The Necro-Industrial Revolution

The next morning.

Inside the bedchamber, Jack’s eyes snapped open. The first thing he registered was a deep exhaustion. His muscles ached, but that was secondary. He immediately closed his eyes again, turning his focus inward to inspect his mana core.

Last night, during the peak of the beast tide, Jack had deliberately pushed himself to his absolute breaking point. He had ordered Elias and Sylvia to cast massive, highly mana-draining spells when simple spells would have easily done the job, mostly when the last few remaining beats had started running away. He had red lined his magical capacity, hoping the immense, agonizing friction would shatter the ceiling of his current tier and push him into Layer 3 of the Iron Core.

He held his breath.

Nothing.

His core remained exactly as it was— at Layer 2. It hadn’t progressed a single inch.

Jack opened his eyes, wiping his face with both hands, and let out a long sigh of frustration.

“Is there some kind of hidden leveling mechanic I’m missing?” Jack muttered bitterly to the empty room. “If there’s a specific catalyst required, my ancestors certainly didn’t bother to leave any guides.”

He sat on the edge of the mattress for a moment, letting the frustration bleed away. Complaining wouldn’t change the laws of magic. As he stood up, his eyes fell on the small table near the hearth. His dinner from last night sat there, completely untouched and congealed from the cold.

His stomach gave a loud, demanding rumble. Fighting a war through undead avatars burned an astronomical amount of calories. Jack quickly ordered one of the maids to bring him a fresh, hot breakfast as soon as possible.

After quickly devouring the plate, Jack moved to his meeting room. He sank into his high-backed chair, adopting a lazy, reclined posture, and prepared for the day’s most important task: assessing the region.

A knock at the door interrupted him before he could use his magic.

“Enter,” Jack called out.

Giles walked in, carrying a stack of fresh parchment ledgers. “Good morning, My Lord. I have the preliminary casualty and ammunition reports from last night’s engagement.”

Jack sat up. “Read them.”

“Zero casualties, My Lord,” Giles reported, a proud smile breaking through his thick beard. “A few minor frostnip cases from the men manning the watchtowers, but Karen’s assistants have already administered them properly. As for ammunition, we lost roughly forty heavy ballista bolts to the frozen ground, and about two hundred crossbow bolts were shattered beyond repair.”

“Acceptable losses,” Jack nodded, doing the math in his head. “Have the men follow the usual routine today. Keep the guards rotating on the walls, and send the collection teams out to haul in whatever corpses are left in the snow.”

“At once, My Lord,” Giles bowed and exited the room.

With the administration handled, Jack leaned back, closed his eyes, and reached deep into the woods.

His consciousness seamlessly snapped into the empty, frozen eye sockets of Grim. The skeletal Alpha winter wolf stood up from beneath a snowdrift, shaking the powdery white flakes from its exposed ribs.

Jack commanded the undead beast to begin a wide patrol of the forest and the mountain ridges leading toward the magical rift. He expected to see the woods teeming with lingering beasts, preparing for another wave.

But as Grim silently prowled through the frosted timber, Jack was met with an eerie, unsettling silence.

The number of beasts had plummeted at an extreme speed. The woods were practically empty.

This doesn’t make any sense, Jack frowned internally. If the beast tide had simply followed its natural course, the numbers would have gradually tapered off over the next few weeks, not vanished overnight.

Determined to find the answer, Jack marched the skeletal wolf deeper into the wilderness, navigating the region until he reached the epicenter of the phenomenon.

He stared through Grim’s eyes, utterly bewildered.

The magical rift was closed.

It looked exactly as it did during the peaceful spring and summer months—a dead, pitch-black tear in the fabric of the air, completely dormant and devoid of the swirling, chaotic energy that usually birthed the monsters.

It closed? Already? Jack’s mind raced with suspicion.

The total volume of beasts that had poured out over the last few weeks had definitely surpassed historical averages, but the duration of the tide was far too short. It should have remained open for at least another two or so weeks.

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Since arriving in this world, Jack had learned a hard lesson: if something seemed too good to be true, it was usually a precursor to a catastrophic disaster. He simply refused to believe the explanation that the beasts had just decided to clump together and attack early this year. Something fundamental was wrong, but he couldn’t grasp exactly what it was.

For the next several hours, Jack ruthlessly scoured the region through Grim’s vision, searching for anomalies.

He found nothing. The forest floor was littered with half-eaten corpses and frozen blood. However, a fascinating shift in the local ecology was taking place.

During the main tides, most of the natural, native beasts of the northern mountains had hidden themselves away in deep caves, terrified of the overwhelming numbers of the rift beasts. But now that the rift was closed and the invading horde was reduced to a few scattered stragglers, the native predators were emerging.

Jack watched a pack of native beasts aggressively ambush a lone, starving winter wolf that had originally come from the rift. The native beasts were essentially conducting a brutal cleanup operation, slaughtering the foreign invaders. However, because the rift beasts possessed a much higher baseline of raw, physical power, Jack often watched the native ambushes end in bloody stalemates, or with the rift beast emerging victorious.

As Grim continued its patrol, Jack noted the volume of snowfall from the previous night. The drifts were staggering. At one point, Grim passed a massive stone boulder near a cliff edge. Jack remembered this specific boulder from his previous scouting; it was several meters tall. Now, it was completely encased in a thick, rounded mound of white snow, making it look ten times larger than its original size.

By the time the afternoon rolled around, Jack was mentally exhausted and no closer to solving the mystery of the closed rift.

He severed his connection, leaving Grim to collapse into a harmless pile of weathered bones in the snow.

Jack rubbed his temples, deciding to take a break from the paranoia. He spent the next half an hour sitting by the fire, drafting new schematics. He tweaked the rudimentary blueprints for his steam engine prototype, adjusting the housing for the magical artifacts he planned to install next year or the year after that.

After a late lunch, Jack pivoted back to the immediate logistics. The beast tide last night had been astronomically large. Even with the palisade walls holding firm, Jack was worried about the exposed infrastructure down by the frozen river.

He summoned Corin, Giles, Barnaby, and Roland to the courtyard.

“We are going down to inspect the water pumping system,” Jack announced. He mentally commanded Elias and Sylvia to flank him, and then turned to the Church mages who were also present.

He ordered Banty and James to accompany them, leaving Carla and Nathen to stand guard on the village walls. Banty grumbled slightly about the cold, but he didn’t dare refuse a direct order after the humiliating duel he had suffered weeks prior.

The group trudged through the deep snow, marching down the cleared path toward the riverbank.

When they arrived, the scene was exactly what Jack had feared, though thankfully not a total loss.

The thick igloo and the stone room they had built to house the Archimedes Screw mechanism was heavily battered. Several massive, bloody claw marks scored the stone, and a section of the roof had caved in under the weight of a larger beast trying to climb it.

“Its almost destroyed, My Lord,” Corin assessed, quickly pulling away the debris to inspect the interior. “A few of the gears have been damaged from the shock of the impacts, but the main axle and the screw itself are completely intact.”

“How long to fix it?” Jack asked.

“If we can source the replacement stone quickly, less than an hour,” Corin replied.

Jack turned his gaze to Banty. The muscular Church mage sighed, stepping forward.

Using his earth magic, Banty effortlessly cleaved several perfect blocks of stone from the frozen riverbank. With Giles and Barnaby providing the physical muscle, and Corin guiding the masonry, the stone room was completely rebuilt and the splintered gears replaced in less than ten minutes.

They left the fresh mortar to dry for a few hours. Just before the sun dipped behind the jagged mountain peaks, Jack ordered Elias to melt the river and then ordered Sylvia to cast a concentrated gust of wind into the turbine. The gears spun flawlessly, lifting the freezing water and sending it rushing down the pipes to refill the village’s massive storage tanks.

The crisis was averted.

Over the next few days, the village remained on absolute high alert. The guards stood tense on the watchtowers, their fingers hovering over the crossbow triggers.

But the attack never came.

To the shock of everyone in the valley, the number of beast attacks dropped to nearly zero. The few stragglers that did blindly wander near the village were effortlessly dispatched by a single volley of standard crossbow arrows.

The villagers, the castle staff, and even the Church mages were utterly dumbfounded. They had achieved an overwhelming, flawless victory. The Frost Grip valley had repelled a historically massive beast tide with zero casualties and minimal structural damage.

For the Church mages, the reality was somewhat embarrassing. They had come to assess, protect, and farm contribution points, but they had essentially served as highly paid, useless spectators. The villagers and their somewhat insane Lord, flanked by his two silent, armored retainers, had handled everything.

Now, the mages just had to sit in the warm castle, wait for the spring thaw to clear the southern pass, and report the miraculous success back to the church.

Despite the relaxed atmosphere settling over the village, Jack remained stubbornly paranoid.

He continued his daily, exhaustive patrols through Grim, refusing to believe the danger was truly over. He couldn’t shake a deep, creeping sensation of dread pooling in his stomach. But as three more days passed in total silence, even Jack began to wonder if his paranoia was getting the better of him.

On the fourth day of peace, Jack decided to conduct a morale tour.

Accompanied by Elias and Sylvia, Jack walked down the hill and entered the village. The atmosphere was incredibly warm despite the freezing air. The villagers were happy, trading jokes near the village square. The people were safe, fed, and happy.

Suddenly, the ground violently lurched.

It wasn’t a minor tremor. The earth shook so heavily that several villagers lost their footing, collapsing into the snow.

An earthquake? Jack thought, struggling to stay upright with his cane.

“Hold your positions!” Giles’ rough voice instantly cut through the rising panic. He had grown immensely as a leader over the last year. “Guards! Eyes on the tree line! Report!”

The guards on the watchtowers frantically scanned the woods, squinting through the bright midday snow glare.

“I don’t see any beasts!” a guard shouted down, his voice panicked. “The snow is clear!”

The ground shook again, a deep, rhythmic thudding that sounded like the heartbeat of a titan.

Suddenly, the guard stationed on the southeastern watchtower leaned over the railing, his face completely drained of color. He pointed a trembling finger deep into the distant snowfields near the mountain ridge.

“My Lord!” the guard screamed, his voice cracking with sheer terror. “That massive snowy boulder… it’s moving!”