151 Dinner in the tiny house

3rd May 1574

"Okay boys, just like we did it last time. This time just use the mortar mixed with some stones for the foundation."

With Elia at my side, heating up the bed in our newly created small, wooden house and supporting me whenever I felt that the number of tasks at hand started to overwhelm me, the rate at which all of the projects were progressing shoot up through the roof.

If I were to be honest, her presence brought all the benefits of having Governor by my side when it came to pulling me down to earth whenever I started dreaming about far-off future, along with the comfort of having someone who trusted me completely always beside me all the way to the fact that with every moment she spent with me on the site, I realised stronger and stronger that whenever I felt unsure about something, her arms were like safe heaven for my soul.

"How did it go?"

For some strange reason, Elia insisted on making the meals for us herself, claiming that she didn't want her cooking skills that she learned while touring the country on the run from her family to rust and go to waste.

"They are already building the furnace. If everything will go according to the schedule, we should be able to start producing the concrete tomorrow morning."

Thanks to the influx of all the workers, resources and money both from my own lands and Sandomir, rather than putting everyone to work all at once, wherever that was possible, I adopted the use double shift, with everyone working for ten hours a day, some from the morning to the afternoon and some working from the afternoon to the twilight. This way, only the darkest hours of the night where only the moon and stars would spare us some of its light were free out of the sight of my men moving stuff around and laying bricks or digging up the ground all over the entire area!

"Here, have some stew."

Placing a bowl filled with a steaming hot soup with multiple pieces of meat floating around rare vegetables, Elia poured a portion for herself before moving a platted with a freshly baked breed ordered directly from the villagers that opted to commute to their workplace by the boat from their village rather than decreasing their income by a tiny bit and just living in the housing I provided for them.

"While it's nice to see everything growing at a fast rate, how are we standing in terms of money? Is what I brought with me enough for a while?"

Since I decided against using the funds obtained from the beer trade solely on this current project of mine, we had to make do with just a seventh of the weekly profit. After paying up the workers, suppliers and piling up a small portion of the gold for emergencies, the amount that was left was still mostly invested back into expanding the production of the beer, slowly but steadily multiplying how much this seventh of the total profit amounted to.

Taking a wooden spoon in my hand, I submerged it into the thick liquid of the soup, before raising it to my mouth and taking a bite of a fresh piece of bread topped with a frugal layer of butter.

"Great soup by the way!"

Just one sip was enough to showcase how quickly did Eve adapt her cooking to my tastes, reaching the perfect level of sourness in the soup all the while allowing the pieces of the bread to flow nicely through the throat thanks to the thin layer of butter.

Looking down on the soup to take another spoon out of it, I realised why this simple sight made me feel strange. In the future, the mean would still be way more expensive than the vegetables, making the plan based filling the basis for any soup, but in the dish arousing my hunger right now, I could only spot several pieces of vegetables with most of the solid elements of the soup based on meat!

But we couldn't expect anything else right now. With how greenhouses required rather modern technology to operate, only certain lucky regions in the entire commonwealth could pride themselves with an early haul of the vegetables, making them quite a prized commodity in the last month before they would turn into something that anyone could get from the side of the road without even attracting the attention of its owner!

"As for this carpentry plant, do you think those three steam horses will be enough? After all, I heard about the accident with the first prototype, and I can't imagine you lessening the testing period for every single one of them!"

Just like Elia pointed out, every single steam engine that was produced and finished, had to operate in a temporary cage for an entire day before the fire below its boiler would be extinguished and the engine itself transported to the powerplant, located perfectly between the mines and the shore.

"Don't worry. While I plan the building to be massive, most of it will be just conveyors and warehouses. After all, constructing machines capable of completing the entire product by itself wouldn't be just hard, it would be a waste of resources and manpower. After all, if we make each product exactly the same, its value would plummet!"

This bit, was the one thing I was sure about even without the use of the system. Working in the marketing department of my company for quite a while, such cheap tricks like limited supply and the product being the only one of its kind were a child play for me!

Thinking about this, someone said that producing one dress allowed the company to put a price tag reaching tens of thousands on it, while with one more dress available on the market, the furthest it could go was only in hundreds!

"But why should we limit its capability to just cutting the stuff? While I'm not an expert by myself nor do I understand the depth at which it would all work, if all the products will be handmade, wouldn't it defeat the purpose of speeding up the work in the first place?"

As Elia's word coincided with the time when my spoon finally hit the bottom of my bowl, I took a nearby napkin to clean my mouth before smiling to my dear wife.

"You see, we can make a simple machine that will put the nail to connect two parts. We can make one that will provide the craftsmen with the exact parts they need. But as long as we make them put those parts together by hand, everything that would come out of the factory will be unique! After all, there is no point in improving the simple work, as it can be done by humans. What's important, is streamlining everything else!"