The honeymoon suite was empty. While the rest of the palace was nursing a collective hangover from the "Merger Ceremony," the Grand Chancellor and the Crown Prince were in the royal forge, surrounded by the smell of coal smoke and the clatter of iron.
"You want to harness the power of... boiling water?" Bastian asked, wiping a smudge of grease from his cheek. He was staring at the blueprints I had spread across a blacksmith's anvil. "Elara, I've seen you turn a kitchen into a treasury, but this... this looks like a 'Physical Impossibility'."
"In my world, Bastian, this is called the First Industrial Revolution," I said, pointing to the diagram of the piston and cylinder. "The Empress and Xandros have the Iron-Silk now. They have the 'Manual Labor' and the 'Market Access.' But they are still 'Scaling' linearly. If we want to beat them, we need to scale exponentially."
