Chương 52: A Secret Trade

Jack was still siting on the edge of his bed, staring down at his pale hands. He closed his eyes and sifted through the inherited memories of the original John Frost-Grip. When he had a Grey Core, those memories had been foggy and fragmented, like trying to read a book through a dirty window. Now that his core had evolved, the knowledge was much clearer. The progression of a mage was not just a straight line. The Grey Core was nothing more than a foundation, a gaseous gathering of mana.

But once a mage compressed that gas into a solid state, they reached the Iron Core. Beyond Iron was Bronze, then Silver, and finally the legendary Gold Core. More importantly, Jack now understood the internal structure of these higher stages. Every core stage from Iron onward was divided into three distinct layers. Layer One was stabilization. Layer Two was expansion. Layer Three was the absolute peak of concentration, the final step before evolving to the next layer.

Jack was currently at Layer One of the Iron Core. He was at the very bottom of a brand new ladder, but the sheer difference in power was staggering. He could feel his connection to his undead with absolute clarity. Rusty, Dusty, Bones, and the rest of the skeletons were currently deep underground. Jack could sense their locations perfectly. Then, he turned his mental focus toward the deepest part of the crypts. Elias Varna. The ancestral sworn guard. The flesh-bound fire mage.

Connecting to Elias the previous night had nearly drained Jack to the point of passing out. The cost of forcing a dead body with frozen muscles and vocal cords to move and speak was astronomical. But Jack didn't need to control Elias like a puppet. Because Elias still had his flesh and his deeply ingrained combat instincts, Jack only needed to act as a commander, not a puppeteer. Jack took a slow breath and tested a theory. Instead of gripping the mental link to Elias with his full strength, Jack relaxed his mind.

He let the thick tether of mana shrink and fade until it was nothing more than a "thin thread." It worked. The crushing mental weight vanished. Jack could still feel that Elias was standing perfectly still in the crypt, but it required zero effort to maintain the connection. It felt like a light tug on a fishing line. If Elias encountered danger or something would happen to him, that thread would pulse, alerting Jack instantly.

"Delegation," Jack whispered to himself, a genuine smile forming on his lips.

"That is the true power of this stage." He grabbed his cane and walked out of his bedchamber. It was time to see the state of his village. When Jack stepped out onto the balcony overlooking the courtyard, the smell of burning coal and roasting fat washed over him. The Beast Tide had not been a single night of combat. It was an ongoing season of survival. Driven mad by the freezing temperatures deep in the mountain peaks, packs of starving predators had been throwing themselves at the village every few days.

But the village was no longer a group of terrified, freezing peasants. They were now like a fortified, well-oiled machine. Down in thevillage, the scene was one of organized industry. The deep defensive trench outside the walls had done its job perfectly, catching the charging beasts and allowing the militia to spear them from above. Now, the courtyard was filled with the results. Dozens of dead dire wolves, massive snow boars, and mountain cats were laid out on snowy ground.

Giles and the village men were working with cleavers, butchering the animals with efficiency. Because salt was incredibly rare and expensive, Jack had instructed the villagers to build smoking sheds along the inner walls. The people had hauled up extra coal and green pine branches for this exact purpose. Right now, thick plumes of fragrant smoke were rising from the wooden sheds as thousands of pounds of beast meat were being cured and preserved.

What had once been a terrifying fight for their lives had turned into an economic boom. The village now had more meat than they could possibly eat before spring. The women were scraping and stretching massive beast hides over wooden frames to cure them into valuable furs. Even the bones were not wasted. The older children were using stones to crush the smaller beast bones into coarse powder, making fertilizer for the greenhouse.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Jack nodded in satisfaction. He mentally checked in with the mining crew below the castle. The undead operation was running perfectly. The skeletons had successfully sealed seven dangerous, toxic side-channels in the old mine, securing the main vein. Jack walked down the mountain path to the village. As soon as the villagers saw him, they stopped their work and bowed their heads in deep respect.

He was no longer the sickly boy-lord they had pitied. He was their savior.

"Lord Jack!" Giles called out, wiping blood and grease from his forearms with a rag. He walked over, followed closely by Barnaby the blacksmith.

"How are the meat reserves looking, Giles?" Jack asked, leaning on his cane.

"Better than we could have ever dreamed, my Lord," Giles said, a massive grin on his face.

"If the merchants make it up the mountain pass this spring, we'll have enough cured meat and furs to buy out their entire caravans. The men are in high spirits. Let the beasts come, I say!"

"That's right but don't get too careless," Jack warned flatly.

"The animals are getting larger. The last wave had bears."

"That is exactly what we wanted to talk to you about, Lord Jack," Barnaby interrupted. The blacksmith looked tired, his face smeared with black soot.

"The trench is good, and the spears work on the wolves. But those mountain bears' furs are too thick. Even after taking five spears to the chest, they keep climbing. We need to build more ballistas. The one in the castle is the only thing that drops the big ones quickly." Jack nodded.

"Then build three more. We have plenty of timber from the logging crews. Position one on each watchtower." Barnaby sighed, rubbing the back of his neck.

"We have the wood, my Lord. The problem is the metal. We are completely out of iron." Jack frowned.

"All of it?"

"Every last scrap," Barnaby confirmed grimly.

"I used it all to forge the tension gears and winches for the first ballista, the iron brackets for the greenhouse roof, as you had asked and the chainmail for your… special armored guards. A wooden gear will snap under the tension of a ballista bowstring. And we need iron to forge the tips of the bolts but it can be replaced with bones. But without iron, I can't build the baallistas." Jack looked around the bustling village. It was a frustrating irony.

They had endless food, endless coal, and a tireless undead workforce, but they were entirely bottlenecked by basic metals.

"Understood," Jack said quietly.

"Make do with the spears and the single ballista for now. Use the sharpened bones of the dire wolves to tip the arrows if you have to. I will find a solution for the iron." Later that night, the village was completely dark and silent. The snow had stopped falling, leaving the forest outside the walls perfectly still under the moonlight. Jack was sitting in his warm bedchamber, a ledger open on his desk. But his eyes were closed. It was time to test his new capabilities.

He reached into his chest and tugged on the thin thread connected to the crypts.

"Elias." Deep underground, the eyes of the ancestral guard snapped open. Jack did not give him complicated instructions. He didn't tell Elias how to walk, how to hold his hands, or how to navigate the stairs. He simply sent a single command down the mental thread: " Go into the forest. Hunt. Find the source of the beasts." Jack felt the thread stretch as Elias left the crypt, silently moving through the castle and slipping out over the castle walls.

Jack remained in his chair, the heat of the hearth warming his back. He didn't feel the biting cold of the wind outside. He didn't have to manage Elias's balance in the deep snow. Elias was a weapon that aimed and fired itself. Hours passed. Jack casually reviewed his logistical ledgers, doing some calculations on how many furs they could trade for iron bars when spring arrived. The mental drain from Elias was completely negligible.

Suddenly, around midnight, the thin thread in Jack's mind gave a sharp, violent pulse. Jack dropped his quill pen. He leaned back in his chair and fully extended his consciousness down the tether, tapping into Elias's vision. The world shifted. Jack was no longer looking at his wooden desk. He was looking through Elias's dead eyes, surrounded by the dark, towering pines of the deep forest. The snow here was thick and undisturbed. Elias had stopped moving.

He was standing in a small clearing heavily shadowed by the trees. Jack ordered Elias to step forward and look down. Lying in the center of the snowy clearing were the massive carcasses of three snow boars. But they hadn't been killed by the village militia, and they hadn't been torn apart by larger predators. Jack commanded Elias to crouch and inspect the bodies closely. The dead mage's hands brushed away the snow covering the closest boar. Jack's heart went cold.

The boar had a deep, perfectly clean puncture wound in the side of its neck. A spear thrust. And embedded deep in the thick shoulder of another boar was the broken shaft of a wooden arrow. A long slice, easily made by an iron broadsword, had gutted the third beast. These were human weapons. Jack stared through Elias's eyes. The village militia had not come out this far. Merchants wouldn't be hunting in the dead of winter. There was only one group of humans desperate enough to be out in these freezing woods.

The Bandits. The ones who had attacked the Castle several weeks ago. Jack had assumed the freezing weather and the starvation had wiped out the survivors who fled into the trees. But they hadn't died. They had adapted. They were lurking just outside the village's patrol radius, poaching the beasts that were migrating toward the castle. They were surviving, and they were watching. Jack pulled his consciousness back to his own body, opening his eyes in his warm bedroom. His jaw tightened.

He could not afford an enemy camp waiting at his back, especially when the mountain passes melted and the spring caravans arrived. He reached back to the thin thread connecting him to his flesh-bound mage in the dark woods. He sent a new, very simple command.

"Track them."