The Necro-Industrial Revolution

The morning sun filtered through the narrow glass windows of the keep, casting long shadows across the dining hall. Jack and Karen had just finished their breakfast. As the maids moved quietly around the table, clearing away the plates and cups, a firm knock echoed from the front doors.

A maid hurried to open it. Corin was standing on the threshold. He had arrived exactly when Jack had ordered him to yesterday.

“Bring him in,” Jack instructed.

Corin stepped into the hall and immediately offered a deep, respectful bow. “My Lord, you asked me to visit you this morning.”

“No need for formalities right now. Let’s head outside,” Jack said, pushing his chair back. He picked up his brass headed cane with his right hand and strode past the engineer. “I want you to begin work on a very important project. For now, you are to slow down the construction process of the new palisade walls.”

Corin blinked in surprise, falling into step beside Jack as they walked out into the crisp air of the courtyard. “Is this new project really so important that we need to halt the progress of the village defenses, My Lord?”

“Not halt, just slow down,” Jack corrected, looking up at the sky. The intense heat of summer had finally started to break. The leaves on the distant trees were already beginning to dry out, their edges tinged with early autumn brown. “Giles’ men are still cutting down the trees, I presume? And the carpenters will be stripping the bark and preparing the logs from the old palisade according to your measurements for a while, right?”

“Yes, My Lord,” Corin replied, his voice much steadier than it had been a few days ago. In just a short amount of time, the engineer had grown accustomed to Jack’s presence. Realizing that his Lord actually valued his professional opinion had stripped away much of his initial terror. “The men are still processing the timber. That preparation phase will take this entire month, at the very least.”

“Very well, then you can decrease your direct involvement down there and focus your attention up here until this project is finished,” Jack said, tapping his cane on the ground. “It’s related to our upcoming steel production.”

Corin stopped dead in his tracks. “Steel production? My Lord… did you mean we are going to produce steel? Here? But how?”

Corin’s engineering mind instantly threw up a dozen red flags. Making steel wasn’t like baking bread. It was an incredibly complex, exhausting process that required extreme, sustained heat for days on end. How were they going to achieve that in a rural valley? They had a few amateur blacksmiths and laborers who had never even seen a proper forge, let alone operated one.

“Correct,” Jack said smoothly, ignoring Corin’s shock. “We are going to forge steel from the raw iron I ordered, which should be arriving soon with the autumn merchant caravan.”

“My apologies for questioning you, My Lord, but how are we going to do that?” Corin just couldn’t stop himself from asking. The work seemed impossible.

Jack offered a confident smile. “You don’t have to worry about the actual forging process. The major burdens—like maintaining the extreme heat and the constant pumping of air—will be handled by my mages. You just need to build the infrastructure for it, and construct the ovens to turn our coal into coke.”

Internally, Jack had already mapped out the entire process. He remembered the basic principles of steel-making from his high school chemistry classes back on Earth. He knew what to do; the real puzzle had been figuring out how to do it using magic and undead labor.

To melt the iron, he would use Elias. Since he was a fire mage, capable of generating immense heat. However, since Elias ran entirely on Jack’s mana, Jack could only sustain that intense magical output for an hour or two at most before his core ran dry. Therefore, he couldn’t rely on magic alone. He needed a physical fuel source that burned incredibly hot—he needed coke. Coke would not only provide sustained heat but also mix the necessary carbon into the iron to create steel.

But coke needed a massive, constant supply of oxygen to burn at steel-melting temperatures for tens of hours. Assigning living villagers to manually pump giant bellows for days would be a massive waste of manpower. It would exhaust his already limited workforce and grind the rest of the village’s development to a halt.

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Jack’s solution? Skeletons.

He planned to use thirty to forty skeletons simultaneously just to pump air into the blast furnace.

He couldn’t use Sylvia, his newly awakened wind mage, for the task. If he drained his mana using Elias for the initial heat, he wouldn’t have the mental or magical reserves left to control an iron-core wind mage for several hours afterward. Skeletons, however, required a fraction of the mana to maintain. And since they would all be doing the exact same repetitive motion, the mental strain on Jack would be entirely manageable. He had been practicing this kind of synchronized, repetitive control in the mines for months.

“Coke?” Corin’s confused voice pulled Jack from his thoughts. “What is that, My Lord?”

It seems coke isn’t a widely known commodity in this world, Jack thought inwardly. Or if it is, the common tradesmen don’t know the proper term for it.

“You don’t know of it?” Jack explained patiently. “It’s made from coal. We heat the coal in a sealed environment, entirely in the absence of air. Once it bakes and loses all its impurities and gases, it becomes coke. We will be using that instead of standard wood charcoal for our carbon content and fuel. I read about the process in an old text a few years ago.”

Corin rubbed his chin, nodding slowly. “I have heard rumors of such a thing… a purified rock that burns hotter than charcoal. I think the guilds call it something else, but I’ve never actually seen it made. But, My Lord, the main question is… will your mages actually be willing to do this kind of grueling labor?”

Jack looked at Corin, his expression perfectly flat. “Why wouldn’t they?”

Corin froze, quickly realizing he had questioned the authority of a noble over his own retainers. “Forgive me, My Lord. I spoke out of turn.”

“Forget it. Let’s get to your main work,” Jack said, turning and leading Corin toward the back of the castle courtyard, far behind the area where they had planned to build the new greenhouse. Jack explicitly wanted the steel operation hidden behind the keep. He couldn’t build it down in the village because he would be using an army of skeletons on a daily basis to run the bellows and hammer the metal. Having forty undead working out in the open village would cause absolute panic.

Jack and Corin had already finalized the design and the construction process of the greenhouse, in the carriage yesterday, in presence of Giles as well. So that didn’t needed to be discussed now.

They spent the next few hours walking the grounds. Jack laid out the specific structures he needed, and Corin immediately went to work, offering his professional opinions.

When Jack described a certain foundation, Corin didn’t hesitate to criticize it, pointing out how the intense heat would crack the stone if they didn’t leave expansion joints. Jack wasn’t angered in the slightest; instead, he quickly accepted Corin’s superior ideas. While Jack had the modern theoretical knowledge of technology from Earth, he humbly admitted to himself that Corin had years of practical, hands-on construction experience.

They debated, sketched lines in the dirt with sticks, and refined the blueprints until the sun was directly over their heads. Finally, the construction plan was finalized.

It was split into two phases.

First, they needed to make the coke. Jack ordered the construction of ‘Beehive Ovens’. These would be built down near the village outskirts, as they just looked like normal kilns and Jack didn’t want them taking up precious space in his private courtyard. They were to be shaped like igloos, roughly ten to fifteen feet wide and six to eight feet high, allowing them to bake a massive amount of coal at once. Corin noted they would need clay, heat-resistant river rocks, and sand to build the thick, airtight walls, with only a small exhaust vent at the top.

Second was the centerpiece: The Blast Furnace.

This massive structure would be built inside Jack’s secure courtyard. It was to be a towering chimney, fifteen to twenty feet high, wide at the base and tapering as it went up. The base would contain the hearth, a heavy clay tap-hole to let the molten pig iron flow out, and several reinforced holes around the perimeter where the bellows would pump in air.

“Once the blast furnace produces the pig iron,” Jack explained to Corin, “the metal will still be too brittle. It has absorbed too much carbon. It will need to be reheated and beaten heavily on an anvil to force the excess carbon out and turn it into true steel.”

Corin frowned. “My Lord, swinging a heavy hammer to fold steel is exhausting work. We don’t have nearly enough trained blacksmiths to handle that volume.”

“Don’t worry about the manpower,” Jack replied, his eyes gleaming with a hidden intensity. “My mages will manage the heavy beating as well.”

Jack had already decided to use his skeletons for the smithing process as well. They were physically far stronger than normal humans and didn’t grow tired. Constantly micro-managing skeletons to forge hot metal would put an agonizing strain on Jack’s mind and mana core, but he welcomed it. He needed to push his limits if he wanted to force his core to advance to the next layer quickly.

“I will trust in your methods, My Lord,” Corin said, looking at the finalized sketches in the dirt with profound excitement. If they pulled this off, they would be the only fief in the north producing their own steel.

Jack nodded, leaning on his cane. “Gather the required clay, stone, and sand. I want the foundations dug and the construction process started as soon as possible. You are dismissed.”