Chapter 1290: Achievement
Roland had begun taking his afternoon nap.
Two to three hours after lunch, every day — long enough to cross into the Dream World and run a working session with the Design Bureau of Graycastle before the day’s other demands reassembled around him. As a consequence, a formation of God’s Punishment Warriors now appeared with some regularity in the Castle District each afternoon, drawing a persistent cluster of onlookers who seemed unable to decide whether to be concerned or merely impressed.
By the final week of fall, the tractor design was complete.
The bottleneck the process had always carried was Anna. Before the Dream World connection, she had been solely responsible for manufacturing and testing every prototype in Neverwinter: building the parts by hand with Blackfire, testing them, refining the tolerances, building again. Her work was extraordinary — Blackfire outperformed any machine tool available — but the gap between what Anna could produce in a one-off and what a plant could reproduce in volume had never been fully resolved. Determining which components could be mass-manufactured to acceptable precision, and which still required her direct intervention, had itself required trial and error. The pressure control valve on the second-generation steam engine had illustrated this exactly: simple in design, catastrophic in production, a defective rate so high that the whole batch had to be scrapped and the process restarted from scratch, costing half a month before a working unit came out.
The Design Bureau had changed this.
Now, Roland drafted a plan and the Bureau worked it forward — testing, redesigning, verifying tolerances against what ordinary machinery could achieve, mapping the assembly sequence — all before a single part was committed to physical production. By the time the Ministry of Industry received a specification, every question had already been asked and answered. The production cycle shortened. The cost dropped.
Roland named the farming machine the “Harvest.”
Its five pairs of road wheels would run on Graycastle’s soil.
Master Xie still had a long way to travel from a working tractor frame to what Roland actually needed: a war machine with tracked drive, armored, capable of crossing the terrain the First Army would face. The “Harvest” was a foundation. Whether the foundation could bear that weight was a question Roland was not yet ready to answer.
For the telegraph project, Qingqing had assembled a team quickly — fresh graduates, hobbyist radio technicians, people who treated the electromagnetic spectrum as a hobby rather than a profession. Roland’s difficulty was simpler than it should have been: he could not read a circuit diagram. The visual language defeated him on a level that no amount of effort had yet overcome. He had the team redraw everything as physical assembly plans — spatial, step-by-step — and even then moved slowly. He memorized the layouts and resolved to work through them with Anna later.
Beyond these two major projects, the preparation in Neverwinter had advanced across a broader front.
The road from south to north — the artery that would carry supplies to the front — was nearly done. Horford Quinn had hired close to a thousand workers and built cement plants in two border cities of the Kingdom of Dawn; those plants ran at hundreds of tons daily, pouring the road southward. The section between the Windswept Ridge and the Sparkling River was finished. Work had begun on the Cage Mountain segment. Estimated completion: half a month. Even accounting for Lotus and Molly’s help — without which the schedule would have been impossible — the Quinn Family had performed well beyond what Roland had expected. They had clearly put every available resource into this, understanding, as Roland understood, that the road was not infrastructure but logistics for a war that had no predictable end date.
Along the Eastern Region, the route down the Redwater River already reached the City of Evernight. They were one supply line away from the front.
The supplementary project — the steam-powered wheeled truck Roland had code-named “Hump” — had entered active use.
It was a formidable machine in its category: a cab-forward design, six wheels, an engine powered by steam, a long front housing the water tank. It weighed roughly ten tons empty. Load capacity: six tons. On hard concrete, it could sustain forty kilometers per hour for three hundred kilometers. The driver could replenish the water from rain, from wells, or in emergencies from whatever liquid was available; even without resupply, the “Hump” could make the distance between most cities and rivers. The design was not elegant, but it worked.
The constraint was human rather than mechanical. Each truck required at least two trained drivers, which meant that production capacity would outrun available operators — possibly badly — if the trucks were built faster than drivers could be trained. The solution was straightforward: found a driving school. There were no traffic laws in this era, no licensed examiners, no written tests. Teaching someone to drive a steam truck was a matter of days, not months.
The last project on the docket was storage batteries.
Less technically demanding than the tractor or the telegraph, but no less important. Battery power would run the headlights and taillights on the “Hump,” enabling round-the-clock operation without stopping for darkness. Electricity would also give the ground crews a way to start the biplanes’ engines reliably, cutting preparation time before flight — and, critically, if an engine seized in the air, a battery could provide the restart power that might be the difference between landing and not landing at all.
Underlying all of this was a change in Neverwinter’s human composition that had accelerated past Roland’s earlier projections. The recent wave of immigrants had brought the city’s labor pool to a new level, and the effect was compounding: experienced workers trained newcomers not out of altruism but out of self-interest, because having capable apprentices was the path to promotion and higher wages. An illiterate person could learn the steps for a specific machining operation in one to two weeks and produce components that met specification. The modern production system and universal education, running together, had created a feedback loop that traditional workshop production had never achieved. Roland suspected that the speed of industrialization in Neverwinter’s urban core would continue to surprise him.
Then the letter arrived from Iron Axe.
The Red Mist had reached the Cage Mountain area. Some outposts were reporting Devilbeasts over the Kingdom of Dawn.
Roland set the letter down and looked out the window.
On the Fertile Plains, he had watched a handful of Mad Demons cover thousands of kilometers to strike the rear. Even a small scouting force, if it moved unchecked, could disrupt supply lines and evacuation routes that months of effort had built. Devilbeasts in the sky above the Kingdom of Dawn were not a coincidence and not a provocation — they were reconnaissance. The demons were measuring the edge of their reach, mapping what they could touch before the main force moved.
The First Army could not hold the sky with ground weapons alone.
Roland let out a slow breath.
He had wanted to hold the Witch Union and the Aerial Knights back a little longer, let them rest, let the situation on the ground clarify before committing them. The situation had clarified in a direction he had not preferred.
It was time to send them forward.