The Genius Girl of a Rural Village
A week had already passed since I'd begun my backwoods-style self-reliance campaign in this unauthorized sacred site.
In that time I had consumed twelve loaves of bread and eight strips of jerky, along with turnips grown in the fields. It was a meaningful stretch of days that taught me just how severe the nutritional imbalance of medieval peasants truly was.
As a bonus, I also figured out roughly what era this place belonged to.
Working from the records I'd found in the village and the general state of society, it seemed to fall somewhere around the thirteenth or fourteenth century by the standards of the Earth I originally came from.
Of course that wasn't exact—history and environment here were different enough that the levels of humanities and engineering development were wildly uneven—but if you took the average, that ballpark was close enough.
So I set the late thirteenth century as my baseline and set about introducing various new technologies. The result:
"Asty, what on earth is this... drawing supposed to be?"
I had successfully converted twenty wooden boards into garbage.
"Uh, it's the blueprint for a water frame that's going to revolutionize the textile industry."
"This?"
I couldn't very well talk back to Elder Brother Oliver.
The shapes I'd carved into those boards looked less like technical drawings and more like modern art.
In plain terms, they looked like trash.
"...Should I just throw them out?"
"Forget it. Leave them. At least they'll burn as firewood."
How was that any different from throwing them away?
The garbage heap born of my artistic soul was stacked neatly beside the firewood hauled down from the back mountain.
Why does everything start out looking like this?
If I'd only had a blank sheet of paper and a single ballpoint pen, I could have drawn blueprints dazzling enough to make anyone's eyes spin.
"Brother, since it's come to this, please help me until we finish a prototype."
I fixed my widest stare on the finest technician I knew.
No paper for blueprints, no fine motor skills to carve precise diagrams into wood—there was nothing left but to go back to first principles.
"...Ugh. Well, it's not like I have a reason to refuse... but what exactly are you trying to make?"
Oliver's bewildered reaction made me pause for a moment.
What am I trying to make, huh.
He'd asked without much thought, but from my side it was a surprisingly hard question.
What I intended to build wasn't some simple toy. It was the signal flare of upheaval that would change the world, the stepping stone that would make me a pioneer of civilization.
If I wanted to keep wringing labor out of Brother Oliver for a long time to come, I needed to declare a grand ambition right here.
"Prosperity."
"Huh?"
"I'm going to make prosperity. An age of prosperity that everyone can share—from His Majesty the King far away down to the basest, most wretched commoner at the very bottom."
Brother Oliver looked at me with an expression of pure pity, the kind of gaze reserved for a child lost in an impossible fantasy.
No child in the world would fail to wilt a little under a family member's eyes that denied both their ability and their vision at once—
"So please help me. For all our futures."
I showed not the slightest flinch, projecting pure conviction.
It might be more accurate to say I simply couldn't flinch.
This wasn't only my dream.
It was the dream I'd inherited from the woman my previous self had resented most, and at the same time loved more than anyone—the woman whose stubbornness had been almost admirable.
In this life, I had decided to carry it all the way to the end.
The presentation meant to take the first step toward prosperity was held on a clearing by the river.
Paper blueprints and wooden-board blueprints having both been eliminated—one for cost, the other for lack of craftsmanship—the only option left was to draw the plans on the ground.
Honestly, this isn't even medieval anymore. This is the Stone Age. I need to make money fast and buy paper by the cartload.
"Um... hello. I'm Asty, in charge of designing the water frame. Thank you for coming."
And so product development proceeded with people gathered around drawings scratched into the dirt.
"People," of course, meant only Oliver the carpenter and Emma, my second sister, assigned to feedback duty.
I'd wanted to drag in my eldest sister Alisha and put her to work as well, but she was apparently too busy with her upcoming wedding.
I puzzled for a moment over the subtle meaning buried in that statement, then realized my sister had committed a speeding violation and beat a swift retreat.
Right. Speeding's still wholesome. At least it wasn't running a red light or a full front-door merger.
"Waaah. I'm really looking forward to this."
"Ooooh."
Anyway, I settled for one brother and one sister.
Our village had no master craftsmen or scholars to speak of, so this was about the best lineup I could assemble.
It was obvious both of them were treating this like a kindergartener's talent show, which annoyed me a little, but without results yet I had no choice but to let it slide.
Once this project succeeded, everyone would look at me differently.
"Making clothes breaks down into three major stages: spinning, weaving, and sewing."
I scratched diagrams into the dirt with a stick as I explained the basic structure of the textile industry.
Cloth garments don't just appear the moment you have raw materials. First you process cotton or silkworm cocoons into thread, then weave that thread tightly into fabric, then cut and stitch the fabric into the desired shape.
Spinning, weaving, sewing—in that order.
And all three of those jobs devour an outrageous amount of time. Making a single set of clothes takes forever.
Naturally that means labor costs soar and productivity stays terrible. In this era, the only way the clothing industry can turn a real profit is essentially the luxury sector.
"We're going to build a water frame and slash the time it takes to spin thread."
So we leap across the centuries and import the inventions of the eighteenth.
It isn't impossible. The water frame only appeared in the eighteenth century not because earlier generations lacked the craftsmanship, but because of complicated limits on supply and demand, the number of skilled people, intellectual property, and so on.
There are even accounts of water-powered spinning machines running in fourteenth-century Yuan China. As long as I wasn't trying to bolt on something like a steam engine, technical limits weren't worth fretting over.
"We attach a small waterwheel to a spinning frame that looks roughly like this, and it pulls out uniform, high-quality thread at high speed."
It didn't even require some massive facility.
My goal was simply to make the city guilds take an interest in my invention.
If I could demonstrate thread being spun by a wheel linked to a water mill, the exterior and structure could be crude and it wouldn't matter.
"Then we feed that thread into this loom and mass-produce excellent-quality cloth."
Improving the loom would come after building the spinning frame.
In a dirt-poor village like this, it wasn't as if every household owned a loom.
If I wanted to touch the three precious looms that constituted the village's entire stock, I needed at least a minimum of results and proven skill first.
"And as for the final stage, sewing... we'll think about that once we've secured a way to automate fine needlework."
Sewing... well. I don't know if I'll get my hands on that before I die.
I'd seen the structure of the hand-cranked sewing machines used in Africa, but metalworking technology here was probably too primitive to manage it.
"Have you followed me this far?"
I paused the explanation and checked my audience's reaction.
It wasn't great.
Brother Oliver, with his carpentry experience, seemed to have grasped at least a little. Sister Emma, however, was staring off at the distant mountains as if she hadn't understood a word.
I fretted briefly over how to get through to them, then decided to fall back on an intuitive method from my previous life.
"We're going to build a machine that makes clothes for us."
Compression and distortion.
It was the miracle lecture technique that had once dragged even the delinquent college students who flopped onto the floor the moment a book was opened all the way up to a B+.
"Ooooh...!"
"Can that actually work?"
My two delinquent students, having finally understood the intuitive explanation, showed mixed reactions.
Sister Emma, who knew nothing about mechanical engineering, lit up like a child at the thought of being freed from hard labor. Brother Oliver, who could at least claim a rough sort of expertise, looked doubtful about whether the plan was realistic.
Fair enough. If my eleven-year-old little sister announced she was going to build a rocket to Mars, I wouldn't have believed her either.
"This is a secret, but... a few days ago the Goddess appeared in my dream and showed me the blueprints."
I had no choice but to borrow a little of faith's power.
I rationalized it to myself: sometimes you need a lie to win the trust of pitiful mortals.
No—strictly speaking, it wasn't even a lie.
The one who had granted Asty's wish was almost certainly this world's goddess.
She was the one who had uselessly awakened my previous life's memories and set me off on this whole rampage, so saying she had shown me the blueprints was the absolute truth.
"Mmm. Even so, that seems a bit..."
"Asty, you're joking, right?"
But when have foolish unbelievers ever taken a prophet's words at face value?
As always, my loving family began treating their adorable youngest's great invention as pure fantasy, making it painfully obvious they were only going along under duress.
But that was fine.
The moment this spinning frame roared to life and started pulling out thread, they would flip their attitudes as if none of this had ever happened and throw themselves into the work with enthusiasm.
All I had to do was prove it with results.