Silvia Network

In the town of Resembool, Wang Shui's newly built granary had been completed the previous week and now met the storage requirements.

The site was close enough to the train station that the land alone had cost a considerable sum, and building the warehouse had outright exhausted Wang Shui's savings.

The good news on the financial front was that production costs were very low. With enough water and fertilizer, grain yields were considerable. As soon as the granary was ready, Wang Shui filled it with ten tonnes of wheat within a week.

Now, Wang Shui was beneath his house, walking through a neat, spacious passage.

The passage was five meters high and ten meters wide, with its ceiling twenty meters below ground. Its walls were smooth stone, and asphalt lay underfoot. Even with his mastery of three forms of Alchemy, carving out an underground space like this alone had taken considerable effort.

On either side of the passage were growing areas, a central control area, and temporary storerooms. There were more than a dozen storerooms alone, divided into three types for storing grain, compressed straw, and specially formulated fertilizer.

The usable underground growing area was only 1,000 square meters. That sounded large, but it was actually just 1.5 mu of land.

Wang Shui had selected and bred the wheat seeds through rapid forced growth. They did not need resistance to pests, disease, or lodging; high yields were all that mattered. The [Fast-Growing No. 11] wheat he had bred could now reliably yield over 300 kilograms per mu.

Wang Shui reached the central control room and checked the report data in the [Array Machine]. This was not a computer, merely a simple alchemical array microcontroller. Its embedded program contained only work-related functions, and its structure was very simple.

The data in the report was quite stable. Wang Shui had extended the maturation time for a crop of wheat to twenty hours. Including the rather cumbersome automated harvesting and storage process, he could more or less guarantee a harvest every twenty-three hours. This would reduce energy consumption to a level that the local earth veins and crust could replenish in real time.

Since he used intensive soilless cultivation, with water and fertilizer flowing directly beneath the growing trays, Wang Shui had planted the wheat in two layers. This directly doubled the effective growing area to three mu, so under normal conditions, this grain factory could produce 0.9 tonnes of wheat a day.

Did that sound like a lot? In reality, it was nowhere near enough.

A rough calculation showed that standard annual output could essentially remain at 300 tonnes, while Wang Shui's newly built little warehouse had a standard storage capacity of 6,000 tonnes. It was not that Wang Shui was aiming too high. This grain only seemed plentiful; in reality, it was far from enough.

Amestris had a population of over fifty million. At a subsistence staple requirement of 0.1 tonnes per person per year, it would need five million tonnes of wheat. According to Wang Shui's investigations, not only did large numbers of people in this country lack staple foods, but even relatively prosperous areas tended to favor meat, eggs, dairy, and some vegetables. Staple food production was severely inadequate.

Wheat, rice, corn, soybeans, potatoes, and sweet potatoes.

The combined output of these broadly defined staple foods might not even reach seventy percent of the subsistence threshold-roughly 3.5 million tonnes.

If Wang Shui wanted to monopolize the staple food market, supply the military, carry out secondary processing, and even export, he would need an annual output on the scale of at least ten million tonnes. Right now, he had only 300, several orders of magnitude short.

Of course, this was only three mu of growing area, and Wang Shui also had the advantage of multilayer cultivation. Expanding the growing area was simple, and something he would inevitably have to do.

His problem now was a lack of money, but he did not want to raise financing directly through agriculture, so he planned to try a few simple tricks.

At the central control console, Wang Shui switched the production mode to [Load 5]. The growing area would be stacked to its maximum of four layers.

The growth time would also be compressed to four hours. This facility would temporarily produce at ten times its normal efficiency, but the safe limit was one month, after which both the factory and the dragon veins would need to rest for at least a month.

Wang Shui needed these 270 tonnes of wheat. He urgently needed his first pot of gold.

After setting the production task, Wang Shui inserted a crystal coin engraved with an alchemical array into the central control console, then went straight up to the disguised first basement level. The Transmutation Circles in the grain factory continued working.

That was right: this was the remote transmutation effect of Alkahestry. However, its range had a limit, and to break through that limit, Wang Shui had developed the crystal coin he had just inserted into the central control console.

"The signal here is good. Everything at [Resembool No. 1 Warehouse Station] is normal. This mechanical body feels really awkward. I'm coming back for now."

Silvia's voice echoed in Wang Shui's mind. Without any sensation at all, the main body of Silvia's consciousness returned to Wang Shui's body. Wang Shui could also sense the warehouse area ten kilometers away. He could sense the simple mechanical body he had made for Silvia-more specifically, the identical crystal coin inside the robot's body.

"This simple network works better than I imagined. As long as I keep increasing the size and power of the [Signal Relay Station], I'll be able to use Alchemy farther away."

Wang Shui sensed Silvia checking the mental synchronization between them.

"I just felt a new device activate. It seemed to be a machine. Is it a new toy for me?"

After growing accustomed to existing as a soul, Silvia had become very interested in all kinds of new bodies.

"No, that's the central control console of [Resembool No. 1 Grain Factory] beneath our feet. I plan to build a relay station here too, then expand into the wilderness to the west with new grain factories."

"Hmm-you shouldn't have much money left now, right?"

"I've arranged for grain merchants to come next month. We'll sell all our stock, plus the 270 tonnes from emergency production, for a total of around 400 tonnes. Those profiteers only offered 550 per tonne after seeing the samples. A conservative estimate gives us 220,000 in starting capital, enough to use as leverage."

"What are you going to lever?"

"Nothing. I'm going to use this money to register a logistics company. No, buying one would be better-a small company with good credit. I'll expand its actual business a little, then find professionals to handle things and get a bank loan, one unrelated to the grain factory. I'll use the loan to expand production. After that, I'll open a bigger grain company and repeat a similar process."

"What would you call that, financial maneuvering?"

"This doesn't even qualify as maneuvering. I don't understand it, and I don't dare ask. At the most fundamental level, playing with finance comes down to hard power. The more deeply you get caught up in it, the harder it becomes to get out.