Chapter 64: The Dwarven Tithe and the Invisible Spark

The receiving yards of Dian City were a sprawling, chaotic expanse of soot, crushed gravel, and deafening noise. Plumes of white steam hissed into the cold autumn air as a massive convoy of reinforced steam-carriages rumbled to a halt.

These carriages had not come from the local mines. They bore the heavy, blocky geometric crests of the Kingdom of Bergran. It was the first official delivery of the Deep-Earth Mineral Accord—the Dwarven iron tithe.

Hameel, Silas’s lead logistics engineer, who just returned from royal capital, stood on a wooden loading dock holding a thick leather ledger and a piece of charcoal. He wiped a mixture of sweat and coal dust from his forehead, glaring down at the line of sullen, broad-shouldered Dwarven miners who had escorted the convoy.

“Dump it in sector four!” Hameel shouted over the hiss of the engines, gesturing to a massive, empty holding pen. “And weigh every single cart! The Accord mandates five thousand tons of raw iron ore per month! If you’re short by even a single pound, Count Kazuha will dock your kingdom’s grain shipments!”

The Dwarves grumbled, their pride severely wounded, but they complied. They pulled the heavy release levers on the sides of the carriages. Tons of jagged, rust-red iron ore crashed down onto the sorting grates with a deafening roar.

Hameel walked down the line, his sharp eyes scanning the raw material. The quality was undeniably spectacular—Bergran iron was legendary for a reason. But as he approached the fourth carriage, his eyes locked onto a massive anomaly.

Sitting right in the center of the iron ore pile was a gigantic, jagged boulder. It wasn’t the rust-red color of the surrounding ore. It was a dark, metallic grey, almost black, and it easily weighed three hundred pounds.

Hameel’s face flushed with anger. “Halt the line!”

He marched up to the Dwarven foreman, pointing a furious finger at the massive rock. “What is this? Do you think we are fools? You pad the bottom of the carts with useless, dead granite to cheat the weight quotas?”

The Dwarven foreman blinked, looking genuinely confused. “I swear on the Stone, human, we did not pad the carts. That must have been mixed in from the upper-tier excavations.”

“I wasn’t born yesterday, Dwarf,” Hameel spat. He turned to a nearby tool rack and grabbed a heavy, four-foot-long solid iron crowbar. “I’m prying this dead weight out of here, and I’m deducting three hundred pounds from your total!”

Hameel climbed onto the sorting grate. He wedged the heavy iron crowbar beneath the edge of the dark-grey boulder and threw his weight backward to pry it loose.

CLANG.

The sound was sharp and violent. The crowbar did not slide beneath the rock. Instead, as the iron tip came within an inch of the boulder’s surface, an invisible, terrifying force violently yanked the heavy tool completely out of Hameel’s grip. The iron crowbar slapped flat against the side of the dark-grey rock with bone-jarring force and stuck there.

Hameel staggered backward, tripping over a piece of ore and landing hard on his back.

He stared at the crowbar. It was defying gravity, plastered horizontally against the side of the boulder.

“What in the…?” Hameel whispered, the color draining from his face. He scrambled forward and grabbed the handle of the crowbar, planting his boots against the grate. He pulled with all his might, straining his back, but the iron bar felt as though it had been perfectly welded to the stone.

“It’s a curse!” one of the human laborers screamed, dropping his shovel.

Panic rippled through the receiving yard instantly. The Vanguard Riflemen stationed around the perimeter unslung their lever-action rifles, pulling the levers down with a synchronized, threatening clack-clack. They aimed their weapons directly at the Dwarves.

“Step away from the carts!” a Vanguard captain roared. “They’ve smuggled a cursed artifact into the city! Black magic!”

The Dwarves raised their hands, their eyes wide with panic, equally terrified of the strange rock and the dozen rifles pointed at their chests.

“Hold your fire! Hold your fire, you absolute idiots!”

The voice cut through the panic like a knife. Viscount Inori Kazuha pushed his way through the line of Vanguard soldiers. He was wearing his heavy leather apron, his brass goggles resting around his neck, and he looked incredibly annoyed to have been interrupted.

“Lord Inori, stand back!” Hameel warned frantically, scrambling away from the rock. “It’s a magical trap! It pulled the iron right out of my hands! It won’t let go!”

Inori frowned, walking right past the aimed rifles and stepping onto the grate. He looked at the dark-grey boulder. He looked at the iron crowbar stuck to its side.

Then, Inori threw his head back and burst into a loud, echoing fit of laughter.

“Magic?” Inori wheezed, wiping a tear of mirth from his soot-stained cheek. “Hameel, you are a logistics engineer! Use your head!”

Inori stepped up to the rock. He grabbed the handle of the crowbar. Instead of pulling straight back, he grabbed one end and violently twisted it sideways, breaking the surface contact. With a harsh scraping noise, the iron bar popped free.

Inori held the crowbar up. “It’s not a curse, you superstitious fools. It is simply Magnetite. Highly concentrated iron oxide.”

“But… but it pulled the iron!” Hameel stammered.

“It is a Lodestone,” Inori explained, his engineering mind instantly shifting into lecture mode. “Sometimes, when a highly concentrated vein of magnetite is resting at the peak of a mountain, it gets struck by lightning. The immense electrical discharge from the sky violently aligns the molecular structure of the iron oxide. All the positive and negative poles face the exact same direction. The rock becomes permanently magnetized.”

The laborers lowered their shovels, looking completely bewildered. The Vanguard slowly lowered their rifles, though they still looked at the rock with suspicion.

Inori, however, was no longer laughing. He was staring at the massive lodestone, the gears in his mind suddenly spinning at a terrifying, catastrophic speed. He had been so obsessed with crude oil and chemistry that he had completely forgotten about the invisible forces of the earth.

“Captain,” Inori ordered, his voice suddenly dropping into a tone of absolute, breathless urgency. “I want four of your strongest men to load this boulder onto a hand-cart. Bring it directly to my laboratory. And do not let anyone wearing a brass or iron pocket watch come within ten feet of it, or the gears will shatter.”

✽✽✽✽✽✽

Inside the secure engineering block of the Dian City R&D facility, the six newly recruited prodigies from the Vocational Institute were gathered around a massive wooden workbench.

Gina, Tirania, Hughes, Raul, Jack, and Marshlom were wearing their pristine new lab coats, watching with wide eyes as four sweating Vanguard laborers gently lowered the massive lodestone onto the reinforced table.

“Thank you, soldiers, that will be all,” Inori dismissed them quickly.

The moment the heavy doors clicked shut, Inori spun around to face his new team. His eyes were wide, burning with a manic, obsessive fire.

“Chemistry is the manipulation of matter,” Inori began, pacing rapidly around the table. “But today, we are going to manipulate the invisible.”

He grabbed a heavy wooden mallet and a cold chisel. With three precise, violent strikes against the edge of the boulder, he chipped off a piece of the lodestone the size of a man’s fist.

“Hughes!” Inori barked. “Bring me the spool of pure copper wire from the storage closet! Gina, bring me a hollow iron pipe, exactly one inch in diameter!”

The teenagers scrambled, infected by Inori’s frantic energy. Within seconds, the materials were placed on the table.

“Watch closely,” Inori instructed. He took the copper wire and began tightly, meticulously wrapping it around the outside of the hollow iron pipe. He wrapped it hundreds, then thousands of times, creating a dense, heavy coil of copper.

“This is called a Solenoid,” Inori explained as his hands blurred. “Copper is highly conductive. Its atoms have a single valence electron that is very loosely bound. It wants to move. But it needs a push.”

Inori snipped the wire, leaving two long ends protruding from the coil. He bent the two ends so they were pointing directly at each other, leaving a tiny, millimeter-wide air gap between the copper tips.

He placed the heavy copper coil on the wooden table. Then, he picked up the fist-sized chunk of lodestone.

“Magnetism is an invisible field of force,” Inori whispered, leaning over the table. The six prodigies leaned in with him, their faces inches from the copper wires. “If I just set this magnet next to the copper… nothing happens. The field is static.”

Inori held the magnet perfectly still. Nothing happened.

“But,” Inori smiled, his eyes glinting in the lantern light. “What happens when we introduce kinetic energy? What happens when the invisible magnetic field is forced to move rapidly across the conductive copper atoms?”

Inori gripped the lodestone tightly. With a sudden, violent thrust, he shoved the magnet directly into the hollow center of the iron pipe, and then rapidly yanked it back out. He pumped his arm back and forth, thrusting the magnet through the coil with incredible speed.

SNAP.

A sharp, brilliant, blindingly blue spark of pure electricity jumped across the tiny air gap between the two copper wires. It crackled with a sound like a tiny whip, illuminating the darkened laboratory with a harsh, unearthly light.

Gina gasped, stumbling backward. Hughes let out a shout of pure shock, while Tirania covered her mouth in absolute awe.

“Fire without heat!” Raul breathed reverently, staring at the air gap.

“It is not fire,” Inori said, his own voice trembling. He stopped moving the magnet, and the spark instantly vanished. “It is Electricity. Michael Faraday’s Law of Induction. By moving a magnetic field through a conductive coil, we are forcing the electrons in the copper to flow. We are generating an electrical current.”

Inori dropped the magnet onto the table. He leaned his hands on the wood, hanging his head as he let out a long, shuddering exhale. A wild, unhinged laugh bubbled up from his chest.

“The Internal Combustion Engine,” Inori whispered.

“My Lord?” Gina asked cautiously.

“The bottleneck!” Inori shouted, slamming his hand on the table, startling the teenagers. “We couldn’t get the gasoline to combust perfectly in the cylinders because lighting a physical fire inside a pressurized chamber is too slow and erratic! But this…”

He pointed to the copper wires. “This spark is instantaneous. It is perfectly controllable. If we run a wire into the combustion cylinder, we can time the electrical spark to ignite the gasoline vapor at the exact millisecond of maximum compression! The Spark Plug!”

Hughes, possessing a brilliant mechanical mind, immediately saw the logistical flaw. “But Lord Inori… you can’t stand there thrusting a rock back and forth all day to power an engine.”

“I don’t have to, Hughes,” Inori grinned, grabbing a piece of chalk and rushing over to the massive blackboard on the wall.

He began drawing furiously. “We don’t thrust it. We spin it. We mount massive lodestones onto a central iron shaft. We surround that shaft with heavy copper coils. We attach the shaft to one of our existing steam engines. The steam engine spins the magnets thousands of times a minute. It will generate an infinite, continuous supply of high-voltage electricity!”

Inori drew a massive box around the schematic. “The Alternator. The Dynamo. We won’t just power ship engines. We can run these wires through the entire city! We can put glass bulbs in the streets and heat thin tungsten filaments until they glow! We can banish the night!”

The six prodigies stared at the chalkboard. They had thought they were here to boil crude oil. They had just been handed the keys to the heavens.

Inori threw the chalk aside. He looked back at the massive lodestone sitting on the table.

“One boulder isn’t enough,” Inori calculated, his mind shifting from science to logistics. “If this came from the Bergran tithe, it means the Dwarves have struck a massive magnetic anomaly deep within their iron mines. I need to see it. I need to survey the magnetic field strength of the raw vein.”

Inori rushed to his desk, grabbing a fresh sheet of paper and a quill.

Takuya, Inori wrote, his handwriting jagged with adrenaline. I have harnessed electrical induction. The internal combustion engine bottleneck is broken. We can spark the fuel. However, I require an infinite supply of naturally magnetized iron. I am halting the refinery tests. I am departing immediately for the Kingdom of Bergran to survey their deepest iron mines. Secure the capital. The Age of Steam is officially obsolete.

He sealed the letter with wax.

“Hughes,” Inori ordered. “Pack a heavy coat, your mining boots, and a full chemical testing kit. You are coming with me to the eastern mountains.”

Hughes paled slightly. The Dwarven Kingdom was a subterranean labyrinth that had just been violently subjugated by their army. It was not a safe place for a human. “Yes, Lord Inori. But… what about security?”

“I am an engineer, Hughes, not a fool,” Inori replied, walking over to a brass acoustic speaking-tube mounted on the wall. He blew into the whistle, signaling the central command office.

“Connect me to the Vanguard Barracks,” Inori spoke into the tube. “Get me Commander Vane.”

✽✽✽✽✽✽

Less than an hour later, the heavy iron doors of the laboratory groaned open.

Commander Vane stepped into the room. The temperature seemed to drop ten degrees. He wore his pitch-black leather combat armor, a heavy grey cloak draped over his shoulders, and the terrifying, featureless ballistic steel mask covered his face entirely. The prototype sniper rifle was slung securely across his back.

The six prodigies instinctively backed away, terrified of the infamous, cold-blooded executioner of the Syndicate.

Inori, however, didn’t flinch. “Commander. I require a secure escort. Hughes and I are traveling deep into the Bergran mines to survey a new mineral deposit. The Dwarves signed the Accord, but I doubt they love us.”

Vane stood perfectly still. His mechanically distorted voice echoed from beneath the steel mask. “The Dwarven lower deeps are a tactical nightmare, Viscount. Narrow choke points. Zero visibility. Absolute high-ground advantage for the locals.”

“Can you secure it?” Inori asked bluntly.

“I can secure anything, my Lord,” Vane replied coldly. “I will requisition a squad of thirty elite Vanguard Riflemen. We will bring the new trench-sweeper models and magnesium flare-rounds for illumination. When do we depart?”

“At first light,” Inori confirmed.

Vane gave a single, sharp nod and turned on his heel, his heavy boots echoing ominously as he left the lab to prepare for war.

Hughes swallowed hard, his throat dry. “He is… terrifying, Lord Inori.”

“He is necessary,” Inori corrected, turning back to look at the tiny gap between the copper wires.

Inori reached out, gently touching the cold metal of the lodestone. He had spent his entire life building loud, massive, roaring machines of iron and fire. But as he looked at the simple setup of wire and rock, a wild, manic grin spread across his face.

The most powerful force in the universe wasn’t loud at all. It was completely silent. It was entirely invisible. And the Kazuha Syndicate had just claimed a monopoly on it.

The revolution had truly sparked.