The silence in the warehouse was different this time.It wasn't the silence of a stopped machine or a scared worker. It was the silence of emptiness.

  "Report," I said, my voice echoing in the cavernous storage bay.

  "Inventory levels critical," Mark II projected a hologram of our supply chain. It was a sea of red warning lights. "Sulfur reserves: 12%. Saltpeter reserves: 4%. Steel ingots: 20%. At current production rates, the assembly line for the Model-1 Rifle will halt in forty-eight hours."

  I kicked an empty crate. Dust motes danced in the light."Forty-eight hours," I muttered. "Magister Elara doesn't waste time."

  It had been three days since the standoff with the Professors.Since then, no fireballs had rained from the sky. No assassins had jumped from the shadows.Instead, wagons just stopped arriving.Suppliers who had been begging for my gold last week were now refusing to open their doors.

  "I tried to buy a shipment of niter from the Merchants' Guild this morning," Amelia walked in, looking exhausted. She wiped soot from her forehead. "They laughed at me, Julian. They said the Academy has reclassified niter as a 'Class-B Magical Reagent.' It’s restricted. Only licensed mages can buy it now."

  "Class-B?" I scoffed. "It's bird poop and dirt, Amelia. It's used for fertilizer."

  "Not anymore," she handed me a scroll—a rejection letter stamped with the Academy’s seal. "They've locked down the sulfur mines in the North too. And the iron imports from the Dwarves have been 'delayed for customs inspection.' They are choking us."

  I read the letter. It was polite, bureaucratic, and lethal.*By order of the Department of Resource Management...*They weren't trying to destroy the factory. They were trying to starve it. They wanted me to come crawling back, begging for a license, begging to be put under their leash.

  "Smart," I admitted. "They control the natural resources. They control the source."

  "So, what do we do?" Amelia asked, leaning against a stack of unsold lumber. "We can't make gunpowder without niter and sulfur. Do we surrender? Pay their tax?"

  I looked at the empty warehouse.I thought about the Academy’s pristine white carriage. I thought about their arrogance.They believed power came from rare things. From crystals found deep in the earth, from bloodlines, from ancient secrets.They didn't understand Industry.Industry doesn't rely on luck. Industry adapts.

  "Mark," I asked. "Display the chemical composition of Potassium Nitrate."

  "KNO3," the drone replied. "One atom of Potassium, one of Nitrogen, three of Oxygen."

  "Nitrogen and Oxygen are in the air," I murmured, looking up at the smoggy sky. "Potassium is in ash. In waste."

  I turned to Amelia. A grin formed on my face—not a happy one, but a hungry one."Surrender?" I laughed. "No. We're going to go shopping. But not at the Guild."

  "Where then?"

  "The sewers," I said. "And the farms."

  The Cesspit.

  Two hours later, we were standing on the edge of the city’s largest waste processing field.It smelled exactly as bad as you’d imagine. Mountains of manure from the city’s stables, piles of rotting compost, and open trenches of sewage.Amelia covered her nose with a scented cloth, looking green."Julian," she gagged. "Please tell me we are here to hire a golem. Why are we staring at... this?"

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  "This," I gestured to the steaming piles of dung, "is our niter mine."

  The owner of the field, a toothless man named Otho, looked at me like I was insane. He was holding a pitchfork."You want to buy... the pile?" Otho asked, squinting at my fine clothes. "All of it?"

  "All of it," I confirmed. "Every pound of manure, every bucket of urine, every heap of rotting vegetation. And I want to rent this land for a year."

  "It's shit, my lord," Otho clarified, thinking I was confused.

  "It's nitrogen," I corrected. "I'll pay you double what the farmers pay."

  I tossed a bag of gold to him. Otho caught it, bit the coin (probably tasting the manure on his fingers), and shrugged. "It's yours, crazy lord."

  I turned to my construction crew, who had arrived with wagons and shovels."Listen up!" I shouted. "We are building Niter Beds! I want trenches dug! Four feet deep! Layer the manure with limestone and ash! Keep it moist! Turn it every week!"

  Amelia pulled me aside. "Julian, have you lost your mind? You're going to turn the Artificer of Sector 4 into the 'Lord of Shit'?"

  "Let them laugh," I said, watching the workers start to dig."The Academy thinks niter is a magical rock dug from a special mine. They don't know chemistry. They don't know that bacteria can break down this waste and turn it into nitrate crystals."

  I picked up a handful of grey ash from a nearby fire pit."We mix this with the waste. The bacteria do the work. We wash the soil with water, evaporate it, and boom—pure white crystals. Gunpowder."

  "And the sulfur?" Amelia asked, still looking skeptical.

  "The volcanic vents on the coast," I pointed west. "Nobody owns them because they smell like rotten eggs. We’ll scrape it off the rocks ourselves. It's not 'mining' if we just pick it up."

  "It's dirty work, Julian."

  "War is dirty, Amelia." I looked back at the city skyline, where the Academy’s spire gleamed white and pure in the distance."They sit in their ivory towers, casting spells with clean hands. They think they can cut us off from the earth."I kicked a pile of compost."But as long as this city eats and shits, we have infinite ammo."

  The Lab: One Week Later.

  The smell in Sector 4 had changed.It used to smell of ozone and hot metal. Now, there was a faint, underlying note of ammonia.But the results were on the table.

  I held up a glass jar. Inside, perfectly formed white crystals glinted in the lamplight.**Refined Potassium Nitrate.** Purity: 98%.

  "It worked," Amelia whispered. She was wearing heavy rubber gloves and an apron. She had spent the last week boiling vats of "earth water," but the skepticism was gone from her eyes. "It actually worked. From... that."

  "Science," I said, pouring the crystals onto a scale. "It doesn't care where the atoms come from. A nitrate molecule from a manure pile is identical to a nitrate molecule from a royal mine."

  "Production update," Mark II chimed in. "Gunpowder synthesis has resumed. Output is at 120% of previous levels. Cost per unit has decreased by 60%."

  "Decreased?" Amelia blinked.

  "Manure is free, Amelia," I grinned. "The Academy was charging us a premium for 'Magical Grade' niter. By cutting them out, we just made our bullets cheaper."

  There was a knock on the heavy iron door.It was Captain Vorian. He looked worried."Lord Julian," he stepped inside, eyeing the bubbling vats. "The Quartermaster told me you were out of powder. He said the Academy embargo..."

  I tossed the jar of white crystals to him.Vorian caught it. He opened the lid, sniffed it (it smelled faintly of urine, but mostly like chemicals), and tasted a tiny grain.His eyes widened."This is potent," he said. "Stronger than the Guild stuff."

  "And unlimited," I said. "Tell your Quartermaster the embargo is irrelevant. In fact, tell him the price of ammo just dropped."

  Vorian laughed, a deep belly laugh of relief. "You crazy bastard. The Academy thinks they have you in a chokehold."

  "They do," I walked over to the map on the wall. I drew a big X over the Academy's supply lines. "But they forgot that you can't choke someone who doesn't need to breathe their air."

  I looked at the jar in Vorian's hand."But this is just a stopgap," I murmured. "Niter beds are slow. They take months to mature. We need something faster."

  "Haber-Bosch Process?" Mark suggested in my ear.

  "Not yet," I tapped the table. "We need high pressure steel vessels for that. We need electricity. Real electricity."

  I turned to Vorian."Captain, how secure is the river dam upstream?"

  Vorian frowned. " The Old Mill? It's abandoned. Why?"

  "I need power," I said. "Hydroelectric power. If I'm going to beat the mages, I need to generate my own lightning. And I need a lot of it."

  "The Academy claims the river," Vorian warned. "They say the Water Spirits own it."

  "Let the spirits sue me," I grabbed a fresh blueprint. "I'm building a turbine."

  I kept this one focused on the logistics.

  It might seem gross (manure mining was a real historical method!), but it shows Julian's determination.

  He will do whatever it takes to keep the factory running.

  Plus, cheaper bullets mean more bullets.

  See you in Chapter 29!