Strawberry's Descent

The math became obvious almost immediately once Arista sat down to actually plan the scale-up. Iron pipe could carry the liquid just fine over short distances, same as it had for the test plot: but iron didn't conduct mana worth anything, and the whole point of the buried network was for that faint, steady flow to actually reach the roots, not just sit contained inside a pipe like water in a hose. If she wanted mana bleeding outward into the soil where the trees could actually pull it in, the pipe itself needed to be part of the conduction, not just a container.

"It has to be mithril," she said out loud, mostly to her own notebook, already dreading the conversation this was about to require. "The whole run. Every meter of buried pipe under an actual field-sized planting, not just one exposed test section."

She did some very rough math on how much mithril that actually meant, compared to how much she currently had sitting in her workshop, which was, generously, enough for maybe one very optimistic garden bed.

"...Okay. I need a lot more mithril than I currently have."

She found Gorthruk at his forge, as always, and made absolutely no attempt to ease into the conversation with anything resembling subtlety.

"Gorthruk-sensei," she said, sweetest voice she could manage, leaning against the doorway with what she hoped read as charming rather than transparently manipulative. "Hypothetically. Purely hypothetically. How much mithril does the Republic actually have lying around?"

Gorthruk didn't even look up from the ingot he was inspecting. "That is not a hypothetical question, Strawberry. That is a very specific question wearing a hypothetical costume."

"...Fair. Okay, not hypothetically, then. How much mithril do you have?"

"Enough for jewelry commissions, focus-cores for the odd mage, small ceremonial work. It's not iron. We don't have mountains of it." He finally glanced up, already reading the shape of where this was headed with the weary familiarity of a man who'd been down this road with her several times now. "Why."

"The pipe network needs to be mithril. All of it. Every buried meter, not just the test section." She held up her notebook, showing the rough field-scale sketch, pipe runs marked out in a grid pattern that even she had to admit looked like a genuinely enormous amount of metal once drawn out properly. "Iron won't conduct the mana outward into the soil. It just carries the liquid without actually letting the effect bleed through to the roots. I need the whole delivery system made of something that actually lets magic leak on purpose."

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Gorthruk set down the ingot entirely now, giving her his full, flat attention. "You want the Republic's mithril reserves. All of them. Melted down into pipe."

"...When you say it like that it sounds like a much bigger ask."

"It is a much bigger ask." He crossed his arms. "Mithril isn't something we pull out of the ground casually, Strawberry. It's rare even by our standards. Every scrap we have is accounted for, earmarked for specific commissions, mage equipment, trade agreements with the Elven court that took years to negotiate."

Arista winced, feeling the actual scale of what she was asking land properly for the first time. "...Okay. That's fair. I wasn't thinking about where it comes from, just what I needed it to do." She paused, then brightened slightly, an idea already forming in the particular way ideas always did for her. "Could we use less mithril, though? Not a lining at all, not really. What if the pipe's almost entirely iron, structural, cheap, handles the actual plumbing, and I only cut small mithril windows directly through the wall exactly where each seed sits. A few centimeters of solid mithril, straight through from the liquid to the soil, right above each planting point. Everywhere else stays iron, top, bottom, all of it. The mana doesn't need a highway. It just needs one clean door at every stop that actually matters."

Gorthruk considered that, stroking his beard slowly. "...That's considerably less material. Windows instead of a solid pipe could stretch what we have a great deal further."

"Same trick as the Damascus fold, kind of. I don't need the whole thing to be the expensive part. I just need the expensive part positioned exactly where it actually matters."

Gorthruk studied her for a long moment, then let out a short, resigned laugh, the specific laugh she'd started associating with successfully talking him into something he'd walked in fully intending to refuse.

"...I'll bring it to the council. A windowed pipe is a far easier sell than a solid one. But you should know, Strawberry, even windowed, this is going to cost you. The Republic isn't simply handing over reserve mithril for a project that's still, technically, an unproven experiment with three acorns as its only evidence."

"I've got the glow-diagnostic data too now! That's practically peer review!"

"That is not peer review. That is a very charming light show."

"...I'll take charming light show as a partial win," Arista said, grinning. "What do you need from me to actually get the council on board?"

Gorthruk sighed, already turning back toward his forge, waving a hand over his shoulder in a gesture she'd learned meant this conversation isn't over, but I need to think.

"A full proposal. Numbers. Projected yield increase, projected fuel savings over time, actual cost comparison against just cutting the forest down the old-fashioned way. Convince the council the way you convinced me, except with considerably less flattery and considerably more math."

"...I can do flattery and math."

"I don't doubt it," Gorthruk said, dryly. "That's precisely the problem."

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