After dispatching Serenus to Eastern Europe, Manuel prepared to return to Pontus to continue managing the affairs of Asia Minor.
However, before returning, he wanted to leverage his knowledge from his previous life to improve the production levels of the current Autocratic State.
Chief among these was the Tauris Peninsula, which boasted excellent geographical conditions and potential resources.
Three days after the delegation led by Serenus departed, Manuel, having finalized his plans, shared his ideas with his Tauris Finance Minister that noon: he intended to improve the domestic fishing and salt industries.
Currently, in Tauris, besides a small amount of iron ore processing and export, and slave trade, the fishing and salt industry held a significant position in the production economy.
However, limited by late-medieval technology and mindset, while Tauris's fishing and salt production could be self-sufficient and even exported, neither its quality nor scale was considered optimal.
It was at this point that Manuel sought to improve it with his unique ideas.
For the salt industry, he set his sights on the natural salt lakes in the North Tauris region and the surrounding seas of the entire peninsula.
For the former, Caesar, after a period of contemplation that blended knowledge from both his past and present lives, identified several salt lakes he considered to have excellent potential.
He planned to encourage domestic salt farmers to develop them, and also try to provide stable employment for newly relocated immigrants and Tatar indigenous people.
As for the latter, he drew on blueprints a relatively new method of sea salt production for Europeans: directly diverting seawater into excavated evaporation ponds, where the seawater would be sun-dried into brine, which would then be poured into crystallization ponds to be sun-dried into salt fields.
At the same time, a trench would be built next to the salt fields to directly drain the bitter brine, returning these useless brines directly to the sea.
Based on his knowledge from his previous life, Manuel named it the'sun-drying salt field' method and planned to officially promote its use after confirming its practicality.
Regarding Caesar's ideas, Finance Minister Isaac Arno was not entirely unmoved; in fact, he was utterly awestruck.
At this moment, he even felt ashamed that, as a descendant of a merchant family from South Tauris, he had failed to make any outstanding independent contributions in financial matters.
This feeling further intensified his admiration for Caesar, who was similar in age to him.
However, despite the immense shock he felt internally, Arno managed to restrain these thoughts on the surface and very earnestly asked, following Caesar's line of thinking, "Then, may I ask what improvements Your Majesty intends to make to the fishing industry? I eagerly await the details."
Manuel, pleased by his subordinate's perfectly timed question, immediately followed up by presenting his ideas for improving the existing fishing industry: fishing should be done as far west as possible.
According to his research (which was actually geographical knowledge from his previous life), the northwestern Black Sea was a deep-water area highly beneficial for fishing.
If concentrated fishing was carried out in that area during the fishing season, the results would be much more abundant compared to other areas of the Black Sea.
"At the same time, if these fishing concepts prove to be practical, I will also share them with Pontus.
After all, Tauris and Pontus are both Black Sea coastal regions; in a sense, the Black Sea's fishery resources are shared between them."
Finally, he concluded his guidance on the fishing industry with this sentence.
Although it sounded very reasonable, Arno felt a slight apprehension for some reason.
So, he immediately voiced his question, "What Your Majesty says is very true, but I would like to know how Your Majesty arrived at these conclusions?"
This question left Manuel momentarily speechless.
He couldn't very well say that these were conclusions he had drawn from idly studying medieval fishing in the Eastern Mediterranean in his previous life, could he?
At this moment, he truly wished Serenus were by his side, for the Chief Secretary, despite his humble aristocratic background, was not entirely ignorant of the fishing and salt industry; he could even be considered completely clueless.
If that person were here today, there wouldn't be this scene of someone persistently asking him, "Why, why?"
Therefore, in the end, the respected Caesar could only smile mysteriously, "By studying fishing reports from the Principality period to the Autocratic State period, and the navigation logs of naval fleets in the Black Sea, wouldn't you reach the same conclusions?
Arno, you need to think more."
Manuel did not know that his words had stirred up another wave in the other's heart.
After much strenuous thought, Arno believed he finally understood the true meaning of his Majesty's words: "Your Majesty wants me to take the reports from the lower and middle classes more seriously, and to examine the actual situation of industrial taxes!
Holy Mother above, truly worthy of Your Majesty, profound words with deep meaning!"
However, Manuel, who was opposite him, was completely unaware that his subordinate's thoughts had diverged so much.
At this moment, he was contemplating another important matter, which was whether the Pontus region had the potential for large-scale forestry development.
A certain 21st-century game Manuel played in his previous life had a famous saying—to get rich, first chop trees.
So, while he made detailed plans and provided guidance for Tauris's fishing and salt industry, he also set his sights on the dense forests of the Pontic Mountains.
This was not a rash assumption born of a sudden whim.
Forestry for wealth was not a convenient game setting from later generations, but rather based on concrete real-world examples.
Aside from the common knowledge that developing agriculture requires felling trees to clear space and making tools, there are many examples of earning a fortune simply by exporting high-grade timber.
For instance, the very well-known lebanon cedar, growing along the Cilicia and Levant Eastern Mediterranean coasts, has brought immense profits to its native regions of Ramazan and Mamluk due to its exceptionally fine timber, which is still widely used in shipbuilding, construction, and medicine today.
As stated in the Bible: "The righteous will flourish like a palm tree; they will grow like a lebanon cedar."①
But after Manuel spent a considerable amount of time searching for and researching data, combined with recollections of his previous life's knowledge, he ultimately regretfully abandoned this idea.
Neither Tauris nor Pontus had any excellent tree species that interested him, and encouraging the populace to develop forest land on a large scale could very likely lead to vulnerabilities in the military defenses relying on the Pontic Mountains in the short term, so the idea of compensating for quality with quantity was also personally rejected by him.
As for the cedars he so favored? Unfortunately, Pontus did not have these tree species, and the lebanon cedar and Cyprus Cedar closest to Pontus were not suitable for introduction.
After all, introducing tree species requires considering success rates and climate.
It was truly a pity that Tauris and Pontus, which he now ruled, were simply too far from the origins of excellent timber like cedars.
But if one day he could rule southwestern Anatolia and even the Levant coast, then he would certainly unleash the true value of these building materials, Manuel thought to himself.