Chapter Thirty-Four: A Timely Gift in the Snow
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Revenge from the stone... Colin muttered to himself.
However, the stone hadn’t landed anywhere near him, missing by about two meters.
After a few seconds of near-dead silence, Colin, rubbing his chest where his ribs ached from the impact, still managed to force a smile to reassure Miss Shana that he was fine.
His gaze inevitably drifted over Shana, and he thought to himself that perhaps earth was the softer landing after all...
His back hadn’t suffered, but his chest certainly felt the brunt of it.
“Ah, I’m so sorry,” Shana apologized sincerely.
Even without her intervening, the stone likely wouldn’t have hit anyone, making the whole situation slightly awkward.
“Do you need me to brush the dirt off you?” Shana offered.
“No, no need...” Colin declined politely, and, eager to move past the awkwardness, he smoothly shifted the topic. “More importantly, I think we should go have a look at the blast site.”
At the mention of the explosion, Shana’s eyes lit up, and she nodded in agreement.
Before long, Colin arrived at the spot where the explosives had been placed, and saw a gaping crater in the ground.
The pit was more than half a meter deep and several meters across, a testament to the terrifying power unleashed. The soil around the crater was “soft and loose,” like stepping into fluffy cake.
[Prompt: By observing, you realize the explosive’s power matches closely with the descriptions you’ve seen online.]
[Therefore, you are quite certain that, even though this world is filled with many strange things, the scientific knowledge you have is still valid here.]
A small smile tugged at Colin’s lips. He’d been worried that in a place where magic and other special forces existed, the power of guns and explosives might be greatly diminished.
Fortunately, the prompt gave him an answer he was satisfied with.
Those around him wore expressions of astonishment. Shana took a deep breath of the lingering “fragrance” in the air, and whatever she recalled made her usually gentle voice tremble with excitement:
“How much of this can you make?”
She had seen it all with her own eyes—using this unique weapon required no magic at all.
Which meant that even ordinary people could use it!
And if it could be produced in great quantities...
Just the thought of it filled Shana with joy.
“Making a dozen or twenty barrels shouldn’t be a problem right now...” Colin recalled and answered offhandedly. “It really depends on how much froststone remains in the mine...”
He wasn’t too worried about exhausting the saltpeter. Judging by the productivity of people in this era, it seemed unlikely.
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Unless those obviously extraordinary upper-class rulers came to mine it themselves, which was even less likely...
So it was foreseeable that there was still plenty of saltpeter left in the mine.
With the system’s various functions, even if Colin were the only one working, he could quickly produce large quantities of explosives.
But the problem was that mining the saltpeter was extremely troublesome. If Colin didn’t want to chain himself to this place, he’d need to establish a production line.
That would require a lot of manpower...
People were worth next to nothing...
To put it bluntly, at a time like this, in this context, a human life was worth perhaps a hundred or two hundred milliliters of water... or a loaf, even half a loaf of bread (for those lords unwilling to resort to cannibalism).
But lanterns, blood, food, and the limits of his territory all prevented Colin from triggering a population boom.
And if he missed today, the cost of expanding the population would only grow greater.
Once those initial, unsustainable slaves all starved to death, the price of trying to boost the population would be astronomical.
The deeper he thought, the more pressure Colin felt.
In an instant, the joy and sense of accomplishment brought by black powder was washed away.
...
Meanwhile, in a second-tier territory shrouded in mist, a lord named Huang Weiyang was leisurely savoring roasted rat meat.
Though there were no spices, no salt, nothing to season it, the crispy aroma of the meat was irresistible, the fragrant fat mingling with saliva, awakening in Huang Weiyang a primal yearning for protein.
“After working hard for years without affording a house, who’d have thought I’d get a place in this godforsaken dump...” he laughed at himself, suddenly nostalgic for his rented apartment of a few dozen square meters.
Sure, the toilet was perpetually clogged despite barely using it, but at least he hadn’t needed to worry about dying the moment he stepped outside.
Last year, his investment in a certain type of “fragrant tech stock” kept rising; he’d planned to splurge at the end of the year, but fate brought him here instead.
Yet as he reminisced, a distant thunderous boom jolted him to the core.
“What was that?!”
He was baffled at first, but then recalled something he’d seen on the chat channel not long ago, and his face paled.
No, it couldn’t be such a coincidence...
He had just been talking big about stockpiling guns, even feeling a bit smug about it, but now that it was happening to him, the flavor changed entirely...
Now, everyone in this area had become part of the granary...
He checked the chat channel. Most people were still oblivious, unaware that anything had happened.
But a few nearby had noticed something was off.
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“I think I just heard something. Does anyone know what happened?”
“Didn’t notice. Why, is something going on?”
“I heard it too. Sounded like thunder. By the way, does anyone know what happened to those who went to explore the woods? Some of the more active guys suddenly stopped talking.”
“Nothing big, probably dead.”
“Guys, let me tell you something, but don’t freak out...”
“What is it? Why so mysterious...”
“Just say it already, don’t drag it out.”
“Someone in our area has managed to make explosives...”
“...”
For a moment, the chat channel went dead silent.
But seconds later, messages exploded, even the lurkers drawn out by the news.
“No way, did you mishear?! Out of millions of regions, how could it happen right here?”
“Honestly, the odds are ridiculously low.”
Huang Weiyang gave a bitter smile as he scrolled, then typed out a message.
“I’ve served in the military and seen these things myself, I swear I didn’t mishear. That was definitely an explosion, not thunder... We really are that one in a million...”
“Damn, explosives?! And there’s no punishment, no ban?!”
“...”
The area channel was instantly flooded with venting messages.
These were all people who had ventured out; they knew exactly what it meant to gain access to black powder at a time like this...
When the outpouring subsided, the man hesitated, then tentatively suggested:
“Should we band together and... go talk to that person? I think I can tell the direction it came from.”
Talk? What a joke!
Everyone knew exactly what he really meant.