The Necro-Industrial Revolution

After the humiliating defeat in the village square, Banty and his silent companions returned to the castle alongside Jack, his armored mages, Karen, and the various household servants and maids.

It was already late evening. Feeling completely drained from the mental strain of the duel, Jack decided to call it a day and retired early to his chambers.

Later that evening, during dinner in the Great Hall, Banty formally approached Jack. The muscular bronze-haired mage bowed his head, offering a stiff, genuine apology. He admitted that he had severely underestimated the young Lord, his retainers, and the resilience of the Frost-Grip fief.

Jack accepted the apology with a calm, magnanimous nod. Capitalizing on the newfound respect, Jack casually asked the Church mages if they would be willing to lend their elemental talents to his ongoing engineering projects. Stung by his defeat and bound by his word, Banty—along with James, Nathen, and Carla—reluctantly agreed.

Although winter had already arrived, snow was falling, and the southern mountain pass would soon be blocked by deep drifts, it was not yet the absolute peak of winter. The mass wild beast tides had not yet begun. This meant Jack still had a precious window of time to finalize his preparations.

Several days passed.

During these days, Jack poured his energy into designing the water-lifting mechanism. It wasn’t a mechanical pump in the modern Earth sense—true pumps required complex rubber seals, airtight valves, and high-pressure steam engines or electricity. Given his current limitations, electricity was entirely out of the question. Instead, Jack had drafted a remarkably clever, hybrid design using the basic materials available in his arsenal: timber, scrap iron, and magic.

The core problem was geography. The river running through the valley was completely frozen over, and the village sat on a geographical incline significantly higher than the riverbanks. Gravity alone could not pull the water upward. To lift it, he needed mechanical force and sustained energy.

Thankfully, he had his two flesh-bound undead mages. Elias specialized in fire magic, and Sylvia specialized in wind magic—precisely the elements needed to drive mechanical rotation without burning coal. While Jack had technically unlocked the ability to animate more mages from the crypts after breaking through to Layer 2 of the Iron Core, summoning a third retainer out of nowhere was problematic. Two were more than enough.

One afternoon, Jack finally completed the blueprints. He gathered his key leaders and called for Barnaby, Giles, Corin, and Roland in the meeting room.

Corin and Roland, being professional engineers, immediately scrutinized the schematics and offered critical structural adjustments. Working together, they spent another full day refining the design until it was as mechanically sound as medieval engineering could make it.

With the engineering plan finalized, Giles dispatched his men back out into the southern woods. Naturally, they were accompanied by guards carrying heavy crossbows, scanning the frost-covered tree line for lingering winter wolves or starving predators. Jack also kept a passive, watchful eye through the empty eye sockets of Grim, his skeletal Alpha Winter Wolf scout, ensuring none of his people died needlessly.

In just a couple of days, teams of lumberjacks felled dozens of thick trees and hauled the logs straight into the village.

Working day and night at the village smithy and carpentry yards, Barnaby, Corin, Roland, and some other blacksmiths under Barnaby successfully manufactured the core component: the Archimedes Screw.

It was a massive undertaking. They had carved out the core of a long, thick tree trunk, hollowing it out completely, and painstakingly fitted a helical wooden screw inside it using forged scrap-iron blades. The alignment had to be dead-center, a challenge that pushed Barnaby’s master blacksmithing skills to the absolute limit.

Next came the power source. Connected to the upper axle of the screw, they built a wind-driven turbine. It wasn’t a standard vertical windmill; instead, it featured an ‘S’-shaped horizontal design. No matter which direction the northern gales blew, the curved blades would catch the wind, forcing the central axle to spin. To minimize friction, Jack had ordered them to construct a specialized bearing system packed with tiny, hand-forged iron balls acting as ball bearings, slathered in thick animal fat as a lubricant.

The structure was engineered so that the spinning turbine would directly rotate the Archimedes Screw, lifting water upward from the freezing river.

It took several days of labor to carve out wooden pipes—hemi-cylindrical timbers joined together and sealed with pitch. The pipeline stretched from the village, through a small, reinforced opening in the newly minted palisade walls, across the deep spike-filled trench, and all the way down to the riverbank.

On the day of the installation, Jack stood on the frozen banks of the river, his breath pluming in the air.

Because the river was completely frozen solid, they couldn’t simply drop the intake pipe into flowing water. Jack commanded Elias to step forward. Unleashing a controlled, precise wave of fire magic, Elias melted a thick section of the river ice, clearing a deep, bubbling pool.

The contraption was lowered into place. To prevent the heavy mechanism from being swept away by spring thaws or knocked over by winter gales, Corin used iron anchoring rods and thick mortar to bolt the framework securely into the bedrock beneath the riverbank.

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The Church mages actively participated in the construction. Banty and his companions rolled up their sleeves, using their earth, fire and wind magic to haul heavy stones and carve out channels. To the peasants working alongside them, seeing mages sweating and working shoulder-to-shoulder with common laborers was an unforgettable sight.

Once the framework was secured, the long line of wooden pipes was connected, bridging the river to the village.

The Archimedes Screw was designed to lift the water just a few meters upward, emptying it into an elevated wooden trough. From there, the water would use its own kinetic energy to flow downward, traveling through the sealed pipes directly into the village.

However, they anticipated a massive logistical problem: the upcoming beast tide. If hordes of starving winter beasts rampaged across the valley, they would inevitably trample and smash the exposed wooden pipes connecting the river to the village.

To solve this, Corin designed the pipeline to be modular. The hemi-cylindrical wooden pipes were lightweight and easily detachable. When the beast tide would begin, twenty men could disconnect the pipes and drag them back inside the village palisade in less than thirty minutes, minimizing potential damage.

The core machinery down by the riverbank, however, could not be easily uninstalled. To protect the Archimedes Screw from rampaging beasts, Corin suggested building a thick, bombproof stone cabin around it.

“We can seal the stone house shut with heavy doors when it’s not actively operating,” Corin explained, mapping out the architecture in the snow. “When beasts wander near it, they will just assume it’s a natural rock formation and ignore it.”

The problem, however, was quarrying the massive, thick stones required to build such a sturdy cabin. The bedrock beneath them was dense, but carving out building blocks by hand in the freezing cold would take weeks.

That was when Banty stepped up.

Channeling his earth magic, the muscular Church mage easily cleaved massive, uniform blocks of stone straight out of the earth. Because the stone was manipulated from natural bedrock rather than conjured out of thin air, it was permanent and wouldn’t magically dissipate. In less than an afternoon, Banty single-handedly quarried enough stone to construct a windowless cabin over the river apparatus.

Back inside the village, three massive, interconnected water containers were constructed from thick timber and iron banding, thoroughly sealed with pitch to prevent leaks. They were elevated on sturdy wooden platforms and linked at the bottom; as one container filled, the water level balanced across all three.

A secondary Archimedes Screw system was installed inside the village to lift the incoming water slightly higher, ensuring it fed smoothly into the elevated storage tanks.

With every component locked into place, it was time for the grand test.

It failed.

The machinery didn’t even manage the initial lift from the river. The winter air was dead calm; not a single breath of wind stirred the valley. Without wind resistance or rotation, the Archimedes Screw sat completely motionless, refusing to budge.

The gathering crowd of villagers groaned in disappointment.

Jack, however, did not flinch. He didn’t look disheartened in the slightest. Failure was simply first step towards the grand success. After conferring briefly with Corin and Roland, they concluded that the system lacked sufficient mechanical advantage—it needed a larger gear ratio to increase torque. But more immediately, they lacked wind.

Jack didn’t need to wait for the weather to change. He turned to Sylvia, his wind mage.

With a subtle mental command, Sylvia stepped forward and raised her hands. Channeling her mana, she conjured a concentrated, high-velocity artificial gale. The powerful gust slammed directly into the ‘S’-shaped turbine blades.

The turbine spun extremely fast.

Instantly, the Archimedes Screw came alive, churning furiously. The helical blades scooped up the melted river water, hoisting it upward through the wooden trunk. The water spilled over the top into the pipeline, rushing through the hollow channels and flowing steadily toward the village.

A cheer erupted from the villagers watching the outflow pipe. Jack smiled, but kept the momentum going.

“Keep the wind steady for another thirty minutes,” Jack commanded Sylvia through his mental link.

For half an hour, Sylvia maintained the artificial gale, her mana steadily draining while the village containers filled to the brim.

Assuming the storage tanks were fully saturated, Jack and his team rushed back into the village center to inspect the results.

What they found, however, caused a collective pause.

The village-side Archimedes Screw—the secondary lift meant to push the water into the high storage tanks—had jammed and failed under the pressure.

Yet, the primary storage containers were already partially full.

Before the secondary lift could be repaired, resourceful villagers had taken matters into their own hands. Seeing the water spilling from the main intake pipe, they had formed a bucket brigade, manually hauling the water bucket by bucket and dumping it into the elevated tanks.

After roughly half an hour of collective pumping and hauling, they had successfully filled the containers. The stored water was more than enough to fulfill the entire village’s basic sanitation and drinking needs for two, possibly three full days.

Jack crossed his arms, watching the villagers chatter excitedly as they secured the area.

It means I have to rely on manual bucket-hauling every third day until we fix the internal lift, Jack analyzed pragmatically.

He considered using his silver spatial ring to transport the water in bulk, but spatial rings rejected uncontained liquids; putting buckets inside the ring was vastly slower than simply walking them over. For now, this hybrid system—mechanical lifting from the river combined with a short manual transfer into the tanks—was the most efficient solution available.

There was, however, another glaring issue: freezing.

Temperatures inside the valley were plunging well below zero every night. The water sitting in the exposed outdoor containers would inevitably freeze solid into massive blocks of ice.

Jack immediately addressed the crowd, raising his voice. “The water in the storage tanks will freeze overnight. To prevent this, I have arranged for the Church mages to use their fire magic to de-ice the containers twice a day—every morning at sunrise and every evening at sunset. You are instructed to come to the central square and collect your water during those specific timings! You can also take ice whenever you need it but try not to waste the clean water.”

To distribute the water efficiently without wasting it, Jack had instructed Barnaby to carve small, clever wooden cocks—primitive spigots—into the base of the storage tanks. By turning the wooden valves, villagers could easily control the flow of water into their personal buckets, preventing overflow and conserving the supply.

With the spigots installed and the de-icing schedule established, another massive logistical crisis was averted.

And as the snow continued to drift down over the hexagonal palisade walls, the Frost-Grip fief braced itself for the arrival of the winter beast tides, once again.