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Chapter 827: War Supplies

Edith was the first to raise the question, once Leaf had finished speaking.

“Your Majesty — is it safe for ordinary people to eat the magic-engineered wheat?”

It was, Roland suspected, what everyone in the room most wanted to know. After the Pearl of the Northern Region put it into words, both Petrov and Spear leaned forward almost imperceptibly, waiting.

Roland smiled. “First: there is no meaningful difference between Golden Twos and Golden Ones. Both were developed by Leaf. The only distinction is yield. Second: although the plant is enhanced by magic during cultivation, the plant itself carries no magic power. You need not worry that it will harm ordinary people.” He let a beat pass. “As it happens, the oatmeal and pancakes I ate a few days ago were made from Golden Twos grown in the testing field.”

He thought, briefly, of the old debates — natural food, hybrid food, engineered food — arguments conducted with great fervor by people who had forgotten what natural food had originally looked like.

The origin of Golden Twos was more complicated than Roland’s two-sentence answer implied. To fully explain it he would have had to teach them about genetic mutation and the mechanisms of heredity, subjects that Leaf herself did not fully understand. What Leaf’s ability could do was induce rapid, dramatic changes in plants — but only so long as she continuously supplied them with magic power. The changes could not pass to the next generation. Push a plant too far and it died the moment the power was withdrawn.

So when Leaf cultivated golden wheat, she used her ability in two ways: to create mutations, and to accelerate growth. Then she selected the survivors and discarded the rest. Repeat. The process was no different from traditional farming — only the timescale had collapsed. What would ordinarily take centuries had taken two years.

Roland had once seen a photograph of an original watermelon. A fist-sized fruit, hard-shelled, its interior divided into a few yellow segments not much different from a mandarin. By the seventeenth century the flesh had reddened and the fruit had swelled — but even then, more than half of it was white rind, with perhaps four or five spoonfuls of edible flesh. Most fruits people took for granted had looked nothing like this a few hundred years prior. Dogs, to push the thought further, were an originally non-existent species, transformed from wolves by generations of human influence.

What people called “natural” was also a product of selection. The true original was most likely tasteless — or worse.

And it was not only human beings who altered the world. Every species, from mammals down to microorganisms, was continuously reshaping itself to better fit the environment. To Roland’s mind, there was no meaningful difference between a yeast fermenting bread and an engineer building a power station. Life itself was nature. The line people drew between them was sentimental, not logical.

He knew none of this would land cleanly in this room. He kept his answer to two propositions: the wheat was safe, and he himself had eaten it.

In this era, a king’s willingness to eat what his people ate was the most persuasive argument available.

Seeing the room’s posture shift — the tight shoulders easing, the watchful eyes settling — Roland moved on.

“Furthermore, as in Neverwinter, all food trades in your cities must be supervised and controlled through the secondary City Hall. Private sale of food is forbidden. Barov, the Governor-in-Chief, will explain the detailed implementation.” He glanced at the relevant faces as he said it. “This is not optional.”

Countess Spear Passi raised her brows. “Your Majesty — if Golden Twos yields as much as you describe, there will be a large surplus after all subjects are fed. Buying back all that excess would create a significant financial burden for the government. The population of Fallen Dragon Ridge is just over ten thousand. Are we truly required to produce at that scale?”

“Yes. Because the excess won’t be consumed. It will be stockpiled.”

“Stockpiled?” A small pause. “For what?”

“For the Battle of Divine Will.” Roland said the words slowly, letting them settle.

He had never lived through a prolonged war. He had been born into peace, and the histories he had learned from were the only maps he had. When he tried to project the worst: a thirty percent reduction in population, all the able-bodied gone to the front lines, women and children working the factories, the farmland standing fallow. If they entered that situation with no reserve, they would not survive it. But with two or three years of stockpiled food — the margin grew.

He had discussed the question with Karl Van Bate, the Minister of Construction. Van Bate believed that a properly designed and maintained granary could preserve grain for up to five years. Grain that was one or two years old would not taste as good. Nobody on the far side of a war would particularly care.

It was worth noting that wheat was not the only high-yield crop in Leaf’s testing field. After two years of work, she had successfully enhanced several imported species — sugarcane, corn, potato — and cultivated high-yield breeds from each. Corn and potatoes, in particular, produced more food per unit than wheat. The reasons Roland had chosen to promote Golden Twos over them were simple: corn and potatoes could be reproduced freely, which made a food monopoly impossible; and their shelf life was shorter than grain. Two decisive disadvantages.

Of course, agriculture was a vastly complex industry — poultry required fodder beans, livestock required pasture, and so on through a thousand dependencies Roland had not had time to carefully address. The food problem in wartime was already a project large enough to occupy him. He could only build the foundations and trust that the rest would follow.

Because the Battle of Divine Will was not an abstraction to anyone in this room, no one raised further objections. When the conference wound down, Roland fixed his gaze on Scroll.

“Add agriculture to the secondary education curriculum,” he said. “Train specialists — people who know how to grow specific crops, manage soil, read yields. Not theorists. Practitioners.”

The education level in the other cities could not yet match Neverwinter’s. Democratizing education across all of Graycastle would take more time than he had. The practical solution — the one that could happen now — was to train professionals in Neverwinter and dispatch them outward, to supervise agricultural practice in the other cities. It would set a precedent for chemistry, architecture, medicine. He did not need his subjects conducting original research. He needed them applying what they had learned to the daily operation of an industry.

That would be enough, for now.

After the conference, Wendy found him in the corridor.

The witches who had been exploring the snow mountain of the Western Region had docked safely at Neverwinter.

Roland reached the wharf before he had fully composed himself. Someone broke from the crowd and threw herself against his chest.

Blond hair brushed his cheek. The scent of her reached him before anything else — familiar, entirely certain, like a room he had stepped out of and back into.

“I’m back,” Nightingale murmured against his ear, laughing softly.

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