Chương 61: Planning

The rhythmic sound of iron striking rock echoed through the main tunnel of the coal mine. Corin wiped a thick layer of sweat from his forehead. He swung his heavy pickaxe again, shattering a large chunk of black coal from the wall. His muscles ached with a deep exhaustion, but he didn't stop. Behind him, several other male slaves were quickly scooping the fallen coal into wooden wheelbarrows. They worked in the dim light of oil lanterns.

Despite the grueling physical labor, Corin found himself entirely surprised by the conditions. He had seen slaves working in mines before. Usually, they were death traps filled with rotting support beams and foul, suffocating air. There was no deadly gas. There were no cruel overseers with leather whips standing behind them. There were only quotas. Barnaby the blacksmith had given them a daily amount of coal to harvest, and as long as they met it, they were left alone to work.

"Wheelbarrow is full," a younger slave panted, lifting the wooden handles.

"Take it up to the bathhouse and the forge," Corin instructed, his voice rough.

"Keep your head down." Corin followed the young man out of the dark mine tunnel and into the bright summer sunlight. The valley was completely green, a sharp contrast to the black dust covering their clothes. As they walked toward the center of the village, Corin saw Lyra and Elara. The twin sisters were struggling to carry two massive, sloshing wooden buckets of water up from the river. Their hands were red and blistered from the ropes. A group of three village children were standing near the path.

The oldest was a boy no older than ten, wearing a coat. He was the son of one of the militiamen. The ten-year-old boy stepped directly into the path, blocking the twins.

"Hurry up, slaves," the young boy ordered harshly, crossing his arms and putting on a scowl that mimicked his father.

"My mother needs that water for the laundry. If you spill it, you'll have to go all the way back down to the river. Move your feet!" Lyra bit her lip, her eyes flashing with a brief spark of anger, but Elara quickly squeezed her sister's arm.

"Yes, young master," Elara said quietly, bowing her head submissively.

"We are moving as fast as we can." The children laughed mockingly as the two older women struggled to carry the heavy buckets around them. Corin tightened his grip on his pickaxe handle, a bitter taste in his mouth. In this world, slavery was as normal as the rising sun. Even the children were conditioned to view anyone with a slave's mark as property, something lower than a stray dog.

The adults in the village didn't beat them, adhering strictly to Lord Jack's laws, but the verbal disrespect and the harsh social divide were a constant, heavy burden. Corin forced himself to look away. He remembered the warm bunkhouse waiting for him, the hot stew he would get at night, and the magical twenty-year contract bound to his hand. He put his head down and kept walking. High above the village, standing on his stone balcony, Jack was overseeing the village's condition.

He rested both hands heavily on his cane. He didn't like seeing people treated like animals, but he knew he could not change the deeply ingrained culture of an entire world overnight. If he tried to force the original villagers to treat the slaves as complete equals, the original villagers would feel cheated and angry, and the social order of his fief would collapse.

"The hierarchy keeps the peace," Jack thought to himself.

"They suffer the insults now, but in twenty years, they will be free citizens owning the land they are currently walking on." Jack turned away from the balcony and walked back into his study. He moved slightly slower than usual. For the past two months, ever since the night he had collapsed on the balcony, a deep, lingering sense of caution had settled over him. He sat down at his wooden desk and placed his hand over his chest. His Iron Core was dense stable, but he kept his magic entirely suppressed.

He could not stop thinking about that boundless darkness. And the massive entities he had felt lurking in the absolute depths. The sheer, crushing weight of their ancient presence terrified him. He had absolutely no idea what they were, or why his magic had accidentally brushed against them when he expanded his core. Or so he thought. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. Because of that fear, Jack had severely limited his use of necromancy.

He hadn't raised a single new bone. He hadn't used Grim, the giant skeletal wolf, in two months. And he had officially retired the fifteen skeletons of the Night Shift from surface labor. With ninety-four living, breathing people now occupying the valley, the risk of a villager or a slave waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a skeleton hauling wood was simply too high. The skeletons simply stood dormant in the dark, waiting. All the labor on the surface was now done by living human hands.

But Jack still needed someone to keep the peace. He still needed a heavy enforcer. Jack closed his eyes and focused his mind, tapping into the thin thread of mana connecting him to his lone guardian. To the villagers, the towering, heavily armored figure was the last remaining 'private mage' who had guarded Lord Jack since the winter. Originally, there had been three of them. But during the bandit raid months ago, one of the armored guards had taken a heavy blow and collapsed.

Jack had smoothly covered the incident by telling the villagers that the mage had died, and that his brother had taken the news and traveled back to their homeland to mourn. That left only the third guard. Or so the villagers thought. In reality, Bones, the skeleton who used to wear the heavy iron chainmail, was currently locked away deep in the crypts with the rest of the undead. Jack had executed a clever piece of social engineering.

A month ago, he had publicly announced that the "Wanderer"—the pale fire mage who guarded the gates—had fulfilled his contract. Elias had walked out of the village gates wearing his traveler's cloak while the village waved goodbye, completely convinced the mercenary was returning to where he had come from. In secret, Elias had simply walked a mile up the mountain road, turned around in the cover of the woods, and sneaked back into the castle through the hidden cellar chute.

Jack had put Elias directly into Bones's heavy armor. Now, Jack had a flesh-bound guard with elite combat instincts hidden in plain sight. Through the mental link, Jack looked through Elias's dead eyes. The armored guard was currently standing near Barnaby's forge. Barnaby was standing next to a massive, incredibly thick square of solid iron. It was the heavy baseplate for the new blast furnace he was building.

Four strong male slaves were standing around it, sweating and panting, completely unable to lift the massive block of metal.

"It's too heavy, Master Barnaby," one of the slaves gasped, rubbing his lower back.

"We need wooden levers and ropes." Barnaby sighed, wiping soot from his face. Then, he looked up and saw the armored guard standing nearby.

"Ah, the Lord's mage," Barnaby grunted.

"Give us a hand with this, friend? Step aside, men." The slaves quickly backed away, looking nervously at the silent, armored giant. Elias did not move. Because he possessed no human consciousness, he did not understand the social nuance of a request. He was a weapon awaiting a wielder. Sitting in his study, Jack felt the cue. He pushed a steady, focused stream of mana down the tether.

"Move that iron baseplate to the marked spot by the furnace," Jack commanded mentally. Elias did not need step-by-step instructions. Once given the goal, the fire mage's elite muscle memory and combat instincts took over. He walked forward, adjusted his footing to distribute the weight, and wedged his armored fingers under the edge of the solid iron block. He stood up. Fueled by the dense, raw mana Jack pumped from his Iron Core, Elias's dead muscles didn't feel the strain or the gravity of the metal.

He hauled the massive plate as if it were a simple wooden crate, walked it over to the designated spot, and dropped it with a heavy thud. The slaves stared in absolute, wide-eyed terror. They subconsciously took a step back, their faces drained of color. Barnaby just laughed.

"Thank you, friend. That saves me an hour of rigging." Elias did not respond. Jack simply commanded him to turn around and resume his patrol. The display of impossible strength had an immediate effect. The slaves quickly picked up their tools and got back to work, absolutely terrified of breaking the rules and angering the young lord who commanded such monsters. Order was maintained without Jack having to lift a finger or raise his voice. Up in the study, Jack opened his primary ledger.

He was doing the preparation for the upcoming months. Fifty new laborers meant a massive increase in productivity. The coal mine was booming, the loggers were hauling huge amounts of timber, and the farming was also going really well. But ninety-four people also meant ninety-four mouths to feed. The single glass greenhouse they had built against the castle wall had kept scurvy away during the last winter, but it was nowhere near large enough to provide staple crops for a population this size.

They needed a massive expansion of indoor agriculture before the snow fell again. Furthermore, human labor had a hard limit. Hauling heavy buckets of water from the river to the bathhouse took hours. Dragging timber took days. Even with fifty extra slaves, simple logistical tasks were eating up all their daylight.

"I need better tools," Jack muttered.

"I need to make use of magic." He began to write a shopping list. 1. Clear Glass Panes (Massive quantities required for building five new winter greenhouses). 2. Spatial Rings (Even low-grade storage rings would allow a single man to haul a mountain of coal or timber without breaking his back). 3. Water-Purification Stones (To clean the river water instantly without needing to boil it for hours). 4. Magical Heat Runes (To maintain temperature in the greenhouses more efficiently than coal). Jack looked at the list.

These were not items he could buy from a simple traveling merchant. These were specialized, high-tier magical and industrial goods. Selling coal and furs made him rich in copper and silver, but magical artifacts cost a fortune in pure gold. He would have to leverage every uncut mountain gem his skeletons had found deep in the bedrock just to afford a few of these items. He just needed to get there safely.

The roads were dangerous, and traveling as an unprotected noble with a fortune in raw gems was a death sentence. Jack opened the top drawer of his desk. He reached inside and pulled out the whistle with the intricate gold veins. The whistle Inquisitor Silas Thorne had given him.

"Well, Silas," Jack smiled coldly, rolling the magical artifact between his fingers.

"You said you would answer my call. It is time to see if the Holy Church honors its promises."