Reincarnated as the Crown Prince
Chapter 59: Internal Affairs Done

Chapter 59: Internal Affairs Done

The Iron Serpent cut northward through charred valleys and silent towns. No fanfare followed it now, only the hum of its engine and the clatter of steel wheels over reinforced track. Every town they passed bore some scar—church bells silenced, noble estates repurposed, crops planted not by landowners but by brigades. Behind them, Aragon’s revolution crept outward like heat from a buried flame.

Ahead of them lay Barcelona.

The city had long stood apart—wealthy, cosmopolitan, devout, and proud. It had not welcomed royalist crusades, nor embraced republican uprisings. It endured. It watched. It traded. And now it waited, uncertain whether to resist or receive the oncoming force of progress.

Inside the Iron Serpent, Lancelot stood in the center of the mobile planning chamber, eyes on a translucent map projected by a rudimentary arc-lamp device. Juliette paced beside him, boots scuffed with soot, her coat marked with grease and chalk. Bellido sat nearby, surrounded by half-drunk coffee mugs and stacked communiqués.

"Two towns between here and Barcelona have declared neutrality," Bellido said. "Vilafranca and Igualada. Clerics control both councils. Their militias won’t attack, but they won’t allow track laying either."

Juliette tapped her chalk against the map. "We’ll bypass their centers. Lay silent relays overnight. Set up portable transformers outside the town perimeter. If we’re fast, we can light up the coast before they finish another sermon."

"And if they retaliate?" Lancelot asked.

"We don’t answer with rifles," she said. "We answer with bulbs."

That night, as the Serpent halted outside Vilafranca, teams deployed in silence. Engineers moved like shadows, digging trenches for cable, hoisting wooden pylons, and setting coil batteries behind dry-stone walls. The townspeople watched from rooftops—silent, uncertain, some praying, others curious. Not a single musket fired.

By dawn, the first streetlamp beyond the church plaza flickered on.

Children crowded beneath it. A boy held up his tin cup, as if it would catch the glow like rain.

They didn’t cheer. They stared.

And word traveled faster than any train.

—

Barcelona’s southern defenses were not made of walls or cannon—but of bureaucracy. The city gates remained open to trade, but closed to anything bearing the Aragonese crest. The Civic Brigades were officially deemed "militant technocrats." Any train flying their banners would be "delayed indefinitely due to logistical disputes."

Lancelot had expected worse.

"They want to look like they’re resisting without burning bridges," Bellido said. "They’re hedging. Waiting to see who blinks first."

Juliette stared out the war car window. "Then we make it impossible to blink."

She unrolled the latest schematic: a modular power grid relay hub designed to draw from Granada’s coil banks and amplify via Jaén’s reservoirs. If installed correctly, it would allow them to light Barcelona’s outlying districts without entering the city.

"Let them argue in council halls," she said. "Their citizens will read by our light."

Construction began in a valley southeast of the city—just far enough to be ignored, just close enough to matter. The ground was difficult, pocked by old quarry sites and prone to wind shear. Workers built scaffolding around cliffs, drilled into limestone, and carried cables up by hand.

Juliette led from the front, refusing any elevated command tent. She slept with the engineers, ate with the linemen, and bled with them when a support beam collapsed, bruising her ribs and breaking two fingers.

When Lancelot visited the field hospital, she waved him off with her bandaged hand.

"We’re ahead of schedule," she said. "That’s what matters."

He nodded, but his face was tight.

"The diplomats in Barcelona want to talk. Clergy too."

"Let them," she said. "But don’t stop the work."

—

The talks were held in a neutral estate overlooking the coast—once owned by a wine baron, now operated by an order of nuns turned mediators. Lancelot arrived without bodyguards, wearing a plain overcoat and carrying no seal of state.

Across the table sat Cardinal Oriol de Rovira—a wiry, sharp-eyed man with silver-streaked hair and an expression like carved granite. Flanking him were two university rectors, a city magistrate, and a retired admiral whose hands trembled faintly when he reached for water.

"You approach our city with machines, not mandates," Oriol began. "You offer light—but darken traditions. You build hospitals—but dismantle parishes. What exactly are you bringing to our gates, Lord Lancelot?"

Lancelot met his gaze without flinching. "Choice."

"Wrapped in power lines and taxes."

"No," Lancelot said. "In permanence. Your sermons fade. My engineers don’t. You want to stop time. I want to give it shape."

The admiral leaned forward. "What if we ask you to stop? To delay this... current?"

"Then I’ll ask the children under our new lamps whether they want to go back to oil and prayer."

The room fell silent.

Oriol tapped a finger on the table. "Barcelona will not fall."

"It doesn’t need to," Lancelot said. "It only needs to join."

He stood.

And left the estate without waiting for a reply.

—

By the end of the week, the outer districts of Barcelona—Sant Martí, El Raval, Poble Sec—had full electric current.

Workshops reopened at night. Reading halls doubled attendance. Street merchants extended hours. And in the slums, children gathered under arc lamps to sing.

The city’s council remained silent.

Then came the retaliation.

At midnight, masked saboteurs struck the primary relay tower. Charges buried under soil. When they blew, half the grid blacked out. Two engineers were killed. A third, a woman named Catalina, was pulled from the wreckage with half her face burned.

Juliette sat beside her cot in the field hospital, gripping the young woman’s hand.

"They took my maps," Catalina whispered. "They knew where to hit."

Juliette nodded. "But they don’t know what comes next."

That morning, Lancelot issued an open declaration—broadcast through every Civic node, wired to town halls, and printed in daily bulletins.

"To those who destroy: We will rebuild.

To those who burn: We will dig deeper.

And to those who fear what we bring: You may kneel before your past, but we will stand in your future."

The response came not from the council—but from the people.

Hundreds of Barcelonans crossed the city limits to volunteer at the southern hub. Teachers, masons, librarians, blacksmiths. One arrived with a violin, saying he’d play for morale. Another brought spare copper fittings scavenged from a shipyard.

Oriol watched from the cathedral balcony as his city moved without him.

He wrote no reply.

—

The final cable was lowered by hand across the Montjuïc hillside.

It was Juliette herself who closed the circuit.

She stood atop the makeshift generator box, one gloved hand on the terminal, the other gripping the stabilizer coil. The wind howled around her, scattering dust and paper across the ridge.

Lancelot stood a few meters away, flanked by Civic aides and silent soldiers.

The final command was hers.

She pulled the lever.

And Barcelona lit up.

First, the port cranes.

Then the rail station.

Then one by one, districts that had never known steady current.

A boy screamed with joy.

A baker opened his shop at midnight just to bake by light.

A woman in her eighties wept as her grandson read aloud from a book she’d never been able to finish by candlelight.

In the cathedral, the stained glass windows flickered with reflected glow. Oriol turned away from the light.

But even his shadow shrank.

—

The next morning, Juliette awoke in a cot beside a generator, her coat used as a pillow. A Civic runner brought news: a delegation from the city council was on its way.

They met on the steps of the provisional energy hall.

The leader was not a councilman—but a teacher from the university.

"You’ve already changed the city," he said. "Now we need to understand how to live in it."

Juliette smiled faintly. "You start by picking up a wrench."

"We already have," he said. "And... we’d like to name this district after the girl who rebuilt it."

She stiffened.

"Which name?" she asked.

The teacher glanced at his notes. "Juliette. No titles. Just Juliette."

She looked toward the power station—coil humming softly in the morning light.

And nodded.

—

Inside the Iron Serpent, Lancelot finally removed the war map from the table.

He replaced it with a blank sheet.

A clean ledger.

And on it, he wrote:

"The first age was of kings.

The second, of war.

The third begins not with conquest—

But with circuits.

And those brave enough to draw the lines."

—

That evening, as the city of Barcelona glowed brighter than it ever had in its long history, Juliette stood on a rooftop near the harbor.

The lights shimmered in windows, danced on the sea, and illuminated towers once ruled by silence.

Bellido joined her.

"It’s done," he said.

"No," she replied. "It’s started."

And together, they watched a city begin to dream.

Not of kings or saints.

But of steam, and light, and tomorrow.

Above them, the stars blinked faintly, nearly outshone by the electric glow. Barcelona was no longer watching history—it was part of it. And as the current flowed through copper veins and into every darkened street, so too did hope. Quiet, radiant, unstoppable. The revolution had found its light.