The Medieval Heretic King is Too Good at Developing - Chapter 65

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Ceaseless

◈ The Medieval Heretic King is Too Good at Developing ◈

Chapter 65: Bohemian Cement (4)

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Two months passed as swiftly as an arrow.

Before anyone knew it, October's autumn winds had swept through Prague.

In an ordinary year, the city would have been a muddy mess after the autumn rains, filth mixed into every patch of sludge.

Carriages stuck fast in the mire, unable to move.

Clothes soaked in muddy water and reduced to rags.

And a foul stench that seeped into the very heart of the city.

That was Prague's usual sight at this time of year.

This year was different.

The central avenue ran straight from Old Town Square to the royal palace. There was no longer a muddy road that sucked at one's feet, nor a rattling gravel road.

In their place lay a smooth concrete road, stretching without a single seam like a vast sheet of gray silk.

It was wide enough for two carriages to race side by side with room to spare.

The medieval chaos of people and carriages tangled together had vanished. In its place stood a civilized road, with the roadway and pavement strictly divided.

Public bathhouses, public latrines, and communal laundries had been built all along the road. Rather than carrying chamber pots outside and dumping their waste onto the streets, people now used the wastewater treatment facilities assigned to each district.

The filth that had once littered every road was gone. Streets that had reeked with foul odors were finally filled with clean air and the pleasant scent of soap.

Overwhelmed by the transformation, Prague's citizens felt reverence for their king and gave the road a name.

'King's Road (Královská cesta).'

It had only been sixty days since the city's old arteries were torn up and that thick gray mixture was poured into wooden frames.

A miracle born in such a short time.

The merchants' reaction on the day the King's Road opened was explosive.

"Your Majesty! Please sell me this magical stone powder! I'll pay double, no, triple the price!"

"Please let us pave the yard in front of our shop with it! We'll gladly pay any amount in cleanliness tax!"

They were the same people who had initially looked miserable, claiming their taxes were being extorted.

Yet the moment they experienced carriage wheels gliding across concrete, the merchants went wild. They rushed in with bags of money.

Naturally, their requests were refused without hesitation.

Every bit of cement production for the next year had already been assigned.

As soon as the Prague project was finished, water and sewerage work had to begin in other major cities, including Kuttenberg and Plzeň. That was not all.

I was also planning to build a network of concrete roads connecting Prague, Sternberg, and every major city in Bohemia.

The city changed. People's lives changed. The kingdom's landscape changed.

Still, among all those transformations, there was something else that gave me the greatest personal satisfaction.

* * *

"Hoo..."

In a small, discreet room beside my private bedchamber in Prague's royal palace, I rose from my seat with a deeply satisfied expression.

Then I pulled the thin cord connected to the wall.

Whooosh!

A refreshing rush of water poured down and swallowed the waste in an instant.

It was an ordinary part of life for a modern person, but a sight close to magic for humanity in 1421.

"Perfect."

I adjusted my clothes and walked over to the sink.

When I turned the brass faucet, clear water came gushing out. I lathered my hands with soap, and the fresh scent of lavender tickled my nose.

"This is how civilized people live."

A life where I didn't need to expose my backside to the freezing winter wind or endure a stench strong enough to rot my nose.

I dried my hands with a towel and opened the bathroom door.

At that exact moment, a familiar voice came from outside.

"Your Majesty? May I come in?"

"Come in."

The door opened, and a maid slipped through the gap with a basket in one hand.

It was Šárka, my personal maid, who had recently been busy as a soap tester.

A fresh floral fragrance drifted from the basket in her arms.

"Your Majesty! I've brought samples of the finest new herbal soaps from the soap workshop."

Šárka set the basket on the table with practiced hands and chattered away.

"I tried them first. The rosemary soap doesn't lather quite as much, but the scent lasts a really long time. The chamomile soap makes your skin as smooth as silk after you wash with it. It's incredible. The maids are already making a huge fuss about when it'll be available."

"Good. You worked hard. I'll leave the practical testing to you from now on as well."

"Hehe, leave it to me! My skin is so sensitive that I can tell whether something is high quality after using it just once."

Šárka beamed, then glanced toward the bathroom.

The faint sound of water draining through the pipes could still be heard.

Unable to contain her curiosity, she poked her head through the open bathroom door.

The ceramic toilet was empty. The waste that had been there moments ago had vanished without a trace, leaving only clean water inside.

"Wow..."

Šárka's eyes sparkled with wonder.

"It's amazing every time I see it, Your Majesty. How does it not smell, and how does everything disappear like magic?"

"It isn't magic. It's the power of civilization. Human dignity begins not with silk clothes, but with comfortable bowel movements."

"Those are truly wise words!"

Šárka shuddered as though she deeply agreed with me.

After all, she had spent the past ten years as a maid. No one knew better than she did the misery of cleaning up the waste left by those above her.

"Emptying chamber pots every morning used to be the worst job. Especially in winter, when we had to carry frozen chamber pots down beneath the castle walls to dump them. If you slipped on the stairs while carrying one... ugh! Just thinking about it is horrible."

She continued, genuinely disgusted.

"You have no idea how happy the palace maids are these days. They say they don't have to worry about carrying slop buckets the moment they wake up, and they go around shouting, 'Long live His Majesty!'"

"Is it really that significant?"

"What do you mean, that significant? This is a revolution, a revolution! Especially Božena... Ah, Božena is one of the laundry maids. Anyway, she grabbed my hand and cried her eyes out, saying she no longer had to fetch water because of the faucets."

It was exactly the sort of testimony one would expect from Šárka, who was friendly with everyone from maids to ladies-in-waiting.

A few days earlier, when I installed a toilet in my own room, I decided to overhaul the entire palace's plumbing.

From the shared latrines used by attendants to the kitchens, laundry rooms, and public bathhouses, I connected all of them to water and sewer lines with faucets.

Once the grueling labor of carrying water containers up and down the stairs disappeared, the palace's work efficiency improved beyond comparison.

More than anything, people looked happier. With no need to struggle with waste anymore, Prague's royal palace was filled with an almost unmedieval freshness.

"These days, thanks to Your Majesty, my hands smell like roses. It feels like a dream."

Šárka happily sniffed the back of her hand, then tilted her head as a thoughtful expression crossed her face.

"Um... Your Majesty."

"What is it?"

Looking between the bathroom drain and Prague outside the window, Šárka asked, "Where does all the waste that goes down that hole end up? Does it go underground... and then flow into the Vltava River?"

"Hmm."

I rested my chin on my hand and pretended to consider it.

Šárka was half right and half wrong.

To be honest, simply sending it into the river was one possible method.

Prague's population was only around fifty thousand at most.

The Vltava River had enough water and a fast enough current to be called Bohemia's lifeline. Household wastewater from a city of this size was well within what nature could purify on its own.

The real problem in medieval cities was throwing waste directly onto the ground.

Waste that seeped into the streets contaminated the soil and eventually flowed into the groundwater. Without realizing it, people drew that water from wells and drank it.

Cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery.

Most waterborne diseases that ravaged the Middle Ages began with the tragedy of drinking shit water.

So even simply moving waste through sewer pipes and into the river would dramatically improve the city's sanitation. The well water would become clean.

But.

'That's the sort of thing only a third-rate hack would do.'

Pouring a city's waste into the river, its source of drinking water, without any treatment?

My pride would never allow it.

I was a chemist. Understanding the properties of matter, controlling them, and putting them to good use was my profession.

Would someone like me destroy the environment for immediate convenience and make people downstream drink shit water?

That would be no different from throwing my doctorate into the trash.

Besides, dumping all that organic matter into the river would be an outrageous waste of resources.

I headed to the terrace at one side of the bedchamber.

"Šárka, come here."

"Yes, Your Majesty."

Šárka hurried after me.

From the terrace railing, I could see the Vltava River glittering under the autumn sunlight.

New gray structures also stood along the riverbank.

"Do you see those square gray boxes by the river?"

I pointed to the end of the sewer pipes. Massive concrete structures leading toward the river had been placed at regular intervals.

"Yes, I see them! What are they? They don't look like watermills..."

"Those are septic tanks."

To an ordinary person, they looked like nothing more than crude warehouses. Yet they were the heart of Prague's sewer system.

Leaning against the railing, I began to explain.

"Waste from the palace and the city flows through the pipes and eventually gathers there. Then it takes a very special bath."

"A bath?"

"Yes. Have you heard of lime? That white powder used to construct buildings."

Šárka nodded.

"I have! It's what they put on walls, right? It gets hot when water touches it."

"Oh."

I had not expected Šárka to know that.

János hadn't, after all.

"That's right. Those tanks are filled with quicklime powder. The moment the waste arrives, it mixes with the lime."

I clenched and opened my hand, pretending to mix the two together.

"When lime meets water, it gives off tremendous heat and becomes strongly alkaline. In that process, all the harmful disease germs hiding in the waste are burned to death. That's called sterilization."

"Sterilization...?"

Šárka tilted her head, her eyes full of questions.

It was only natural.

The fact that invisible microorganisms caused disease remained unknown to humanity until Louis Pasteur appeared in the nineteenth century.

Trying to make a fifteenth-century person understand bacteriology would be like preaching to a cow.

Rather than giving her a complicated lecture on microbiology, I offered an easier comparison.

"Yes, and that isn't all. Lime also makes the dirty particles floating in water clump together. Scattered specks of dirt gather together and grow larger, like a snowball. What do you think happens once the particles become larger and heavier?"

"Um... do they sink to the bottom?"

"Correct."

Coagulation and sedimentation.

They were among the simplest and most reliable methods used in the primary treatment stage of modern wastewater plants.

Of course, biological decomposition using microorganisms would have made it perfect, but with current technology and infrastructure, chemical treatment using quicklime was more than enough.

"The particles sink to the bottom, and only the clear water at the top, with the disease germs gone, flows into the river. That way, the river stays clean."

Šárka's mouth fell open at my explanation.

"Goodness... what on earth is inside Your Majesty's head? How do you even think of things like that?"

"I appreciate the praise. But the real thing comes next."

"What? There's more?"

With a grin, I pointed toward the boats moored by the riverbank. Workers were scooping something out from the septic tanks and loading it onto the boats.

"Those particles that settled at the bottom. They aren't simply thrown away."

"Eek, what would you use those filthy chunks of shit for?"

Šárka frowned and pretended to cover her nose.

"Filthy? To farmers, they're treasures more precious than gold."

"Gold?"

"Yes. Once those particles are mixed with lime and the disease germs are killed, they become the finest fertilizer. After they're scooped out, aged, and spread over the fields, wheat will grow as tall as you, Šárka."

Šárka's eyes widened like full moons.

"Shit... turns into bread?"

"Strictly speaking, it grows wheat. But that is the result."

"Wow..."

Šárka stared at the septic tanks along the riverbank again, looking as though she could not believe it.

The crude gray buildings that had seemed like nothing but filthy waste containers moments earlier now looked like mills that produced bread.

Knock, knock.

Then came a polite yet firm knock at the bedchamber door.

Startled, Šárka straightened her clothes and hurried back toward the door.

The way she transformed from a curious girl into a well-mannered maid in an instant was almost astonishing.

"Come in."

"Excuse me, my lord."