Munitions Empire

"Teacher! Even you are leaving?" a young apprentice asked in a corner of the bustling workshop, looking at the old craftsman drinking tea from a mug.

The tea-sipping craftsman blew on the scalding liquid, glanced at his apprentice, and revealed a helpless smile, "I wasn’t originally from Brunas, and this place is not my hometown... So for me, leaving or staying, it makes no difference."

"But, Teacher! You’ve worked here for five years already!" another apprentice protested with reluctance.

"Sigh," the craftsman sighed, then looked at the apprentices gathered around him and continued to comfort them, "Great Tang Group has been good to me, offering hope when I was at my lowest. This time, moving to Linshui is the organization’s arrangement, and I have no reason to refuse."

The old man didn’t mention that to persuade him to go to Linshui, Great Tang Group had offered him double the salary and promised him a house at Linshui Port within two years.

In Brunas, he hadn’t qualified for a house, but now Great Tang Group was giving him a second chance; how could he not seriously consider it?

Though Linshui was really far for him, he discussed it with his children, and they all felt that moving to Linshui would provide better opportunities.

His children had all learned valuable skills; one even worked at the Brunas City Hall. The other two were senior craftsmen, which were highly sought after in the factories of Great Tang Group.

The officials who spoke with him hinted at some details, such as the possibility for his entire family to move to Linshui and be considered as Tang People afterward.

Not only were their salaries guaranteed, but his grandchildren would also be able to attend school in Linshui for free—the quality of education was high there, and the teachers had been transferred from Brunas.

Not to mention the way Great Tang Group took them in during their toughest times, providing work and helping them through the hardest years. Just the benefits of moving to Linshui alone were very decent.

Hearing that their teacher was determined to leave, the apprentices all showed faces of regret. Since they had joined the factory, they had been learning from this old craftsman and knew he had real skills.

In Great Tang Group, what was most valuable were probably these craftsmen who had accumulated their skills over generations.

They each had their own trade; skilled workers could even diagnose a machine’s fault just by its sound, determining how it affected the manufacturing precision.

These workers could tell with a touch if a steel plate was flat, with errors precise to one-tenth or even one-fiftieth of a millimeter!

If there really is such a thing as the spirit of craftsmanship in the world, then these masters truly possessed it.

Being able to learn from these masters was a great honor for the apprentices. If they could master eighty percent of the skills, they would become key figures in the factory, maybe even lead their own apprentices and earn multiple salaries!

The workers inside Great Tang Group were well-compensated, and as their craftsmanship level increased, they could even receive expensive property and enviable wages.

Some highly skilled workers could even afford their own cars, and the wealthier ones could afford leisure and entertainment in the lavish Brunas district.

"You little brats, I always told you to learn your skills diligently, but you were always slacking off. Now that I’m leaving, you finally feel the loss?" The old man laughed, took a light sip of tea, and chided his apprentices, "I’ll still be here for a month. This last chance is yours to seize as much as you can!"

His words immediately filled the apprentices with determination, knowing that their ability to stand on their own depended on this final month.

"Teacher! I’m having some trouble understanding this part!" After a brief rest, an apprentice called out to his teacher by the machine.

"Control the speed here! Find the right angle!" The old worker didn’t hold back, sharing all he knew. He received a special allowance each month, which was awarded based on his apprentices’ progress.

In the workshop, machines operated in orderly fashion, as every worker tirelessly manipulated the equipment in front of them, processing various parts.

The factory was actually quite new, having been built in less than three years. In that time, the factory’s production equipment had been replaced three times, with the first two replacements even occurring within less than six months of each other.

In the workshop supervisor’s office, a middle-aged man in glasses looked at the staff relocation paperwork and irritably lit up a cigarette.

He glanced at the colleague who had brought in the documents and said dissatisfied, "My workshop hasn’t added any new equipment or replaced any old ones in over a year."

"I know, what’s so surprising about that?" The colleague who delivered the documents obviously didn’t want to dwell on the matter and simply smiled and retorted.

"It’s not just my workshop; I’ve asked around, and it seems our entire factory is in this situation," said the workshop director, exhaling a smoke ring, staring at the other person. "Don’t tell me that we’ve offended someone higher up, and they’re not giving us technology upgrades, are they?"

In the past, in Brunas, a factory’s production equipment would be updated about once every seven or eight months. But now, it’s been a year and a month, and they still haven’t received any updates for more advanced equipment.

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At the same time, throughout this past year, they have been producing an engine model that was finalized a year and a half ago—and this engine’s performance is now quite ordinary.

With technology improving worldwide, sticking to producing an engine from over a year ago doesn’t cut it competitively, leaving everyone at the factory feeling lost.

"You’re really sensitive, aren’t you? There’s no such thing," the other person still played dumb and spread his hands with a helpless expression, "As for the specific situation, I don’t know either, I’m just a low-level employee."

"It’s bad enough that the equipment isn’t being upgraded, but that’s the industry planning from those above, so we won’t think too much about it," the workshop director took a deep drag on his cigarette, then continued, "But what are you in the HR department doing? Pulling out our key production personnel one by one. How am I supposed to complete production training?

How am I supposed to organize production?"

His words made the colleague who had come to deliver documents scratch his head in embarrassment and let out a helpless sigh, explaining, "It’s not our intention, it’s the higher-ups’ orders. We just follow the directives, and I don’t know the specifics either."

"Sigh..." The workshop director sighed with frustration as well, feeling an unfair sense of abandonment. "This is unfair!"

In fact, many had noticed that the Great Tang Group was intentionally or unintentionally shifting its industries toward Dragon Island and Linshui’s Tongcheng.

After all, those were the real safe havens, and since they were newly established cities, their industrial layouts would certainly be more logical than Brunas. Most importantly, they were completely under Tang Mo’s control.

In order to industrialize Tang Country as much as possible, the Great Tang Group was frantically reassigning workers, teachers, and management staff from places like Brunas and Jade City.

This kind of shift was ruthless and came at no small cost, adversely affecting the normal development of Brunas and Jade City.

Originally, everyone estimated that Brunas’ population would exceed 3 million this year, but now it still hovers around 1.7 million.

Jade City might have broken through 800,000 inhabitants, but now it just has over 500,000 with almost no change in the past year.

Besides population decline, factory development has also slowed. Technological innovations that used to take place almost every month have now been at a standstill for a long time.

The equipment remains the same; the products are still the same. The main products of Brunas are still those from more than a year ago.

The latest products from the Great Tang Group weren’t born in Brunas but rather in Dragon Island, Linshui, or Tongcheng; it’s been a while since any new products emerged from Brunas.

On the contrary, the older, capacity-demanding items are now being produced in Brunas: inexpensive civilian cars, free-wheels, outdated traction grenade launchers, and foreign trade rifles and machine guns.

If it weren’t for the fact that the Mark 1 model foreign trade Tank production was assigned to Brunas and Jade City, the latest military equipment being produced here would still be the Great Tang Group’s simplified version of the Destroyer...

Such arrangements have caused some dissatisfaction in Brunas and Jade City. They feel that Tang Mo is showing undue preference to the newly acquired territories, neglecting these "old districts."

However, many also understand that from both a strategic and investment efficiency standpoint, what Tang Mo or the Great Tang Group is doing now is reasonable.

Tang Mo is building his own kingdom, and industrial relocation is inevitable. Moreover, it is more efficient for the upper management of the Great Tang Group to invest in and build new factories than to upgrade older ones.

It’s a clear-cut matter: constructing new factories in new areas, selecting staff, and installing completely new equipment is obviously much cheaper than upgrading equipment in existing factories.

From Tang Mo’s perspective, having already invested his main Troops and management efforts in the western Tang Kingdom, he clearly doesn’t have the spare energy to take care of Brunas and Jade City anymore.

From a strategic safety standpoint, it is a better choice to introduce new technologies to Dragon Island or Tongcheng, Linshui.

From an economic standpoint, building brand-new factories in Linshui and Tongcheng while maintaining existing production capacity in Brunas is undoubtedly the most efficient solution.

In summary, although very reluctantly, at this moment, the Great Tang Kingdom is in the process of relocating Brunas to Linshui. It’s a massive undertaking that will take a long time, but it’s something that must be done.

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