Civilization Chronicles: Rise of the Divine Creator

What was consistent with Lucas, though, was that if you worked hard and achieved results, you would be fairly rewarded. Even if you didn’t manage to accomplish all the orders given to you, as long as you had a good reason for the delay or failure, the young boy wouldn’t unjustly punish you.

However, if you screwed something up so bad that Lucas thought firing, slavery, or even death were the only appropriate punishments, he wouldn’t even hesitate to pass that sentence.

As for being Lucas’ enemy... Victoria shuddered at the mere thought, thinking death might actually be the least painful consequence of getting on her young boss’ bad side.

All that was to say that for the first few days of the Project Maple, the code-name for establishing wide-scale harvesting and production of lych tree sugar, Victoria had no choice but to have as many workers as possible remain at the construction sites while the rest had to commute in from Falcon’s Bend.

Funnily enough, rather than everyone clamouring to return to Falcon’s Bend, where they had warm homes and hot meals waiting for them, there was fierce competition among the workers to be the ones who actually stayed at the campsites.

This might have had something to do with the fact that Victoria offered another 20 Coppers in ’hazard pay’ to those who braved the snows and cold... but who could say?

Of course, this back-and-forth travel cut several hours out of the work day for the majority of workers, slowing construction considerably, so Victoria and Laura were both desperate to find a better solution.

The two women wracked their brains hard for 5 days, but the problem seemed unsolvable; fortunately, upon learning about this issue, General Caldwell approached Victoria and offered to loan some of the Swift Current Legion’s cold weather tents to her.

It was highly improper for a standing army to ’lend’ such vital equipment to civilians, but it wasn’t technically against any rule or law.

Coupled with increased deliveries of hot food and firewood from a central base set up in the western district of Falcon’s Bend, semi-permanent camps were finally erected at each of the new settlement sites, freeing up the wagons and pack-animals to transport construction materials and barrels of sap instead of just shuttling people to-and-fro.

Why ship sap back to Falcon’s Bend and not just boil it on site, reducing its weight by 50 times and thus making it much easier and more efficient to transport?

There were many reasons, actually, but broadly speaking, it came down to security and equipment limitations.

During her initial experiments, Victoria was using any old pan or pot to boil down the sap to get sugar; however, months of tests and consultations with Alchemists like Ava Dalton had refined the process significantly.

For the red lych sap, massive custom-built stoves and pans, all designed to reduce waste, maximize efficiency, and lower labour requirements, had been constructed by Old Braxton and the Balfour Family smiths with design inputs coming from Victoria’s team and Lucas himself.

These stoves were even equipped with primitive thermometers, a technological innovation that Braxton and Lucas had spent many frustrating days struggling to make a reality.

Unfortunately, the best way to speed up evaporation was to make very shallow boiling pans, so these contraptions became quite large and unwieldly. Each rectangular evaporation pan was 1.5 m x 4 m x 0.2 m, capable of boiling between 500 and 700 litres of sap at once.

By necessity, the stoves were even larger, and the overhead equipment to funnel smoke and steam were not small either.

Simply put, these were difficult to manufacture, difficult to transport, and difficult to maintain, so only 2 had been completed by the time construction on the new villages had begun.

With 2 stoves and 5 possible locations, Victoria felt it was better to just leave them at their base camp in Falcon’s Bend for this season, even if that meant extra transportation costs.

If construction proceeded faster than expected, and more evaporation stoves were completed quickly, she would consider moving the stoves to the settlements, but until then, the current setup would have to do.

For the star lych sap, however, an entirely different boiling setup was required.

After Ava Dalton and Olivia Roth got a look at the manufacturing process for maple sugar, they had made a number of suggestions regarding how to boost the concentration of World Qi in the final product.

Victoria had tried all of these suggestions out over the following month or so and determined that they indeed worked; however, all of these methods either lengthened the processing time, required more specialized and expensive equipment, or the addition of other ingredients, most of which were either rare or pricy.

Using a combination of these methods, Victoria and her team had determined it was possible to turn roughly 30% of the maple sugar made from red lych sap from a High-Rank Mortal Grade Tier 2 product into a Peak-Rank one that could be sold for at least 15% more.

However, it was more than twice as expensive to produce this Peak Tier 2 sugar. Until they could find a way to bring this cost down, Victoria and Lucas had agreed it was better to just focus increasing the volume of production, rather than the Grade of the final product.

The story was different for star lych sap.

Using versions of the recommended alchemical techniques, instead of producing 90% Low-Rank and 10% Mid-Rank Tier 3 sugar, they could now basically get a 100% Mid-Rank Tier 3 yield.

When they went all out, using every possible trick and technique, including the addition of Spirit Water which had a higher-than-average concentration of World Qi, sap from the oldest of star lych trees could actually be used to manufacture High Tier 3 sugar.

The latter process was, again, prohibitively expensive as Spirit Water was by no means easy or cheap to acquire, but the increased cost of the former process was deemed acceptable for the reward.

Only a single prototype star lych sap boiler had been built, and it had yet to be fully tested, but given the time constraints, Victoria had brought it along with her to Falcon’s Bend anyways.

This star lych boiler system much more resembled an oversized alchemy furnace than the shallow pans they were using for red lych sap. It was much taller and had significantly thicker walls, all forged from a special alloy that was much better at insulating World Qi than ordinary copper, iron, or steel.

The boiler also had a sealable lid, allowing the first step of the cooking process to be done under high pressure.

Of course, a sealed container doesn’t allow for evaporation, so after the initial pressure-cooking phase, a spout at the top of the boiler could be opened to allow a burst of steam out.

As soon as the initial burst of steam was ejected and the pressure inside the boiler was reached equilibrium with the atmosphere, the lid was sealed and the process repeated.

A total of 10 pressure boils were completed like this before the remaining liquid was transferred to a regular evaporator.

From there, it was the same as with red lych sap, boil until the mixture reached a specific temperature and consistency, then pour the viscous syrup into a giant bowl where it was stirred vigorously, cooling it until sugar crystals formed.

The actual optimum temperature and pressure for this method had yet to be determined, but even if they were nailed down, the available methods to monitor these factors were still quite crude and unrefined, making such precision meaningless.