Having received the news of the successful rescue operation, Roland was finally relieved.
Although it deviated from the original plan, failing to sweep through Dawn in the guise of a conqueror, the neighboring country ultimately overthrew the Moya family's rule and maintained basic stability. The Quinn family of New Dawn would be Greycastle's most loyal ally before they completely gained a firm foothold.
Besides, there was also Andrea in Neverwinter City. As long as there were no accidents, the allied relationship with Dawn would be maintained beyond this generation.
He did not think the Third Battle of Divine Will would last for a century.
Andrea and the God's Punishment Witches on the expedition were expected to return to the Western Region in about a month. He planned to take advantage of this time to properly plan Greycastle's future development.
After all, with the destruction of the Tiffecco remnants, the opposing forces had temporarily disappeared, and the kingdom had been nominally unified. Although it would still take some time for the secondary city halls in various places to function and completely transform Greycastle into an efficient centralized state, he could start preparing now. When that day arrived, Greycastle's strength would inevitably take an unprecedented leap, widening the gap between it and the other three countries.
And the most important part of the development plan was how to make good use of the witches' abilities.
After all, they were the primary productive force.
In just the half month since Anna's return, the city had undergone a series of changes—the most obvious being Roland's castle: his redwood table had doubled in size, covered with more than a dozen hand-cranked telephones, connected to the Witch Building office, the City Hall, the barracks, Third Border City, Longsong District, and other key locations. In the event of an emergency, he no longer had to rely on the guards' legs to deliver messages.
In addition, the first public telephone had appeared in the Central Square, connecting the city with the Misty Forest, and extending with the railway construction progress to meet the needs of workers who could not return home for a long time to contact their families.
Of course, this line was charged by the hour, and the number of callers was limited each day, requiring advance application. If they didn't want to spend too much money, they could choose the cheaper flying messengers and railway transportation to deliver letters. Thanks to the popularization of primary education, literacy had become increasingly common for the residents of Neverwinter City.
And the department responsible for the operation of these systems was a newly established department of the City Hall: the Communications Department.
Since its work covered all aspects from taking care of messengers to delivering messages, its subordinate organizations instantly became a behemoth second only to the Construction Department, providing about a thousand jobs for Neverwinter City, almost sweeping away the newly graduated residents.
Within this department, Roland had vaguely seen the outline of a super-giant group rising in later generations.
This was just the power of Anna alone.
Therefore, after resolving the devil attack, he focused most of his energy on the ability statistics of the Sleeping Island witches.
With the arrival of the second batch of migrants, the number of Sleeping Spell members had increased to ninety-six. Just testing their abilities kept Wendy and Scroll busy, and with a few uncooperative witches, the first step was quite difficult. Fortunately, with Tilly's personal prestige and Wendy's appeasement offensive, the registration was finally successfully completed.
Now in front of Roland was the black leather booklet, which was the preliminary investigation results of all the witches' abilities.
He had been reading it repeatedly for several days, and had planned the destinations for most of the ability users.
It had to be said that the previous classification methods of enhancement, summoning, and enchantment were too broad and no longer suitable for intuitively expressing the scope of their abilities. Therefore, he simply reclassified the witches according to their job categories. For example, those skilled in processing were classified as manufacturing abilities; those close to animals were classified as breeding abilities; and those whose uses could not be found temporarily were placed in the pending column. In this way, the City Hall could clearly see the number of witches available for hire in major production categories.
In addition, these nearly a hundred witches also allowed Roland to see how amazing the differences in their abilities were.
Clearly they were all awakened ones, but some could only make flowers grow from cracks in stones, while others could create burly magic servants—no wonder the Union could not withstand a protracted war. Once a combat witch died, who knew how many years it would take to find someone who could replace her.
Obviously, placing the witches properly in factories was the safest approach.
Among this list of a hundred people, Roland valued four in particular.
They were Cloud No. 26, Archima No. 43, Doris No. 44, and Slenderwrist No. 89.
Cloud's ability was "Dyeing," which could dye objects she came into contact with any color without changing the original properties of the object.
Theoretically, this should be considered a type of enchantment ability. The duration was limited, and the consumption of magic power was greatly affected by the size of the target. Once completed, it was not affected by the God's Stone of Retaliation. However, the power of her ability lay in the fact that the dyeing activation time could be incredibly long—probably because changing the color had almost no effect on the substance itself, she only needed a tiny bit of magic power to maintain it for several years. In other words, if Cloud went all out, she could keep the color for a century.
But the limitation of the target volume still existed, and she had no way to instantly release her ability like Hummingbird, while compressing the activation time as much as possible. Therefore, once she encountered a large object that exceeded her magic power limit, the result would be that the ability was invalid. It was still too difficult for her to change the color of the sea in one go.
In fact, after Wendy's test, she could only affect objects within the range of her outstretched arms, which was about one and a half meters square.
For Roland, such a large dyeing area was already enough.
After all, objects could be divided and combined.
It could be said that Cloud's ability filled a blank in Neverwinter City—the development of dyeing technology. The dyeing methods of this era came from natural extraction, which would definitely be a major selling point in advertisements in later generations, but the fact was that the performance of naturally extracted dyes was really terrible. There were many impurities, they faded easily, had poor oxidation resistance, and the types were very limited, so that only nobles could afford brightly colored clothes, and the latter's effect was mostly achieved through gold and silver inlay.
Dyes had extremely wide applications. In addition to the traditional textile industry, education, printing, chemical industry, and biology were inseparable from its support. Moreover, Cloud could also alleviate Soraya's burden to a certain extent, so she could be regarded as an all-rounder.
However, the following No. 43 and No. 44 made Roland feel a little headache.
Archima and Doris were among the witches who Wendy said were less willing to cooperate. They had expressed dissatisfaction with Tilly during their first meeting and wanted to leave Neverwinter City as soon as possible. Although this disagreement was temporarily dispelled by Scroll, the rift always existed, and it was still unknown whether the two were willing to accept recruitment and devote themselves to work.
But their abilities were very unique—Archima's ability "Tracing the Source" was slightly better and not irreplaceable, but Doris's "Demonization" made Roland see the possibility of large-scale use of magic power.