Industrial Cthulhu: Starting as an Island Lord

Perhaps it was just an illusion.

The Prince did not pay much attention to the matter of the lighthouse. Castel had far too many things that piqued his interest—for instance, the church before their eyes.

“I had already heard of the grandeur of this church before coming here, but seeing it with my own eyes still leaves me amazed.” The Prince sighed as he gazed toward Castel’s main cathedral.

“It actually doesn’t have any design worth praising. It is purely a functional structure. Back when we urgently needed permanent fortifications during the Deep Sea War, we hastily built this. It was cast entirely from reinforced concrete—hmm, a substance similar to cement. At this thickness, it can completely withstand the bombardment of a battleship’s main cannon—though at present, we have neither battleships nor main cannons.”

The Prince nodded.

So it was cement. He had seen that before.

The architects in Rhine often liked to decorate buildings with this easily molded substance.

It was simple to make and convenient to cast, but its flaw was brittleness. Let alone being used for proper construction, it was barely even suitable for decoration, easily weathered by sun and rain.

And this thing could be used for building?

The Prince actually did not know that what he had seen in Rhine as cement was almost entirely different from what Hughes called concrete.

The cement in Rhine was still rather primitive. It was used mainly as a bonding agent between stones, somewhat like the mortar employed by the Romans, composed mainly of limestone, sand, and volcanic ash.

Apart from decent plasticity, its strength and properties were utterly incomparable to modern cement.

The technique Hughes used here, however, was far more advanced. The calcined limestone underwent chemical reactions during hardening, and concrete was one step further on this basis.

Using cement as the raw material, mixed with sand, gravel, and blast furnace slag from steelworks, with steel bars as the skeleton, it became reinforced concrete.

The Prince’s eyes fell upon the outer wall.

Because it needed to withstand the head-on charge of Sea Urchin Monsters, the cathedral’s wall thickness was shockingly exaggerated. After the new Stellar Furnace was built, the entire structure had been thickened once more to ensure absolute safety.

All this together made the monster before their eyes: the exterior walls of the cathedral reached an insane thickness of more than three meters, with the core section exceeding seven meters—practically nothing but a massive lump of concrete.

The core circle of Castel had no surrounding walls; instead, it was ringed directly by one permanent fortification after another, each one a fortress of its own.

After seeing such thickness, the Prince’s doubts were completely dispelled.

At this thickness, even if it had been made of plain mud, the walls would not collapse.

But why build with such a brittle material?

“This is a scaled-down model of the cathedral.” Hughes presented a finely crafted little box and offered it to the Prince. He picked it up, played with it for a moment, and then put it away.

The carriage rolled toward the gates of the core circle, about to enter the fortress cluster. The Prince suddenly noticed that the Banshees who had originally accompanied them were nowhere to be seen. Puzzled, he peered outside through the carriage window.

The road they had traveled back was all flat plain, with visibility far into the distance, yet there was no trace of the two Banshees.

“They left through the Network Path,” Hughes mentioned casually.

Network Path? Perhaps something like sewers. As a rising metropolis, Rhine had a rather complex sewer system. The Prince understood somewhat and nodded with half-understanding.

It did not take long before the two of them entered the church. At this moment, the interior was in a clamor, with several Banshees having just untied Monica from the Memorial Stele.

Hughes looked a little embarrassed. “Ahem, these Banshees are somewhat… too lively. Lately they’ve been busying themselves with newspapers and such things, stirring up quite a bit of trouble.”

The Prince naturally knew what newspapers were. Such things were not even fashionable anymore. It was only that publishing them required printing equipment, so they were basically available only in cities around Rhine.

But that was not where his attention lay.

“You allow them to handle newspapers?” He carefully studied the Banshees, each in her distinct everyday attire, then glanced at the surrounding people.

Among the islanders, some were night-shift workers, others on rest days enjoying their holiday—ordinary folk, nothing more.

They crowded around in a circle, watching the scene with amusement, clearly long accustomed to the Banshees’ presence.

The Prince’s eyes narrowed slightly.

“No, it seems I was mistaken. These extraordinary beings of another race are not merely warriors. You treat them as ordinary subjects, let them interact with humans, let them take up other professions, is that so?”

Hughes met the Prince’s gaze and silently nodded.

“Why?”

“If it were you, what would you do?”

“I would designate a separate district for them to reside, isolate Banshees from humans, place them under military management, grant them privileges beyond the reach of law, and train them into loyal warriors—my sharpest blade.” The Prince answered without hesitation.

Having said that, he looked at the Banshees frolicking in the courtyard.

“Newspapers? Production? Even if one Banshee equaled the productivity of a hundred workers, it would not matter. A hundred, a thousand workers are easy to find. A single Banshee, however, can alter the course of an entire battlefield.”

He withdrew his gaze and met Hughes’s eyes.

“This is a tremendous waste.”

“So, why?”

The Prince was not wrong. The place where Banshees could exert their greatest value was indeed the battlefield.

As for scientific research, while many innovations had indeed been pioneered by Banshees—such as Ash’s polluted plants, Nini’s fish-herding spell, Monica’s Machine Soul and Clamorer—their advantage in research over humans was not great.

But on the battlefield, Banshees could achieve things humans could never hope to.

Against monsters like the Compassionate Mother, perhaps not. But in a human war, a single charge of the Banshees could shatter any defensive line the enemy had built.

In fact, when the Empire suffered setbacks in the Northern War, it was under similar circumstances. The Bishop-Priests of the Silent Sanctum, clad in heavy armor and chanting hymns, tore open the enemy’s formation under a hail of musket fire.

From that moment, the North saw no further wars. The Empire and the White Raven Principality signed a non-aggression treaty, and the flames of war shifted westward instead.

Not until the White Calamity did the White Raven Principality collapse completely, sending waves of refugees southward—but that was another story.

The Prince could never forget those heavily armored Priests on the battlefield. One could even say he was haunted by them. The moment he saw the Banshees appear in Blood Harbor, those old memories surged to the surface.

His eyes shone sharply as he stared at Hughes, waiting for the Frontier Count to give his explanation.