One problem that Bernard foresaw with centralized, government-subsidized industry was that it would require regular growth to be sustainable. If he hired a bunch of people to do construction for Lenoran (even if they were more focused on collecting and preparing materials than the finished construction, which the residents would do themselves), and then the construction just ended, he'd have a huge percentage of his population that was out of work. This meant, Bernard reasoned, that once he'd started on this path he'd have to begin moving much faster.

He simply couldn't afford to take a year here or there - no more mistakes, and no more waiting. It a way, it was exhilarating, but it was also terrifying. While still a young man at this point by most people's accounting, Bernard felt like he was getting to be too old to start over again. The stress of each new start was getting to be a lot. No, he told himself, not again. Whatever it took this time, he needed to succeed.

Lenoran had already started to grow quiet a bit due to his efforts, and the quality of life was higher than it had been in decades, for the average citizen. Bornarth - the next town over - was in exactly the opposite situation. Bornath had been falling steadily for many years, but its decline had taken a rapid turn, and even during the time that Bernard and Peter had been in Lenoran, Bornath's state has worsened significantly.

Huge swaths of Bornath's population were destitute - sharing houses, or homeless, starving, with malnourished children and absent fathers who had left to find work elsewhere. The inhabitants were sick regularly, due both to poor nutrition and a polluted river. The river had gotten so bad that even the animals had stopped coming to drink, that plants near the riverbed died off, and crops grown near the river were inedible.

Luckily, Lenoran had plenty of fresh, clean water, and its population was healthy. Their increased crop yield was more than they needed, so rather than selling the excess, they could help out their neighbors. Bernard called the town to a vote - and of course, had Peter working the crowd in advance to make sure that it went his way - and proposed that Lenoran offer to annex Bornath, taking its land and its inhabitants.

It was a masterful piece of campaigning; Bernard spoke of their opportunity to do right by their neighbors, and extend their good fortune, to be a force for positive change. He reminded the Lenorans that many of them and their parents grew up with the people of Bornath. To hear Bernard tell it, it was practically a civic duty, with virtually no downside. The vote went exactly the way he wanted it to, and nearly unanimously so.

The people of Bornath were certainly in no position to barter or negotiate - for them, it was no more and no less than a rescue operation. The vast majority were ecstatic that someone was going to lend them a hand, and not just charity, either; the fact they'd be able to work on building their own houses, and have good work to do going forward, was more than many of them had thought possible after so long.

Bernard got the construction work started, ramped up some of their education and goods manufacturing so that he could combine providing services with paying for those services, and had Peter look for especially skilled (or in the worst case, at least trainable) people that he could put in prominent positions, showing the new residents that they were fully integrated and better off than before.

With the people sorted out, there was still the matter of the river to address. Bernard started asking around for historical information, and found easily that there were two major contributors to the town's water problem. The first, a smelting operation, had been running for several years, although as it increased its production, so too did the amount of waste being dumped into the river increase.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

The more recent contributing factor was a large-scale distillery, operating more like an illegitimate moonshine operation, that had cropped up out of nowhere in the last year. The byproducts from both were damaging the inhabitants immediately downstream, which in this case meant Bornath. As would be expected by reasonable people, appeals had been made to the owners of both to relocate, or to reduce their output, but these pleas had fallen upon deaf ears.

Bernard was actually excited to hear of the smelting operation. It meant a lot of good things - first, that there was ore around in abundance; second, that there was a demand for industry; and third, that there were skilled workers nearby. It wouldn't be hard, he reasoned, to take care of that little problem.

Of course, Bernard would have liked to just get the owners of the processing facility on his side directly, but a large-scale private enterprise (especially one that hurt people) wouldn't be a good image for him. It would invariable cause somebody who had lost a loved one, or gone broke, or had some other wrong placed upon them, to act out against Bernard for "throwing his lot in with them" or some such nonsense. Instead, he'd have to play competitor.

It didn't take too long to set up a public works ore processor. After all, it was a reasonably simple operation to run, the materials were handy, and some of his new inhabitants had even worked at the polluting plant before they became too ill to continue. Because it was a government-owned facility, nobody was making a disproportionate profit.

Even better, Bernard could offer the services to businesses and other customers for quite a bit cheaper than the profit-driven operation upstream had been, especially considering they had no other competition. That would - in some circumstances - make a few enemies of the workers and owners, but Bernard had a good plan for that, too.

Reducing his liability and exposure just meant offering better jobs to the workers of the offending smelting enterprise, and giving them a chance to work according to higher standards. Many of them accepted, and some were very vocal about their distaste for the way the previous operation had been run. Bernard had Peter approach the management of the private enterprise, which was now hemorrhaging both customers, and feel out which (if any) could be trusted to come run the public works operation without falling back into bad habits.

With that done, the private processing plant went nearly bankrupt. This could have caused a few more problems for Bernard, but he simply offered to buy the plant, clean up the pollution-causing parts of their process, and then double his own operation with the renovated facility, all under the auspices of the public works.

Suffice to say that the crisis was averted, and everyone ended up happier - and under Bernard's thumb, which was of course the entire point. Doubling production meant needing more customers to keep the operation going, so he issued a challenge to start looking at ways to use the ore and metals in what was rapidly becoming large-scale municipal activity. At the same time, Bernard shifted his focus onto the distillery.

This one was going to be trickier, he could tell, and it was also a hot-button topic for the townsfolk. The distillery supplied most of the hard liquor in the region, from what he could tell - at least at the prices they could pay - and it had grown up almost overnight. In addition, people tended to get...excited about alcohol. It was a very divisive topic, and one that could cause tempers and passions to flare. Bernard would need to be very careful indeed.

During his initial investigation into the water supply issues, he heard a few tales that the distillery had begun as a simple small moonshine operation run by a few locals, but that it had gone through a sudden, forced, hostile takeover by an outside party. That in itself wasn't too different from how some people might see Bernard's tactics, but this party was clearly not concerned about making enemies.

In fact, the rumors were that the new operators were criminals, part of a small cartel. That might explain the ludicrous amounts of booze that seemed to be produced there, as it was far too much to be consumed locally - but they seemed to have no branding or even a storefront. It was also strange that they operated in such a small town, which wasn't particularly near to anything that would be considered strategic. Unlike the smelter, Bernard wouldn't be able to just bring this all in-house and eliminate the problem...he would need to do something more drastic.