The roar of water as it struck the old mill's wheel could be heard for leagues. Sharath arrived at dawn, Mira on one flank, Master Henrik on the other. The miller, Orvin, had agreed to let the genius boy experiment on one condition: double the daily sheet output, or give up.
Sharath's first inspection was methodical, even mathematical. The wheel, though sturdy, turned too slowly. Paddles scattered spray. "Energy is wasted," he told Mira. "If we fit shrouds here, and gear the drive shaft up, rotation will increase."
Inside, pulpers slogged through fibrous soup with carved oaken paddles. The mixing action was uneven—one patch clumpy, another soupy. At Sharath's suggestion, Henrik forged a set of metal blades designed to slice and shear the mass, mounted on a shaft angled to move the slurry through a spiral channel. Water flow, not just muscle, propelled the mixture.
The heart of the new process was the beater trough. "We must treat every fiber the same," said Sharath. He supervised the installation of movable screens and hand-cranked dilution valves; nothing left to chance. The first run fouled, but a second—after recalibrating for pH—yielded a rich, glossy pulp with minimal debris.
While waiting for sheets to dry, he tested different ratios: straw for flexibility, old rags for body, pine for structure, marsh grass to bind. Each batch was tested for absorptiveness, strength, ease of folding, and resistance to tearing when damp.
By midday, the mill floor piled with wet slabs. Mira orchestrated drying: clean racks, sunbaked terrace, regulated airflow through slatted shutters. The result was near miraculous. "Five times the output," Orvin calculated, wide-eyed. "Once, a sheet took a day to dry; now, an hour."
But technology alone was not enough. Inspired by the cooperative guild spirit, Sharath recruited local families to supply rag and fiber while offering fair prices. He devised incentive wages: better sheets meant better coin; efficient teams earned bonuses from production profits. Old tanners became smoothers, their callused hands perfect for pressing sheets flat. Potters' children perfected stacking and loading.
The mill's output soon outpaced the ink supplies in three shires. Sharath responded by improvising a recipe using lampblack and boiled honey, then organized a new guild of rural apothecaries to manufacture pigment by the barrel.
News spread of Riverbend's miracle paper. Visiting scholars praised its smoothness and consistency. Schoolmasters predicted a golden age of letters. Local officials boasted that their land now exported not just food and wool, but the stuff of knowledge itself.
That summer, Sharath and Mira pressed their names into the wettest, softest sheet, marking it as the ten-thousandth produced. Years later, that first master sheet would be framed and hung in the Hall of Invention, the seed of an industrial forest.