The Necro-Industrial Revolution

Over the next few weeks, the influx of laborers from Alaric’s fief completely transformed the pace of the valley. With fourteen fresh, motivated workers joining the construction crews, the work leaped forward.

In the castle courtyard, Corin finally laid the last heavy, heat-resistant brick of the blast furnace. It stood tall and imposing, tapering perfectly toward the sky.

“It is finished, My Lord,” Corin announced, wiping brick dust from his sweat-soaked brow as Jack approached the site.

Jack inspected the structure, tapping his cane against the solid foundation. “Excellent. Now, I want you to build a heavy enclosure completely around it. Cover the furnace from all sides with thick timber and packed earth. Leave only one heavy door for entry, and install a locking mechanism on the inside.”

Corin blinked, his exhausted smile faltering. “An enclosure? My Lord… why?”

“My retainers require absolute peace and focus to operate the furnace,” Jack said, his tone leaving no room for argument. “I do not want anyone wandering in and disturbing them. Also, pack the walls tightly. Try to make it as soundproof as possible.” Jack knew the walls won’t completely isolate the sounds, but even a little silence was better than none.

Corin’s jaw tightened. He looked past the courtyard, toward the village where the palisade walls, the winter cabins, and the greenhouse all desperately demanded his attention. Building a massive, sound-dampening shed around a towering brick chimney felt like a colossal waste of timber and time. But he was an engineer in the presence of his Lord; he swallowed his complaints and bowed his head.

“As you command, My Lord.”

It took Corin and his crew another five days of grueling labor to erect the thick, insulated walls around the furnace. He balanced this task by running back and forth to the village, checking plumb lines on the new cabins while the mortar dried.

Once the heavy wooden door was finally hung on its iron hinges, Jack summoned Corin to the site. Jack arrived with his two fully armored mages—Elias and Sylvia—flanking him in total silence.

“Walk me through the exact operational flow,” Jack instructed, stepping into the dim, enclosed space.

“Of course, My Lord.” Corin pointed to the various vents and levers. “The mages will need to feed the coke here, and pump the bellows in this exact rhythm to maintain the airflow. The slag drains from this chute, while the pure iron taps from the lower hearth.”

Jack listened intently, committing every single physical motion to memory. Corin assumed he was just briefing his Lord, but in reality, Jack was learning the exact sequence of movements he needed to force his skeletons to perform. Even though Elias possessed basic combat instincts, the undead fire mage had no idea how to smelt steel. Jack would have to give commands almost the entire operation through his mental threads.

Later that very night, while the castle and the village slept, Jack sat in his bedchamber and extended his mana into the deep crypts.

Operating in total secrecy, he commanded a team of skeletons to start digging upward through the dirt. They clawed silently through the packed earth, creating a narrow, hidden tunnel that connected the underground crypt directly to the dirt floor inside the new furnace enclosure. Now, Jack could march his skeletal workers straight up into the locked room, forge the steel, and march them back down into the dark without a single villager ever seeing a walking corpse.

Down in the village, the massive hexagonal palisade was taking shape.

Giles’ men slotted the freshly cut timbers into the deep trenches. The perimeter looked formidable, and the corner watchtowers already loomed over the tree line. However, large sections of the wall remained unbound.

“We can’t secure the heavy gates or the cross-beams yet,” Giles told Jack during a morning inspection. “We are waiting on the steel.”

It was the same story at the weapons forge. The engineer stood beside half-finished wooden ballista frames and empty trap pits, tapping his foot impatiently. The designs required high-tensile steel springs and reinforced gears. Without the steel, the valley’s defenses sat in limbo.

Meanwhile, the construction of the new winter cabins dragged along at a slow but steady pace. They would undoubtedly be finished before the peak of winter hit.

The greenhouse, however, hit a frustrating snag.

Corin stood in the center of the courtyard, counting the crates of clear glass panes they had scavenged and bought. He looked at Jack, a grimace on his face. “We miscalculated, My Lord. We are short by at least a dozen panes. We can’t cover the roof design as planned.”

Jack clicked his tongue. “Then we don’t wait. Redesign the pitch. Make the structure slightly shorter and decrease the roof angle so the glass we do have covers the entire canopy.”

Corin immediately drafted the new dimensions, and a few days later, the massive, squat glasshouse was sealed.

Jack didn’t waste the opportunity for a public spectacle. He ordered the villagers to gather in the courtyard just as the chilly autumn wind began to whip through the valley.

“Last year, I heated the soil with burning coal,” Jack projected his voice over the crowd. “It poisoned the dirt and nearly ruined the fertility of the land. This year, we use the power of the magic.”

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He gestured to the glass doors. The villagers leaned in, their breath pluming in the cold air. Inside, Jack commanded Elias and Sylvia to walk along the planting beds. The armored figures meticulously buried several heavy stones deep into the dirt at calculated intervals.

Once the mages stepped back, Jack pulled a handful of spirit stones from his pocket and used them. He channeled his mana, activating the dormant arrays.

A low, vibrating hum echoed inside the glasshouse. Instantly, the Ever-ember heat runes flared to life beneath the soil. A wave of stable, comforting warmth radiated outward, pressing against the glass.

The villagers gasped, stepping closer to feel the heat radiating from the structure. Magic was usually a violent, terrifying thing—fireballs and lightning strikes. Seeing it used to nurture life, to banish the winter frost and grow vegetables in the dead of the cold season, left them utterly astonished.

Normally, if someone used a heat rune in the open winter air, the freezing winds would overpower it instantly. They would need dozens of runes running continuously to make a difference. But Jack’s insulated glasshouse trapped the heat perfectly. The runes only needed to be activated twice a day for a few hours to maintain a balmy, spring-like temperature inside.

As Jack watched the villagers marvel at the greenhouse, he focused his mind on the magical connection. He felt the pulse of the runes through his link with Elias’s touch. Curious, Jack mentally pinched the flow of energy.

The low hum stopped. The runes instantly powered down. Jack opened the flow again, and they roared back to life.

I can switch them on and off at will, Jack realized, a thrill of excitement rushing through him. If he didn’t possess a mana core, the runes would just greedily consume the spirit stones until they turned to dust, wasting massive amounts of energy. His ability to toggle them manually was an incredible economic advantage.

But as he reached into his pocket to feel the remaining spirit stones Silas had given him, his excitement waned. He only had a few left. He had completely forgotten to buy a bulk supply during his trip to the western market city.

I can’t make that long trip back to the west right now, Jack thought, calculating his options. I will see if the autumn caravan carries any. If they don’t, I’ll have to make a miserable journey to one of the regional Church branches as a last resort.

By the end of the week, the harvest ended.

Men and women swung their scythes, felling the tall stalks of grain, while others bundled them into heavy sheaves.

Standing by the storage barns, the Old Miller wiped sweat from his brow and smiled at the piles of grain. “It’s a beautiful harvest, My Lord. Once we thresh the stalks and mill the grain into flour, the villagers will finally eat the fruits of their own hard labor.”

“We aren’t threshing it,” Jack said, looking over the ledger. “Bundle it raw. We are selling the entire harvest directly to the merchants.”

The Old Miller’s smile vanished. “Sell it? But… My Lord, the people grew this. They want to eat it. If we sell the raw stalks, we will just have to turn around and buy expensive, ready-to-use milled flour from the caravans!”

“Exactly,” Jack nodded. “And buying pre-milled flour will cost us slightly more gold than we make selling the raw grain. I am aware of the deficit.”

“Then why do it?” the Miller pleaded, bewildered.

“Because threshing and milling this much grain by hand will take the village weeks of agonizing labor,” Jack explained, his tone firm and uncompromising. “Labor that needs to be spent building the palisades, forging steel, and mining coal. The village has much more important things to worry about right now than losing a few gold coins in an agricultural exchange. Time is our most valuable resource, Old Miller. We buy the flour. Sell the stalks.”

The Old Miller bowed his head, clearly disappointed, but he didn’t dare argue further.

That evening, craving a distraction from the endless logistics of the village, Jack retreated to the northern side of his lands with Elias, and cast his mind down into the northern trench.

He connected to Rusty, Dusty, and Bones. They were still standing exactly where he had left them.

Let’s see what these things are actually made of, Jack thought. He commanded Rusty and Bones to grab the heaviest, most intact carcass.

The skeletons hauled the massive, fibrous body back up the rocky path. Jack watched eagerly through Bones’ eyes. However, the exact second the skeletons dragged the dead monster across the threshold from the second layer onto the first layer’s ledge, the carcass reacted violently.

It didn’t rot. It didn’t burn. It simply dissolved into thin air, leaving absolutely nothing behind—not even a speck of ash.

Jack cursed aloud, gripping some of the dirt on the ground in frustration. What kind of bizarre ecosystem was down there?

Determined to find answers, he commanded the trio to abandon the upper ledge and march back down, past the mud, toward the pitch-black sinkhole that led to the third layer.

The skeletons approached the descent. The darkness was so thick it felt like a physical wall pressing against Jack’s undead vision.

Keep moving, Jack commanded, pushing them over the edge.

They scrambled down the slick, muddy decline. Suddenly, a wet, violent shifting sound echoed in the dark. Something massive lunged from the shadows.

Jack couldn’t see a damn thing. He wildly commanded the skeletons to retreat, pulling them back up the slick slope. But the mud was too treacherous.

Dusty’s skeletal foot slipped on a jagged ridge. The skeleton tumbled backward, falling into the suffocating abyss of the third layer.

A split second later, a sharp, physical pain sparked behind Jack’s eyes. The mental thread connecting his mind to Dusty snapped like a violently severed wire.

Jack gasped, his eyes flying open in the real world. He rubbed his temples, his heart racing.

He could still feel Rusty and Bones huddled on the edge of the second layer, but Dusty was completely gone. Did the skeleton shatter upon hitting the bottom? Jack wondered, his breathing heavy. Or did it fall past the few hundred-meter range limit of my mental control? Or… is there some kind of magical interference down there severing the link?

It was a deeply worrisome mystery. However, Jack forced himself to calm down. The trench had sat there for centuries, and nothing had ever crawled out to threaten the village. The locals firmly believed ghosts haunted the ravine and refused to go anywhere near it. Whatever was lurking in that third layer, it wasn’t an immediate threat to his industrialization plans.

He severed the connection to the remaining skeletons, leaving them down there, and went to sleep. He would worry about the abyss later.

Two more weeks passed in a blur of hammers, mortar, and falling leaves. It was the peak of autumn, and the morning air now carried a sharp, freezing bite that warned of the approaching snow.

One crisp morning, a loud, echoing sound broke the quiet routine of the valley.

Jack stood on the castle balcony and looked out toward the southern pass. Heavy wooden wheels crunched against the dirt road, accompanied by the rhythmic jingling of iron bells and the snorting of massive draft horses.

A long line of heavily loaded wagons crested the ridge, surrounded by armed mercenary guards.

The autumn caravan had finally arrived.