After evaluating their merits and bestowing them with their rewards, Roland had doubled the size of the First Army, increasing it to the size of 600 people. Soon after the recruitment order was made public, the whole town’s square became packed with enthusiastically people who wanted to sign up. Roland still followed his old concept to select the member of the First Army. He chose the three hundred indigenous people, who had the best physical condition, and did not have a criminal record and let them join the First Army.
The rest was a summary of all kinds of technical personnel.
For example, the smelting and firing industry had substantially increased in the past month, from the initial no more than 20 people, they had risen to about 400 people. Thanks to the furnaces granted by the “furnace expert” Lesya, the North Slope Furnace Group could not only produce red brick but they could also fire cement and glass. At the same time, they had also erected three shaft furnaces. They were used to smelt the ore which had already pilled up n the yard. The produced ingots could afterward also be transported to the required areas.
As for education, chemistry, industry, animal husbandry, the people engaged within amounted to less than 50, so from a demographic point of view, Border Town still had a long way to go. But the fact that the original population of hunters and miners in Border Town could be changed into this within merely half a year, could be regarded as earth-shaking.
Today, the occupation of hunters had basically disappeared, from hunting for surviving it was now changed into a hobby. Excluding those people who became members of the First Army or joined the smelting industry, the current Border Town still had nearly a thousand individuals who were unemployed. While waiting for the literacy phase of the universal education finished. Roland decided to pull all of these people into the factory, and open up the prelude to the industrial era.
After Barov left, Roland went to the drawer and put the statistics into it. Looking back at Nightingale, he wanted to ask her what had happened with her but after hesitating for a moment, he ultimately wasn’t able to.
He already had a vague answer within his heart, but saying something like that was too embarrassing, and even if he guessed wrong it might even be even more embarrassing. So in the end, Roland swallowed his question and said instead: “Now with this done, let’s go to the North Slope Mine.”
“Do you want to go and see what changes Soraya’s new ability could make?” Although Nightingales behavior has become somewhat strange, her attitude was still the same as before, with a smile, she took off her hood and said, “Let’s go.”
The ride on the hot air balloon on the other day had influenced far more than only one or two people.
He never imagined that Soraya would become the second witch who gave birth to a fundamental change of her ability.
In fact, even she wasn’t aware of the change.
Roland had only been present by chance when her talent appeared.
Since the hot air balloon was a gift for Anna, it had been placed in the castle courtyard. Whenever someone wanted to see the landscape from high up, they had to call for Anna and Lightning. But the day before when it began to rain, Roland suddenly remembered that the out of rattan weaved basket would become soft when immersed in water, and even if it later got dried it would still lose its toughness, thinking of this he wanted to take it back into the castle.
He had intended to let the servants do it but he then had second thoughts about doing so, whatever the outcome, the hot air balloon was his present to Anna, and the ropes and airbag were parts that could also be easily damaged, so he decided to personally bring it back to the castle. After he had called Hummingbird over and came to the vestibule, he got surprised by what he saw.
The whole basket had a pattern painted on it — it was covered by a bird’s-eye view of the scenery of Border Town. But unlike her previous photo-like paintings, her paintings unexpectedly looked like they would immediately stand up and come to life. And it also seems that the raindrops here couldn’t fall on Roland either. When he took a closer look, he discovered that her paintings had for the first time gotten a “thickness” to it.
It wasn’t strange that a picture had thickness. Theoretically, every real picture should have had a thickness — because the pigment itself had a thickness. In paintings, this thickness could even be put to use. By using brushes, strokes or scrapers it was possible to create rough textures, and through a variation of layers the realism itself could be increased, enhancing the expressive power of the painting.
