Chapter 56
The first step in the Enersis marquessate-promotion project.
The clothing industrial revolution!
From mass-harvesting cotton to using a cotton gin to remove the seeds from the harvested cotton.
Then came the carding process, blowing air into the deseeded cotton to separate out impurities.
It still had to be combed here to straighten the fibers.
Only after that could it be spun into thread with a spinning machine, woven into fabric with a loom (or handloom),
and made into clothing with a sewing machine… It was an incredibly complicated process from start to finish.
There also had to be additional equipment at every stage, and honestly, Akion felt like his head was going to explode.
“Young Master!”
“It’s been a long time!”
“Wow, everyone’s gotten quite tanned! I suppose the southern sunlight really is intense.”
In fact, Akion had dealt with the former to some extent by dispatching workshop employees.
He had seen various patents related to clothing production during his previous life, just out of curiosity…
Based on those memories, he could more or less recreate the blueprints.
He had even made prototypes.
“Wow, you all look sturdy… Who’s the pregnant woman in the back?”
“Ah, haha. Well, you see……”
In addition, there were the workshop meisters who had honed their skills on everything from Akion’s small motors to ceiling fans, turbine pumps, and the estate’s plumbing system.
When the harvest was delayed, Akion gave them blueprints and prototypes for a cotton gin that could handle both carding and combing at once, as well as a spinning machine, and sent them to Gossypium.
He then sent every resource they requested without delay and waited for them to harvest the cotton…
“A local wife?”
“Honey? What do you mean?”
“Are you insane, Young Master?! She was the first woman whose hand I’d ever held!”
“Just kidding, just kidding. Heh-heh.”
There was the unfortunate(?) incident of some of them bringing wives home from there, but…
“Here it is.”
“Whoa……”
Akion was able to welcome a cart piled high with cotton yarn.
They were skeins of cotton yarn wound thickly around wooden spindles.
- Sliiide.
Feeling its softness, Akion was satisfied with the high level of completion achieved without him.
They had suffered on their business trip… though some of them had even brought their pregnant wives along.
Still, they had certainly worked hard, so Akion gladly decided to give them leave.
“How did you manage to complete it so well? You worked hard. I’ll give you honeymoon leave, so take a month off and come back.”
“……Why are you giving us leave when we’re newlyweds?”
“……Ah.”
Unfortunately, the workshop employees were still medieval people at heart.
Akion handed them their leave certificates with pity and tears in his eyes.
*
- Rattle-rattle!
Akion emptied all the cotton yarn into one of the workshop’s basins.
“Oh? Are you dissolving it in starch water?”
“Wow, Young Master. They say this is a method known only to weavers. How did you know about it?”
It was a wooden basin filled with flour starch.
The cotton yarn had to be sized like this to increase its tensile strength and make it smoother.
And if they left it to dry like this?
“Isn’t this awfully stiff?”
“That’s because the starch was applied too thickly. I wonder whether the dye will take properly…”
“That’s not the end of it. You have to boil it once in lye.”
Sizing naturally made it too stiff and also interfered with dyeing,
so it had to be boiled once more in alkaline water made by dissolving ash.
This process was called desizing.
And once they had finished desizing and dried it?
- Shrrrk~!
“Whoa……”
“It looks like yarn used to make clothes for noble lords……”
They had completed cotton yarn for the highest-grade fabrics fit for noble lords.
Now, if they put it into the machine known as a loom, weaving machine, or handloom, it would become fabric…
“Hoho, grandson-in-law?”
“E-Empress Dowager!”
The Empress Dowager, who had been preparing to leave, visited the workshop.
The purpose was….
“When will it be finished?”
She had come to check when the fabric would be completed.
The Empress Dowager had originally intended to return to the capital before the end of summer.
It would have been nice to stay longer, but doing so would impose on the count, and the longer she remained away, the more work would pile up at the academy.
“The yarn is complete. Now we’re going to put it in the loom and weave it into fabric.”
“Oh my! Already? Could I perhaps see it?”
“Of course.”
Akion had asked her to ‘wait until the fabric was finished,’ so she had delayed her preparations somewhat.
She had come to the workshop partly out of curiosity and partly to check on its progress.
And what she discovered in one corner of the workshop was…
- Rattle-rattle-rattle-rattle!
- Click, clack! Click, clack!
“Oh my……”
It was the moment when the completed cotton yarn was drawn into the automatic loom, woven across and down, and born as fabric.
When the Empress Dowager had served as regent, she had looked after the people and gained a thorough understanding of how industries operated throughout the empire.
- Click, clack!
Among them, the loom, along with the spinning machine, was kept in the imperial palace.
Of course, those had been made with technology at a medieval level….
“What do you think?”
“It’s excellent… The shuttle moves automatically and weaves the horizontal threads, does it not?”
“Yes. The pickers strike it and make it move from side to side like that.”
Compared to Akion’s automatic loom, it was rather pathetic.
- Click, clack! Click, clack!
Wheels had been attached to the shuttle that inserted the horizontal threads into the fabric, allowing it to automatically run in the opposite direction whenever the pickers (Picker, striking mechanism) on either side struck it.
“Oh, Workshop Master─ Gasp?! W-What brings Her Imperial Highness here─!”
“Hehe, I merely came to look around for a moment. Please continue concentrating on your work.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
As for the operating method?
The person standing in front could control everything with a single handle.
It was at this point that the Empress Dowager realized how excellent the machine was.
“If there were dozens of these, no… hundreds….”
The amount of labor required would be drastically reduced, allowing them to put their abundant workforce to use and produce an enormous amount of fabric.
“What His Majesty wanted may really come true….”
Provided that mass production of cotton supported it, the price of clothing would plummet.
If that happened, there would no longer be any imperial citizens walking around half-naked.
“And this sewing machine, too….”
“The sewing machine? Was there anything else that needed to be done to it?”
And what about the sewing machine here?
- Rat-a-tat-tat-tat!
“……….”
Following the cotton gin, spinning machine, and loom, Akion’s mana motor had now been added to the sewing machine as well.
Thanks to it, tailors were turning out clothing at an astonishing speed.
The Empress Dowager nodded as though she understood.
‘I will make absolutely sure she marries Flare.’
This man absolutely could not be allowed to get away.
*
After seeing everything, the Empress Dowager…
“Khhhoooor……”
“……Good grief.”
As soon as they had finished everything and set out along the carriage road, she let out a hollow laugh when she saw Akion fall fast asleep.
Of course, she knew that Akion had not slept a wink for an entire week.
“I-I’m sorry, Your Highness….”
“Hoho, it’s all right! Goldie, you know very well how hard my grandson-in-law worked, don’t you? Still, if you feel sorry, why don’t you keep this old woman company?”
“G-Goldie? Me?! Uuugh….”
“Hehe. We’ve known each other for several months now. There’s no need to be so nervous.”
Knowing how hard they had worked, the Empress Dowager decided to let it slide.
She would pass the time chatting with Goldie, who was around the age of her granddaughter.
* * *
“Has Her Imperial Highness’s health improved significantly?”
The capital was in an unexpected uproar.
“According to her attendants, her back pain has almost disappeared.”
“What a relief….”
The Empress Dowager, who had been recuperating at Enersis, had finally been cured and was returning to the capital!
The health of the imperial family was a state secret, but the Empress Dowager’s severe back pain was an open secret.
They even said that any imperial citizen who did not know about it had to be a spy, or something like that.
“Hmph, they cured a person’s body with magi-engineering?”
“Ridiculous. The human body is incredibly complex!”
That was why the nobles gathered for the Empress Dowager’s welcoming ceremony openly vented their displeasure.
They were even more sour because Enersis had been rising rapidly in popularity lately. Anyway.
- Boom boom boom!!
- Rumble-rumble-rumble!!
“Her Imperial Highness the Empress Dowager is entering the capital─!!!”
The current emperor, the father of the empire.
His mother, a wise sovereign who had even served as regent when he was young and laid the foundations that allowed the empire to rise to its current heights.
“Hurrayyyyy!!”
“Long live Her Imperial Highness the Empress Dowager! Long live the Khalid Empire!”
To the people of the empire, she was another emperor,
a great mother whom they could not help but love.
“Let us go.”
“Yes!”
The Empress Dowager had returned in good health?
The imperial citizens were naturally delighted.
Thus, amid the applause of the imperial citizens and nobles, the members of the imperial family welcomed the Empress Dowager’s carriage.
- Clack.
In front of the carriage, the emperor and Flare eagerly awaited seeing whether Empress Dowager Aurelia’s back had straightened.
“Your Imperial Majesty! Her Highness the Seventh Princess!”
“Hmm?”
“Huh?”
A middle-aged beauty around the emperor’s age—or perhaps even younger—had called out to them, leaving them flustered.
Where had the wrinkled but wise elder gone?
Of course, this relatively young middle-aged woman also exuded wisdom.
“Mo...ther?”
“W-Wha?! That’s Her Imperial Highness the Empress Dowager?!”
Of course, given that Emperor Theodore Fandragon, who always maintained his dignity, had unwittingly used an address he would only use in private, it really was her…!
“Your Imperial Majesty. Have you been well? And have you been well too, Her Highness the Seventh Princess? Ohohohoho!!”
“Indeed, but….”
“Y-Yes….”
“I can see how flustered you are at a glance. Ohoho! This granny has so much to tell you!”
In other words, this was an event so enormous that even the emperor had been left completely flustered.
‘An eighty-year-old grandmother who had suffered from back pain suddenly became as young as a middle-aged woman?’
‘Is that right? Can that really be right?’
The gathered imperial citizens and nobles were all bewildered as well.
“Ugh, there are too many people….”
“Young Master, stand up straight! People are watching…!”
Their attention soon shifted to the genius alchemist of Enersis, who had gotten off the carriage with them.
‘He did something like that with magi-engineering? Isn’t that practically black magic?’
‘That can’t be… I can’t sense any black-magic energy at all…!’
‘Then… what if I get it too?’
People had always been interested in eternal life and health, and the older they grew, the more interested they became in rejuvenation.
“Ah.”
The tremendous number of gazes converging on Akion.
Even Akion, who was slow on the uptake, could easily guess the desire contained in those gazes.
“Tsk.”
Only then did Akion realize that he should have sneaked in.
“Your Imperial Majesty, Her Highness the Seventh Princess. Akion Enersis presents his respects.”
“Ah, yes. It’s you. To think you managed to make my mother look younger than I am. Impressive… Very impressive, but….”
“It would be difficult to explain everything here… I’ll be sure to tell you after we enter the palace.”
“Ahem. Understood. I shall escort my mother inside, so take your time and come in when you’re ready.”
“Yes, sir! I’ll enter the palace as quickly as possible!!”
On top of that, he could feel the emperor’s gaze asking, ‘What on earth did you do?!’
Akion wanted to go straight home.
“Ah, Young Master Akion! I’m from the House of Viscount Forcellum─!”
“What kind of magic did you use to rejuvenate Her Imperial Highness the Empress Dowager?!! M-My wife too─!!”
“Ahem, step back!”
“Young sir, this is dangerous! Please enter the palace at once!”
“Yes….”
Of course, he had come this time to propose supplying academy uniforms.
He could not return to Enersis until he finalized the business,
and in the meantime, no one was going to leave Akion alone….
“Oh? Young Master? Why are you crying?”
“Because I’m happy. So happy….”
Having brought this disaster upon himself, Akion had to wipe away his tears.
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