God Of Crafting

Chapter 137: Outsourcing the problematic parts

"Yeah, I can certainly do that," Jenny, NovelFireid-tier maid of the villa assigned mostly to taking care of the laundry reported, nearly standing at attention as she confirmed her ability to turn the 3d printer from a scrap of cables and hydraulics into an actually useful machine. "Then again, I can only aim to replicate whatever mold you will create unless you want me to design it from scratch.

But the designing process…"

The young man in the middle of her twenties shook her head.

"You can trust me, sir, copying a mold will be much, much… MUCH more time efficient than designing the whole thing from scratch."

"I understand," I nodded my head, trying to be as reasonable as possible here.

It was an unexpected benefit of being filthy rich. An aspect of life that was so foreign for me, Claire ended up giving me a weirded-out look when I first brought up the potential of the staff in our villa just happening to have the skills we realized we needed.

For me, it was all but a matter of luck… luck padded by how the terms at our villa were apparently great enough to allow the staff to pursue their own passions and hobbies in their spare time. Heck!

After digging into the topic, Claire explained how there even was a special fund described within all of the staff employment contracts dedicated just to helping the staff play around with whatever they were interested in!

For Claire, however, the fact that the staff working for her came in with abilities that had nothing to do with their job description and just so happened to be extremely useful for us at the moment… It was no coincidence, good luck, or fate.

It was the inevitability.

"When the terms you offer are so above the expected, you get to be extremely picky with who you hire," she explained shortly only to sum the entire topic up with a shrug of her shoulder.

And so, rather than having me grow more and more desperate by the minute to decipher the control scheme of the 3d printer we had in the workshop… or do this whole process from scratch but this time at the circuit board printing machine… We just called for a maid and a butler, letting us solve the issue for us!

'The danger of them learning even the smallest bits of the design… Well, they are already loyal, so it shouldn't be that much of a problem, especially with how what we want them to do are just the rudimentary parts rather than the core elements…'

There was only so much one could learn from studying the shape of the food-tray-like piece of plastic or an empty circuit board with nothing in it beyond the particular set of paths.

And to get their hands on either of those, one already had to overcome the tall order of not only finding someone within our staff who was willing to sell our secrets but finding someone who actually had access to those secrets, paying a bribe fat enough for that person to risk their employment and then the wrath of Chihiro's clan…

And all of that just for the sake of getting the outer shape of the Qi condensing device or the empty circuit board with nothing more on it beyond the marked paths?

'Yeah, while it forces us to give up on some degree of safety, it still remains within the realm of reasonable safety.'

I took in a deep breath, before performing the ultimate technique for dealing with problems bigger than me.

'Ultimately, it's not my problem to be concerned with. The moment I escalated that device to Chihiro, it now falls under his responsibility to keep it secure!'

Rather than worrying about it myself, I simply decided to ditch the responsibility and focus on more productive aspects of the topic instead.

And from the looks of things, even though it was already late into the afternoon by the time we found the staff with the skills we desired, there was still just enough time to, at the very least, prepare some of the half-products necessary to craft the device in bulk!

"I'm going to get the mold and then leave it to you to replicate it en mass," I stated before nodding my head to the maid and turning right back only to walk across the entire workshop, all the way to where the other machine of interest was located, currently under an active jurisdiction of the butler Henry.

Normally, he was a man responsible for the maintenance of the lawns and gardens of the villas outside, keeping them always in the perfect condition to take a walk through or host a small, fancy tea party in.

Right now, however, he was busy tapping furiously into the keyboard attached to the machine, inputting line after line of commands as if he scorned the very idea of using the touchpad that was right next to his hand.

Whatever his methods were, however, contrary to the 3d printing machine that still required a mold to first get a model for what it would print out, the circuit printing machine was already operating, slowly spitting out freshly cut and arranged circuit boards onto the short conveyor that then stacked all of the boards into a simple, plastic box set right by its end.

'It's going to be one hell of a pain to solder all of those,' I thought as I grabbed an empty box before switching it over at the bottom of the conveyor and taking the box with quite a bit of circuit boards stored in it instead.

"I'm going to take those," I called out to Henry only to then nod my head while offering him a small smile, "keep up the good work!"

"Will do, sir!" the middle-aged man replied, only ever looking away from the screen to perform a proper nod that was expected from a butler… only to then fully ignore my presence and go right back to fiddling with the machine. "I'm not sure if you are aware, sir, but you can feed the components directly into this monster and it will be able to solder them into the circuits all by itself!"

Hearing this, I raised my eyebrows a bit.

That was… truly, a godsend. Just by looking at the circuit boards in the box I held, it would take me half of a night just to properly solder those.

And given how the machine continued to spit more and more of the boards even as we talked, it was quite likely that by the time I would be done with the circuits already in my possession, there would be several times as many boards ready for soldering left by this machine by then!

But then again, if I were to go with a convenient solution here, I would leave the task of soldering the tiny elements onto the boards to the machine. In other words, there would be now a hackable actor with quite a sizeable chunk of my project's recipe. And if anyone were to ever get their hands on its instructions…

'The bare circuit board alone isn't much of a hint. But one with all of the electrical components already soldered into it?' I shook my head.

"Thanks for letting me know, but kindly don't take the last fun part of this mass-crafting process from me, please!" I pleaded in a joking voice, a small play that earned me a smirk from Henry.

Read today at NovelFire _em _pyr.

"Sure thing, boss. How many of those plates do you need, then?"

I squinted my eyes a bit before taking a look at the small, plastic crate in my hands.

'This should take me about… that long to solder through,' I thought after doing quick, makeshift calculations in my head. 'Then…'

"Four more boxes like this," I shook the plastic crate in my hands while making sure to do it lightly enough not to damage any of the circuit boards haphazardly stored inside of it. "Any more and I don't think we will be able to make enough box frames to match their number!"

I took a step back while making sure the plastic crate rested comfortably in my arms as I carried it over where the staff turned one of the few zones of relatively empty space into a storage for all non-cultivation-related resources.

There, I quickly arranged for some simple desk, seat, and several boxes worth of electrical components before arming myself with the soldering gun, preparing the soldering agent and the flux, and then finally taking aim, ready to combine the components into the circuit board to make an example I could then replicate over and over again.

'If everything goes well, I should have this batch done by midnight,' I thought as I pushed the pins of several resistors and transistors into their respective holes before pressing my hand down against their tops only to then flip the board as to gain access to its underside.

'And it all starts with...' I thought, pressing down on the gun's trigger to heat its tip up, before melting some of the soldering agent on it and putting it down towards the protruding pins of the first capacitor in the series, 'this!'