As Augustine Reibert morosely looked at the note in front of him, he finally remembered that he seemed to have indeed forgotten about a debt he owed.
Truth be told, as the Prime Minister of Poplar Kingdom, he dominated the entire kingdom, standing second only to the King, so he had never considered that one day someone would actually come to collect a debt from him.
Augustine's rise to power had been so swift that it even gave Reibert a sense of an unreal illusion. He even thought that he had touched the threshold of becoming the Empire's Prime Minister, or even the Emperor himself.
Such illusions, such castles in the air, made him forget that everything he had seemed to come from a distant place, from an obscure human being.
Now, the other party seemed to be coming to collect the debt, and doing so by knocking on his door, which suddenly reminded him of many things, many, many things!
"My dear Augustine, worrying now is of no use, because our first fleet has already set sail for the Southern Waters, and nothing can stop the outbreak of this naval battle now," said the King of Poplar Kingdom with quite a good mood lately, comforting Reibert with a smile.
His Prime Minister had brought him one victory after another, and the size of his kingdom had already tripled!
Having defeated their Orc neighbors, they took control of a large number of pastures. They had more horses and more food, which could be used for further expansion.
After obtaining support from the Shireck Consortium, they were nearly invincible. Any resisting country would be easily defeated by them.
The only thing constraining the Elf Race was that the speed of their weapon production could not keep up with the pace of their expansion.
Since defeating the Orcs, Poplar Kingdom had consistently been short on metal, and the production of bullets couldn't keep up with the consumption of the front-line troops.
Everyone suffered yet reveled in this problem, because they had never encountered such good fortune before—whenever their troops had the logistical support to attack, they were certain to achieve victory.
The problem seemed simple. They just needed to frantically increase their production capacity, and that's precisely what the Augustin Family did.
As a result, they did indeed reap benefits—in the past six months, the Augustin Clan became extremely wealthy, and Poplar Kingdom launched outward expansions and, relying on the Augustin Family's munitions, secured a record of complete victory.
Even more so, they had improved their weapons, creating a bunch of strange and messy repeater weapons that turned out to be quite useful when facing enemies armed with Shireck flintlock guns on the battlefield.
However, problems were not nonexistent as they had pushed their production capacity to the limit, and the downstream industries were struggling to keep up.
Steel smelting could be directly increased by building blast furnaces, but where the iron ore would come from, was unknown. The Elves had really not considered using steam engines to boost the productivity of the mines first, as their other factories also desperately needed steam engine equipment.
The frenzied competition for steam engines among factories led to a bottleneck in the production of steam engine equipment—the Elf Race didn't have an electric power system to balance the power generated by steam engines, so they had to place a steam engine at every location that needed one, which was far less efficient compared to Tang Mo's electric power transmission.
The mines could only rely on hard labor from miners. If they were short on manpower, they forced overtime, and if that still wasn't enough, they used slaves to mine; efficiency was terribly low.
Low efficiency resulted in insufficient production capacity, and the ultimate solution was to rely on Poplar Kingdom's naval fleet to make large-scale purchases from other countries.
They had plenty of money from annexing neighboring countries and exploiting the citizens of the occupied areas, so Poplar Kingdom wasn't short on funds, and purchasing metal ores was going very smoothly at first.
"I really didn't know that you had a debt relation with the recently frequently mentioned Great Tang Group," said the King of Poplar Kingdom to his most capable subordinate, "It seems that the situation is already irreversible, isn't it?"
Reibert bowed his head and answered with some embarrassment, "I'm afraid so, and thus I plan to prepare a delegation to negotiate with the owner of this Great Tang Group in Leite Kingdom, seeing as it's all just business, with no deep-seated hatred..."
"We sank one of their ships, and they've sunk at least 30 of our merchant ships! This is already enmity," the King of Poplar Kingdom interrupted Reibert, quite agitated.
If a kingdom was blockaded at their doorstep and had so many ships sunk while still maintaining restraint, then there was no need to mention valor or spine.
This was an outright provocation, practically a declaration of war! Therefore, as the King of Poplar Kingdom, Poplar XI did not intend to let this go so easily.
Meanwhile in Brunas, Tang Mo was looking through the complete dossier on the Augustine family of the Poplar Kingdom, a thick stack that seemed comprehensive. Exclusive tales from m v lem|p-yr
"Aren't you worried that sending a warship to challenge an entire nation might not succeed?" John asked nervously, standing before him.
"Why worry?" Tang Mo replied with an odd gleam in his eye, looking at John and smiling as he retorted.
His warship had an absolute advantage in speed, firepower, and defense. If it could be sunk, the Poplar Kingdom would have already united the seas long ago.
Even if the enemy concentrated their forces and surrounded it on all sides, the ironclad warship could easily break through and destroy the encircling enemy vessels, possibly even turning the tables to sink all the enemy ships surrounding it.
Moreover, he had the advantage of communication, being able to command the warship at any time—a condition the enemy did not have. Where battlefield coordination was concerned, if his side scored 80, the enemy might at best score less than 10.
If anything went wrong, he could directly order the warship to return home, which was much faster than sending a message.
Furthermore... he had two ironclad warships! If one was not enough, he could deploy three, completely preventing the Poplar Kingdom from setting sail!
So Tang Mo was not concerned about the battle, but instead started teasing John, "Just how many dads do you actually have? The first time you introduced yourself, you claimed your dad was Tural... Later, you said your dad was William..."
"That..." John immediately blushed. He had boasted extravagantly in the past without revealing his true identity, but now Tang Mo had investigated him thoroughly.
Tang Mo continued to tease John, "Later, I did some investigating. The current patriarch of the Augustine family is Reibert. Guess which one is your real dad?"
"Alright, I lied to you before... I never expected to become so deeply involved with you," John admitted his previous lie with some embarrassment.
Tang Mo pointed at the report featuring Reibert and asked curiously, "So, is he your real dad?"
"..." John looked at Tang Mo speechlessly, feeling the powerless urge to punch someone but not daring to.
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Finally, the update is complete, no debt owed anymore! Hehehe!