In the cramped room on the workshop's second floor, Roselle lifted a corner of the curtain and cautiously peered outside.
The street below was already packed with an angry crowd. From above, he could see only a dense mass of soft caps, headscarves, and waving arms. Several agitated workers stood on handcarts used to haul goods, leading chants to destroy the machines and protect their jobs. Every line drew a loud, unified response from the crowd.
"That machine only needs one person to operate it. Doesn't that mean a demon is secretly helping?"
"Machines made by demons!"
"Tear them down! Sushit's textiles must be made by the people of Sushit!"
"Made by us!"
"Make City Hall answer us! We can't repeat the Old District's failure forty years ago!"
"Make them answer!"
These fellows are pretty good at whipping people up... Should I hire them to write news articles...? Roselle's thoughts wandered in confusion. Only when the cries surged over him like a tide, making the windowpanes tremble slightly, did he drop the curtain and turn back to the room with a sigh.
Inside stood the very "devil machine" those workers were shouting about.
Unlike the half-finished version still sitting in the abandoned workshop in the Old District, the textile machine was now much cleaner and more streamlined. The parts made redundant by changes in its design were gone, and the Punched Card System had been further refined. A single worker could genuinely operate it with only a little training, achieving nearly twice the production efficiency of a traditional jacquard loom with a much smaller machine.
The machine had been moved into the Green family's factory because its design was almost finalized, and it needed testing under actual production conditions to uncover any remaining problems. But those tests had yet to