A month later, when the gigantic freewheeler arrived at Hotwind Port, it startled the workers who were building even larger cranes on the docks.
They had truly never seen such a huge ship, let alone such a massive iron vessel.
As the ship blew its whistle and docked beside the pier, like a giant beast, it made the beside massive sailing ship unloading its cargo look incredibly tiny by comparison.
Even though the sailing ship was already quite large, besides the tall masts, one could not see the deck of the freewheeler from its deck.
Leaning on the railing on the ship's side, a sailor overlooked the entire dock, where porters were coming and going busily, and not a single one was not curiously sizing up this steel behemoth.
A total of 100 trucks and the parts for two cranes for loading and unloading, with the rest of the cabins filled with bagged cement, just the transport capacity of this single freewheeler could almost rejuvenate Hotwind Port completely.
Just a few months ago, the place was nearly attacked by the Taren Kingdom's troops, but a few months later, it had already become the largest freight port in the south.
Near the port, the newly constructed coal yard was filled with black coal piled up like mountains, and a direct road for transporting coal to the port had just been completed and opened to traffic.
The railway of Hotwind Port leads to the Dorne King City. To be honest, its construction was not fast. From the start until now, it had been progressing at a steady pace of about five to six kilometers a day.
There was really no helping it, the place indeed needed development, but the Great Tang Group really couldn't spare the strength to develop it for the time being.
A massive number of railway workers were working on the railway between Jade City and Laines' capital city. The railway between Ice Crystal City and Jade City was also being furiously constructed.
Car production never ceased, and the Great Tang Group's car production lines were running at full capacity, even with overtime on holidays.
Over 100 cars were produced daily, about 60 of which were sedans, and the rest were trucks. At this rate, the Great Tang Group could produce nearly 40,000 cars a year, which was an astonishing figure.
With the frenzied construction of freewheelers to dominate the shipping trade of the entire Endless Sea, the capacity for steel production was really struggling to keep up.
Clearly, it wasn't that the technology or funding couldn't keep up, but the pre-industrial production capacity....
Car production capacity was already maxed, yet it still couldn't meet the demand, but expanding car production was impossible because producing more cars was futile without enough gasoline supply.
Similarly, building more oil refineries was useless, because the capacity of the oil fields was there, and more refineries wouldn't help without crude oil supply.
So they could only go about expanding oil fields honestly, to increase the total oil production—a lengthy process that couldn't be solved as quickly as starting from scratch.
For example, rail production capacity was maxed, but to continue building more rail production plants meant increasing the source steel production.
But steel production was also maxed, so they needed to mine more iron... Such matters restrained the development of the Great Tang Group, as well as the development of the entire world.
Each crane was working non-stop, with only their passenger dock devoid of mountainous piles of cargo.
The sound of car engines, the noise of the waves, the clamor of the working cranes, the shouts of the workers, and the clanging from the shipyards being built all interwove, making the place somewhat noisy.
But this kind of noise truly conveyed a sense of booming prosperity, an impact that instantly conquered the children who disembarked, and also astonished the members of the Taren royal family who had accompanied Taren the Tenth to Brunas.
Taren the Tenth had seven princesses and over a dozen children, the eldest being fifteen years old this year, and the youngest still needed to be held.
They all came to Brunas because, at the very last moment, Taren the Tenth had chosen dignity. He dignifiedly gave up his kingdom, dignifiedly chose a manner of death, and then dignifiedly announced to the world that he had committed suicide.
Now renamed Tark, he and his family arrived in Brunas by ship, where he would receive a significant sum of money and a luxurious residence of considerable value.
This was the dignity promised to him by Tang Mo, although an officer Housen of the Taren had killed a captain of the Great Tang Group's patrol team, avenging that captain by eradicating Taren could definitely be said as revenge.
A life for a kingdom... it seemed fair. At least Tang Mo thought that such equivalent recompense for debts was fair.
"Quiet!" The girl's mother looked very dignified as she scolded, then realized her husband showed no displeasure over their daughter's exclamation.
The former Taren the Tenth, or rather, Mr. Tark as he was now known, had his attention captured by the luxury car parked in front of him.
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"Mr. Tark?" The driver politely opened the car door for Taren the Tenth, making a welcoming gesture: "I am your driver, sir. The cars behind are all prepared for you and your family."
With that, Taren the Tenth followed his pointing finger towards the other side and then noticed that there were already seven or eight cars waiting there.
Besides his luxury car, the rest of the vehicles seemed pretty nice. Taren the Tenth really hadn't expected that Mr. Tang, whom he'd never met, would truly fulfill his promise.
He had promised to give him a million Gold Coins, allowing him to live a life of affluence in the days to come, and also promised that he could live incognito, undisturbed by anyone.
What Taren the Tenth hadn't anticipated was that he would also encounter modern life in Brunas, something he had never experienced before.
His residence had electric lights, flush toilets, soft Simmons beds, and he could even retain his original butlers and servants.
Even more, he could keep his own bodyguards if he could afford them; he was allowed to maintain a bodyguard unit of up to ten men.
This was certainly much better than surrendering to the King of Dorne. Because of wary considerations, a dethroned monarch would unlikely enjoy such good treatment.
"Sigh..." Exhaling, Taren the Tenth bent down, entered the small car, and sat on the soft rear seat of the automobile, comfortably closing his eyes.