Chapter 20 -Master Operational Plan
"Olford showed me the results of your prototype wheels, village blueprints, and the subsequent operational plans today," Dad began, clearing his throat as he stood by my bedside. "The tax models, the resource extraction points, the crop rotation cycles, the meat harvest schedules, the land grants for the Lowland surveys... I didn't realize you were thinking about those things, Zaemon."
"I was just seeking opportunities to contribute to the development of our House," I replied, my voice steady despite my fatigue. "I am curious about the world beyond the Star Fort and how we will navigate this exile. I merely brought my queries to Olford; the overall planning and the practical implementation are entirely his doing."
This was a half-truth. The core logic was mine, but Olford's Hidden Eye had been the filter that caught the faults in my theoretical Earth-side ideas, grounding them in the harsh realities of the Sanni Forest.
Dad stared at the scrolls laid out on the table for a brief moment. "Alright then," he said, a rare note of respect softening his tone. "I am assigning you and Olford to be the coordinators of this project. Since you're so interested, it will be a vital learning experience. Your mother's early expertise in handling finances and resources is what kept us alive during the war and until today; it is time you learned the weight of that responsibility."
He paused at the door, the general finally giving way to the father. "I am leaving now. Rest properly, Zae. Do not be in a hurry to grow up." He left then, a visible peace settling over his shoulders.
I closed my eyes and fell into a deep, restorative sleep.
The next morning, Olford and I met at the strategy table. He unrolled the master survey across the table, anchoring the corners with needle-like pins. The map of the Sanni Forest stared back at us.
"Before we begin," I said, "I want to talk about the wheels."
Olford raised an eyebrow.
"The ball bearing prototype. I've been thinking about the numbers." I tapped the supply route lines on the map. "Our animals were burning out on the forest roads. A fully loaded cart on a bad axle costs us in replacement animals, repair time, and delayed supply windows. The new hubs eliminate most of that friction. One animal can now pull what used to require two."
Olford nodded slowly, the faint satisfaction of a man who had already run the numbers. "The first full convoy using the modified carts cut travel time to the small cities by nearly a third. The merchants from the Lowlands noticed before we announced it. Two of them have already asked where to commission the design."
"Which means the design leaks within the season if we don't control it," I said.
"Already in hand, Young Master. The smiths who built the prototypes are under a house contract. The design stays ours until we decide otherwise. Also, blacksmith Reek Loh Galar showed interest in becoming our family's official blacksmith." He allowed himself a small smile. "Your father's instinct was to share it freely to build goodwill. I persuaded him that goodwill is worth less than a licensing arrangement."
Olford possessed a stronger intuition for the market than I realized. The mention of Reek Loh Galar recalled the memories of the dwarf whose grandfather was a half dwarf. His last name revealed his non-human origins. I expected a loud, uncivil giant, but his character was entirely different. He was very excited when we tested the first prototype.
"Good. Now continue the last discussion and review of the Sovereign Grid."
"In the Lawless Lands, power is as fluid as the forest shadows. To replace the "Law of the Fish" and anchor the authority of House Hatar, we must first control the geography. We had to adapt to the Sanni Forest until now; it's time we force the forest to fit the map." I said.
Olford uncapped his ink and pointed to the Star Fort watchtower symbol at the map's center.
"The Centre," he said. "We use the watchtower as the fixed point and project a North-South and East-West axis from it. From those axes, we partition the land into uniform fifty-hectare squares, each numbered, each assigned a lead resident accountable to the Fort."
Olford spoke and wrote, his shorthand precise and fast. "Conceptual conquest," I said. " If the land has been marked, then it has an owner. If it has an owner, it has a law."
"A bandit cannot disappear into 'the forest' if the forest has been renamed Square A-1 and the militia of Square A-1 are his neighbors." I watched him draw the grid lines. "The roads follow the same geometry. Three-meter orthogonal ditches flanking every major road—soil from the ditch elevates the road surface, giving our patrols a height advantage. The ditches also break the momentum of a charging beast and double as drainage channels when the rains come."
"The excavation cost will be significant," I said. Olford paused his pen.
"Spread over two construction seasons and offset by the monster materials the ditch system itself produces when the beasts fall in. We treat every beast that dies in the ditch as a raw material inflow." he responded.
"We have already started the work on buffer zones. We will clear a wide expanse of land around the perimeter of both the village and its fields. This removes stalking cover for predators and provides archers on the walls with a clear line of sight," he informed me.
"What about the nights? For predators, darkness is their natural ally."
"Enchanted Bricks are the best solution, and if possible, at every grid intersection and village gate, we embed stones etched with low-level lumen runes. These draw from environmental mana to provide a constant, pale-gold radiance. And also install a ring of permanent braziers or torches with barbed wires to eliminate the darkness in areas of lesser importance and for additional safety."
I nodded and traced the outer perimeter. "Processing squares in every Bastion's Village—smokehouses, tanneries. Preserved monster jerky will be used as military rations. Treated hide will be supplied to the coastal armorers. We will convert violence into money. "I couldn't stop myself from saying those words. An old habit from the time of making my videos. He glanced up at that phrase. "Good practice for your future speeches and conversations, My Lord."
We worked through the defense architecture in layers. The first line of defense was the high-mobility crow's nest towers within signal distance of each other, using mirrors by day and colored alchemical fire by night.
Then, the Clusters of Villages consisted of 500 to 800 people, built on high ground, were designed to swallow an attack and hold it in place while the Star Fort's cavalry hit the flank. The villages can be added later to form Bastion Cities.
The last were small, hyper-fortified hamlets clustered around the fort itself, holding the grain and water reserves needed to sustain a months-long siege even if the outer lines failed.
Olford mapped each layer as we discussed it, his pen moving with the certainty of a man who had been waiting for someone to put words to instincts he had carried for years.
When we reached the intelligence framework, he set the pen down entirely.
"The idea of the ulterior census is straightforward," he said. "A Protection Registry in which we will catalog every soul, every head of cattle, and every acre. To be unregistered is equivalent to being an outlaw." He folded his hands on the table.
"Our silent observers are already recruited by me. They consist of institutional travelers, who are already on our payroll. I also have three healers and two cloth merchants who report to me. We formalize the arrangement and expand it, and we will have ears in every village hub before the second construction season ends."
"And the plan to handle the local forces?"
He was quiet for a moment. "The undertaking of warlords and local influential people's children."
"Education, not hostage-taking," I said. "The framing matters more than the fact. If their fathers see it as an insult, we get a unified Lawless Land and five hundred soldiers who cannot hold it. If they see it as the only place in the region where their children can learn to be something more than mud farmers with swords, they bring the children to us willingly."
"And the children grow up loving our culture more than their father's," Olford said.
"I will train alongside them. Learn alongside them. They don't become hostages—they become the first generation of our system, and they go home to inherit their fathers' territories with our values already installed." I picked up the wooden boar necklace from the table's edge, turned it once in my fingers, and set it back. "We don't just offer an education. We offer a future they cannot find in the mud."
Olford looked at me for a long moment. "A future they cannot afford to refuse." He picked up his pen again. "I will begin the outreach list."
We worked through the economic engine next—the one-sixth tax rate, the militia drill exchange, and the agripreneur land grants that converted soldiers from men with paychecks into men with farms and families anchored to the Third Line.
We also discussed forming a special group and its structure called "The Thorn-Pickers" because as we grow, we will attract "thorns"—spies, bandit infiltrators, and political saboteurs—to us.
I carefully observed the written plan on the table; it reminded me of my study nights for a rich classmate's thesis and the amount of time I dedicated to my live channel stream. Memories related to "moneymatters 101" and "cutiepie98" emerged in my mind, the discussion we had on similar topics on my livestreams.
"It's a beautiful number on paper," I said, tracing the one-sixth notation. "The social gravity that pulls every weary farmer from the coast to our gates. But beauty is expensive. How long before the financial bottleneck starves our own treasury?"
Olford leaned over the map, his shadow stretching across the Sanni grid lines. "You've noticed the problem, Young Master. By cutting the tax, we are burning our money. To build the rune-wells and the vibrant roads while only taking a sixth of the yield—we are betting the Hatar name on a thirteen-month sprint. If the Meat Harvest doesn't turn a profit by next year, we won't just be a noble house. We'll be a bankrupt noble house."
"There's another problem." I kept my voice neutral. My audial skill had caught the tremor in the servants' quarters two mornings ago—a conversation that had stopped the moment footsteps approached. "There are whispers of gold from the North. If our Thorn-Pickers can be bought, the Grid isn't a shield. It's a blueprint for our enemies."
Olford went still. He recovered quickly, but not quickly enough. "The Thorn-Picker's integrity is our most fragile link. In this land, loyalty is often just the highest bid. I've increased the internal audits, but even the best eyes can be blinded by enough coin. We must ensure they fear your father's wrath more than they love gold."
"And then there's the Month of Ace." I tapped the calendar notation at the map's margin. "We've built a machine state that depends heavily on mana. What happens when the tide goes out? When the enchanted bricks dim and the weight-reduction arrays fail? If we can't maintain the Grid's calibration during the forty days of the mana drop, the monsters will realize our gilded periphery is just a battery that ran out."
"The Ace fluctuation is the ultimate stress test," he agreed. "It's why your father insists on the boar style and the physical ditch. When the magic fails, the cold steel and the stone must remain." He paused. "But the most difficult problem, Young Lord, isn't the mana or the gold."
"The children," I said.
"Exactly." He didn't elaborate. He didn't need to. I leaned back from the table and looked at the completed map. The grid lines, the defense rings, the signal towers, the processing squares — it was, by any measure, a functional sovereign state drawn on parchment.
And yet.
Somewhere in my heart the pain of my bruised ego, which was the direct result of my own foolish assumptions and inadequate planning, was still present. Ever since I knew in this world magic was real, I had nurtured the arrogant assumption that a magic-heavy society would be technologically stunted.
I expected my life to play out like a typical isekai or soul-migration story, a modern mind effortlessly outsmarting a medieval world. But the one thing that has been bothering me ever since I read the archaic book of my mother led me to conduct a deeper assessment; it revealed a world far more complex and sophisticated than I'd bargained for.
The ball bearing wheels had worked. The rune workers, to their credit, had installed weight-reduction rune arrays on the transport wagons without a second thought—the concept of reducing friction through mechanical means was apparently not foreign here.
I was clearly disappointed and angry on seeing my first hot air balloon in this world, much to the surprise of my mother, who held me at that time. Though they were rare and expensive to produce, they were used primarily for aerial surveillance or to carry alchemical payloads against flying monsters.
Archimedes' screw showed up within a month of us coming here and in the rune-well designs. The mages had reinvented it independently and called it something else. I observed during the journey that the heavy plow was standard in the southern farming territories and fenced with a structure similar to barbed wires different from earth as they were made from plant materials. I didn't give it much thought at that time.
I also came to know that the blast furnaces were in limited use at the coastal production centers. Master Arka had described many more things in study time. The Star Fort's own walls had been defended, at some point before the Orc War, by a battery of archballistas and torsion catapults. The work to construct them again would start next week.
Mother commissioned the construction of a kid's ride for me made up of pulley systems that were everywhere, so common the porters used them without thinking.
The Earth-side monopoly I had been quietly banking on was significantly smaller than I had hoped. Magic had not completely replaced engineering here. It had run alongside it, absorbed the parts it found useful, and left the rest to evolve on its own schedule. The opportunity I had expected to take advantage of initially turned out to be a Charmander, not Charizard.
I filed the disappointment and moved on. A smaller gap was still a gap.
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