27th April 1574"Who"s hurt!?"
As soon as the initial shock after the crash pa.s.sed through my mind, I raised myself and shouted in the air. Yet rather than listening to the potential responses, my sight instantly moved all over my body, scanning whether I wasn"t hurt myself.
Working as a white-collar worker for most of my adult"s life forced me to remember one of this vital tips for any accidents. Take care of yourself first. With the sudden rush of the adrenaline from the explosion, it wouldn"t be that strange if I were to lose a limb and not even realise that fact! Who couldn"t have known that those safety seminars could come in handy in such a strange way!
Only when I confirmed that no foreign pieces of iron protruded from my body in places where metal should never happen to be, I raised my sight to a.n.a.lyse the situation. Maybe due to the sheer luck or maybe due to their determination, the workers at the boiler managed to spill the water from the nearby buckets on the fires, stalling the engine, yet just a quick peek to the side revealed that with all the acc.u.mulated steam, it would still take a long time for it to cool down, but with all the cranks destroyed, the control piston couldn"t move anymore, saving us from the onslaught of the broken iron pipes poking the air at an insane speed.
"We have injured!"
As soon as I confirmed that the steam horse didn"t pose any additional threat, for now, I moved my sight to the source of the voice that somehow managed to be hearable despite all the commotion that turned this joyous place into a complete mess.
With my sight landing on a few gravely injured men, I had to use all my mental power to hold myself back form instantly puking my guts out. From what I saw, when the crank gave up due to the excessive speed at which they were operating, after shattering in many pieces, quite a lot of them shoot at their given speed into the air, with a part of them ending up penetrating the bodies of unlucky workers.
"STOP!"
Seeing how one of the luckily unharmed workers kneeled in front of one of the injured and reached for the iron needle that stuck to his abdomen, I could only shout and realise with growing desperation that in the sea of screams of fear and pain, my shout simply didn"t reach the ears of the man.
First rule of injuries like that. Do not pull the foreign body unless you have ample stock of bandages around to stop the bleeding from the wound!
"EVERYONE, DON"T YOU f.u.c.kING MOVE!"
Ignoring the pain from a few bruises I earned when the shockwave forced my body to drop flat to the ground with the instincts I never expected to have kicked in, I ran towards the injured man while repeating my shout over and over again. Only when I dropped to my knees, tearing my own robes in the same, smooth move did I notice that my words started to take any effect, allowing me to give more reasonable orders.
"DO NOT REMOVE ANY IRON FROM THEIR BODIES! WE NEED TO PREPARE BANDAGES FIRST!"
With the pieces of expensive cloth now completely torn in my hands, I covered now profusely bleeding wound with the makes.h.i.+ft bandage, making sure to tie it tight enough to keep it from moving.
"Don"t move him, let him rest just like that. I need some men to bring all the alcohol we have, two pots, one bigger than the other and an iron plate, hurry!"
Lacking any proper, medical tools, all I could do right was to try to disinfect the wounds to the best of my ability and prevent others from being patched up without any rational approach.
"Sir, we have seventeen wounded!"
Only when Al appeared near me did I managed to calm down to a certain degree, and rethink the orders that I just gave. There was no way I could distil any reasonable amount of spirit in the open, especially when everyone was in such a tragic mental state! After the explosion, I doubted anyone would be willing to just light the fire under any kind of machinery of my making!
"Wait, forget about those pots, I should have some spirit saved up in my own pile. Al, take over the wounded. Make sure they won"t attempt to remove the iron pieces without the necessary amount of bandages. Also, get someone to find some spiders web!"
With a sudden memory emerging in my mind, I realised that maybe even without all the alcohol necessary to disinfect the wounds of the people, we could still use some of the more traditional medicine, wildly used across entire eastern and central Europe at this time.
Chewed up breed mixed with spiders web. From when I was curious enough to verify whether this scene so commonly appearing in the period movies and novels had any sense to it, and to my surprise, it turned out to be actually a proper, ancient method to produce makes.h.i.+ft penicillin!
While obviously, its efficiency was a far cry from the pure ingredient, in my current situation, every little bit would help!
"Patch the wounded, and leave the steam horse for now. I know why it failed, and I will personally compensate all the wounded!"
Standing up, I said those words with as deep voice as I could produce, hoping it would reach the majority of the workers and craftsmen. Even if most of them wouldn"t believe even a single word of mine after this spectacular foresight, just by having someone composed in the middle of this chaos would lift their morale to a manageable degree!
Additionally, when I brought up the matter of the compensation, all of the injured would gain all the more reasons to toughen up through the pain just to see this free money they would get after recovering!
"Sir, we have two dead. The flywheel broke free from its restraints and smashed them to the death…"
While the flywheel wasn"t as big and heavy to be a dangerous element in itself, with how fast it was rotating at the moment of the crash, rather than being a relatively harmless part of the engine, it turned into a disc of death, shooting forward just under the force of its own movement.
"Pull them away from everyone and cover the bodies with some blanket. Their families will receive two red goldens each!"
While splurging on the compensation fee like that was uncommon, with how important this project was both to me and the entire country in the future, I couldn"t allow any bad rumours to go about it in the near future. With how manpower hungry this place already was, only for this hunger to grow at an exponential rate in the future, unless I was willing to go to war with nearby n.o.bles in order to steal their serfs and force them to work under me, I had to make sure that this stupid mistake wouldn"t bear any negative effect on my projects in the future!