If blood was the currency of the Viking Age, Bilal decided he would mint his own.
His Water Mill was a relentless, tireless beast. While the women of Norway broke their backs grinding grain with rough stones—leaving grit that eroded their teeth to the nerve—Bilal's millstones were set with mathematical precision.
They never touched. They only crushed the grain.
The result was "White Gold." Flour so fine, soft, and pure that when Bilal first brought a sack to the market at Kaupang, the local Jarls thought it was powdered snow.
But Bilal knew flour alone wouldn't make him special. He needed a signature. A brand that would make the nobility addicted to his existence.
He found it in the wild blueberries and lingonberries of the Nordic forests. He ordered his workers to harvest them by the barrel.
He boiled fresh, high-fat cow's milk to kill the bacteria, stirred in massive quantities of pure honey, and crushed the berries into the mix.
The "Blueberry Honey Milk" was born.
Served cold, it was a thick, sweet, purple elixir packed with protein, antioxidants, and pure caloric energy.
To a Viking used to drinking sour ale and eating salted, rotting fish, the purple milk tasted like it had been poured directly from the cup of the Gods.
Bilal sent barrels of it to Earl Eric, the current ruler of Norway. The Earl became obsessed with it, drinking it before every hunt. Without drawing a sword, Bilal had addicted the ruler of the country to his kitchen.
But this utopian diet created a terrifying flaw—a visual divide that alienated his people from the rest of the world.
Bilal's 100 orphans were growing up on massive amounts of beef, liver, and calcium. By their teenage years, they towered over visiting merchants. Their skin was clear; their teeth were blindingly white.
To Bilal, it was just basic nutrition. But to the starving, pock-marked, stunted peasants outside his valley, it was horrifying.
"They are not human," the rumors whispered through the dark forests. "The Giant feeds them the blood of trolls. They are soulless Elves. Beautiful, but cursed."
Bilal heard the whispers. It terrified him.
"They don't understand," he wrote late at night by the fire, using charcoal on his newly invented rag paper. "If they think we are magic, they will burn us when things go wrong."
He began to write obsessively. Not in Norse, nor in Arabic, but in Modern English—a language that would not exist in this form for nearly a thousand years. It was an unbreakable cipher.
He titled it Kitab al-Amlaq (The Book of the Giant). Page by page, he documented germ theory, geometry, and the formula for Roman cement. He was securing the backup drive of human civilization.