Little Tru felt divinely guided—his craft was improving at an uncanny rate.

He had never felt anything like it. Every day brought fresh inspiration.

With each improvement, he felt closer to matching his own father.

"Could it be... the old man's skills were just bad, and he's been holding me back all along?"

Rapid progress naturally inflated a young man's head.

Fortunately, the gains began to taper off, and Derek deliberately kept him in check, so his conceit never got out of hand.

One month was still too short. Even the rest of the family didn't imagine Derek could amount to anything in thirty days.

But Derek figured it was time to go out and have a look around.

With the Panel, a month of his growth was worth half a year for anyone else. Staying holed up here was a waste.

Besides—without opening up a source of income, how was he supposed to grow quickly?

Rely on Little Tru? A profit of one or two gold a year was far too thin.

The last few days had yielded around twenty cast-iron spearheads—nowhere near enough to count as trade goods.

He'd been cautious before, and fair enough. The next step was converting the gold in his purse into strength.

Leaving aside living expenses, each recruit drew eighty coppers a month—below the going rate.

Little Tru drew one silver, since he counted as a retainer.

Total wages came to under eight or nine silver a month. Add rations and sundry costs, and one gold covered it.

Keep ten gold for emergencies, and he could deploy at least forty. That was serious money.

"You want to recruit twenty more?"

Andrew decided his nephew had lost his mind. Dozens of mouths to feed plus wages—how long could that little purse of his last?

"Derek, first you train a core of soldiers, then you figure out how to earn.

"Believe me, recruiting men is easy. Feeding them is not.

"And no man's loyalty survives an empty stomach."

Andrew spoke from experience.

House Ferreira counted as strong: a regular guard of more than a hundred, seven or eight knights, and enough militia on call to assemble a five-hundred-man company at a moment's notice.

But all of it rode on the family's holdings—thousands of tenants, manors and businesses by the score. Go bankrupt today, and tomorrow every bit of it would scatter like smoke.

Derek knew all this perfectly well. He held his course anyway.

To keep Uncle Andrew from interfering, he even spun a white lie: "Uncle, I've already taken a long-term escort contract. I'll be setting out soon.

"I need the manpower. These soldiers will train here first; I'll take them along next trip."

"You're sure you haven't been swindled?" Andrew couldn't believe it. Since when did such good deals exist?

"On Derek's honor—absolutely not.

"It came through Count Perez's people."

Derek let slip just that one mysterious hint, and Andrew's imagination staged the entire play on its own.

"You've got talent after all—making reliable friends out there already." Andrew sounded oddly deflated, but his doubts were gone. His nephew hardly looked like a boy who'd lost his wits.

Truth be told, noble rule had its upsides and its downsides. On Perez family land, recruiting without a constable's cooperation would've been a fantasy.

To put it bluntly: without one word from Andrew, how would Little Tru ever have "volunteered"?

Having swept up the finest young men in the village in one pass, the next round of recruiting would have to lower the bar a notch.

Derek arranged the training, then assigned two apprentices to Little Tru with explicit instructions: train them.

In this era, a craft was a family secret, passed down and guarded. Little Tru surely resented it, but with a blade at one's neck, resentment changed nothing.

Derek understood the boy wouldn't give it his all at first. No matter. Time would teach him what was good for him.

The Panel only gave Derek a head start. Everything else had to be learned by doing—and he could afford more mistakes than other men.

He waited a few days until everyone was registered under the Panel's tracking, then set off with one squad of recruits. The rest stayed behind, grinding experience on schedule.

The destination this time: Sentinel City.

The largest city in the area, and the second largest in the whole Northern Province.

It was administered by officials dispatched by the crown—there was even a royal army garrisoned there.

Derek didn't travel empty-handed, of course. He brought a cart loaded with roughly a thousand pounds of wheat bran.

Around here, bran sold for two coppers a pound at best, and buying it cost even less.

Carted to Sentinel City, it yielded half a copper in profit per pound.

A full five hundred coppers for the load. Small money—but money earned in passing.

As for why he didn't haul proper grain instead: apologies... grain was House Ferreira's own business.

Within the family fief, at least, nobody out-competed them at it.

Even that thousand-pound load Derek had scraped together piecemeal.

Were he not the baron's son, his corpse would already be floating in a ditch somewhere.

Profit was not really the point—experience was. He hired a carter and bought a cart: his first fixed asset.

And so this shabby, ragtag little caravan creaked its way onto the road.

Word of it landed on Baron Ferreira's desk almost immediately.

The baron gave it one flat glance. Nothing followed.

...

On the road, Derek half hoped some bandits would appear for his men to practice on.

Alas, his escort was absurdly over-spec. Nobody on the road was mad enough to trade lives with a dozen soldiers over a few silver's worth of feed.

The caravan swayed along for ten days before finally arriving.

Sentinel City. For the first time since crossing into this world, Derek beheld a proper city.

A pitiful thing to say out loud—but true.

Even Count Perez's castle looked several sizes smaller beside Sentinel City.

The gate guards saw the caravan—and saw, just as clearly, the triangular pennant of nobility.

A token entry fee of fifty coppers, and Derek was inside.

And then... who in God's name just relieves themselves in the street?!

One foot came down squarely in dung of unidentifiable origin. Derek nearly retched.

Rural sanitation had been hard enough on him—on his own ground he enforced strict standards.

But this first step through the gate stamped out every last illusion.

"It really is a different world."

Derek collected himself, sold the bran cheap to a Ferreira family shop, and found lodgings.

He'd come for two things: to see the world—doubling as a training march—and to find a reliable supply of iron ore.

...

Derek was away, but back at base the training never stopped.

The recruits drilled under the veteran militia, copying the routines by rote.

Far less efficient—but with the Panel's blessing, not actually slow.

It was Little Tru's corner where progress truly crawled. The smith apprentices did fine for the first few days—then Derek left, and output promptly dropped below half.

The Panel's blessing carried them regardless, with overflow experience quietly topping them up.

Ten days on, both apprentices held formal Army Blacksmith levels.

Little Tru soon discovered that the new apprentices were geniuses—just like him.

No. He remembered Lord Derek's words. Geniuses? No. Keep the materials coming, and even a pig could be raised into a passable blacksmith.

He had privately sneered at Lord Derek once. Now it was clear who the fool had been.

His attitude reversed on the spot.

If smithing could no longer remain his exclusive secret, he had best behave and do as he was told—before he was dealt with.

That was the advantage of Little Tru being young. Old Tru would never have been talked around so easily.

If the Panel had tracked loyalty, Little Tru's would have jumped fifty percent on the spot.

From Sentinel City, watching through the Panel, Derek could guess more or less what had happened.

So—this little man-management trick actually worked rather well?

Not that toying with a village smith's boy offered much sense of achievement.

The next day Derek began combing the streets. Sentinel City teemed with people; the nobility of the whole region clustered here.

Shops of every kind, goods in abundance.

And not one person here he could afford to offend. His knight's title was merely the ticket through the door.

Reputation, muscle, price—all of it was Derek's to weigh.

He had no intention of buying too much ore at once. Little Tru burned through only seven or eight pounds a day; short-term consumption would stay modest.

Sentinel City deserved its standing as the region's greatest: every trade had someone plying it, and iron ore was no rarity.

No wars lately, either, so prices held steady.

Iron ore ran about 10 coppers a pound and yielded roughly a third of its weight in iron.

Do the sums: a pound of iron cost barely 30 coppers to make, while the market price sat at forty to fifty.

Sounds lucrative, doesn't it?

Strip out labor, fuel, and transport, though, and it was sweat money like any other.

A full cartload of ore—some eight hundred pounds—cost about 80 silver.

Hauled home for his smiths to practice on, it would yield close to three hundred pounds of iron—enough for a good seven or eight hundred spearheads.

Worth over three hundred silver, all told. Though even three novice smiths would need two or three months for the job.

Subtract a trivial dozen-odd silver for labor and materials, and the books showed a clean profit of two hundred fifty silver and change.

Derek was well aware that any man who did his accounting that way had "born fool" written across his forehead.

Three months for a dozen gold in trade—while dozens of men and horses ate through three gold a month in wages and upkeep. Three months of work for nothing.

Of course, keeping dozens of men fed opened other roads to money.

The average noble couldn't afford to keep this many men at all. There was profit in it yet.

To Derek, money was only ever a resource. Building strength—that was the real business.

With three squads of regulars in hand, even Baron Ferreira would have to look at him properly.

Target chosen, Derek promptly bought a cartload of iron ore.

A modest quantity. Nobody paid it the slightest attention.

This visit to Sentinel City, he was a nobody among nobodies.

Derek knew it would not stay that way for long.

The little caravan creaked its way back to Haystack Village. Andrew still thought nothing good would come of this blacksmith obsession.

Having lent out the training yard, he rarely went there anymore.

A measure of distance, properly kept, was the secret to keeping kin close.

The round trip had eaten nearly a month.

Between the base and the traveling party, soldier levels barely differed: recruits bobbed around three to five, veterans five to seven.

The blacksmiths, though, had advanced by leaps and bounds.

Tru

Class: Army Blacksmith, Level 4 (17/100)

Experience Pool: 22/100

The two apprentice smiths had reached Level 2 themselves.

At their reunion, Little Tru bowed lower than ever.

"How many spearheads a day now?"

"A dozen or so. My craft's come along again lately, and with the two apprentices helping, we manage a dozen sets a day."

"Try forging some iron swords. Use the ore I brought back freely. A good smith isn't made without burning through material."

"Well said, my lord. I've grown more here than in ten years behind my father. I have some ideas about swords—though it may take a few tries."

Little Tru glowed with confidence. His progress had slowed of late, but he could still see it. Given time, he was certain he could forge a proper iron sword.

Derek nodded, satisfied—though in truth, he could see the boy's talent was close to its ceiling.

The daily gains had thinned to a trickle; some days, nothing at all.

Only overflow from the Experience Pool kept pushing him along. Without it, Level 5 would have been the limit of his entire career.

And that was with the Panel accelerating everything. Left to nature, a Level 4 smith was likely his fate—about the same as his father's.

But that hardly mattered.

An iron sword took three to five pounds of metal—a cost of one or two silver—and sold for five.

Even at one sword a day, the profit doubled.

Provided, of course, the smith was Level 5.

That appeared to be the threshold. Below it were village smiths, earning two or three gold a year.

At five, a man had made it—forty or fifty gold of value a year, at minimum.

Windfall profits. Now that was a windfall.

Sure enough, value-added goods were where the money lived.

Fifty gold, for perspective, matched the annual output of an entire small manor.

Once all three smiths could forge swords, with a few apprentices in support, one hundred fifty gold a year—enough to keep six or seven squads of soldiers.

In practice, with expenses of every stripe, even four or five squads would strain it.

The smiths settled, Derek buried himself in training again. Everything rested on having force enough to guard it.

A business like this was more than enough to make others green with envy.

The ability to earn did not confer the right to expand without limit. In this feudal world the nobility held every basic resource, and a man played within the rules or not at all.

A month and a half later—after failures beyond counting—Little Tru could forge iron swords.

Against cheap spears, swords carried far more value.

By the time a few dozen blades had stacked up, the iron ore was nearly spent.

Tallying the days: three months, all told.

A small half of his gold was gone.

Linger here longer, and eyes would begin to turn his way.

Derek needed to find ground of his own to stand on.