Just as Tang Mo finished writing his reply, Galsa excitedly knocked on Tang Mo's door. Tang Mo had just folded the letter and placed it in an envelope, "Galsa, just in time! Your father has been thinking of you. In Roger's letter, he asked me to check how you've been lately."
"Me? I'm doing quite well," Galsa, clever beyond his years, said to Tang Mo with a grin: "My studies are going great, and recently I've been learning swordsmanship from Master Wes."
"Hmm, that's good. I also mentioned in the letter that you've been doing well lately," Tang Mo said, looking at the boy who had once been his young apprentice and noticing that he had grown to about 1.7 meters tall in a year's time.
The food at Brunas was really good, plumping up the boy who had once been rather scrawny.
"By the way," Tang Mo said as he sealed the letter with his own seal and casually asked Galsa, who had come to see him, "What brings you here?"
Galsa remembered the purpose of his visit and immediately relayed the good news to Tang Mo: "My lord! That plant you wanted... we've found it!"
"Hmm? Which plant?" Tang Mo had people collecting seeds of various plants all over, hoping to find methods for hybrid crop cultivation, so he couldn't immediately recall which exact seeds had been found.
As Tang Mo pondered, Galsa explained: "A merchant ship that came by recently had an old sailor whose hometown grows a plant that, when dried and ground into pieces and set alight, can be inhaled and, once one gets used to the peculiar smell, is said to be very soothing."
"He has that plant?" Tang Mo asked in surprise and then eagerly inquired.
Galsa nodded affirmatively, "Yes, and there's plenty of it."
"Plenty?" Tang Mo became even more excited, feeling his craving for tobacco kicking in.
"Yes, in his hometown, many people have the habit of inhaling the smoke from burning this plant. Every time he goes home, he brings back a lot of it and smokes it when bored at sea," Galsa continued, nodding in response to Tang Mo's questions.
"Did he bring the stuff here?" Tang Mo asked almost without pausing for a second.
Galsa nodded again, "Yes, both the dried leaves and the ground powder are here."
"Bring it to me, let's have a look! Go on! If it's what I've been looking for, that'd be great," Tang Mo, like a smoker who had finally found a tobacco shop after searching for over a year, felt as though he finally had something to look forward to.
Tang Mo had always been in search of tobacco, a habit for him and also an incredibly lucrative industry.
Someone once joked that if a few billion people smoked a pack each, the country could fund an aircraft carrier. Although it was in jest, it spoke volumes about the profitability of the tobacco and alcohol industry.
Unlike alcohol, which involves grains, the cultivation of tobacco and tea leaves hardly takes up any good farmland, avoiding land conflicts.
Given the not-so-high food self-sufficiency rate at present, tobacco and tea are certainly more worth investing in and promoting over brewing.
As for the issue of the lighter's air-tightness, well... it didn't actually need to be solved. The most famous ZIPPO lighters in the United States were known for their leaking.
After stacking the hand-rolled cigarettes in a corner of a drawer, Tang Mo headed towards the noisy workshop with the two blueprints.
He handed his drawings to Mathews, who was discussing improvements to the Maxim gun with Parker, and shouted to his key technical team member, the old Dwarf, "Mathews! Take a look at these two items. Can you make them?"
"No problem," the old Dwarf glanced at Tang Mo's drawing of the cigarette case, dismissively passing that blueprint to Parker, and then looked at the other with the lighter's design.
Examining the strike wheel and simple airtight structure, the old Dwarf looked back at Tang Mo and said admiringly, "This is very sophisticated! Master! If it had been invented some years earlier, it could have become standard army artillery gear!"
"So you can make it?" Tang Mo wasn't concerned about how useful the gadget would be to artillerymen right now; he was only interested in when he could have his own ZIPPO lighter.
The old Dwarf set the blueprints aside on the table, speaking with a trace of disdain, "Leave it to me! Master, I roughly understand the purpose of these two items now—one is a simple box that can hold things, and the other is an ignition device. I will make them well for you, don't worry."
"I'm in a hurry," Tang Mo added another comment.
"Give me no more than two hours, and I will deliver them," Mathews confidently promised.
Soon enough, Tang Mo saw the two items Mathews had brought to his office, and to be honest, he was immediately stunned by their exquisite craftsmanship when he first laid eyes on them.
It was his first time seeing such a beautifully made cigarette case—crafted with metal reliefs that looked incredibly delicate.
Since it was made of two layers of metal, it felt satisfyingly heavy in his hand. The inner box fit precisely with not even the slightest gap, and the outer metal layer had been hammered into an exquisite design with a rough technique, conveying a profound sense of power and beauty.
Tang Mo caressed the twining vines of the embossed design with his fingers, his eyes fixed on the half-visible wolf head at the center of the case, his face full of satisfaction.
As a traditional blacksmith, Mathews's skill in such artistic design really had reached mastery.
And when Tang Mo saw the ZIPPO lighter, he was even more astonished by Mathews's sense of aesthetics.
It was also adorned with an embossed design—this time featuring the emblem of the Great Tang Group, Tang Mo's family crest—the dragon totem.
To be frank, Tang Mo had never imagined that Mathews could make the act of smoking feel so ceremonial. He was extremely fond of the two items, even feeling an almost unreal sense of magic.
He took out the hand-rolled cigarettes from his drawer, placing them one by one into the cigarette case. Meanwhile, Mathews stood quietly by his side, waiting for Tang Mo to change the world once again with his inventions.
After Tang Mo had finished, he held the last cigarette between his fingers, and with a finger from his other hand, he struck the lighter that had just been filled with kerosene.
"Ding!" With a crisp sound, the lighter's lid flipped open, and the flint made a gratifying scratch noise as it sparked.