In King Redfield's audience chamber, Chamberlain Rockwell kneeled with a strained expression before the king. "Speak," the king commanded. "It's been a year. What is the progress of Baron Everwood in Elderthorn?"
"Right away, Your Majesty," Chamberlain Rockwell swallowed. "While I'm not sure how, the barren land in Elderthorn has become fertile, and crops are growing using strange methods that our informants describe as 'miraculous.'"
"What type of magic is it?" King Redfield asked. "Is it earth magic? Or some kind of dark magic?"
"It seems to be neither, Your Majesty," the chamberlain said. "There's no sign of magic in the soil. Their only explanation is that they dug up twenty miles of clay, built walls, and filled it with dirt from the forest before adding farming innovations."
"What?!" the king roared. "Every beast in that forest should be capable of killing everyone except Baron Everwood, who is a sage, and his servant who trains with him. Yet you're telling me they are venturing in there?! How?!"
Chamberlain Rockwell returned a wry smile. "I'm not sure how, but Thea Lockheart seems to have tamed a wyvern. So—"
"WHAT?!" King Redfield snapped, standing up. "That cannot be true! How?!"
"As I said, Your Majesty, I don't know how," the chamberlain replied. "Most of the work was done before Baron Everwood enlisted aid."
"This is absurd," the king scoffed, sitting back down. "How is his soap research progressing?"
Chamberlain Rockwell closed his eyes. "Baron Everwood has paid 1,000,000 gold in taxes this year. It's mostly from sales of new magical soap and high-level beast pelts. He has also provided materials from multiple guardian beasts and a hundred A-rank beasts."
"What is he doing with the meat?" King Redfield asked in horror.
After a deep sigh, the chamberlain replied, "He exclusively feeds it to his people."
King Redfield froze in shock. "Are you telling me he's turning the commoners into immortal warriors?!"
With enough soul mana, no one in Elderthorn would ever age or get sick. Their bodies would turn to steel, and their mana production would skyrocket. Ryker taught every person in Elderthorn magic, using the abundant soul mana.
With his immense strength, he built an army of ordinary people under the guise of ruling a simple barony on twenty square miles of land.
"It seems that way," Chamberlain Rockwell cringed.
"How many people does he have there already?!" King Redfield roared.
"There are two thousand people, Your Majesty," the chamberlain replied. "Most of them are high-level guild members trained by top professionals in the kingdom."
"If we were to go to war with them right now, what would be the projected casualties?" the king sighed, rubbing his temples.
"The toll would be immense," Chamberlain Rockwell grimaced. "We can't send land troops due to the high-level beasts, and they have a wyvern. Even if we sent armored griffons and thunder stags to kill the wyvern, Thea Lockheart could tame more A-class avians. Therefore, we need to gather the top talent in the kingdom and strike all at once."
"Was it a mistake not to kill him?" King Rockwell asked.
"Not necessarily," the chamberlain answered. "He pays his taxes, and anyone who interacts with him says that he only cares about one thing: results. There's a chance he might still marry into this family as a logical move to prevent problems. I doubt he intends to stay in the Nightshade Forest forever."
"I see..." King Redfield replied. "Prepare for war and focus on diplomacy. We need to bind him to us or find a way to eliminate him. Those are our only options."
"Do you really think he's the reincarnation of the demon lord, Your Majesty?" Chamberlain Rockwell asked.
"Hah," the king huffed, shaking his head at the ceiling. "To be honest, I don't. No evidence has surfaced suggesting he spread the black death, and his soap is both cheap and revolutionary, significantly reducing mortality. Demons don't save mortals.
Moreover, we put him through years of brutal training to see if he would slip up on his magic knowledge, but he never did. He consistently made intentional mistakes taught to him by Alphonse. His magic also uses language that has never been recorded.
I'm unsure what that boy is, but he's not the demon lord's reincarnation. However, I can tell you one thing..."
"What's that?" Chamberlain Rockwell gulped.
"He's worse," King Redfield replied. "We know how to fight the demon lord, but this boy... if he finds a way to use his waterwheel to create swords and shields, we'll be in trouble."
***
A year flew by, and society progressed significantly. Peggy established a soap-making empire that brought substantial revenue to my mother, father, and baby brother. Then, she, Carter, and Timothy moved to Elderthorn for exceptional pay, soul mana meat, and limitless opportunities.
Everyone who comes here is horrified. And it's understandable. The more I learn about this place, the more terrifying it becomes. It's essentially a walking death trap, survivable only due to the massive amounts of soul mana that cleanse toxins from people's bodies. We learned that when some idiots attempted to have sex in the woods and exploded. They literally fucking exploded. It was some ebola meets the demon lord shit.
Damn, I had to get that off my chest. I'll stop cursing now.
Seriously, we've lost many people just expanding our land. Therefore, there's a new policy to recruit only those we wish to invest in, and then we feed them soul meat until they no longer randomly grow parasitic mushrooms that drive them to kill people.
Did I mention that someone's muscles melted, reducing them to a pool of skin and bones?
Yeah, that happened.
While I'm grateful for King Redfield's foolishness in training and sending me here, I can only witness so many horrifying sights before I acknowledge that this man deserves death.
At least he is rational enough to recognize my talent and my low tolerance for stupidity. I can appreciate that. However, it also means he's already preparing for war, assuming we can't reach a diplomatic solution. Therefore, I need to expand my arsenal.
Fortunately, this place is a formidable fortress of death, making the Russian winter seem like a beginner course on suffering. Thus, we only need to prepare for aerial attacks.
That means four things: steel, gunpowder, cannons, mortars, and ballistas.
Well, we'll need steel swords, shields, and spears to fight beasts. While I've been systematically mining large mountain faces and extracting iron, copper, coal, alumina, zinc, nickel, lithium, quartz, and a variety of gemstones, and precious metals, our people will soon need to mine for themselves. So, preparing for battle will become important.
That's why I train everyone and teach them magic daily. It's also why we need to ramp up weapon-making.
This month I'm introducing three things to make that happen: the blast furnace, the trip hammer (also known as the power hammer or water hammer), and steel.
Therefore, I headed for my increasingly tired blacksmith.
"What are we buildin' this time?" Carter asked, rubbing his bald head as I walked into his shop.
"We're building a blast furnace," I replied. "It will significantly reduce the time required to smelt iron ore."
Smelting refers to the process of extracting ore from metal with high heat. It is melted into a material known as bloom, which is then hammered into metal and folded to increase its hardness and durability.
"That would be useful," Carter smiled. "Please tell me we're going to use one of those waterwheels. I've been so jealous."
"Oh, you're going to have the most envy-inducing setup among everyone," I grinned.
***
Over the next week, I helped construct a blast furnace. In medieval times, iron was produced using a bloomery, a furnace that involved melting iron in a low-oxygen environment using charcoal to reduce iron oxide to metallic iron.
Imagine trying to melt iron using the same charcoal grill you use for cooking Diablo Bull steaks. It'd take forever, and that's exactly the problem with bloomeries.
Enter the blast furnace. It's a furnace where a waterwheel opens and shuts a bellow, the great, great, great, great, great-great-great grandmother of the hairdryer, and feeds it air to make the furnace two to three times hotter. It operates continuously, eliminating the need to add more charcoal constantly, and allows for larger quantities of iron to be processed.
Most importantly, it produces higher-quality iron that can be refined into steel.
Building a blast furnace isn't overly difficult. If you have some death clay from an Elderthorn valley, you can make indestructible bricks and arrange them in a cone shape with a wide base and a narrow top. This design allows for more iron to be melted while retaining heat.
Next, you create an opening for the bellow. A bellow is essentially a bag of air that releases air when squeezed and sucks in air when lifted, just like a sponge that expands and contracts when squeezed or released.
The waterwheel lifts the bellows through its rotational force and then closes it, continuously supplying air effortlessly. It would be unthinkable to do this manually, but the process becomes effortless with a waterwheel.
That's pretty much it. Create a door where you can add the metal and coal, and you're good to go.
I explained this and guided Carter through the process with the pottery guild. Within a week, we had a functioning blast furnace that made the blacksmiths eager to get to work.
"This was worth the extra 20% and more," Carter laughed, impressed by the increased production speed.
"This is just the beginning, guild master," I smiled. "Next, we're building a trip hammer. We'll automate your hammering process with a lever, just like we did with soap."
"You can't be serious," Carter blinked.
"I'm dead serious," I replied. "It will provide more force and improve the quality of your iron."
"I'll be blunt—I don't know what to give you for that," he warned.
I chuckled. "You're paying me 20% plus property taxes. Helping you is in my best interest, isn't it?"
"Well, hell yeah," Carter laughed, slamming his hand into his fist.
"Let's get started," I smiled.
A trip hammer works similarly to everything else powered by the waterwheel. You create a massive hammer and use a pulley system that lifts and drops the hammer when the waterwheel pulls the rope.
By this point, the concept is pretty familiar. The water spins the rod, the rod spins something else, and that operation is performed using the rotational force. It's extremely useful.
After a month of work and extensive testing, we built a trip hammer. Between the blast furnace and the trip hammer, the output of blacksmithing work increased tenfold, allowing for increased weapon production.
"Before we move on to mass producing weapons, we need to improve the iron," I announced.
"What do you mean?" Carter asked. "I've never seen iron of this quality before. Are you sayin' it can get even better?"
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
"Oh, it can get much better," I smiled. "Hasn't iron improved significantly since we started using coal?"
"Yeah, it's like night and day," he replied.
"That's what we call cast iron," I explained. "It's stronger because it contains carbon. However, it contains too much carbon, so we must reduce it. Once we do, we'll create a metal that will revolutionize the world."
If I had told Carter that a month ago, he would've rolled his eyes and told me to stay in my lane. But now, he gulped and nodded.
The difference between iron—or wrought iron—and cast iron lies in the amount of carbon present. Cast iron contains more carbon, which comes from coal. What distinguishes cast iron from steel is keeping the carbon content less than 2% instead of 3-4%. So, it's a matter of finding the right recipe.
There are various methods to control the carbon content, including adding charcoal directly into the iron during forging to allow the carbon to diffuse. That's the one we would use until we developed better equipment.
Therefore, we spent another month refining the process until a sword emerged from the forge one day, leaving Carter in shock.
"T-This..." Carter gulped. "This is what you were talking about?"
"Yes," I smiled. "That's steel. It has increased strength and hardness, it's easier to shape, less brittle, and has future applications that you can't even imagine."
"Who are you really?" he asked, smiling.
"Someone blessed by a very kinky goddess," I replied, turning around. "I'll leave you with some blueprints. These are your top priorities for the next month. You'll need to make molds and stamps. I don't care how you do it, but ensure that they are all exactly the same size. After next month, I'll be ordering ten thousand of them."
Carter looked at the images of mortar shells and massive steel arrows with a strange expression. "Well, I'm not going to ask questions anymore." With those words, he opened up his blast furnace, inserted iron ore, and started the bellows.
***
Gunpowder is simple to make if you have the right materials. For me, it's been a joke. Whenever I burn wood to obtain ash for potassium hydroxide leaching, I also extract pure charcoal, which is a primary ingredient of gunpowder.
Next, you need to obtain potassium nitrate or saltpeter, which I acquired while gathering sand and silt from the forest and domestic animal manure from the livestock we imported during the summer. However, if we needed to, we could have obtained it by leaching compost or finding a saltpeter deposit in a cave.
Lastly, you need sulfur. Once you have it, mix 10 parts sulfur, 15 parts charcoal, and 75 parts saltpeter.
Gunpowder.
Seriously, that's it. Mix the three together and create a spark with flint and steel, and it will violently explode. That's it.
This type of gunpowder—known as black powder—enjoyed widespread usage in cannons between the 14th and 20th centuries. That's 600 years of military might, so it'll suffice for us for now.
In the future, we'll produce smokeless powder, which involves using cellulose, often from cotton, and combining it with nitric and sulfuric acid to create nitrocellulose. After that, it's washed in boiling water, neutralized with a weak alkali, and dried. When mixed with ether and alcohol, it dissolves the nitrocellulose into a gelatinous substance that is then pressed through a die (essentially an industrial-grade cookie cutter) to create the grains of powder. Finally, the grains are soaked in a stabilizing solution, dried, glazed, coated in graphite, and screened.
That's modern gunpowder.
We could accomplish most of these steps. However, we need sulfuric acid, which requires us to locate natural acidic springs or develop highly specialized equipment that can synthesize sulfuric acid by burning sulfur to create sulfur dioxide, transferring the gas to a tank with vanadium oxide at high temperatures to create sulfur trioxide, and then adding water to it.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's no way in hell I can create modern gunpowder at this point. However, I will.
For now, we must mass-produce black powder for cannons, and I'm currently sitting in a Nightshade Forest hot spring full of sulfur. Who knew future widespread death and suffering could feel so relaxing?
It's the best.
"I always forget that you're thirteen," Lyssa sighed. "You're still a kid, and you have to go 30,000 feet into the air to avoid people asking you questions."
I looked up at the night sky, covered by a blood-red moon, and then surveyed the vast valley of trees, rivers, and lakes that appeared deceptively beautiful until a colossal nocturnal assassin bird swooped down from the shadows and picked a 20-foot chimera before carrying it back to their lair. It was horrifying—for people without a dragon.
After taking a deep breath of crisp, sulfur-free water, I nodded. "Yeah."
Lyssa rolled her eyes at my dramatic build-up and unenthusiastic response. However, Thea giggled and hugged me.
"It's a shame that you can't join us, Zenith," Thea said to the wyvern, watching from a ledge, pretending not to care. When she received a strange response, Thea puffed out her cheeks and began communicating with Zenith through her thoughts for five minutes before huffing. "Come on, it's not like anyone will judge you."
"What are you talking about?" I furrowed my brows. "If it's more than one toe, I do mind." I thought she wanted to soak with us!
Thea giggled at the miscommunication before turning back to the wyvern. "Hey, I'm curious, if Ryker can do something about it, would you?"
"Can someone—"
"Shush," the cute cat woman hushed me while communicating. Then she turned to me. "Hypothetically speaking, can you do something about a burn on someone's face? A human's?"
I narrowed my eyes suspiciously before looking at Zenith, who turned away and then back at Thea. "I could create cosmetics that would hide it," I replied, glancing at the wyvern out of the corner of my eye. "If it were someone important, I'd even be willing to spend an absurd amount of gold to secure the services of a high-tier healer if I can find one."
"What are cosmetics?" Thea asked as Zenith's head swung toward me with surreal force.
"You know how pretentious noblewomen wear that gaudy white makeup?" I rhetorically asked. "It's like that, but it matches your skin tone, making you look like a fresher version of yourself instead of a ghost. And there's a special kind called concealer that can hide scars and burns to some extent."
Zenith turned her dragon head towards Thea with a sharp, focused gaze.
"However!" I interjected, my eyebrow twitching. "Before we entertain any more questions, people will start telling me what's going on."
In an extraordinary display of anthropomorphism, Zenith gave me a wry smile with her large, ominous blue jaws. Then she pouted.
"Zenith just wants to know if you can make this mythical 'concealer' or if it's just a legend," Thea giggled.
"Do you doubt me?" I chuckled. "Yeah, I can. However, we'd need to obtain the necessary materials from somewhere else, perhaps even another continent, because I wouldn't trust a goddamn thing from this forest on my skin."
My comment elicited giggles from the women. Then I pressed further. "Now, can we talk about whatever we were discussing?"
Zenith turned away bashfully, and Thea spoke for her.
"Zenith, like all divine beasts—AKA me," Thea said, puffing out her chest with pride, "has a human form. However, Zenith hasn't transformed into her human form since the acid burned her face, so she's been lonely in her wyvern form. That's why she made a temporary contract with us when we met her. She just wanted to talk to someone."
My eyes widened, and then I looked at Zenith with a complex expression. Like me, she suffered from something that made her feel scorned and isolated. It was a truly terrible situation.
"Well, if that's the case, I'll try to find a wizard-class healer," I replied. "It's not the best time to leave, with the kingdom sending spies in here. However, if I can't find a healer, we'll take a trip to find the necessary nuts and fruits to make cosmetics. There's already things I need from a tropical climate, and it'll be a great way to fund a war, if it becomes necessary."
Lyssa and Zenith shuddered at my grin, but Thea gushed and hugged me, demonstrating why I appreciated her so much.
In reality, it wasn't cosmetics I was after; it was what often grew next to shea trees: cocoa trees, coffee cherry trees, and sugar cane. Why? All of them led to the same place: addiction. I could hop people up on modern drugs and let the money pour in. It'd fuel our war chest, squeeze the Valerian economy for political leverage, and give Zenith concealer simultaneously. It was a beautiful opportunity.
However, before I can take over the world with chocolate, coffee, and cosmetics, I have to prepare the people for my temporary departure, which will probably take a month.
"Keep in mind that we're still discussing makeup," I said. "It has its limitations. Can I see it? It'll be our secret."
Zenith thought about it for a few minutes of silence before she flew above the hot spring, creating waves before...
Splash!
I shielded my eyes from the sudden splash, and when I opened them, I saw a beautiful woman with silver hair and sapphire highlights walking toward me.
My body heated up because she was very, very naked, exposing her perfectly proportionate body, and I didn't know how to react.
"HEY!" Thea yelled, seeing the silver-haired woman lowering herself to my level. "Don't just wave the melons all over the place! Ryker's helping you, not accepting a harem application"
My eyes blinked in shock, realizing that this silver-haired woman with an oppressive aura wading up to me was Zenith. When I made eye contact with the blushing woman, I finally noticed the red mark over her eye. It was similar to a panda's eye but light red, like a permanent sunburn.
Once I made eye contact with her vibrant purple eyes, Zenith panicked and jumped back into the water. It was clear that she was not okay with seeming like she was getting fresh with a teenager.
"Concealer can hide that," I announced, breaking the oppressive, awkward silence. Then I laid my head back and looked at the stars again. "The skin's smooth, so you can make it completely disappear. If you get good enough with it, you may even look prettier. If that's possible."
Zenith blushed, Thea huffed, and I stared into the nighttime sky, trying to figure out whether this world had shea or cocoa trees and where they would be.
***
If we were taking Zenith and Thea on a trip, we needed to prepare our people for aerial attacks without us. Therefore, we stayed for the next month as I developed units of measurement and set them as a standard that all guilds operating within Elderthorn had to abide by.
While I used feet, miles, and gallons mentally, I introduced the metric system to Solstice. Why? Everything was divisible by 10! That way, you can just add and remove zeros as needed. In a world with low literacy, it was a necessity.
After making a meter stick and smaller rulers with centimeters, I had another blacksmith guild replicate them a thousand times and distribute them to the carpentry guilds to start using for making everything. I ordered metal rulers so they didn't expand or contract due to temperature, ensuring measuring over time.
I also improved the scales for advanced units of measurement and introduced the cup system for baking, as it was faster and more efficient.
Once I established the system, I returned to Carter to check on his progress.
"How are the mortar shells and ballista arrows coming along?" I asked.
"Well, if you wanna call this massive spear an arrow, the arrows are done," Carter laughed, looking at the steel spear, which was five feet tall and had a massive arrowhead that was dual-pointed with fins on either side to create a T-cut.
"However, these mortars are extremely challenging," he confessed with a frown. "We followed your advice and made a metal stamp, but it's going to take a while to perfect. The tubes are done, and the rifling, as you call it, is okay, but the striker pin system is a pain in the ass."
"That's to be expected," I nodded. "Do you have the iron balls?"
"Yeah, I made the mold," Carter scratched his head. "Are you going to tell me what all this stuff is for? Right now, it just seems like a pain in the ass for the sake of art or somethin'."
I chuckled and asked him to come outside with the baseball-sized iron balls. On the outskirts of the growing operation, I took a large tube, bolted it into the ground, and then used the hinges to make it lean at a 45-degree angle against a wall. Lastly, I reached into my spatial bag and pulled out a bag of black powder.
"This is gunpowder," I explained, pouring some into the smooth tube, dropping the iron ball into it, and then adding a rigid piece of string. Lastly, I picked up the magnesium flint that I had Carter create when he first showed up.
A magnesium flint is a bar of magnesium that, when struck with a special type of metal made with cerium, will create 3,000-degree sparks even in a rainstorm. Needless to say, it was a revolutionary invention here and would change the world once my people were strong enough to start mining for themselves.
When I struck the rod against the flint, it lit the string bound with black powder and started burning quickly.
"Cover your ears," I said, clapping my hands over my own ears.
"Why?" Carter asked with a frown, looking at the strange string burning quickly. "What's gonna—"
BOOOM! BOOM!
Carter gripped his ears when the mortar exploded, and his eyes widened in shock as a massive chunk of our proud clay wall exploded.
"W-What the hell just happened?" he asked in shock.
"The future of warfare, Carter!" I yelled into his ringing ears and patted him on the shoulders. "Just wait until you see what those shells you're making will do."
Everyone ran outside when they heard the noise, witnessing the aftermath of Solstice's first cannon. However, we're skipping past Napoleon's reign and going straight into World War I.
Carter was making explosive shells with a striking pin that exploded on impact, which would create a siege weapon that could be packed with napalm and all the other illegal weapons that the world had become wise to ban.
The more overwhelming the force, the fewer people have to die before giving up. That's how I see it. So let the mortar building begin.
I left the cannon fiasco location and walked into Timothy's spot.
"How's the ballista coming along?" I smiled.
"Oh, yer gonna love this," Timothy grinned, taking me into a back room. There was a massive bow on a cart with wheels. It was a ballista.
A ballista is a regular bow where a person pulls back the arrow by spinning a wheel instead of using their hand. That's it. Well, it shoots a spear about as fast as a bullet, so there's that too.
The string was made from the tendons of an A-rank Diablo Bull, making it nearly unbreakable. The end of the string had a cap where the back of the arrow went, and that was connected to a rope on a spool with a large wheel that looked like a pirate ship's wheel. When someone spun the wheel, it pulled the cord back, allowing the bow to be drawn back with several tons of force. When someone released the lever, it shot the arrow.
***
Another two months flew by, and production was moving smoothly. We were producing hundreds of top-tier steel swords and axes that we sold for an absurd profit on the outside. We'll sell steel weapons all day; we just won't sell modern weaponry. That's our way of seeming friendly when we're really amassing an armory.
Between the money and the promise of opportunity, another five thousand people showed up.
To accommodate them, I led the strongest members into the forest for a good old-fashioned slash-and-burn operation. It was effortless. My thought when I did it was, goddamn, no wonder this was so common in the Amazon!
Naturally, the beasts fought back, but my people weren't pushovers. I had taught them magic, they had steel swords, and we had ballistas in siege towers pointing into the forest, taking out flying creatures and the larger ones. Within a month's work, we cleared out another five miles of forest and built another wall. All that space was purely for barracks for new people to live in.
Between the ballistas, ever-improving mortars and cannons, and blacksmithing automation, we finally had a defense system for invasions from Valeria.
Winter was fast approaching.
I just had to teach people how to can, smoke, and ferment food to start stockpiling for war. Then we would head south of Solstice's equator to enjoy summer on the tropical side of the world, gathering shea, cocoa, and coffee to set my ever-developing forced diplomacy strategy into motion.