Valkyrie's Shadow

Chapter 14

After an evening at a fancy dinner theatre with Lady Frianne and Dimoiya, they dropped the two imperial nobles off at their homes in the First-Class District and retired to their suite in the Mithril Market Inn. With Ludmila’s departure coming up in a few days, her thoughts turned to what was gained and what remained of her time together with her friends.

While it had been for the most part a relaxing experience, they had still come away with a number of productive results. Most importantly, the Empire was no longer just a name on the regional map and the four of them felt more familiar with the culture and people of its capital.

They relaxed in the suite’s living room, though because of a certain Countess Wagner, they ended up sitting on the floor.

“Does Liane always do this?” Ludmila asked.

“She can get like this, yes,” Florine answered. “When we were kids, entire rooms in her manor would get spontaneously reconfigured. Her parents never scolded her for it so now she ends up doing it whenever she gets ideas.”

Liane had ‘constructed’ something in the central space between Ludmila, Clara and Florine. Their purchases and their containers had been repurposed into building materials for a structure formed out of boxes, cushions, clothing and magic items.

Her head poked up from the interior.

“Aren’t you actually the one most excited about the Slimefinery?”

“I look forward to seeing how we can apply it to our territories, yes,” Ludmila replied. “That doesn’t mean…what in the world is this, anyway?”

“A processing unit!” Liane said proudly.

“…as in the ones indicated in Baroness Noia’s schematics?”

“Yep, yep, yep,” Liane replied. “The ones she has in her territory are serviceable, but this one’ll be better.”

Baroness Noia’s proof-of-concept was already simple and cheap, so Ludmila wasn’t sure why Liane felt the need to make it ‘better’. A field of rectangular pools was arranged over an area of four square kilometres. The pools were lined with a type of inert clay that alchemists often used to make vials and other types of storage for their work.

Effluent from the city sewer system would be pumped to the pools and, while the water evaporated away, Slimes managed by Rangers would be brought to ‘graze’. The trick was in how different species of Slime would be rotated into each pool. Common Slimes would come first, consuming the majority of the waste. Once their work was done, species that dissolved specific minerals would have their turn.

As one might refine materials through certain metallurgical processes and alchemy, the Slimes would naturally refine substances in the Slimefinery. What Slimes consumed was not destroyed, but absorbed into their bodies. When a Slime ate enough, it reproduced by dividing in half. Excess Slimes would be harvested once the Slimefinery’s capacity matched the volume of its input.

As long as infrastructure was adequate, the Slimefinery could adjust its capacity to match the needs of a population centre by managing the number of Slimes present. Once Baroness Noia’s concept was fully realised, the days of unmanaged Slime populations in city sewers would come to an end. In its place would be a lucrative new source of revenue for whoever owned the operation.

That being said, Ludmila still couldn’t figure out what was going on in front of them.

“What part of this ‘processing unit’ are you?” She asked.

“Uh…I’m not any part? Just sitting inside because it feels sorta like a fort.”

“Your ‘fort’ has glaring weaknesses,” Ludmila said.

“Oh yeah? Where?”

Ludmila stretched out her leg, poking a spot on the ‘wall’ of the ‘fort’ with her toe.

“Eh? Nooooooooo!”

The entire structure collapsed, burying Liane. Her health remained unchanged according to the Life Essence spell conferred to Ludmila by her ear cuff, so she was probably alright.

“Now all of your Rangers are dead,” Ludmila told her, “and their Slimes are on the loose, eating up your shiny new town. I’m certain Baroness Noia is setting things up the way she did for a reason.”

“Probably because it’s cheap and simple,” Liane’s voice rose from under the ruins. “She’s just trying to demonstrate the potential of the concept in an easy-to-understand way. Since you already said it would work, we don’t need to sit around waiting for her proof.”

“Liane is right,” Clara said from beside Ludmila. “A part of our job as Nobles is to introduce new concepts to our fiefs and make them feasible. Baroness Noia’s ‘Slimefinery’ is particularly easy to work with because it can generate revenues and has extremely low operating costs.”

“Our problem is space,” Liane said. “Ludmila aside, we don’t have a lot of free land to work with. Putting those fields outside of every town and village will add up to a lot of productive space being taken. Plus it’ll stink.”

Liane burrowed her way out of the pile of their stuff, worming her way over to rest her head on Florine’s lap.

“From what we’ve seen of the city,” Liane stretched lazily, “these imperials still think in two dimensions. All the tall structures built around here aren’t made because they’re efficient: it’s because they either need a defensive structure or they built something meant to impress. Everything else is just the short buildings that fill the space inside the wall. Engelfurt was like that, too. So were all the towns and villages on the way. Urban areas are built short and wide and it’s expensive as hell for the people in charge to maintain.”

“I think the underground area of the Demihuman Quarter is a good example for us to use,” Florine said. “Liane and I went to Feoh Berkana a few times and it looks like the Dwarves do the same thing. The higher population density does wonders for business, too. We have a huge surplus of food in the Sorcerous Kingdom, and, eventually, we’re going to have a lot more people. If we use the same old style of development, it will require a lot of space. By changing the way we build things, we can have a lot more people without needing to sacrifice land.”

Like most of the Sorcerous Kingdom’s nobility, they were trying to find solutions for the population growth that would inevitably follow the drastically improved agricultural production of the nation. While it would not happen immediately, higher urban population ratios seemed inevitable. This, in turn, demanded infrastructure and city planning more advanced than anything in the region.

“So the processing unit you were thinking about was meant to be built underground.”

“Yeah. We already have everything that’s needed to build a much-improved version of Baroness Noia’s facility.”

“How so?”

“Well, first of all, she’s using evaporation pools, which require a large surface area. This’ll get worse the more people there are and doing that is bad for us. So we move the facility underground and use a different process to get rid of the water. That’s where those magic items you’re making come in: they regulate the temperature of a certain volume of space, so all we have to do is make magic items that heat the effluent that we’re processing.”

Liane rolled off of Florine’s lap and crawled back to the collapsed pile. She picked out three small boxes and a silk scarf.

“So say this is where all the waste flows in,” she set down one of the boxes. “We’ll heat it in here and the water and whatever else that boils away will be piped out like how distilleries and alchemists do their thing.”

The scarf was stretched out from the box, and Liane placed another box on the other end of it.

“A thingy on the other end will collect the distillate that can be used elsewhere. Another product is heat.”

She put a box on top of the scarf.

“That box is whatever we run the pipes through to bleed off heat along the way to the collection thingy. You can warm buildings with it or whatever. Next…”

Liane grabbed another box and a bolt of cloth. She stretched out the cloth from the first box to the new one.

“What’s left over will be a slurry of condensed waste, which we’ll drain into this other chamber with magic items to return the temperature to normal. This is where we’ll have the Slimes slurp everything up.”

“If it’s just this,” Ludmila said, “then why did you build that fort?”

“I was trying to figure out how many we could fit under a town or city and how it could all be arranged. That’s the best part about this whole thing: it takes waste and refines it into different products that can be resold. Sewer systems usually cost money to maintain, but now they can turn a profit. It’s like a secondary tax we can collect from our tenants. Ass tax.”

Clara went into a fit of coughing. She set down her glass of wine and sent a baleful look in Liane’s direction.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Florine said. “How do we extract resources from the Slimes?”

“I thought you knew since you called Sophie’s concept a ‘Slime Ranch’,” Ludmila said.

“So you…milk them? Squeeze everything out somehow.”

“You slaughter them,” Ludmila told her. “You can’t milk Slimes.”

“Have you tried?” Liane frowned.

“Yes. If you’re worried about the Slimes, Florine, you probably shouldn’t. A healthy population would be maintained in each Slimefinery, and the Slimes will spread to wherever they’re needed. As Sophie mentioned, Slimes have coexisted with humanity for longer than anyone can remember. As useful as they are, they’re a species that we’ve never really thought of managing as livestock.”

“Didn’t you say Slimes were ‘cute and cuddly’?”

“Yes, but so are a lot of things. We still kill them for food or materials.”

Beside her, Clara had finally recovered. She used a Trooper’s Towel to clean away the spilt wine.

“I can’t believe you’re still picking those things up,” she said.

“Still?” Florine tilted her head, “You mean to say that Ludmila has always done this sort of thing?”

"Yes,” Clara shivered. “She and her brothers used to pick up all sorts of things when we were kids. It was fascinating when she had songbirds alight on her finger or squirrels and bunnia came over to be petted, but then she would get slimes and snakes and giant spiders too. At one point I half expected her to randomly appear in my village riding a bear.”

Though her brothers had tried taming a bear at one point, Ludmila hadn’t. For Ludmila, attracting animals was the only thing that the other Noble girls seemed to like about her, so she had often used her nascent Ranger skills to entertain them.

“Uh…how long ago was this?” Liane asked.

“When we were six or seven.”

“I guess that might be the reason why nothing normal seems to scare you. Y’know, with everything I’ve heard since we came together, I can’t for the life of me figure out how you two got together.”

Clara glanced over at Ludmila. Ludmila smirked in response.

“House Zahradnik has always had a minor trading relationship with House Corelyn by necessity,” Ludmila said, “but I didn’t like Clara when we met.”

Across from them, Liane and Florine straightened at the revelation.

“Didn’t like as in ‘I disliked her’?” Florine asked.

“Yes, that sort of ‘didn’t like’,” Ludmila answered. “‘Radiant Jewel of the Riverlands’ was not always a complimentary moniker.”

“Oh wow,” Liane said. “So she must have been a real piece of work then.”

“Yes,” Ludmila nodded. “When we were first introduced, I decided that she was a spoiled brat. The next time we met, I didn’t like the way she was acting so I threw her into the river.”

Horrified looks filled Liane and Florine’s faces, their mouths falling open in unison.

“It’s true,” Clara smiled slightly. “She jumped in to save me after that, though.”

“I didn’t jump in to get you,” Ludmila told her.

“You didn’t?”

“My father was furious. He grabbed me and hurled me into the river after you, yelling at me to bring you back.”

“…but you would have come anyway, yes?”

Ludmila turned her gaze away, falling silent for several moments.

“I wonder,” she said. “You were insufferable back then. Everyone praised you for your intelligence and how you would grow up to be a peerless beauty. The only thing that seemed to grow was your ego. It was probably what kept you afloat.”

“I gotta wonder how that kinda reversal happens,” Liane said. “I can’t even remember anything from back then.”

“It shouldn’t be anything surprising,” Ludmila replied. “Because Clara was like that, everyone hated her. Their parents prodded them into staying on her good side because of House Corelyn’s wealth, so all the relationships that she had were fake. She started behaving herself around me after I threw her into the river and I ended up becoming her only real friend.”

“And now you two may as well be married. I guess the mystery of why everyone leaves Baron Hamel to you is solved, too: you have unmatched experience in taming brats.”

Was that the reason? Something that people remembered from over a decade ago?

“Now that you know about that,” Clara said, “what about you two? I’ve seen you two together since you were five or six as well.”

“Funny that you ask…it started when I was attacked by one of Florine’s cows.”

“What?”

“Liane hasn’t changed much from that time,” Florine said. “One day, she learned how cheese was made. Then she walked all the way to my demesne to milk a cow so she could try everything herself.”

“And then her stupid cow attacked me.”

“It wasn’t my cow: it was part of a herd managed by one of our tenants. After the Farmer got her out of a tree, she was delivered to our manor. You’d think that a six-year-old girl would be terrified after being chased by a cow, but she was only mad that she didn’t get to milk it. When my parents left me alone with her, she convinced me that we should sneak out and find another cow to milk.”

“Ah, she got yelled at so much.”

Liane seemed entirely unapologetic. Florine punched her in the arm.

“It was terrible! I was five and you were an older girl so I listened to you. After that, I just hit her whenever I thought she was up to no good.”

“That explains why you always do that,” Ludmila said, “but it doesn’t explain why His Majesty’s servitors never react when you attack her.”

“Because I tell them how much of a terror she is,” Florine said. “They all know, and they have no reason to doubt me. Did you know that she made a Shadow Demon cry a few months ago?”

Ludmila looked up at the Shadow Demons hiding in the dark areas of the ceiling. She could think of a number of ways to make them cry, but she doubted that they would be something Liane would do.

“So tomorrow’s the Academy, huh,” Florine said tentatively into the lingering silence. “And then the Arena…I’m still unsettled about going.”

“It seems to be a central component of Arwintar’s culture,” Clara said. “I don’t look forward to the matches, but I do want to observe the crowds. The more we understand the Empire’s subjects, the better we can work with them in an official capacity.”

“I don’t think there will be anything ‘new’ to understand,” Ludmila muttered. “I’ve seen how people become when they watch others fight. Maybe you’re imagining some unique cultural element to the Empire that has been cultivated over generations, but I highly doubt it. If anything, it’s the exact opposite: the stimulation of instincts common to all species that must fight to survive. They are presenting savagery as entertainment.”

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