This chapter can get a bit too much infodump, and yet still barely scrape the surface of Inath. Don't feel like you have to read this since it just gives some colour to Cato's actions.
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Time
I just realized. These people understand the concept of a 'week'. It's even seven days long. Amazing how certain coincidences happen.
On the other hand, they don't consider any day of the week to be a rest day. They work all week but that could be due to economic reasons, labour efficiency here is really bad, almost four in five people are farmers or hunters or paka herders or some other profession related to gathering food.
Despite that, I asked further and learned that they also have the concept of a month, which is thirty days. All twelve of the months, making a 360 day year. Since there are no astronomical features or seasonal cycles that would be natural to divide a year into, like Earth does, it makes no sense why they would have a year be almost exactly the same as Earth's. They are even celebrating a yearly festival called Cel Inci next month.
I call shenanigans. Something strange is going on here, they have similar concepts of time to Earth. So similar that I could even suspect a common root, adapted to local conditions.
The festival name doesn't sound like an Inath word either.
My attempts to build a clock... have not gone well. Water clocks suffer a large drift and can only be trusted to measure hours. Clockwork mechanisms required for a pendulum clock aren't high quality enough. Landar's attempt at a spring stores only enough torsion to power the clock for maybe ten minutes. Not to mention the irregularity in surfaces that causes it to drift perhaps a second every minute.
Speaking of hours though, whatever I call an hour isn't the same as an Inath hour. The time is perhaps close, but their hour is measured from the time of a Little Night, apparently the same anywhere on the planet. That gives them twenty one hours in a day.
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Economics
There is very little concept of an industry in Inath. Craftsmen who produce various items, I count alchemists among them, are organized into workshops, with one master craftsman overseeing an apprentice or two. They also sell their products directly from their workshop, or to a patron or by work order, as Landar does.
Similarly the currency is positively medieval. A Rime is the official Inath currency and the most common, but all the regional currencies still exist in circulation. And there's no such thing as a money changer.
How? Simple, the coins are all worth exactly the weight of the metal they're made out of. A Rime is a disc of iron with a smaller pellet of gold inside. The iron is worth almost nothing but they make the gold pellet easier to pick up. The people here love gold just like we do. Well, I guess it's shiny and rare.
One Rime is worth perhaps a cartful of chokos, a sour citrus fruit. Plus the cart. Meaning I massively overpaid the innkeeper. Telin, the small change of the official currency, is a thousandth of a Rime and worth about one fruit.
My current income from the bottled milk and the new building materials averages to half a Rime per day. I am getting ridiculously rich compared to the normal craftsman. On the other hand, that would be because Kalny and Muller are dominating their markets, so I'll only get to enjoy this until the competitors catch up.
The work culture is also unadapted to the sort of industry I am trying to introduce. A concept of a labour force who has no say in what gets produced and comes to work strictly on time is completely foreign, every craftsman is an independent supplier. Given our historical experience with Luddism, some sort of plan to smooth a transition into an industrial era economy would be required.
Obviously I am not in a position to implement any such plans. The most I can do is to introduce an industrial base as quickly as possible and hope the political masters can keep up.
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Culture
I previously noted the hierarchical structure of relationships in this country but it runs much deeper than I thought. After a few social missteps, it is apparent that everyone in this society begins any meeting by assessing their social distance to each other. And the subordinate person automatically confers initial respect.
I also noted a few interesting lacks. There is no use of steaming while cooking and, as I discovered in Wendy's Fort, forks are not common. Neither are chopsticks, but I can't use those anyway. They just have spoons and knives. Perhaps I could introduce some of these as well.
Clothing and fashion is also another major difference. Robes are apparently in fashion among the upper classes, being easy to keep clean and therefore allowing them to always look their best. Kalny has worn his set a few times to major meeting with suppliers.
Unlike the industrial era on Earth, the women do have a high labour force participation rate. As most craft professions are piecework, crafters work from home and only head out to sell their wares on market days. Most such working women perform such roles, in fact I also observed this in the Fuka village. Market days occur once every week or so but there are always a few stalls open.
Writing is also an interesting area. The alphabet is thirty one characters, a somewhat reduced list from the thirty four of the ancient First script. While I know all of this, and how to write all the letters, I know for a fact that Earth English has twenty six letters. Somehow, my knowledge of language has been overwritten?
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Politics
The northern region that I am in is known as the Kingdom of Ektal. One of the mid-sized countries making up the Inath federation. Each of these countries are still independently governed but they are subservient to the central authority of the Inath court. Even more interestingly, political control is centralized while monetary control isn't. Each country, or perhaps state would be a better word, is expected to manage its own affairs with its own taxes, as well as follow the directives of the Inath parliament, made up of each of the country's rulers.
As they only have a physical currency, moving large chests of coin around is quite a risk; so I can understand why this might be the case. Simply put, anything like an federal treasury is physically impossible because they simply cannot move that much money.
Each state is devolved into local counties, governed by another tier of nobles who collect their own taxes, pay taxes to the state ruler and implement their instructions. This makes each individual state have it's own court full of nobility. All in all, there is one federal parliament and at least six individual state courts, more depending on whether you consider the states small enough to only have a few counties. Plus the few special areas and principalities.
As you can expect, this makes the politics in Inath extremely complicated. Especially once you consider that the nobility have intermarried, harbour generations old feuds and have made cross state alliances. Even the state borders aren't quite solid, since the counties near the nominal border have ties to neighbours belonging to either country and sometimes are influenced more by the neighbouring state's court instead!
The leader of the Inath parliament and therefore the leading political power in this federation is the ruler of the state Inath. In fact, the federation takes its name from this state. Inath is the largest state and therefore has the most powerful voice in the parliament, but the Inath ruler, currently Queen Amarante, can be overruled by sufficient dissenting voices.
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Theoretically anyway, since the parliament is known for not obeying its own rules. The federation is only about fifty years old, being formed by the Inath king two generations ago when the first organized monster attacks began to happen. That would be the zombies.
I doubt I will fully absorb much of this quickly, Inath politics can make even the European Union appear simple. And the nobility here spend all their time on it.
Well, I suppose there's a market for a federal newspaper right there.
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Magic
Magic. Once a dream, now a reality. Or so I wish, it turns out that no one knows what exactly is wrong with my lifeforce, so I'll never be able to cast magic until they figure it out. The Order of Pastora are mentioned often but they are currently having a feud with the Ektal's king so they're hard to find in this area. Something about the king refusing the High Leader's hand in marriage. Or was it one of the First Circle?
No matter, it turns out that most people here don't learn magic. Despite its battle power, magic isn't used to grow crops or make clothing. And to master magic requires dedication, training and time, luxuries that only the nobility can afford. Or people like Landar, who are practically nobility even if they don't have titles. The closest that comes to any use of magic in industry is how I had Landar heat a furnace, apparently that's pretty normal for blacksmiths who are also alchemists.
I will record my observations about magic here, based on questioning of Landar and Danine's learning.
Casting Magic
When casting magic, a caster uses magic from their lifeforce to enact a change in the magic in the surroundings. It's how spells aren't part of you, you just maintain a connection to them in order to feed them power. How this all works probably requires detailed knowledge of what magic is made of, which these people don't have, obviously.
In any case, since lifeforce is composed of magic, the act of casting a spell can theoretically be mimicked by a spell. It's all the same thing, but when I asked Landar to try, she told me that simple functions are easy but to attach more complex functions requires so many steps that no person can remember all of it. And casting a complete spell is not simple at all, at least compared to performing one or two modifications to existing spells.
Magic Effects
Examples of simple magical functions included most of the basic exercises mages learn, ranging from a targeted spell disruption (more efficient than a simple blast of raw magic) to pushing spells around.
Spells themselves can do things like create heat and light, push physical objects around. Useful things like that. So I asked the obvious question of whether you could lifeforce to do that directly. This is already known and the technique is called Ems, not the same as spells. Ems are less efficient than spells and are considered really really hard, but good Em users can achieve a precision and speed with their learnt techniques that no caster can do. It just takes decades of training.
Alchemy I have received the most detail about, Landar being a top ranked alchemist in the Order of Knights. Alchemy simply traps magic into physical materials so that they don't degrade over time. Spells that aren't bound like this will lose their power steadily and eventually disappear, and degradation happens over a span of minutes while humans recharge the magic in their lifeforce over a period of days.
But other than this difference, and a large cost associated with binding the magic to the material, Alchemy spells are no different to a normal spell. Due to its high cost, and therefore poor efficiency, Alchemy is often used to supplement a caster's ability. Whether as a small boost to power or to do something else while a caster is busy with the main target. As I had Landar do with the bellows and exhaust fans for the furnace.
Armour is virtually always enchanted, and one use items like magical arrows and wands with stored spells are common as dirt. This makes alchemists quite looked down on in the knight order, they are just a support function and most alchemists have rusty combat skills. On the other hand, alchemy is currently the only method by which one can store power for later use. This makes it essential for industry, which cannot afford to have highly trained people doing essentially grunt work. Having someone like Landar do something as simple as heat a furnace will never be economical.
On the other hand, since magic is rare due to a lack of education, I wonder if mandatory education could help there. Can magic be taught outside the apprenticeship system currently had by the Academy? Perhaps. I will also need to look into other possible sources of magical power, having humans do all the work of running the machines is defeating the point. Until magical power that is not under the severe limits placed by how fast humans regenerate magic is discovered, magic cannot play a central role in technology. The industrial revolution was not powered by hand cranks.
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Future Work
For the immediate future, now that I have some seed money, I can work on a few projects.
The most pressing is the need for standardized parts and this will require a set of measuring standards. Since Inath has no concept of a standardized anything except time, with each craftsman working with his own judgment, I can import Earth standards and the concept of metric units. Some unofficial weights do exist among merchants and builders but these are not subject to quality control and are rarely checked for drift.
A second similar to an Earth second will have to wait until we can perform good enough astronomy to measure the length of a year. Otherwise, I will currently just use 4114 seconds per Inath hour, assuming twenty one hours per Inath day. It will be off by a few tenths of a percent but that much is acceptable for now.
To this end, Landar and I will create a bar of steel that can be defined as one meter. Since gravity here is similar enough to Earth, I can also use the same historical definition of a one-second pendulum. One cubic centimeter of pure water will be the weight of one gram, at twenty five degrees celsius. A degree is defined by having one hundred degrees be the difference in the freezing and boiling point of pure water.
This should generate a basic set of units that will give results that are intuitively similar to those of Earth. It will still be off by enough to make parts in Inath not work with Earth parts but that won't matter too much.
Other interesting mathematical problems would be to calculate the value of pi and e, useful mathematical values that I will require for geometry and statistics, to at least twenty decimal place accuracy. I recall the statistical tests but unfortunately, I don't recall the formula of the Normal Distribution, which will have to be re-derived. At least I have the concept, hopefully I can find a good mathematician.
Apart from those, I anticipate a labour crunch happening soon without some way to increase the efficiency of food production. Current Inath requires at least half to three quarters of its population be farmers. This is of course extremely high for an industrial society and I should look into the problem to see what Earth technology might be able to help with.