When the Saintess Arrives, No King Exist

The Crystal Palace, named as a palace, is actually a commercial street, so the buildings on both sides are all commercial properties.

The special triangular structure prevents rainwater from accumulating on the glass, only allowing it to flow onto the roofs of the buildings on either side.

Rainwater is then directed along iron pipes to either side of the Crystal Palace, drained into the sewage pool through the underground water system of the Holy Mechanism Court.

The third level of a Crystal Palace building is where staff can access.

However, the person in front of me can easily step onto the second floor on the mortar surface of the steel framework.

This is because he is not just anyone, but the Pope of the Holy Alliance, His Majesty Saint Sun.

Picking up a bottle of pepper-flavored soda, the high-collared spider silk-clad Horn stands between tall window panes, looking down below.

The pedestrian street of the first floor of Crystal Palace is roughly 250 meters long and 24 meters wide, accommodating around 3,000 to 5,000 people daily.

As for the second floor, on the foundation of the first-floor pedestrian street, a 4-meter-wide attached walkway platform has been constructed with stone pillars and colonnades.

The colonnade platforms serve both for tourists to visit the second floor and to provide shade for the exhibition halls on the first floor.

Enclosed between the sky-blue walls and the slate-gray ground, travelers and tourists in various attires come and go incessantly.

Underneath the glass dome, tall, green-leaved plants are visible, many of which are rare tropical trees from Black Snake Bay.

Numerous empire naturalists look upon these towering plants, always marveling with a tsk at the "tall plants."

Between the flower beds and trees, large and small crowds move to and fro.

In the center of the Crystal Palace street are booths for engineers or inventors seeking investment.

As for the open exhibition halls on the first floor of the buildings on either side, a variety of exhibits sent by the Holy Alliance or local companies or monasteries are displayed.

These exhibition halls hang all sorts of signs, selling all types of seeds and new crops, selling simple machine tools to artisans, and selling all types of new tools and even weapons.

There are even exhibitions of ancient artifacts, books, fantastic flora and fauna, and even holy relics like the black dragon head and Holy Cabinet.

Various agricultural machines are among these, including different brands of threshers, seeders, and harvesters.

These agricultural machines and weapons and armor are the core of this Holy Alliance expo.

The external steel frame glass dome and those sophisticatedly structured machines are just prototypes.

Compared to large-scale production, their cost does not match their demand.

In Hilov’s words, they are just for fun, big toys.

As for these agricultural machines, they are the machines that the Empire or, rather, the Eastern Continent needs most at present.

The star among them is the horse-drawn reaper designed, developed, and assembled by Holy Alliance engineer McCormick.

Even with the scythe upgraded, traditional manual harvesting could only reap 2 to 3 mu per person per day, with subsequent manual bundling needed.

McCormick’s horse-drawn reaper relies on three new structures: the reciprocating cutter, gathering wheel, and conveyor belt.

With two horses pulling it, it can reap 60 mu per day, equivalent to 20 to 30 laborers.

However, even though it is animal-powered, the completion of complex functions leads to the need for complex parts.

Gears, bearings, hinges, and screws...

How many workshops of the Holy Mechanism Court are participating in the manufacturing, and how many jobs will it create in Hot Spring Castle and Joan of Arc Castle?

For investors from Falan and Leia, as long as this machine is indeed viable, its profits are enormous.

Currently in the market, although Public Register Farmers and tenant farmers are not allowed to be bought and sold, they often accompany land transfers and recruitment.

The recruitment cost for a Public Register Farmer or tenant farmer is mostly around a daily wage of half a Dinar, including room and board.

Only during the harvest season or for skilled farmhands will there be higher prices.

This price has been decreasing day by day for nearly fifty years.

The underlying reason is the import of cheap grain from the Royal Court, even with high tariffs, making grain farming a highly costly trade.

Apart from the oldest or very large landholding inland noblemen, almost no one makes money relying solely on growing grain anymore.

From the noblemen’s perspective, they feel aggrieved too.

Prices rise, grain prices drop, so it’s only natural to reduce labor costs, isn’t it?

If it sells, you get a bite to eat; if it doesn’t, everyone starves to death.

Why don’t you common folk understand the plight of us nobles?

Now with this horse-drawn reaper, what’s the need for you farmers?

Two horses plus a reaper, compared to the price of 20 tenant farmers, which is more cost-effective, the lords can still figure out.

Moreover, the reaper doesn’t talk, much easier to handle than tenant farmers.

As long as a horse-drawn reaper can be used for five years, the rest is pure profit.

There’s a seeder for sowing season and a reaper for harvest season.

Except for some miscellaneous tasks needing a few tenant farmers hired, essentially not many people or labor costs are needed.

For those lords, that’s a great boon.

As for where the jobless tenant farmer laborers will go, that’s not the lords’ concern.

Many citizens who originally just came for the spectacle, upon discovering the huge business opportunities within, immediately started organizing to pool funds with fellow townsmen for purchases.

According to the information Horn received, as the expo proceeded, orders for the horse-drawn reaper exceeded one hundred units.

Don’t think one hundred units is small; for cautious and prudent merchant citizens, this is already vast trust.

Only after the first wave of reapers has been delivered and proven effective will there be a second and third wave of orders.

Besides these machines stationed in building showrooms, there are also those walkers in the crowd made by inventors parading mechanical displays.

Brass-colored machines bustle against the human traffic, clinking and clattering as they move.

Mechanical dogs, mechanical monkeys, mechanical horses, land sailboats, unicycles...

The "inventors" clad in overalls deliberately stick wrenches into their back pockets, with leather goggles embedded with glass lenses perched atop their heads.

This is primarily because Holy Alliance’s promotional illustrations of engineers always depict this outfit.

Consequently, many engineers not in this costume, to inspire investor confidence, have to don this outfit.

As for where this stereotype originated, we’ll have to ask the great Saint’s Grandson.

After taking a sip of pepper-flavored soda, Horn takes two more steps forward, reaching the window.

His gaze roves over the crowded people, searching for the shadows of spring mechanism devices.

These spring mechanism devices are intricately structured, with linkages moving and gear transmissions, along with the unfolding and tightening of spider silk and springs.

But they all share one feature.

A palm-sized clock tuner made from dragon bone fragments is installed on the side of the spring housing.

Engineers or creators need to occasionally manually or semi-automatically operate the output of the spring housing.

Whenever the spring is fully released, these machines halt on the spot, awaiting the owner to turn the winder of the clock tuner.

This winder only provides an initial power for the tuner’s vibration, serving purely as an ornament.

Yet to outsiders, it seems like they’re using a small winder to tighten a massive mountain copper spring.

To those unfamiliar with ether functions and energy transfer, they think the spring housing’s power comes from manual winding.

In recent days, Cheka’s reports to Horn have mentioned:

Many citizen artisans, buying some mountain bronze themselves, return home brimming with confidence, ready to create their own.

Upon hearing this, Horn laughs wryly.

It’s likely these artisans see the parts exposed to the air, with nothing hidden, visible to the naked eye, and assume what you see is what you get.

They’ve forgotten that this design is meant to facilitate engineer adjustments.

The reason Horn is not selling these machines with modern flair in large quantities is because, without the Holy Mechanism Court, they would immediately turn to scrap iron.

If wanting to use them outside the Holy Mechanism Court, not only would the price skyrocket, but the size would multiply tenfold!

The mercury damping fluid required would be astronomical.

Besides a handful of wealthy nobles and tycoons who might collect them as toys, ordinary people simply can’t afford or maintain them!

In that moment, Horn can’t help but lament for these artisans’ wallets.