Chapter 35: Fief-Up

We arrived just after it became April. As we were now entering into Winter, it was cool for spring, more similar to English weather than I had grown used to. Namely, wet and cool. The plants didn’t seem to mind, luckily.

In my absence, Harrenhal had been growing well. The paper and printing production had been allowed to reinvest all the subsidy money that was equal to what they would have been getting had I been selling my basic guides to my people, rather than giving them away, and all of the proceeds they were getting from selling my Farmer’s Guide and blank books for notes and documents.

Once all of the new facilities came online and the workers were trained and experienced I hoped they could manage a full half-million pages a day. That would let me print enough guides on country living, religion, and literacy/numeracy to put one in every family home in the Seven Kingdoms within fifty years.

They were already building half a dozen new halls to fit everything in. Between that and my expanding metalworks I had had to get the Tullys and Robert on board with allowing me a charter for a city to account for the burgeoning population of workers.

That said when I got back there, I realized there was still a lot to do. After being in the cooler and thus less pungent North, I was assailed by the scents of humanity. I decided to do something about, to look after my people properly after being gone for so long.

It was early April, nine months after I had Balanced and developed the mana-bonding spell. I had a massive quantity of four thousand mana in my pool, and a cycle time of just under a minute.

After charting it out, I had figured out the rules governing my mana growth. The daily growth to my total mana was a constant plus a coefficient times the mana I had raised to a power. The coefficient was related to how well I resonated to a color of mana. If I were to define resonance on a 1-10 scale, then every mana color with a resonance above 5 added 0.2 to the coefficient, while every mana color with a resonance below 5 subtracted 0.2 from the coefficient.

For the power, it seemed to be related to a function of the resonance minus five that added up the integers greater than zero for that number. In other words, function of two was equal to three (one plus two), of three was six (one plus two plus three), four was ten, etc. This function was then divided by the sum of the possible resonance, or fifty (maximum resonance of ten times five colors).

The mana growth was thus exponential, but only grew at ridiculous speeds when the color resonance was high. The fact that I cultivated all colors was actually a major limiting factor for my growth. But necessary to avoid shifts in personality. Luckily it seemed that when my mana within a color was greater than that color’s resonance raised to the power of that resonance (eg, if resonance is five, then five ^ five), then the resonance would increase.

Given sufficient time, my mana growth would become explosively exponential, just as with a single mana color, but the diversity would give me greater flexibility while avoiding mental contamination.

In short, the TL;DR…

My mana in April was more than enough to play Sim City in real life, and would only grow from there.

I always liked Sim City.

I drew on the dirt, forming it into stone and then that stone into a foundation for my town. The roads became like concrete. Beyond the original boundary of the town I continued to expand the system of roads, round-a-bouts at each intersection. I laid out enough ground for my city to grow an entire order of magnitude, though I suspected it would be some time before that occurred.

Below and to the side of the streets were sewers, with points for people to put in their liquid waste, and storm-drains to channel water to rinse the sewers. I modified a toad to live in the sewers, with Black enchantments to make it impossible to sicken and a White driven compulsion to stay in the sewers and keep them clean by attacking anything that stuck to the walls or began to pile up.

I raised a thick wall around my city of seamless stone. There were covered parapets with arrow slits. They overhung the walls with murder-holes to allow my defenders to drop things on those who were attacking. Towers were spaced along it, and double-gated gatehouses raised at the corners for entry purposes.

Then I extended the road to the main gates of my castle, and grew more walls to turn that space between castle and city into a ward where I could establish more factories, greenhouses, fields for horses or whatever else I needed.

Then I went into my castle, my people’s somewhat terrified gratitude still ringing in my ears, and I got to work.

I decided I was going to work on five things. First, I would learn smithing to the point I could make the true form of Valyrian steel without assistance. My people had been getting by in my absence by using the special Valyrian forge I had made. It allowed them to process ingots of metal I had already enchanted with the Valyrian Blessing.

The blessing actually added all the magic to the metal that the full Valyrian steel enchantment needed; the rest was shaping the enchantment itself. In Qohor they used blood magic to loosen the enchantment from the steel, allowing them to work on both; I had a special spell built into one of the furnaces to do the same thing. But I wanted to be able to make true Valyrian steel products on my own.

Second, I realized that it would be incredibly useful to get a glassworks in operation. Not only were jars great for storing food, with enough sheet glass I could have greenhouses to keep my people well fed even in the harshest Winter.

Third, I wanted to upgrade the plants that my people farmed. Better vegetables like tomatoes, onions, carrots, and leafy greens. Better crops for the four-field rotation of wheat, barley, turnips and clover. Better legumes and other beans to act as nitrogen fixers. Better apples, berries, and other fruit. Better farming tools, and produce processing tools would likely be useful as well.

Fourth, I wanted to figure out teleportation. It was driving me crazy.

So I portioned out my days, and I got to work.

Every morning I spent with my top smiths, getting them to teach me how to do everything they knew. They started me off with the very basics. Surprisingly, a lot of smithing was figuring out what blend of materials to use to get good quality steel. My basic oxygen furnace/Bessemer converter took away a lot of the difficulty from that, but it was still an issue for them. The difference between a common smith and a good one was knowing how to pick out and combine the right materials in the right ratios.

Of course, my visual acuity and image processing was much stronger than a normal human’s after all of my upgrades, and that helped a lot. But I was trying to push my magic whenever possible, so along with developing the basic skills, I developed a spell to tell me the composition of the materials.

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I called it, of course, Structural Grasp. I had no idea if it might lead to some sort of artificial reality marble if I could perfectly grasp and memorize objects, but it seemed like a good thing to aim for.

With that, I quickly learned how to balance impurities, carbon content and iron to get good batches of iron and steel.

My teachers skipped over a lot of the mechanics of the forge; I had had to learn those to build my metalworks in the first place, after all. So I got to skip pumping bellows, and move right onto manipulating metal. Here again I used magic as much as possible, Grasping the materials to know how stressed they were, heating, annealing and quenching with fire magic to affect their hardness, manipulating the metal with telekinesis.

They didn’t say much, but I could tell my smiths wished they had had my advantages when they were learning.

Finally they moved me onto the apex of skill in Westeros: plate armor, and folded steel blades.

Plate armor is difficult because it has to be closely fitted and carefully worked. A bad fit can wear at the user, put undue stress on their body, catch when making certain movements and cause other issues. Beyond that, the plates need to be treated carefully to avoid having overly brittle work-hardened areas where an enemy’s attack could penetrate. Building a full suit of armor was thus a difficult endeavor, and a mark of the maker’s skill.

Folded steel blades had two hurdles to success. First, the smith needed to select up to five pieces of good but different carbon-content steel to work. If any of those had impurities, extra particles, a poor steel composition, or any other issue it could cause the whole blade to fail. Unlike in the modern age, where I could have ordered these billets with precise metallurgical composition, that selection took real skill. Luckily, I had structural grasp.

Second, there was a lot of work to go into one of those. The steel had to be beaten out and folded back in on itself, doubling and redoubling in layers until it might be over a thousand layers thick. There was heating, quenching, and annealing to do as well, all of which were difficult to control without high temperature sensors to take the temperature. A single mistake in any of these processes and the blade may be damaged. Unlike a blade made of a single piece of steel, once the steel was folded the billets of metal were no longer recoverable.

Days turned into weeks into months as I worked on smithing in the morning. Sometimes Jon would look in on me, but he had no real interest in smithing. Instead he focused on leading the training for the twenty odd boys and half-dozen girls who had qualified as squire-candidates from my archery program, and got to know the two actual squires who had qualified via horse archery. Dany was mostly focused on little Lila; I saw little of her save at mealtimes. She haunted the library mostly, reading to herself and her daughter, played with the animals and helped teach the squires and squire candidates their numbers; she was quite popular among the young men.

Then I was finally pronounced the equal to any of the smiths in my employ. That day I forged my first Valyrian steel blade on my own. The experience was entirely different from doing so as part of a group, my understanding of the conceptual cutting effect far improved when I applied it myself. I could tell that there was something more to the effect now, a possibility of applying that same impossibly effective edge not to a blade, but to a telekinetic structure. A vorpal blade projection, one might call it.

It was still beyond me, but something I might research in the future; it could easily turn into one of my more potent evocations.

While I worked on smithing in the morning, in the afternoons I worked on a glassworks. My territory had a decent supply of clean sand near the lake, and by June the alchemists were able to come up with a mixture that produced a reasonably strong and clear variant of soda-lime glass. The glassworks had two sides to it.

One side used a tin-float system under positive pressure of nitrogen gas to make large quantities of sheet glass for windows and greenhouses. There were ten workers there, and they could make a total of a quarter million square meters of glass a year. Each square meter of glass sold for five silver stags; I had wanted to make it two and a half, but was told that was simply too cheap. Even at five stags I had to restrict the amount that foreign merchants could buy; I wanted my people to get the glass for their windows and greenhouses first.

The other side of the glassworks had a full sixty seven workers, trained by Myrish glass workers stolen away from slavery at great risk and expense. While some work on colored glass and other luxuries was done, the shaped glass side mostly worked machines to blow out glass jars. I had taken a bit of the rubber from the boots I was wearing when I arrived in Westeros and made a magically modified tree to produce rubber. That let me have gaskets put onto the jars, making air-tight seals. It wasn’t perfect vacuum sealing, but it was a massive improvement over what the previous technology was capable of. It used a production line was at two million jars a year, and already there were plans for three new shaped-glassworks to be raised and occupied when enough extra workers could be trained.

Of course, none of it would have been possible without magic. I used magic to form shapes for machines, to enchant parts to have superior performance, to heat, cool, and move objects, to partition gasses, and on and on and on.

By June I was done with metal. By July the glassworks needed little of my input, and I had transitioned away from metal and glass. Instead I worked on improving agricultural yields again, this time by improving my plants. I didn’t want to cause too much ecological upset, or create invasive super-wheat or some other disaster, so I kept the modifications mostly within reason.

I gave the plants the sorts of things that were pretty obvious, but would make a massive difference for my farmers; after upgrades, my plants were somewhat more resistant to heat and cold, too much or too little water, and less likely to rot. The yields were more bountiful, and individual fruits, vegetables and grains had higher concentrations of nutrients. They were just generally better, rather than trying some crazy idea derived from genetic engineering’s hopes for true super-crops. I guess that’s why I wasn’t so interested in them; compared to my animals, my plants were just too mundane.

I still transformed many of my fields; once the harvest was in anyone in my territory would be allowed to trade their seed grain in at a one-to-one ratio. In a year or three I had no doubt that my farmers would see massive improvements to the quality of their crops. Which meant healthier, happier peasants, and more tax income.

Other than that, I formed a working group of some of the more innovative and mechanically minded to improve processes, create new machines, and turn my half-remembered descriptions of tools into reality. They managed to get a few prototypes of mechanical reapers and seed drills built, and full production of those would begin soon. That would allow for a lot more land to be farmed, improve yields per acre, and increase productivity per capita.

I had noticed one problem caused by the Pest-eating birds; they had driven mice, rats and other vermin out of the fields and into my castle and city. I really needed a cat to go after them, but didn’t want to end up making some super cat that would drive all sorts of birds and other prey to extinction. Then I had a clever idea; I made a cat which was scared of the outdoors.

More specifically, I made a cat with a high degree of White to it. It could manage to be out in orderly areas, farms, villages and roads, but was really happiest indoors. But it had an aversion to Green, to avoid nature, and a hatred for Black, to kill vermin. The cats were made smaller than normal, just a little larger than the rats that they were designed to hunt, but with physical improvements and increased toughness. They were absolutely adorable serial killers, their metabolism linked to how much they ate. Destroying vermin made them happy, and so they would kill and kill and kill. Then when no vermin was present, their appetites would diminish and they would be happy to laze about someone’s home.

My house-cats proved extremely effective, and quickly had my castle clear of pests. I had some of my tax-collectors bring them out to distribute to farming communities and turned dozens of them loose on my little city.

The humans were well under control as well. A hundred and twenty companies of Hounds kept it that way, though many were still puppies and the companies were still coming up to full strength. Thirty companies of Ravens supported them.

I had decided that I would begin to grow my human forces relatively soon, and had sent out agents to purchase six hundred mares and a hundred and twenty stallions all of a quality to be used by a knight. As they arrived I transformed them into Guards Horses, suitable to be used by my future soldiers. I drove them into a bit of a breeding frenzy; in the future the front line units would use the stallions and geldings which were less valuable for reproduction.