Reborn In 3rd Century Rome with Future Industry

March 5, 221 AD, Civitas Aurelia, Gallia.

Deep within the subterranean bathing complex of the Governor’s palace, Kallias, the Syndicate’s Greek chemist, was staring at a row of wounded men resting on cots.

Months prior, these *Custodes* had taken shrapnel and lacerations during the valley engagement against the vanguard.

By every metric of medicine, half of them should have succumbed to the rot of gangrene.

They should have died screaming, their blood poisoned by what the physicians in the empire called *miasma* bad air.

But they were not dying. Their wounds were closed, pink, and free of infection.

Kallias wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead, his hands trembling as he recorded the data on a wax tablet.

Before the army had marched, Lucius had handed Kallias a mandate. The Forge Master had ordered him to cease all bloodletting and herbal poultices.

Instead, Lucius had instructed him to boil every surgical tool in water, wash his hands with lye soap, and flush the soldiers’ wounds with the spirits the chemical division was producing.

*"The humors are a lie, Kallias,"* Lucius had told him. *"Rot is caused by microscopic beasts. Invisible scavengers that feed on open flesh. You cannot see them, but you can burn them with boiling water and alcohol."*

Kallias had thought the Forge Master had lost his mind.

Invisible beasts? It sounded like the raving of a street magician. Yet, Kallias was a man of empirical evidence.

The results were undeniable...

The alcohol, which Kallias had thought was a waste of liquor, acted as a poison to these unseen creatures. The infection rate had plummeted to zero.

An awe washed over the Greek chemist. If this was standardized, the Syndicate’s army would possess a survivability rate that defied the natural order of the world.

Lucius had handed him the key to cheating death, upending centuries of Hippocratic doctrine. Kallias began transcribing his findings onto a scroll. He had to show this to the Dominus.

While Kallias was launching the medical revolution in the palace cellars, Decimus, the Prefect of Machines, was experiencing his own revelation on the *Campus Martius*.

Inside a foundry, the roar of the blast furnaces was deafening. Decimus stood before a contraption bolted to a timber frame. It was a cast-iron cylinder, bored out with precision, containing an iron plug smeared with animal grease to create an airtight seal.

Beneath the cylinder sat a boiler, roaring over a coal fire.

Weeks ago, Lucius had sketched a diagram of the *aeolipile* a spinning steam toy invented by Hero of Alexandria centuries prior.

Lucius had pointed at the sketch and said, *"Stop letting the steam spin freely, Decimus. Trap it. Force it to push a sealed plug. If you can trap the pressure, you can move mountains."*

Decimus had spent a month blowing up copper pipes and melting valves, convinced that trapping expanding steam was a convoluted way to build a bomb.

But today, he had perfected the tolerances...

Decimus gripped an iron lever and yanked it downward, opening the intake valve.

Steam rushed from the boiler into the bottom of the cylinder.

The internal plug shot upward.

The force of the upward stroke lifted a two-hundred-pound block of lead attached to the top of the rod as if it were a feather.

Decimus’s jaw dropped. He stared at the suspended lead block, the heat of the furnace baking his face.

It was an engine that did not breathe, did not sleep, and did not require grain. If he could link that rising rod to a pivoting beam, he could pump millions of gallons of water out of the iron mines!

If he attached it to a crank, he could turn a wheel without draft horses!

The smith felt a shiver run down his spine despite the heat of the foundry.

Grabbing his apron, Decimus bolted from the foundry, sprinting toward the praetorium as fast as his legs could carry him.

The doors of the Governor’s study were blocked by a bottleneck.

Kallias, clutching his rolled parchment, collided with Decimus.

The two men rebounded off each other in the corridor, both wide-eyed and vibrating with excitement.

"Out of my way, smith!" Kallias snapped, straightening his tunic.

"I hold a medical revelation that will alter the fabric of human anatomy!"

"Keep your potions to yourself, Greek!" Decimus fired back, his chest heaving.

"I have captured the wrath of Vulcan in an iron tube! Move aside!"

Before the two prefects could come to blows, the door swung open.

Lucius stood in the doorway, an amused expression on his face.

"If the two most brilliant minds in my empire end up strangling each other in the hallway, I am going to have you both demoted to shoveling coal," Lucius warned.

He stepped back, gesturing into the study. "Enter. And stop shouting."

The two men scrambled into the room, competing to reach the desk first.

Lucius raised a hand, cutting off their babble.

"Kallias. You first," Lucius ordered, taking a seat.

The Greek chemist shot a smirk at the blacksmith before stepping forward.

He unrolled his parchment, slamming it onto the desk.

"Dominus, I do not know how you see the world, but your ’invisible beasts’ are real," Kallias declared. "I washed the blades in boiling water and flushed the lacerations with the distilled spirits. Out of fifty wounded men, not a single one has developed the black rot. Not one! The alcohol slaughters the unseen creatures!"

Lucius smiled, leaning back in his chair.

He had introduced germ theory to the ancient world, bypassing the ignorance of Roman battlefield medicine.

"It is a triumph, Kallias," Lucius praised. "We will mandate this across the army. We will call these invisible scavengers *bacteria*. And the order to clean the tools will be known as *sterilization*."

Kallias’s eyes widened, absorbing the terminology as if it were scripture. "Bacteria. Sterilization. Yes, Dominus. It is brilliant." The chemist paused, swallowing hard before making his request. "I require a reward for this implementation, Forge Master. Give me fifty literate scribes from the captured Roman quartermasters. I want to train them as a medical corps, operating under these new sterilization laws."

Lucius didn’t hesitate. "Granted. Coordinate with Valerius to pull the men."

Kallias bowed so deeply his nose nearly touched his knees, stepping back with a look of elation.

Lucius turned his eyes toward the blacksmith.

"Your turn, Decimus. I assume from the soot on your face that you didn’t blow up the foundry?"

Decimus stepped forward, his hands gripping the edge of the desk.

He leaned in, his voice dropping to a whisper.

"It pushed, Dominus," Decimus breathed. "I sealed the steam in the iron bore. When I opened the valve, the piston shot upward and lifted two hundred pounds of dead lead in the blink of an eye. If we rig a seesaw beam to the top of the rod, we can pump the flooded lower levels of the iron mines dry in days."

Lucius felt a thrill ignite in his chest.

The first working steam piston in history had fired in Gaul, fifteen hundred years ahead of schedule!

"You did it, Decimus," Lucius said, a pride radiating from him. "Pumping water is only the beginning. Eventually, we will lay the cylinder on its side, attach the rod to a steel wheel, and we will move thousands of tons of cargo across the land without a single beast of burden."

Decimus looked as though he might faint.

The implications were so vast they were almost incomprehensible...

"I need resources, Dominus," Decimus pleaded. "If you want these steam-engines scaled up for the mines, I need the foundries expanded. I need twice the coal shipments, and I need priority access to the high-carbon steel ingots."

"You shall have it," Lucius decreed, picking up his signet ring. "I am authorizing a total expansion of the Campus Martius works. Take whatever raw materials you require. The steam engine is now our highest priority."

Decimus struck his breastplate with a fist. "It will be done, Forge Master!"

The two men exchanged a look of respect, their previous bickering forgotten in the face of the advancements they had secured.

They bowed to Lucius once more before sprinting out of the study to begin their new mandates.

Alone in the quiet of the praetorium, Lucius stood up and walked over to the tray resting on a side table.

He poured a measure of the spirits... the liquid Kallias was using to revolutionize medicine into a goblet.

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