Chapter 450 — The Prelude to the Age of Print

The book was old, and had clearly been read through many, many times; the print in some places had grown slightly blurry, and the edges of the pages were badly worn, but it was still evident that it had been carefully treated and preserved to this day.

"This is... Mr. Santis lent it to me," Betty explained, accounting for where the book had come from. "I'm almost finished. I have to give it back when I'm done."

Rebecca looked at Betty in some surprise, and in that moment a thought suddenly surfaced in her mind, which was so often given over to flights of fancy:

Betty was only two years younger than she was.

Yet this girl, only two years her junior, was only now just beginning to recognize basic words, only now just able to understand a primer that Rebecca had already read through and grown bored of by the age of seven — and she was reading it with relish.

And if her own Ancestor had not insisted on spreading general education, this little maid would likely never in her life have had the chance to lay hands on this book.

Rebecca blinked. She had never regarded Betty as a "lower sort"; she got along with everyone in the castle like family, even the lowliest menial who shoveled the horse dung and kitchen maids like Betty. When she was very, very small, she had even dragged Betty and several other little maids of similar age into organizing little castle expeditions, and they had played together like sisters.

But why had she never noticed... that Betty did not even own a single book?

Rebecca grew a little bewildered. She could not work out why, in all the more than ten years of her life before this, she had never noticed such a thing — but she felt that the reason she had noticed it today was that the "arcane printing press" was on the verge of success.

The Ancestor had once said that once printing presses became widespread, the age of print would arrive, and the monopoly of a few over knowledge and the means by which knowledge spread would inevitably be utterly shattered. By then, even the most ordinary and impoverished of households ought to have a few books of their own at home.

Industrial printing was an indispensable link in extending Cecil's "general education" across the whole of the Southern Frontier.

"Betty, do you want books? Books of your very own."

Betty looked a little confused, but she thought it over seriously and then nodded hard: "Mm."

Rebecca laughed. "Then in a little while I'll give you some books!"

In fact, she could give Betty plenty of books right now — she had everything from simple primers to genuine magic tomes — but she felt that none of those books met her requirements. She wanted to wait until the printing press was put to use, until the first batch of books produced by industrial mass production came off the line, and then pick out suitable ones from among them to give to Betty. Only that would be meaningful.

When Betty heard Rebecca's words, she was bewildered for even longer, and only after a good while did she say, dazed: "But books are very precious..."

"No, books won't be that precious anymore. My Ancestor once said something: knowledge may be valuable, but it should not be noble, and still less should it be expensive," Rebecca said, shaking her head. Noticing Betty's muddled look, she laughed. "It's fine — it's fine if you don't understand. Soon you'll see it with your own eyes — from now on, every ordinary person in this land will not only be able to read and to read the newspapers, but will also be able to own books of their own! Lots and lots of books!"

Betty widened her eyes and stared, somewhat dazed, at this "young miss of the viscount's house" who had, more or less, grown up alongside her. After a long while, she managed to say, "My lady... that way of speaking is a little like the master's."

Rebecca scratched at her hair. "Eheh, right? I think it's like him too."

...

The first usable industrial printing press was completed a little sooner than Gao Yang had expected.

By the very next afternoon, he was standing on the "mechanical round platform" of the Machinery Research Institute, looking at this massive machine that Nikoxi Egg had personally machined, personally assembled, and personally tuned to completion.

Along with Gao Cen and the others who had come to the Machinery Research Institute to inspect the equipment were Hetty, Rebecca in her role as project director, and Godwin Orlando, head of the Cecil Newspaper and the man in charge of the news and publishing department.

The new printing press crouched on the ground like a steel monster, with long metal channels extending from its front and rear — those channels were presumably the paper-transport structure — while at the machine's center one could see that all-important "arcane transfer cylinder," held by a movable bracket above a flat plate at the heart of the machine, the outline of gears and connecting rods faintly visible on the inner side of that bracket.

Below the transfer apparatus lay the guide channel through which the paper would pass, and at the very bottom, the ink plate.

Beyond these main structures, there was also an "attachment structure" on the side of the press that looked like a separate machine altogether. On top of that square, half-a-man-tall metal box, Gao Yang saw the "large color-palette keyboard" Rebecca had mentioned, along with the "editing mechanism" used to control the projection crystal inside the arcane transfer cylinder — dozens of dazzling keys arranged in a fan shape, mounted on a slanted metal panel, and at the top of that panel he could also see a small projection crystal.

That projection crystal was presumably there to provide the "preview."

Judging by appearance alone, the complexity of this apparatus far surpassed any magical machine that had ever been built in the territory before.

If he had not known Nikoxi Egg's abilities, Gao Yang would never have believed that such a thing could have been built in a single day.

"See, didn't I tell you — you'd be seeing it soon enough!" Nikoxi Egg floated beside the new machine, saying this with thick pride in its voice.

Gao Yang gazed in wonder at the industrial printing press before him, but what surprised him even more was Nikoxi Egg's form — this silver-white metal sphere, originally a perfect globe, now actually looked a little square.

It had not yet reached the point of having proper edges and corners, but it was indeed a little square.

"How did you... how did your shape end up like this?"

"Oh, I've been messing with this printing press all this time, and I got square-tired — it's fine, I'll just sleep it off later."

Gao Yang: "..."

What was wrong with this sphere?