Extra's Sign In System: The Hero's an Idiot!

Chapter 235: Chapter 235: The Anvil and the Ink

Chapter 235: The Anvil and the Ink

The nights were sleepless. Overworking was in the veins of the Forge District.

In the main workshop floor, Master Engineer Halvers stood with a slate in his hand. It contained the data about the projects ongoing for the next week.

"Right," he said. "Somebody explain to me why we are not building a tower every two days?"

Nobody answered him.

The world had matured eight days ago and the rate at which she was producing the leaves had increased. It was four times the old rate.

They had prepared three Towers.

"We have the steel," Halvers continued, ticking it off. "We have the credits. We have two hundred and forty workers, forty smiths, and a scribe corps that can copy Voltaire’s lattice work in their sleep."

He looked up.

"We have leaves coming out of that courtyard faster than we can carry them across the city."

He pointed the slate at the far bench.

"And we have one Cole Rust."

Cole did not look up from the anvil.

CLANG.

He had been in the cradle for eleven hours. The way he hammered the Star-Iron was so intricate that it felt like an artist drawing a Masterpiece. Each hit of his hammer made it look less like a Machine part, but more like a nest.

Every strike had a rhythm only he could hear, which further guided him into making that Masterpiece.

"You are taking thirty hours preparing a single cradle," Halvers said.

"The leaves are not the constraint anymore lad. You are. We do not have people capable of making the cradles on the same level as you."

CLANG.

"I am aware," Cole said.

You might be wondering something like, ’Just teach them how to make it.’ They had already tried the obvious answer.

Halvers had forty smiths in that district and eleven of them had been working Star-Iron since before Cole was born.

Three days. Cole spent three days trying to teach them. But as they say, not every intelligent man can be a great teacher.

It did not work.

"Ok boy! Say it again," a broad woman named Torval said.

She had an experience of thirty-one years. She genuinely wanted it. "Slowly."

"Put your hand on the blank," Cole said. "And wait."

"For what?"

"For it to tell you which way the grain runs."

Torval put her palm on the Star-Iron blank in front of her and waited.

She waited for a long time.

"It is cold," she said finally. "That is what I am hearing. It is telling me it is cold."

Cole rubbed his face with both hands.

He was not being condescending.

Cole was not trying to hide a secret technique or something. It was too foolish to do something like this in the grand scheme of things.

He had explained the method eleven separate ways. But none of them were able to understand the method.

’How do you explain a color to somebody with no eyes?’ Cole thought.

’A blind man is not stupid, but for them to understand color is just not their fault. They just do not have the means to perceive the color. But the blind can still survive in this horrible world through their other senses....’

"Damn it! It is not a technique, but a sense!" Cole admitted.

"I am trying to teach it to them like a technique!"

Torval nodded slowly and did not argue.

With thirty-one years of experience to assist her, she had experienced several abnormalities in this profession.

Some men could hear a flaw in a bell and some could not! It was a sense of these blacksmiths that made them better than the ordinary.

This sense is developed over the course of time for ordinary blacksmiths, but some abnormalities exist where they could hear them from a young age.

"Then we are stuck at one cradle every thirty hours," Halvers said grimly.

"No, we are not."

Lyra Voltaire had been sitting on a bench under the high windows for four hours with the Elven codex open across her knees and eleven separate readings spread out around her.

"You all are barking up the wrong tree all this time!" Lyra said, standing up.

"Again. It is becoming a pattern with this project and I would like it noted that I keep having to point it out."

"Voltaire?"

"Why does the cradle have to be forged to the leaf?"

Silence spread through workshop.

"Because that is how it works. We do not have another way." Cole said.

"That is how you’ve been doing it." Lyra came closer to the bench and slapped those readings down.

"every leaf produced by that tree is slightly different. The factors that make it different are the day it was produced, the amount of light it absorbed, it’s position on the branch, etc. The frequency of these factors is never identical."

She tapped the sheets.

"So you have been forging a bespoke housing for each individual leaf. Thirty hours of hand work, tuned by ear, to match one specific object that will never exist again."

She looked up.

"That is magnificent craftsmanship, but it is an idiotic manufacturing process."

Halvers leaned forward. "Go on."

"Flip it," Lyra said. "Stop matching the cradle to the leaf. Match the leaf to a standard cradle."

Cole stopped hammering.

The workshop was completely silent for a while.

"You want to treat the leaves," Cole said slowly.

"Yes."

"We tried that. On the first night. You dried one and cured it and it held a frequency perfectly and it did absolutely nothing, because you killed it."

"I know. I was there." Lyra was already writing.

"That was eight days ago and I was working blind off theory. I have eight days of live tower data now and a book written by people who did this for nine thousand years."

She looked up at him.

"I do not need to kill the leaf. I need to make it boring."

---

Only she knew what that meant! But what followed was a series of failures.

The first attempt turned the leaf brown at the edges within an hour and dropped its output to nothing.

The second attempt held the leaf alive perfectly and did not damp its variation at all. It sat in the suspension singing exactly as erratically as it had on the branch.

The third one caught fire.

That was when the Warden came.

It came through the workshop doors on the second evening. It had followed the leaves across the city the way it had followed every leaf since the first one.

Deep green shot through with veins of gold, and the temperature of the room dropped when it entered.

The forty smiths stopped working.

Lyra did not look up from the bench. She already knew.

"Three," the Warden said.

"I know."

"Six days of her life are lying on that bench in pieces."

Lyra set down her pipette.

"She gave you every one of them," the Warden said.

"She did not hesitate. She has never once hesitated with any of you, because she cannot. She has no way to refuse."

Lyra’s hands were shaking.

"I am trying to feed a city," she said quietly.

"I know," the Warden said. "That is why I am speaking to you instead of stopping you."

It turned toward the door.

"Do not burn a fourth."

The Warden was definitely not happy with what was happening with the leaves of the World Tree. His emotions, which he hid deep beneath his cold exterior could not hide his immense love for the world Tree.

Lyra did not burn the fourth leaf.

Twenty-nine attempts were enough to get it right! It was about three in the morning and she was working off a Chapter from the codex that talked about how Elves kept cut flowers alive in statis for ceremonies.

She found the answer through the codex and it was not a treatment, but a buffer.

A thin suspension of mana-conductive gel, laced with a trace mineral compound that Lyra could produce in bulk out of common Wildlands ore, held in a sealed collar around the stem.

It did not stop the leaf living. It slowed how fast the leaf could change.

"Cole," Lyra said. Her voice was very thin. "Cole, wake up and read this."

Cole came off the bench where he had passed out four hours earlier, walked over, and put his hand flat on the collar.

He closed his eyes.

He stood there for nearly a minute.

"It is holding one note," he said.

"Yes."

"It is holding one note and it is still alive."

"Yes."

Cole opened his eyes.

"Then I only have to forge one cradle," he said. "One design. One frequency. Over and over."

"You have to forge one master," Lyra corrected. "And then Torval and her forty smiths copy it to spec, because it will be a fixed measurement instead of a thing you feel."

Cole turned around and looked at the workshop.

Forty smiths looked back at him.

"Torval," he said. "Get everyone up. I need thirty hours and then nobody ever needs me for this again."

Halvers ran the numbers three days later with a fresh slate and better handwriting.

"Leaf every two days," he said. "Buffer collar takes Voltaire about four hours and she can do them in batches. Standard cradle off the master pattern is eleven hours with four smiths on it, and I have forty."

He looked up.

"Lattice raising is thirty hours with the crews we have, and we can run three sites at once now the northern ground is clear."

He set the slate down.

"A tower every two to three days. Held indefinitely, as long as that tree keeps breathing."

There was no cheering. Everyone in that room had been awake for most of a week.

Cole sat down on an overturned crate.

That was the third cradle he had personally forged, and the last one he would ever have to.

"So what does that get us?" he asked.

Halvers’s face changed.

"It gets us the future," he said carefully. "It gets us a green continent in about four years. It gets us grain out past the wall, timber, herds, water. It is the single largest thing anybody has built since before the Fall and I will be telling my grandchildren about this week."

"Halvers."

"It does not feed anybody this winter," Halvers said flatly. "Not one person. Not one loaf."

He tapped the slate.

"The soil in the first ring is ready. We can seed it in a week. And then the wheat sits in the ground for a hundred and twenty days doing exactly nothing, no matter how many towers I put around it, because that is how long wheat takes."

He looked around at the exhausted faces.

"The shelves go bare in twenty-six days. The first harvest is a hundred days after that."

Nobody said anything.

"We are building it four times faster," Halvers finished. "And it is still a hundred days too late."

The workshop emptied out around four in the morning.

Cole stayed. He sat on his crate with his forearms on his knees and looked at the master cradle sitting on the bench, perfect and finished and completely useless for the only problem that actually mattered.

Lyra was still at her table, packing away the buffer compounds.

"You are not going to bed," she observed.

"No."

"Because of the hundred days."

Cole rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

"Lyra. That book of yours."

"It has a name."

"That book of yours," Cole repeated. "It was written by people who lived for nine thousand years. Is there anything in it about growing food faster?"

Lyra stopped packing.

She stood there with a jar in each hand and did not answer for a long moment.

"No," she said.

"Nothing at all?"

"You are asking the wrong question again." She set the jars down very slowly. "There is nothing in it about growing food faster because there is nothing in it about growing food."

Cole looked up.

"The Elves did not farm," Lyra said.

She turned around and looked at the codex sitting closed on the far end of the bench.

"Nine thousand years in a mountain, and there is not one page in that book about a field, or a plough, or a seed going into the ground."

She walked over to it.

"I have read it four times and I never once noticed, because why would I?"

Lyra put her hand flat on the cover.

"So what were they eating?"

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