Core Technology Tree

In the temporary camp at Blackpine Fief, deep into the night.

Shien raised a hand and pressed his brow. He had kept the Canon of Grace and Righteousness open too long that day, and his temples still throbbed faintly.

He sat at a rough wooden table and began recording, one by one on the first sheet of parchment, the pale-green information he had gleaned from the three thousand refugees that day.

He filled an entire page with tightly packed writing.

Nearly a hundred names, each followed by the skills that person knew. Craftsmen, alchemists, mechanics, apothecaries... The list was dizzying, and Shien was delighted.

What Bishop Castian had sent him this time was charcoal delivered in a snowstorm. Every one of these people was talented.

Whatever else the Church's Heretic Tribunal was good at, it had always been thorough when it came to burying talent.

Shien studied the list for a moment, then picked up his charcoal pencil and began circling names, drawing lines, and sorting them into new tiers.

Too many people shared the same basic skills. Fifteen knew elementary gear polishing, seventeen knew basic stone reinforcement, and several had a little knowledge of rudimentary alchemical repairs.

He did not need to rush to spend Reward Value copying their skills. Sending them straight to the workshops and construction sites would do.

As long as the work credits were fair and the meat soup kept coming, they would work themselves to the bone.

Shien marked those names and assigned them to the rank-and-file workshops and the backbone of his construction crews.

Foremen, skilled craftsmen, and junior assembly-line supervisors could all be picked from this group.

The truly valuable ones were the core specialists. He pressed his pencil a little harder as he circled a dozen or so names.

Each of them possessed a core skill at the third tier.

If Blackpine Fief was to survive the Blood Moon Season in a little over five months, building two more walls and digging a few more ditches would not be nearly enough.

What could truly push the situation forward was the knowledge in those dozen or so heads.

With that thought, Shien pushed the first sheet of parchment aside and quickly spread out a second, blank scroll.

The knowledge from his previous life was now beginning to mesh, piece by piece, with this world's alchemy and arraycraft.

Nothing that could truly change the course of battle would ever come from a lone Blacksmith slowly hammering away beside a forge.

And at the heart of this interdisciplinary puzzle stood one man: Victor.

The gaunt old man whose right arm the Church's Heretic Tribunal had hacked off, whose right eye it had gouged out, and whose body it had covered in Sinner Brands.

He had been the Church's Alchemical Artificer, and the complete body of Alchemical Rune Artificing in his head was precisely the strongest trunk for the tech tree Shien wanted to build.

Take the Semi-Automatic Rune Steam Repeating Crossbow, for example.

Beside the sketch, Shien drew three lines from Victor's name and wrote a name from the other list at the end of each.

The first led to an alchemical runesmith whose tongue had been torn out.

His specialty was inscribing Scorching Runes. Bolts fired from an ordinary fine-steel crossbow might not pierce a High-Rank Werewolf's hide. Even if they did, the wound might swiftly grow shut again.

To make a wound stay open, Shien needed the Scorching Runes in that man's head.

The second line led to the name Mechanic.

He could handle the pneumatic valve seals. Victor understood Construct work and alchemy, but when it came to the Steam Closed-Cycle System, his knowledge still fell short.

Without this man, when the boiler overpressurized, the first thing to burst would not be a Demonic Beast's head, but the operator's chest and face.

The third line pointed to a scrawny Blacksmith.

That man knew how to forge resilient metal. If the repeating crossbow was to sustain rapid, repeated fire, the first problem would likely be neither the bolts nor the boiler, but fatigue cracks in the crossbow limbs and mechanism.

Once he had sorted out the Semi-Automatic Rune Steam Repeating Crossbow, Shien kept writing. Beside it, he added a second device: the Pressure-Triggered Poisonfire Mine.

It was cheaper and better suited to Blackpine Fief's present circumstances.

This time, Shien drew only two lines from Victor.

One went to a scholar of Toxicology and Acid Purification.

Anything buried in the trenches had to work even in bitter cold, and it had to be vicious. If it could only blow up low-tier packs, its use would be limited. Ideally, even a Third Tier Werewolf would lose a layer of skin the moment it stepped on one.

The other line went to an alchemical runesmith who understood detonation arrays made with low-grade crystals.

The mine's greatest value lay not in its power, but in its numbers. If every one needed a high-tier array, they might as well throw their money straight into the fire.

They had to drive the cost down, low enough to bury them row after row in frozen ground, low enough that Blackpine Fief could bear the loss of thousands upon thousands.

With the two main Construct paths laid out, his charcoal pencil paused at the edge of the plans, then moved downward again.

These skills could also be used to develop the High-Pressure Venom Sprayer, the Living Thorn Caltrops...

The former was meant for trench warfare. If the wolf packs reached the edge of the ditches, the crossbows and mines might not stop them all. But a blast of high-pressure venom sweeping into their faces would surely make things lively.

The latter was meant for the outermost defensive line. If Plant Grafting could be combined with a method of nourishing plants using Abyssal Demonic Beast flesh, they might actually grow a corrosive Living Vine.

And this was only the beginning. If they kept digging along this line of thought, Venom Mist, Living Trap... even more outlandish things might not be impossible to make.

Sooner or later, this wretched corner of Blackpine Fief would sprout a whole heap of troublesome things that would make even Demonic Beasts want to go around.

The key to making any of it happen was the dozen or so specialists who held those crucial skills. Without them, the plans were just plans. With them, much of the work could truly begin.

The pale-green grace now hovering over their heads only meant that a bowl of hot soup and a winter coat had made them willing, for the moment, to lower their heads and work.

They probably would not object to hauling stones at a construction site or polishing parts in a workshop.

But getting them to devote themselves wholeheartedly to developing these new inventions for Blackpine Fief was another matter.

Pale green was nowhere near enough. Shien had to raise the grace of those dozen or so people further, at least to deep blue.

Only then would the advanced permissions of the Canon of Grace and Righteousness truly unlock, giving him a chance to copy those Third Tier core skills into his own mind, one by one.

For him, this was about far more than saving effort.

Shien needed to copy the skills and master them first. Combined with the theories from his previous life, that would give him a real bridge from ideas to practice.

Then, when these people hit a wall in the workshops or spent half a month stuck before a set of plans, unable to take a single step forward, he could point out the problem and steer them right in terms they understood.

Otherwise, he would be nothing more than an irritating noble standing to one side and barking orders.

Shien tossed the worn-down stub of charcoal beside the parchment and let out a soft breath.

The Church liked using threats and harsh penance to grind down the minds of Heretics.

The nobles were much the same. They had the same few tricks, over and over: whips, hunger, and endless demands for loyalty.

In the end, they were all too lazy to think.

After tormenting people until they were nearly broken, expecting them to invent something new for you was hopelessly naive.

Shien picked up his pencil again and wrote three strategies for raising grace in the margin of his draft.

First, keep them alive. No one could think seriously on an empty stomach. Feed them properly before discussing anything else.

Second, pull them out from under the Church's rules. Heretic or not, if what they made could kill Demonic Beasts, that proved their ability, and they would be rewarded for it.

Third, people with real ability usually had some pride. When they hit a wall, he had to show them that their young lord was not some noble standing aside and giving blind orders.

Shien leaned back against the rough wooden chair and went over the plan from beginning to end.

The night wind still blew outside. Now and then it gently billowed the tent, while the brazier's fire lit his profile by turns, bright, then dim.