Chapter 107: Buying Or Building?
Four days had passed since Evelyn officially returned to her desk outside his office, bringing a small crew of newly hired clerks and administrative staff with her. With the mountains of daily paperwork, ledger entries, and vendor filing off his plate, Ricky finally had room to breathe.
He leaned back in his leather chair, staring at four thick, leather-bound engineering manuals resting on the edge of his desk. He had bought them from the System library three days prior, intending to solve a very simple business problem: replacing Atlantic & Pacific’s horse-drawn delivery wagons with a fleet of commercial motor trucks to speed up routes across Midtown and Lower Manhattan.
However, after digging into the specs of existing 1910-era trucks, his enthusiasm had vanished. The commercial vehicles currently on the market were notoriously unreliable, prone to throwing drive chains, snapping axles, and breaking down every few miles under heavy city traffic. To make matters worse, most of them could barely haul two to four tons of cargo before their frames bowed.
Looking at those flawed designs had sparked an old, almost forgotten childhood dream from his previous life—building his own automobile company.
Why waste money acquiring a struggling motor firm or buying delicate, third-rate delivery trucks when he could design and build something far superior from the ground up? Ricky thought.
There was only one glaring problem. He wasn’t a mechanical engineer. He had never studied automotive design in his life. Reading advanced technical schematics on internal combustion engines and power transmission systems had given him a throbbing headache within thirty minutes.
Ricky sighed, tapping his desk before mentally calling up his System status window. "This isn’t going nowhere. I have no choice but to do that."
A translucent blue display materialized in his vision:
[Name: Richard Stevenson]
[Strength: 15]
[Agility: 15]
[Perception: 15]
[Vitality: 70]
[Intelligence: 11]
[Unassigned Stat Points: 102]
His eyes lingered on his Intelligence stat, currently sitting at 11. He had avoided touching it for weeks. The human brain was a fragile, ridiculously complex organ, and without any manual explaining how the System modified neural pathways, he almost never wanted to risk giving himself a stroke or altering his personality.
But if I can’t digest these technical books, Ricky reasoned, staring at the screen, it’s literally because my baseline processing capacity isn’t high enough. Is it a passive mental upgrade, or will it rewrite how I think?
He had plenty of spare points sitting idle. When he raised his Vitality to 70, his body had gone through a brief, intense physical adjustment as his bones and muscles hardened.
"Only one way to find out," Ricky muttered under his breath. "Let’s take it slow."
He mentally allocated 10 points directly into Intelligence, bringing the stat from 11 to 21.
Ricky closed his eyes, squeezing his hands against the armrests as he braced for an overwhelming brain freeze or a sharp spike of pain.
Five seconds passed. Then ten.
Nothing happened. No headache, no burning sensation, no strange ringing in his ears.
Ricky opened his eyes, blinked, shrugged and pulled the heaviest volume—a breakdown of early industrial gearboxes—back toward him. He flipped to a page detailing planetary gear ratios and sliding-gear transmission shafts that had completely baffled him an hour ago.
He read through the paragraph once.
This time, his mind didn’t stall. The relationship between input shafts, countershafts, and gear ratios slotted together effortlessly in his mind. It felt like doing simple arithmetic—where before he had to pause and manually trace every gear teeth calculation, his brain now processed the mechanical logic almost instantaneously.
"So upgrading INT improves information processing efficiency," Ricky whispered, a small smile touching his lips. "I’m still the same guy, just... sharper."
He looked back at his status screen.
"Fuck it," he muttered. "Let’s see what happens if I take it a step further."
He mentally assigned another 10 points to Intelligence, pushing the value straight up to 31.
The effect was immediate and pronounced. A wave of total clarity washed over his mind, stripping away all mental fog and background distraction. He picked up his fountain pen, opened the manual to a complex diagram of forced-induction fuel flow, and dove back into the text.
He didn’t just read the words; his mind actively visualized the moving parts inside a engine block—piston strokes, valve timings, and crankshaft rotations—as if he were watching a transparent 3D model operate right in front of him.
After ten minutes of effortless reading, Ricky closed the book with a soft thud and sat back, taking a slow breath.
"Alright, let’s hold off right there," he said to himself, running a hand over his hair. "31 is more than enough for now. Going any higher might cause psychological shifts I’m not ready to handle."
For the next five hours, Ricky remained locked in his office, completely immersed in vehicle design.
Outside his window, the afternoon sun drifted across the sky. The distant sounds of Hudson Street—clattering wagon wheels, shouting dockworkers, and the occasional blast of a steamship horn down at the piers—faded into a quiet hum as he filled page after page of his notepad with precise sketches and technical notes.
By late afternoon, Ricky leaned back in his chair, stretching his stiff shoulders, and looked over the handwritten blueprint for Atlantic & Pacific’s future commercial utility truck.
Instead of trying to invent late-twentieth-century technology that would be impossible to manufacture with current industrial tools, he had laid out a practical, highly durable design utilizing components that could actually be produced right now in 1910.
"Alright," he muttered, leaning over a fresh pad of paper, his pen moving steadily. "First off... the engine."
He thought about using aluminum to keep the weight down, but immediately caught himself and shook his head. Not with 1910 foundry technology. The casting quality is too unpredictable, and an aluminum block will just crack under heavy loads.
"Cast iron for the block and cylinder head," he murmured aloud, writing it down. "Heavy, but it’s indestructible."
His pen moved to the oiling system. Most commercial trucks on the streets right now relied on crude splash lubrication, which meant the moment a driver hauled a heavy load up a steep Manhattan incline, the bearings starved of oil and threw a rod.
"Pressure lubrication," Ricky whispered, circling the words on his pad. "A force-feed pump to keep oil flowing to every bearing under load. Add a larger radiator cooling jacket, keep the four cylinders simple, and pair it with a single-jet carburetor and a magneto ignition."
He paused, tapping the pen against his cheek as he considered the electrical setup. An electric self-starter would be nice, but the batteries and starter motors right now are too weak and unreliable.
"Hand crank," he said softly with a faint shrug. "Keep it simple. Fewer parts to break down in the middle of a delivery."
Moving down the pad, he tackled the drivetrain. He hated the clattering, fragile drive chains used on existing delivery trucks. They stretched out, snapped under heavy loads, and threw grease all over the chassis.
"No chains," Ricky muttered under his breath, drawing a straight, solid line from the engine down to the rear wheels. "Propeller shaft. Direct drive running into a heavy-duty worm-drive rear axle. Everything enclosed in a sealed housing where dirt can’t grind the gears to dust."
For the transmission, he ruled out modern synchromesh or automatic designs. His mind knew the machine shops in town couldn’t produce those tight tolerances yet. A sturdy four-speed sliding-gear manual made from heat-treated steel, paired with a heavy dry-plate clutch, would be more than enough to handle heavy torque.
Next came the brakes. Most delivery wagons only had light mechanical shoes on the rear wheels, which was practically a death trap when carrying several tons of cargo downhill toward the Hudson docks.
"Mechanical drum brakes on all four wheels," Ricky murmured, sketching out heavy steel rods and linkages connecting them to a main foot pedal and hand lever. No hydraulic lines. Fluid will just leak out or freeze solid during winter.
He filled in the rest of the chassis specs in quick succession: a rigid steel ladder frame, solid beam axles front and rear, heavy semi-elliptic leaf springs, and a manual worm-and-sector steering box. For the wheels, thick wooden artillery spokes wrapped in solid rubber or heavy pneumatic tires that could roll over jagged cobblestones without popping.
Finally, Ricky sketched out the driver’s cab. He couldn’t help but smile faintly as he drew the roof, doors, and windshield.
"A fully enclosed wooden cab," he muttered, drawing roll-down glass windows on both sides. "No reason my drivers should freeze to death in sleet and snow just because they’re hauling goods across Midtown."
Ricky tapped his pen against the desk, reviewing the final list.
By sourcing high-purity raw steel and metal ingots directly through the System shop—where material quality and structural integrity were guaranteed to be flawless—his manufacturing shop could build a commercial truck that would easily outlast and out-haul anything built by Mack or Henry Ford.
Because these trucks would be produced in small batches purely for Atlantic & Pacific’s internal trade network rather than mass-market consumer sales, he wouldn’t have to worry about causing massive, unpredictable butterfly effects in the global automotive market.
Ricky gathered his notes, slid them safely into his desk drawer, and locked it tight.
"Evelyn," Ricky called out as he opened his office door, buttoning his vest.
Evelyn looked up from her typewriter, her hands pausing over the keys. "Yes, Boss?"
"Have Jimmy drop by my office first thing tomorrow morning," Ricky said, offering a calm, confident smile. "It’s time we start looking for a proper industrial workshop."