When the Saint comes, she does not collect food

#652 - Three Days in the Sky

Leaving the mechanical palace's glass greenhouse and seated in a sturdy carriage, Horn lifted the curtain, revealing half his face as he gazed outside.

The Saint-Geartin district was still veiled in a light morning mist, and the dull, distant tolling of the clock tower echoed through the air. On the streets, laborers and workers, in twos and threes, carried wooden baskets on their way to work.

They stuffed towels around their necks as scarves, wearing grimy, tattered '专用' (dedicated) woolen-linen blend work clothes.

After the Saint Advent holiday, single laborers, having worked double shifts and earned double pay, staggered out of taverns, moving against the flow of workers heading to their jobs.

Wealthier artisans or engineers typically chose to ride the public carriages to work.

Ordinary laborers went to the dock area, boarding small boats in turn to sail towards the downstream industrial zone.

Because the Palla River was relatively shallow, large ships couldn't enter, so these amplified versions of Venetian gondolas were used.

Traveling from the city's residential areas to the industrial zone on foot would take about an hour.

Workers in alchemical workshops and clockwork factories were unwilling to walk an hour home after working ten hours, so they preferred to spend a few copper coins on a boat ticket.

Generally, textile workers and employees worked from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., with a one-hour lunch break, totaling about ten hours of work per day.

Sometimes, when there was a backlog of goods, factory managers and supervisors would even cut into the lunch break.

In theory, Horn required overtime pay, but in practice, it was often not given.

At most, he would increase inspections and urge the laborers to form their own committees to elect representatives to supervise.

No matter how pervasive the Cheka was, it couldn't manage everything.

As a veteran office worker himself, he didn't dislike the idea of an eight-hour workday, but the brutal accumulation of industrial capital relied on competition and diligence.

So, besides giving them a set of housing next to the factory as compensation, Horn had no other solution.

Although they had to work ten hours a day, textile factories and peat workshops, among other alchemical workshops, were still the laborers' first choice; others couldn't even find a place to work ten hours.

These were good jobs with daily wages of 3 to 6 dinars, 2-3 times that of construction workers and porters, second only to municipal employees and soldiers.

These alchemical workshops often prioritized recruiting military families, which wasn't actually Horn's decree, but because most of the people in charge of these workshops were from the Salvation Army.

Compared to outsiders, they were certainly more inclined to recruit their own people.

Besides preferential treatment for military families, the biggest reason was that they lacked sufficient trust with 'strangers'.

In other words, they didn't have much of a concept of the Thousand River Valley identity and were still building entities using the most primitive kinship relationships.

So, breaking through the church's ideological barriers was only the initial deconstruction; now, what he had to do was gradually construct the Thousand River Valley government entity.

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Returning to his office, he found a pile of official documents in the pending file box, and Horn couldn't help but complain: 'Look at these documents, they're almost reaching the ceiling.'

Rafael smiled as he straightened the tilting documents. In reality, it wasn't that exaggerated; they only reached about Horn's nose.

'Please bear with it a little longer.' Picking up the documents from the completed box, Pettier prepared to leave. 'This should be the last batch of documents; all you need to do is sign them.

Sign these Horn Gallar, sign these Horn and Jeanne, sign these Horn and Catherine, sign these…'

Amid Pettier's rambling, Horn didn't immediately take the documents. Instead, he picked up the documents he hadn't finished reading yesterday from the pending file box.

To be precise, the content of this document was about establishing the Truth Court's Health Department.

After the promotion of new planting methods and the bumper harvest, according to reports from priests' associations in various places, a large number of new pregnant women had appeared in Langsand County this year.

Two years of peace had caused the birth rate here to rise rapidly. If the short-stalk wheat was promoted and the yield per mu increased, the newborn population would likely be even greater.

However, this led to a classic medical and health problem.

The Papal Palace did have a health and medical system under its rule, such as the hospitals in Jeanneburg and Saint-Geartin, but this only solved the medical and health problems in urban areas, because all the medical resources in a county were basically concentrated in the county's main city.

Witch doctors and monks were already few in number and couldn't spare manpower to go to rural areas.

According to the official documents submitted by monks from various places, a large number of newborns and pregnant women suffered dystocia due to poor sanitary conditions or delivery methods.

At the same time, more ordinary people died from headaches and fevers, not to mention the large and small epidemics and flu outbreaks in various places after the war.

Now that there was sweet potato root distilled alcohol, enough steel to make obstetrical forceps, and enough farmland to grow herbs and make alchemical potions, could priest association-level health clinics be gradually promoted?

In Horn's view, the so-called health clinic should be responsible for basic services such as midwifery, selling cheap medicines, and providing basic trauma treatment.

Not only health clinics, but also seed stations would be needed to promote improved varieties, thus establishing several new institutions again.

Because their function was essentially to provide medical services rather than to make a profit, they would inevitably be unable to operate like shops and could only be hired by the priest associations and paid a fixed salary.

In that case, next year's expenditure would increase again, which would inevitably put considerable pressure on the financial budget.

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Moreover, this kind of investment, unlike building bridges and paving roads, could improve the industrial and commercial economy in a few years, and the benefits of medical investment might not be seen for more than ten years.

Forget it, let's put it on the agenda for the meeting and discuss it. If not, let's start with a pilot program and then gradually promote it, so that the pressure on the finances will be less.

Throwing the health system's official documents into the file bag for tomorrow's meeting, Horn had just opened the first official document to sign when Pettier spoke again: 'Your Majesty, there is one more thing I think you need to know.'

'What is it?'

'The Megdi Merchant Guild recently sent a message saying that because you falsely claimed to be the Pope and expelled the local church, they have declared an interdict against you…'

"He placed an interdict on me? Does he not know what the Thousand River Valley Church has done? Isn't he going to cut ties with the crimes of the Thousand River Valley Church first? Is he really going to place an interdict on me with the confirmed crimes?

Besides, he knows that the Thousand River Valley Church has been expelled by me, so how is he planning to place an interdict?" Horn found it somewhat amusing. "How can his face be so thick? It's even thicker than the turning of a city wall."

The so-called interdict was actually 'excommunication', forbidding any churches, religious orders, or monasteries from contacting or providing services to him, and the crown would no longer enjoy the support of the Holy Father.

In the hands of most contemporary lords, this would mean that almost all grassroots ruling structures would shut down and go on strike, and all subordinate lords would naturally gain the right to claim his crown.

But these two points were invalid for Horn. The first was because Horn's grassroots government was directly controlled rather than outsourced, and the second was because the Grand Patriarch's power came from the dual guarantee of the Holy Lord and the believers.

Not to mention the believers' intentions, but the Holy Lord's intentions must definitely be biased towards Horn.

This so-called interdict offensive was more for internal pacification than external aggression.

"Your Majesty, you…"

"He is a Pope, and I am also a Pope." Quickly signing a warrant, Horn handed it to Pettier. "If he interdicts me, then I will interdict him."

"Your Majesty." Pettier took the warrant and said helplessly, "I wanted to say that the fake Pope Puliano in the north and the fake Pope Grandiva in the south have also done it."

"He also interdicted!"

With Horn's order, a magical scene appeared at the end of 1446 in the imperial recorder's history books.

On the second day of Saint Advent, not only were there three Popes in the empire, but these three Popes were also mutually interdicting each other!