Accumulating Capital and Developing Energy

In October of Year 137 of the Pandora Era, the Southern New Regime had now established a firm foothold here.

During Wei Keng's exploratory phase, the main natural obstacles had already been cleared. Now, after a smooth handover, a new round of development was underway.

Militarily, to open up transportation routes between the core of the New Zhujiang region and the surrounding city-states, the Unified Punishment Army conducted several military exercises.

The round-headed War God Tanks had buckets mounted on their fronts, which they used to push aside the dry twigs and tangled vines blocking the way.

The diesel convoy followed the old railway embankments and national highways built during the Civilization Era, pushing all the way to the walls of each city-state. Then it carried out a military exercise codenamed "Liberation."

The rifled guns on the tank turrets began adjusting their firing parameters. Their barrels, which had initially pointed toward the city walls when they arrived, turned ninety degrees to face the hillside exercise area. They accurately hit the targets temporarily designated by representatives of the autonomous regions (the nobles within the city-states), fully recreating the conditions of actual combat.

Jin Hua Daily: On April 13, the Unified Punishment Army successfully completed its military exercise, demonstrating to the people of the autonomous cities across the Yue Region the resolve of our People's Army to defend national property. Representatives of the autonomous city-states firmly supported the new government's leadership and joined the initiative to economically integrate the New Zhujiang region.

In plain English, those tanks had secured a Pact of the City Under Siege, and signed economic and free movement agreements with Yuan Hua Port.

Wei Keng had repeatedly reported to the organization that the Yue Region had a population of five hundred thousand and a complicated local situation.

So when planning their work, Sun Xiangyang and the other organizational cadres, who were still unfamiliar with administration, could only follow Wei Keng's "PowerPoint plan."

Wei Keng was better educated than the crew members from the Desperate Plane. It was an advantage that was not very conspicuous, yet still produced clear results.

The Chinese people's traditional respect for scholars was already etched into their cultural genes. Even bandits knew to kidnap a Xiucai to serve as their military adviser once they had grown powerful enough.

So Wei Keng didn't need to fight for decision-making power or claim many seats. His proposals, backed by the records he had compiled, always moved forward smoothly.

After June, once the small workshops and city-state economies had been cracked open by the new regime's ironclad weapons, the New Zhujiang Economic Circle began its first surge of growth on the old ruins, following the arrival of cargo ships. Thirteen excavators leveled part of the ruins, while building materials from the lime kilns were used to erect rings of walls. Inside them, buildings were laid out one by one, with greenbelts and space reserved for possible future road expansions. This was the layout of a factory compound.

As waves of people gathered in the New Zhujiang region, factories and other buildings had to be constructed in advance. Based on information about population outflows from the various cities, as well as fluctuations in grain prices, Wei Keng modeled the movement of people from other regions into the Guangzhou Economic Zone. The new government then planned production and construction according to the trends shown by the model.

Economically, while ensuring that the people of the New Zhujiang region had enough to eat, the new economy began producing for export and accumulating capital.

It was the 27th century, after all. Wei Keng's education in sociology meant he naturally didn't romanticize capitalism. But "capital" was an objective reality in a world that had yet to reach a state of spiritual and material abundance.

Accumulating "capital" wasn't about finance. Capital was trust within the exchange of social goods.

Society couldn't be made up of people who were all selfless, and those in high-level management positions were even less likely to be.

Having lived through the chaotic 21st Century, where all kinds of monsters and demons ran wild, and heard such sanctimonious yet shameless lines as "Overtime is training for you" and "We're forcing you out of work to provide talent for society,"

Wei Keng had come to detest selfless devotion. For all his labor, he needed people with credibility to assign him a value he could claim as his own. The thing that most closely embodied that value in society was money! Capital!

In a society with a stable population and productive capacity, the total amount of trust required to keep society running was also stable. Sometimes, certain systems in society would create imaginary trust to concentrate some of society's wealth and invest it in high-tech industries, gambling on the future. This way of manipulating trust was a financial tool.

Of course, what was imaginary remained imaginary. If financial tools weren't used to gamble on future industries, but instead to inflate a bubble that let parasites feed in the present, then a financial bubble would eventually build up.

After every bubble burst, a great deal of capital would vanish. But as long as society still needed to function, capital—as a form of trust—would continue to exist.

In the Pandora Plane, where was the capital of this world concentrated? In the upper classes of the various city-states!

They had gathered in their own hands every one-yuan Steel Cent and fifty-cent Copper Coin that had been widely circulated before the Great Cataclysm.

After Wei Keng arrived, the new economy in the Zhujiang Region used production advantages rather than war to earn those Copper Coins and Steel Cents back through commerce. That was how it accumulated capital.

The Desperate Plane could provide facilities to mass-produce Copper Coins and Steel Cents. But doing so would only destroy their circulation in the south and bring both sides down together. It wouldn't accumulate capital.

The essence of capital was trust: a measure that could temporarily secure the labor and material wealth of every social class, from top to bottom, so society could keep functioning. It couldn't be produced by a minting machine just like that; it had to be established through the process of society functioning.

A group had to show the world that it could generate new wealth for society and provide security! The currency backed by that group would then become a measure of trust.

This could be regarded as "Establishing Trust Through Action." The process was quite complicated: it required proving both productive and military capabilities. But by now, with modern civilization so advanced, anything involving governance ought to be far larger and more sophisticated than it had been in Shang Yang's time.

Actually, it seemed Wei Keng had another way to accumulate capital quickly: plunder by military force! He could directly destroy the credibility of the upper classes in the old city-states nearby.

However—

Leaving aside whether Wei Keng, a man afraid of death and pain, was willing to make sacrifices for this plan, this approach was far too limited. Even if it could quickly gather the trust of the Yue Region, it would destroy the Unified Punishment Army's credibility elsewhere.

A power that concentrated wealth through plunder would be questioned from every angle beyond the areas it could pillage!

And there were other city-states across the East Asia Continent besides those in the Yue Region! They still communicated with one another. The Unified Punishment Army's military expansion would certainly threaten them with force, after all. Its very name meant "Unified Punishment," not local separatism.

Military action might cause tremendous economic damage to a region, but it absolutely must not "make the other side dirt-poor in the name of plundering wealth."

At the very least, it couldn't be done openly. The army couldn't be allowed to do it in an organized fashion.

Otherwise, your army wouldn't be a force "establishing order," but a pack of beasts sucking the marrow from people's bones. No matter how much real money you seized, it would only serve as capital (trust) for stabilizing the occupied territories. As for the outside world? Unless you gave up your conquests, other powers would never feel safe trading with you.

If something could clearly be obtained through economic means, there was no need to act like reckless Russians! Besides, after Wei Keng's thorough investigation, the wealth structure of the Human City-States was extremely distorted. Economic means would work better.

The economic model of the city-states in the Yue Region concentrated vast amounts of capital at the top, without reinvesting it in the lower classes through large-scale projects.

The city-states now had an addictive demand for two types of goods: luxury goods and weapons.

Luxury goods and weapons catered respectively to the upper classes' hedonism and their need to maintain the stability of their rule.

The Great Qing was a case in point: they bought opium and Krupp Cannons by the cartload.

To help the surrounding Human Forces deal with the threat of Gene Colonies, the new government in the Zhujiang Region would sell them some guns and ammunition. But the New Canton Fair's main products were still high-end consumer goods.

What counted as a high-end consumer good in this era? Instant noodle seasoning packets!

For this purpose, an MSG Factory was set up. When Sodium Chloride and Sodium Glutamate could both supply sodium ions, the capital held by the upper classes allowed them to buy a hundred times the salt they needed. But since they didn't need it, they wouldn't let that many Steel Cents circulate. So MSG, now ten times the price of salt, was custom-made for them by Wei Keng.

In the Yue Region, there were trade routes that carried salt to the Inland City-States, so this consumer market was enormous.

And the city-states that kept losing Steel Cents had no capacity to use a planned economy to allocate production goods among the various classes. Once they lost a vital medium of social and economic activity, the outflow of capital meant a decline in trust.

On August 17, outside the supply cooperative.

"Buy, buy, buy!" At the goods distribution point, merchants clutching order forms jostled each other as they tried to buy enough stock. The crush was so bad that by afternoon, the supply cooperative had to assign police officers to maintain order. Ordinary people had no use for this MSG, fragrant body soap, or the Cotton Inside Leather Outside Coats. When these goods reached the city-states, they appeared to bring back coins from before the Great Cataclysm. But in reality, they were the lifeblood of social order within those city-states.

Meanwhile, the new government's workers were frugal with their own needs and worked overtime to produce goods. The Steel Cents they earned for themselves and their factories were more than just pieces of metal; they guaranteed that when the Unified Punishment Army entered each region in the future, it could quickly gather the local strategic resources.

As capital accumulated, it seemed to exert a kind of magic. Wei Keng found that he, too, had been affected by it. He realized that he was working through the night as well—and on work that demanded intense concentration.

Wei Keng wondered, "So what exactly am I doing all this for?"

The Lord Wei, who was about to return to the Shenzhou Plane and join the upper echelons of society, realized that he shouldn't leave just yet. He ought to do a little more.

In October of Pandora Year 135, with guidance from technical experts from the Desperate Plane, Wei Keng launched the New Energy Revolution on the Pandora Plane.

The information about the Energy Station had been handed to Wei Keng by Luo Hongxing.

When Wei Keng got busy, Luo Hongxing sent the Observer watching him a message: "Little Deer, it's important to guide things according to the circumstances!" Bai Linglu said she would humbly take his advice, but only heaven knew how much of it she would actually take to heart.

Now, let's talk about what Wei Keng was busy with.

For boys growing up before China's urbanization, a pond that had been dug for a few years would always give off bubbles if you stirred it with a long pole. It was a common sight.

After the crew from Yuan Hua arrived, urbanization in the Yue Region accelerated, and energy consumption rose sharply. The old method of using charcoal as an energy source now faced serious challenges: charcoal was easily attacked by fungi in storage, and the spores it released could cause Biological Pollution. So there was an urgent need for an energy source that was easier to store and transport.

In the Main World, electricity and natural gas had been important sources of energy for human society in the same period. One was transmitted by power lines, the other by pipelines. There was no Natural Gas here, but what about biogas? With the Biological World flourishing as it was, there could not only be biogas, but plenty of it.

According to Luo Hongxing, after arriving in the Desperate Plane, he had spent some time in parts of South China. Those rural areas had no coal mines, and their electricity supply was too limited to support large-scale use of electrical appliances. To solve the problem of power generation, they had resorted to simple methods and started producing electricity from biogas. Actually, those methods weren't crude; the National Power Grid simply wasn't yet extensive enough to provide technical assistance to rural areas.

Wei Keng got straight to work. He dug out a pond—deep and large—with Heating Pipes connected along the bottom. When hot waste from the factory was led into a pool beside it, the heat flowed through the pipes to the Reaction Pool, regulating its temperature. Then he lined the pool with cement, added a waterproof layer, and tiled it. Pipes fed materials into the entire pool, a Shaft Seal Agitator was connected to the top cover, and an outlet allowed waste to be discharged during production.

Once it was built, they filled the fifteen pools—each eight meters wide and twelve meters deep—with water and added the raw materials. Almost overnight, the contents began roiling like beer. The dry leaves and twigs, including straw, decomposed as quickly as mold spread over a strawberry. As the agitator mixed the contents evenly, biogas bubbled out of the large pool like shaken cola, rushed through the pipes into the combustion chamber, and drove the Gas Turbine. The generator converted its power into electricity, which traveled along the elevated power lines to nearby factories.

But on the Pandora Field, the energy from life activities could interact across distances.

After receiving an abundant supply of nutrients, the Methanogens produced methane, while their remaining Life Energy radiated onto nearby plants, trees, and even insects.

The first biogas pool had to be shut down ten days after it began generating electricity, because an Old Tree Root swelled up and split Pool Number Three.

So when rebuilding the biogas power station, Wei Keng piled a three-meter-thick layer of kaolin around each pool, then sealed it up tightly with Blue Brick and cement. (This was Imperial Tomb Burial Craftsmanship.)

A cement pool that could continuously produce Gaseous Energy emitted an outward density of Life Radiation no less than that of a Nuclear Reactor in the Civilization Era. Methanogens lacked Complex Genes, so their effect on inserting genes into humans was limited. But the continuous radiation still caused some carbohydrates and proteins to proliferate in greater quantities, beyond what the human endocrine system could handle.

Between November of Year 135 and April of Year 136,

workers in the non-Wei Keng Control Group who stayed at the site for three hours at a time would develop stomachaches or Mite Tinea on their skin.

Wei Keng and the Engineering Team concluded that they had to increase automated control of the power supply. Each inspection must last no more than half an hour, and every day, staff had to exchange blood with comrades on duty in other areas or receive an injection of Wei Keng's blood to greatly increase their resistance to Life Radiation during microbial proliferation.

When assigning work, however, the organization preferred to have the Wei Keng Collective handle half the shifts, while waiting for the next generation of technology.

Each pool at the Biogas Power Plant could process a hundred kilograms of straw-like material per day, generating about 10,000 kilowatts of electricity daily—that is, 10,000 kilowatt-hours. Electricity currently cost 0.8 cents per kilowatt-hour, so that came to eighty yuan a day. The entire plant required ten people to keep it running. A third of its output could be used for Post Salaries.

As the largest group of workers at the Biogas Power Plant, Wei Keng and the others received their wages from the organization and couldn't help exclaiming, "This really is a high-benefit job."

If the job could truly offer an unchanging way of life, it would be perfect for taking it easy. But! Wei Keng clenched his fist and encouraged himself: "We have to keep striving, for a better tomorrow!"