Coleridge laughed to himself and twirled the paintbrush in his hands. “Like this?” he rhetorically asked, knowing fully-well how to paint a building. He had been “assigned” to paint a three-story brick structure on the base belonging to the Combined Fleet, considered a neutral organization between the feuding naval factions. At the moment, Coleridge didn't seem too concerned with any of that; paintbrush in hand, he moved his arm up and down the wall, his face full of satisfaction.

Nearby, Lynn had set up a folding chair and sat nonchalantly on it, drinking a cup of coffee while reading a magazine. “Oh? Yeah, sure, exactly like that. You’re the best, Coleridge.”

“I really am, aren’t I?” He giddily kept working, his face and arms animated like a kid in a candy store. Lynn often volunteered for labor duties; today, she caught a passing Coleridge and with simple eye contact and friendly conversation, got the hapless officer to do her assigned painting for the day.

Isaac and Reed, his charges, poked their heads out from behind a nearby storage shed.

“We’re fortunate to have the worst officer in the entire Naval Police assigned to us,” Reed supposed.

“Yeah.” Isaac frowned. “Almost too fortunate, you think?”

Reed just shrugged and went back to looking at her palm, studying the writing she had earlier scrawled across it. Isaac waved a hand to get her out of the trance - they had business to attend to today. With Coleridge out of the picture, the pair headed to the administrative keep at the back of the base and found their waiting Research Bureau guard in the lobby. He brought them down a hallway, then another one, passing them through several security checkpoints, another guard with a blue beret joining them along the way. At last, they arrived in an otherwise nondescript corridor with a freight elevator at the back. Two people stood in front of it: Naval Intelligence Chief Leyton and-

“Have we met before?” Ms. Essex asked Reed, extending her hand to shake. Her neat blonde hair bobbed up and down as the women introduced themselves. Reed frowned - not only did Ms. Essex speak like the smartest person in the room, she also smudged the writing on Reed’s hand. Nevertheless, Essex's white labcoat trailed behind her as she nodded at the guards. The two got the freight elevator up and running, closing the metal doors behind them once the party entered. Concrete walls surrounded Isaac as the elevator descended, dim light bulbs guiding the way.

The journey on the elevator was quick - less than a minute later, they found themselves in a large tunnel. Evidence of recent construction work was everywhere - unnaturally smooth stone that could only have been carved by earth cultivators, along with several idle excavators and other construction equipment. These ones lacked the Cartwright conglomerate logos found on the equipment above ground; instead, they were marked with STOCKHAM CORPORATION.

“Our beloved general comes from an otherwise minor family in the construction industry,” Essex explained as the guards led the way. “Something like that proves useful for projects that we’d prefer to keep hidden.”

Droplets of water hit the ground somewhere in the distance. They arrived past a stacked bundle of rails and found a small station surrounded by more Stockham construction equipment. The guards wheeled out a handcar much like the one Isaac and Reed used to go from Dai Hong’s estate to Four Eagles; at least this time they wouldn’t have to push. The guards moved the lever up and down as the handcar got underway, heading down a long tunnel illuminated by Rddhi lights. Every time Isaac had seen a similar light system, someone had to place a hand on the wall and emit energy from it in order to activate the system; these lights appeared permanently lit, some sort of scientific advancement that Essex would make clear to him soon enough.

“This’ll take us to the rail depot,” Essex explained, idly lighting a cigarette as the handcar advanced. “Beats getting around the Naval Police checkpoints at the base’s exits, right? Course, I wouldn’t know, because I spend more time underground than a mole person, but I have to imagine.”

Leyton admired the new lighting system. “It’ll also serve as a bunker. And, perhaps one day, the start of an underground subway system.”

Isaac raised an eyebrow. “Don’t we already have a city rail system?”

“The elevated rail,” Leyton said. “It won’t be able to withstand bombardment. We need an underground system.”

“Why’d we build the rail above ground then?” Reed asked.

With a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, Essex gave a wry grin. “We didn’t build it. The State Police did. Whatever it is, they have a reason for it.”

“Maybe to avoid dealing with all those pre-Unleashing tunnels and subways,” Isaac proposed. Essex nodded, but the look on her face suggested she didn’t believe it. But that’s how she always looked when someone else besides her talked.

The ride to the rail depot didn’t take all that long - it was quite close to the naval base, after all. They got off at a much more active station; Research Bureau guards oversaw the area, while laborers worked on the walls, moving equipment around, everything touched by the sound of hammers and buzzing of saws. Somewhere, pistons churned; the lights continued to glow.

Another freight elevator took them to the surface. And when they got off and exited another nondescript building, Isaac simply didn’t expect to see so much activity. The entire depot was hard at work - under the cool sun, laborers pushed wheelbarrows, repaired rail tracks, ascended scaffolding, set up radio towers. The depot was almost the same size as the base, but lacked the imposing walls, with barbed wires and fencing patrolled by Combined Fleet conventional marines serving as its defenses. Not a single Naval Police officer was found - on the highest tower, only the flags of Arcadia, the Navy, the Cultivator Marines, and the Combined Fleet fluttered in the breeze.

“How come there’s no Naval Police presence here?” Isaac asked.

“That’s another big administrative brew-ha-ha,” Essex explained as the guards retrieved a truck for them. They piled into the back while the guards drove down several small roads, some still covered in battle scars from when the depot was seized from Zhanghai, wheeling through rows of administrative and storage buildings. Not too far off, smoke rose in thick columns from factory chimneys into the sky, and that’s where they ended up heading towards.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Essex lit another cigarette. “Naval Police says that since this is Navy-owned, they have a right to police it. Stockham and Broadhurst from the Combined Fleet say that since this was recently seized in a war, trying to transfer it to a different authority before they’ve even established their own would be an inefficient headache. Naval Police seized their own facilities in the nationalization, so they’re still trying to consolidate those before they’ll really come after this one.”

“Politics,” Reed muttered, squinting at her palm.

The truck parked in a lot next to the largest building in the whole area. Smoke poured through multiple chimneys, mixing into the winter gray above. Isaac’s whole body tingled - not from the smoke, but from what caused it. Looking up at the tall, rectangle building that laid on its side like a brick, Isaac felt dwarfed by the Rddhi emanating from inside. His heart rate increased; his legs felt antsy. Reed noticed the concentrated energy as well and stopped looking at her hand for once.

Essex finished her cigarette and grinned. “Welcome, cultivator cadets, to the future.”

And with that, she took them inside, past guardsmen posted at the entrance. After being waved through a lobby, they headed up a staircase, spiraling upwards, the banging of pistons and engines barely muted by thick walls. When they got to the top, the guards led them through a door, and Isaac felt utterly ensconced by the energy swirling around him.

They arrived on a catwalk and had to raise their voices to be heard over the sound of furnaces, engines, pistons, valves, gauges, boilers, turbines, and generators. Metal pipes snaked their way up walls, heading out of the machines and toward transformers and then outwards, towards the other factories surrounding the depot. Hundreds of workers - no, not just workers, cultivators - were stationed in front of machines, pressing their palms into a gauge on the machine’s edge, pouring Rddhi outward and into the machine.

The red lights danced in front of Essex’s ambitious eyes. “Factory Number One. One day, I want to build a thousand of them. But this will do for now.”

Sensors and levers and glowing lights constantly strobed on the machinery. The lights washed over Reed’s face while Isaac gripped the railing and gazed downwards. “How does it all work?”

“I’m glad you asked,” Essex said, clearly intent on explaining her factory whether or not he did so. “It all started with the Rddhi lighting system. It’s a simple mechanism - there’s a small plant known as Spirit Grass whose evolution has been affected by Rddhi. Some time after the Unleashing, a mutation appeared in it that allowed it to absorb Rddhi similar to the process of photosynthesis. Those plants that could absorb it thrived and prospered, enough that several state-owned farms are completely dedicated to it.”

She motioned with her pale hands. “You build a little receiving chamber out of Spirit Grass lined with steel, you place your palm on it and emit energy. That energy travels out of the chamber and into wires lined with Spirit Grass, and you can transmit energy that way. Unfortunately, Spirit Grass can only transfer enough energy for a lighting system, little beyond it, because it can only absorb so much. Rddhi can be found in anything, so it tends to escape and roam, you know?”

Isaac nudged Reed awake.

Essex was too engrossed in her factory and explanation to notice. “So, how do you upscale it? You have the receiving chamber, you have the wire, but you need to prevent all that energy from escaping. Fortunately, we have material perfectly suited to the task. Easily-found, easily-mined, easily-malleable.”

Her eyes glowed. “Lead. Lead is the perfect shielding for cultivation. A steel pipe, with lead and Spirit Grass lining the inside - it’ll transfer your energy no problem. The State Police wants to reduce our coal? Let ‘em. We keep building these factories and it’ll be all the energy we need. Better than steam, better than coal. This is the future.”

“But don’t we need lead and Spirit Grass now instead?” Isaac pointed out.

“Baby steps,” Essex said as if he was simple. “Baby steps.”

“Hey, wait a minute.” Reed pointed down at the cultivators. “Aren’t some of those former cadets? I feel like I’ve seen them around the base.”

Leyton took this question. “I was involved in the personnel and training for this. Your Cadet Squads, like 1 and 3, are the most promising cultivators. We give them space and generally let them pursue their own learning paths as it’s been historically done. It’s what the State Police and Army still do. But times are changing. More and more people are becoming cultivators. The vast majority of them aren’t promising. All they can do is bend a spoon with their mind or flick a little fireball from their palms.”

At the moment, hundreds of palms shot out red energy into the machines. “But being a mere 1A cultivator is enough to power the machine. All you have to do is study a rudimentary Energy Art and you’re able to do this. Those cadets without promise, when they’ve graduated, we’ve assigned them here.”

Isaac asked his next question before thinking. “Do they like it? Standing in front of a machine all day?”

“It’s no different than being in a mine all day,” Leyton answered. “Perhaps even better. I won’t do the explanation justice, but…the Army and State Police have devoted their seized factories to making weapons of war. Because our energy supply is more efficient, we can spare enough factories to make products of peace. We’ll dominate the Arcadian textile industry, and from there, it’ll snowball.”

His own eyes glowed in ambition now. “The end goal is to make the Navy the economic engine powering Arcadia into the future.”

“Far out,” Reed mumbled. By this point, her attention had shifted back to her palm again.

The demonstration would soon end, but Isaac had one more question before leaving.

“Why did nobody think of this before?”

Essex and Leyton glanced at each other. He opened his mouth, but she decided to answer. “As for the lead part, it’s because I’m quite the genius.” She tugged on the lapels of her lab coat in pride. Then she turned her attention to the cultivators down below. “As for having cultivators produce energy, cultivation used to be highly controlled by the sects and powerful families. Cultivators were so rare and could be so powerful compared to muskets and cannons that when one appeared, a sect family would immediately adopt them into the clan. There’s a certain amount of pride that comes with it. Back then, if you were a cultivator, you were a warrior, and a proud one at that.”

A shrill whistle rang out, signifying a short break. The cultivators sighed in relief and left their machines, talking among themselves, glancing up at the catwalk where the group stood and looked down upon them.

“But nowadays,” Essex continued. “Cultivation is no longer limited to the elites. It’s spread through the masses, and we’ve developed weapons just as powerful as cultivators. Merely being able to cast a fireball doesn’t cut it anymore. And merely being able to cast a fireball doesn’t guarantee food on your table, either. So someone with minor cultivator skills is far more willing to work a menial labor job than before just to get by.”

Essex led the group back toward the staircase. Before heading through, she glanced back at the factory floor.

“We’re in a new era of cultivation - the era of the masses. If I were you two, I’d make sure I end here, up on this catwalk, looking down, rather than on the factory floor, looking up.”