Chapter [B4] 17 — War Preparations
I watched through a window from the Lord’s manor as the Lord left the seventh peak, alongside an entourage of carriages carrying weapons, supplies, and all sorts of things needed for the war front. The sun set in the distance, painting the skies red, and I felt a strange melancholy at the sight. Almost as if I was grieving the loss of how things had once been, and how they had become now.
As the carriages left the seventh peak city, I felt a weight settling onto my shoulders. Now, I was officially in charge of the seventh peak, and the weight of that responsibility began settling on me.
Not wanting to be weighed down by my emotions, I turned around and glanced behind me to acknowledge the presence that had just made its way into the chamber. Qiao Ying stood there, head bowed to me with scrolls in his hand as always. I nodded, glad to have something to do instead of just wallowing in my own feelings.
The first order of business was a report on how everything was going on.
“What’s it looking like?” I asked Qiao Ying, not needing to elaborate.
“Better than we had expected, but not good enough, sir,” Qiao Ying said frankly. That was part of what I liked about the man so much, his frankness and bluntness, he was not the type to sugar coat things. And that’s why I found myself holding back a sigh. That was the theme of this entire thing wasn’t it? Unprecedented achievements and progress and yet it was still not enough.
“Give me the report,” I said, and Qiao Ying straightened, nodding.
“The first order of business is in regards to weapon production. The blacksmiths are working as hard as they can but we’re at maximum capacity. They’re using everything they have and more, and actively recruiting and training anybody who’s free, but they have a shortage of actually skilled people who’d be able to guide them and do the necessary work that they simply can’t fill without more time. There is also a shortage of ores and the other peaks are in… well, they’re not in any condition to help us, so we are having to rely entirely on our own resources. The Qi vein around Taizhou and some of the other villages had some important ores such as Iron available which we were able to extract, but our capacity is running out. I’ve reached out to Yu Lan in the capital and she’s using your money to source and send us more metals, but even they have their hands tied.”
I frowned. There was not much that could be gone, these were all new tech and new techniques and the first few blacksmiths we’d trained were not that many, we couldn’t expect people to pick these things up so quickly, but even besides that, the ore issue was going to be a problem.