Theoretical Steel Output—The Iron Ore Is Running Out, Your Highness. For Aningsbe, Charge!

After giving it some thought, Lynn spoke to everyone.

"Everyone, if this magic-powered electric arc blast furnace is filled completely with processed nodular iron ore, it can produce ten tons of high-quality steel. Theoretically, that is more than enough for now. We can set aside the blast furnace and converter for the time being and study them slowly. This one is efficient—we'll use this."

"After all, one electric arc blast furnace can theoretically produce 3,600 tons of steel a year."

"A Flintlock Musket requires roughly five, or perhaps three, kilograms of steel. A Field Cannon requires one ton of steel."

"In just three months, we can produce 300,000 muskets and more than 900 cannons. If we reduce those numbers, we could even equip the soldiers with armor."

"Of course, that is only theoretical. We still need to make machine tools for manually drilling holes and run tests before we can determine how many gun barrels we can produce in a day."

"Returning to the matter of steel, all we need to accomplish this is to build enormous Slime Magic Storage Towers. At the same time, we need to draw blood from living creatures for use, and their magic power must be extracted as well. According to the method Lilim provided, we can also extract and store the magic power from plants."

"Use as little blood as possible. If we get non-human Prisoners of war in the future, we won't have to feed them—for example, orcs. None of them taste very good anyway. Better to use them to generate power."

"We can also collect criminals' blood."

"The main issue is that there are too few people from whom we can collect taxes. Our actual population is only a few thousand. Drawing magic power is harmless, but we can't keep drawing it continuously. It will still leave people mentally unwell, so we can only draw it once a month. A few thousand people are just enough to keep one electric arc blast furnace smelting one batch every day."

"One batch of steel is exactly ten tons. The smelting time is only four hours before the molten steel can flow out into molds to cool."

Lynn was holding a Small meeting, explaining the efficiency of electric arc steelmaking to everyone.

Lilim's eyes shone. Such a tiny thing could produce 3,600 tons a year!

Back then, the Demi-human Kingdom's annual Pig Iron output had been five million jin—2,500 tons.

And Lynn could casually produce 3,600 tons on the spot—and it was steel!

Pig iron and steel were not the same thing.

For instance, the human August Empire currently produced 500,000 tons of pig iron, yet its steel output was only 30,000 tons.

The Dwarf Kingdom produced one million tons of pig iron and 100,000 tons of steel.

With output like that, humanity had 60,000 knights. Of those, the Royal Family directly commanded 30,000 Heavy Knights. Aside from Olexian, the remaining dukes each had 5,000 Heavy Knights.

Because Olexian had so many pastures, it could make a great deal of money simply by selling expensive Devil Beast Horses. It had 15,000 knights.

And those were only knights. Humanity also had cavalry—that was, Knight Attendants—as well as Heavy Infantry, Regular Infantry, archers, and more, for a total force of three million.

There were 300,000 cavalry alone.

Thus, the Empire claimed to have an army of three million. These were Mobile forces, meaning troops that could be mobilized and deployed in every direction. The exact figures were unclear, but as Lynn's home, Olexian was a place Lilim had known well after being inseparable from Lynn for five years. She knew exactly how many troops Olexian had.

It had 15,000 Heavy Knights and 75,000 Knight Attendants, who were also cavalry.

The rest were infantry and archers.

There were several thousand mages. Their numbers were not fixed, since this was something that depended on talent, and mages were people who wandered everywhere seeking patrons. They all had pursuits of their own.

Thus, the Principality of Olexian's Mobile force was only 100,000 greater than when it had resisted the Orc Khan in the past, with roughly 300,000 mobile troops.

After all, when Olexian's ancestors had resisted the orcs, it had still been the Iron Age. In Lynn's words, productivity had been insufficient, so they could only scrape together 200,000 men from here and there. Only after the Elves developed a series of magic spells to increase food production, which humanity then carried forward and spread across the world, did the world's population surge.

After that surge, the outrageous dwarves directly showed everyone what it meant for great strength to work miracles, pounding out heaps of hundredfold-forged steel by hand.

The Demi-humans' situation was rather absurd now. The Witches still knew that magic, but the Demi-humans' farming techniques were simply too poor. What they did could not even be called farming.

Lynn had said without mercy that Demi-human farming meant burying seeds in the dirt and then ignoring them. The smarter ones might use a spell.

Humans were not wrong to call the Demi-humans a tribal society. First, they were not unified—tribes of several hundred people fought on their own. Second, their technology was poor. Third, whenever the ruler of a slightly larger tribe died, it immediately split apart, making unification difficult. The former Demi-human Nobles, the Feng clan, had only their main branch inherit the land and proclaim themselves little kings. All the other branches had run off.

None of those self-proclaimed kings were recognized, so naturally they did not count. In human eyes, this truly was a tribal society. Powerful empires simply liked to call the people around them barbarians.