I Became a Witch and Started an Industrial Revolution

After the outburst, when the miners looked at the officers’ corpses scattered all over the ground, fear surged back into their hearts as their minds calmed.

Most of them were utterly confused at this moment.

They had no idea what had just happened—after a noisy commotion, they suddenly found themselves murderers...

At that moment, a young man jumped onto the dining table and shouted loudly: “Everyone, the nobles come here every now and then to beat and curse us, to seize our money and grain! We are not slaves! We can no longer tolerate such oppression!”

“Beyond the mountains, not too far from here, a brand-new kingdom has already been established, one of true equality without oppression! There, no nobles exist, no slaves exist, and nobles can no longer bully them!”

“If they can do it, so can we! We too want a stable life! We have many comrades who share our ideals, we all hold the same hope—let us unite!!!”

With tacit approval from the civilian merchants, a large number of workers were stirred up by the team Tina had brought.

They gathered together and merged into a force numbering in the thousands.

Of course, those with real combat power were still the hundred backbone fighters Tina had brought.

The others were mostly for momentum.

Yet the scale had already formed a force of its own.

With masses of workers in tow, Tina launched an assault on the city.

The unprepared Stark City was easily taken.

The adjutant left in charge, along with the private soldiers, were all sentenced to hang.

The adjutant was even hung at the city lord’s mansion gate for public display.

Afterward, Tina began a great purge within the city.

A large number of noble landlords’ estates were searched and confiscated.

Among them were opportunists who took advantage to loot other civilians’ homes, but these were executed on the spot by the Ceres sergeants in charge of inspections, as a warning to others.

While the nobles’ property was being cleared, Tina and Marlon personally led their teams to quickly seize all the factories in the city, gathering all the craftsmen and firmly taking control of production capacity.

In less than a week, all the city’s various powers were purged, leaving only the civilian merchants to grow stronger from the opportunity.

According to Tina’s request, they were quickly divided and integrated, each assigned to different fields, and forcibly transformed into industry-leading enterprises.

This was something Mitia had especially instructed Tina—no empty promises, only commit to what was achievable.

Build trust step by step before speaking of more.

With the help of these merchants, Tina dispersed most of the sergeants, each leading hundreds of workers to assault the nobles’ territories in the towns.

Their goal was very clear: nobles they could defeat would be captured alive and, along with criminals, brought before public trials held by farmers, then executed.

Those they could not defeat would be encircled but not attacked—waiting until comrades from other directions finished their tasks and regrouped for extermination.

At the same time, they created farmers’ associations in the countryside under Tina’s leadership, and workers’ associations in the city under Marlon’s leadership, absorbing large numbers of poor civilians, beggars, and laborers—anyone that could be absorbed.

By day, Tina and the others led them in purging bandits and nobles, while also getting them familiar with firearms.

By night, they gathered young villagers and taught them under Mitia’s theoretical guidance.

Qualified ones were immediately approved to join the National Socialist Party.

This was to lay the groundwork early, so that when they returned to their villages, they could expand the farmers’ associations.

As for the teaching content, beyond giving high praise to their acts of resistance, it elaborated in detail on many of Mitia’s core ideas, as well as the concrete strategies of the movement to come.

In summary, it was very simple: strike the nobles politically, strike the nobles economically, strip away their cloak of authority and their superficial dignity.

Let the unions and farmers’ associations handle everything—disputes between workers and farmers had to be mediated by the associations, otherwise they would not be recognized.

Absolute concentration of authority.

Overthrow the landlords’ dominance in the towns, overthrow their armed forces, overthrow the nobles’ private soldiers.

Open the granaries, measure and divide the land, publicly try the nobles.

Abolish all taxes.

Punish and confiscate the nobles’ and landlords’ wealth and land, and have unions and farmers’ associations redistribute them to members.

At the same time, ban all vices such as gambling, drunkenness, and oppressing women and the elderly.

To emphasize their determination, Tina deliberately invited rural women into the nobles’ manor houses to dine, forcing the nobles into restraint.

These people under Tina were elites Mitia had trained since childhood, cultivated at immense cost—individuals who not only had political minds but also understood military organization.

While Tina was arming the peasants with ideology, the city’s workers, under Marlon and the civilian merchants, began unifying production resources, gathering craftsmen to found the Stark First United Manufacturing Plant.

Most of them had originally worked in workshops producing muskets for the city lord, so they absorbed the new musket technology very quickly, especially since Marlon had modified the production method.

The musket components were dismantled, with each group of craftsmen specializing in producing one part.

Each part had to be engraved with their work number for traceability in case of issues.

Everything done so far boiled down to one thing: controlling all production capacity at the root—the peasants’ grain and manpower, and the workers’ products.

Solve the peasants’ and workers’ problems, and one could gain the strongest support of the people. This truth never changed anywhere.

Tina adopted a rough approach: one or two squads of musketeers would sneak into a village, attack the landlord, confiscate property, and then organize a public trial with the peasants deciding the landlord’s guilt.

Afterward, a farmers’ association would be established to reclaim all land, divide land and grain, and encourage families who received them to enlist.

When the new recruits reached a certain scale, it was announced that military pay would be changed to allowances—not in money, but in grain, cloth, and the like. Those serving only for money were weeded out.

Meanwhile, newly recruited sons of workers and farmers in the National Socialist Party were inserted into these new troops at the grassroots squad level, completing a top-to-bottom transformation.

Because of the Church’s wars siphoning away grain and troops, Ovinia’s grassroots power was no longer as strong as before.

Most areas were hollowed out, left to recuperate.

The old power structure persisted only through long-accumulated authority.

Tina’s arrival tore away their emperor’s new clothes.

The common people, already burdened with resentment from wars and Church plundering, were at their limit.

The long winter had not yet ended, and their grain supplies were nearly exhausted.

Tina’s campaign was straightforward: fight, purge, try, divide, and replenish.

Repeating in cycles.

As the news spread, in some villages before Tina’s forces even arrived, peasants had already risen up.

Although most ended badly, some succeeded.

Even if they were illiterate, they clearly understood the core concept of farmers’ associations: no taxes, land distributed, grow and eat their own grain, and the farmers’ association led by their own people.

As long as they resisted successfully, they could spontaneously form new associations and replicate Tina’s methods.

Everything happened extremely swiftly.

In a short time, the farmers’ associations began expanding exponentially.

Almost every village that received word of the uprising was itching to move.