Chapter : 1399

He looked at his team. They were eccentrics. They were weirdos. They didn't care about politics or weddings. They only cared about making things work.

"Listen to me," Lloyd said. "We have a puzzle. A 500-year-old puzzle. We need to connect this ancient, sentient rock to these modern, programmable crystals. We need to build a bridge between the magic of the past and the logic of the future."

"Impossible," Alaric muttered, adjusting his spectacles. "The resonance frequencies are incompatible."

"Difficult," Lloyd corrected. "Not impossible. We are Ferrum engineers. We eat impossible for breakfast."

He took off his coat. He rolled up his sleeves. He grabbed a wrench.

"Borin, start calibrating the mana-siphons. Lyra, map the rune sequences on the Heart. Alaric, get me a schematic of the Aegis neural web."

The team scrambled. The workshop came alive. Sparks flew. Steam hissed. The sound of hammers and chanting filled the air.

Lloyd stood over the Golem Heart. He activated his [All-Seeing Eye]. The layers of the stone peeled away, revealing the intricate web of energy inside. He saw the dormant consciousness of Elisa. He saw the logic gates carved by Anubis.

"Hello again," Lloyd whispered to the stone. "Let's see what you can do."

He felt a deep, profound peace settle over him. This was simple. This was binary. Input and output. Cause and effect. There were no ambiguous emotions here. No angry spouses. No political traps. Just pure, clean engineering.

He picked up a stylus and began to trace a new circuit. The world outside—the demands of the Envoy, the tears of Rosa, the anger of Faria—faded away. They ceased to exist.

Here, in the circle of light under the workshop lamp, Lloyd Ferrum was not a lord or a husband or a pawn. He was a maker. And for the first time in weeks, he was happy.

He worked through the night, the scratching of his stylus the only sound in his universe, building a shield to protect himself from a world that demanded too much of his heart.

The cliffhanger hung in the air like the smoke from Borin's soldering iron: Could he solve the riddle of the Heart before the real world broke down his door? Or would his sanctuary become his tomb when the war finally came knocking?

Lloyd didn't know. And right now, he didn't care. He had a robot to build. And that was enough.

Lloyd stood in the center of his manufactory, surrounded by the hum of machinery and the smell of ozone and oil. It was his favorite smell. It smelled like progress. It smelled like not having to talk to people about feelings. But he had a problem. He had the Golem Heart—the ancient, sentient rock that was supposed to run his giant robot suit—but he didn't understand it completely. It was like trying to read a book written in a language that hadn't been invented yet.

He needed a translator. And he knew exactly who that translator should be.

"Alaric," Lloyd called out to his head alchemist. "I am going to make a hire. A consultant."

Alaric looked up from a bubbling beaker. "A consultant, sir? We have the best minds in the duchy right here. What kind of consultant?"

"An archaeologist," Lloyd said. "Someone who speaks 'dead genius'. Prepare a workspace. A nice one. With a comfortable chair and maybe some flowers. Not roses. Roses imply romance. Maybe daisies. Daisies imply 'we are just studying rocks'."

Lloyd sat down at his desk and drafted a formal letter. He wrote it carefully. It had to look official. It had to look like a boring, academic request so that no one in his house—specifically the three women currently plotting his demise—would suspect anything.

To Lady Mina Siddik,

Regarding the structural analysis of Anubis-era Artifacts...

He sent the letter via a runner. Then, he waited. He paced around the workshop. He adjusted the lighting. He felt nervous, which was annoying. He was Lloyd Ferrum. He fought demons. He shouldn't be nervous about a study date.

When Mina arrived the next morning, she looked like she was going to a funeral for a library. She was wearing a severe grey dress and carrying a stack of books that probably weighed more than she did. But her eyes were bright. She looked at the manufactory not with confusion, but with hunger.

"So," Mina said, dumping her books on the table Lloyd had prepared. "This is where the magic happens."

"This is where the science happens," Lloyd corrected. "Magic is just science that hasn't had its morning coffee yet. Welcome to the sanctuary, Mina."

"Sanctuary?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.

Chapter : 1400

"Yes," Lloyd said, gesturing to the heavy iron door. "Out there, in the main house, there are envoys with elephants. There are wives who freeze things when they are angry. There are princesses who play 4D chess with my life. But in here? In here, there is only the project. And us."

Mina looked around the workshop. She saw the half-built limbs of the Aegis suit hanging from chains. She saw the glowing Lilith Stones. And she saw the Golem Heart, sitting on a velvet cushion like a crown jewel.

"It is... peaceful," she admitted. "In a chaotic, loud, industrial sort of way."

"Exactly," Lloyd grinned. "Now, put on these goggles. Safety first. We are going to poke a 500-year-old brain with a stick and see what happens."

For the rest of the day, they didn't talk about politics. They didn't talk about marriage contracts or traitors or assassins. They talked about Anubis.

"Look at this rune," Mina said, pointing to a microscopic carving on the Heart's surface. She was looking through a magnifying glass. "It is not standard script. It is a dialect from the pre-unification era. It means 'Flow', but it also means 'Thought'."

"Flow of thought," Lloyd mused. "Like a data stream. Anubis wasn't writing a spell; he was writing code. He was programming the stone to process information like a river."

"And this one," Mina continued, her finger tracing a spiral pattern. "It references the 'Star-Fall'. Elder Corin mentioned that. It connects the physical stone to the celestial energy."

"The antenna," Lloyd realized. "That's the receiver for the wireless energy transfer. If I can tap into that, I don't need a massive battery pack. I can pull power from the ambient mana field."

They worked for hours. They fell into a rhythm. Lloyd would propose a theory based on mechanics ("It needs a heat sink here"), and Mina would counter with historical context ("Anubis used water-cooling runes, not metal vents"). They argued. They debated. They drew diagrams on the chalkboard until it was covered in white dust.

It was the most fun Lloyd had had in months.

Around noon, Lyra, the logistics manager, brought them lunch. She looked at the two of them—heads bent together over a glowing rock, arguing about ancient grammar—and smiled.

"You two look busy," Lyra said, setting down a tray of sandwiches.

"We are solving the mysteries of the universe," Lloyd said, taking a sandwich without looking up. "Or at least, the mysteries of a very complicated paperweight."

"It is not a paperweight," Mina corrected him, taking a bite of her own sandwich. "It is a masterpiece. Anubis was a poet."

"He was an engineer," Lloyd argued. "Engineers can be poets. We just use metal instead of words."

"That is the most romantic thing you have ever said," Mina teased.

Lloyd froze. He looked at her. She was smiling. It was a genuine, relaxed smile. The tension that had defined their relationship since the carriage ride was gone. Here, surrounded by grease and gears, she wasn't the sister-in-law or the forbidden love interest. She was just Mina. The brilliant scholar. His partner.

"Don't tell anyone," Lloyd whispered. "I have a reputation to maintain as a grumpy tyrant."

"Your secret is safe with me," Mina said.

They ate lunch in a comfortable silence. Outside the heavy doors, the world was complicated. Arch Duke Roy was probably yelling at the Zakarian envoy. Rosa was probably freezing a fountain. Amina was probably plotting to take over the world.

But in here, the world was simple. It was just a puzzle waiting to be solved.

"You know," Lloyd said, wiping crumbs from his chin. "Bringing you here was my best idea. Better than the soap. Better than the salt."

"Better than the salt?" Mina laughed. "That is high praise. You love salt."

"I do love salt," Lloyd admitted. "But salt doesn't know how to translate ancient dialects. You are definitely more useful than a mineral."

"You really know how to compliment a lady," Mina rolled her eyes. But she looked pleased.

Lloyd watched her go back to work. He realized that this—this quiet collaboration, this meeting of minds—was what he had been missing. He had power. He had money. But he had been lonely. Even with all the people around him, he had been intellectually lonely.

Mina filled that void. She was the software to his hardware.

"Okay, Librarian," Lloyd said, clapping his hands. "Back to work. We have a robot to build. And if we finish early, I'll let you blow something up."

"Really?" Mina asked, her eyes lighting up.

"Maybe a small thing," Lloyd amended. "Let's not get crazy."