Shien's Blueprint

The dim underground workshop was thick with mingled, acrid smells. None of them were pleasant.

Several days had passed, and Garrick still wasn't used to it. He stopped at the door, took a breath, then stepped inside.

He had worked out his path over the past few days: don't overreach, don't stick your neck out, and cling to Victor 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 the old monster, he would probably secure a place in Blackpine Fief's inner circle.

Garrick narrowed his small, puffy eyes and quietly surveyed the band of Heretics by the workshop's firelight.

The first person he saw was, of course, Victor.

The Construct master whose name had once shaken the entire continent of Osteria stood there like a human skeleton draped in old burlap.

Garrick looked away toward the furnace, where a Blacksmith named Kori stood.

He was terribly thin, his ribs visible through his chest, yet the iron-forging hammer in his hands was absurdly large, and he swung it like a madman.

Every blow sent sparks bursting high. They landed on his bare skin, but he didn't so much as furrow his brow.

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

Kori hadn't even looked up. He had only snorted, and Garrick had known better than to say another word.

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 as still as a mountain beneath them, while his engraving knife moved across it bit by bit, smooth as drifting clouds and flowing water.

He was engraving miniature runes. One crooked stroke, and the entire tube would be ruined.

Besides them, a dozen or so figures bustled back and forth around the workshop.

At first glance it looked chaotic, but a closer look revealed order. Everyone handled their own part, and they all seemed to know exactly what they were doing.

Garrick had arrived with some of a Royal Capital veteran's pride, imagining himself above everyone here except Victor.

But after looking around, he felt that pride shrink back on its own.

They were a collection of the old, the weak, the sick, and the disabled, but when it came to their respective skills, not one of them was there for show.

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

Had he done it all by dreaming?

He muttered to himself, but a smile immediately spread across his face.

No. I need to cling to someone important, and fast, or I'll disappear into the crowd.

Garrick tucked his hands into his sleeves, put on an air of knowing his place, and slowly approached Victor's hopelessly cluttered workbench.

He was about to find an opening for conversation when his gaze landed on a sheet of parchment freshly spread across the table.

One look, and he froze.

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

There were intricate interlocking gears, channels for diverting and releasing steam pressure, layer upon layer of transferred stress through metal, and several mechanisms that even a master of machinery like him had to study for ages just to barely understand...

All of it was woven tightly into one blueprint, as though someone had forcibly kneaded machinery, alchemy, runes, and a craft he had never seen before into a single whole.

Garrick's breathing grew heavy.

His decades in the machinery trade hadn't been for nothing. It was precisely because he understood a little that he knew just how novel and wildly imaginative this was.

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

"Master Victor, this blueprint... I've never seen anything like any of it, and I can't find a single flaw! And these sets of mechanisms... Beautiful. They're absolutely beautiful!"

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

"How did you design a structure like this in your head? If this blueprint is ever built, it'll earn a place in the history of machinery across the entire continent!"

But instead of the satisfaction of a senior basking in a junior's praise, Victor's lone eye held a trace of something complicated.

Only then did Garrick sense that something was wrong.

He blinked instinctively.

What happened? Did my flattery miss the mark?

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

Garrick heard a buzz in his ears, as if someone had taken a mighty swing and smashed a hammer straight into the crown of his skull.

The image of the silver-haired boy's youthful face rose unbidden in his mind.

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

Garrick looked back at the blueprint in the middle 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 the wild proposal Victor had put forward years ago, back when he was still at the Church's research institute—the Sourceblood Heavy Crossbow.

That proposal had caused quite a stir inland. Some called it a work of genius that came along once in a century; others had cursed Victor, accusing him of grandstanding.

Garrick had only been an apprentice machinist then, but he had managed to get hold of a copy and spent a long time poring over it in private.

Four words summed it up: exquisite, precise, expensive, and fragile.

The old Primordial Blood Heavy Crossbow's core concept was to use a Third Tier Primordial Blood Crystal as its heart, forcibly drive an entire set of enchanted gears, then use layer upon layer of complex energy-conversion runes to force power into the heavy crossbow's drawing mechanism.

On paper, it truly was beautiful.

But by the blueprint's design, one Third Tier Primordial Blood Crystal could fire only a hundred armor-piercing bolts. Any Long Night Lord would frown at that cost-effectiveness.

Worse, every core assembly required a high-ranking artificer to engrave that mind-numbingly intricate set of conversion runes by hand.

The slightest deviation meant redoing the whole assembly. At best, such a thing belonged in a tower in the Holy Capital as a collectible. Expecting to deploy it across a battlefront was pure fantasy.

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

They had burned through plenty of money and produced one worthless contraption after another.

But the new blueprint before Garrick was another matter entirely.

It hadn't tried to patch up the old approach. It had flipped the table.

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

Shien had cut ruthlessly, stripping away nearly two-thirds of the complex runes and using only the cheapest First Tier Primordial Blood Crystals.

They were full of impurities, low in energy, and foul-smelling—essentially scrap. Some Long Night Lords didn't even bother collecting them.

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

The mechanism had none of the dense gear assemblies of the old design. In their place were a piston-driven heavy crossbow, a crank and connecting rod, and a steam valve.

It could hardly be called elegant. It was even a little crude, yet the longer he looked, the more it shook him.

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

The low-grade Primordial Blood Crystals boiled the water inside a thick-walled, sealed tank.

High-pressure steam then forced open the valve and drove the piston forward. The piston's straight-line thrust passed through the crank and connecting rod, becoming the force that reset and drew the crossbow.

The entire system worked without complex guiding runes. It relied on mechanical linkages unlike anything Garrick had ever seen.

As long as the Primordial Blood Crystals kept burning, the mechanism would cycle again and again, drawing the bow, readying it to fire, then resetting.

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

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

But when Blood Moon Season came and they faced the surging Beast Tide, this would be an absolute trump card. One such set of equipment could take the place of more than a dozen skilled crossbowmen.

Garrick stared at the blueprint's almost unreasonably ingenious load-bearing structure, more certain than ever of what he thought.

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?"