Chapter : 615

The air over the southern coast of the Ferrum Duchy was thick with the promise of salt and sweat. A relentless sun, a merciless golden eye in an endless blue sky, beat down upon a vast, sprawling construction project that scarred the coastal plains. What was once a useless expanse of marshland, too saline for farming and too soft for building, was being reborn. This was the dawn of Project Brine, and Lloyd Ferrum stood at the epicenter of its creation, a quiet lord presiding over a revolution.

He wore simple, practical leathers, a stark contrast to the fine silks of the capital, but here, under the harsh sun and amidst the clamor of labor, he was more at home than he had ever been in a palace. The wind whipped his dark hair across his face, carrying the briny tang of the sea and the scent of freshly turned earth. Beside him, his trusted team stood in a mixture of awe, confusion, and zealous excitement.

Mei Jing, her practical dress immaculate despite the dust, held a parasol to shield her from the sun, but her sharp, analytical eyes were unprotected, devouring the scale of the operation. Her mind was not seeing mud and timber; it was seeing ledgers, profit margins, and the slow, inevitable death of a commercial rival. Tisha, ever the empath, had her gaze fixed on the bustling workers—local fishermen and their families, men and women whose livelihoods were often at the mercy of the sea’s whims. She saw not a factory, but a community being born, a promise of stability forged from seawater and sunlight.

And then there were the alchemists, a trio of brilliant eccentrics who seemed both perfectly suited and wildly out of place. Lyra, the pragmatist, was already scribbling furiously in a waterproof notebook, her brow furrowed as she calculated load-bearing capacities and potential soil erosion. Alaric, the perfectionist, was on his knees, tasting a pinch of the dried mud and muttering about its mineral composition.

Borin, however, was practically vibrating with manic energy. “By the forge of the gods, Young Lord!” he boomed, his voice carrying over the din of hammers and shouting foremen. “The sheer, elegant simplicity of it! It’s… it’s poetry! A poem written in hydrology and solar radiation!”

Lloyd offered a faint, dry smile. “It’s a farm, Borin. Nothing more. We are farming the sea.”

He knelt and drew a diagram in the damp, dark soil with his finger. “The principle is ancient, but the application is new to this world. We do not fight the sun; we harness it. We do not fight the sea; we invite it in.” He sketched a series of vast, interconnected, shallow rectangles. “These are the evaporation ponds. Each one a little lower than the last. We use windmill-driven pumps to draw seawater into the first, highest pond.”

He gestured to Borin. “Your task, Borin, is to design those pumps. They must be robust, efficient, and repairable by local hands. No complex magic, no rare materials. Just clever engineering.”

Borin’s eyes lit up like twin furnaces. “Windmills! Yes! I envision a quadruple-geared rotary system with a counter-weighted crankshaft to maximize torque! We could generate enough pressure to shoot a jet of water a hundred feet in the air!”

Lyra sighed, not even looking up from her notes. “And the wooden gears would splinter on the second rotation, the crankshaft would snap, and the maintenance would require a master clockmaker. Keep it simple, Borin. Durability over spectacle. We’re moving water, not laying siege to a castle.”

Borin deflated slightly, muttering about a lack of artistic vision, but he nodded, his mind already churning with more practical, if less explosive, designs.

Lloyd continued his drawing in the sand. “As the sun beats down, the water evaporates, leaving the salt behind. The brine becomes more concentrated. It flows, by simple gravity and controlled by your gates, into the next pond, and the next.” He looked at Alaric. “And this is where your genius comes in, Master Alaric. Seawater is not just sodium chloride. It contains other minerals—gypsum, magnesium, potassium salts. They all crystallize at different levels of salinity. As the brine moves from pond to pond, it will naturally shed these impurities. The first ponds will yield industrial-grade gypsum. The middle ponds, valuable magnesium salts. It is a process of fractional crystallization, a natural refinery powered by the sun.”

Chapter : 616

Alaric’s eyes widened, a flicker of true intellectual fire replacing his usual detached curiosity. “A tiered purification system… Of course. The specific gravity of the brine will dictate the precipitate. We can harvest different elements at each stage. It’s… flawless. We can test the brine at each gate, ensuring only the purest solution reaches the final stage.” His voice was filled with a reverence usually reserved for a perfectly balanced potion.

“Exactly,” Lloyd confirmed. “The final ponds, the crystallization pans, will be left with a brine of almost pure sodium chloride. The sun will do the rest, leaving behind a thick, white crust of perfect, crystalline salt. No mining, no grinding, no impurities. Just pure, clean salt, harvested with simple rakes.”

He stood up, brushing the dirt from his hands, and looked out at the vast, sun-drenched expanse. “This is Project Brine. We are not just building a business. We are building a new foundation for the duchy’s economy. And we are doing it with nothing more than wood, mud, and the power of that star in the sky.”

The team was silent for a long moment, the scale of the vision settling upon them. It was audacious. It was revolutionary. And it was so profoundly simple that it felt like an undeniable truth they had all been blind to. Mei Jing was the first to speak, her voice a low, avaricious hum. “The Salt Guild will burn.”

Lloyd’s smile was thin and cold as the steel he commanded. “Let them,” he said softly. “Their age is over. The age of brine has begun.” He looked at his team, his generals in this new, silent war. “Now, let’s get to work. We have an empire to build.”

The sun began its slow descent, painting the western sky in hues of orange and violet, but the work on the brine fields did not cease. Under the light of magically infused lanterns, the cacophony of construction continued, a symphony of progress against the gentle rhythm of the tide. Lloyd moved among his people, no longer just a lord giving orders, but a chief engineer solving problems, his mind, forged in the advanced crucibles of another world, operating on a level his team could only marvel at.

He found Borin arguing passionately with a grizzled, barrel-chested carpenter named Fendrel, the foreman of the construction crew. They were standing before a half-finished windmill tower, its skeletal frame stark against the twilight.

“It needs more sails!” Borin insisted, gesturing wildly at a complex diagram he’d drawn on a slate. “Eight of them, angled at precisely twenty-two degrees to catch the crosswinds! And the gearing must be bronze, for precision!”

Fendrel spat a wad of chewing-leaf onto the ground. “And when the first winter gale comes roaring in off the sea, your eight fancy sails will be ripped to shreds, and your soft bronze gears will be stripped bare before the first watch is over. Beggin’ your pardon, Master Alchemist, but this ain’t a laboratory toy. This is the coast. She needs to be tough, not clever.” He pointed with a thick, calloused finger at a simpler design. “Four sails. Good, solid ironwood. Simple iron gears, thick as my wrist. She won’t be as fast, but she’ll be turning long after your fancy contraption has become driftwood.”

Lloyd stepped in before Borin could launch into a lecture on fluid dynamics. “Master Fendrel is right, Borin. We are designing for a hundred years, not a single perfect summer. The goal is relentless consistency, not peak performance.” He turned to the foreman. “However, Master Borin’s calculations on sail angle are sound. Let us use your four-sail design, Fendrel, but we will angle them as he suggests. A marriage of your durability and his efficiency.”

Fendrel grunted, a sound of grudging respect. Borin, though still muttering about lost potential, conceded the point. A compromise was struck, and the work continued, a small victory for practical leadership.

Further down the line, Lyra stood over a massive, illuminated map of the coastline, her face a mask of concentration. She was coordinating the logistics, a general marshaling her forces. Carts laden with clay for lining the ponds rumbled in from the north, their paths carefully planned to avoid creating impassable quagmires. Barges carrying timber from the ducal forests were scheduled to arrive with the morning tide. She directed the flow of materials and labor with the precision of a master choreographer, her quiet competence the invisible engine driving the entire project.

“We have a problem, Young Lord,” she said as Lloyd approached, her voice calm and level despite the issue. “The local clay is too porous. Even when packed, it will allow for significant seepage. Over time, the brine will contaminate the surrounding groundwater and we will lose a non-trivial percentage of our product.”