Civilization Chronicles: Rise of the Divine Creator

Turning to a different section of the forge, one where a few apprentice smiths were fiddling with a machine she had never seen before, Pauline inquired, "And what is this?"

"Oh, that?" Braxton grinned, "They’re called lathes."

"I assume they were your idea, yes?" Pauline glanced over at her small tour-guide.

"En," Lucas nodded, guiding the Great Elder over to one of the available lathes and picking up a nearby piece of wood, "The concept is simple. Simply attach a work piece with these clamps, then start rotating it."

This particular lathe was a manual one, so after Lucas clamped the wooden piece in place, he began stepping on a foot-pedal-system to get it spinning.

"Now, all you need to do is use one of these tools to shave away at the material," Lucas again demonstrated by grabbing a hard metal chisel, holding it tight, and pressing it against the rapidly spinning wooden block.

Chips and sawdust went flying at first, but it wasn’t long before the rough wooden block had become a smooth cylinder.

"It’s a simple concept," Lucas shrugged, "But I thought it could help save us a bit of time when it came to manufacturing certain small parts."

"Hmph, stop underselling it, boy," Braxton snorted, "These lathes are absolute miracle tools."

"This thing? A miracle tool?" Pauline wasn’t immediately convinced.

Sure, what Lucas just demonstrated to her was impressive, but as far as she could tell, it wasn’t really that different from having someone shape the material by hand.

Snickering, Braxton walked over to a nearby bench, grabbed a few things, and brought them back over, slapping one of them into the Great Elder’s hand.

Looking down at what she was handed, Pauline discovered it was a metal gear, a rather common component in a great many machines and devices, but one that she knew was not easy to manufacture due to the need for precision and its complicated design.

"Do you know how long it used to take us to make one of these things?" Braxton asked.

Wrinkling her brow, Pauline searched her memory, but didn’t find an answer, so she just shook her head. Unlike many people in positions of power and authority, she wasn’t afraid of looking ignorant. In her opinion, instead of wasting time pretending to know something, she might as well just ask and find out.

"A fine gear like this used to take a master smith like myself an hour to hammer out, and if I wanted to make a matching gear, it could take two to three times longer to make sure all the measurements line up properly," Braxton explained.

"I see," Pauline nodded, finding this to be reasonable.

"However," Braxton continued, "Using these new lathes, especially the big girl over there which is powered by the forge’s main waterwheel, even a novice smith can now make a dozen of these gears in less than an hour."

"Wha... that’s not possible..." Pauline gasped, unable to believe what she was hearing.

"Oh, trust me, it is," Braxton snickered as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a whole fistful of gears.

Grabbing the 10 of these gears and examining them closely, even using her Soul Sense to compare them, Pauline was unable to find any differences between them, which meant that by Rockwell Kingdom standards, they were identical.

"This... these... they’re..." Pauline’s jaw flapped dumbly as her hands trembled slightly, feeling like she was holding some kind of rare and priceless treasure, not a pile of ’simple’ iron pieces.

"Like I said, miracle tools," Braxton grinned proudly before launching into a long spiel about the lathes and their capabilities.

Pauline, of course, didn’t hear anything he was saying as her mind was too busy trying to catch up to the new reality before her.

If you had told her that a master smith like Braxton had taken 5 days to forge these, she would have readily accepted it as true, that was how impeccable the workmanship of these pieces was.

But for these to have been forged by a mere apprentice in just a few minutes...

This didn’t represent some small increase in productivity, or some minor boost to efficiency, it was a complete re-writing of the entire concept of metalworking and manufacturing!

The implications of this were so numerous and so wide-spread that Pauline literally frozen in place as the overwhelming possibilities flooded her mind.

It was only a minute later, when Braxton started going on and on about how they were now able to make ’standardized’ parts, dramatically increasing the number of complex machines and systems they could manufacture while drastically decreasing their cost, that Pauline was able to snap out of her daze.

"We were actually thinking of contracting out some of the work to the other forges and woodshops in the city," Braxton noted, a gleam of excitement flashing across his eyes, "Doing everything ourselves is wasting too much time."

"Wouldn’t that cause our technology to leak?" Pauline immediately realized the implication of this proposal and asked with some concern.

"We’ll keep the core technology in shop, like the lathes and the gear manufacturing, but for things like hammering out axels or producing wooden boards, there’s no need for us to do that ourselves," Braxton shrugged, not the least bit worried.

"All this, from such a simple thing..." Pauline muttered as she took a closer look at the lathe.

The concept was simple, as was the workmanship, but somehow, this dull tool, whose only purpose seemed to be holding and spinning things, now somehow looked like it was forged from pure Spirit Crystals in the Great Elder’s eyes.

Turning next to Lucas, Pauline couldn’t help staring hard at him, as if trying to bore a hole in his skull with her gaze so she could see just how his brain worked.

Had this been a year ago, Lucas would probably have felt awkward being glared at like this by a Mid-Rank Spirit Adept, but oddly enough, he had gotten used to these kinds of looks, so he just sheepishly scratched his head and shrugged, "I don’t like wasting time."

"Wasting... time?" Pauline’s face cramped.

This kid had practically revolutionized the entire Balfour Family forge, increasing its efficiency by perhaps 5-fold, and all he had to say was that he ’didn’t like wasting time’?

"Hahah," Braxton, who was probably the adult who had spent the most time together with Lucas these past 4 months, just patted Pauline on her shoulder and laughed, "Well, spend enough time around this brat and you’ll get use to it."

Allowing a small smile to creep onto her usually stoic face, Pauline shook her head lightly. She felt like she now understood why her mother had basically given Lucas the key to treasury and let him spend however much he wanted on whatever he wanted.