Chapter 52
Washing machine!
The machine dedicated to laundry, known as an essential household appliance for anyone living alone.
“It’ll give the attendants some free time, and maybe time to study, too….”
“That’s just like Young Master, always thinking of the people and the attendants!”
A household appliance that stood shoulder to shoulder with refrigerators and air conditioners,
but Akion had not developed a compressor yet, so he decided to put those two off for later.
That left the most important matter: deciding the direction of development.
“Top-loader or front-loader….”
A vortex-type washing machine, commonly called a top-loader.
A drum washing machine with a laundry tub shaped like a drum.
The former showed overwhelming washing efficiency with large loads,
while the latter caused relatively little damage and used only 60–70% as much water as a top-loader.
They said the difference in damage was not actually that great,
but even if the river never ran dry, it was still better to conserve water.
Even so,
“Let’s go with the top-loader.”
“Because the tub spins?”
“Yep.”
Akion chose the top-loader.
Its structure was simpler than a drum washer, which made maintenance easier.
There was also an agitator type, where a central pillar spun to wash the clothes.
They said it was excellent at removing stubborn stains and well regarded in the American market, but….
“Sis, this dress. You said it was expensive because it used good fabric, right? About how much was it?”
“Hmm. I had it tailored at a boutique in the capital, but… around this much, I suppose?”
“Wow. That’s my monthly budget when I was making incandescent bulbs.”
“……The Enersis family really is rich.”
They said it shredded the fabric.
Of course, clothing in this era was often made of thicker fabric, so perhaps that would not be necessary. In any case.
“To reduce damage to the fabric, we just need to accelerate it slowly….”
If he made the washing tub’s rotation pattern and acceleration smooth, there would be less friction between the clothes and therefore less damage.
And if they needed to scrub away stubborn stains, they could simply make it rotate as roughly as possible.
The pattern? He could just recycle the cylinders he had used to make the waterbed.
As Akion was drawing up the blueprints and making plans,
“But why are you here today, Sis?”
he asked Aisirel, who had unusually stayed by his side all day.
He wanted to know why Aisirel was there instead of Goldie and the Tower Master.
“They both said they were busy, so I decided to guard you today.”
“I heard a lot of explosions coming from the training ground last night.”
“……Goldie is laid up with body aches, and I got one over on the Tower Master.”
“Don’t bully Goldie too much. And… you got one over on the Tower Master?”
The answer that came back was astonishing.
A Swordmaster had gotten one over on a dragon who was more than a thousand years old!!
No matter how much of a Master she was, the Tower Master was an existence beyond the heavens.
As far as Akion had heard, she had toyed with even two Masters when slaughtering the ducal house of the rebel faction.
“I just pushed her into a situation where she had to use draconic form. She even acknowledged me, saying it had been a while since she used it against a human! Ahem.”
“What’s draconic form?”
“You can think of it as putting a dragon’s armor over a human form.”
From the sound of it, it was roughly in the same category as a Rider transformation.
Akion decided to understand draconic form as something similar to a Rider transformation.
“That’s cool.”
“……Men have a strange fondness for things like that.”
“Yeah. There are novels about it, too.”
A Rider? Can you resist?
A transformation? Can you resist??
A monster who still champions humanity? Can you resist that??!
In any case, that sort of thing was a man’s dream regardless of the era.
Akion wondered whether he could spread that culture someday and sell transformation-belt toys for children.
*
“By the way, how do you know so much about laundry, Sis?”
Around the time Akion began seriously designing and producing the components,
“Huh? Me?”
Aisirel had been coming to the workshop frequently these days,
and Akion had recently noticed that she knew a great deal about laundry.
“Who else would it be, if not the duke’s daughter? Should I call you Auntie?”
“You may. Weak Goldie.”
“Eeeek! Let’s go again!”
“Yep, you’re totally hopeless.”
“Owaaah!!!”
And lately, Goldie, who had become Gol-den Thunder, had been suffering defeat after defeat against Aisirel in sparring.
No matter that Goldie was a fifth-circle mage… she did not even come close to Aisirel, who must have stabbed her way through countless magical beasts and battles.
“Auntie! Old maid! Hurry up and get married!”
“But you’re weaker than me, aren’t you? You can’t protect Akion as well as I can, can you? Disqualified as a guard maid, aren’t you?”
“Owaaah!!!”
Besides, Aisirel was a Master.
If a mage wanted to stand on equal footing with a Master, they had to reach at least the seventh circle. Extensive experience in one-on-one and close-quarters combat was essential, too.
“Why are you two arguing so childishly?”
“You act the same way when you quarrel with Goldie or me.”
“Oops.”
In any case, Akion felt guilty that he was the root of their childish argument.
“Tower Master!! Tell this auntie off!! Tell her how cute, adorable, loyal, and devoted Goldie is, and what a wonderful guard dog she is for being willing to lay down her life for Young Master!!!”
“You’ve been thoroughly wounded. Come here and let me pet you.”
“Waaah!! Tower Master!!”
But if he got involved, she would surely ask him to take sides, so Akion decided to pretend not to notice.
* * *
Almost none of the workshop employees participated in developing this washing machine.
“It’s been a while since we’ve had a project led by the workshop master!”
“We do have the clothing industrialization project.”
“That was delayed because Earl Gospium’s cotton harvest fell behind.”
Because Akion had rolled up his sleeves and taken charge for the first time in a while.
Unlike other fields, such as the mass production of steel, this was something Akion could handle by himself.
And during the waterbed project, hadn’t he mostly been an onlooker aside from giving advice?
The engineer in him had been itching to get to work.
“It is pretty annoying that the delivery keeps getting delayed. Have we heard anything?”
“They say they’ll ship it up soon. But, Young Master.”
The employee explaining the situation was bursting with curiosity beside Akion.
“This roller that turns in both directions… why are you making it?”
Akion had laboriously brought over a long copper plate and fed it into the gap between the interlocking rollers.
And lo and behold, the copper plate curled inward all by itself!
Before this, people had bent metal sheets through backbreaking manual labor, so the employees could only stand there, stunned by this revolutionary device.
“Slip rollers. We’ll need to make a lot of boilers from now on, and imagine how inconvenient it would be without one of these.”
The boilers before this had been made by casting them as a single piece or by similar methods.
But if they kept making them that way, they could never reduce the production cost… so Akion had finally whipped up a machine for rolling metal sheets.
The blacksmiths who watched this, for reference,
“Let me try it.”
“Put down the hammer before you say that. What are you planning to hit with it?!”
“Young Master’s head.”
“That’s basically saying you want to kill him! Calm down!!”
It would have been nice if he had made this sooner.
They huffed and puffed, voicing their complaints.
“Would it really kill him?”
“Just words, just words.”
“Tsk. Back to work. All we have to do is feed it through at a steady speed, right?”
They were only grumbling in words.
What employer was better than Akion?
Their wages were never late, they worked a five-day week, and the bonuses were generous! What a dream workplace!
The only downside was that he made them work overtime five days a week.
And when crunch mode began, that turned into six or seven days.
When they thought about it, they had every reason to be extremely angry, but….
“Something’s really getting on my nerves…?”
“Still, it’s much better than Charles next door. Back to work.”
Even so, their work environment and income remained top-tier by medieval standards, far beyond the average.
Thus, the blacksmiths wound copper sheets around several slip rollers.
- Sssizzle!
“Yes, yes. Just like that, nice and tight. Keep going along where the borax has been sprinkled.”
Next, following Akion’s instructions, they sprinkled borax into the tiny gaps in the copper cylinder sheets, placed silver against them, and melted it.
- Bang, bang!
“Wow. This is incredibly sturdy?”
“Seems better than rivets.”
This way, the borax prevented the silver from bonding with oxygen, while the molten silver joined the copper sheets together firmly.
“It has its pros and cons. Once I properly develop a welding machine, you’ll all be happy.”
“Heh heh, whatever this technology is, we’ll be looking forward to it!”
Of course, this silver soldering was a primitive form of welding.
If he could develop proper welding here—for example, coated arc welding, or some other form this world’s technology could implement—how much cleaner would it be?
- Scritch-scritch-scritch!
“This is still manual labor, though.”
“Nngh. Young Master, isn’t there a more convenient way to do this, too!”
“Dunno. Get back to work.”
Of course, sanding the joints with sharkskin or horsetail grass still had to be done by hand by the employees.
- Click.
“Phew.”
Once they fitted it into the heavy, waterproof oak barrel they had prepared in advance, the washing tub that would spin inside the machine was complete.
“We finally made one…!”
“Now we need to make five more.”
“Young Master. May I really hit you just once?”
“No. I have to work out the wash patterns and drainage system now.”
He also had to design the patterns for how the washing machine would operate according to its settings,
engrave those patterns one by one onto the cylinders for each setting, and program the motor’s rotation speed and the timing of water intake and drainage,
and then Akion and the mages would have to tear their hair out applying all of it after listening to the maids’ experiences with hand-washing laundry.
“Once that’s done, it’ll be over.”
“Sorry for complaining, Young Master.”
Faced with the next plan, which looked twice as grueling as their own work, all the workshop employees became humble.
“Don’t go! If you’re going, take me— Aaaah!!”
“Where do you think you’re running? You have to research to the end, too!!”
“Mm.”
At least they could go home when their shift ended.
* * *
“This is… a washing machine.”
And so, the washing machine was completed.
However, Akion did not particularly celebrate.
He had the head attendant set up a laundry room and install the washing machine there without much fuss.
“The instruction manual is here.”
“Ho ho ho. So we add powdered soap and soapwort in the usual ratio….”
“It says never to fill it all the way. It’s prone to breaking.”
For the attendants who handled laundry full-time, it was not exactly anything revolutionary.
The only thing that had changed was the receptacle: from basins carried to the river to the washing tub inside this machine.
“Did you bring the laundry?”
“Yes! I sorted it by fabric, just as the manual said!”
They all assumed there would be no dramatic change.
They put in the clothes to be washed as usual, added the natural surfactant made by mixing powdered soap and soapwort,
and pressed the button labeled ‘Normal Wash.’ That was the only real difference.
Even as they thought it was not much different from the laundry they had always done─.
- Vrrrrr!
- Whooosh, whooosh….
“Oh my. Oh my goodness?”
“Ah~! Since it spins, the water spins with it, too…!”
They marveled as the laundry that had always exhausted them was done automatically.
Only after feeling their hands no longer cracked and their arms no longer ached did they realize how useful the washing machine was.
“Then during the rinse cycle, we just add a little of this vinegar….”
“We have… much more time left than before…?”
One of the great things about household appliances was liberation from housework and the free time that resulted.
They said that was one of the things that accelerated industrialization. The Enersis maids were no different.
“We can study magic at our leisure while it washes.”
“B-But is that really okay?”
“The head of household and the head attendant haven’t forbidden it. And Young Master Akion clearly made this for us….”
Freed from their enormous workload, they were flustered, but also deeply moved that Akion had given them this technology.
“It’ll give the attendants some free time, and maybe time to study, too….”
Wasn’t that what Goldie had said she heard from Young Master Akion?
Of course, Akion had only meant it as an added benefit, but the grateful maids took the misunderstanding a little further….
“I-I want to be Young Master’s maid, too, like Goldie.”
“Oh my. Don’t tell me you mean Young Master─.”
“Not that. As his guard!”
A slightly heavy loyalty was engraved into them.
In a good way.
“I heard Goldie trains with the knights these days… Should I train with them, too?”
“Trying to give yourself body aches? Think about it after you’ve built up stamina like Goldie… maybe?”
“The washing machine will give us time to take a nap in the middle of the day… So should we train for just an hour a day?”
“Aw, I only have lots of mana… Oh! What about making something that can rapid-fire stones accelerated by mana?”
“Why don’t you suggest it to Young Master?”
Thus, with their newfound free time, the maids were busy chattering away.
- Ding-a-ling~!
“Oh, it must be finished.”
The maids chatted merrily until the laundry was done.
They all happily took out the fully washed clothes, and
“……….”
“……….”
Even as they placed the clothes in baskets, they tilted their heads and wondered.
“Am I the only one sensing mana?”
“You too?”
“You too? You can feel it, right?”
A small amount of mana had seeped into the washed clothes.
How could mana have entered the clothes when they were not mana stones?
“Hmm, maybe mana dissolved into the water…?”
Or perhaps the mana from the magic stones had mixed into the water during the wash.
The maids more or less dismissed their suspicions, hung the clothes on the line, and left them to dry for a day….
The next day.
“Why is it still there…?”
“I know…?”
They were dumbfounded to find the mana still faintly lingering.
“……What has Young Master Akion made this time?”
“With this much mana… wouldn’t a defensive magic circle inscribed on the clothes work?”
“No way. That’s taking it too far… isn’t it? Hmm, since we washed it with a magic tool made by Young Master Akion….”
There were simply too many positive(?) incidents and accidents Akion had caused to dismiss this as mere coincidence!
The maids were left wondering whether to report this with a smile or as a serious matter.
notes안내되지 않은 반복 표현은 제거했고, 장면의 화자와 대상이 불명확한 부분은 이름이나 역할을 사용해 중립적으로 유지했습니다.