Enlightened Empire

Chapter 330: War Against Nature

Although the war was still raging on within the Verduic Sea, the ongoing transformation of the Green Island's political and economic landscape couldn't be neglected. Thus, Corco had set off to inspect Saniya's newest industry on this day, while Sumaci was still busy with her restructuring of the court.

On his way to his inspection, Corco had to travel by palanquin. He tried to avoid those things whenever he could, but he needed to keep up appearances as demanded by his status. Plus, Sumaci had argued that his invisible deterrent on the local warriors would be much greater if he remained a more mysterious and shadowy figure. What could be more shadowy and mysterious than being carried in a closed box by other people?

While he was on the way, he checked the pistol that had arrived together with the latest shipment of materials from Saniya. Its barrel was all bent and plumed out, and its powder had been used up. Corco felt like he should connect it to some clever metaphor, but he really wasn't in the mood. Dedrick's departure was something inevitable, but when it really came, it upset him quite a bit.

From a purely functional perspective, it wasn't a big deal to let Dedrick go. Although the knight was a very capable soldier and commander, as were his wolf mercenaries, there were many qualified officers under Corco now. After years of persistent efforts, the local officers, together with the wolves who would stay behind, would be enough to handle all of Saniya's military needs for the foreseeable future.

In the end, Dedrick and the men he took with him only amounted to a few hundred at most. That number wasn't nearly enough to matter anymore, not to Saniya with its rapidly expanding army.

Still, from a personal perspective, Corco had every reason to be upset. They had worked together for years, so this kind of departure felt cold to the king. At least the mercenary knight could have waited until his return, and said his goodbyes in person. Maybe inventing the radio had been a bad idea. People were already getting distant and impersonal.

Before his idle thoughts could take over and spin into even stranger ideas, a voice from outside brought him back to reality.

“King Corco, we have arrived.”

“Yup.”

When Corco jumped out of the palanquin, he was confronted by Llamka, one of Sumaci's maid guards. Unfortunately, it was the not fun one.

“Hey, how was your trip? Had a good time?” he asked in a casual tone, but in her usual unfun ways, Llamka didn't even acknowledge his strange question.

“King Corco, maybe you should not be carrying that weapon around in the open,” she said, and pointed at the pistol he still held in his hand. “We are about to deal with commoners after all. They will be scared if they see a weapon, which may interrupt their work.”

“Oh yeah. Right.” Corco chucked the weapon back into the palanquin. “There ya go, sentimentality gone.”

The king brushed off his hands for no good reason, before he looked around the place they had arrived at. On their way here, they had gone past a small area filled with fields. Now however, all the fields were gone. Everything smelled of earth, and there were sounds of busy work in the distance. Shouts of animals, calls of humans, as well as the sounds of hammers and saws exuded a level of energy he hadn't seen in Rasacopa yet.

“Anyways, where's all the work being done?” Ge asked the question even though he could just follow the sounds. After all, he would need Llamka to answer some more important questions for him later, so it was good to start with a simple one.

“This way please, King Corco.”

The maid led him along an unpaved road next to a beach, through an area of roughed up earth. Soon, the first pieces of greenery greeted them, piles of bushes and stacks of wooden logs, arranged in piles all over the place with no perceivable rhyme or reason.

In the distance, further inland, Corco could see the workers who had left all this chaos along the path, though they had done it for a good reason. On the edge of the dense forest, they were systematically taking out the trees in the name of their work, chopping them down and removing their roots, to fight back the jungle bit by bit. It was an admirable battle, but for now, he was interested in something else first.

“So what happens to all the wood?” he asked as he pointed to the stacked logs along the way.

“First, the logs and roots will be piled up here while the workers are busy. After enough has been collected, it is separated into hard- and softwood. Then, all of it will be stored to dry. The required storage rooms have already been set up in the new worker town not far from here. Once they are dried, a part of the logs will be used right in the town, to create housing and other amenities for the workers. The rest of the wood will be dragged to the river next o the town and then shipped downstream to Rasacopa, where it will be used for all kinds of purposes, mostly shipbuilding.”

“Hmmm... that seems like a waste to me. You know, there's all kinds of trees here, which means all imaginable kinds of wood. We won't know the exact properties for a lot of them, some we don’t even have names for. Would be a shame if all of that was just turned into generic planks and used in some cupboard. I think you should make an effort to properly classify all of them, and at least leave some samples behind from every type of tree you encounter, for some experts to research. That's probably a very good use of time. Who knows what we'll find, and what useful new applications different types of wood might have.”

“Yes, Queen Sumaci has already instructed us to do so, and thus the work has been underway since clearance work on the southern jungle has resumed.”

...then what am I even wasting my breath for?

With the conversation so rudely broken by the maid, the atmosphere became uncomfortable for at least one of the two people. He himself had reminded Sumaci of the value hidden in the surrounding jungles, so he really should have known better. This turned into a bit of an embarrassment for Corco, so the king tried to restart the conversation in another direction.

“...so how's the status on the cotton farming?”

“So far, most of the land that was previously reclaimed by King Tacao has been planted with cotton. This has happened three triums ago, so we can expect the first, proper harvest of cotton during the next harvesting cycle. However, the total farmed area is still very small, not nearly enough for the goals laid out in the planning documents.”

Ever since the triumvirate had been established, people in Saniya had begun to count shorter time intervals by triums, which was ten days long, the time it took for the Triumvirate Meeting to switch its head seat.

“That's fine,” Corco said. “For now, we're just doing a test run anyways, to see if everything works as intended, or if we’ve overlooked anything important. We're trying to jumpstart an entire industrial chain from nothing. It's gonna take a while, and there will be many problems we encounter on the way. Starting with a smaller scale to see what works and what doesn’t should be a good idea in general.”

As they talked, the two passed the area with the stacked dead trees and reached the one with the live ones instead. Here, the workers of Rasacopa were beating back the edge of the forest, to create more land for agriculture. In the years before his death, Sumaci's father had already started reclaiming land in this area.

Now that Sumaci had inherited his position, she had redoubled the previous efforts, paying the commoners well for their work and providing them with higher quality tools, which she imported from Saniya. Despite that, the work looked hard and slow to Corco. Workers would fell the trees by hand, drag the logs away with the help of animals, and then dig out the stems and roots one by one.

In fact, the shrubbery around the trees took just as much time to get rid of as the trees themselves, with some workers constantly walking around the edges of the work area just to hack back the advancing plants that threatened to return the new land to nature.

“This looks like a huge pain,” Corco commented. “Can we even make progress like this?”

Even with advanced machinery, clearing a jungle would be a massive undertaking. Corco remembered that the construction of the Panama canal in a jungle environment had cost tens of thousands of lives and taken several attempts over across decades to complete.

In comparison, this project was smaller, but they didn't have any machinery, and no tools beyond some simple steel saws and axes. Reclaiming land on such a large scale, with pure muscle power – and maybe the help of a few donkeys and elephants – was ridiculous in Corco's eyes.

“Progress is somewhat slow, but steady,” Llamka replied. It seemed like she had prepared well for today's inspection and had anticipated many of his questions. “King Corco should have seen all the previously reclaimed fields on our way here. This particular area of the Green Island's jungle mostly grows tree variants with shallow roots,. For now, the reason for this is unknown. Although the details are still unclear, this section of the jungle is nevertheless particularly easy to clear.

“In that case we have a good start at least.”

As Corco was talking absentmindedly, he watched an elephant with a crude rope harness fashioned around its front drag a wooden log behind it.

“Though maybe we should consider some better tools as well,” he added. “I'll see if someone back in Saniya can fit some tools for the elephants and donkeys, to make their work easier. That should be a good use of time and money, excavators are still far off after all, and we should really reduce the pressure on these animals. If not for humane reasons, we need to consider the time when we run out of easy forest to clear.”

“The reclaimed land from this area should be more than enough for the plans. By the time it has been cleared, we estimate that the total reclaimed land area will amount to around five thousand hectares. With an estimated cotton yield of between one and two hundred kilograms per hectare, that comes out to between half a million and a million kilograms of cotton, which should be more than enough for early texile production.”

“I think you're underestimating just how much cotton we'll need once we get this industry going. I don't think five thousand hectares is nearly enough. Not to mention, we won’t only plant cotton, and we don’t want to limit our sales to Rasacopa and Saniya alone. We’ll also need to plant tea and rubber trees, among others, and we'll want to expand into all of Medala, and the Verdant Isles, even far beyond that.”

Even in the face of Corco’s grand plans, the maid still looked as stoic as ever.

“There are further plans for expansion of the planting area, but so far they have not been started,” Llamka explained. “The plan is to clear a path through the jungle to cut it into two sections, and then burn the smaller section in a controlled manner. This clear the trees much faster, and it would also fertilize the soil for the first harvest.”

“That sounds like it can get out of hand very quickly. Do the people here have any experience with this kind of work?”

“Not that I am aware of, but the locals sounded very confident.”

“They never did it, but are confident that they can burn down half the jungle, without burning down all of it, or any towns or villages around it? Should be easy, right?” Corco was suspicious, so he did his best to sound as sarcastic as possible. “Allow me to be skeptical. This sounds like an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Even if I didn't care about the forest itself, which I do, it's a scandalous waste of resources, just burning down the forest like this. It's not like we need the soil fertilized anyways, what with our artificial fertilizer being readily available.”

“So that would be a no on the burning.” The maid said, and jotted down his decision. Corco thought for a moment, before he measured his previous, extreme response.

“Provisionally,” he said. “We can look at the area, first and if it can be done safely on a smaller scale, maybe it can be tried as an additional method if we really need the extra space. Though in general, I'd prefer if we increased our investment in manpower and the efficiency of our tools instead.”

“Understood, King Corco. It will be done.”