Fourteen days went by in the strange, slow blur of a life Remus was still learning to wear. Gregory left first, for the Adventurer's Guild hall in the Central District, to register properly as an adventurer with a look on his face that Remus recognized, from the far side of two lives now, as the particular hunger of someone leaving home for the first time and not yet knowing what it would cost him. Annabelle left the same morning for Oldtown, to join the Merchant's Guild, a small case of belongings clutched against her chest and a nervous, hopeful set to her jaw.
That left Remus alone in the manor with two weeks and a body that still didn't quite feel like his.
He spent most of it in his room. On the second afternoon, restless, unable to sit still with only the System windows for company, he'd knelt at the cold hearth and picked through the ash for something to draw with, an old habit from Yoshi's life reasserting itself before he'd even consciously decided to indulge it. He'd always sketched things before he built them. Every project, every prototype, every late-night fix to a design that wasn't behaving, had started the same way: pencil or charcoal, a scrap of paper, his own hand working out the shape of a problem before his hands ever touched the actual materials. It was less a method than a compulsion, something steadying in the motion of it, and some part of him had gone looking for that steadiness without being asked to.
What he'd found in the grate was a half-burned stick of charcoal, blackened and brittle at one end, still solid enough to hold at the other. He'd knocked the worst of the ash off it against his palm, leaving a grey-black smudge across his skin that didn't fully wash off for two days, and kept it.
Now he sat cross-legged on the floor of his room with a scrap of butcher's paper flattened against a book on his knee, the charcoal held loosely between two fingers, sketching the long, simple lines of a pencil the way he might once have sketched a bracket or a hinge. He worked the proportions out twice before he was satisfied, blew a light dusting of black dust off the page, and only then reached out and touched the drawing.
"Identify."
Item Design Acquired: Pencil!
He grinned, a small private thing, and repeated the process for a wooden box with a hinged lid, wheels, and a fold-down handle, something to carry his things in for the road ahead. He sketched the box in profile first, then from above, the way he'd have laid out orthographic views on a real drafting table, before touching the paper again.
Item Design Acquired: Traveling Box!
"Alright," he said to the empty room, tucking the stub of charcoal behind his ear where it left one more smudge, this one along his hairline, that he wouldn't notice until he next looked in a mirror. "I'm almost ready for the road."
He used Craft twice more that afternoon, once for a proper handful of pencils and once for the box itself, each time laying the charcoal stub down beside the finished object like a tool returned to its place on a bench, a small ritual he didn't examine too closely and didn't stop doing.
On the sixteenth day, with his few belongings packed into the traveling box he'd made himself, Remus's door burst open hard enough to nearly tear it off its hinges.
It was the quiet servant girl, the red-haired one who'd led him downstairs on his first morning in this body. She'd always struck him as reserved to the point of distance, someone who watched more than she spoke, and the sheer force of her entrance now, before she'd even said a word, told him something was badly wrong.
"Master Remus, your father's been wounded," she said, breathless. "He's asking for you in his chambers."
Remus ran.
He hit the door to his father's room at a near-sprint and found Duke Ferron laid out on the bed, jaw clenched hard against pain, the Duchess seated beside him holding his hand so tightly her knuckles had gone white. Someone had cut away his shirt to expose his torso, and a cloth pressed against his right side had gone from white to a deep, saturated red.
"What happened?" Remus asked, and his voice came out steadier than he felt.
"Bandits," his father managed through his teeth.
Lorekeeper Leo knelt at the bedside, both hands pressed to the wound, a faint pale glow gathering under his palms that did nothing, as far as Remus could tell, to slow the bleeding underneath it.
"Sorry to see you again like this, Master Remus," Leo said without looking up, sweat standing out on his brow, "but I have to tell you plainly, there's damage to the internal organs. If he survives this, it's three months of recovery at the very least. Possibly longer."
"Come here, Remus," his father said, and something in his voice had gone thin and urgent in a way that frightened Remus more than the blood had. "Listen. I don't have much time."
"I won't dress this up in kind words." Ferron's grip found Remus's sleeve and held on with more strength than a dying man should have had left. "You are not the son I wished for. I never once considered you my heir. But right now, you're all I have."
Remus said nothing. It was, he realized distantly, almost exactly the sentence his own father, Yoshi's father, had once said to him across a different kitchen table in a different life, different words but the same shape of rejection, and he felt the old, familiar numbness rise up to meet it before he'd even decided to let it.
"I have no proof," his father went on, "but those weren't ordinary bandits. I believe they were working for Duke Corvath of the Eastlands."
"Why would he do this to you?"
"The Southlands haven't fared well of late, and we owe the Banking Guild a great deal of coin," Ferron said. "If this harvest fails, we may well lose the duchy to the Eastlands outright."
"What do you need from me?"
"Take charge. Step into my place as Duke while I recover, however long that takes." His grip tightened once more, then began, alarmingly, to slacken. "I'm counting on you, Remus."
"I won't let you down," Remus said, and meant it with a fierceness that surprised him, given how little history the two of them actually shared.
Leo administered something from a small vial that made the Duke's eyes glaze and roll shut, then worked his healing magic in earnest, the glow under his hands steadying at last into something more purposeful. The fate of the Duke, for the moment, remained an open question.
---
At dawn the following day, Remus found the red-haired servant girl watching over his father through a gap in the door, so absorbed in the sight of the sleeping Duke and his wife that she didn't seem to notice Remus had come up behind her. She was biting her lower lip, an unconscious tell, her whole posture bent toward the room like something being pulled by a string.
Remus read it as concern. He would spend a long time, later, wondering whether that had been the right read at all.
"What's your name?" he asked.
She startled, the private moment closing over instantly like water over a dropped stone.
"Andrea," she said, in a voice smaller than the one he'd have expected from someone who'd just kicked a door half off its frame the night before.
"Andrea, there's nothing more either of us can do for his health except pray to the Drowned Faith," Remus said. "But if you want to do something useful, come help me get his affairs in order."
He didn't fully know why he was asking her, of all the household staff, but something about the precision of her earlier entrance, the exact, economical way she'd delivered the bad news without wasting a single word on panic, told him she was more capable than a servant's plain grey dress suggested.
"Of course, my lord," she said, with a small, correct bow.
"Where's my father's office?"
"Follow me. I'll take you there."
She led him through the manor to a room in the south wing that turned out to be, when the door opened, nothing short of chaos: scrolls and ledgers strewn across every surface, drawers hanging half-open, papers stacked in towers that looked one draft away from collapse. Remus picked up an open scroll from the nearest pile and stared at it, trying to make sense of the looping, unfamiliar script, before Andrea reached over, took it gently from his hands, turned it right side up, and passed it back without a word.
"Can you read?" he asked her.
She glanced toward the open door before answering, a quick, habitual check that told him the answer mattered more than the question implied.
"Yes."
"What's wrong with that? Is it such a bad thing?"
"It's looked down on, for a servant to read," Andrea said. "There's always a worry we might make off with something valuable, once we understand what we're holding."
"Well, I value someone who can," Remus said. "I need you to bring order to this mess. Can I count on that?"
She nodded, and something in the set of her shoulders eased slightly, as if she'd expected a different reaction and was recalibrating for a kinder one.
"Who's my father's right hand? The one who actually runs things day to day?"
"That would be Julius," she said. "You'll find him near the stables, most likely. He walks with a limp."
Remus made his way outside, following the smell of the stables before he saw them, a thick, animal reek of urine and straw and old leather that hit him almost as a physical wall. He found a hunched, weathered old man in a straw hat leaning against a post, limping a slow, unhurried circuit around the paddock fence as though he'd been doing it his whole life and would keep doing it well past the point anyone asked him to stop.
"Are you Julius?" Remus asked.
"Depends who's askin'," the old man said, not turning, chewing on something Remus couldn't identify.
"I'm Yosh, Remus," he corrected himself, the slip small but strange in his own mouth. "Lord Draymoor's second son."
"Ah, you mean Ferron's boy," Julius said, finally squinting over at him. "Terrible business, what happened to your father. So what d'you want, Squirt?"
"He's put me in charge while he recovers."
"That's a hell of a risk for a house this deep in the hole." Julius spat to one side, unbothered, the way a man spits when he's spent decades not caring who's watching. "So what d'you want with me, then?"
"Information," Remus said. "What's the actual state of the Southlands? Not the polite version. The real one."
"Fucked is the state of it," Julius said, with the flat, cheerful bluntness of a man who'd long since stopped softening bad news for anybody. "We've got forest for miles, but so does every duchy in the Kingdom, so no one's buying our wood. The only decent farmland we've got, we ran it into the ground years back, and we haven't got half enough manure to bring it back proper."
"So the fix is finding a way to replenish the soil, plant, and harvest."
"I wish that were the whole of it." Julius shook his head slowly. "Every time we get something growing worth taking, the bandits come and take it."
"Why can't we stop them?"
"That's above my pay grade, Squirt. I'm a farmer, not a soldier." He jerked his chin toward the gatehouse in the distance. "You'll want Ed for that. Captain of your father's men."
"Where do I find him?"
"Gatehouse, edge of the property. Can't miss him."
Remus found the gate easily enough and was pointed toward a lean, upright man standing watch at the wall with the particular economy of movement that comes from years of drilled discipline, the kind that never quite leaves a body even at rest.
"What can I do for you, Master Remus," Ed said, without wasted motion, snapping to something just short of full attention.
"What can we do about the bandits?"
"Nothing, currently. I won't pretend otherwise." He said it the way he'd report a casualty count, plainly, no dressing it up. "Here's why."
Ed drew his sword and held it flat across both palms for Remus to inspect. The blade was pitted along its length, the edge dulled and uneven, the whole thing looking one hard parry away from snapping.
"Compare that to what the bandits are carrying," Ed went on. "Sharp. New. Good steel. That's how we know Duke Corvath's behind it. We don't stand a chance man for man unless we're re-equipped."
"Why not just buy new weapons?"
"Can't afford to, my lord. Last year's harvest didn't leave coin for it." A short pause, precise as a held breath, before he added, "That's the whole report."
"Alright. Thank you for telling me straight," Remus said. "At dawn tomorrow, bring Julius with you. I'll have a plan ready."
"Understood. Dawn. Julius." Ed repeated the order back exactly as he'd received it, the way you'd read back coordinates to make sure they'd landed correctly, and turned back to the wall without another word wasted on ceremony.
---
Back in the office, Remus found that Andrea had made astonishing progress, ledgers stacked by category, scrolls sorted and shelved, the whole chaotic room folded down into something that actually resembled order.
"Andrea, this is excellent work," he said. "But I need more from you."
"Anything, my lord."
"Tell me everything you know about Duke Corvath and the Eastlands," Remus said. "I told Julius and Ed I'd have a plan by dawn tomorrow. Lay it all out for me. Something in there will be useful."
She bit her lip again before answering, that same small tell.
"He's your father's cousin, and his fiercest rival," Andrea said. "His lands sit on iron and coal, which have made him rich and powerful, since both are vital for weapons. His farmland is nearly as depleted as ours, though, if that's worth anything."
"What's the current price of iron, coal, wood, and grain, on the open market?"
"Wood runs one bronze coin per unit. Grain, one silver, or ten bronze. Iron is five silver, or half a gold. Coal runs three silver."
"What else? Any rumors worth hearing?"
"Only that he's ruthless, and gets what he wants regardless of the law," Andrea said. "That's the common wisdom on him, at least."
"Thank you. I think I know what to do." Remus was already moving toward the door as he said it, mind racing ahead of his feet the way it always had, in either life. "First, I need as much wood as we can gather. As much as physically exists."
The moment she left, Remus pulled the stub of charcoal from behind his ear and a fresh sheet of paper from the box he'd made, and got to work in earnest, sketching in quick, sure lines: a simple chemical process laid out like a flowchart, a crossbow with a modified loading mechanism, a squat, practical steam-powered tractor with oversized wheels for soft farmland.
Design Saved: Nitrogen Fertiliser!
Design Saved: Wooden Crossbow!
Design Saved: Steam Powered Tractor!
"I hope this works," he said to the empty room, and meant it more literally than he let himself dwell on. An entire duchy's survival, riding on sketches made with a burnt stick over a stolen scrap of paper. It would have sounded absurd, said out loud to anyone from his old life. It didn't feel absurd. It felt, oddly, like the first time in either life that the stakes had actually matched the size of his ambition.
He worked through the night without stopping, and by the time morning came, so did Julius and Ed, arriving together at the office that now doubled, in every practical sense, as Remus's command post.
Remus took a breath before he started, aware of exactly how the next sentence was going to sound.
"I have a plan, and both of you have large parts to play in it." He looked at Julius. "How much urine do the horses and livestock produce, in a day?"
"Why in the world does that matter?" Julius said, incredulous, glancing sideways at Ed as if checking whether this was some kind of joke at his expense. "Are you makin' fun of me, boy?"
"You'll address Master Remus with proper respect," Ed said, sharp and immediate, the words snapping out like a drilled reflex. "He may be young. He still speaks for the Duke."
"That's alright, Ed, I'm not making fun of him," Remus said. "It matters a great deal, actually."
"My apologies, then." Julius scratched at his jaw. "They make plenty of the stuff, but I couldn't tell you exact numbers. Never had reason to count it before."
"I need you to give them all the water they'll drink, and collect everything they produce in barrels. As much as you possibly can."
"Come again?" Julius squinted at him like the words might rearrange themselves into something sane if he stared long enough.
"We're going to turn it into fertilizer instead of using raw manure," Remus said. "It's far more effective, unit for unit."
Julius sat there for a long, considering moment, turning it over, before finally standing and saying, simply, "As you wish."
Remus watched him go and found himself, not for the first time, wondering whether the old man would actually follow through, since so much of the plan rested on nothing more than one skeptical farmer's willingness to do as he was told without understanding why.
"Captain Ed, gather your men. I'm going to train them on a different weapon."
Once the soldiers had assembled in the yard, uneven ranks of tired, underfed men in mismatched leathers, Remus opened his inventory and drew out a finished crossbow along with a handful of short, sharpened wooden bolts.
"This is a crossbow," he said, holding it up for the group. "I've modified the design to fire three bolts in a single pull."
"You load it like this."
He fitted the three bolts into place, demonstrating slowly, aware that every man watching had probably never seen a mechanism like it before.
"You aim it here."
He leveled it at a broad old oak standing at the edge of the training yard.
"And you squeeze this. It's called a trigger."
The bolts leapt free with a sharp triple crack and buried themselves solidly in the bark, still quivering slightly from the impact. A ripple of low, surprised murmuring passed through the assembled men as they crowded forward to inspect the tree.
"Since it's built from wood, we don't need to rely on Eastland iron to make more," Remus explained over the noise. "You reload the same way, and fire again."
He demonstrated a second time, driving another cluster of bolts into the trunk beside the first.
"Forgive me, Master Remus," Ed said, stepping forward with the same clipped economy he used for everything, "but a weapon this strong still takes time to reload. What happens in the gap?"
"Good question." Remus had been waiting for exactly that one. "That's why you'll form shooting lines."
"Explain the formation."
"Ten men fire, then fall back to reload, while a second group steps up and fires in their place," Remus said. "Each line covers the other's reload time. Properly staggered, you should be able to keep a bolt in the air at least once every three seconds, continuously."
Ed's eyes narrowed slightly, running the numbers the way Remus imagined he ran every tactical problem, breaking it down into countable, verifiable pieces.
"Sound math," he said finally, which from Ed, Remus was already learning, counted as high praise. "I'll drill the men on rotation timing starting today."
"Hand me your sword a moment," Remus said. "In case the bandits close the distance before a line can finish reloading."
Ed drew his battered blade without hesitation and passed it over, hilt first, the proper way.
"All of you, hand your swords to me," Remus called out to the assembled men. "I'll be modifying them."
"Modify," he said, laying his palm flat along the length of Ed's blade.
Light flared briefly along the steel, and when it faded, the sword in Remus's hands looked newly forged, the pitting gone, the edge bright and even from tang to tip. He handed it back.
Ed took it, turned it once in his grip, testing the new balance, and his eyebrows lifted a fraction, the closest thing to surprise Remus had yet seen cross his face.
Skill: Modify
Effect scales with the base material's own quality. A property can be improved toward the upper limit of what that material could achieve on its own. Iron pushed through Modify performs like well-forged steel. It will not perform like enchanted mythril, because plain iron never carried that ceiling to begin with.
Remus read the little confirmation window with real satisfaction, the same satisfaction he used to get from a spec sheet that finally made sense. There was a ceiling. It just scaled with what you started with. That was a rule he could actually plan around, instead of guessing at.
"I made it lighter and stronger too," he told Ed, "but there's a limit to how far I can push any single piece of metal. This is about as good as that blade is ever going to get, short of forging it from something better entirely."
Ed swung the sword experimentally at the old oak and cut clean through a low branch in a single stroke, the wood parting with a crisp, sharp crack. He sheathed the blade, then took both of Remus's hands in his own in a grip that was, for a man built out of clipped sentences and drilled economy, almost startlingly warm.
"Master Remus. You have my undying gratitude." A beat, and then, dryer, almost to himself: "Whatever else you are, you're worth following. I'll log that for the record."
A few days later, Remus made his way back out to the stable yard and found row upon row of barrels lined up in the sun, each one filled to the brim with a thick, ammoniac stench of horse and cattle urine strong enough to make his eyes water from ten paces off. He was relieved, mostly, that Julius had actually followed through, though relief and the smell were fighting each other hard for control of his expression.
"Aye, you little squirt," Julius called out, spotting him and picking his way over between the barrels. "What exactly are we plannin' to do with all this stinking piss?"
Remus stepped up to the nearest barrel and raised both hands over it.
"Modify."
A faint shimmer passed down through the liquid. After a few seconds the smell simply stopped, cut off as cleanly as a valve closing, and what remained in the barrel was a shallow layer of fine white granules where a foot of liquid had been.
Item Modified: Urine, Nitrogen Fertiliser!
Remus turned the rule over in his own head as the light faded, matching it against what he'd just learned from Ed's sword. This wasn't him inventing something out of nothing, or reaching past what the raw material could support. Urine already carried nitrogen compounds in it, chemically, waiting to be rearranged into a simpler, purer, entirely natural form. He wasn't pushing it past its own ceiling. He was just helping it get there faster than nature would have managed on its own. Same rule as the sword, really, just running in the other direction: refinement, not invention.
"What in the world did you do to it?" Julius asked, leaning in and sniffing cautiously at the granules, then recoiling slightly at his own curiosity.
"Turned it into nitrogen fertilizer."
"Into what, now?"
"Spread it evenly over the soil, then water it lightly to activate it," Remus said. "It'll do more for your fields than raw manure ever could."
"The farms run wide, boy. There's a lot of ground to cover." Julius eyed the row of barrels with new, calculating interest. "You're going to need a great deal more piss than this."
Two months later, the fields stood thick and heavy with a harvest that seemed to have grown almost too fast, stalks packed shoulder to shoulder, grain heads bowing under their own weight.
"Haven't seen a harvest like this since I was a wee lad," Julius admitted, running a hand almost reverently over the nearest row. "I should never have doubted you, Squirt. Might be you make a fine Duke yet."
"When can you be ready to bring it all in?"
"Few days' time," Julius said. "Take a buttload of hands to get it all harvested proper, but we'll manage a good go at it."
"Delay it a week," Remus said. "I need the time to move the next part of the plan into place."
---