Herad sold the batch of long-barreled muskets he had purchased to the rangers at cost.
He disdained making money by marking up goods as a middleman.
Equipping large numbers of rangers with ranged weapons like muskets would draw the attention of other high elves.
Once the first batch of muskets opened up the market, the weapons factory Herad had established would start receiving orders.
After arranging a date with Sylvanas to test the muskets in actual combat, he quickly left the ranger training camp.
He had already spent quite a lot of time strengthening the high elves' war potential.
Now it was time to buckle down and train!
However, the Silvermoon City Royal Academy of Magic had fairly strict teaching requirements.
He still had to attend his scheduled classes every day.
Besides, the lecturers genuinely knew their stuff. They did not simply recite from textbooks.
Herad considered himself quite skilled in golemcraft.
He had modified arcane golems to make them sturdier, smarter, and more precise in their movements.
But after attending Grand Archmage Rommath's lectures, he realized his improvements were merely minor tricks.
No matter how many clever modifications he made to an arcane golem, it remained an arcane golem.
Rommath, on the other hand, was making changes at the fundamental level.
He was researching how to power golems with other forms of magical energy rather than arcane energy.
Existing arcane golems absorbed ambient arcane energy as their power source.
Thanks to the Sunwell, Quel'Thalas had an abundant supply of arcane energy.
But once arcane golems left Quel'Thalas, they were like robots running on ordinary batteries. They would run out of power before long.
Arcane golems were vital war machines.
But their dependence on arcane energy made it difficult for them to display their strength elsewhere.
When Herad visited Dalaran, he had not seen arcane golems wandering through every street and alley as they did in Silvermoon City.
The energy they consumed patrolling the streets was more than Dalaran's modest energy concentration could sustain.
Yet Dalaran's energy concentration was at least twice that of the outside world.
Even there, arcane golems could not operate at full capacity.
The situation elsewhere hardly needed explaining!
Whether arcane golems wore heavy armor or moved with greater agility, neither improvement was as useful as developing an entirely new power source.
Finding a new power source was not that easy, however.
Suitable sources of energy were all difficult to access.
One example was the liquid energy that formed the water of the Sunwell.
When Herad suggested it to Rommath, the Grand Archmage, who possessed no small amount of authority, replied dejectedly:
"Only members of the Royal Family can approach the Sunwell. There's no way we can get any of its water for experiments!"
At this point, Rommath was not yet a powerful leader who stood above everyone but the king.
He was merely a member of the High Elf Council.
Thinking of the bizarre High Elf Council, Herad shook his head helplessly.
Its members were certainly all intelligent people.
But gathering too many intelligent people together meant that reaching a consensus was difficult.
The enemy might already be at their doorstep while hundreds of council members were still chattering away in debate.
By the time they reached a conclusion, the High Elf Kingdom might already have fallen!
Everyone knew that the council system had serious flaws.
Yet changing it was absolutely impossible!
When the high elves split from the night elves, the Sunstrider family had led everyone on their migration to the New Continent.
They were leaders who had worked hard and rendered great service.
Out of respect for the Sunstrider family, everyone had chosen them as the royal line, granting them a greater say in affairs.
But any proposal the royal line put forward still required the approval of most council members.
The involvement of Noble Factions large and small had turned the High Elf Kingdom's politics into a complete mess!
Changing this vast, cumbersome structure would mean subjecting the high elven race to a brutal purge.
At least half the population would have to be eliminated before the Sunstrider family could gain absolute control of the government.
Human kingdoms could afford such a bloody change of regime.
Their population could recover to its former level in thirty or forty years at most, and might even grow far beyond it.
Europe on Earth had endured the ravages of the Black Death, smallpox, and influenza pandemics. Its population had suffered devastating losses, yet it had still quickly returned to prosperity.
That was why humans could do well in any world!
High elves did not have that advantage.
Their population grew very slowly, on a timescale measured almost in millennia.
Losing large numbers of people would mean throwing away thousands of years of effort.
No matter how ambitious those in power were, they would never consider a purge.
Thus, the unfortunate high elven king could only watch the council members cause trouble in every conceivable way.
The Royalists, the Neutralists, the New Party, the Old Party, and the Opposition Party.
These factions kept one another in check, creating a situation that left him speechless.
Faced with such circumstances, even Herad's foreknowledge could do little to change things.
Besides, Azeroth had bronze dragons that commanded the power of time.
Without knowing where those dragons drew the line, he truly did not dare make any major moves.
What if the bronze dragons discovered that he was a destabilizing factor and came together to wipe him out?
Wouldn't he be completely screwed then?
All he could do was train hard and improve the high elves' racial strength in ways that were perfectly reasonable.
For example, no one had said high elves could not cooperate with gnomes to establish factories.
What was wrong with high elves hunting with muskets?
If the high elves discovered that muskets worked well and then used them to shoot trolls, that was perfectly reasonable too.
If the bronze dragons thought that was unreasonable, they could always blast through the high elves' magical barrier and eliminate every destabilizing factor!
Herad did not believe bronze dragons carrying out a mission would dare run wild in high elven territory.
The high elves had quite a good relationship with the red dragons.
Korialstrasz, the Red Dragon Queen's consort, had even taken the form of the high elven mage Krasus and joined Dalaran's Council of Six alongside Prince Kael'thas.
The red and bronze dragonflights both belonged to the ranks of the Dragon Aspects.
And the red dragons were the strongest among them.
The bronze dragons might get away with quietly killing a few high elves.
But slaughtering high elves on a large scale for using firearms would certainly provoke the red dragons' wrath.
Herad was extremely cautious in how he operated.
He had been quietly testing the bronze dragons' reactions all along.
Yet the bronze dragons clearly did not care about a minor figure like him.
Jindi had recruited a group of gnomish engineers to come to Quel'Thalas, and that had not prompted any action from the bronze dragons either.
As he watched the factory buildings rapidly taking shape on the small island off Sunsail Anchorage, Herad's fear of the bronze dragons diminished considerably.
If even a move like this had not stirred them, their oversight could not be all that strict.
Still, he would never push his luck with increasingly reckless tests.
If he really did provoke the bronze dragons, he might simply vanish without a trace.
Herad did not think he was recklessly tempting fate.
Yet within a rift in spacetime beyond his ability to detect, an ocher dragon was watching him.
The ocher dragon was a bronze dragon.
At that moment, the phantom image of an hourglass flickered in its eyes.
The bronze dragon was casting time magic to examine Herad's past.
It saw every experience from the more than two hundred years since Herad's birth with perfect clarity.
After watching the young high elf and finding nothing unusual whatsoever, the bronze dragon agonized over the matter for a while before finally deciding to stop monitoring him.
Before you continue