The next year went on well for Zona and her family, the printing business had been going booming. By now anyone who wanted to publish a book would contact them to get it printed. This was extremely good for Zonas plans first her family was starting to make a lot of money which her father would take a large chunk out and put it back for Zona, since he knew in his heart that it was largely due to her that the family was doing so well.

The second reason why it was so beneficial to her plans is that they had basically taken full control of the distribution of knowledge. So as long as they kept the functioning of the press a family secret they would be able to decide which books would get distributed in large numbers and what would things would not be published.

This was an extremely important part of her plan. She would, in the future, be able to control the information and doctrines the people would be exposed to and slow down the distribution of information she did not want to spread.

This brought her to her next two new projects. The first one was the creation of the school she encouraged her father to open. She had already decided on a name 'The Red Academy'. It would first be opened in a house they had rented nearby to teach reading. But she planed to expand the circulum and later on, she wanted to have a huge red brick stone building be built near the city, so she would later be able to expand the campus if needed. She had been starting to write some textbooks for different things that would later on could be taught.

The second project was the publication of a regular newspaper. She would be starting by doing a monthly issue. In this world a year was 432 days long and every 3 years there would be a day less. A year had 12 months, a month had 3 weeks, a week had 12 days. Days were split into 12 hours, actually people did not count in tens but in twelves in this world. It had been difficult for her to get used to this in the start, but then she had slowly gotten used to it.

The newspaper would allow her to inform the people about what was happening all over the empire. In the future she planed to also distribute other short writings with the news, in this way would slowly start to take more influence on the happenings of this era.

For that she had to start creating a network of reliable informants. She did not want to just report about local news of the city she lived in. So she had to think for a way to get her hand a reliable intelligence and not fall for gossips.

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Building up a spy network was not an option that would take to long and way to many resources, so she came up with a better plan.

Her first sources were her fathers follow scholars, she wrote to them under a pen name. Slowly that pen name became more and more renown, and she was able to get news from more scholars. But that was not sufficient for her. She had to build up some kind of informant network that would enable her to get fresh news at any time.

So she started collecting information on people from around the capital through her current connections. Then she stated to sort them in different categories. For example people that seemed very uncontent with the current Ruler were carefully selected or people that had connections to the army, government, notable houses, etc.

Then she would try to get into contact with people of interest by getting introduced through one of her contacts for unrelated reasons. After that, she would slowly befriend those people through letters.

This actually worked out well, and she soon had many people writing her about small and big happenings from all around the empire. She then carefully noted each information and crossed checked it with what other people had written or by asking someone else about it.

Soon she was could get regular information that was enough to start with a first issue of the newspaper. She selected major news from all the kingdom and some funny happenings in the court, wrote up the very first issue of her newspaper.

She printed a hundred copies at her own cost and sent them to her closest pen pales, some people that would spread this novelty quickly and to some important figures of the empire.

The interest in the newspaper was moderate at first, and only few people showed interest in it. So it costed her a lot of money and time to continue on. But starting with the fifth issue she started to get more interest into it. That was when people started to notice that this novelty was actually one of the best sources for information about what was happening in the empire. It was even more reliable than some of the big noble family spy network. Those nobles could only feel ashamed about how inefficient their information collection was.linearly

The high echelons had a hard time understanding why someone would share their information so freely they also wondered when a new figure with such wide spread spy network appeared. This ensued into a wide spread search for spies that literally created a spy war between the different forces of the empire, of course our Zona was completely unaware of this, she would have been laughing her head of if she had known.

With her seventh issue the demand started to be so high that she had to create a press just for printing the newspaper. Of course, she adapted this press adding new technologies that made printing newspapers more efficiently.

Also, she had to start a distribution network for the newspaper, that quickly expanded into the first postal service of the empire, to be able to keep a positive return. Before anyone who wanted to send something, would have to rely on merchants to bring to its destination.