I Became a Witch and Started an Industrial Revolution Chapter 74

【In the Beginning】

【No one paid attention to this uprising. It was nothing more than an accident, an ordinary riot, the misfortune of a few nobles, the fall of a city—until the revolt swept across most of the kingdom and became inseparable from everyone’s fate.】

By the time the kingdom finally realized that the Stark uprising was not just a common mob riot, Tina’s red regime had already succeeded in hanging the hastily returned city lord and seized a vast territory in the process.

She set a terrible precedent.

Countless manuals of Mitia’s ideological program were printed and distributed.

Every time a small detachment occupied a village or town, they handed them out in bulk.

At the same time, she organized local Farmers’ Associations, stripping away the very foundation of the Kingdom of Ovinia’s rule—the noble estate lords.

The existence of these landlords, and the reason they could tyrannize rural life, lay chiefly in the fact that the kingdom used them as the nodes for conscripting soldiers and collecting taxes and grain.

Once Tina hanged them on stakes, the power vacuum below caused chaos to spread within the kingdom.

Tina had inherited Mitia’s teachings well.

She avoided direct battles with major cities, instead maneuvering through mountains and forests to strike rural towns and villages.

Whenever they succeeded, they confiscated property, opened granaries to release food, held public trials, redistributed land, and then hired literate intellectuals at high pay to explain the texts in the manuals to the peasants.

By establishing Farmers’ Associations to govern, the locals were allowed to rule themselves.

Once that was done, the region once under Ovinia’s control became a no-man’s white zone.

Afterward, they would leave, and larger forces arriving later would turn the place into a red zone—again and again in cycles.

By the bonfire, several male and female comrades sat together, discussing and reflecting on what they had gained from battle.

Meanwhile, Tina quietly leafed through the notes of quotations Anna had secretly slipped her, using the firelight.

Though their uniforms and faces were covered in dirt, their spirits and energy were soaring.

Seeing this, Tina smiled knowingly.

She couldn’t help but recall Mitia’s words in class.

【If you start with nothing, and want to bypass nobles and landlords—the nodes of power—and instead organize the masses to create wealth belonging to the people, it is exceedingly difficult.】

【Otherwise, why have no other forces done so? Do you think they don’t want to?】

“They want to...”

When the students answered, Mitia gave a reply they never expected: “No! They truly don’t want to.”

“If it’s only for power, then think: is it easier to cling to the privileged few—nobles, elites, and landlords—”

“Or is it easier to mobilize the countless masses at the bottom, billions of laboring people, uneducated, with varied needs, ignorant and superstitious?”

Mitia flung the question at them again.

The young men and women fell silent, for the answer was obvious—the first was far easier. Yet Mitia’s lessons had already told them that this was not the road she wanted to take.

“To organize the masses, you must start from nothing—give them education, build an economic system from the ground up, raise billions from ignorance, and guide them to believe in learning, practice, and the faith of living for themselves and others. Doesn’t this sound like a fantasy?”

“If all you want is power, then naturally you take the first road—it’s the easiest. Walk the elite path, merge with the evil dragon, and become the evil dragon.”

“Our goal is not power itself. That’s why we choose the second, hardest, nearly impossible road—the people’s road. Because seizing power is not the goal—it is only a means. The goal is to liberate the masses.”

The students’ eyes lit up.

Mitia told them of the nobles’ innate faith in the Heroic View of History.

Their perspective made them believe all good things in the world came from elite rule.

They could attribute every great deed to shining names of individuals.

In their eyes, commoners were nothing but loose sand—ignorant, powerless.

Only a nation under elite rule could be considered a proper kingdom.

Like two armies clashing—when the generals won or lost, one gained fame while the soldiers beneath them were merely numbers, unimportant.

But Mitia ended with this: 【I firmly believe that history is not created by a handful of elite heroes, but by the people!】

This sentence became the anchor in the hearts of every member of the National Socialist Party.

With such a clear purpose, no strange thought or rhetoric could shake their conviction.

At that time in the Kingdom of Ovinia, the noble lords and city lords had not yet realized anything was amiss.

They still hid comfortably in their fortified cities or castles, mocking the foolishness of the rioting commoners.

But very quickly, they realized the danger.

The villages and towns had stopped supplying the cities with goods—not one or two, but tens of thousands.

Tina had abolished taxes.

All harvests now belonged to the farmers themselves.

Which farmer would deliver free grain to the cities?

And because of the Church’s earlier corruption, it had already lost all control over its lower-level believers.

In towns and villages, it was hated to the point of being attacked on sight.

By the time they sensed the problem, the cities were already declining.

With food and goods cut off, prices soared, and famine spread rapidly.

Cities were typically just junctions for surrounding villages and towns.

Some served only military purposes.

Without exception, they depended on food and products grown in nearby farmland.

They could never support so many residents on their own.

In desperation, many city lords opened their granaries to calm unrest. But some miserly nobles ignored it, and their cities soon fell into turmoil.

This was a naked stratagem.

Either you opened your granaries, fed the people, and stabilized morale—but then your stockpiles would quickly deplete.

Or you shut your gates, ignored everything, and waited for the commoners inside to act as guides, opening the gates to let the peasant armies flood in.

No matter which choice, the nobles suffered. Ovinia III, furious in the Royal Palace, raged as the rebel forces cut off the royal capital’s support to the border lords.

Strategically, they had isolated these nobles into one enclave after another outside the kingdom.

Meanwhile, Tina’s merciless redistribution of land and grain from the landlords made it nearly impossible for the lords’ armies to reclaim territory.

Even if they recovered land, they could take it back and dissolve the Farmers’ Associations. But the grain and cloth already distributed? To seize those again, they could only resort to violence.

Murder, looting, rape, brutal tortures inflicted on the Farmers’ Association leaders—these were carried out as the nobles tried to restore their old authority through force.

However… how could those who had glimpsed the light ever willingly return to darkness?

What Tina and her comrades had done was like planting seeds deep in the hearts of every commoner.

Someday, they would break through the soil and grow into towering trees.