Chapter 23: Gamble

After sending away the messenger who came to ask for weapons, Chris knew that he should develop his weapons more urgently.

He has used it for a long time to accumulate his industrial base, and now it is time to test his own strength.

So, on the tenth day after the messenger left, Chris held a plenary meeting to discuss the next stage of development.

At the meeting, Chris first asked Gurlo about the popularization of education, because he clearly knew that to develop industry systematically, the talent pool must be an issue that must be paid attention to.

Previously, the mode of individually hand-made weapons and equipment, like Chris, who took the lead in staying up late and working overtime, could not support a large-scale war.

Hearing Collins’ question, Gurlo helped his glasses on the bridge of his nose and said: “According to development needs, we have built 30 primary schools and 9 junior high schools. Using the movable type printing technology you provided, we made A large number of textbooks were distributed to all students for free."

"It only takes one year, we can train many talents, when the time comes, the factory will have enough talents to use." He said while pushing a report to Chris: "We bought from nearby A large number of young people can be cultivated easily."

"It's really self-willed to have money..." Hearing that even the population of this world can be collected with gold coins, expanding like a hangover, Chris feels that having money is really a very pleasant thing.

In fact, there are still many problems that can be solved with money. In order to support its own industrialization process, Serris purchased a large amount of industrial raw materials from the three surrounding areas, but basically did not export anything of value.

Gurlo imported a large amount of cotton and stone from the Arante Empire. The cotton was used to support the textile industry and the production of some explosives, and the stone was completely used for the infrastructure of the entire Principality of Ailan Hill.

According to Chris' request, the crushed stone was stored and prepared for the roadbed laying of the railway in the future, while the entire stone was used for the construction of the factory building. Almost at any cost, countless factories have been erected, and many of them have no time to install machinery, so they can only measure the size and leave them vacant in place.

Constructions of this kind that only invest without asking for return abound in Serris, but there are also profitable projects that have been put into production. For example, the two cement plants that have just been built are currently the busiest factories. Manual cement manufacturing has been going on day and night, but the cement produced is not enough.

All the purchased items were used in the construction of Ailan Hill, and nothing was wasted. The products of cement plants and stone are used to build buildings, and minerals are used to smelt into metal. The quality of life of civilians in the Principality is improving at a speed visible to the naked eye. The hundreds of thousands of gold coins brought by Desai are also Disappeared at a speed visible to the naked eye.

"I'm desperately purchasing food." Dianes, who was tired and almost detached, said in a tired report: "Our population has at least doubled in the past two months... The reserve of food is definitely not enough. So we must prepare in advance."

His report fully proves that there is no money: food procurement is definitely a major direction. In order to feed more and more people, food can only be ensured by procurement. This is by no means a one-off deal, because next year the population of the Principality of Ailan Hill will definitely increase.

It is almost an endless loop to gather people because of the shortage of people, and to provide sufficient food because of the shortage of people. Most of the time, in order to allow the surrounding civilians to immigrate to Ailan Hill, Chris will also order food subsidies for all residents.

Now he has enough manpower and enough troops, but the pressure is passed on to Diens, who manages population and civil affairs. This middle-aged man is not busy now, and he doesn't even have time to sleep.

The situation on Strider's side is not much better: "I only came back from the Higgs Kingdom yesterday... The kerosene there... Uh, no, the price of oil has risen by 50%. The biggest problem Yes, the output of this thing is not that big. We have money, and we can't buy much in stock."

Although there is consumption of alchemy in this era, in most cases, kerosene is only a weapon used to defend cities, so the output is small and the demand is not large. Now Chris is consuming a lot of oil and plans to reserve more, which is a bit difficult.

The bare-headed Mr. Strider bought almost all the kerosene in the Higgs Kingdom, but he couldn't meet Chris's requirements or even a fraction.

Because the number of purchases and the number of products sold are too much, Ailan Hill's current situation is that what is sold has plummeted, and what has been bought has skyrocketed. In order to grab the speed of development, such an irritating thing, the Principality of Ailan Hill can only pinch his nose to recognize it.

"The construction of the factory is very fast! After all, most of Ailan Hill's expenses are piled up on the industry I am responsible for." Smith, who is already the best engineer in the city of Serris, said.

Holding a report on the industrial process, he said to Chris: “We built ten blast furnaces and started smelting steel with a new type of timer. The efficiency has increased dozens of times. The pass rate of steel has been satisfactory. There is no problem with the production of the new 75mm caliber infantry gun."

"However, there are also some unsatisfactory places." He pointed to a line in the document and complained to Chris: "The amount of copper is seriously insufficient. We have smelted 1 million copper coins, but we still can't keep up with the consumption of copper. speed."

A sufficient amount of copper can be said to be the calcium flakes of modern industry. A large number of problems that could not be solved in the early industry were solved by the good metal properties of copper. This metal also has anti-sky conductivity and is the best choice for wire and telephone lines.

"The copper problem can only be solved by increasing purchases." Chris said depressedly: "In addition, think of a way to use iron as an alternative."

During World War II, Germany was also a severely copper-deficient country. When stretched out, the Germans even had to use iron to make the shells of bullets. Although the bullet casing made of iron is not as good as the copper bullet casing, it is better to have bullets than no bullets, right?

Therefore, under the premise that he can't think of a good way, Chris can only reduce the requirements for use first, and let the factory start mass production of bullets with iron shells. Anyway, occasionally the problem of getting stuck, the soldiers on the front line should understand the same sentence, isn't it better than nothing?

Taking a look at Wagron, Chris raised his hand to indicate that he didn't need to introduce the training situation of the army. Because he only went to see it yesterday, the situation in the barracks was not ideal either: "I will talk to you about your problem alone for a while!"

"Yes!" Wagron reluctantly gave up his plan to expose his family ugliness. Recently, the funds invested in military training are actually not a lot. However, the talents in the military are too scarce. He can only reluctantly let him go. The training barely continued.

Because the focus of Ailan Hill's construction recently is not on the army, everyone has no intention of asking Wagron to report. Soon after he passed him, Gurlo went on to talk about the extremely important education issue.

It is not easy to make a society move towards industrialization. In practice, it is much more complicated than Chris thought.

Even if he has countless books and knowledge to guide specific actions, the accumulation of a large amount of work is still a daunting huge project.

Now, the surrounding areas of Serris, including Arante in the south, the Tuborg in the north, and the Higgs Kingdom in the west, have benefited from the crazy development of the Principality of Alan Hill in violation of the law. They earned a lot of gold coins from Ailan Hill, which once made the border area extremely prosperous.

But who would have thought that Alan Hill, who has been burdened with too many unreasonable contradictions, had already made up his mind from the beginning to use a war to pass on all the domestic contradictions, open up the market, and complete one. Gorgeous transformation!

As long as the defeated countries can be allowed to pay for their own development, this kind of illogical leapfrog development can be established. Ailan Hill will be able to eliminate the disaster invisible, and then get a short-term development opportunity.

Of course, if it continues to develop in this way, Ailan Hill will still expand abroad, attacking the next neighboring country like a glutton, and it will not stop until it eats all the neighboring countries.

"The next thing we need to do is to set up the arsenal as soon as possible! No matter what method is used! We have to prepare for a war!" Chris looked at his confidants and said.

He put his hands on his chest and thought about his decision at this moment: "Sit down like this, we have only one ending."

"Yes, I just made a statistics. If we can't get a huge sum of 300,000 gold coins within half a year, we will be insolvent... we can declare bankruptcy." Desaier is more sensitive to this. Before the meeting, he also reminded Chris to pay attention to the problem of insufficient funds.

If you slowly digest internally and develop other new industries, it is not impossible for the Principality of Ailanhill to digest its own industrial achievements. But that would only slow down their own development speed and waste precious time.

Including Chris, Desaier and Dians and others are all aware that they seem to have more irresponsible, or better options for war!

The reason is really simple: if war can be won, why not use war to solve the problem? Looking at it from the perspective of being able to win, the war brings all tantalizing benefits!

As long as the war can be won, Ailan Hill can expand the territory, have more population, can offset part of the debt, and reduce the pressure on the border...

All of these are very tempting in front of you. For the first time, Chris felt the mood of those war fanatics: After careful calculations, you can roughly determine the win or loss of the gamble, it is too people can not help but want to place a bet.

Unlike the others, Chris has a lot of bets and he has a huge win. No matter whether Desaier or Chris, they didn't even think about losing the war. In fact, they didn't need to think about it, because they would definitely not be able to see the outcome of losing the war alive.