Core Technology Tree

Late that night, in a makeshift tent in Blackpine Fief, Shien raised a hand to rub his brow. He had used the Canon of Grace and Righteousness for too long during the day, and his temples still throbbed faintly.

He sat at a rough wooden table and began recording, one by one, the pale-green pieces of information he had uncovered among the three thousand refugees that day.

He filled an entire sheet of parchment with dense writing.

Nearly a hundred names, each followed by a skill: craftsmen, alchemists, mechanics, apothecaries... The sheer variety made Shien's eyes swim, but it also delighted him.

Bishop Castian's delivery had come at exactly the right time. Every one of these people had something to offer.

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

Shien studied the list for a moment, then picked up his charcoal pencil. He circled names, drew lines between them, and began sorting them into tiers.

Too many had the same basic skills. Fifteen could do elementary gear grinding, seventeen knew basic stone reinforcement, and a few could manage simple alchemical repairs.

There was no need to spend Reward Value copying their skills. He could send them straight to the Workshop or the construction sites.

As long as the work credits were fair and the meat soup kept coming, they would work their hearts out on their own.

Shien marked those names and placed them under workshop staff and construction crew leaders.

Foremen, skilled hands, and assembly line supervisors could all be chosen from that group.

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

They possessed core skills at the Third Tier level.

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

What could truly change the situation was the knowledge in those dozen heads.

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

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

Anything that could truly change the course of battle would never come from a single blacksmith slowly hammering away beside a forge.

And at the heart of this cross-disciplinary puzzle stood one man: Victor.

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

Victor was the Church's Alchemical Artificer, and the complete system of Alchemical Rune Artificing in his head was the strongest trunk Shien could have asked for in his technology tree.

Take the Semi-Automatic Rune Steam Repeating Crossbow.

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

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

The man excelled at inscribing Scorching Runes. Bolts fired from ordinary refined steel might not pierce a High-Rank Werewolf's hide, and even if they did, the wounds might quickly heal over.

To make those wounds last, Shien needed the Scorching Runes in that man's head.

The second line ended beside a mechanic's name.

He could handle the pneumatic valve seals. Victor understood artificing and alchemy, but the Steam Closed-Cycle System was still beyond his full grasp.

Without that mechanic, an overpressurized boiler would blow apart the operator's chest and face before it ever blew apart a Demon Beast's head.

The third line pointed to a gaunt blacksmith.

The man knew how to forge tough metal. If the repeating crossbow entered service as a rapid-fire weapon, the first things to fail would likely be neither the bolts nor the boiler, but the limbs and mechanism cracking from fatigue.

Once he had mapped out the Semi-Automatic Rune Steam Repeating Crossbow, Shien kept writing. He added a second design beside it: the Pressure-Triggered Poisonfire Mine.

It was cheaper and better suited to Blackpine Fief's current needs.

This time, Shien drew only two lines from Victor.

One went to a scholar versed in Toxicology and Acid Purification.

Anything buried in the trenches had to work even in bitter cold, and it had to be potent. A mine that killed only low-level beasts would be of limited use. Ideally, even a Third Tier Werewolf would lose a layer of hide the moment it stepped on one.

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

The real value of mines lay not in their power, but in their numbers. If every mine needed a high-tier array, he might as well throw the money into a fire.

He had to drive the cost down until they could bury row after row in the frozen ground—until Blackpine Fief could afford to expend thousands upon thousands of them.

With the two main Construct designs laid out, his charcoal pencil paused at the edge of the page before moving farther down.

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

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

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

And that was only the beginning. Following the same line of thought, Venom Mist, Living Traps, and even more outlandish things might be possible.

Sooner or later, this miserable patch of land called Blackpine Fief would be bristling with contraptions that even Demon Beasts would want to avoid.

But making any of them real depended on those dozen or so people with the crucial skills. Without them, the designs were only drawings. With them, the work could truly begin.

The pale-green Grace hanging over those people's heads meant only that a bowl of hot soup and a winter coat had persuaded them to work for him for now.

They probably would not object to hauling stone at a construction site or grinding parts in the Workshop.

Getting them to devote themselves 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 people further, to deep blue at the very least.

Only then would the Canon of Grace and Righteousness's advanced permissions 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 first had to copy and master those skills. Only then could he combine them with the theories from his previous life and find a way to put them into practice.

When those people hit a wall in the Workshop someday, or spent half a month stuck on a design without making progress, he would be able to explain the problem in terms they understood and steer them in the right direction.

Otherwise, he would just be an irritating noble standing around giving orders.

Shien set the worn-down charcoal pencil beside the parchment and let out a quiet breath.

The Church liked to use fear and hardship to grind the minds of Heretics flat.

The nobles were much the same. They always fell back on the same few things: whips, hunger, and endless demands for loyalty.

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

It was naive to wear people down until they were nearly broken, then expect them to invent something new for you.

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

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

Second, pull them free of the Church's rules. It did not matter whether someone was called a Heretic. If they built something that could kill Demon Beasts, they had proved their worth—and they would be rewarded.

Third, capable people tended to have some pride. When they hit a wall, he needed to show them that their young lord was not some noble shouting ignorant orders from the sidelines.

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 the tent billowed gently, while the fire in the brazier cast his profile alternately into light and shadow.