Rewrite That Witch
CH183 · Rewrite
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Chapter 183: The Township Construction Plan

“What is this?” Nightingale studied the black stone on the table, turning it in the light.

“Obsidian.” Roland didn’t look up from the blueprint.

“Ob— what kind of stone?”

“I was speaking nonsense.” He sighed and glanced up. The stone was dense and dark, its surface bright where the furnace heat had treated it, with a quality that was not quite metallic and not quite mineral. Only the ghosts know what this is. He was a prince with memories of another world, not a geological engineer; looking at ore and naming it was not a skill his previous life had given him. He knew in the abstract that most ores were complex compound mixtures, their colors produced by varying impurities — pyrite could look like gold, fool’s gold, and fool people who should know better. Heat resistance varied by composition, not just by material family. Without a purification method, smelting was useless regardless of what the metal turned out to be.

He would send it to Kyle.

“There are actually things you don’t know?” Nightingale’s tone suggested this was genuinely surprising to her.

“Many things.” He set the quill down and poured a cup of black tea. “Do you want some?”

“No.” She waved it off. “Actually, salted fish is better than beef jerky. If you want to put something in the drawer, put salted fish.”

Roland decided he had not heard this.

The blueprint in front of him was a blast furnace — or rather, an evolved version of one, large enough to make Lesya’s shaft furnaces look like experimental prototypes. Eight meters tall, three meters at the widest point, firebrick interior courtesy of Soraya’s coating magic, steam-powered forced air through a dedicated ventilation shaft. Capacity approximately four times the existing shaft furnaces. An automated feeding rail along the exterior, steam-driven carts that would climb to the top and discharge directly into the mouth without human labor at the hot end.

He’d visited Lesya’s construction site after receiving the strange stone, looked at the shaft furnace with fresh eyes, and recognized what was there: good basic design, limited by available materials. Without firebrick — without a material that could survive sustained high heat — you could not push the furnace temperatures high enough to produce steel rather than just pig iron. With Soraya’s coating magic, firebrick was now manufacturable.

Which opened the door to this.

Five or six of the new furnaces running simultaneously would multiply Border Town’s pig iron output by an order of magnitude. More iron meant more machine parts meant faster construction of everything else. The cascade was straightforward once you saw it.

He was also drawing, on a separate sheet, a tap water system.

The concept was simple: a steam pump drawing from the Redwater River, a water tower for head pressure, pipes running underground through covered trenches to each residential block. The siphon principle handled distribution without additional pumping. The technical difficulty had never been the engineering — it was the pipes. Iron pipes rusted. Copper pipes were prohibitively expensive given the mine’s output. Brass pipes were ideal but required copper they didn’t have.

With Soraya’s coating applied to the inside of iron pipes, the rust problem disappeared. With her coating used as a mold — wrap iron rod in paper, coat the paper, withdraw the mold — they could manufacture pipes from nothing more than magical application. Even if the resulting pipes were not pressure-rated, embedding them in underground trenches meant they didn’t need to be.

He added a note to the specifications: gravity-fed, pressure not required, trench depth 0.5m minimum.

“You’re drawing a tower?” Nightingale was leaning over from across the table, reading the blueprint upside down.

“Almost. It’s empty inside — loads with fuel and ore through the top, iron comes out the bottom. Like Lesya’s shaft furnaces but larger.”

“Much larger.”

“That’s the point.” He set his wrist and kept drawing.

The electricity infrastructure he was leaving for later. The concept was clear enough — generators, Soraya-coated copper wire for insulation, incandescent lamps with carbonized bamboo filaments or tungsten wire — but the manufacturing requirement was still ahead of what they could produce at scale. The tap water system came first, because it affected daily life for every resident and required less precision engineering. The blast furnaces came first before that, because without iron production everything else was downstream.

He finished the blast furnace blueprint. Then the water tower. Then a schematic of the distribution trench network, drawn at approximate scale over a rough map of the town’s residential blocks.

He set the quill down and rubbed his wrist.

Then he pulled a box from the desk drawer and slid it across the table to Nightingale.

She looked at the box the way people look at things they haven’t expected and aren’t sure what to do with. “This is—”

“I’ve been meaning to give it to you for a while. The engraving took time — I’m not particularly skilled with the factory’s machines, as it turns out.” He smiled. “Open it.”

She opened it.

Inside: two revolvers, silver-finished and polished to a reflectiveness that made them look more like ceremony than instrument until you looked at the action and recognized that every line of the engineering was functional. The grips and bodies were engraved with a fine pattern that had required considerably more patience than Roland had initially estimated. Along the top of each barrel, in small clean letters: Dedicated to Veronica.

Nightingale stared at them for a moment without speaking.

He’d been thinking about this since the first revolver prototype. Nightingale moved in and out of visibility, operated at close range and within occupied spaces, needed something that could be concealed and deployed quickly and that she could operate without both hands clear. The revolver was almost exactly right: six rounds without reloading, reliable ignition, short and light enough to conceal under her cloak. The flintlocks she’d been working with were all wrong for how she actually fought.

She picked them up — both at once, one in each hand — and jumped off the table. Without seeming to think about it she fell into a shooter’s stance, arms extended, one pistol following the line of sight out the window.

“Will you show me how to use them?”

“This afternoon,” he said. “It isn’t complicated.”

She turned and grinned, the pistols catching the light, white cloak and silver steel and the specific quality of satisfaction she had when she was given something she immediately understood the application of. Roland thought: she is going to be terrifying with these. Then: good.

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