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-VB-

Deacon Benjamin did as he promised. He asked the people after their welfare, their questions about the faith, and whether they needed help or not. He didn\'t ask anything remotely political or speak threateningly.

In fact, he got more questions from the locals about why the bishop started the war.

I helped explain to them that it wasn\'t the bishop who declared war but the greedy nobles who attacked the good bishop.

It wasn\'t until later that night that I talked with the deacon again, but this time, he was curious about the "alliance of villages" that I helped establish.

"So what is the Compact about?" he asked me. I could see that he was honestly curious. I supposed that he already knew the general gist about what the alliance was about.

The bishop of Chur, technically, remained an enemy of the Compact of the Seven Towns not because we fought against each other. This was because the Bishop of Chur was our geopolitical rival; they laid claim over the valley where two of our seven-member towns resided (St. Peters and Langweis), held ecclesiarchal domain over the region, and played political games with the surrounding nobles, who were our direct enemies.

Count of Sax-Misox died, yes, but the title of Count of Sax-Misox was still in conflict with us. Just because the man died and his army broke up and retreated didn\'t mean that the war he pursued against the Baron of Vaz stopped and ended. The new Count of Zernez had signed a peace treaty with me, so he was honor-bound to keep it; beyond the peace treaty, he had no manpower, gold, or will to fight me.

Telling Ben about what the Compact wanted would be counterproductive to the Compact\'s goals.

If we had a goal, that was.

The thing about the current "model" of the Compact was that it was an emergency defensive pact between seven towns plus myself. I intended to keep them all interested in remaining within the Compact by providing them with industry.

"No, I don\'t think I will tell you," I replied. "You are still beholden to the Prince-Bishop of Chur, who is the secular ruler of Chur and the lands he claims. He did go to war with the Baron of Vaz over a small portion of farmland that belonged to the baron."

The deacon nodded uncomfortably yet understandingly. "I see your point. Very well, I won\'t pry."

The next day, we traveled to Langweis, the town deeper in the valley, then he returned back to Chur while I crossed over the mountains with my men back to Davos, and finally, from there, I traveled on my own back home.

With my first patrol of the Seven Towns complete, it was finally time to work on my own goals.

-VB-

The first thing I worked on once I got home was put two ideas to test.

The first idea was primitive blacksmithing automation using water power. Unlike the volatile and unpredictable wind, water flowed down constantly without stopping.

So with Arnold\'s help (he was more or less my apprentice now), I made a water wheel, a mill, and large cogs. I reached LvL.50 in Logging, Construction, and Carpenter while working on the mill, and the 25% reduction in material need was a huge boost to how quickly we could construct the watermill.

In only two weeks, I had a working mill (without using Construction\'s instant building mechanism), and also got a new skill.

[Engineering] LvL.1 (Pre.Req: Construction LvL.50)

Making a better solution to your problem.

*0.05% reduction in material cost for tools

*0.01% increase in tool output

… I wasn\'t sure what "tool output" was or what objects qualified as tools. Considering that I couldn\'t - as of yet - detect how much damage I delivered, the best I could do was …

It didn\'t take long after having that thought for me to go looking for tools.

However, this only happened to objects that were made after my skill acquisition.

Anyways, the first thing I did with the water mill? Because the end of its mechanical cogs ended with a hammer within my fort (the entire mill was just outside the walls to the east) right next to my smithing area, I melted down a bunch of iron to test out the gear mechanics and the hammering speed and strength of the watermill.

And then when I was ready to have someone hammer the molten iron into shape, I walked over to the wall and pulled down the lever with a grunt.

The lever controlled a mechanism that lowered a cog down onto the slowly spinning gear within the watermill itself.

And when the cog slammed into place, the hammer began to move.

And move hard it did.

Arnold, Alvia, some of the residents of the fort, and I stared with pride as the watermill-powered hammer hammered the heated iron piece held by the tongs by Arnold. It was nothing like the hydraulic presses and hammers I remembered from my previous life, but this was still good!

"Well, I guess that\'s a start!" I chuckled. I could improve the water mill\'s design in the future as well, so I wasn\'t going to complain at all.

I then proceeded to make molds. Most of these molds would have heated iron laid on top of them while someone (our water mill) would hammer it into place. The shaped iron would then be processed (sharpening, cleaning, sanding, etc) by someone else with the right skills.

Now, I had a lot of options when it came to what I should make.

I needed to make something that was not noticeable, something made from iron and steel but something that wouldn\'t stand out like sword or speartips (because those were still made by castle blacksmiths rather than village blacksmiths).

I already thought to make nails. It was probably the cheapest product for us to make. Sure, it wouldn\'t get us a lot of profit per object sold, but the point was to make a profitable industry, not make a massively profitable industry.

Actually, I knew that nails were important. I kept underplaying the nail\'s importance and how cheap they would be, but I keep forgetting that nails were hard to come by for normal people because iron was hard to come by. I had a bunch of iron because I could mine for it without getting black lungs, but I could only do that because my power more or less broke physics to make it happen.

Nails wouldn\'t just be used to fasten building materials together but also on wine barrels.

… I would have to talk with passing peddlers and merchants to get a better accounting of the needs of the market, but I will make nails. With the water hammer, the speed of the smithing should be faster.

Yeah, nails will be the start of my fort\'s export economy.

-VB-

Arnold blew out a breath as he pulled the finished nail out from under the scary hammer and tossed it into the pile next to him. Then he reached into the heated furnace next to him with the same tongs and pulled out another heated rod. He waited for the hammer to pull up and placed the rod down at an angle. The hammer came down, and he winced as the impact strike of the hammer crawled up his arms. He quickly flipped the rod around and winced again as the opposite got hammered. He then placed the iron into a slot where it slid down until its now two-sided tip wedged into the carved groove.

The hammer came down, and a new flathead was made for the nail.

He removed this one as well, and then walked over to the wall next to the hammer and pulled the lever up with his fatigued arms.

The hammer clunked as it shuddered once and stopped moving.

Arnold had to give it to Hans. This was a genius way to make nails.

And what did Hans say when he told him this?

"No, I\'m sure someone else came up with it first. I\'m just reinventing something the world already knew… and maybe lost somewhere along the way."

Hans said things like that a lot, but this one stuck with him.

Arnold knew that what he did here in his homeland with his family was nothing new, but for how long had this been "not new"?

It got him thinking.

But right now, he had a job to do: sharpening those nails.