Molting the Mortal Coil

Wan Ling stared him down again. Those beautiful eyes of hers seemed like they could read his thoughts and he felt sweat beading up on his back. She narrowed her eyes, but didn’t say anything else. Instead she waved her hand in a gesture for him to continue. She also seemed a bit sad and Sage didn’t know what that meant.

“Ahem. As I was saying, since I’m now the City Lord of Lionheart Town I can authorize alterations to the town. There are many upgrades to the city's infrastructure that I wish to perform. I’ve had these ideas for a long time, but I was in no position to get any rulers to invest so heavily. These changes don’t bring any revenue after all, so who would want to just waste their money? Of course, I know better. I believe with these changes our city will prosper and people from all over will want to live here. With greater population and popularity, Lionheart Town will grow larger and larger until we rival the county capital, and that is only a start. I don’t even think it would be a stretch if the Dou Capital City came knocking at our door to get the same improvements.”

“Infrastructure?”

Sage realized that he’d used a word that didn’t really exist yet, which was doubly confusing because he was speaking in the native language of this world, “Public works. Roads, sewers, and lighting. I also want to delve into parks, public transportation, education, and a news outlet.”

“The town already has streets and drainage sewers. I didn’t really catch the rest of that.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll understand it all eventually. Let me show you the plans!”

Sage hadn’t just been working on the carriage engine, he had also drawn up a bunch of designs and sketches. Firstly, the roads were packed earth, but he planned to dig them out. The roads would be the guiding lines for a new sewage and drainage system for the town. Then new brick roads would be installed with access hatches to the sewers. With an access system they wouldn’t have to rip up the road every time he wanted to make changes to the sewers and the roads would have adequate drainage. It wasn’t exactly a revolutionary idea for this world, but it was an expensive choice. Sage wasn’t really worried about the cost as he had huge insects to use as construction equipment and an excess of free labor.

Lighting also wasn’t anything new, but it would take a small army of people to refill, light, and extinguish enough oil lamps to light up the whole city. That, or an immense fortune to cover the city in Spirit Torches. Sage instead had a different route. He shared his plan to alter a type of firefly to be larger and follow specific behaviors. Then he would create ‘streetlights’ which would essentially be a hive for fireflies with a reflective housing like an umbrella to shed light over a large area and a central location to make it easy to tend to them.

Parks were something only the most wealthy had in the center of the most congested urban areas. In this world, if you wanted to experience nature you merely had to go outside the walls of the city. Sage planned to change that. He planned to add small trees to the sides of the roads and public parks strategically placed around the city. They could double as mustering grounds for troops in a pinch, but the hard to notice improvement to morale would be the real benefit. He was sure many would enjoy the scenic atmosphere of nature without having to risk their safety to experience it. There were far too many powerful creatures in this world and most of the normal people couldn’t relax without a city wall around them.

The public transportation referred to his carriages, which he planned to create a bus route out of. It would have a fee, of course, but it would still only end up as a way to transform Spirit Stones into gold coins. Coins were worth far less than Spirit Stones, so it was a losing wager, but he hoped to remove all the beasts from the city streets. Once Lionheart Town was known for not having piles of crap on the streets it would certainly increase in popularity.

Improving education was a difficult prospect, but Sage had tied it into the ‘news outlet’. The concept of the news was a foreign concept in this world. Beyond the orders issued by the local power, people gained most of their information mainly from word of mouth. Rumors were a powerful force here. Sage had already thought of creating a newspaper in the past, but even now his Information Network was inadequate. Instead he planned to let the people do the work for him.

The plan had two steps. First, his plan outlined placing Movie Projectors all over town. Coming from a world with very sophisticated usage of the media he planned to create a sort of town wide television network. Every day, they would fill a number of identical Memory Spheres and distribute them to the projectors all over town. They would play all day and cover many essential features. There would be a news program that could play for a few minutes once every few hours and update the people of the most important local or regional events. Educationally, they could have short tips about how to do things and teach the citizens whatever they wanted them to know. They could even create shows filled with propaganda to make the people favorable to their causes, and run advertisements for their products. While running so many Movie Projectors constantly would waste a lot of Spirit Stones, once they were getting paid to run advertisements for others and merchandising the shows that were the most popular, Sage was sure it would pay for itself. All he had to do was write down all the things that the media could do and let others work out the details.

As for part two of the plan, he was quite sure that once the news was watched by many, then people would be volunteering everything they learned. All he had to do was offer a small reward and they’d have so much information they’d likely need to spend a fortune just vetting it all. He also noted down plans for expansion. Once their network became popular enough then others would pay a fortune to be shown in favorable images. What rich young master wouldn’t want to be the hero on a tv show? There was sure to be a never ending line of people that wanted to be famous and spread their reputation. He was already planning to create a new ‘branch’ of his information network to put in charge of creating content and verifying information for this new television network.

Wan Ling looked at him dubiously, and then she glared when he gave an estimate on the costs. Just the daily upkeep of these changes would be quite a significant expenditure, and that was without considering the huge initial investment.

“If you think it’s a bad idea, I’ll pay for it with my own funds.”

Wan Ling gaze turned predatory, yet she still had quite a calm and placid smile on her face, “Don’t be silly. The Prosperity Company will be taking all of this new work on. If you are confident in it, then we shall follow your lead. Don’t you worry, just like in the past I will take your ideas and alter them as needed.”

Sage laughed, since he knew that she wouldn’t let an opportunity slip past. She could tell that if he would waste that much of his own money, he was very sure of his ideas. She would just have to keep a close watch and make enough changes to keep them from losing money.

“I’ll leave it in your capable hands then. Oh, you should probably make a deal with Thousand Treasures for the Movie Projector just like the one for the Airship and… let’s see… Steamcoach. That should be a decent name.”

He ripped off that name without a second thought and then quickly proposed another, “Oh and for the movie projectors around the town, we can call it the ‘Prosperity Network’. I’ll keep sending you more of the plans for how it can work. For now, I am going to start breeding Fireflies, if I can be excused?”