The Necro-Industrial Revolution

By the morning following the caravan’s departure, the valley was a hive of organized chaos just like every other day. The villagers had already hauled the newly purchased goods from the staging area at the gates to their designated locations, yesterday.

The two massive, groaning carts fully loaded with raw iron ore and pale limestone were dragged by teams of laboring men straight up the hill. They parked the heavy wagons in the castle’s rear courtyard, positioning them directly outside the newly built, heavily insulated wooden enclosure that housed the towering blast furnace.

Inside the castle, the air was thick with the pungent, earthy aroma of dried roots, crushed leaves, and expensive spices. Jack stood in the Great Hall, looking over the open crates of medical supplies. The merchants had provided a wealth of remedies, complete with detailed instructional parchments, but this presented a glaring logistical hurdle. He needed to appoint someone to manage the valley’s new apothecary.

The problem was literacy. Most of the original villagers couldn’t read a single letter. While some of the former slaves possessed specialized trades and basic literacy, none of them had any practical medical experience. Putting these potent herbs into the hands of an amateur could easily lead to a fatal misdiagnosis.

Just as Jack prepared to randomly select two of the smartest-looking villagers to stumble their way through the texts, Karen stepped forward from the line of busy maids.

“My Lord, if I may,” Karen said, wiping her hands on her apron and bowing her head respectfully. “I can take charge of the medicines.”

Jack raised an eyebrow, genuinely surprised. “You?”

“Yes, My Lord,” she explained, her voice remarkably steady. “I spent years working closely with Old Martha. She taught me many things about herbal remedies and treating wounds. I cannot use any healing magic like she once could, but I know exactly how to brew these herbs, how to set a splint, and how to apply a poultice properly.”

Jack studied his head maid carefully. Because his inherited memories from the original John Frost Grip were fragmented and blurry, he didn’t recall Karen spending much time with the old hedge-witch. However, a vivid, lingering memory from earlier this year surfaced in his mind: Old Martha’s funeral.

Jack had felt a detached, respectful sadness when the old woman passed away. She had saved him from the brink of death just after his arrival to this world, pulling him back from a frozen grave twice. But to Jack, she was like a highly competent, kindly doctor he had only met a few times for business. He respected her immensely, but he lacked a deep emotional bond with her.

Karen, on the other hand, had wept bitterly at the graveside. She had been the most devastated person in the entire valley, her shoulders shaking as the pyre burned. That genuine, raw grief spoke volumes about their relationship.

“Very well,” Jack nodded, trusting her experience. “You are now the head of medicine for the valley. Take two of the village women—specifically the ones who helped care for Martha during her final months—as your direct assistants.”

This was mainly because those two women had seen Old Martha working many times by now, thus they knew how to do the most basic stuffs.

Since serious injuries and illnesses didn’t happen every single day, the two female assistants would still perform their regular village duties. But because they were now taking on this highly specialized medical responsibility, Jack officially raised their wages by two copper coins per month each.

With the medical supplies sorted, Jack sat down on the chair in the meeting room to finalize the internal market prices for the newly acquired food and spices.

He opened his master ledger and dipped his quill in ink. He calculated the exact costs of the goods from the merchants, then set a four percent markup on the grains and staple foods, and an eight percent markup on the spices.

It wasn’t extortion; it was basic economics. Jack desperately needed to generate internal revenue. That small margin of profit wouldn’t starve his well-paid workers, but it would steadily pool silver back into the castle’s treasury to help pay off the Church debt and fund future infrastructure. If he sold everything at exact cost with zero profit, the valley’s economy would stagnate, and they would hit rock bottom again in a few short years. The mind of a former corporate worker knew that absolute charity was the enemy of sustainable growth.

With the logistics settled and the ledgers closed, Jack retreated to the quiet sanctuary of his room. He locked the wooden door, sat down in his high-backed chair, and closed his eyes.

It was time to make steel.

Down in the pitch-black crypts, Jack’s mana surged. He seized control of eighteen skeletons, marching them silently up through the secret, narrow dirt tunnel he had carved before. They emerged seamlessly from the dirt floor inside the enclosure of the blast furnace.

At the exact same time, to maintain appearances for any villagers working in the courtyard, Jack marched Elias and Sylvia out of the castle. The two armored figures walked up to the furnace enclosure in broad daylight, unlocked the heavy wooden door from the outside, and stepped in, locking it firmly behind them.

Inside the sound-dampened room, Jack orchestrated his undead workforce with absolute precision.

He only needed Elias for his intense fire magic. Sylvia was there purely for show. Since a blast furnace required a massive intake of oxygen, any villager listening outside would naturally assume the wind mage was providing the airflow.

Jack sent a few skeletons scrambling through the small lower access ports of the furnace. Working quickly in the confined space, they laid down the foundational kindle: a bed of dried grass, crop straws, and brittle twigs, followed by a thick layer of raw coal, and finally a thin layer of pure coke.

Once the skeletons crawled back out, Jack ignited the kindle with a spark of Elias’s magic.

The flames caught, flickering weakly at first. Jack assigned just three skeletons to man the massive leather bellows. They pumped slowly and rhythmically, feeding just enough air to nurture the fire without blowing it out.

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It took fifteen minutes for the coal and the first layer of coke to catch. A deep, intense heat began to radiate through the thick brick chimney.

Now, the heavy lifting began. Jack shifted his focus to Elias and Sylvia.

Elias climbed the heavy wooden scaffolding attached to the side of the towering blast furnace. Down on the ground, Sylvia extended her armored hands. Using a surge of wind magic, she effortlessly levitated heavy wooden crates of coke, iron ore, and limestone up to the platform.

Elias caught the crates and aggressively dumped their contents down the mouth of the roaring chimney. He layered them meticulously: a massive bed of coke,after the coke caught Elias dumped iron and limestone, then more coke.

Why did Jack waste his precious mana using mages for this simple lifting task when his skeletons could have hauled the crates up the stairs? It was a matter of secrecy. The enclosure Corin had built wasn’t very high, and the upper part near the chimney was not enclosed at all—if it were, the toxic black smoke would have trapped inside the room and suffocated anyone entering. Because the roof was open, if Jack had sent skeletons up the scaffolding, their pale skulls and bony arms would have been entirely visible over the walls to any villager walking through the courtyard. Using the armored mages maintained the illusion of human labor perfectly.

Jack ordered two more skeletons to join the bellows. The rhythmic whoosh-clack of the leather pumps increased in tempo. The rushing oxygen caught the next layer of coke, driving the internal temperature higher. Elias continued dumping alternating layers until the massive, twenty-foot furnace was three-quarters full.

Having finished their physical tasks, Jack left the two armored mages standing dormant. He shifted the entirety of his mental focus to the skeletons.

This was the true crucible. Jack ordered all eighteen skeletons onto the bellows array. They began pumping with relentless fury.

Pushing maximum airflow into a pressurized furnace for hours on end was an agonizing job. Even though the skeletons required a negligible amount of mana to operate, commanding eighteen distinct entities to perform rapid, synchronized labor for hours placed an enormous mental burden on Jack’s mind.

The sun peaked over the valley, casting midday shadows across the courtyard. Inside the castle, Jack sat at the meeting table now, eating a quiet lunch with Karen. He chewed his food mechanically, making polite small talk about the new medical supplies, while the vast majority of his consciousness was trapped inside the blazing, roaring inferno of the furnace room.

Hours bled by.

The core of the furnace was now burning a blinding cherry-red. But the ambient heat of the coke alone wasn’t enough. It couldn’t completely liquefy the iron and force it to bond perfectly with the carbon.

It was time for the catalyst.

Through his mental threads, Jack commanded Elias to step down from the scaffolding and approach the lower bellow ports. Jack ordered the skeletons to step aside.

Elias pressed his heavy steel gauntlets near the primary air intake. Sitting in his chair, Jack reached deep into his Iron Core and unleashed a terrifying density of pure fire mana directly through the undead mage.

The reaction was instantaneous.

The small cracks and seams along the brick furnace flared from cherry-red to a blinding, violent orange. The heat became so intense that the ambient light inside the room was almost too bright for Jack to look at through the skeletons’ eyes. The furnace didn’t just burn; it roared. It sounded somewhat like a modern, high-performance super car engine redlining, the deep, vibrating hum easily penetrating the thick soundproof walls and echoing faintly into the castle halls.

Ten minutes into this magical injection, Jack felt his mana reserves draining at a terrifying speed. Pouring raw fire magic into a sealed, pressurized environment was exhausting. But through the strain, Jack felt a familiar, thrilling friction in his chest. He was pushing his core to its absolute limit, scraping violently against the ceiling of his current magical tier. He was incredibly close to a breakthrough.

Gritting his teeth in the meeting room, sweat beading on his forehead, Jack pushed even harder.

Inside the furnace, the temperature hit critical mass. The heat was so intense that the skeletons standing near the bricks began to suffer ambient heat damage, their bones drying out and cracking slightly under the radiant pressure.

But it worked.

The thick, stubborn iron finally liquefied completely. The molten metal began to drip down through the towering layers of glowing coke chunks. As the liquid fire cascaded over the coke, it aggressively drank in the pure carbon. This violent chemical reaction transformed the basic, brittle iron into high-carbon pig iron.

Simultaneously, the limestone melted. The liquid stone acted like a chemical, magnetic sponge, latching onto the useless rock and sulfur impurities trapped within the raw iron, pulling them away to form a layer of useless slag.

Elias maintained the inferno for another hour and a half. It took that long for the thick, sludgy iron to fully filter down through the towering stack of fuel. Jack was now sweating profusely in his high-backed chair, his breathing ragged and heavy.

Finally, the smelting was complete.

Jack commanded one of the resting skeletons to grab a heavy, pointed iron rod. The skeleton marched up to the upper tap-hole of the hearth and violently smashed the clay plug.

The slag poured out first. Jack watched through the undead eyes as the thick, glowing liquid cascaded down a carved clay trench into a massive waste pit to cool. It looked like sluggish, volcanic lava. Once it hardened into a glassy rock, Jack planned to crush it and use it as durable road gravel or a primitive cement binder in some not very important structures.

Once the slag finished draining, Jack ordered the skeleton to smash the lower clay plug.

Liquid iron exploded from the spout.

The heat radiating from the molten stream was so staggeringly intense that Jack actually felt a phantom burning sensation through the skeletal link. His survival instincts kicked in, and he immediately forced the skeleton to take several steps back.

The white-hot liquid poured down into a thick, central trench carved into the packed sand floor. From that main artery, it branched off into dozens of smaller, uniform side trenches, forming the classic “pig and sow” casting shape.

The moment the molten metal hit the cold sand, the ambient moisture vaporized, filling the enclosed room with a deafening hiss and a thick cloud of steam.

Slowly, the blinding white liquid faded to a violent cherry-red, and finally settled into a dull, solid grey.

This was pig iron. It was technically a massive success, but because the iron had melted directly through the coke, it had absorbed far too much carbon. In this current state, the metal was too brittle to forge into a reliable sword or a ballista spring; it would snap under high tension.

Jack severed his connection to Elias, leaving the mage dormant, and let out a long, exhausted sigh in his meeting room. Phase one was complete.

The next morning, the refinement began.

Operating under absolute secrecy, Jack commanded his skeletons to haul the heavy, cooled bars of pig iron over to the standard blacksmith forge he had secretly assembled within the enclosure. They buried the bars in the coals, heating the metal until it glowed a malleable red.

Pulling the glowing bars onto the heavy iron anvils, the skeletons raised massive forging hammers. Because the skeletons were powered directly by Jack’s Iron Core, their physical strength was several times greater than an average, muscular human blacksmith.

Smash!

Smash!

Every time the heavy hammers struck the glowing metal, a violent, blinding shower of white sparks exploded outward.

Those brilliant white sparks were the visual proof of the excess carbon burning away as the metal was repeatedly folded, compressed, and exposed to the oxygen in the air. The skeletons worked with tireless, mechanical perfection. They struck the metal, rotated it with heavy tongs, folded it over, and pounded it flat again, forcing the impurities out and evening the carbon content perfectly throughout the bar.

After several hours of deafening, relentless hammering, the brittle pig iron was completely transformed.

It was no longer raw ore. It was no longer brittle pig iron. It was a dense, flexible, and highly durable bar of true steel, ready to be shaped into any weapon, gear, or tool the valley desired.

For the very first time in its history, steel had been born in the Frost Grip valley.