Chapter 529 — Holy Light and Holy Light
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
On the road back to the lord's manor, Gao Yang still shared a carriage with Amber. Watching the merchants' guildhall recede behind them through the window, the half-elf lady could not hold back a mutter: "Five years of mining rights... Say, you aren't actually planning to dig that whole place out in five years, are you?"
"Dig it out? Of course not—even with advanced mining machinery and Rebecca crystals to blast the hills apart, hollowing out the White Sand Hills in five years would be impossible," Gao Yang shook his head. "But I can at least guarantee we extract in five years what the Easterners planned to take in fifty—and if we don't care about any consequences and go straight for destructive mining, that number could even double."
Amber blinked, seeming at a loss for words for a moment. Only after mulling it over for a good while did she suddenly ask, "Honestly—is this really the right thing to do?"
Gao Yang glanced at her. "Do what?"
"...Selling weapons to the King, selling alchemical potions to the East, making this civil war more and more impossible to contain..."
Gao Yang shook his head. "Even if I didn't sell, do you think this civil war could still be contained?"
"That's not what I meant," Amber scratched her hair. "I just feel like everyone dying right now is Ansethian... Don't you care?"
Meeting Amber's puzzled gaze, Gao Yang spoke slowly: "Frankly, I do care, because those are people—precious population. But I also don't care—because they're not Cecil people. At least not yet."
On this matter, Gao Yang had no intention of invoking conscience or morality, for he was acting, quite simply, for profit—even if what he schemed for was the profit of the whole Southern March. His goal was all of Anseth, but for now he lacked the capacity for that, so his only choice was to feed the industrial machine of the South as quickly as possible—even if that machine had to drink blood and eat flesh. After all, he was the lord of the Southerners now, not the King of Anseth.
Judging by the inevitable shape of the future, the King and the Eastern Legion would sooner or later be enemies.
And on the other hand, his export of arcanotech weapons and alchemical potions to the King and the East had a second consideration: he wanted to try to force Anseth to develop.
Promoting arcanotech in the Southern March had brought a great deal of experience and hard lessons. This land was like a blank sheet of paper—once the old nobility were swept away, Gao Yang could splash his ink however he liked. Even so, arcanotech had not developed smoothly here. So what if he wanted to spread arcanotech across all of Anseth? What an immense undertaking would that be?
Typhon was already watching hungrily from the sidelines, just waiting for Anseth to bleed its last drop. If one day the civil war ended and Gao Yang succeeded in seizing control of this land, the Typhonians would certainly not give him time to develop slowly and close the gap. To avoid the worst outcome, he had to put Anseth on the arcanotech industrial train starting now—even if he had to tie it down and drag it aboard.
As industrial products, alchemical potions and arcanotech armaments could not exist on their own; they required an entire industrial chain to support them. Just as Prince Edmund of the East had realized the importance of factories and production technology before departing from Bellac, the nobles of the royal capital would also soon realize the necessity of arcanotech industry for maintaining an "industrialized army." Traditional nobles might be narrow-minded, but they were not incapable of thought, and they would not allow their lifeline to be completely controlled by Gao Yang.