Kyle had a few solutions to his lumber problems. While the coal vein would last a while with the small amount of steam engines he was fueling, it was still uncomfortably finite.

  The best solution would be to ask for his own land to deforest. Just a decent distance down the road, the huge forests that supplied the town could be found. They were bigger and less megafauna-infested than the mountainside woods closer to the city.

  He could start coke ovens to convert the plentiful bituminous coal of the plains into coke. This solution was pretty good, because of the strange lack of sulfur in the region.

  Sulfur in materials caused a lot of problems for industrial processes. Alloying, coking, and smelting were all harder when the sulfur content of the resources was high. Even though he needed it for gunpowder, it made a lot of industrial processes easier for him.

  Coking was probably the best way to go. Clay firebricks were plentiful, and a basic chamber oven could efficiently refine coal into coke. One factory full of small-scale chamber ovens could probably handle his needs for fuel for now.

  Well, there goes another prefab factory. I’ll also have to dedicate one to making concrete, and another to bricks. Only two left after considering my other plans.

  ———

  Kyle gathered the final batch of overseers and another couple of hundred workers in the huge mostly empty factory. A row of coke ovens lined one wall, and Kyle shortly instructed the workers on their use.

  “You put the coal in one chute, and coke comes out the other. Simple enough, no?” Not including the basic safety information, it was the simplest presentation Kyle had given yet.

  The workers and overseers got right to it. The mines were slowly adopting his new techniques and had finally reached full production.

  He was at last able to cut something off the import list-the city was officially fuel self-sufficient. He’d actually consumed all the readily available coal in the region, and the price had skyrocketed. The mine coming online was fortuitous.

  ———

  The first caravan of trade carts had arrived. Although all the merchants had promised to send carts, some must have clearly been worried about his supplies running out.

  The crates were duly loaded with steel products, and in return, crates of food, sundry items, clothes, and iron ore were unloaded. A single crate of sulfur was among the arrivals.

  Every day, more and more of the population of former slaves was employed, but some still needed jobs. Once the army started up, the problem would mostly be mitigated.

  As Kyle expected more traffic bringing in raw resources for him to turn into products, he’d hired nearly 100 people as marketplace workers. These people ran back and forth from the waiting carts to another transport cart that would deliver civilian goods and take the resources to the warehouses.

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  Kyle was happy with how smooth his mini-industrial revolution was going. Set up some steam boilers, skip a step or two using the nanofactory and the hoard money, and voilà-cheap industrial steel.

  As long as he could feed base elements into it, the nanofactory could make anything out of those elements.

  It could turn iron into durasteel, produce space-age compounds and materials, and turn gold into dirt. Provided you’d given it enough dirt, that is. It could break down any input at a molecular level.

  The problem is, the nanites only functioned inside a Reality Sheathe, the system that allowed for the League's FTL travel. It was a bubble of subspace that did not follow the laws of physics and the standard universal model.

  Nanites could function outside of reality sheathes, but only for several hours. They would die after that much, as the quantum transistors inside degraded in realspace.

  Kyle’s nanofactory was a Reality Sheathe, as such, the nanites could multiply and function without limitations inside its confines.

  Special varieties of nanobots that could outproduce their losses to attrition existed and were used for terraforming, but those were a state secret of the highest level.

  Kyle obviously didn’t have any on hand when he woke up in the world.

  As he silently watched the first real trade network take its baby steps, he mused. He couldn’t make another Reality Sheathe without a city-sized space facility, and he wasn’t willing to vaporize tons of metal to use the nanofactory.

  For uplifting, an “assisted” industrialization worked well enough.

  Another curious thing was how well-behaved his imported population was. There had been street crime and muggings in the first week, but once he got everyone employed, those problems had drifted away.

  Factory work wasn’t the hardest thing, but you had little energy to rob someone after a 9-hour shift. Kyle chose 9 for several reasons.

  He wanted maximum productivity-8 was too little. 10 led to nasty things like workers’ unions and socialism, so 9 was a perfect number.

  People seemed moderately happy. The prefab apartments were pretty well ventilated, and the smooth erected bedrock was quite insulating. Most windows had shutters, as Kyle had just planned out basic glassmaking.

  The slaves adjusted to industrial work easily. The majority were unskilled, and had been mining or farming throughout their whole lives. Factory work wasn’t too large of a jump for them.

  Steel was flowing, the second full shipment of low-quality textiles had just been sold, and several organizations had petitioned him for a building to operate from.

  Things were going shockingly well. Kyle chalked it up to the hoard money.

  He’d been able to feed the population, buy up rare-ish resources needed for industry, acquire land, and employ a company of mages to build a city for him. An ugly Soviet style city, but a functional one none the less.

  If he hadn’t the money or favors the dragon and its hoard had brought him, this would have been magnitudes more painful.

  As he watched a lone merchant haggle with an employee over a few rolls of cloth, one of the mercenaries came up to him. “M’lord, a representative from the Greater Southeastern Smithery Conglomerate has come to see you. They looked right and proper pissed, if I do say so myself.”

  Ahh. The meddling guilds and institutions. Let’s see how this goes…

  “Thank you for telling me. You can accompany me yourself if you have nothing more pressing.” “Anytime, M’lord.”

  Kyle proceeded to walk down the slightly-less-empty-than-a-month-ago streets, the mercenary following.