Chapter 69 — The Failed Project

As for the common folk, who in the past had rarely had the chance to see the domain's nobility and could now come into frequent contact with Hetty, Rebecca, and the others, they had developed no small fondness and closeness toward this viscount's daughter who was always running about busily: Gao Yang was a powerful pillar and backer, but to the common people he was rather too intimidating; Hetty was clever and not without kindness, but she came across as somewhat stern and unsmiling. Only Rebecca—this girl who ran everywhere lending a hand, who put on no airs whatsoever, and who greeted everyone with a smile—made almost everyone instinctively overlook her noble birth.

Another important reason was that Rebecca's big fireballs were genuinely first-rate for burning off brush and blasting stone...

Seeing Rebecca deep in thought, the few commoners helping nearby did not dare make a sound to disturb her. They did not understand what the Duke meant by ordering such a place built to fire stones, but the waterwheel the Duke had ordered constructed had already shown its wonders, and the camp's layout was quite ingenious. Add to that the smooth progress of the land reclamation and the presence of the newly recruited druid, and everyone had considerable faith in what Gao Yang arranged. Even if they couldn't see what use firing stones had... following orders was always the safe course.

After thinking hard for a while, Rebecca finally raised her head and reached a conclusion:

She was not cut out for this kind of thinking.

So with a wave of her little hand: "Pick all this up and bring it to my ancestor for a look!"

A short while later, Gao Yang was looking at the pile of... indescribable objects carried before him.

"This is the... 'cement' you fired?" He stared at Rebecca in astonishment. If he hadn't given the order himself, he could hardly have connected those gray-black lumps with the "cement" in his mind.

"Huh? So this stuff is called cement?" Rebecca's eyes went wide. "What a strange name."

But Gao Yang had no time to explain what the term meant. Though he had long been mentally prepared for setbacks, he still felt a subtle sense of defeat at this moment—and when he saw the "stone blocks," porous like pumice, that Rebecca pulled from another basket, his confirmation of the failure was complete.

"This is what you get when the finished product is mixed with water, just as you instructed," Rebecca blinked. "It really does set quickly, and once set it looks like stone on the outside, but in fact it's loose and brittle..."

Rebecca had barely finished speaking when a piece of amber wriggled out from some nameless nook or cranny: "What's this about something loose and crispy? Let me have a taste!"

Gao Yang casually pressed the creature back into the shadows, then turned to the dark, lumpy masses and sighed: "Looks like it was a failure."

He carefully went over Rebecca's procedure once more, confirming there was no problem from raw materials to production process. He also learned that Rebecca had gone out of her way to adjust the ratios of every raw material, as well as parameters like firing temperature and calcination time. She had even run several cross-tests using four kilns, and had swapped in limestone and clay of different textures and origins — yet the results all came out roughly the same.

Once again, this world had shown Gao Yang its peculiarity and its malice.

The properties of matter simply did not match up. Of the widely known earth-based formulas in his memory, how many were actually usable?

Gao Yang resolved that, conditions permitting, he would test every simple-to-verify item he knew from memory, and as he made this decision he steeled himself for the possibility that every last test would end in failure.

Meanwhile, Rebecca was still gazing at him expectantly. Having finally found a way to help everyone, only to fail, the girl seemed never to have considered that the "formulas" Gao Yang provided might be the problem — instinctively, she blamed herself: "Ancestral Inkwright... have I disappointed you?"

"No — any experiment is a long process, especially when you're searching for a new material," Gao Yang said with a shake of his head and a sigh. "Keep trying to calcine all sorts of different stones and earths, and I'll give you a few more possible formulas. Treat this as a long-term project, something to try whenever you have spare time — just don't let it slow down progress at the steel mill."