Chapter 154: Time For New Project
The post-festival hangover hit Oriel Estate like a heavy blanket.
The banners had been packed away into cedar chests, the grand speeches were already fading into local gossip, and for the first time in nearly five years, the constant, headache-inducing rattle of steam-hammers and stone-cutters had stopped. Helmarte was quiet.
Well, quiet for a capital city that had just survived a total urban overhaul. Outside, birds actually sang in the estate gardens, occasionally drowned out by the clack-clack of a carriage rolling down the main avenue.
Inside the manor, the staff moved on tiptoes. Nobody wanted to be the idiot who disturbed the boss. They all knew where Ernest was.
His study.
Late afternoon sun cut through the tall windows, painting dust motes gold over wall-to-wall shelves stacked with thermodynamics manuals, geological surveys, quarterly ledgers, and a absurd mountain of leather notebooks crammed with Ernest’s chicken-scratch handwriting. One wall was practically hidden beneath topographic maps of the realm; another held the final, ink-heavy master schematics of the Helmarte Reconstruction Project.
Then there was the desk. A massive slab of dark oak, sitting right in the middle of the room. On top of it sat a single, pristine, incredibly offensive sheet of blank paper.
It had been sitting there for thirty minutes. Unscrawled. Unblemished.
Ernest leaned back in his leather chair, fingers loosely laced beneath his chin, staring at the white space like it was a complex calculus problem.
It was weird. For the first time since he’d woken up in this world, there were no emergency requisitions waiting for his signature. No panicked ministers hammering on the door about budget overruns. No chief engineers sweating through their linen shirts, begging for clarification on tolerance limits. The Reconstruction Authority was running on autopilot. Teucher Industrial Group had competent managers who actually understood double-entry bookkeeping now. The whole damn kingdom was functioning without him having to micromanage every waking second.
It made his skin crawl.
A soft double-knock broke the silence.
"Come in," Ernest called out, rubbing his eyelids.
The heavy door creaked open, and Anna stepped through, balancing a silver tray. The scent of roasted coffee beans hit him first, followed by the sweet butter smell of fresh biscuits and a small bowl of crisp, red apples from the orchard out back.
She set the tray down on the edge of the desk, taking care not to disturb his crisp blank paper.
"You’ve been glaring at that sheet like it owes you money," she said, a dry smile touching her lips.
Ernest chuckled, leaning forward to grab the coffee cup. "Has it been that long?"
"Thirty-two minutes. Give or take." Anna leaned against the mahogany edge, her eyes drifting over the empty desk. "I know that look, Ernest."
"Oh yeah? What look?"
"The ’I’m about to make a lot of contractors very rich and very stressed’ look."
Ernest nearly choked on his coffee. "Come on, it’s not that dramatic."
Anna raised an eyebrow. "The last time you had that exact expression, you tore up three districts and laid down a municipal sewage system."
"Which was completely necessary," he muttered defensively. "The river was turning into a biohazard."
"I didn’t say it wasn’t." She reached out, placing a warm hand gently on his shoulder, giving it a brief squeeze. "Just try not to pull an all-nighter, alright? You actually have a break for once."
"I’ll try."
"Which means you won’t. I know you." She offered him a fond, lingering smile before turning around, her skirt rustling as she slipped back out into the hall, closing the latch with a soft click.
Silence claimed the room again.
Ernest stood up, taking his coffee over to the window. Outside, Helmarte sprawled all the way to the horizon. Smoke curled lazily from the brick chimneys of the industrial sector. Unlit glass globes of electric streetlights lined the wide avenues below, waiting for dusk. Down on the main artery, horse-drawn haulers moved in an endless, agonizingly slow parade.
Coal. Raw pig iron. Cut timber. Ashlar stone. Machine parts. Grain.
Tons of it, pouring into the heart of the capital every single hour. The reconstruction project was technically ’finished,’ sure, but the industrial engine he’d kicked awake wasn’t stopping. If anything, the demand was compounding exponentially. Factories were expanding their footprints every month. New machine shops were popping up like weeds. Every merchant guild master in the city was practically screaming for higher cargo quotas.
The economy was sprinting ahead full tilt, but it was running on a body that couldn’t handle the strain.
Ernest turned back to his desk, setting his empty cup down, and pulled a thick folder of logistics reports closer. He flipped through the top pages, eyes tracing the numbers provided by the Merchant Guild.
"Twenty-eight heavy wagons stranded in the Northern Pass due to mud..."
"Coal freight from North Teucher Mine averaging 13 days in transit..."
"Iron ore deliveries down 18%; foundries operating at partial capacity..."
"Harvest season causing critical teamster shortages..."
He tossed the papers aside with a sigh. Different clerks, different regional offices, same damn bottleneck.
The kingdom was producing goods faster than draft horses could physically drag them. A horse had friction, biological fatigue, thermal limits, and a strict requirement to eat oats whether it was moving or not. You could pave every road with asphalt, but a four-horse team was still only going to pull a few tons at a brisk walking pace before its knees gave out.
The infrastructure wasn’t the wall. The propulsion method was the wall.
Ernest walked over to the giant wall map of Belfast. Colored brass pins dotted the terrain—coal basins, iron mines, timber concessions, river ports. Charcoal lines crisscrossed between them, tracing the old, winding wagon roads that hugged the contours of the land.
They looked like clogged arteries.
He picked up a fresh piece of charcoal, rolling it between his fingers. He didn’t follow the gentle curves of the dirt roads this time.
Clack.
He pressed the charcoal to the parchment, drawing a bold, dead-straight line straight from Helmarte to the northern coalfields.
Clack.
Another line shot west toward the heavy timber stands. Another snapped east toward the high-capacity steel mills. He didn’t skirt the hills; he cut right through the valleys. He bridged the rivers at right angles.
It wasn’t a road map. It was a grid.
Ernest stared at the dark charcoal lines, his mind drifting back to lecture halls, dusty textbooks, and his past life as a stress-deprived engineering student back on Earth.
Stockton and Darlington. 1830. The Liverpool and Manchester.
Stephenson’s Rocket
The Industrial Revolution didn’t just happen because someone figured out how to forge cheap steel—it happened because someone figured out how to move fifty tons of that steel at thirty miles an hour using a high-pressure boiler on wheels. Without rail, all this industrial growth was just going to suffocate under its own weight.
He walked back to the oak desk.
The blank paper was still there. But the hesitation was gone.
Ernest grabbed a graphite pencil and a brass ruler. He didn’t start with a high-concept artistic render. He started with the mechanics.
First, the rolling stock geometry—four heavy driving wheels linked by a side rod. Then he laid down the lines for a horizontal fire-tube boiler, a rear firebox, a forward smokestack, and the double-acting cylinders mounted at a slight angle.
He wasn’t sketching a Stephenson original or a sleek 20th-century American 4-4-0. The metallurgical limits of Belfast weren’t there yet. High-stress cast parts were still prone to internal micro-cracks, and their machine shops were just mastering standardized screw threads.
So he simplified. He increased wall thicknesses on the pressure vessel. He designed the valve gear with broad tolerance margins so local blacksmiths could actually forge replacement linkage pins without needing a micrometer.
It was time to work.