The Light Industry
The Light Industry
Comparing to his meticulous look past few months, Carter's icy face had shown other emotions, the steady feeling had faded a lot and he was showing a lot of hope and impatience.
[It must have something to do with the Star of the Western Region,] Roland thought.
Roland also heard a little about the matter that Carter had recently gotten very close to May. After all, as one of the top-level in the first army and Roland's representative in the army, his every action had been watched; not to mention that he was close to the attractive lady, May.
When they first appeared side by side on the streets of the town, the guards had already reported the news to Roland.
Roland did not really care for such things. It was very strange for Carter to be still single as he was probably two or three years older than Roland. It would be good if he could find his spouse in the Western Region as long as it did not affect his work.
According to the report of the chief knight, the First Army had possessed around 200 revolving rifles equipped and it was increasing by 10 daily— in fact, if the raw material was enough, Anna could produce several times more, however, the speed decreased as she was also responsible for pig iron and steam engine manufacturing at the same time.
However, the production speed was acceptable as there were only 600 people in the First Army, and it would be finished reloading within one and a half month. The military scale temporarily could not be further expanded before the new population expansion arrived.
Another point was the formation of the Second Army.
The civilians recruited from Longsong Stronghold were incorporated into the Second Army by Roland after verification in order to facilitate the training convenience and security needs. They were currently accepting the discipline training which was also a part of military training. It was the ideological education course at night in order to develop their ideas as the guardian of the Western Region, and they needed to protect the safety of their loved ones.
"The training of the Second Army personnel was progressing well at the moment, and they were expected to be transferred into shooting training after a week. Then, the sifted-out flintlocks were enough for one each." Carter concluded.
It was also the advantage of the flintlock. It would take at least a year to train a cold weapons fighter and five or six years to train a knight, but yet the musketeer would only take a month to complete training and enter into combat. The longer a battle lasted, the more dominant force of the musketeer was—after all, pulling the trigger was easier than fighting with the sword.
"The live ammunition shooting practice requires to be paid attention to the management of firearms, the number returned had to be the same as the number given out. The same applied to the gunpowder, which was distributed on the spot during training and it was arranged to be supervised by the veteran of the First Army."
"Yes." He nodded.
"Very well." Roland waved. "In this case, you may go to do with your business."
"Uh, Your Highness," Carter said with hesitation, "you mentioned to me last time that the perfume that was mixed into the soap was made from sugar cane, was it true?"
"Yes," Prince Roland leaned against the chair and said, "why?"
"Is the sugar cane expensive?"
"No... Just an ordinary crop."
"I heard that a thumb-sized bottle of perfume can be sold for five gold royals in the king's city." Carter scratched his head. "If so, can manufacturing perfume with sugar cane bring huge income to the town?"
"Five Gold Royals?" Roland startled as he did not consider about this point. Thinking back the time in the palace, Prince Roland never cared about the prices of daily necessities and he had only little contact with the thing such as perfume—only women preferred the stuff that could make them smell nice.
The initial motivation for him to make perfume was to get soap. Otherwise, it always felt like something was missing in a bathroom without scented soap, since rubbing the bubbles all over the body was the true romance in the bathroom.
If a small bottle of perfume could be sold for a few gold royals, it would be indeed a good business. Unlike the coated mirrors, the sugar cane and flowers that were used as the raw materials were much cheaper than the crystal glass.
Thinking about it, Roland laughed. "It's a pretty good idea. I'll consider it."
"Your Highness, in this case... May I bring a sugar cane out from the castle?" Chief Knight asked with hope.
"For sure." Hearing from the tone, Roland could guess what Carter wanted to do—the Western Region was different from Port of Clearwater, the crops in the Fjords were rare here, and it was a good choice to give it to the lady as a gift. "It's on the wall in the backyard. You may go and pick it yourself."
"Thank you, Your Highness!" Carter bowed and left.
After that, Roland summoned Barov—it was no longer appropriate to call him the assistant minister, for he had been regarded as the administration manager of Border town as the headline of the City Hall.
After Barov was seated, Roland mentioned to him about perfume. "What do you think about this business? Can we earn a lot from it?"
He did not answer immediately but stared at him. "Your Highness, are you sure that perfume is made from the sweet crop?"
"Did you not use the soap that was distributed to you? The reason for the fragrance was because of the perfume that was mixed in it," Roland stretched his arms and said, "its raw materials are indeed worthless things. I'm just unsure if it's true that the perfume in the king's city is as expensive as Carter said."
"More than that, Your Royal Highness," Barov excitedly said, "the perfume was the top-secret product of the King's City Alchemy Association. There were only about 1,000 bottles produced a year, and only a small part of it would be sold in the king's city. The price for those which were transferred to be sold in the Kingdom of Graycastle and other cities were 20 or 30 percent higher. If it was sold to the Fjords and other kingdoms, the price can be almost doubled. In order to prevent the merchant from earning the difference, the association not only firmly controlled the perfume price of the other area, and even the merchants were designated by them. If you can produce perfume, we can get a huge return even if we're just selling to Redwater City and Fallen Dragon Ridge."
"I see." [He's indeed the man who served as the finance minister's assistant for 20 years,] Roland thought. Barov was really good at the price of the goods and trading market. With this information, he also formed a preliminary plan.
There were many methods of making perfumes, the simplest method was soaking the unique fragrance petals or herbal in the alcohol, letting the aromatic oil of the plants dissolved in the alcohol, and finally filtered the residue, adding water to dilute it.
The alcohol came from the sugar cane juice fermentation; the raw materials of the aromatic oil could be roses, and it could also be the more commonly seen rosemary and Vanilla. However, since it would be under mass production, getting Leaf to cultivate a magic plant that would directly produce the fragrance aroma oil would be the best choice.
The industry could also produce sugar and white liquor, which were also consumables with a considerable demand, although the profits were less than perfume, it could be sold to the people at a low price to enrich their recipes and it would be a big progress for the people's livelihood.
Roland was not developing the light industry due to the small-scale production of daily necessities was very difficult to earn high profits with the lack of manpower; investing the limited manpower into the heavy industry was the most cost-effective approach.
Since the production of perfume was profitable, perhaps he could take this opportunity to make up for this missing link.