My Players Are So Fierce

The Steam Lord Council is not just a governing body of population management.

In the societal structure of the halflings, this organization also encompasses planning and creation.

At the beginning of each fiscal year, they map out production plans for the halfling-owned cities and supervise the next generation of Steam Lords to draft a series of successive short-term goals for their term, ensuring that Steam Lords always lead their communities under rational guidance.

To achieve such goals, the creation organization directly under the Steam Lords is naturally massive in scale.

In fact, Professor Malcolm once calculated that the manufacturing institutions directly managed by the Steam Lords account for over one-third of the halfling population’s production capacity, meaning that in this unique societal structure, Steam Lords possess nearly absolute control over materials and production.

This is also the foundational reason that halflings have not experienced any large-scale internal strife over the past millennium.

They possess a very strong regulatory government agency, which generally maintains a low profile and constantly works to diminish its own presence.

For human civilizations still in the feudal era, the societal structure of halflings is completely incomprehensible, and even unimitable. The origin of this structure is deeply ingrained in the ordering nature of the halfling soul, more akin to a tailor-made social machine.

It cannot be recognized or understood by anyone outside this system.

Of course, these conclusions all stem from Professor Malcolm’s concluding remarks to Murphy while introducing the halfling race. Expecting Murphy, whose intelligence has somewhat declined from playing with knives too much, to comprehend these complex political nuances would be asking too much.

After all, he learns Triss’s complex spiritual energy knowledge quite slowly, let alone pondering these political issues.

The reason for stating the above is merely to arrive at one conclusion: if Murphy wants to cooperate with halflings to create something new, then the best approach is to directly collaborate with the Steam Lords.

Like now!

When Minkus’s manned walker stopped in front of the industrial area of Charldo Harbor, what greeted Murphy as he stepped out of the vehicle was a gigantic mechanical factory.

This structure has an area on the surface as large as a town, and its underground area is about the same.

During the previous mechanical chaos at Charldo Harbor, numerous manufacturing devices, including this factory, experienced uncontrolled conditions. However, after players reclaimed the Mechanical Brain, the Steam Lords immediately restored operations here.

During this period, various components and weapons supporting the northern war were realized by this industrial area.

“You are not the first foreign leader invited to tour our mechanical factory, but I think your visit here holds significant importance for us. It’s not that we are deliberately hiding secrets here, it’s just that the prominent figures who visited earlier knew this place was important, yet completely failed to understand the true significance of these mechanical existences. Over time, we no longer open this place to outsiders. Lest every time we rack our brains trying to explain the operation principles of various machines, when most invited guests struggle to understand those engineering concepts. For them, simply explaining that every machine has a ‘little sprite’ pushing levers and gears might be the most perfect answer to match their perception of engineering principles.”

Minkus, leaning on his mechanized cane, led the way as he recounted the enduring “foreign leader joke” among halflings, simultaneously guiding Murphy to board a device similar to a sightseeing vehicle. After starting, it proceeded along tracks into the busy and noisy manufacturing area ahead.

Murphy was not amused by Minkus’s joke.

He earnestly observed the factory structure of the halflings and compared it with a factory from another memory.

The existence states of both were not very similar, after all, the development level of mechanical technology in the other world exceeded that of the halflings; excluding the unscientific influence of spiritual energy factors, the halflings’ production techniques roughly equated to the era of transition between steam engines and internal combustion engines in another world.

Seemingly backward, yet considering the current overall technological level of the old continent, the existence of this factory itself is already at a Zenith Star level.

Due to their individually weak physical strength, halflings considered “automation” during the initial design; in this venue planned into different regions, where machinery could accomplish tasks, the presence of halfling mechanics was absolutely absent.

Those mechanics primarily operated machinery and conducted production planning.

The scene of giant equipment driven by burning steam furnaces operating not so delicately to produce sets of industrial standard parts, and sending them for further processing in subsequent machines through complex mechanical linkage, was indeed awe-inspiring, spontaneously evoking a sense of “big industry.”

If the big shots from the “Explorer’s” Guild were to observe around here, they would definitely propose at least a hundred improvement plans; however, the halflings would absolutely not adopt a single one.