Could He Be a Chosen Child of the Holy?

Garrick stared at the blueprint. What rose in him first was not admiration, but a cold, barbed sneer.

What sort of man had Victor been back then? Even the red-robed bishops of the Church had treated him with courtesy when asking for his help. He was a master of Constructs.

Now that he had fallen to a wretched place like Blackpine Fief, he had learned to bow his head after all.

The blueprints were still his, but the credit went to a fourteen-year-old lord. Plainly, he was trying to secure a way to survive.

Garrick was not surprised. He had done the same thing inland: the powerful wanted fame, scholars wanted money, and everyone got what they needed.

So he said nothing. If Victor was willing to put on a show, Garrick did not mind playing along. He knew the rules well enough.

That was what Garrick had thought. But over the next half month, everything Shien did smashed those notions to pieces.

Every evening during that half month, the silver-haired lord entered the Workshop on time, went straight to the blackboard, and drew and revised designs alongside Victor.

Most of the time, before the others had caught up, the two of them had already worked through the next step.

Holding a piece of charcoal, Shien casually sketched a complex transmission assembly 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 will take a lot of strain off the main shaft."

Garrick was still looking down, trying to work out why that change would help, when Victor jerked his head up. His one eye shone.

"So we can do it this way... That sheds the lateral torque. The main shaft won't need those complicated Runes anymore. One set of Balancing Runes will be enough."

Standing behind them, Garrick felt a chill down his spine. He had understood half of it, and that was precisely what made the chill worse.

And so, with Shien and Victor each adding strokes in turn, the blueprint was completed.

But a workable blueprint did not mean they could build the thing. The moment they tried to move it from parchment to anvil and boiler, Blackpine Fief's crude craftsmanship slammed everyone face-first into the floor.

The boiler failed first. Kori and the blacksmiths hammered away for three days before they finished the first thick-walled boiler shell.

But as soon as they began the closed-loop test and burned Sourceblood, the water tank's steam had not even reached full pressure when the entire Pig Iron boiler began to bulge and warp. Tiny cracking sounds came from its surface.

Everyone nearby went pale. They could all see that if it held for a few more breaths, it would blow up half the laboratory, people and all.

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

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

Most of the force that should have driven the mechanism forward vanished in an instant. After several tests, they could not even achieve stable propulsion, let alone draw the string. The mood in the Workshop sank to rock bottom.

Victor stood before the heap of ruined parts that were still smoking black and said nothing for a long while. The old man had already been thin; after days without proper rest, he looked even more like a rotten branch.

At last, he spoke hoarsely. "My lord, there's nothing wrong with the blueprints. The materials we have are too poor. This boiler, these guide rails, these seals—they simply can't withstand that kind of force.

"Unless we pour high-tier Runes into every critical component, layering on strength, 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 go straight back to the old way of doing things: expensive, slow, and impossible to mass-produce.

And right now, time and resources were exactly what Blackpine Fief lacked most.

Then Shien suddenly spoke. "Who said we have to force it to hold?"

He walked over to the bulging, warped boiler and rapped the scalding iron shell. "If the pressure's too high, don't keep it bottled up.

"Give it an outlet and let it vent the excess steam. Open it when the pressure crosses the limit, then close it when it falls back to a safe level."

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

Before most of the others had grasped his meaning, Shien turned to the piston.

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

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

Once Shien finished speaking, the whole Workshop came alive again. It had been like this for days: his flights of imagination had helped the team solve one problem after another.

And that was not the most frightening part. Garrick realized that Shien knew far more than Alchemical Constructs and mechanical design.

The Semi-Automatic Steam Repeating Crossbow, Poisonfire Mines, cultivating Living Vine... Wherever he went, he always found a finishing touch that sped up the research.

The true pillar of this underground Workshop was indeed Shien, not Victor.

But that did not mean Shien surpassed Victor in every skill.

When it came to the demanding work of Alchemical Constructs, rune inscription, and material ratios, Victor remained the Workshop's most indispensable man. He had once been the continent's foremost Alchemical Artificer, after all.

Yet whenever they reached a dead end, whenever a group of them stood around the blackboard with bloodshot eyes and no answer in sight, it was usually Shien who made the final call.

Unlike Victor, he could not draw an entire advanced Construct blueprint by hand from start to finish.

But at the crucial moment, he could always give something no one else had considered the lightest nudge, and suddenly the whole game came alive. His solutions were always simple and rough, yet nothing like them had ever appeared in this world.

Late one night, the underground Workshop finally fell quiet.

Most of the people had long since left. Garrick sat alone at a workbench, the repeating crossbow sketch spread before him, now dense with revisions. A piece of charcoal rested 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 a tangled skein of thread he could not unravel.

He had thought he understood it all. Life had broken Victor's backbone, forcing him to put his blueprints and achievements in the lord's name. Shien was merely a lucky young noble with a little knowledge of alchemy.

As for this underground Workshop, Garrick had initially seen it as nothing more than a crude little place putting on airs beside the Eternal Night Wall.

But after this month, he realized he was the one who had understood nothing from the start.

What Shien knew was far too broad, and far too deep.

Alchemical Constructs, mechanical principles, the fine judgment of heat in metal forging... He could even listen in on a discussion about cultivating Living Vine, then point straight to the heart of the matter.

Problems that had left Garrick, Victor, Kori, and the others stumped for days were easily untangled when Shien looked at them.

"Talent" alone could not explain it.

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

It was not as though he had never met geniuses.

He had met plenty of young mechanics, Alchemists, and potion-makers cherished by nobles and the Church.

Some had quick minds from birth, some had excellent memories, and some had a monstrous instinct for one particular field.

But they all had limits.

A person skilled in Constructs might know nothing of potions. Someone deeply versed in enchantment usually left machinery alone.

Even with a man like Victor, what made him truly formidable was his accumulated knowledge and talent in Alchemical Constructs, not an ability to understand everything like this.

Just then, the words Shien had spoken to Garrick when they first met suddenly flashed through his mind.

The Most Holy One's Dream Visitation.

And all at once, everything that had baffled him fell into place.

What other explanation was there?

How else could anyone explain his age?

And how could anyone explain abilities that seemed to have no limits?

Garrick's breathing gradually quickened.

His eyes widened bit by bit, and his hand tightened around the corner of the table without his noticing.

The thought that had been vague before, one he had not even dared examine closely, finally took clear shape.

Could this lord be a Chosen Child of the Holy?

Once the thought took shape, he could no longer suppress it.

Sitting in the empty Workshop, Garrick stared at the nearly completed prototype Semi-Automatic Rune Steam Repeating Crossbow in the distance. Even his scalp tingled.

Elsewhere, Shien finished dealing with official documents and opened the Canon of Grace and Righteousness.

Over the past month, the Grace Values of the dozen or so core technicians in the underground Workshop had climbed steadily as he shared everything he knew. Only Garrick, that crafty old fox, had proved hard 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, the value that had been stuck for so long had shot upward without warning, as though something had given it a mighty shove. It went straight to deep blue.

Shien quietly watched the change, and at last, the corner of his mouth lifted ever so slightly.