Could He Be a Chosen Child of the Holy?

Garrick stared at the plans. His first reaction was not admiration, but a bitter, mocking smile.

Who had Victor been back then? A master artificer whom even the Church's red-robed Bishops had treated with the utmost courtesy.

Now, stranded in a godforsaken place like Blackpine Fief, he had finally learned to bow his head.

The plans were still his, but the credit went to a fourteen-year-old lord. He was trying to secure himself a way to survive.

Garrick was not surprised. He had seen the same thing Inland: the powerful wanted prestige, scholars wanted money, and everyone got what they needed.

So he said nothing. If Victor wanted to play along, Garrick did not mind joining him. Victor knew how things worked.

That was what Garrick had thought. Over the next half month, however, everything Shien did shattered those assumptions.

Every evening, the silver-haired lord arrived at the Workshop on time. He went straight to the blackboard and began drawing and revising alongside Victor.

Most of the time, the others had yet to catch up before the two of them were already working through the next step.

Holding a charcoal pencil, Shien sketched a complex drive mechanism on the blackboard. "We don't need to inscribe a Rune here. Split off the excess kinetic energy and divert it at this point. That'll take a lot of strain off the main shaft."

Garrick was still trying to understand why the change would work when Victor's head snapped up, his single eye shining.

"That works too... Yes, that would release the lateral torque. We wouldn't need all those complicated Runes on the main shaft. A single set of Balancing Runes would do."

Standing behind them, Garrick felt a chill down his spine. He had understood only half of it, which made it all the more unsettling.

And so, with Shien and Victor adding strokes in turn, the plans were completed.

But plans that worked on parchment did not guarantee a working machine. The moment they tried to turn them into iron and steam, Blackpine Fief's crude craftsmanship gave everyone a brutal reality check.

The boiler failed first. Kori and the Blacksmiths hammered away for three days before they finished the first reinforced boiler shell.

Then the closed-loop test began. As soon as the Sourceblood burned, before the steam in the water tank had even built up fully, the entire Pig Iron boiler started to bulge and warp. Tiny cracks popped across its surface.

Everyone nearby went pale. A few more breaths, and that thing would blow up half the laboratory with them in it.

Before they could get the boiler under control, the piston failed too. There was no suitable flexible sealing material to be found anywhere nearby.

They smeared on layer after layer of grease, but as soon as the high-pressure steam hit, it still hissed out through the gaps.

Most of the force that should have driven the mechanism vanished in an instant. After several tests, they could not even achieve steady propulsion, let alone draw the bowstring. The mood in the Workshop sank.

Victor stood before the ruined parts, still smoking black, and said nothing for a long time. The old man had been thin to begin with. After days of work, he looked more like a dead branch.

At last, he spoke in a hoarse voice. "My lord, there's nothing wrong with the plans. Our materials are too poor. These boilers, these guide rails, these seals—they simply can't withstand that kind of force.

"Unless we load every critical component with high-level Runes, layering on reinforcement, pressure resistance, and frost, I'm afraid... this approach won't work."

The Workshop fell even quieter.

If they made those changes, the Semi-Automatic Steam Repeating Crossbow would revert to the old approach: expensive, slow to make, and impossible to mass-produce.

And Blackpine Fief desperately lacked both time and resources.

Then Shien spoke. "Who said we have to contain all that pressure?"

He walked to the swollen boiler and tapped its scorching iron shell. "If the pressure's too high, don't trap it all inside.

"Give it an outlet so it can vent the excess steam. Open it when the pressure crosses the limit, then close it again once it drops to a safe level."

Victor froze, then his eye lit up. "Don't contain it all... Close it once the pressure drops back..."

Most of the others had yet to grasp what Shien meant when he turned to the piston.

"Stop stuffing grease into the gaps. It won't hold." He pointed to the worst leak.

"I'll have the knights hunt Swamp Mud Toads out in the marshes. We can strip off their skin membranes and fit them into the piston gaps. They resist heat and swell at high temperatures. There's a good chance they'll solve this."

The Workshop came alive again. That was how it had gone these past few days: Shien had led the team past one obstacle after another with ideas no one else would have imagined.

And that was not even the most startling part. Garrick realized that Shien's knowledge extended far beyond alchemical Constructs and mechanical design.

The Semi-Automatic Steam Repeating Crossbow, Poisonfire Mines, Living Vine cultivation... Wherever he went, he offered a crucial insight that sped up the research.

The person the underground Workshop truly relied on was not Victor, but Shien.

That did not mean Shien surpassed Victor in every skill.

When it came to demanding work such as alchemical Constructs, Rune inscription, and material ratios, Victor remained the Workshop's most indispensable member. After all, he had once been the continent's foremost Alchemical Artificer.

But whenever they reached a dead end, whenever a group of them stood red-eyed around the blackboard with no solution in sight, Shien was usually the one who made the final call.

He could not draw an entire set of high-level Construct plans from start to finish by hand, as Victor could.

But at the critical moment, he could always nudge their thinking in a direction no one else had considered, and the whole problem would open up. His solutions were invariably simple and rough—and unlike anything this world had seen before.

Late one night, the underground Workshop finally fell quiet.

Most people had already left. Garrick sat alone at a workbench, the heavily revised crossbow sketch spread before him, a charcoal pencil motionless in his hand.

He had been sitting like that for a long time.

Everything that had happened over the past month churned through his mind like an impossibly tangled knot.

He had thought he understood it all. Life had broken Victor's pride, forcing him to put his plans and achievements in the lord's name. Shien was merely a lucky young noble who knew a little alchemy.

As for the underground Workshop, Garrick had initially dismissed it as a crude little operation putting on airs beside the Eternal Night Wall.

But after a month there, he realized that he had been the one who failed to understand, from the very beginning.

Shien knew far too much, across far too many fields, and in far too much depth.

Alchemical Constructs, mechanical principles, the precise heat needed to forge metal... Even when people discussed Living Vine cultivation, he could listen for a moment and point straight to the heart of the issue.

Problems that left Garrick, Victor, and Kori struggling for days often yielded easily to Shien.

"Talented" could no longer explain it.

Garrick sat where he was, chills running down his back as sweat slowly gathered in his palms.

He had met geniuses before.

He had seen plenty of young Mechanics, Alchemists, and potion makers whom nobles and the Church held dear.

Some thought quickly by nature. Some had remarkable memories. Some had an almost monstrous instinct for a particular discipline.

But every one of them had limits.

Someone skilled in Constructs might know nothing about potions. Someone versed in enchantment usually had little to do with machinery.

Even Victor's formidable abilities came from his talent and years of work in alchemical Constructs. He did not understand everything the way Shien seemed to.

Just then, something Shien had said when they first met sprang into Garrick's mind.

The Most Holy One's Dream Visitation.

Suddenly, everything that had puzzled him fell into place.

What else could it be?

How else could he explain Shien's age?

How else could he explain abilities that seemed to have no limits?

Garrick's breathing quickened.

His eyes widened, and his hand tightened around the edge of the table.

The thought that had been only a vague suspicion, one he had not even dared examine closely, finally took shape.

Could His Lordship be a Chosen Child of the Holy?

Once the thought formed, he could no longer suppress it.

Sitting in the empty Workshop, Garrick gazed at the nearly finished first prototype of the Semi-Automatic Rune Steam Repeating Crossbow. His scalp prickled.

Elsewhere, having finished his paperwork, Shien opened the Canon of Grace and Righteousness.

Over the past month, the Grace Values of the underground Workshop's dozen or so core technicians had climbed steadily as he shared everything he knew. Garrick alone, that wily old fox, had been the hardest to win over.

He was the most suspicious and calculating of them all. His Grace Value had risen more slowly than anyone else's in the Workshop.

But just now, that number, stuck for so long, had suddenly shot upward as if something had given it a hard shove. Without warning, it had reached deep blue.

Shien watched the change in silence. At last, the faintest smile touched his lips.