Chapter 28: Lord of the Beast

However effective it seemed to be, the archery program didn’t address the issue that I was dealing with at the time; a small, underpowered guard force. For that, I turned to my general solution to problems in Westeros; magic, and animals. I used Green mana to send the ravens and the castle’s hunting pack into a breeding frenzy.

Then I turned all the dogs into what I called a Gangari Guard Hound. The new Hounds were about a hundred and twenty pounds, and had similar upgrades to Togo apart from the size. They were further inherently embedded with loyalty to me, a sense of justice, and a pack mentality to induce order for military affairs.

In a few months, about as much time as it would take to train even the worst guardsman, I’d have about two hundred Hound puppies. In a year, I’d have about a thousand Hounds, and then if I wanted to their population could really take off. Each one was easily the match for a proper warrior, and they could stand watches and help on patrols as easily as any of my guardsmen. Already the twenty males were helping out.

Likewise, Gangari Guard Ravens were patterned off of Nevermore’s enhancements, just without a comm link and with an embedded sense of loyalty and justice. They were designed to act as scouts for my guard forces, relaying messages, and finding and reporting crimes to their attached units. Unlike the Hounds, which were basically a soldier-substitute, the Ravens were an effectiveness multiplier, allowing each member of the Guard to be much more effective.

As part of that same effectiveness multiplier, I changed the horses into Gangari Guard Horses. These were modelled after Aethon. Since my guardsmen were unenhanced, the horses had a less powerful version of the Supernatural Physique enchantment. They were designed to be even more biddable and calm, and slightly less intelligent.

The soldiers riding them weren’t always the best riders, after all, and really intelligent horses weren’t exactly designed for combat. Unlike Aethon and Shadowfax, I wouldn’t be around to ensure the horses survived, so I didn’t feel comfortable making them that sentient. But still the horses were far faster, ate less, had better endurance, were tougher and easier to ride and in all respects superior to ordinary steeds.

The Gangari Guard animal variants all had a unique coloration; they were varying shades of grey, with a hand sized version of my house’s Parthian shot horse-archer silhouette on their front shoulder in black. I thought it looked quite smart, like a natural uniform. They were modified to only be viable with each other, a specific sterility enchantment that could be temporarily unlocked by another animal which had the same enchantment. I didn’t want the breeds to intermix with animals intended for use by others who weren’t loyal to me.

Luckily the soldiers seemed to be adjusting relatively well to the changes, taking the magic in stride as it just being normal from a wizard and adapting to their new compatriots.

Having made animals for the Guard, it seemed natural to design better animals in general. Farms, even ones that mostly grow grain, depend on animals. Shepherding dogs look after animals and protect the farms from predators. Work horses pull ploughs and wagons. Cattle, for milk, meat and leather. Sheep, for wool, milk and meat. Goats, for fur, milk and meat as well. Chickens for eggs and meat. And bees, for pollination and honey.

My castle and the nearby farming villages that supplied it and Harrentown had all of these animals to one degree or another. I used those for my first experiments. Then whenever I finished with a design I had Steward Bridges purchase a quantity of each of the animals for me to modify and then begin to breed for future sale to my farmers.

I started off with the Gangari Shepherd dog. Basically a sixty pound version of the Guard Hound with weaker physical upgrades and inclined to be naturally gentle towards humans unless it or its family was being attacked. It was pretty easy to design and enchant those. I started off with a population of sixty.

Next were perhaps the most important aspect of any farm; the horses. Gangari farm horses were designed to be biddable, to endure heat and cold, to pull heavy loads without complaint, and to consume food efficiently. Unlike Aethon, they didn’t emphasize extreme speed or intelligence, though because of the supernatural physical enhancements they ended up being faster than normal horses when they went full speed. As horses breed slower than dogs, I started with a herd of three hundred. It took me two weeks just to enchant them all.

After the lengthy period enchanting horses, I wanted to make something new. Pests are a massive problem in farms. I wanted an animal that would go after them, without damaging the environment in general. At first I thought of cats, but they don’t do as good a job eating bugs, and they end up going off and killing birds instead of rodents. Dead birds don’t eat bugs either, so that’s bad.

Eventually I made what I called the Gangari Pest Eater bird. It was mentally modified to be drawn to orderly nature, in other words agriculture. They were designed to be voracious eaters when food was available, but enter into a low-energy mode when it wasn’t to survive winters. They were both territorial and at the same time hesitant to enter another’s territory. This was to avoid overpopulation, and to drive off encroaching rodents and other birds that would eat the crops. If a bird ever managed to be full for a few days, implying that there were too many insects, it would cease to emit its territorial aura, switching to one designed to attract free nearby Pest-eaters and go into a higher breeding rate. I developed them off of a sparrowhawk, and used Green mana to help build up an initial population of two hundred.

After that, I went back to the basics; the simple chicken. Apart from increasing food efficiency, reducing susceptibility to disease and improving biological efficiency in general, I focused on two designs. The first were egg-laying chickens. They would lay eggs more regularly, and lay better eggs. The other were meat chickens, which would have more and tastier meat available for cooking and grow faster than usual chickens. I made a hundred of each.

Since I’d been dealing with birds for so long, I decided to move back up to something bigger, and tackled the cow situation. Cows come in two main varieties: milk, and meat. Milk cows make milk, meat cows make meat. It’s pretty simple. The meat cows were easy; make them bigger, the meat tastier and more nutritious, improve the efficiency of their digestion and tolerance to heat and cold, improve their health, make them nice and biddable, and I was done.

The milk cows were a little harder. Milk itself can be quite dangerous if it’s not pasteurized. I wanted to come up with an inherent filter. Basically, something that would make sure the milk was safe to drink. It took a bit of doing, but a mix of White enchanted into the udders meant that the milk was sterile, at least when it left the cow.

Further, milking cows is a massive nuisance; I made the cows self-milking. They could choose to release their milk, and I made them a little more intelligent so they could be easily taught were to milk themselves into. Beyond that, the everclean coat that I was adding to all the animals would help keep their skin clean and disease free, but I also made them naturally tidy.

Other than that, they got the typical enhancements to efficiency of digestion, weather and temperature tolerance, disease resistance, and were made somewhat regenerative to increase the amount of milk they could produce.

Given all their advantages I was sure that my cows were going to be very popular, and I established herds of a hundred of each milk and meat.

Sheep were next on the docket. Sheep also have two purposes; meat, and wool. For the standard or meat sheep, I made them totally white in their wool, and made the wool itself somewhat higher quality and more consistent. I gave the sheep the same sorts of upgrades I’d given the meat cows. And then I made the sheep a lot more orderly.

There’s a secret joke in the Bible that anyone who grew up in an agricultural community with sheep knows that far, far too few people outside of those communities understand. Every time Jesus was being called a shepherd, it wasn’t just because a shepherd leads and protects the flock of innocent helpless animals. It was saying that trying to look after humanity was going to be like looking after sheep, which is fucking miserable.

Sheep aren’t actually as stupid as some people think. They can recognize people and like some more than others, are pretty good herd animals, can anticipate events and some even come when called by name. That’s already better than most cats.

But for how sort-of smart they can be, they are also just about the dumbest animals on earth. Leave forty sheep alone for a few hours, and one of them (at least) will have gotten themselves in some situation that’ll kill them if you don’t fix it. They’re smart enough to get into trouble, and dumb enough that they can’t stop themselves or get out of it. The biggest problem is that for a herd animal, sheep are far too happy to just wander off. Reinforcing the herding instinct saved about half the trouble the sheep caused, so it was well worth it.

As for the wool sheep, those were designed with one purpose and one purpose only; making wool. Instead of the animals that might eventually be eaten when they died, I decided that the wool sheep were a cash crop. Someone who wanted wool and a sheep could buy the standard sheep; its pure white coat was already highly desirable for merchants already as the white could dye easily and the wool was superior to natural versions.

But my wool sheep, those were designed to have no dye needed. Instead, I focused on two things. First, making the sheep take as little expense in food and care as possible. I used some of the Zorse-derived low-food and low-water requirement adaptations to achieve that. That meant the meat wouldn’t be suitable to eat; to make sure no one tried, I made it toxic enough to be obvious, and made the meat black and slightly smelly to really drive the point home.

Second, I focused on the wool. These sheep came in vivid reds and scarlets, yellow and gold, blue and turquoise, green and grey and brown and every color between. Each sheep was a single, perfectly even shade save for a single tuft at their chin that was multi-colored. The wool was fine and strong and soft, the everclean coat a permanent part of the wool that would make the fabric stain resistant in the future.

The coolest part about the sheep was that they had a sympathetic coloring enchantment. If you took a locket of the hair from the chin, picked out a specific color, and tied a piece of that colored wool to a shaved sheep’s neck then all the new wool coat would change to and grow in as that color. These were going to revolutionize the dyeing industry, and neither the initial herd of five hundred, nor their progeny would be resold.

I wanted a monopoly on the colors to keep prices high. There was one particular lapis-lazuli derived blue dye that was literally worth its weight in gold. And I could grow masses of wool that exact shade if I wanted. Without flooding the market, and making other attractive shades of fabric, I was looking at expected profits of about twenty dragons a year on each of those multi-hued sheep. It wasn’t as much as my Valyrian steel, but it was nothing to sniff at either.

I did however make a herd of a hundred white standard sheep, which were still highly attractive to the populace as their wool could easily be dyed. Those would be available for sale in the future.

With the sheep done I was making a goat when I decided it was too likely to become an invasive pest species, and stopped. Goats eat everything and can live everywhere. Making them even better at survival could easily end up with a swarm of goats covering my lands.

Instead, I moved on to working with the bees. The bees were pretty easy; I reduced their desire to sting White-oriented creatures, which mostly included organized humans and their pets, unless said White animals were being really annoying. I increased their tolerance to temperature and weather, gave them the favorable winds enchantment to make flying easier and less energetically costly, improved their digestion, health and energy efficiency in general, and upped their breeding rate and lifespan. I had had a full twenty bee-hives and their keepers hired, so I used the enchantment on those queens.

All of the Gangari agricultural animals were given a marking, somewhat similar to how I marked my Gangari Guard animal lines. Because they weren’t warriors though I didn’t use my sigil. Instead I used an ornate, gothic G inside a white circle with a black border on their heads. Also similar to my Guard animals, they were designed to breed true.

And then I was finally done. Two and a half months of enchanting work on the farm animals, and some two thousand dragons spent hiring laborers, breeders, workers to make stables and buildings… It was a real project and strained by castle’s staff to organize. Still, I would begin spreading them, first on my own personal lands, then my territory.

Soon the whole world would know my mark as that of the absolute champion of agricultural animals!

Ahem. The whole, unholy mixture of science and magic, creating new species thing might have been getting me in a weird headspace.

But that was okay because, suddenly, baby!

Daenerys was giving birth.