Chapter 57: Elves, Currency, and Irrigation

No sooner had Amber finished speaking than Gawain whipped his head around and fixed her with a piercing stare, making the half-elf rogue shiver all over. “W-what do you mean by that look…?”

His gaze was like he was staring at some alien creature. “How do you know a druid?”

“Why wouldn’t I know a druid?” Amber crossed her arms, standing her ground. “I’m half-elf, you know—didn’t you hear that all druidic orders originally come from the elves?”

If any other pointed-eared person had said that, it might have sounded plausible. But coming from Amber, the so-called ‘disgrace of the elves,’ it was utterly unconvincing. Gawain sized her up from head to toe, watching her stubborn expression, then finally blurted out, “You mean the kind of ‘know’ where you’ve stolen from them before, and now they’re out to get you, hunting you down everywhere?”

“That’s an insult to my character!” Amber snapped, bristling like a cat. “How could I have been caught stealing?”

Gawain was speechless.

Something about her rebuttal felt off.

Still, despite his doubts, Amber’s confident tone made it seem like she really did know a druid. She launched into a sales pitch like a merchant hawking wares: “Listen, the druid I know isn’t just any druid—he’s a scholar-type, knows a bit about everything. His order is the pure-blooded ‘Heart of the Woods,’ especially skilled at dealing with plants and animals. Totally reliable…”

At last, Gawain believed her story. But he didn’t press for details about how she met this mysterious druid or what his name was—asking that now would be rude. After her pitch, he only asked two questions: “Can you still contact him? And if so, how long would it take to bring him here?”

“Contacting him’s easy enough. Although people say druids keep to themselves and are hard to find, his range is pretty fixed—around the southern borders. As for how long it’d take to bring him…”

Amber kept winking at Gawain as she spoke. “I can shadow-step all the way there, but coming back, I’ll have to travel normally. How fast we get back depends on transportation—you know what I mean?”

Gawain immediately caught on. He pulled out a few copper coins and pressed them into her hand. “Go buy yourself some new shoes.”

Amber’s eyes went wide. “…You’re not serious! And you have to give me some money as a deposit, right? Even if it’s a friend’s introduction, there’s a hiring fee!”

“You should’ve said that earlier,” Gawain joked. Watching her bounce around was entertaining, but after the joke, he got serious. From another pocket, he pulled out some thin gold and silver bars, all cut to uniform size. “Here. Use this to get the job done. Whatever’s left over is yours.”

Amber’s face lit up as she eagerly took the shiny treasure.

Since the mint wasn’t fully operational yet, “Cecil’s coinage” was still just a concept. So Gawain had craftsmen melt down some gold and silver from the treasury into these small bars for trade.

This wasn’t unusual in this world—using precious metals directly as currency was common in a medieval economy with a rudimentary commercial system. Gold and silver of a certain purity were money themselves; coins were just for convenience, making them easier to carry, verify, and count. Merchants also accepted raw gold and silver, but that required checking purity and weighing, so prices were usually a bit higher when paying with raw metal.

Of course, this worked only as long as the nobles’ “currency reputation” held up. If one day the nobles started mixing impurities into their coins to the point of annoying merchants, unofficial gold and silver bars would become the mainstream currency, and using official coins would actually cost more.

That’s why the god of commerce’s emblem is a scale, with an iron cutter on one side and an eye on the other—the cutter to slice gold and silver bars, the scale to weigh them, and the eye representing the sharp judgment a good merchant needs to assess purity.

If Gawain weren’t a bit of a perfectionist, insisting on minting refined, distinctive coins, he could have taken a simpler approach—casting gold and silver into rods, slicing them into thin pieces, and stamping them with the Cecil emblem. In 536 AS, the Duke of the Western Borders did just that to save time and labor costs. That year, the Western Border coins were mockingly called “the miser’s toll money” because the law required all merchants entering the region to convert a third of their money into these low-quality coins and use them for tolls.

The monetary system here was truly peculiar.

Amber left in high spirits, practically floating away from everyone’s sight. Heddy couldn’t help but worry: “Do you think she might run off with the gold and silver?”

“Embezzlement?” Gawain muttered, secretly thinking the ‘disgrace of the elves’ might actually pull something like that off…

Well, for now, better to trust her—there was no one else claiming to know a druid in the entire camp.

After Amber left, Gawain turned his attention back to the land reclamation project.

The old farmer named Norris quietly kept his head down, neither fidgeting like a poor man nor speaking out of turn, as if waiting for Gawain to ask.

“Any other problems with this land?” Gawain asked. “If there’s anything that might cause trouble, better to say it now.”

“Well, if I had to say, the land’s a bit higher than the riverbed, so it’s hard to channel water directly. We’d have to dig a canal upstream or dig wells,” Norris replied. “But there’s a silver lining—if there’s heavy rain and the Whitewater River rises, we don’t have to worry about the fields flooding.”

Irrigation… If they had pumps or some kind of lifting machinery, that would be easy. Or they could use the world’s “special technology” and hire a water-elementalist mage to water the fields. But the second option was clearly unrealistic—once the camp was running smoothly, Heddy would be too busy to come act as a human water pump. Hiring a professional mage to water fields? Even the Violet Kingdom in the north or the elves in the south wouldn’t indulge in such extravagance. Besides, even if the Cecil family’s money fell from the sky, how many mages would want to do such “lowly, dirty work” in the fields?

They’d rather take half the pay to set off fireworks at the king’s or nobles’ banquets, entertaining those pale, drug-addled noblewomen and ladies.

So Gawain immediately dismissed the idea of a mage as a human pump and turned to mechanical solutions. Of course, by the world’s usual standards, nobles would just throw more serfs at the problem. But for Gawain, wasting manpower like that was too extravagant.

Then an ancient, effective machine popped into his mind. “Have you ever heard of something called a waterwheel?”

Heddy, Norris, and Sir Philip all looked utterly confused.

No one had heard of it.

Gawain looked at Heddy. “Got paper and pen?”

Once he had them, Gawain sketched a simple diagram. It was a tall wheel supported by spokes, with evenly spaced, slanted cylinders and wooden boards fixed around its rim. On one side of the wheel, he drew a water trough extending outward.

Due to time constraints, he only drew part of the waterwheel—a rough sketch—but the principle was surprisingly simple. He explained, “This is a waterwheel. River water flows underneath, pushing these boards, turning the wheel. The wheel lifts water-filled cylinders to the top, where the water pours into this trough. The cycle repeats, raising water to a higher level. How high depends on the size of the wheel, as long as the materials hold.”

He added, “Of course, this is just a sketch and a basic principle. There could be many variations.”

Heddy was completely captivated. She couldn’t speak—her eyes were glued to the drawing.

With a little reasoning, she could see this machine was absolutely useful. But before seeing the sketch, she’d never imagined such a thing existed:

It required no manpower, no supernatural power. It could work day and night, doing the work of many serfs, powered solely by nature’s force.

Suddenly, she felt a sense of “beauty” emanating from this simple machine—a word that seemed utterly out of place with its rough, primitive structure.

Still, Gawain sighed. “Too bad there’s no bamboo here, or it’d be much easier to build…”

Heddy didn’t catch that at first. “Sorry? What did you say?”

“Nothing,” Gawain waved it off. “Any other thoughts on this machine?”

Heddy was about to praise it as a stroke of genius when Norris picked up the pen and started sketching on a blank sheet. The old farmer drew while saying, “If we build it right on the Whitewater River, it’ll be affected by the river’s flow. During the dry season, it won’t work. If we could dig a separate canal nearby, then during the dry season…”

Noticing the sudden silence around him, Norris snapped back to reality, then nervously threw down the pen and stepped back, trembling. “My lord, I was just…”

But Gawain surprised him: “Can you write?”

(End of chapter)