Chương 25: More Problems

The Great Hall of the castle was a massive room, but it was no longer large enough. For the first few weeks of the winter, the roaring fire in the central hearth was a miracle. It was the only thing standing between the villagers and a freezing death. But as the first month of the siege slowly dragged on, the novelty of the warmth was completely gone. Over forty people were living, sleeping, and eating inside the single room. The sensory overload was absolute.

The smell of unwashed bodies and boiling cabbage was thick in the air. The noise never truly stopped. A baby was always crying in a corner. An old man was always snoring loudly. The low murmur of dozens of private conversations was very chaotic. Privacy was entirely non-existent. The families had divided the floor of the Great Hall into small, imaginary territories using their meager belongings. A row of wooden stools was the border for the One family. A line of rolled-up blankets was the boundary for another.

Jack was standing on the second-floor interior balcony, looking down at the crowded floor. His brass-headed cane was in his hand. He watched the people below. They were safe from the bandits and winter outside the walls, and the heavy torsion ballistas Barnaby and Giles were building were almost finished. But the physical cold and the bandits were not their only enemies. Cabin fever was setting in.

The sheer mental strain of being trapped in a stone box with forty other terrified, exhausted people was tearing their patience apart. A sudden, sharp crash echoed from the floor below. Near the stone hearth, a fragile wooden drying rack was on its side. A young boy, no older than seven, was standing near it with wide, panicked eyes. The boy had tripped over a floorboard, knocking the rack over. Two pairs of wet boots were originally on that rack.

Now, those filthy boots were resting directly on top of a clean, dry sleeping blanket belonging to a different family.

"Hey!" a harsh, angry voice yelled. A middle-aged man with a thick, unkempt beard jumped up from his spot. He was Thomas, a former miner with a famously short temper. He pointed a trembling finger at the boots on his bedding.

"Keep your brat's filthy boots off my bedding!" Thomas roared, his face turning completely red.

"We only have two dry blankets left! Do you know how long it took to dry those near the fire?" The young boy's father, a thin man named Elric, immediately stepped in front of his son. His own face was tense and defensive.

"He is just a boy, Thomas!" Elric shouted back, his voice cracking with stress.

"It was an accident! He tripped!"

"An accident?" Thomas sneered, stepping closer. He kicked the fallen wooden rack out of the way. The wood splintered loudly against the stone floor.

"Your boy is always running around! Tell him to sit down and stay quiet! This isn't a playground!"

"Do not yell at my son!" Elric yelled, pushing Thomas forcefully in the chest.

"You think we want to be crammed in this stone box with you? You snore like a dying bear all night! My wife hasn't slept in a week!"

"If you don't like it, take your family back to your freezing hut!" Thomas shouted, raising his fists. The entire hall went silent. The tension was like a stretched bowstring, ready to snap. Several other men began to stand up, taking sides in the petty dispute. The stress of the siege was finally looking for a physical outlet. Before a punch could be thrown, a figure pushed through the crowd. Giles stepped directly between the two angry fathers.

The big carpenter placed one hand on Thomas's chest and the other on Elric's shoulder, shoving them firmly apart.

"Enough!" Giles bellowed.

"Put your hands down! Both of you!"

"He ruined my blanket, Giles!" Thomas spat, though he took a step back from the larger man.

"Then you will turn it over and use the other side!" Giles commanded harshly.

"We are besieged! The bandits are still in the woods, and the Beast Tide is less than two months away. If I see any man raising a fist against his neighbor in this hall, I will personally throw him out the front gates into the snow! Are we clear?" Thomas glared at Elric, his jaw tight, but he slowly nodded. Elric grabbed his son's hand and pulled him back to their designated corner. The immediate threat of violence was over, but the toxic, suffocating atmosphere in the room remained.

Up on the balcony, Jack let out a heavy sigh. Giles had stopped the fight, but a simple scolding was not a permanent solution. The villagers were at their breaking point. Jack turned away from the balcony and hobbled down the stairs, heading toward the quieter kitchen corridor at the back of the hall. He needed a moment away from the noise and he was also hungry. When he entered the narrow stone corridor, Karen was there. A large wooden basin of hot water was in front of her.

She was scrubbing the porridge bowls from the morning meal. But she was not alone. Old Martha, the village hedge-witch, was standing next to her. Martha's coat was wrapped tightly around her stooped shoulders. When Jack entered the corridor, the old woman did not bow or offer a polite greeting. Her dark, cynical eyes locked directly onto him. Her expression was incredibly grim.

"Lord Jack," Martha said, her voice a low, raspy whisper.

"We need to talk. Now."

"What is it, Martha?" Jack asked, leaning on his cane. Martha pointed a crooked finger back toward the archway that led to the Great Hall.

"Listen," she commanded. Jack frowned, tilting his head slightly to listen to the chaotic noise of the crowded room. Beneath the sound of crying babies and murmured conversations, a different sound was present. Cough. Hack. Cough. It was the sound of people coughing. Jack had heard it for days, but he had assumed it was simply the lingering effects of the winter chill.

"I hear coughing," Jack said.

"Listen closer," Martha insisted, her eyes narrowing.

"It is not the dry, rattling cough of a simple winter cold. It is wet. It is heavy. It is deep in their chests." Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. Jack listened again. She was right. The coughs coming from the hall sounded thick and congested.

"Three children and two of the elders developed it this morning," Martha explained, her voice entirely devoid of her usual sarcasm.

"I gave them a steep brew of willow bark and pine needles, but it won't be enough. It is the Stone-Sickness."

"The Stone-Sickness?" Jack repeated, unfamiliar with the term.

"It happens when too many people breathe the same stale air in a sealed room," Martha said.

"The walls are thick. The windows are shuttered tight. The heat from your great hearth is a blessing, but forty humans sweating, breathing, and sleeping in one room turns the air into a humid swamp. The stone traps the moisture. It incubates the sickness." Karen stopped washing the bowls. Her hands were trembling in the soapy water.

"Is it deadly, Martha?"

"It killed over a hundred of our people last winter alone," Martha stated bluntly, her dark eyes flashing with a bitter memory." You don't remember? Before your father passed away two years ago, Lord Jack, he had a fierce argument with a visiting officer from the Holy Church. He cursed them for hoarding the empire's wealth while the north froze. Because of his pride, the Church punished us. They deliberately refused to send their healing mages to our valley last year.

When the deep cold hit and the villagers crowded together just like this to share the meager warmth, the sickness spread.

We buried over a hundred bodies in the frozen dirt before the spring thaw." Jack's chest tightened. Martha pointed a crooked finger back at the hall.

"Right now, it is just five people. In three days, it will be fifteen. In a week, every single person in that hall will be drowning in their own lung fluid. If we do not spread these people out and give them fresh, clean air to breathe, half of them will be dead before the Beast Tide ever reaches our walls." He had focused entirely on external threats. He had built defenses, secured food, and started a greenhouse. But he had completely ignored the invisible, silent threat of disease.

His skeletons were completely immune to sickness, but his human subjects were fragile.

"We need to move them out of the Great Hall," Jack said, his mind racing for a solution.

"We need to put them back into their own homes in the village below."

"We can't, My Lord," Karen interrupted, her voice frantic.

"You saw the village huts before the siege. The walls are single-plank timber. The mud chinking is cracked and frozen. If we send the families back to those drafty boxes, they won't die of fever. The deep winter wind will freeze them solid in a single night." Martha nodded in agreement.

"The girl is right. The huts are death traps. That is why they all moved into the castle in the first place." Jack stood in the corridor, leaning heavily on his cane. The situation was a massive, contradictory puzzle. They could not stay in the warm castle because the cramped conditions were breeding a deadly plague. But they could not return to the spread-out village because the houses were completely incapable of retaining heat and protecting from the beast tide.

"I understand the danger, Martha," Jack finally said. His voice was calm, projecting an authority he did not entirely feel.

"Keep brewing your willow bark. Keep the sick ones near the edges of the hall, away from the direct heat of the fire. I will find a solution." Martha looked at him, her dark eyes searching his pale face. She didn't argue. She simply gave a slow nod and shuffled back toward the main hall. Jack turned and made his way back up the stairs toward his private bedchamber. The room was perfectly quiet. A small, bright fire was in his personal hearth. Jack walked over to his heavy wooden writing desk and sat down.

A stack of blank, rough parchment was on the desk, along with a piece of black charcoal. He stared at the blank parchment. He needed to build houses. He needed to build shelters that were spread out enough to prevent the spread of disease, but warm enough to survive a winter with minimal coal. As he stared at the empty page, Jack's mind drifted away from the frozen wasteland of the Frost-Grip fief. His thoughts traveled backward, across the boundaries of his transmigration, returning to his past life.

He thought about his old identity. Before he was John Frost-Grip, before he was a corporate logistics manager stuck in endless meetings, he had been a son. His father was a renowned civil engineer in a sprawling, modern city. Jack closed his eyes. The memory was incredibly vivid. He could perfectly recall the sharp, distinct smell of black coffee in his father's home office. Massive, slanted drafting tables were in the center of the room, covered in complex blueprints and architectural schematics.

As a boy, Jack had loved that room. He had spent countless hours sitting on a tall stool beside his father. His father was a stubborn, pragmatic man who loved strong foundations. He didn't design beautiful, sweeping glass monuments or artistic museums. He designed functional, durable structures. He designed housing blocks for harsh climates, bridges that could withstand earthquakes, and heating systems that were perfectly optimized.

"A house is not just a wooden box, Jack," his father's voice echoed clearly in his memory.

"It is a shelter that must actively fight the weather. If you do not understand how the wind finds the cracks, how the heat rises and escapes, and how much heavy snow a roof can truly hold, your box will fail the people sleeping inside it." His dream was to follow in his father's footsteps. But the real world was cruel. The college entrance exams for the top engineering universities were highly competitive. Jack had studied until his eyes bled, but when the test results came back, he had failed.

He missed the cutoff score by a tiny margin. His dream was entirely crushed. He lacked the elite academic credentials to become an architect or a civil engineer. Defeated, he took a safe, reliable job in corporate logistics, organizing supply chains and managing warehouse schedules. He spent years moving boxes from one facility to another, his knowledge of structural engineering completely useless and forgotten. Until now. Jack opened his eyes, looking at the blank parchment on his desk.

His corporate logistics skills had kept this fief alive so far. His ability to organize his skeletal Night Shift and his supply chain management had saved them from starvation. But logistics could not cure the Stone-Sickness. Logistics could not keep a drafty wooden hut warm. To save his people, he needed the knowledge he thought he had abandoned forever. He needed his father's teachings. Jack picked up the piece of black charcoal. He didn't need to design a modern skyscraper.

He didn't need steel beams or concrete. He needed to apply the simple, unyielding rules of trapping heat and managing cold to the materials he had on hand. He pressed the charcoal against the parchment and began to draw. His hand moved with a focused energy. He sketched the outline of a small, rectangular cabin.

"The current huts are single-plank walls with mud chinking," Jack muttered to himself, his eyes darting across the paper.

"The wind cuts right through the wood, and the mud freezes and cracks. The heat from their fires escapes instantly." He drew a second line parallel to the first wall on the blueprint.

"Double-timber walls," Jack decided.

"A house within a house. Leave a six-inch gap between the inner and outer planks." A hollow wall was better than a solid one, but it wasn't enough for this extreme cold. The gap would eventually become a freezing wind-tunnel. He needed insulation to trap the dead air. In his modern world, they used fiberglass. Here, he had to use what was available in a primitive winter setting.

"Sawdust," Jack whispered, writing the word in the margin.

"And dry ash from the forge and the hearths. We pack the gap between the walls completely full of tightly pressed ash, sawdust, and dry pine needles. It will trap the air and prevent the heat transfer." He moved to the roof. The current huts had flat or slightly slanted roofs that collapsed under the heavy snowdrifts. Jack drew a high, steep-pitched, triangular roof.

"A fifty-degree angle. The snow will not gather. The weight of it will force it to slide right off the wooden shingles, preventing a collapse." Finally, he focused on the center of the cabin. The villagers used simple, open dirt hearths in their homes. The smoke choked the room, and most of the heat went straight up a poorly built hole in the roof. The floors were always freezing dirt or stone. Jack applied the exact same logic he had used for the greenhouse.

He sketched a large, central stone hearth in the middle of the cabin. But instead of the heat just radiating outward from the fire, he drew a network of shallow stone channels radiating from the base of the hearth, running directly underneath the wooden floorboards of the cabin.

"A domestic hypocaust," Jack wrote. When a fire was lit in the central hearth, the hot exhaust and ambient heat would be forced under the floorboards before venting out a side chimney. The stone channels would absorb the heat. The floor itself would become a warm radiator. Combined with the thick, ash-insulated double walls, the cabin would trap the heat perfectly. It would require only a tiny fraction of the coal to stay sweltering warm, even in the middle of a blizzard. Jack leaned back in his chair.

He looked at the finished blueprint. It was simple, pragmatic, and incredibly effective. It was a Winter Cabin.

"We don't need to build forty of them," Jack realized, doing the math in his head.

"We just need to build a few large, communal cabins to thin out the Great Hall. Four or five families per cabin. It will give them privacy, clean air, and absolute warmth." He carefully rolled the parchment up.