Rewrite That Witch
CH1003 · Rewrite
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Chapter 1003: New Progress

“Why so serious?” Nightingale settled onto the edge of the desk and picked up a piece of dried fish. “I said I believe you. I just need a moment to absorb it. You can’t expect everyone to look at that tiny pebble and picture it annihilating a thousand demons — especially after they’ve watched Lucia pull it out of a rock.”

“Do I look serious?” Roland touched his own cheek. Perhaps he did. The knowledge that this was a race against extinction had a way of showing on a face, no matter how much you tried to set it aside. “You’re right, though. I barely believe it myself, and I know what I’m looking at.”

He turned the fragment over in his palm.

This — this thumbnail of dull silver-grey, cold to the touch, oxidized to the color of old ash — was purified uranium. The starting point of everything.

The surface had lost its shine. It felt like nothing. It looked like nothing. There was nothing about it that suggested heat, or light, or the annihilation of matter — and yet Roland knew what it could become under the right conditions, assembled in the right configuration, at sufficient mass.

Getting here had cost considerable effort. Lucia and Spear had spent nearly a week at the North Slope Mine, pressing uranium from crushed granite particle by particle. The Countess had complained at length about the impropriety of subjecting a lady to such heavy labor; in exchange, she’d taken five apprentices from the city hall. A reasonable trade, all things considered.

And the result was this: a thumb-sized piece, over ninety percent pure, two layers — Uranium-235 and Uranium-238, in the ratio found in nature, roughly one to ninety-nine. The surface layer, thin as it was, was the usable portion. In terms of weapons, that was the only layer that mattered.

Both isotopes were stable as stone. Uranium’s half-life ran to ten billion years. The alpha particles they shed during decay traveled only a few dozen microns — not enough to breach a person’s skin. You could hold this fragment bare-handed without consequence.

But not thoughtlessly. Concentrated alpha particles, if they entered through food or breath, were another matter entirely. That was why Soraya had coated the stone in a transparent film: to seal the surface, slow the oxidation, and protect anyone handling it from contamination. A small precaution, easily taken. Roland had learned that the easy precautions were also the ones most often skipped.

He held the fragment a moment longer, then placed it back in its box and locked the drawer.

For all its potential, the stone was just a material. The next problem was supply. Azima’s reaction had confirmed that the sample could locate uranium ore in the field — a high-purity source produced a correspondingly strong signature. In theory, Roland could ask Lucia to extract uranium at a known mine site, bypassing the need for large ore volumes entirely.

But Lucia was already essential to the smelting industry. Pulling her to run uranium collection would sabotage everything running in parallel.

And there was a second constraint. A uranium weapon wasn’t made of uranium alone. A very rare element occurred naturally alongside it — present in uranium deposits, but in far smaller concentrations. For that element, a large volume of raw ore was unavoidable. Even Lucia couldn’t extract what wasn’t there.

So Azima was the key. She would find the ore bodies. The rest would follow.

He pulled a half-finished sketch from the stack on his desk — an internal combustion engine, still lacking several components — spread it over the table, and picked up a quill.

“Late night again?” Nightingale tilted her head.

“We’re marching toward victory.” He stretched, rotated his neck. “If you want to be remembered by history, you accept some small sacrifices.”

“You seem reluctant, though.”

“I’m entirely willing.”

A pause.

“That was a lie,” she said.

Roland exhaled. “Fine. I don’t want to lose. That part’s true. I don’t want to lose to the demons or to whatever this Divine Will actually is.” He set the quill back down. “Is that enough of a truth?”

“Yes.” She was already moving toward the door. “Hot tea. Spicy barbeque, mushrooms, shrimp, Chaos Drinks.”

“That’s—”

“As you wish, Your Majesty.”

He watched her go and shook his head.

Azima departed the next morning with the uranium fragment and Sean.

Meanwhile, Roland received word from City Hall: the Ministry of Construction and the Ministry of Industry had completed Fractionation Tower I.

The occasion warranted his presence in person.

The tower stood on the bank of the Redwater River in Neverwinter’s industrial zone — nearly twenty-five meters tall, a column of steel and concrete that caught the grey winter light and gave nothing back. The design incorporated concepts that hadn’t existed in any Neverwinter building two years ago: multiple fractionation chambers, each tuned to a different boiling range; Anna’s welding along every seam; an array of inspection windows, carrier pipes, and pressure valves fitted so precisely that the chemists could now control the separation process with a fineness simple distillation could never achieve.

A boiler could separate oil from water. That was all a boiler could do. What poured out the other end was still thick with wax, sulfur, and mineral salts — as dark and viscous as river mud, barely combustible, essentially useless. Refining was the difference between a resource and a fuel.

Roland had spent years thinking about natural resources in the abstract — ore grades, mineral deposits, the gap between raw extraction and practical use. The fractionation tower was the first time that gap had closed in a meaningful way for oil. The crude from Shallow Beach would run through the tower and emerge as something he could actually use.

The best news was that he hadn’t designed most of this himself. The Ministry of Construction and the Ministry of Industry had handled it — final review only from Roland, no daily intervention. The staff had absorbed two years of mining and furnace work and applied those lessons here without being told to. They’d developed reading and writing, learned to interpret technical drawings, figured out how to verify part tolerances before the machines ever reached the plant floor.

Two years of mandatory education, producing visible results.

Steam lifted from the tower as the boiler heated. Snow still fell. People crowded the riverbank anyway, breath clouding the air, mixing with the machine-steam until the whole scene blurred into white. They’d come to see the king, and to see the thing the king had built.

Roland stood among them, watching the smoke rise.

If the furnaces at North Slope Mountain were the first industrial revolution, this is the second.

He let himself feel it — the weight of it, the strangeness, the pride — before the crowd’s cheer rose and drowned out thought entirely.

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