Chapter 666: Make Me One Too

Last year, Celestina had celebrated News Years, as well as performed her all-important Discipleship Ceremony, in Misty City.

Naturally, this meant that this year, she had to attend the New Years Banquet in Martin, the political and administrative centre of the Balfour March.

As her Disciples, Lucas, Eris, and the recently returned Christina also had to attend, as did a couple dozen other. Some were related to the Balfour Family directly, while some were just important guests who Celestina had a duty to entertain.

Ordinarily, such a large group would have taken the Sunchaser, but with it being unable to fly currently...

In any case, with no Skyship available, and not wanting to spend days traveling by land, tartans were the only way to go.

So, the night before New Years Eve, Celestina and her traveling companions boarded a flock of 20 Tartans and took off from the Raging River Legion base.

The flight to Martin was quite chilly, especially for the weaker members, but with enough warm layers wrapped around them, it wasn’t too much of a problem for a short time.

Still, once they touched down at the main Balfour Manor and greeted Great Elder Pauline and everyone else who had come out to welcome them, Lucas, Eris, Christina, Olivia, Danika, Edward, Amalia, and all the others in the Mortal Realm headed straight to the baths.

An hour later, after a long hot shower and soak, all of them, with the exception of a certain workaholic, were in bed, catching up on some much-needed rest and preparing themselves for the long day ahead of them.

.....

"Still up?" Celestina asked her First Disciple after spotting him munching on a late-night snack while writing something as he sat in the Manor’s main dining hall.

The dining hall wasn’t completely empty, but there certainly weren’t many people here this late at night, and certainly no children as young as Lucas, which made his presence stand out all the more.

"Hm? Oh, Master, Great Elder, you’re both here," Lucas lifted his head from his notebook and smiled.

Standing next to each other, everyone would probably assume Celestina and Pauline were sisters rather than mother and daughter. The two of them were even wearing matching sets of casual clothes from [Vision], which only further emphasized just how similar they both looked.

In fact, the only obvious difference between them was that Celestina had wavy hair, while Pauline’s was straight.

Taking a seat across from the boy she hadn’t seen in a few months, Pauline glanced at what he was working on and couldn’t help rolling her eyes.

Celestina had a similar reaction to her eldest daughter, though she soon let out a light laugh, "You really enjoy doing that, don’t you?"

"Not really," Lucas shrugged, "But it seems the women of the Rockwell Kingdom can’t get enough of them, with each of them wanting something new and unique."

Putting it simply, Lucas wasn’t writing anything, he was sketching a new dress design.

Neither woman attempted to make any kind of argument here, as they both wholeheartedly agreed with his statement.

Compared to historically comparable times in the other universe, or even several centuries after, the idea of gender equality in the Rockwell Kingdom was significantly more developed thanks to the existence of cultivation. It was hard for a Body Tempering Realm man to look down on an Initiate-Realm women or treat her as an object he could posses when said woman was capable of crushing his neck with just her thumb and index finger.

That said, if 10 men showed up at the same banquet all wearing the same outfits, no one thought much of it.

If 10 women all wore the same dresses to a party, however, and they hadn’t done so on purpose for some reason...

Lucas’ new-style clothing had only made this trend worse, as wearing one of Vision’s unique dresses was now seen as something of a status symbol.

Snatching the sketchbook and taking a closer look at what had been drawn in it, Celestina nodded in approval before demanding, "Make me one too."

Lucas’ brow twitched when he heard this and turned to Pauline, hoping she could talk some sense into her mother, only to see the Great Elder avert her eyes with a slightly guilty look on her face.

"Haaa..." Lucas sighed before waving his hand, "Fine fine. I’ll let Isaac and Felicity know to make a custom dress of the new design for each of you."

"Good boy," Celestina grinned, patting her Disciple on his head.

Ever since she first put on that first crimson-red dress for Christina’s 16th birthday party, Celestina had absolutely refused to wear old-style formalwear again.

The same went for Pauline after she got her first Allure dress, a long black evening gown with a high-neck, cap-style-sleeves, and a slightly ruffled skirt she had worn to a dinner party in Rockwell City that followed a lengthy set of meetings between high-noble-houses about boosting internal trade between them.

Needless to say, after experiencing just how much easier it was to wear Lucas’ new-style formalwear, Pauline Balfour had no intention of strapping on one of those old torture devices disguised as a dress ever again.

If these two had been ordinary woman, with the current production capacity of his clothing factory, Lucas wouldn’t have any difficulty supplying them with 10 new pieces every month; however, as Adept-Realm Cultivators, the demands Celestina and Pauline had for formal clothing was much higher than normal.

Spirit Grade fabric was the minimum requirement, which caused Lucas quite a bit of headache as sewing together such materials was incredibly difficult.

It wasn’t impossible for Mortal Realm seamstresses and tailors to work with Spirit Grade cloth, but it certainly wasn’t easy either, especially when it came to fine detail work.

I really need to find a way to get mechanical equipment into the textiles industry, Lucas thought to himself, hoping that the latest LBM Mark 2 would be stable enough to properly run a sewing machine.

Steam engines would also be useful in spinning thread and producing cloth, but Lucas wasn’t too concerned about that just yet as the supply of such materials was actually quite abundant right now.

The boy was also a bit wary of disturbing too many basic industries all at once.

He had already noticed the effect his agricultural machines were having on farmers, displaying a large number of them every time more seed-drills, harvesters, and threshers were introduced.

For the moment, that extra labour was easily absorbed by other ongoing projects, or by simply expanding farm fields further, but that wouldn’t last forever.

It wasn’t technically Lucas’ responsibility to maintain the rate of employment of the peasant class in the Rockwell Kingdom, but from his inherited memories, he understood what would happen if no one at least tried to mitigate the consequences of mechanization.

Too much automation, too quickly, would lead to suffering, poverty, and starvation, ultimately resulting in widespread disaster or rebellion, and that was certainly something Lucas didn’t want to see come to pass as a result of his carelessness.