Chapter : 579

“With each successive pond,” he continued, his voice ringing with the passion of a creator, “the brine becomes more saturated. The impurities, the other minerals—the magnesium, the potassium sulfates that ruin our current supply—they crystallize at different rates, at different salinities. They can be precipitated out, removed, in the earlier ponds, leaving the final ponds with a brine of almost pure, unadulterated sodium chloride. And in those final, crystallizer ponds, under the slow, patient heat of the sun, the water evaporates completely, leaving behind not dirty rock, but a thick, beautiful, crust of pure, white, and almost flawless, salt crystals.”

He stopped, his vision laid bare. It was a process so simple, so elegant, so reliant on the free, inexhaustible power of nature itself, that it felt, in this world of brute force and complex magic, like a kind of heresy. A kind of miracle.

Arch Duke Roy Ferrum was silent for a long, long time. He stared at his son, at the fierce, brilliant passion in his eyes, at the way his hands had sketched a vision of industrial-scale alchemy in the empty air. The Arch Duke’s mind, a formidable instrument honed on the complexities of warfare and statecraft, was grappling with the sheer, elegant simplicity of the concept. Evaporation ponds. Windmill-driven pumps. Fractional crystallization. These were not the words of a fumbling youth; they were the confident, precise terms of an engineer, a scientist, a master of a different, and perhaps more potent, kind of magic.

He thought of the vast, unproductive salt marshes that bordered the southern coast of their duchy, lands considered worthless for farming, useful only for grazing a few scrawny sheep. And he saw them now, through his son’s eyes, not as a wasteland, but as a potential gold mine. A vast, flat, sun-drenched canvas, perfectly suited for the very ponds Lloyd described. They owned the land. They controlled the coast. The primary resources—seawater and sunlight—were infinite, and free.

The potential was… staggering. It was not just about replacing their current, inefficient salt supply. It was about dominating the entire salt trade. Their current supplier, the Western Salt Mines Guild, held a near-monopoly, their power derived from their control over the few known rock salt deposits. They dictated the price, the quality. But this… this would shatter their monopoly. It would create a new, superior product, at a fraction of the production cost. They could not just supply their own house; they could supply the entire kingdom. The entire continent.

The political implications were as immense as the economic ones. Salt was not a luxury; it was a necessity. It was used for preserving food, for curing leather, for a hundred different industrial and domestic processes. The house that controlled the purest, cheapest, and most abundant supply of salt would hold a new, powerful, and deeply insidious, form of leverage over every other house, every other duchy, every other kingdom. It was a weapon disguised as a commodity.

Roy looked at his son again, and the last, lingering vestiges of his old perception of Lloyd—the weakling, the disappointment—were burned away completely, replaced by a new, profound, and almost fearful, respect. This was not just a mind for soap. This was not just a spark of hidden power. This was a mind that saw the world in a fundamentally different way. A mind that could look at a salt marsh and see an empire.

“This… ‘Project Brine’…,” Roy said finally, his voice a low, thoughtful rumble, the words tasting strange, new, on his tongue. “The scale of it is… ambitious.”

“Ambitious, Father?” Lloyd replied, a slow, confident smile spreading across his face. “No. It is logical. It is efficient. And it is, I assure you, entirely achievable.”

He continued, his own mind already leaping ahead to the next logistical steps. “We would need to dispatch a survey team, of course. To identify the optimal location, to test the salinity of the local seawater, to plan the construction. We would need to commission the construction of the pumps—a simple design, I can provide the schematics. And we would need a workforce.” He paused, then played his next, brilliant card.

“But the labor costs would be minimal. This is not skilled work, for the most part. It is digging, hauling clay, managing sluice gates. We could offer employment to the coastal fishing villages, the ones that struggle during the lean winter months. We would not just be building a factory; we would be creating a new source of prosperity for some of the poorest, most neglected subjects in your entire duchy.”

Chapter : 580

It was a masterstroke. He had not just presented a plan for immense profit and political power; he had framed it as an act of benevolent, ducal patronage. An infrastructure project that would enrich the house while providing stable employment for its people. It was a plan that was not just profitable, but popular. Defensible. Noble.

Roy Ferrum could only stare. The boy had thought of everything. The engineering, the economics, the logistics, the politics. It was a perfect, self-contained, and utterly, comprehensively, brilliant proposal.

He felt a surge of pride so immense, so powerful, it was almost painful. This was his son. His heir. The boy he had once feared would be a burden to their house was now, with a quiet confidence and a terrifyingly brilliant mind, laying out a plan that could secure its dominance for a thousand years.

He rose from his position by the shattered training dummy, the weariness of their duel completely gone, replaced by a new, powerful, and deeply, profoundly, excited energy. He clapped his son on the shoulder, the gesture no longer just one of paternal affection, but of a shared, audacious, and thrilling new purpose.

“Draft the full proposal, Lloyd,” the Arch Duke commanded, his voice ringing with a new, vibrant authority, the voice of a ruler who has just been shown the path to a new, golden age. “Include your schematics for the pumps, your projected costs, your logistical requirements. Present it to me, to Master Elmsworth, to the Ducal Council, by the end of the week.” He grinned, a true, rare, and almost predatory, grin of shared ambition. “It seems,” he said, his voice a low, satisfied rumble, “that our family is no longer just in the soap business. We are now, it would appear, in the empire business.”

The duel was over. The lesson had been taught. But the true outcome of their clash was not a victory or a defeat. It was a birth. The birth of a new, powerful, and utterly unstoppable, partnership between a father who had finally, truly, seen the potential of his son, and a son who was finally, truly, ready to claim his own, magnificent, and revolutionary, destiny. The age of steel and fire was just beginning.

—

The study at the Elixir Manufactory, which had so recently been a war room for commercial domination, had now become the cradle of a new, even more audacious, industrial revolution. The air, still fragrant with the familiar, comforting scent of rosemary and almond, was now charged with a new, sharper, and more exciting, energy. The scent of salt, of the sea, of a vast, untapped economic ocean waiting to be conquered.

Lloyd stood before a massive, newly acquired map of the Ferrum Duchy’s southern coastline, which was spread across the large oak table. It was a beautiful, hand-drawn thing, its coastlines rendered in delicate ink, its salt marshes a pale, greenish wash. But Lloyd saw not a map; he saw a blueprint. A canvas upon which to build an empire.

He was still aching. The duel with his father, though it had ended in a strange, exhilarating new partnership, had been physically brutal. Every muscle in his body screamed a protest when he moved, a constant, dull, throbbing reminder of the vast, almost comical, disparity in their raw power. The memory of his Chimera Blade shattering, of the effortless, contemptuous ease with which his father had dismantled his ultimate attack, was a humbling, and deeply motivating, lesson. He needed to get stronger. He needed to master his powers. And to do that, he needed the System. And the System needed resources.

Project Brine was the answer. It was the next great engine. A machine that would turn sunlight and seawater into a river of gold, which he, in turn, would transmute, through the strange alchemy of the System, into pure, unadulterated power.

He had spent the last two days since the duel in a state of focused, almost manic, creation. He had filled pages of vellum with intricate, precise schematics, drawn from the depths of his eighty years of engineering knowledge. Designs for the windmill-driven water pumps, their sails angled to catch the coastal breezes. Plans for the interlocking system of evaporation ponds, their depths and surface areas calculated for optimal evaporation rates based on the region’s average sunlight and humidity. He had even drafted preliminary designs for a small, efficient refinery, using a controlled heating and cooling process to further purify the harvested salt crystals, to create a product so fine, so pure, that it would be considered a luxury good in itself, fit for the King’s own table.