Shien's Blueprints

The dim underground Workshop was thick with a mix of acrid smells, none of them pleasant.

Garrick still hadn't gotten used to it after several days. He stood at the door, took a breath, then stepped inside.

Over the past few days, he had figured out his path: don't show off, don't stick your neck out, and get on Victor's good side first.

This was Victor, after all. He might have only one arm left, and he might have been reduced to this state, but a master was still a master.

As long as Garrick stayed close to that old monster, he could probably secure a place in Blackpine Fief's inner circle.

Garrick narrowed his puffy little eyes and discreetly surveyed the Heretic crew by the Workshop's firelight.

The first person he saw was Victor, of course.

The Construct master once renowned throughout the continent of Osteria stood there like a human skeleton draped in old burlap.

Garrick looked away, toward the forge, where a Blacksmith named Kori was working.

He was painfully thin, the ribs in his chest plainly visible, yet the forging hammer in his hands was absurdly huge, and he swung it like a madman.

Sparks flew high with every blow, landing on his bare skin, but he didn't even flinch.

Two days earlier, Garrick had tried to use his social skills to strike up a conversation and make himself known.

Kori hadn't even looked up. He had merely snorted, and Garrick had taken the hint and shut his mouth.

At a workbench on the other side of the Workshop sat Eli, the mute Alchemical Artificer.

His face was frighteningly pale, and all ten fingers bore dark purple burns left by Rune backlash.

Yet those hands were astonishingly steady. A Mithril tube as fine as a strand of hair lay motionless beneath his fingers as his engraving knife traced across it with effortless precision.

He was carving miniature Runes into it. One crooked stroke would ruin the whole tube.

Besides them, more than a dozen figures bustled around the Workshop.

At first glance it looked chaotic, but closer inspection revealed an orderly rhythm. Everyone had their own task, and they all seemed to know exactly what they were doing.

Garrick had arrived with some of the pride of a veteran from the Royal Capital, thinking he would rank just below Victor and above everyone else.

But after looking around, he felt that pride shrink away.

They might be a sickly, battered bunch, young and old, but when it came to their skills, not one of them was dead weight.

Garrick swallowed. How had that white-haired lord found so many monsters?

Had he simply dreamed them up?

He grumbled inwardly, but a smile immediately spread across his face.

I need to get on someone's good side fast, or I'll be just another face in the crowd.

Garrick tucked his hands into his sleeves, adopted an air of tactful restraint, and slowly approached Victor's hopelessly cluttered workbench.

He was just about to find a way into the conversation when his eyes fell on a sheet of parchment newly spread across the table.

One glance stopped him cold.

What was drawn on the blueprint overturned everything he thought he knew about machinery.

There were intricate interlocking gears, channels for diverting and releasing steam pressure, layered paths for transferring force through metal, and several mechanisms that even he, a master of machinery, had to study for ages before he could barely grasp them...

All of it was woven together on one blueprint, as if someone had forced machinery, alchemy, Runes, and a craft he had never seen before into a single whole.

Garrick's breathing grew heavy.

He hadn't spent decades working with machinery for nothing. It was precisely because he understood some of it that he knew how novel and wildly imaginative it was.

Garrick whipped his head around, opened his mouth, and poured out praise as if it cost him nothing:

"Master Victor, this blueprint... I've never seen anything like it, and I can't find a single flaw! And these mechanisms... beautiful. Absolutely beautiful!"

The more he spoke, the more excited he grew, until he couldn't help gesturing in the air.

"How did you ever design these mechanisms in your head? If this blueprint becomes reality, it'll earn a place in the history of machinery across the continent!"

When he finished, Victor didn't look like a senior master pleased by a junior's praise. Instead, his lone eye held a complicated expression.

Only then did Garrick realize something was wrong.

He blinked instinctively.

What? Did I flatter the wrong person?

Victor paused, then said, "I didn't draw it. The ideas all came from Lord Shien. We refined them together."

A buzz filled Garrick's ears, as though someone had swung a hammer with all their might and struck him square on the skull.

Against his will, the image of that young, silver-haired boy rose in his mind.

Fourteen years old... How could he have drawn something like this?

Garrick looked back at the blueprint in the center of the workbench, studying it more slowly and carefully this time.

A line at the top read: Semi-Automatic Steam Repeating Crossbow.

Garrick had never seen the name before, but after only a few careful glances, he recognized its foundation.

It was based on the wild concept Victor had proposed years ago, back when he was still at the Church's research institute: the Sourceblood Heavy Crossbow.

That proposal had caused quite a stir in the Inland. Some had called it a work of genius the likes of which appeared once in a century; others had savaged it, accusing Victor of grandstanding.

Garrick had been only an apprentice mechanic then, but he had managed to get hold of a copy and studied it in private for a long time.

Four words summed it up: fancy, precise, expensive, fragile.

The original Primordial Blood Heavy Crossbow was built around a Tier Three Sourceblood Magic Crystal. It forcibly drove an entire array of enchanted gears, then used layer upon layer of complex energy-conversion Runes to channel that power into the heavy crossbow's cocking mechanism.

On paper, it was certainly beautiful.

But by the blueprint's specifications, one Tier Three Sourceblood Magic Crystal could fire fewer than a hundred armor-piercing bolts. Any Long Night Lord would frown at that cost.

Even more expensive was the core mechanism: every assembly required a high-ranking Artificer to engrave those mind-numbingly intricate conversion Runes by hand.

The slightest deviation meant starting the entire assembly over. At best, something like that belonged in a tower in the Holy Capital as a collector's piece. Expecting to deploy it along a battle line was pure fantasy.

That was why, after Victor was implicated in a secret case, branded a Heretic, and disappeared, many Alchemical Artificers had tried to improve the weapon. Every attempt had failed halfway through.

They had burned through plenty of money, and every result was more useless than the last.

But the new blueprint before Garrick was another matter entirely.

It didn't try to patch up the old design. It threw the whole thing out.

Garrick's gaze followed the ink lines down the page, his breathing growing heavier with every inch.

Shien had been ruthless. He had cut nearly two-thirds of the complex Runes outright and used only the cheapest Tier One Primordial Blood Crystals.

Those things were full of impurities, low in energy, and foul-smelling. They were basically scrap; some Long Night Lords didn't even bother collecting them.

But the key was the novel power mechanism on the blueprint, which used them as its core energy source.

The dense gear assemblies of the old design were gone. In their place were a piston-driven heavy crossbow, a crank and connecting rod, and a steam valve.

It was hardly elegant, even a little crude, but the longer Garrick looked, the more it stunned him.

Shien had broken the entire power cycle into a few steps: ignition, heating, boiling, steam release, and driving the piston.

The low-grade Sourceblood heated the water inside a thick-walled, sealed tank until it boiled.

High-pressure steam then forced open the valve and drove the piston forward. A crank and connecting rod converted the piston's linear thrust into the force needed to reset and cock the crossbow.

The whole system worked without relying on complex Runes to guide the energy. It relied on mechanical linkages unlike any Garrick had ever seen.

As long as the Sourceblood kept burning, the mechanism would cycle again and again: cocking, readying, resetting.

By this point, Garrick's face had gone stiff.

He knew his trade, so he could tell at a glance that, if built, its maximum power per shot would fall far short of the original.

But when Blood Moon Season came and the Beast Tide surged in, it would be an absolute trump card. One such weapon could do the work of more than a dozen skilled Crossbowmen.

Garrick stared at the ingenious force-distribution system on the blueprint, so clever it almost defied belief, and grew even more certain of his conclusion.

How could a fourteen-year-old lord possibly have designed this?

"Master Victor, you were once so proud. Have you really learned to put your own life's work under that fourteen-year-old lord's name just to curry favor with him?"