Chapter 443: Good News And Bad News
Once the frustratingly handsome and stupidly pigheaded man had left, Victoria slumped back into her chair and rubbed her temples hard. She wasn’t offended by Dean’s rude behaviour just now, partially because she had gotten used to his frequent outburst, but mostly because she knew he was right.
What she, or rather, what Lucas was asking of Dean wasn’t reasonable, a fact that had become painfully obvious over the last month.
This was actually not the first time Victoria had set up a new town, she had done this twice before. If smaller villages and outpost were also counted, the former Viscount had overseen the establishment and construction a dozen such settlements in the past.
Although none of those operations had been as large-scale, time sensitive, and complex as Project Maple, Victoria thought she had accounted for that in her original timeline estimates.
What she hadn’t been able to anticipate was all the additional requirements Lucas would dump on them for the construction process.
Clearly, she had been far too optimistic, at least when it came to the construction aspect of this operation.
Laura and Blaine had also just finished giving the Head Manager a progress report on the 4 new villages, and the news there wasn’t encouraging either.
If they were just building ordinary villages, things might have been going more smoothly, but with Lucas’ stringent requirements for road sizes, house spacing, foundation strength, water availability and drainage, waste disposal, and a whole host of other seemingly inane details, construction had been going much slower than they had anticipated despite the massive amount of workers they had hired.
The situation in Maple Town was even worse, as Lucas’ list of demands had been even more exaggerated here.
Victoria, and even Dean, would freely admit they didn’t know what half the things Lucas ordered them to put in place were for. As such, both of them had separately and jointly questioned the young boy during this past month when he flew out for inspections.
Lucas felt it was reasonable to explain himself, so he did just that, but even after he had gone through his entire chain or thought, Dean and Victoria still didn’t completely understand what he was thinking.
The boy tried several different times to get his point across, but it was ultimately a futile effort. The gap in basic knowledge, especially with regards to scientific concepts, was just too large to bridge with a few quick on-the-fly lessons.
Realizing this, Lucas was forced to resort to his least favourite method of persuasion, ordering two of his most competent and most trusted subordinates to just follow his instructions.
Victoria and Dean were naturally not happy about this because it felt like Lucas was telling them they were too stupid to understand, which in all honesty he was; however, they also understood their positions and accepted the order.
Lucas was the boss and he was footing the bill, so while they could complain and raise concerns, when he made a final decision, it was their job to execute, whether they understood all his motivations or not.
The young boy giving them extensions on deadlines and lowering the total expected production numbers for this season helped ease their frustrations as well.
Now, it seemed, Victoria would have to deliver more bad news to her boss as further delays seemed unavoidable at this point.
If there was one silver lining in all of this, it was that the actual harvesting of lych tree sap wasn’t just proceeding as expected, it was going better than any of them had anticipated.
As soon as Victoria realized that the town and villages weren’t going to be completed on time, she had diverted another 10% of her workforce to tapping lych trees, figuring that if she couldn’t get the settlements built, the least she could do was prove the viability of Project Maple by reaching their target amount of sugar for the season.
With some 500 workers now dedicated to drilling holes into trees, hanging buckets, and collecting sap, it was only natural for a bottleneck in transportation capacity to appear.
Hauling so much sap back to Falcon’s Bend from the settlements without specialized equipment was becoming an issue, so Victoria was very much relieved when 3 more of the standard evaporator stoves were shipped up from Misty City at the end of March.
Now, there were enough stoves for each of the settlements to have their own, and because of the recent focus on industrial buildings over residential ones, workshops dedicated to boiling down sap into sugar were now operating 24 hours a day.
The only reason the fires ever went out was to perform maintenance checks on the stoves, never because they had run out of sap.
There was still only a single star lych furnace setup available, so the higher-end sugar was still being processed exclusively in Falcon’s Bend.
Victoria had considered bringing that furnace to the new town as the processing building for it was ready, but it was actually still more efficient to transport goods from the 5 new settlements back to the city, rather than trying to bring it to Maple Town.
In any case, with 1 month left in the estimated harvest season, Victoria’s team had already managed to produce over 250 tons of High Tier 2, and nearly 60 tons of Mid Tier 3 maple sugar.
Assuming nothing else went wrong, and that the boilers could keep up, Lucas’ Head Manager figured they would end this season with nearly 700 tons of sugar worth in excess of 15 million Gold!
That was all very exciting, but the best part was that according to the tapping teams, they had barely scratched the surface. There were still hundreds of thousands of lych trees that remained untapped around the 5 new settlements, meaning they hadn’t even begun to see the upper limit of maple sugar production yet.
What’s more, there were 10 additional locations nearby with the potential to become sugar villages, and the scouts and lumberjacks from Falcon’s Bend were continuing their search for more.
It was completely conceivable that by this time next year, a million more taps could be installed, increasing sugar production by at least 10-fold!