The Necro-Industrial Revolution

“This really looks much better than our current one,” Jack said, leaning his hands on the table in the castle’s meeting room.

Spread out before him was a large piece of parchment. Corin, still looking slightly nervous but visibly proud of his work, stood on the opposite side. Giles and Barnaby flanked the table, their eyes tracing the charcoal lines of the newly proposed village layout.

The new design was vastly superior. Corin had expanded the village perimeter significantly. The fifteen new cabins Jack had requested were plotted out at a calculated distance from the older structures, creating a wide, open plaza in the center of the village.

“The central gathering space won’t just make the village look proper,” Corin explained, tapping a finger on the plaza. “It also gives every family their own personal breathing room. Cramping houses together leads to fires and disease. Space is a luxury, but out here, we have plenty of it.”

Jack nodded thoughtfully, his mind turning the gears of his socio-economic plan. There were only about forty original villagers—roughly eleven families—currently living in the valley. Building fifteen extra cabins seemed like overkill on paper, but Jack was playing the long game.

Now that I’ve declared everyone equal, the slaves are officially part of this village, Jack thought to himself. Right now, they don’t have families here, but they are packed together in cramped, temporary bunkhouses. Once I cut off the freebies next week, they will need homes.

His plan was simple but effective: he would offer these newly built cabins to the former slaves and the original villagers on a low-rent system. It would act as a massive motivator. If they worked hard, they earned wages; if they earned wages, they could afford the rent for a private home. Eventually, once they saved enough, Jack would allow them to buy the cabins outright. If they owned a piece of property in the Frost Grip fief, the chances of them leaving after their five-year contracts expired would plummet.

“Back to the defenses,” Jack said, dragging his finger to the outer edges of the map.

Corin had completely scrapped Jack’s old circular palisade. The new wall was hexagonal. According to the blueprint, it required heavy iron support beams locking the wooden posts together, drastically increasing its ability to take a hit. It also featured two raised watchtowers on each of the six sides.

“I kept the trench design you dug last year, My Lord, as it acts as a perfect first line of defense,” Corin continued. “And we now have a total of three reinforced entrances: one facing the southern fields, one facing the castle road, and the last one facing the north.”

Giles and Barnaby hadn’t said a word, but the look of quiet respect on their faces said everything. They were rugged men, but they recognized a masterpiece of defensive engineering when they saw one.

“Well?” Jack asked, looking up at his two foremen.

Giles scratched his chin, his eyes scanning the perimeter lines. “My Lord, this design is exceptionally good. There is no doubt about it. It’s a proper fortress wall. But… we are going to need a massive amount of wood. Even if we rip up the old palisade and reuse every single log, we’ll still need to cut down just as much fresh timber to cover the new hexagonal perimeter.”

“So?” Jack raised an eyebrow. “Is there any problem with that?”

“No, no, My Lord,” Giles quickly corrected himself, standing up straighter. “If you want, my men and I will take axes to the tree line and start the work right away.”

Jack shifted his gaze to Barnaby. “And you?”

Barnaby frowned at the blueprint, his mind doing the math. “From the look of things… it seems we will be short on iron, My Lord. This new design is incredibly sturdy, but those support brackets and gate hinges require a lot of refined metal.”

“It would be much better if we could use steel instead of raw iron,” Corin blurted out, interrupting Barnaby.

The room went dead silent. Corin instantly turned pale, realizing he had just interrupted one of the Lord’s men. “I—I am extremely sorry, My Lord, I spoke out of turn—”

“No need for that,” Jack waved a hand dismissively. “You are right. Steel has a much higher strength than raw iron, and I was actually planning to use it for the structural supports anyway. But… that will have to wait until the merchant caravans arrive in autumn. We don’t have the facilities to forge that much steel yet.”

Jack looked between Giles and Barnaby. “So, for now, do all the woodwork. Leave the specific joints bare where the steel and iron brackets need to go. We won’t be needing the palisade fully operational until the winter beast tides anyway.”

“Yes, My Lord,” the men said in unison.

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“You are dismissed.”

As the three men bowed and turned toward the door, Jack spoke up again. “Barnaby. Hold back a moment.”

Barnaby paused, letting Giles and Corin leave before turning back to the table. “My Lord?”

“I want you to give back one of the spatial rings I gave you for the mining operation,” Jack said. “Since we are slowing down the coal output to focus on construction, one ring should be fine for your crew. I need to hold onto the other myself.”

“As you wish, My Lord,” Barnaby bowed. “I will return with one as soon as possible.”

“Be quick about it. And fetch one of the carriage drivers to come with you.”

Ten minutes later, Barnaby returned, handing over the silver spatial ring, accompanied by the same driver who had taken Jack to the Vance fief.

Jack took the ring, dismissed Barnaby, and walked down the hall to the secure treasury. Once inside, he counted out exactly one hundred gold coins and willed them into the spatial ring.

Stepping out into the courtyard, Jack climbed into the waiting carriage. This time he summoned Elias currently clad head-to-toe in heavy steel armor. The driver cracked the whip, and they set off for the regional market.

The journey took a solid three hours of dirt roads.

When they finally arrived, the regional market was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with merchants, farmers, and travelers. However, it was nothing like the grand, magical market city of the west. Here, everything was entirely mundane. Not a single stall sold anything related to magic. This was due to the complete lack of Mage Guild branches in the region, as well as a lack of natural dungeons. In the entire northern region, dungeons only spawned in the far north-east; thus, adventurers rarely came here, and magical goods simply weren’t sold publicly.

Still, the market was abundant with normal goods—wool, grain, livestock,and many more.

Jack didn’t have time to browse. After asking a local guard for directions, he headed straight for the minor branch of the Merchant Guild located in the corner of the market square.

The guild hall was filled with wealthy businessmen arguing over ledgers and cargo. When Jack walked through the doors, followed closely by his hulking, silent “knight” in full plate armor, the atmosphere shifted. Instinctively, the businessmen stepped aside, parting like a sea to give Jack a clear path to the counter. Jack carried the unmistakable, arrogant aura of a noble with important business.

He walked up to the currency exchange counter. “I want to exchange gold for silver and copper,” Jack told the clerk.

Without waiting for a reply, Jack placed his hand over the wooden counter. With a flash of mana from the spatial ring, one hundred gold coins clattered into a shining pile on the desk.

Several merchants nearby gasped, staring openly. They weren’t surprised by the gold—they knew a noble when they saw one—but they were shocked by the spatial ring. Magical artifacts were incredibly rare in this region; only a few high-ranking noble families possessed them.

The clerk behind the counter, however, looked completely indifferent, as if nobles dumping gold out of magical rings happened every few days. He pulled out a ledger and began the tedious process of counting the gold, verifying its weight, and then hauling out heavy canvas sacks from the vault to count out the lesser coins.

It took a painfully long time. Finally, the clerk slid a massive mound of silver and copper across the wide desk.

“Here is the exchange amount, My Lord,” the clerk said in a bored, practiced voice. “A total of 9,200 silver coins and 5,000 copper coins. That covers 97 of your gold coins. We have retained 3 gold as our standard three percent commission fee, balancing the total to 100 gold.”

Jack did the math in his head. The standard exchange rate held true: one gold equaled one hundred silver, and one silver equaled ten copper. He had exchanged 92 gold for 9,200 silver, and 5 gold for 5,000 copper.

With a wave of his hand, Jack began absorbing the massive pile of 14,200 coins into the spatial ring. It took a few moments for the magic to process the sheer volume, but even with thousands of coins, not even thirty percent of the ring’s internal storage was filled.

Not wanting to waste daylight, Jack turned on his heel and left the guild hall immediately.

The return journey took another three hours. By the time the carriage rolled back into the Frost Grip courtyard, the sun was sinking near the jagged peaks of the mountains, casting long, fiery shadows across the valley. It had been a six-and-a-half-hour round trip just to get change.

Jack went straight to the treasury and dumped the thousands of silver and copper coins into the secure chests, emptying the ring.

After heading to his quarters for a quick meal, Jack didn’t rest. Instead, he walked down to the crypts beneath the castle. He found Rusty, Dusty, and Bones standing exactly where he had left them.

Focusing his mana, Jack activated the spatial ring. In a flash, the three skeletons vanished, stored perfectly inside the ring’s pocket dimension. Spatial rings violently rejected living, breathing creatures, but since the skeletons were completely dead, the ring classified them as objects.

Stepping back upstairs, Jack found Karen in the hallway. “I may be back a bit late tonight,” he told her casually. “Don’t wait up.”

Leaving the castle, Jack walked down the hill, completely bypassing the bustling village, and headed deep into the darkness toward the northern edge of his territory.

He eventually stood at the precipice of the northern trench.

It was a massive, jagged scar in the earth. Last winter, Jack had sent his skeletons down a shallow section of this very ravine to harvest Frost-cap mushrooms to cure his failing lungs. But back then, he hadn’t ventured very deep. Now, looking at it, the trench seemed bottomless, swallowing the light completely.

Jack didn’t know of any specific dangers hiding down there. The original John Frost Grip’s memories held no warnings, and no villager had ever spoken of anything bad crawling out of the abyss. But Jack refused to leave a blind spot in his territory. He needed to know exactly how deep it went, and what was at the bottom.

His control over his undead had grown massively over the last few months, allowing him to command them from a great distance, but it wasn’t endless.

He had brought Elias and the Wind Mage, but decided to not use them instead. If the trench turned out to be treacherous, or if there was a sudden cave-in, losing one of his Iron Core mages would be a devastating blow to his military power.

Instead, he looked at his spatial ring, containing his three loyal, utterly expendable skeletal workers. With over eighty more just like them back in the crypt, Jack was more than willing to risk a few bony scouts to uncover the secrets of the dark.