Chapter 236: Chapter 236: Thresholds
Chapter 236: Thresholds
Nine days of brutal training was over.
It was late afternoon and Draven walked into the underground arena.
At the end of the eastern end, there was a grey film of stone dust. It was the same place where Bram had stood for nine hours every day.
It clung in a rough circle around his feet and it was not swept away because Halvers had forbidden it.
At the sparring end there were scorch marks. Small ones, paired, about the width of two fingertips.
They were formed due to the intense training performed by Lucien. He had burned his own hands for about nine hundred times, trying to hold a single thread of lightning steady.
Reina was present in the arena training her control over the ice.
Draven watched it all and took it all in without a comment.
While they were training he was busy with other things. He had not slept for more than four hours in the last nine days. He had been working with Sirius about the smuggling routes, argued with Halvers about the transport schedules and a lot of hectic work that he just wanted to quit.
He looked considerably worse than any of the people who had been training.
The Guildmasters gave their assessment together, standing in a loose line at the head of the arena.
Seraphina spoke first.
"Every one of them has improved," she said.
"But that is not flattery. Lucien can hold precision through a full exchange now. Bram has begun to feel the ground instead of only his own body. Reina can freeze a cup of water without destroying the cup."
She paused.
"None of them are closer to Level 200 than they were nine days ago."
Nobody in the room reacted, because nobody in the room was surprised.
"I want to be exact about this," Seraphina continued. "What we have given them is control. Control does not raise a threshold. It keeps you alive long enough for a threshold to have a reason to arrive."
"You said the Seed blooms under lethal pressure," Draven said.
"It does."
"So the only training that works is nearly dying."
"The only training that works is nearly dying for something," Seraphina corrected. "And no drill I can design in a bunker will ever be that."
Lady Elara Logcheville folded her arms.
"My son fights better than he did," she said flatly. "Getting to a Valor will definitely require much more effort and commitment. And more importantly, they will need more opportunities and experience."
Through the projector at the far end, Gunther Stillbane snorted.
"Aight, somebody gotta say the ugly part," Gunther said. "These kids are the best Level 100s walking this continent right now. I mean that. I have seen what is in the Capital and it ain’t them."
He leaned forward.
"They are still Level 100. That is the whole sentence. Do not let nobody dress it up for you."
---
Cole and Lyra came down from the surface an hour later, both of them grey with exhaustion.
"Two to three days a tower," Cole reported. "The master cradle works and Troval’s smiths are copying quite well. Lyra’s buffer collars are also coming off the bench in batches."
"How many will stand by the end of the week?"
"By the end of the week, we will have five of them ready. The next week, we will have about eight of them as long as the tree is not burnt down."
This report was an achievement. An achievement that will write their names in the History books. Each and every one of the engineers, who contributed in this great plan, will be noted down for the future generations to inspire.
But there should be a future for it to be written down.
"Say the rest of it," Draven said.
Cole broke the silence.
"Everybody starves this winter. Having the towers will not help speeding the agriculture. Halvers has run it four ways. The shelves will go bare in 26 days."
Draven got out of the room and went on his own way. He was betting his hopes on the Weekly Reward.
---
The Weekly came four days after the training ended.
DING.
[Weekly Milestone Reward Unlocked.]
[Reward: Deep Root Cultivation Method (Mythic).]
[Description: A complete pre-Fall agricultural discipline. Soil conditioning, mana-assisted germination, and rotation schedules developed for exhausted and contaminated earth.]
---
Draven stopped walking.
He opened it.
It was not a physical book. It unfolded in his mind the way the World Map did, layered and indexed, and it was enormous.
He went straight past the rotation schedules and the soil chemistry and found the germination section, because that was the only part that mattered.
He read it twice.
Then he stood perfectly still in the middle of the villa courtyard and did the math.
Winter wheat took a hundred and twenty days in ordinary ground.
In mana-saturated soil, under the conditioning method described in that section, the same crop reached harvest in sixty.
Half.
The first harvest moved from the deep end of next season to somewhere just past two months from now.
Draven closed his eyes and ran it against Sella’s ration curve, and against Sirius’s smuggling schedule, and against Gunther’s transports.
The gap did not close but it shrank.
A hundred days of empty shelves became forty.
Then he kept reading, and the price arrived.
’Mana-saturated soil.’
He went back through the germination section line by line, and the requirement was written into every part of it.
The technique did not accelerate wheat. It accelerated wheat in ground carrying ambient mana density above a stated threshold.
Ordinary purified earth did not qualify. Cleared earth did not qualify. The pre-Fall authors had assumed a world where that density was simply present in the soil the way water was, because before the Fall it had been.
There was exactly one thing on this continent currently putting mana back into dead ground.
Draven opened his eyes.
’Every field we want to plant needs a tower standing over it first.’
Cole had spent a week solving the cradle bottleneck. Lyra had burned three leaves and nearly been thrown out of the courtyard by the Warden to do it. Between them they had turned one tower a week into one tower every two or three days.
And this codex had just consumed all of it.
They were not building towers to reclaim the continent anymore. They were building towers to make the ground underneath the seed work.
And every day of delay on a single site was a day added to the famine.
He walked upstairs and put it in Lyra’s hands.
She was at a bench in the villa’s upper workroom with four books open and the Elven codex closed at her elbow.
Cole was asleep sitting up against the wall. Estella was in the doorway with a water jug she had been about to bring down to the arena.
"Read this," Draven said.
Lyra took the interface transfer, and her eyes went very wide, and then she went white.
"This is a complete agricultural discipline," she whispered. "This is nine hundred years of somebody’s work. Where did you-"
"Sixty days on the wheat," Draven said. "Not a hundred and twenty. It needs mana density in the soil, which means towers standing before we seed, not after. Rebuild every schedule around that and tell Halvers tonight."
Lyra was already reading, flicking through indexes faster than should have been possible.
Then she stopped.
"This is human," she said.
"What?"
"This is a human discipline. Pre-Fall. Fields, ploughs, rotation, seed." She looked up, and there was something almost aggrieved in her face. "It does not answer my question at all. The Elves did not do any of this."
"Voltaire."
"I know." She waved a hand irritably and went back to the text. "I know. Forty days of famine first. I will find out what they were eating afterward."
Estella had not moved from the doorway.
"You have had that since this morning," she said.
Draven turned.
"Yes."
"You have read it."
"Yes."
"And you are handing it to her."
Her voice was perfectly level. It was not an accusation. There was nothing in it that anybody standing in that room could have called a challenge.
"She is the best for this job," Draven said. "She runs the alchemical corps, she has eight days of live tower data, and she will have this implemented across four sites before I could finish explaining the first Chapter to anybody. It is the fastest route."
"That is true," Estella agreed.
She set the water jug down on the table and went back down to the arena.
Draven watched the doorway for a moment after she had gone.
---
Then he went to find Helion.
He gave the Lord Commander the number in the war room with the door shut.
"Sixty days on the wheat instead of a hundred and twenty," Draven said. "It requires mana-saturated soil, so the towers have to go up before the seed goes in. Halvers is rebuilding the schedule tonight."
Helion looked at the map on the wall for a long moment.
"The gap?" he said.
"Forty days."
"Not a hundred?"
"Forty."
Helion sat down slowly.
Forty days of empty shelves was still forty days. People would go hungry. Some of the very old and the very young would not come through it, and both of them knew that without saying it.
But a hundred days was a city eating itself. Forty was a city holding on with its teeth and then eating bread in the spring.
"That is survivable," Helion said.
"It is survivable if nothing goes wrong," Draven corrected. "Every tower goes up on schedule. Every convoy Sirius runs gets through. Every neutral Bastion keeps selling at four hundred percent. Gunther keeps sending crawlers."
He put both hands on the table.
"There is no slack in it anywhere. Not one day. If we lose a single tower site or a single shipment, the forty becomes fifty, and fifty is a different kind of winter."
Helion nodded slowly.
The projector in the corner chimed. Gunther’s image resolved above the plate, and Draven put the new figures to him directly.
"Forty," Gunther repeated. "That is a real number. That is a number a city can chew on."
"It relies on your transports."
"Then it relies on my transports," Gunther said easily. "They will be there."
"Bastion Six is still rebuilding."
"My city is holding." Gunther said it fast, and flat, and without a single beat of hesitation anywhere in it. "Do not worry about Bastion Six. Worry about your own numbers."
The connection cut half a second later.
Draven stood looking at the empty projector plate.
’He answered before I finished the sentence,’ he thought.
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