Taking in the workers exiled by the Candlelight Society was all well and good, but he couldn't bet everything on that. The territory's own talent cultivation had to keep pace—that was what mattered most. Rhine's workers could only serve as an emergency measure.
The blueprints for the steam engine parts had already been handed to craftsmen across the island. Once they finished, everything would have to be collected and brought to Theus, who would inspect it all again.
There wouldn't be any problems with the drawings he had made, but the island's craftsmen might not necessarily be able to understand them properly.
It couldn't be helped. The craftsmen on the island were basically illiterate. Even when they took on custom jobs before, most of them had relied on talking and gesturing as they worked. The little bit of spatial imagination needed to turn a blueprint into an actual object could stump quite a few craftsmen.
When he had tried making things before, he had run into plenty of such trouble. In the end, he had only managed it by correcting them bit by bit himself.
Sigh. Forget science and engineering education—literacy alone was a long and arduous road. Worse still, he couldn't let craftsmen who only half-understood things start production directly. Once Cognitive Interference set in, who knew what bizarre contraptions they might make.
The steam engine might even stand up and start pushing the millstone for him.
That was why Theus had long made up his mind: even if he gathered every prerequisite for building a steam engine, he would first have to train qualified personnel. And this was only for one or two factories. If he wanted to spread these new technologies into most people's lives in the future, he would first have to achieve mass literacy.
A