongside them.

And what might have been a greater source of motivation would be seeing Jeanette working hard alongside them.

Most servants had now accepted her status and sort of declared her their queen even though she wasn’t married to Harry.

And seeing their queen work herself till exhaustion had lit fires in their hearts.

They now saw her as someone who didn’t let the fame get to her head.

She was still the same human being as them, not some snobbish royalty that they were normally used to.

And if she, as their queen, could work herself to exhaustion by her own will, why should they stay behind?

And so, many of the servants started exercising by themselves to get stronger by the time they healed up enough to go back to the barracks.

So, most of the servants had increased their recovery speeds like this.

Some tried to push their weakened bodies beyond their limits, but Harry had quickly intervened before they managed to hurt themselves significantly.

Even many of the maids had taken a liking to this and could be seen jogging in their free time.

Harry couldn’t be prouder of his servants.

He had initially thought that they might resent him for making them suffer through so much pain, but the opposite had happened.

Everyone seemed doubly motivated to do things, be it their original jobs around the palace or training to get stronger.

That’s why Harry too could focus on his paperwork, though he didn’t like it one bit, instead of constantly monitoring them or cleaning the place himself. (He had to clean the palace with Qing and Shin during the time all the servants were taking rest and he got so exhausted that he considered begging the system for some help.)

Even Jeanette started to go jogging every day once she recovered sufficiently.

And the next time they went to the barracks, everyone had at the very least completed the course before some of them had collapsed. (The guys who had collapsed early on in the first round thought that frog jumps were easy and it was obvious from their overconfident faces that they would be the first ones to go down.)

And seeing even the palace servants do so much better, the soldiers also doubled their own efforts.

And this helped George a lot since he didn’t need to go around trying to manage as many people.

Most of them followed orders properly and didn’t need anyone monitoring them.

As for George, he had been doing a lot of special training with Harry and ended up looking somewhat like a buff battle veteran after going through a demonic training regimen set by Harry.

And respect for him had skyrocketed amongst the soldiers since they could tell the level of demonic training he had undergone to go from looking like a scrawny newbie to looking like a war veteran in just a few months.

And in this time, Harry had also done a few more meetings with Liang.

The paper he made was very popular both among humans and demons.

And since the production process was never revealed, Harry figured that it would take at least a year before anyone managed to make good quality paper on their own.

However, the production also had to be expanded a lot and Harry had managed to collect several other families to work under Brittney’s family and make paper. (Brittney being the young wife from the family of lumberjacks that Harry had visited.)

Also, on the successful invention of plant-based paper, the system had rewarded Harry with the knowledge on the production of an advanced steam engine.

Harry had quickly contacted a lot of blacksmiths living in the country and placed orders for making the several different parts of the steam engine.

He had even received a lot of parts.

However, a lot had to be sent back for reforging since they were much below the quality need by Harry.

But considering how undeveloped this world was, it was still shocking to see the precision shown by many of the blacksmiths.

Harry figured that he should be getting all the required parts in a few days and he’ll be able to invent the first “machine” on Etheldor.