I Became a Witch and Started an Industrial Revolution

Chapter 26: The Kingdom Nobles Who Courted Death

The expansion of her territory made Mitia increasingly busy.

At the very least, her once unshakable afternoon tea time had long since been canceled.

With the full-scale population census conducted by the officers, the total population of the five territories had easily surpassed two million.

To Mitia, managing such vast lands and people was a completely new experience.

The training of the new army and the production of weapons could not be relaxed.

Basic factories across the four domains were also successively built and put into operation, already possessing a certain level of production capacity.

The statistics and redistribution of land had basically been completed, while the new fertilizer factories worked overtime to produce fertilizer for farming.

The purge and reorganization of the nobility also progressed smoothly.

After all, whenever things went poorly, clearing the way with muskets made everything… smoother~

Overall, everything was moving in a positive direction.

As for the movements of the Kingdom of Ovinia, Mitia remained highly vigilant, sending out many agents one after another.

Most of them entered Ovinia in the guise of merchants within trade caravans.

Yes—trade caravans!

At present, Mitia still maintained a tacit understanding with the Kingdom of Ovinia.

She had not formally established a nation or officially declared independence, and was still considered merely an internal rebellion.

So even though both sides were fighting fiercely, the kingdom had not banned caravans.

On the contrary, the nobles of Ovinia had developed great interest in the rise of Astal.

Mitia even ‘carelessly’ let a batch of steam-powered machine tools slip away, which the ‘cunning’ merchants smuggled out and sold to Ovinia’s nobles.

The nobles adored these self-operating machines—capable of raising production, easy to maintain, requiring little from the workers’ skill.

There was simply nothing more perfect in the world.

They quickly discovered where these machines could be used—mines, forges, steel smelting, weapons manufacturing, and more.

After selling those obsolete pieces of junk at high prices, Mitia finally unleashed her true trump card.

Two things.

The first: large-scale, high-priced purchase of cotton and other textile raw materials.

The second: large-scale, low-priced dumping of cloth and ready-made garments.

The industrial base of the four domains had been developed in coordination.

Mines were upgraded and laid with railways, ores transported into newly built steel mills, with the finished steel directly used in the production of new machines and factory construction.

Once several industrial textile mills were completed, Mitia began mobilizing women to enter the factories.

With the guidance of the veteran textile workers previously trained in the Astal domain, these women became the second generation of state-owned textile workers.

Thanks to mass production lowering costs, large quantities of fine yet inexpensive cloth entered the Kingdom of Ovinia with the caravans, instantly winning the favor of everyone from top to bottom.

As for the countless small-scale handicraft workers who went bankrupt, it did not stir much reaction within the kingdom.

Instead, since the value of cotton and other cash crops had soared, they were all seized by the petty lords and forced to turn their fields into cotton plantations.

One plantation after another sprang up across the Kingdom of Ovinia.

Naturally, muskets could not be concealed either—after all, Astal had made its name on the battlefield with them.

Although they lacked the necessary technical foundation, through crude imitation the Kingdom of Ovinia actually managed to cobble together powder-loaded flintlock muskets.

Even though the rate of fire was pathetic and barrels occasionally exploded from overloading powder, they still managed to produce usable firearms.

This left Mitia astonished at how fast people in this world learned.

But their musket production was handed over to various blacksmith shops, with no standardization in caliber, no guarantee of quality, and power that was utterly unreliable.

Meanwhile, Mitia’s side had already advanced into the era of metallic cartridges, with industrialized mass-standardized production far outclassing such handicraft workshops.

The most important point was that crudely crafting front-loading flintlocks was already the limit.

To improve and refine musket technology required industrialization and scientific progress advancing hand in hand.

Clearly, Ovinia had neither the ability nor the will to reach that stage.

To the nobles, manpower was the cheapest resource—they had more than enough.

As for the high failure rate of muskets, they could not care less.

They armed their musket squads with slaves and peasants, not themselves.

If a few men died in barrel explosions, so what?

Mitia herself had only directed the cotton and textile strategy.

As for muskets, she had not exported any.

Thus, regarding the Ovinian nobles’ clumsy imitation, she could only comment with one phrase: ‘Serves them right.’

Introducing Ovinia into a semi-steam era and launching the cotton strategy were her way of planting mines, making the lives of the people worse and building up their resentment.

But the musket—that was the nobles themselves playing with fire.

It directly escalated the uprisings she foresaw in the future into armed rebellions…

Even though front-loading flintlocks were garbage in every respect, they still had the ability to kill knights and low-level mages at close range.

And once smithies began producing them, the spread of technology was inevitable.

In the future, even if Mitia did nothing, the Kingdom of Ovinia would not escape disaster.

To this, Mitia simply observed in secret with an attitude of watching the show.

As for herself, she kept her head down, developing quietly, occasionally going to schools to tighten up ideological education.

A modernized army required far more than advanced weapons.

Both body and spirit had to be fully armed.

After all, ideology was something—if you did not claim it, others would.

Especially since Mitia had already offended the Church, she could not allow them to seize her lifeline.

Moreover, there was one thing she absolutely had to strip away from the Church: medicine!

The Church’s deep-rooted influence allowed them to select children with strong light-affinity talents from across every nation and train them into obedient priests.

Having been baptized by the Church since childhood, these people were naturally the staunchest supporters of the Papacy.

And their healing ability was something the common people simply could not do without.

If this cycle was not broken, not even Mitia could do anything to the Church.

Because while food and clothing were survival rights, so too were birth, aging, sickness, and death.

In fact, since she had already ensured the people had enough to eat and wear, they would care even more about the latter.

If things continued to tip in this way, the longer it went, the more Mitia would suffer, while the Church would reap benefits without lifting a finger.

Therefore, her next focus would be dismantling the Church’s monopoly.

First, by vigorously developing scientific theory—extracting basic medical knowledge from the system to establish new schools, and even printing some “barefoot doctor” manuals for emergencies.

Second, what was most important right now, the thing she needed most: ‘allicin’ and ‘penicillin’.

Allicin was the most basic antibiotic.

Taken orally, it had bactericidal effects with no side effects, and with her current industrial level, it could be extracted and purified through low-pressure steam distillation.

As for penicillin, it was also simple—but its production… best not to mention it.

Allicin was much easier.

Large-scale extraction of penicillin was relatively difficult for the moment, requiring significant manpower and equipment.

Only when these became established could she dare to cut off, from the root, the Church’s monopoly on talent and medicine.

Whenever she thought of the Church, Mitia grew deeply irritable.

The pressure it placed on her far outweighed that of the Kingdom of Ovinia.