Chapter 823 Chloe Never Works Overtime!
Chloe froze, the pages of her diary trembling slightly.
"Are there illiterate people in Castells?"
Castells had already carried out his popular education countless times; not only were most people literate, but the vast majority had even completed advanced courses.
But Machine Soul doesn't actually have this requirement.
"What's the point of the machine spirit being literate? The stoker can just be literate, to please the machine spirit and control the machine, machine spirit, machine spirit."
Hughes suddenly stopped halfway through his sentence.
"Wait a minute, it doesn't seem like there's any downside to letting the machine spirit learn to read, right?"
"Exactly!"
“Now that the machine spirit can read, we won’t need so many people to do maintenance. The machine can just follow the maintenance manual and be done with it.” Hughes stroked his chin, his eyes gradually brightening.
"Furthermore, the machines can monitor the production line automatically; the engineers only need to communicate the relevant processes to the machine's controller, and the controller will work overtime on its own."
"Hiss, that makes sense. If people can work overtime, why can't machines?"
"Exactly!"
Nini, standing to the side, asked with some concern, "What if the machine spirit rebels if pushed too far?"
"Impossible, absolutely impossible! Machine spirits are the souls of machines, and machines are created to work. To put it simply, machine spirits are born to work overtime. We're just doing what's in their nature!"
Hughes couldn't help but applaud in admiration: "No wonder he's a cult leader, he's really good at bewitching people's hearts and minds."
"Not at all."
“Then I’ll give you a self-propelled artillery piece. Let’s start with that. You can teach it to read.”
"No, no, wait a minute!" Chloe suddenly realized, "You want me to teach a cannon to read?"
How did the idea she finally came up with end up backfiring on her?
Shouldn't we have set up a special artillery literacy class?
"Of course not, you've misunderstood."
Chloe breathed a sigh of relief.
“Teaching one cannon at a time is a bit wasteful. As for lecturing, you can teach a group of people at once. How about this, I’ll open a special artillery literacy class, and you can teach them as well.”
Chloe: 『.』
"However, the production schedule for artillery is quite tight right now. Once it comes off the production line, it has to be transported to the front line immediately. There's no time for you to teach it like this. You should go directly to the production line and teach them to read."
"My workload is already full!" Chloe said sadly. "Oh well, I guess I'll have to work overtime again. Fine, I'll work overtime. I don't need to sleep anyway, I won't die."
Hughes watched Chloe's pitiful state with great interest for a while before slowly saying, "Who said you had to work overtime?"
"ah?"
"You always complain that the courtroom is too boring, so why not change your job? You can focus on teaching, and I'll figure out a way to handle the courtroom work."
Chloe's diary froze, then began to tremble. After a while, she suddenly jumped up, almost hitting the ceiling.
"Really? Really? I don't have to work overtime?!"
Hughes sighed helplessly, watching Chloe happily bouncing around on the table.
This leader of the Fire-Chasing Moths truly deserves the title of "devoted to the cause," and, well, perhaps even to the point of dying for it.
Castells was so short-handed at the beginning that Hughes had no choice but to make his men work overtime all the time.
But things are different now. Castells' civil service system has begun to operate, and trained and selected personnel are being continuously supplied to various positions.
“Overtime and dedication are just temporary measures to get through difficult times; how can they become the norm?” Hughes said with a smile and a sigh. “If an organization can only keep running by exploiting its members to the extreme, it can never last long. We are all human beings, flesh and blood; how can we work like machines?”
“Chloe has no blood or flesh,” Nini whispered.
"Shut up!"
"Chloe doesn't have a mouth either."
"!?"
"So you're planning to squeeze the soul out of her?" Nini used all four hands to pin Chloe, who was about to pounce on her, onto the table, and turned to look at Hughes.
“How can this be considered exploitation? Machines are meant to work, don’t talk nonsense!” Hughes’s eyes widened.
"Really? I don't believe it."
"Heh," Hughes sneered. "Almost all the machine spirits like Beatrice because she can transform into a pollution fountain, and pollution is the fuel for machine spirits, their work supplies."
Would you like having an endless supply of blank paper at your workstation?
Nini's eyes widened. She felt that what Hughes said made some sense, but she also had a vague feeling that something was wrong.
"Anyway, let's leave it at that for now. Chloe, you can take this opportunity to get to know the Machine Soul better. You'll be fighting together later, so it'll be like half of your body."
"Yay!"
Chloe cheered for a while, then suddenly remembered something: "I still need a teaching assistant. As you can see, I can't speak; I can only communicate with the literate machine spirits."
"Oh, I've already prepared this for you. Someone will be there to coordinate with you when you get there."
"Who is it? Zoe? She seems busy too. I remember she became the chief clerk of Bloodharbor; she can't possibly abandon her job to teach people to read, can she? Could it be Connor Gaia? Tata?"
You'll see when you get there.
Chloe: '?'
Hughes smiled; it felt great to be the riddle solver.
Nini went to contact the other Fire Moths. Infiltrating the Empire with novels is something that can't be rushed; it requires careful planning.
Chloe, on the other hand, skipped and hopped her way to the factory.
Hughes specially arranged an artillery production line for her. This was Castells' largest military factory, located on the east side of the volcano. Due to its large size, it couldn't even be squeezed into the fortress complex.
Its main production capacity is self-propelled artillery, and Chloe was somewhat stunned when she entered the factory.
"Wow, it's so big!?"
She had been busy in the courtroom, and because of her health condition, she hadn't been to the factory in a long time.
Chloe's memories of the factory are still those of the workshop where she used to build airships.
Those factories weren't actually that small, but the main assembly was outdoors, and the production lines were mostly used for manufacturing parts. They had only recently introduced steam power and were completely different from the factories we have now.
When Chloe entered the factory, she was immediately taken aback by the dense array of machinery and pipes.
If factories in the past were like various machines stuffed into a concrete shell, today she felt like she had walked into the stomach of a steel behemoth.
Strictly speaking, the factory in front of us was actually much more spacious than those we had seen before, with wider corridors and walkways, and the specially treated floor marked with various lines and painted colors.
With the extremely high ceiling, Chloe felt as if she had entered an art gallery.
(End of this chapter)
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