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-VB-

A mutual defense pact was good and all, but it couldn\'t keep a people together.

No, for a people to remain together, there needed to be more than just an outside enemy. After all, the likes of the British and the French found native helpers wherever they went.

While an outside enemy would provide a great initial cause for cooperation, this cooperation would disappear the moment the enemy disappears as neighbors are, after all, one\'s greatest competition and rival. For our mutual defense pact to survive, I have already provided one reason to stay: information exchange. Again, this wasn\'t enough.

I thought long and hard about it. I mean, I had quite a bit of time on my hand to do exactly that. Early winter went and the deep winter came with plummeting temperatures. Snow was already getting too much to handle, even for me, and gave up on cleaning it outside of my fort.

It wasn\'t like there were travelers at this time of the year, anyway.

As for the people in my fort, we have done well in our preparations. We had enough food for the winter and spring. The problem would start around summer, but that was enough time for me to come up with something, right?

So I did.

Fluela Valley possessed no great resource. Sure, I mined up some gold, but that had more to do with the fact that I mined a lot of rock. Since winter began, I have been mining on average once a day at the very least, which got the villagers curious. A few of them tried mining after I gave them permission to try and quickly gave up after suffering through claustrophobic panics.

I didn\'t suffer the same phobia because I could literally dig out the dirt and rocks around me if there was ever a cave-in or the fact that a cave-in was unlikely to hurt me too much.

On average, whenever I mine one million units of dirt, rocks, and ores (which was around one cubic meter), I get a tenth of a unit of gold, which was two grams of gold per ten thousand cubic centimeters (roughly the size of a human head), and I can\'t mine anything smaller than a cubic centimeter. This was also after I used [Prospecting] skill to find the right spot to mine.

[Prospecting] LvL.54

Finds pockets of ore. Can specify which ore to look for.

*Increases chance of pinpointing potential ore by LvL*INT/100

*Decreases chance of ruining non-target minerals within deposit by 1 - SQRT[(INT/100 + Dex/100)*Skill.LvL/10]

[Deposit] World Resource

One thousand cubic centimeters of

*May contain mineral

*Mineral make-up is heavily influenced by the history of the area

*Mineral make-up is lightly influenced by Gamer\'s skills

So yes, it wasn\'t just about finding the right ore deposit for the ore I wanted, but it was also finding a significant enough deposit for me to extract the ore. This also came at the expense of ruining whatever other significant ore deposit that wasn\'t the ore I wasn\'t looking for but not ubiquitous or common enough for me to not completely ruin.

An example of this was borax, the stuff used as a flux (lowering melting temperature) for glassmaking. It helped make clear glass, the kind that I was used to in my past life. While there was borax in these mountains and valleys, it wasn\'t available in large quantities. Each deposit had only a finite source of any mineral, but it may contain multiple minerals. Borax came up often enough in quantities like gold ore, but if I mined specifically for gold, then I would lose borax, and vice versa if mined for borax.

I also couldn\'t bring up more than ten thousand units at a time because the burlap sack I carried for mining purposes could only fit that much, and anything bigger wouldn\'t fit down the mining shaft.

This was why despite how I mined for weeks upon weeks, I only had fifty-seven units of borax and fifty-nine units of gold ore. That much borax was barely enough to make four hundred fifty hundred units of glass.

[Glassmaking] LvL.13

Make fancy and glittering luxuries with sand and fire.

*Decreases chance of project failure by 0.9% per level.

*Decreases accessory material need by 0.25% per level.

[Glass] Raw Resource

Transparent solid for many projects

*Known Recipe: sand, soda ash, borax = borosilicate glass

*Known Recipe: sand, soda ash = murky glass

Four hundred fifty units of glass may sound like a lot, but that was enough for exactly half-inch thick by one eight-inch wide by one and a half feet long windowpane.

And it took me literal weeks to gather just the borax.

On top of that, my crafting skill made it so that I could only craft in batches of ninety units of glass, and my skill level told me more or less that I would lose 80% of what I make, which meant that theoretically, I could make 450 units of borosilicate glass, but in actuality, I would only make 90 units of boroscilicate glass.

You know just enough for a bloody cup.

Of course, the reason why I went out of my way to make glass was to discover if there was a chance that I could turn glassmaking into an industry.

Why did I want to make an industry?

"Because you hoped that you could make it into an industry to tie the entirety of the seven towns," Arnold said with a slow nod.

I blinked.

I looked up and saw Arnold, two others, and Kraft. They all looked at me with wide eyes. All of us were sitting in the dining hall, and I realized that I had begun to talk aloud while I had been calculating with a piece of paper in front of me and a charcoal piece for writing (ink was hard to come by).

"Uh… yes," I muttered.

"That\'s not going to work," Kraft shook his head. "There is a city in Swabia that makes glass, probably more than what you can make by yourself, especially if you intend to use only that borax stuff of yours."

"I don\'t have to strict use it," I grumbled. "I could use just sand and soda ash, but it\'s gonna be harder on the furnace. Without borax, the melting temperature of the glass would be too high for my furnace for long."

"Then don\'t make glass," Kraft said. "You can still mine gold."

"These mountains are not made up of gold, Kraft. There\'s only so much gold before it runs out. It can\'t be the source of our revenue, never mind the fact that it\'s going to attract wrong sort of attention."

Arnold raised his hand, a habit he learned while I tutored him.

"Yes, Arnold?" I asked him as I set the charcoal down.

"Why is it bad?"

"You mean aside from getting greedy nobles to look into how to take over our valley?"

"... Yes, aside from that," he replied sheepishly.

"Gold mines can run on dying slaves," I narrowed my eyes.

The "commoners" in front of me all froze.

"That\'s why I was looking into glassmaking and not gold mining. If a noble does take over with the force of arms, then they can then bring in cheap laborers from elsewhere. Gold mining also pollutes the hell out of any place unless you want to go at it really slowly and inefficiently."

"I see," Kraft muttered. "Then perhaps we should stop talking about gold and not let mention of gold get out."

I nodded and the others nodded as well.

Of course, this left me back in square one on how to bring the seven towns together.

"Well, these mountains do have a lot of iron…" I muttered. Hematite was the main iron ore I have been using because it was abundant in mountains. "Well, I guess we can, but isn\'t there also a lot of other cities and nobles who mine and refine iron?" I asked. "I mean, I assume the Habsburg do at the very least; they wouldn\'t be able to field their armies otherwise."

"... What do you want to do?"

I blinked. "Sorry?"

Kraft spoke up again. "I … understand," he began, trying to use words he normally didn\'t use to sound more formal. "That you are trying your best to think of something to tie the towns together. I don\'t get why you seem to think that going on our ways is bad after surviving invaders. I mean, isn\'t that the point of this mutual defense pact you had us sign? Some of the villagers may think that you are trying to form a county of your own."

I hadn\'t expected that.

"Umm. It\'s just the nature of smaller powers getting eaten up by bigger powers," I responded. "It doesn\'t matter if what we want is to simply enjoy our simple and peaceful lives; others have their ambitions and goals, and we stand in the way of that regardless. I mean, we keep bringing up Habsburgs, but they do want to take over the entire empire. It\'s why the Forest Cantons banded together."

The Forest Cantons were the three original cantons, one of which was Uri my homeland, that formed the Old Swiss Confederacy.

"We could be mercenaries."

Kraft and I turned to Arnold, who\'d just made that suggestion. He now looked uncomfortable. "I-I know that it\'s not a good thing to fight and kill for a living, but I-I think we can agree that our valleys aren\'t … rich?"

I nodded, and Kraft grunted in irritation like most people did after their home was called piss poor, directly or indirectly.

"But if you can make us armor and weapons and teach us how to fight, then we can fight."

"Boy," Kraft hissed out, upset. "Fighting is not a good way to make money. Did you not just see Hans\'s father? They lost half of their men, which is that many men unavailable to defend their home."

Arnold raised his hands in surrender. "I\'m not saying that all of us should be mercenaries! Just … a few who would like to see the wider world."

I thought about it.

Mercenary work was … look, it wasn\'t a great profession. Chance of dying was high, and if I got hired by the loser, then I might not even get paid. If I was on the winning side of a war, then pillaging and looting would be part of my mercenary contract, which meant my morality and ethics took a dump for a monetary payout.

"Let\'s… put that as a backup," I replied reluctantly.

As much as I didn\'t like the idea of working as a mercenary, I would be dumb to dismiss it out of hand. Survive first, think about morality and repent later. It\'s what I had planned when I attacked Zernez, after all.

"What other ideas did you have?" Kraft asked me, suddenly a lot more interested in this because there was not an insignificant chance of his son wanting to go out and dying on a battlefield far from home.

"A few, but none I could implement or test during winter. For now, I could … probably teach you all how to be a blacksmith-."

I paused.

Trade was a thing in medieval Europe. Sure, it wasn\'t operated at the same scale as 21st century Earth, but it existed. The Forest Cantons formed, after all, to take advantage of the fact that they controlled the territory right between Swabia and Italy\'s rich Po Valley.

While Fluela was not a location involved in many trades, it did have a pass that connected iron-rich Tyrol to the main trade route between the Po Valley and Swabia. I mean, technically speaking, we might be able to leverage that to do something. Buying iron ore, raw, would not be a problem since while Tyrol might be under Habsburg control, they didn\'t directly rule over it. Hell, my information could even be wrong!

God, this was giving me a headache…

Okay, whatever! Iron!

I could get iron, whether I mine it myself, with the villagers, or by buying it from places with richer iron mines.

Then … Then I could make a rudimentary manufacturing, preferably an automation. Something that makes hammering easier. I could probably do it with wind and water, both of which I had in abundance. Would it be enough for any kind of serious automation? If I could get automation going, then I could make even small things like nails at a very cheap price since I wouldn\'t need a blacksmith working on a single piece of nail at a time.

Hmm.

A plan was getting together in my head now.

Hell, why should I stop at making only nails? Swords, armors, and more… Just making the wind and river run the furnaces would ensure that the base cost of any steel I make would be lower than anywhere else.

Ping!

[New Quest]!

I blinked.

It\'s been a long time since I got a quest like this…

[Quest: Industrialization!

You might not have the coal-based steam industry ready to make and start, but you can start something smaller. Your job, if you choose to accept, is to set up a fully fledged industry within five years of accepting this quest!

Requirement:

*Establish a profitable industry for the Compact of the Seven Towns

Bonus:

A-Establish 2 profitable industries

B-Establish 3 profitable industries

C-Hire a total of five hundred people

Reward:

*10 stat points

A-+5 stat points

B-+10 stat points

C-+10 stat points

Failure:

*Potential collapse of the Compact]

… Bruh. Where\'s the Yes or No option?

-VB-

[Character Status]

Name: Hans of Fort Fluela

Age: 18

LvL: 28

HP: 540

MP: 200

ST: 270

STR: 39

END: 54

AGI: 60

DEX: 44

INT: 20

CHA: 9

Current Objective: Set Up Home [10/?]

Current Quest: N/A

-VB-