Chapter 566: Mountain Road

In the quiet valley, the lush green trees rippled in the gentle breeze, a truly spectacular sight. However, this magnificent natural scenery was accompanied by some untimely blood and darkness.

“Ready!” an SS officer shouted hysterically, raising his arm.

Clack! A line of German SS soldiers worked the bolts of their rifles, then impassively raised them. Opposite them were sallow-faced, terrified Polish laborers.

They had been brought here more than half a year ago, ordered to lay a railway line into the Austrian Alps. Along the way, they had endured the elements, and thousands had fallen into the deep ditches on either side of the tracks due to meager rations and the intense workload. Now, the railway was on the verge of being fully operational, but the SS soldiers guarding them had raised their butcher’s knives against the unarmed men.

“Spare us! Oh God!” an elderly Pole cried out, begging the Germans opposite him to let him live. But the men on the other side were clearly used to such pleas and showed no intention of lowering their guns.

Most of the others were silent. They knew there was no escape for them today, and they knew the Germans opposite would certainly not let them go. They were just clinging to this world, greedily breathing in the fresh air around them, as if they wanted to absorb everything into their souls and take it with them to enjoy in heaven.

“Shoot! You devils! God will not forgive you!” a middle-aged man shouted.

“As you wish,” the officer in charge of the execution said softly with a smile. As he spoke, the arm he had held high was suddenly brought down.

Crack! Crack! The gunshots rang out chaotically, and a line of ragged civilians fell into a pool of blood.

Clack! This was followed by the sound of rifle bolts being worked, and the guns were raised again. A second volley, then a third, until the huddled crowd had become a pile of corpses. These people had been tied together with ropes when they were brought here, and they had no chance to scatter or charge in resistance.

Beside the bodies was a huge pit, which had been dug by the previous batch of executed people. At the command, the German soldiers began to clumsily push the bodies into the deep pit. Some of the wounded were still groaning as they fell to the bottom, but soon a soldier with a submachine gun fired a full magazine into the pit.

The valley returned to silence, with only the sound of the wind rustling through the trees and the scraping of shovels filling the large pit with dirt. And not far from this deep pit was a double-track, four-rail railway, built to the highest European standards, which looked very expensive.

This railway ran from an important city in Austria into the mountains of the Alps. Few people knew where this railway ultimately led, and even the vast majority of the people who had built it had never seen its end point with their own eyes.

“My Führer, I don’t know why you were so sure that there would be a large amount of open-pit tungsten ore in the mountains of Austria. But this time, the White Orchid Group has really hit the jackpot. I hear that the annual output of tungsten ore there can exceed 100,000 tons, and the amount of refined tungsten metal can exceed 1,000 tons,” Krupp said with emotion. “It’s a good thing I shamelessly got 3% of the White Orchid Group’s shares from you. Otherwise, I would have died of envy.”

“You? Isn’t the income from the cannons you produce every year enough?” Akado asked, standing in front of a group of company managers and executives, smiling as he watched Speer prepare for the official opening ceremony of the White Orchid Group’s rare metal mining subsidiary.

“I’m not an idiot. The research and development of tungsten alloys will definitely be a very important industry in the future. The investment the White Orchid Group is making in materials research can now be described as insane. Didn’t Colonel Demont’s engine technology also have to ask for help from your White Orchid Group, my Führer?” Krupp said with a helpless smile. “But the annual output of cannons will not always be as high as it is now.”

“You and those Jews, you only think about how to make money… As for me… I’m thinking about how to make more money,” Akado said with a smile, bending slightly and whispering into Krupp’s ear, “I have predicted the trend of the international situation, and most of my predictions have been proven to be accurate… I have also predicted the outcome of wars, and as it turns out, I guessed right again… If your memory is good enough, it was I who sent people to find the oil fields in the Middle East, right?”

Krupp was stunned, then he suddenly looked up at Akado, his face full of shock, his voice trembling slightly. “You… you have the ability, the ability to discover underground mineral deposits? This… this is incredible.”

“So, don’t question my decisions, especially the ones that could make everyone rich. This is my advice to you, and also a warning. Of course, you should know that for a plan to get rich, the fewer people who know about it, the better,” Akado said to Krupp, then waved to Speer.

The Minister of Industry of the Reich, the recent star of the Greater Germany Party, hailed by countless businessmen as the heart of German industry, Speer, saw Akado waving at him. He excused himself from the guests around him and walked towards his Führer with a beaming face.

“My Führer!” Arriving in front of Akado, Speer stood at attention and gave a German salute. If there was one person in all of Germany whom he admired the most, it was the German Führer standing before him, Akado. Others only knew this lofty Führer from one side, but he had personally experienced a great revival process, from having to having not, and then from having not to having again.

This German Führer had once been pretty much the richest man in Germany. He controlled the White Orchid Group, a behemoth that spanned various fields and industries, and it was no exaggeration to describe him as being as rich as a country. But for this empire to continue to operate, he had actually sold off his most valuable assets in exchange for a pile of worthless junk.

Of course, the empire had continued to prosper as a result. The happy outcome was that the anti-war voices within Germany had disappeared almost overnight. The entire country was now unprecedentedly supportive of the Greater Germany Party’s war, and many military-industrial enterprises had even spontaneously begun to implement wartime mobilization production regulations.

And at this time, Akado’s own net worth had shrunk by a full half, and most of the enterprises he held were not the most profitable military-industrial ones. The civilian automotive and textile industries had also basically been handed over.

In the midst of this self-destructive process of cutting off his own flesh, Akado had actually found tungsten ore in Austria, uranium ore in Czechoslovakia, and had expanded the scale of copper mining in Poland. This series of invasions into the energy sector had caught the traditional German mineral tycoons who controlled the Ruhr completely off guard. By the time they came to their senses, the White Orchid Group, which had originally been cut into pieces, had leaped to become a super giant in the field of rare metal mining.

Subsequently, based on the research and development of new alloys, White Orchid began to penetrate and expand its influence in various fields. Because of the simplification and scaling up of the production process for aluminum alloys and some other materials, the White Orchid Group already had a place in the German aviation field. Not to mention that in the research and development of jet engines, the White Orchid Group had always occupied the cutting edge.

This time, the mining of tungsten ore and the successful development of tungsten alloys was just the tip of the iceberg of the massive White Orchid new materials field. The alloys of this rare metal had already begun to play an important role in the German armor-piercing shell field. According to experiments, the 88mm cannon of a German tank, using a new type of discarding sabot armor-piercing shell, could even penetrate a 170mm-thick steel armor plate at a distance of 1,000 meters.

Of course, in the development of nuclear energy, the White Orchid Group was also at the forefront of the world. Although there had been some interference from Dr. Einstein before, Germany’s technological reserves and research direction were ahead of the world. At the very least, Germany’s nuclear energy experts had not continued down the wrong path of nuclear fusion but had correctly chosen the simpler research direction of nuclear fission.

In another unknown technological field, the energy and resources Akado had invested were actually even greater: the field of electronic technology. Under his direction, Germany’s computer research had already achieved phased results, and its radar and radio technologies had always maintained the most advanced level in the world. Germany had even begun to experiment with installing radar equipment on a twin-engine Ju-88 experimental aircraft to serve as a night fighter for homeland air defense.

Turing and his assistant had created a computer prototype in a laboratory carefully prepared by Akado. Although its functions were not yet perfect, it could already perform simple calculation work. This prototype was whimsically named the “Galaxy No. 1” by Akado and was one of Germany’s most strictly guarded secrets. Turing had already promised Akado that in the next few months, this computer could be put to use in code-breaking work. At that time, Germany’s intelligence war would be sufficient to defeat any opponent.

And this did not even include the rocket research and development that Akado had always attached great importance to. Germany’s latest V-type rocket was already very reliable, and German rocket engineers were working hard to make the V3 rocket more reliable and practical.

Only Akado knew how valuable the technologies of computers, material science, electronic technology, and aerospace would be in the future. He had every reason to believe that with the development of these fields, the White Orchid Group could, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, once again become the world’s number one giant conglomerate.

Speer had personally witnessed the demise of one miracle and the rise of another. And between the demise and the rise was an empire transforming from being riddled with diseases to being strong and robust. How could he not admire the Führer before him? How could he not be convinced by this man who could be said to be a miracle?

Published: 2025-09-06T04:24:13.000+00:00
Last Edited: 2025-12-31T11:46:56.000+00:00
URL: https://www.patreon.com/caleredhair/posts/mtr-c566-road-138253989

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