Chapter 12: The Watt Steam Engine

Karl came and went in a hurry, having immediately recognized the immense value hidden within the soap after experiencing its cleaning power firsthand.

Once Su Na provided her price quote, he felt his premonitions amplified infinitely.

Soap was a consumable, a daily-use necessity that could be utilized in virtually every aspect of life, from laundering clothes to washing dishes, bathing, and cleaning hair.

Cleaning hair was particularly problematic; it was a major hassle even for wealthy families, let alone ordinary ones, primarily because natural herbal cleansers had limited effectiveness.

Every wash was time-consuming and laborious, which naturally led people to reduce the frequency of their baths as the effort mounted.

For a noble lady like Su Na, a daily bath was a massive undertaking with an entire team serving her, a luxury far beyond the reach of the general public.

Laundering clothes was the ultimate headache, as the oils secreted by the human body were extremely difficult to remove.

Peasant women had to beat clothes vigorously with wooden clubs, while commoners often simply wore the same garments all day without ever washing them.

The wealthy would rather have new clothes made than wear laundered ones.

Grease-based soap would solve these problems perfectly, fundamentally altering and improving the quality of life.

This meant it would become an indispensable item for every household, representing potential profits that were beyond imagination.

This was exactly why Su Na chose the Kortel Merchant Guild to handle the sales; once the soap was officially launched, anyone with even a shred of insight would recognize its value.

If she tried to monopolize all the profits herself, a good thing could easily turn into a disaster.

Although Su Na’s family were nobles, every region had its own local tyrants in the form of other aristocrats, and opening up sales channels on her own would be an endless ordeal.

Conversely, granting exclusive agency to the Church-backed Kortel Merchant Guild allowed her to use the Holy See’s powerful influence to rapidly saturate the market.

It also allowed her to gain an ally to share the risks while deepening their mutual interests.

Simultaneously, Su Na had begun slowly transitioning the territory’s industrial layout, as the soap industry would create the first group of full-time professional workers.

She also intended to marketize the repeating crossbows produced by the carpentry workshops, a goal that required significant assistance from the merchant guild.

There was no real technical barrier to manufacturing repeating crossbows; any other territory could replicate them once they had a finished product.

Furthermore, they posed no threat to a lord’s rule, as their power was only sufficient to harm unarmored commoners.

In the near future, they would likely spread rapidly to all surrounding territories plagued by goblins.

However, those territories would face the same hurdle Su Na had initially: the challenge of mass production and outfitting.

The output of ordinary craftsmen was a mere drop in the bucket compared to the massive consumption of bolts.

Where there is demand, there is a market; if high-quality, affordable finished products were available, no one would bother making their own.

Her plan was to leverage her early-mover advantage with integrated workshops to mass-produce the crossbows.

Then, she would utilize the Kortel Merchant Guild’s network to sell them, nipping any potential competitors in the bud.

Su Na would manufacture the finished products, and the guild would sell them at low prices, forcing other territories to pivot from making crossbows to making bolts instead.

This would allow the guild and the Fafnir Territory to seize the crossbow market together.

It would provide Su Na with an established upstream manufacturing base and sufficient capital to train primary technical workers.

She didn’t care about the meager profits from selling crossbows; what she wanted was the positive industrial momentum generated by their production.

To produce more crossbows, one needed better equipment, larger factories, and more materials.

Lowering costs created new demands for technological upgrades.

By using market demand to drive technological breakthroughs, Su Na would face almost no resistance when she eventually introduced various reform measures.

The repeating crossbow market would eventually saturate, but Su Na didn’t care.

What she wanted was a workforce with a collective awareness of assembly-line production.

These carpenters were the veterans most easily transitioned to new production models.

After all, the most primitive breakthrough was the shift from wooden tools to iron ones.

With the goblin expulsion back on track, the most abundant resource released from the forest was timber.

The issue of charcoal supply had been effectively solved.

Initially, Su Na considered building blast furnaces, as charcoal could reach temperatures over a thousand degrees.

She could have used the System to experiment with hundreds of feasible designs for refractory bricks and furnace construction.

But after reflecting on it, she decided to abandon the idea for now.

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