Reincarnated as the Crown Prince
Chapter 64: The Furnace of Empire

Chapter 64: The Furnace of Empire

The highland winds howled like the ghosts of a forgotten world.

Prince Lancelot stood at the edge of a limestone ridge, his boots caked in red dust, his coat whipped by the wind. Before him stretched the inland plateau—untamed, vast, and cloaked in clouds. It had taken three weeks of rail through sheer granite and jungle to reach this height, and now the world opened up before them. Fertile valleys, glinting mineral ridges, and rivers that fed into distant, unmapped forests.

Juliette climbed up beside him, panting slightly, goggles around her neck, field notes tucked under one arm.

"This is it," she said, nodding at the view. "The Crown’s Furnace."

Lancelot raised an eyebrow. "The name?"

She smiled faintly. "Heat, ore, and pressure. It’s where empires are forged."

—

By the fourth month of the African campaign, the Civic Brigades had established eight primary settlements, all connected by a central railway artery stretching 140 kilometers inland. But now, at the frontier of the known plateau, the game changed. The terrain was steeper. Rainfall heavier. The soil richer—but riddled with sinkholes and ancient aquifers.

It was no longer just about industry.

It was about permanence.

"This can’t just be a camp," Juliette warned during the evening meeting in the steel prefab command hut. "If we’re building here, it has to last through floods, landslides, maybe even seismic events."

Bellido poured over geological charts. "Then we adapt. Modular steel foundations. Deep anchors. We’ll divert the water into retention basins and power turbines with it."

"We’ve never built a highland city before," one of the engineers muttered.

"Then it’s time we start," Lancelot said simply.

—

Work began the next day.

The site was codenamed "Project Firewell." The goal: a self-sustaining industrial city. Steelworks. Hydro-generation. Smelting lines for iron, bauxite, and now cobalt—recently discovered in outcroppings to the northwest.

The first innovation came from an unlikely place. A young technician named Manuel Delgado proposed an improvised Bessemer converter system using surplus gas from the generators and local clay-lined crucibles. His prototype melted a bar of iron in under three minutes.

Juliette watched the demonstration with arms crossed. "Can it scale?"

Manuel, eyes wide, nodded. "If we can get the proper insulation and pipework, yes. The plateau winds even help cool the outer shell."

Lancelot clapped the young man’s shoulder. "Then you just invented our future."

The Firewell Foundry was born.

—

By month five, the new city had a population of nearly 2,000—engineers, locals, laborers, and students. The air reeked of forge smoke and eucalyptus. At night, the lights of the plateau glowed like a second sunrise.

But progress came at a cost.

Civic records showed the first spike in fatalities since the expedition began—not from sabotage or disease, but exhaustion. Collapsed lungs. Industrial accidents. Heatstroke. The pace of expansion, relentless and glorified in Valencia’s newspapers, was breaking flesh and bone.

Juliette sat in her tent late one evening, reading the latest casualty reports. Outside, she could hear the distant hum of turbines and the occasional hammerfall.

Lancelot entered without knocking.

"You saw it too?" he asked.

She nodded. "Seventeen this week. Ten of them locals. Three underage. The rest—engineers."

He sat across from her, silent.

"They’re not soldiers, Lancelot," she said softly. "They’re builders. Dreamers. They believe in what we’re doing. But belief won’t protect them from steel beams and fatigue."

He didn’t argue.

He only looked down at his hands—soot-blackened, callused—and whispered, "We’ve asked too much."

After a long pause, Juliette leaned forward. "Then we change how we ask."

—

The next day, new labor protocols were announced across all Aragonese territories.

Mandatory rest rotations. Medical screening stations. Compensation packages for families of the deceased. And perhaps most importantly—apprentice programs that promoted locals to overseer roles. The empire would not simply extract labor. It would elevate it.

Resistance, surprisingly, came not from the field—but from Valencia. Ministerial councils grumbled about the cost. Some accused Lancelot of softening.

His response was clear.

"The bones of empire cannot be stacked like firewood. They must stand upright."

And the council backed down.

—

As Project Firewell solidified, exploration parties were dispatched farther north. One such group returned with more than maps.

They brought a delegation.

A coalition of highland tribes—smaller, more isolated, but united by kinship and geography—had sent representatives. They wore layers of woven fabric, carried steel-tipped spears, and spoke through a translator with formal, almost regal clarity.

They had heard of the glowing cities in the south. Of water that flowed without a well. Of machines that taught children to write.

And they wanted answers.

Lancelot met them personally in the civic chamber beneath the steel clocktower.

"We are not your enemies," he said.

The eldest among them, a woman with white braids and weathered hands, replied, "Nor are we your workers. If you want land, offer truth. If you want peace, offer legacy."

Juliette stepped forward, laying out blueprints and diagrams—showing not conquest, but curriculum. Not taxes, but cooperatives. Shared factories. Democratic civic councils. Medical exchanges.

The elders took the documents, studied them, and departed.

They returned three days later.

With gifts—spices, salt, and copper ingots.

And a request: "Teach our children the sun’s language."

Juliette blinked. "Sun’s language?"

The elder pointed to the electric lamps.

"You carry its fire."

—

By month six, the civic network had extended into the highlands. Power lines danced across valleys. The first airship beacon tower was built on Mount Kareya, allowing courier balloons to dock safely in mountain winds. A signal tower relayed messages from the plateau to Nueva Cádiz in under six minutes.

But then, the unexpected.

A diplomat from Rome arrived—an envoy not of steel or sabotage, but words.

He was lean, clad in crimson ecclesiastical robes, with a silver cross and tired eyes.

"I come not to protest," he told Lancelot. "But to understand."

He toured the schools, the hospitals, the factories. He watched as a boy no older than seven learned how to assemble a transistor radio kit.

And in the Firewell Cathedral—a recently converted Civic Hall with stained glass made from melted forge scrap—he knelt and prayed.

Later, in private, he said to Juliette, "You do not destroy faith. You reroute it."

She tilted her head. "And does that scare you?"

"No," he replied. "It humbles me."

—

Meanwhile, Britannia was not idle.

British operatives were caught stirring dissent in Port Mirasol—whispering about child labor, about secret Aragonese weapon shipments, about planned annexation.

Juliette had them arrested—but Lancelot released them.

Instead, he summoned their leader, a wiry man named Edwin Granger, to a public debate held in the new amphitheater.

Broadcast by radio.

Watched by thousands.

Lancelot didn’t shout. He didn’t condemn.

He asked questions.

"When was the last time your empire built a school here?"

"When did you last share your medicine?"

"When did your steel lay tracks for someone else’s dreams?"

Granger had no answer.

When it ended, the crowd did not cheer.

They built.

—

By the end of the sixth month, a statue was erected in Nueva Cádiz.

Not of a king.

But of a child holding a book in one hand and a wrench in the other.

The plaque read:

"Future, Forged."

Lancelot visited it alone.

The sea wind tugged at his coat. Behind him, the city buzzed with cranes, drills, steam, and symphonies of industry.

Juliette found him there.

"You look like a man staring at his own reflection."

He glanced at the statue. "Maybe I am."

"Regret?"

"No. Just... scale. We started this with a map. Now we’re redrawing the world."

She stepped beside him. "And when it’s done?"

He didn’t answer immediately.

Then quietly, "Then we’ll teach them how to draw their own."

—

The Seventh Month loomed.

And Aragon’s African project was no longer a campaign.

It was a continent-spanning network of minds, rails, wires, and willpower.

The world watched.

But for the builders of the Fourth Age, the future wasn’t watched.

It was made.

And in the glow of that realization, a new philosophy was taking root—not etched in doctrine, but hammered into steel, spoken in classrooms, and drawn across the sky by the path of copper wire.

In Firewell, dusk came not with silence, but with music. The clatter of tools formed a strange symphony, a chorus of persistence. Down in the residential quarters, children traced power circuits into the dirt with sticks. In the mess halls, foreign dialects blended into a new shared tongue—part Spanish, part tribal, part machine.

Juliette stood on the edge of the new civic plaza, watching a shipment of books being unloaded—manuals on engineering, architecture, sanitation, and civic law. No longer imports. These were printed on Firewell’s first industrial press, assembled weeks earlier by a coalition of locals and exiled scholars. Knowledge was now native.

She glanced toward the forge tower, where light pulsed like a mechanical heartbeat, steady and sure.

Lancelot joined her without a word. He carried a scroll—a new rail proposal, linking Firewell directly to a coastal aqueduct terminal near the mineral coast.

"Do we ever stop?" she asked quietly.

He looked out across the ridge.

"When a tree stops growing," he said, "it starts dying."

And in that answer, she understood.

This was not expansion.

It was rebirth.

Beneath them, the plateau city lived—its veins copper and its breath steam.

And above them, the stars blinked down on a world being rewritten.

One tower, one school, one oath at a time.