Herald of Steel



Alexander spent almost the entirety of the next week teaching the cooks the things he wanted to be served on the wedding dinner table, the most important one being the wedding cake.

Baking a cake without an oven was possible, but a pain in the ass.

And whilst this training, one day he took a day off because Takfiz had informed him that all the necessary facilities had been set up.

The coal briquettes plant was complete.

So, naturally, Alexander had to go see that for himself.

As he made his way there, Alexander had two options on how to use the coal briquettes.

One was selling it in the open market as cheap fuel, both for civilian and industrial use.

One might think that daily output of 2,000 tons of coal might be too much production for civilian consumption and most of it would go to industrial use.

But one would be surprised by how much firewood, which was roughly equivalent in energy density (Joules per kg) to the briquettes, a regular peasant would consume.

In winter, for heating alone, a family of 4-8 would use an average of about 50 kg dried firewood per day.

With an additional 15-20kg of wood per day was used for cooking.

Though interestingly, despite the high amounts of wood being burned, the room temperatures of these houses would be generally only around 4 degrees Celsius higher than outside temperatures, This was mainly because of the poor insulation of the house, and also because burning firewood was an inefficient way to transform chemical energy into heat, its conversion being only around 30%.

So to mitigate this, the peasants would build their huts with really low ceilings and small doors and windows, so that there would be less space needed to be heated up and fewer ways for the heat to escape.

And since the peasants spent almost their entire day outside, and only spent the night, all wrapped up and sitting or sleeping near the fireplace, there really was no need for large, lavish houses for the poor folk.

Though the size of the short doors would give later historians the misconception that peasants of this time were short, lanky, and malnourished.

Whereas the truth was the quite opposite.

Peasants of this time, due to all the physical activity they were required to do were quite muscular.

Not buff, but strong and muscular.

And they were certainly physically fitter than the twenty-first-century average city dweller.

A peasant would spend about 5 tons of firewood for heating in a year as winters in Zanzan were relatively short, about three months.

While cooking would need an additional 7 tonnes, making the average demand for firewood in Zanzan about 2 tons per capita per annum.

And with a current population of 150,000, that produced a total demand for firewood of more than 800 tons per day.

Or about half of Alexander's daily production.

And Alexander could easily sell the other half to all the industries like steel, cement, and brick who used firewood for kindling.

But Alexander was reluctant to follow this path.

One because in the civilian sector, most of the firewood was self-sourced.

And the very simple reason was because no peasant could afford to buy that much firewood from the market.

So, when there was a lull in the work and in seasons with less load, peasants would often go to the woods and cut firewood, then store them in barns for use in winter.

Or they would simply chop off the dead trees in winter, as they would have little work at that time.

This was also the case in Alexander's previous life, until the medieval times when forests in Europe started to get scarce as people had been hacking away at all the forest areas for generations and over millennia.

It was only then when the price of firewood had begun to rise that people started to seek alternative sources and found coal.

But coal really gained its popularity with the advent of the industrial revolution, when the black soft rock becomes the fuel of the future.

But Adhania had not reached that point, and so currently the civilian market was out of the picture for Alexander, leaving him with only the second option- selling the coal briquettes to the various industries.

And he did plan to do, for he had asked Takfiz to transfer some of the woodcutters who used to provide firewood to these industries to his briquettes-making plant.

But that would not be enough to sell 2,000 tons of coal, which turned to briskets would become 2,500 tons.

Maybe Alexander would be able to sell half that amount.

And so Alexander decided that he needed a second way to use these fuel sources.

And then determined he would use them to make salt.

Salt was a precious commodity of the ancient world, greatly desired by the mass, for to be used as a seasoning, needed to preserve meat and fish, and even prescribed by doctors as medicine.

But contrary to popular belief, salt was not expensive, or more specifically the quantity of salt a person might buy wasn't particularly costly and valuable.

For example- a kilogram of salt in Zanzan cost about the same price as wheat, at 2 ropals.

So a peasant, who earned around 1,800 ropals a year could afford almost a ton of the stuff.

But he would at best need two to three kilograms for his diet, while the majority of his demand would come from him requiring the white powder as a preservative for storing meat, fish, and vegetables.

But though salt was relatively cheap, that was not to say that the salt 'trade' was cheap.

In fact, the salt trade was immensely lucrative as everyone needed salt to smoke their produce and not starve in winter.

Hence it was a volume business.

In this time period salt could only be produced from seawater, but could not be mined from salt deposits as done in modern times.

This was because there was no way to drain the underground water without heavy machinery.

Thus coastal cities could capitalize on this and sell immense quantities of the stuff inland.

Also it was not like all coastal cities could produce salt, causing many of those even living by the sea not necessarily be able to meet their own demand.

The reason for this was because to make significant quantities of salt, one needed to construct salt pans that could take on a great deal of seawater were broad enough to provide a lot of surface area for evaporation and were adequately sheltered from waves and rain so that they don't get wet again, starting the evaporation cycle over again.

Zanzan did not meet the last criteria, for it rained frequently in there, thus depriving it of a salt industry.

Pre-drought salt would be bought from merchants, while currently, it was through the graciousness of Alexander who had bought a large stockpile of salt from Adhan that the people here did not die of malnutrition.

But those places that did meet the criteria did become wealthy through the salt trade.

Very wealthy.

Wealthy like Adhan.

In fact, it was because of the salt trade, that Adhan was able to become the richest province in the country.

They would not even need to set up a salt pit to extract the salt in Adhan.

The life sea would by itself graciousness leave huge deposits of salt on its shore every year and all someone would have to do was scoop it up and collect it.

And since the royal family controlled the life sea, it was they who profited the most from this trade, enabling them to become the wealthiest and strongest family in Adhania and thus its rulers.

They would say 'We are blessed by the gods, that's why we were given the Life Sea.'

Whereas the true saying should have been, 'We control the Life Sea. That's why the gods favor us.'

And Adhan was not in any way unique to this circumstance.

In Alexander's previous life, Venice's first major domestic industry in the Middle Ages was salt. The shallow marshes of the lagoon were already halfway to being functional salt pans and so all that the Venetians had to do was adequately wall it off and clear out the vegetation, and let nature do its work.

The lagoon was typically sheltered from the worst of the action of the waves and so Venice could make a lot of money off of salt.

Not because salt was intrinsically a very valuable substance, but because the city was in an advantageous position to produce and export large quantities of it.

As did Adhan, and as was Alexander planning to.

Alexander's plan was simple, use the coal briquettes to boil off the seawater manually and produce salt like that.

And by his calculations, if could make the plant large enough, by boiling the seawater off instead of slowly evaporating it, he would be able to sell it in such large volumes as he would be able to produce much faster.

This would enable him to take advantage of the economies of scale and underprice the traditional salt.

Because salt trade was a volume trade.

And additionally, Alexander had already transferred the cost of digging up the coal with the steel production because he found all the small considerations tedious, and so he would now only have to consider the cost of making the briquettes.

And that was what he was going to find out today, as Alexander approached the seashore where Takfiz was waiting to greet him.