Chapter 30: Men of Steel

Back at Harrenhal and with a massive supply of mana, I decided it was time to go through all of my upgrades, cultivation and personal enchantments and improve them. It was, in fact, past time for me to do so, but there hadn’t been a pressing need at any point and I had been focused more on breeding support animals than on improving my own person. It was probably because I’d been overly White at the time, which made me a bit selfless.

I first improved my thought acceleration to allow me to think about the spells better, allowing me to manipulate more complicated structures before they started to unravel. Then I improved my mana-sensing and mage-sight. I realized with that greater accuracy of sense that the thought acceleration could be further improved, so I went back and did so. That in turn allowed me to improve the mana-sensing and seeing patterns. Then I was at the limit that my connection to the concepts and power of Blue would allow there.

I really had been letting myself get behind, it seemed.

I similarly upgraded my combat “jedi” precognition, not once but twice. The rest of my Blue-aligned personal improvements were more difficult to increase in their efficacy. Favorable winds wasn’t a structured spell that I truly understood, but rather something I had evolved and copied. The mental ward was more technical than instinctive, and needed research rather than mana insight to upgrade. The communications link was the same.

So I moved onto my physical Green improvements. I increased my supernatural physique qualitatively, then refined it a second time. My oakflesh spell went from something I could call stoneflesh, to graniteflesh, to bronzeflesh. It was incredibly hard but more importantly very, very tough.

My regenerative healing factor likewise grew in strength. Before, I used to have to use a bit of Green and White mana every day to inject myself with life-energy, preventing aging. After the upgrade to regeneration, I realized that my body was naturally no longer aging, fixing itself into an optimal state. I still wasn’t wolverine, but I had easily reached the point of battlefield-relevant levels of regeneration.

I even managed to refine the structure of my dragon bone-derived skeletal structure, and used that to increase the natural strength of my body, the baseline on which the active supernatural enhancements were added. Green didn’t just provide unnatural strength; it boosted the body’s natural state too. Sort of like taking a number of small advantageous mutations and adaptations, and adding them without the necessity of waiting for evolution. Naturally I was near Captain-America levels of strength and speed, as good as or better than the best Olympic athletes back on Earth. With the enhancements over the top of that, I was truly a physical beast.

With my Green sorted, I moved onto Red. I further increased my reaction speed, making it so fast as to be almost instantaneous. I also improved my haste effect which made me faster in general, then refined the improved structure to get a second qualitative improvement out of it. Combined with my non-magical baseline and Green’s more physically-derived strength and speed, I could do things like lunge faster than a hundred miles an hour from a standing start, and punch fast enough to start approaching the speed of sound. The increased impact at the moment of hitting something was improved a smaller bit.

I also added a new Red improvement: fireproof. I’d finally taken the time to test the enchantment lying dormant in Dany’s blood. It was pretty good to start off with, but I even managed to improve it a bit. From my testing, it could withstand temperatures of about fifteen hundred C without issue, and even temperatures above that were much less damaging. It was enough to forge without any protective equipment, which made me feel like a boss, so it was well worth it. Higher temperatures were still an issue, and things like wildfire were still potentially deadly, but typical flames were no longer a real threat.

My White saw similarly impressive gains. The stored healing energy was enough to auto-repair getting my chest blown apart or some similarly extreme injury; my more extreme experiments with rabbits showed that depending on timing, it might even be able to repair my head getting blown off before my life-pattern and mana structures dispersed too much as they did when the creatures died. My conceptual armor was less like having a padded leather armor, and more like having full plate against physical attacks; more importantly, it gave a similar level of equivalent protection against any threat including spell energies, psychic assaults and the like. As a last line of defense it was great, especially if I came up against some threat I hadn’t previously considered.

The projectile shield was improved significantly in both individual shield strength, and the number of shields layered. I also improved the linking effect, so other nearby projectile shields would not only help share the load of impacts, something I’d done before, but massive impacts would only impact the shield it hit. That way, something like a ballista bolt would take down a single shield layer on one person by overloading its concept of protection, rather than a shield layer from them and everyone connected to them. In fact, a ballista bolt may be a poor example; given the recent shield strength upgrade, a ballista bolt might not even take down one shield layer on an individual, let alone a group.

The problem with that upgrade to the linking spell was that if someone was hit with multiple of those heavy impacts in succession they could lose all of their shields. So I further improved the linkage, allowing people with full shield-sets to shift one of their shields to the party under attack. That meant that I had the best of both not using more shield than needed at any point in time, sharing shield regeneration through the group, and even sharing number of shields through the group.

Black, despite being my weakest color, also improved. My anti-disease and anti-toxin effects got stronger; I doubted that anything non-magical could hope to affect me. But the gains I was most interested in was in my improved consumption ability. Before, it harvested the possible nutrition near-perfectly. After upgrading it, it could substitute life and energy content for nutritional content; I could have survived on wood if I needed to.

Not only that, but with refinement my consumption upgrade even allowed me to gain some small benefit by processing the food for essences. If I ate strong things, I would – over an admittedly very long time – get stronger. Fast things, faster. Poisonous things would give any poisonous glands greater strength. And so on. It was very, very inefficient, and I suspected would reach levels of diminishing returns, but it was only the start.

With that done, my upgrades were complete. I did a similar process to Togo, Aethon, Jon, Ghost and Shadowfax over the rest of the day.

What I really needed to develop was a way to pass on these upgrades in large numbers though for my Guard animals. As it was, I had neither the time nor the patience to do upgrades to them on an individual basis. It wasn’t strictly necessary, especially on Westeros, but I worried that if they were somewhere more advanced like Earth that my beasts would be less invincible.

While I was at it, I also added figuring out how to do the enchantments at long distance, such as for Ned and Ser Barristan.

I did however take the time to make my smiths fireproof. I guess I took that whole “Only You! Can avoid workplace accidents!” message to heart.

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While I was gone, my alchemists had finally figured out paper. It wasn’t the nicest paper I’d ever seen, but it was easily good enough to allow for decent quality printed books. They had a pilot paper mill already running, with ten workers preparing about five hundred pages a day each; it wasn’t designed to be profitable, but to test new devices. More importantly, they had identified what they needed in a plant to make optimal paper with the least processing.

I grew a few fields of the newly designed and magically modified paper-fiber plants. They were pretty heavily enchanted, and it was basically as easy as walking along the rows of trellised vines and picking off the matted plant fibers. Regeneration meant they grew back practically overnight, and they basically consumed air, water, manure and dirt to balance masses. Those fields would be more than enough for my paper industry for decades to come.

The printers meanwhile had the first press fully functional. It could do six thousand pages of text a day, or four thousand if there were images involved. Again, it was mostly a prototype; the full production facility would be about twice as fast with trained workers, and the factory would ramp up to at least twenty such presses.

By the end of the decade I intended to have printed enough books for one to be in every home in the Riverlands. The initial investment I’d assigned of a thousand dragons should be enough that by the end of the year I’d have the factories established, and then reinvestment could take care of the rest.

There were going to be four books to start off with. The first, a guide for farmers with information on “cutting edge” farming techniques and tools, hygiene, health, and archery (in my province’s edition, at least). The second, a booklet with pictures, letters and numbers to help people learn to read and do math from basic arithmetic through geometry and basic algebra. The third, a book on the religions of Westeros, including both the Seven-Pointed Star as well as essential teachings and writings by Old Gods philosophers. The fourth, a book on the history of Westeros with commentary.

If I could fully distribute all of those, I would do a lot to improve literacy and education in my little corner of the world. I’d also be making something like twelve and a half thousand dragons a year doing so. Compared to the profits from my Valyrian steel industry that wasn’t much. But considering that was about ten times the yearly profit from my fief when I took charge, the perspective shifted.

Other than that, there hadn’t been so many changes while I was off gathering mana. Valyrian Steel was still making a fucking fortune for me. The farm animals were still breeding. The peasants were still happily practicing archery.

As for the Steelworks, they now needed me to get involved and actually build the major installations of blast furnace and Bessemer converter; the test beds had successfully identified how much of each of the different ores and such we had to use, and meanwhile the storehouses were just gathering more and more ingredients as my purchasing agents went about buying up ore and shitty iron. But there were finally enough high-quality bricks and refractory material to get building.

And so I did.

Luckily for me, making the blast furnace and Bessemer converter was actually really easy with my magic. I had massive piles of bricks where the blast furnace was going to be, and the Bessemer lining material was nearby. I had used the stone-manipulating spells enough that I hadn’t had much trouble making a generalized “shape stone” spell, and I used that to form the blast furnace and Bessemer converter.

Then I did something very clever. I developed selectively permeable gas filters using White based wards. The only real difference between a Bessemer converter and the more modern basic oxygen furnace is that the latter avoids issues from nitrogen in the steel by using oxygen gas only. It wasn’t hard to get a ward to reject nitrogen gas, and the high heat and pressure easily overcame any entropic energy losses from unmixing the gasses. The nitrogen was used as secondary heating for the blast furnace, increasing efficiency.

To be honest, magic overcame so many materials difficulties. All the metal I used in the devices was Valyrian blessed, and could withstand greater stresses and temperatures because of it. Making things myself was very quick considering I could shape the materials with my will alone. Stone could be made highly heat-retaining through use of insulating White enchantment, which reduced fuel losses. And on, and on – every issue I might face, I easily magicked away. Even my workers were largely immune from risk of injury due to my magic.

It was fucking awesome.

Between the blast furnace and converter, my new steelworks could process ore and scrap into quality iron, and quality iron into high quality steel (extremely high quality compared to the general technology level), faster than I could acquire the necessary materials. Even given that limitation though, within a few months my steelworks was up to about two thousand tons a year of iron production and a thousand tons a year of steel.

In consultation with the smiths, I designed and built a massive foundry for all of the smiths flocking to my lands. It took me months. As the word spread, I must have had half the free journeymen in Westeros coming to my lands. Apart from the individual and shared workplaces, I had wind and water powered machines to make plates, bars, rods, pipes, wire, and nails, and some hydraulically powered hammers, grinders, drills, saws, mills and lathes.

Many of the tools worked almost entirely on magic, or if not entirely, still relied on it for much of the work transferring energy into motion, moving energy through the space, and so on and so on. Beyond that, the tools were made of valyrian blessed steel, and so would never rust or wear so long as they were used on regular iron and steel and could withstand higher temperatures which reduced issues from long usage times from friction on the worked piece.

In short, even a modern machinist would give their left nut to be able to use my gear.

After three months of making buildings, designing tools, and all the rest of it I was sick to death of dealing with the metalworks. I estimated that by the end of the year, it would be making me some obscene amount of profit, about fifty eight thousand dragons a year even if I reinvested about half the profit, and putting more and more effort into it seemed like a waste at that point.

I felt like Midas; everything I touched turned to gold, and I had no idea of where to spend it. The only real place I had to spend money was re-investing it, or my Guard. The Guard still needed to get bigger, but I wasn’t ready to start a whole shift in training, doctrine and professionalism just yet. Nor was I willing to expand until I’d managed my military reforms.

It almost came as a relief when I got word that ice zombies were gathering beyond the Wall.