Junho did not sleep well.

  This was partly because the cot in the farmstead's back room was about forty centimeters too short for his current body, and partly because his brain had decided that two in the morning was the ideal time to begin calculating timber yield estimates. He lay on his back with his knees bent over the end of the cot, staring at the ceiling — stone, poorly pointed, a slow leak in the northeast corner that had left a brown stain shaped vaguely like a boot — and ran numbers.

  The numbers were not comfortable.

  2,400 gold. Ninety days. Eighteen families. One broken mill.

  He rolled onto his side. The cot complained.

  Milled oak, if the system's price estimate is right, around two gold per cubic meter. How many cubic meters can eighteen families harvest and transport in ninety days?

  He didn't know the answer to that yet. He didn't know the stamina of the tenants, the quality of their tools, the condition of the forest paths, or whether there was any equipment for felling large oak at all. He was calculating with variables he hadn't measured.

  That's the problem with not having done a site survey. You don't know what you don't know.

  He sat up. Outside the small window, the sky was doing that thing it does in the hour before dawn when the black starts to look less absolute — not light yet, just a slightly warmer darkness at the eastern edge.

  He got up, found the candle stub, and lit it from the embers of the fireplace.

  On the table, he found a blank piece of parchment at the bottom of the satchel and a stick of charcoal tucked into a pocket he hadn't noticed. He sat down and began to write.

  Not calculations. A list.

  Junho was a lists man. Had been since university, when his professor had told him that the difference between a good engineer and a dead project was documentation. You wrote down everything you knew, everything you didn't know, and everything you needed to find out. Then you worked the list.

  * * *

  By the time pale grey light was coming through the window, the parchment was mostly full.

  He had two columns. The left column was labeled KNOW. The right column was labeled FIND OUT.

  The FIND OUT column was considerably longer.

  He was reading back over it when Dorvin Pell appeared in the doorway of the back room, dressed and holding a clay pot from which steam was rising. The steward looked at the candle, the parchment, and Junho, in that order, and something shifted in his expression — not quite hope, more like the cautious recalibration of a man who had expected to find the young lord still passed out in yesterday's mud.

  'You're awake, my lord.'

  'I didn't sleep much,' Junho said. 'Is that tea?'

  'Bark tea. It's what we have.'

  Junho accepted a clay cup of it. It tasted like someone had boiled a tree, which was accurate, but it was hot and he drank it without complaint. In six years of overnight deadlines, he had consumed worse in the name of staying functional.

  'I need to see the mill site this morning,' Junho said. 'And then I want to meet with the tenant families together. All of them. How many people are we talking about?'

  Pell settled into the other chair with the careful movement of a man whose knees hurt. 'Eighteen families. Seventy-some people in total, counting children. Three of the families are short-handed — lost men to the fever two winters back. The Dunwick family is the largest, nine people, and Mara Dunwick runs them like a sergeant. The others mostly follow her lead on things.'

  'Good. That means if I convince her, I've half-convinced everyone.'

  Pell gave him a look.

  'The late baron,' the steward said carefully, 'did not typically approach the tenants in terms of... convincing.'

  'The late baron is why we're in this situation,' Junho said, and immediately felt slightly guilty, because the late baron was Lloyd's father and he was speaking poorly of the dead. Then he decided the situation was too critical for etiquette. 'What time do people start work?'

  'Dawn. Or shortly after.'

  'Then we have about an hour. Let's go look at the mill first.'

  * * *

  The mill site was a ten-minute walk north along a creek that Pell called the Ash Run — a reasonable name for a waterway running through Ashmore, Junho supposed, the sort of naming that made perfect sense until you thought about it too hard.

  The creek itself was healthy. Good width, consistent flow, a steady gradient — his [Engineer's Eye] assessed it without being asked, overlaying faint annotations across his vision like a heads-up display.

  Ping—!

  ―――――――――――――――――――――――――――

  [ ENGINEER'S EYE — WATERWAY ANALYSIS ]

  Ash Run Creek

  Width: 4.2m average Depth: 0.6–1.1m (seasonal variation)

  Flow rate: Approx. 2.8 cubic meters/second (current season)

  Gradient: 1.4% over assessed reach

  Assessment: Excellent millrace potential.

  Sufficient head and flow for undershot or overshot wheel.

  Seasonal variation acceptable — summer low unlikely to impair function.

  ? Millrace channel partially silted. Requires clearing.

  ―――――――――――――――――――――――――――

  Junho crouched at the bank. The millrace — the channel that would divert water to drive the wheel — had been partially dug, then abandoned. Sediment had crept back in over two years of neglect. But the channel geometry was there. Someone had known what they were doing when they dug it, at least.

  The water is the least of our problems.

  He stood and followed Pell another fifty meters to where the mill foundation sat in a clearing above the creek bank.

  He stopped.

  He looked at it for a long time.

  The foundation stones were good. Thick-cut limestone, dry-laid with reasonable care, forming a rectangle approximately eight meters by six — larger than he'd expected. The wheel housing on the creek-facing side was stone too, solid, the channel opening intact. Someone had done this part correctly.

  The collapsed superstructure was a different story. Fallen timbers lay across the foundation in a rough tangle, grey and beginning to rot at the ends where they'd been in contact with the ground. He could see immediately what Pell had described — the mortise joints, poorly cut, had sheared under lateral load when the wheel frame went in. The whole frame had torqued, taken the wall studs with it, and the roof had followed.

  Classic construction failure. Underprepared joinery under dynamic load.

  The timber itself is actually — wait.

  He stepped carefully onto the foundation and crouched beside one of the fallen beams. He pressed his thumb against the wood. Solid. Dense. He snapped his thumbnail against it and got a sound like knocking on a door.

  Tok.

  Oak. Good oak. Two years of lying here and it's barely started.

  He began moving through the fallen timber systematically, checking each major piece. Pell watched from the foundation edge with the expression of a man who had decided to reserve all judgment until further information arrived.

  Ping—!

  ―――――――――――――――――――――――――――

  [ ENGINEER'S EYE — STRUCTURAL SALVAGE ANALYSIS ]

  Collapsed Mill Superstructure

  Foundation: INTACT — full reuse recommended

  Wheel housing: INTACT — minor repointing required

  Fallen Timber Assessment:

  Primary beams (oak, 8): 6 fully salvageable, 2 end-rot (recut to shorter length)

  Wall studs (mixed, 14): 9 salvageable, 5 discard

  Roof purlins (pine, 11): 4 salvageable, 7 discard

  New timber required:

  → 4x wall studs (oak or elm, 3m length)

  → 7x roof purlins (pine, 4m length)

  → Wheel frame components (seasoned oak, see blueprint)

  → Millstone: 1 pair (cannot be salvaged — original never sourced)

  ? CRITICAL: Millstone not present. Must be sourced externally.

  Without millstone, mill cannot function regardless of construction.

  ―――――――――――――――――――――――――――

  Junho read the last two lines twice.

  ...Of course.

  The mill was never finished because they ran out of money before sourcing the millstone. And a mill without a millstone is just an expensive shed next to a creek.

  He sat down on one of the fallen beams and looked at the creek. The water ran past with cheerful indifference.

  Millstones were not something you cut yourself out of random forest timber. They were quarried — specific stone, specific dimensions, specific weight. They had to be sourced, transported, and installed by someone who knew what they were doing. He had absolutely no idea where the nearest quarry was, what a millstone cost, or how long it took to get one.

  He opened his status window and looked at his funds.

  14 silver, 3 copper.

  I can't afford to breathe near a millstone on this budget.

  He sat with that for a moment. In his previous life, this was the point in a project where the client called and explained they'd revised the budget downward by forty percent and did he think that was a problem. He'd learned to treat this moment not as a wall but as a constraint, and constraints were just parameters to design around.

  If I can't buy a millstone, what can I mill with?

  This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

  The question sat in his head for a while. He picked up a flat stone from the ground and turned it over in his hands. Limestone. Common. Soft. Useless for milling grain, which required the dense, abrasive surface of millstone granite or sandstone.

  But.

  ...I don't have to mill grain yet.

  He looked at the forest.

  A watermill didn't need millstones to function as a mill. A watermill was, at its core, a wheel turning a shaft. What the shaft drove depended on what you connected to it. Grain milling was the obvious application. But the same mechanism could drive a trip-hammer. A bellows. A saw frame.

  A saw mill.

  Timber. That's what he had. The forest was full of timber that needed to come down anyway, timber he was planning to sell. Rough-cut logs sold at one price. Planked, dimensioned lumber sold at a significantly higher price. And a water-powered saw could process timber faster than any number of men with handsaws.

  He didn't need a millstone. Not yet. He needed a saw frame and a cam mechanism to convert the wheel's rotation into the reciprocating motion of a saw blade.

  Ping—!

  ―――――――――――――――――――――――――――

  [ ENGINEER'S EYE — DESIGN OPTION UNLOCKED ]

  Blueprint Available: Reciprocating Sawmill (Basic)

  Function: Water-powered frame saw for log processing

  Throughput: 8–14 logs/day (dependent on log diameter, wood hardness)

  Components: Existing wheel housing + crank shaft + pitman arm + saw frame

  Advantages over grain mill:

  → No millstone required

  → Immediate revenue from timber processing

  → Processed lumber value: +60–80% over raw log price

  Construction difficulty: Moderate

  Estimated construction time: 18–25 days (4-man skilled crew)

  Estimated construction time: 30–40 days (unskilled labor + 1 carpenter)

  Note: Conversion to grain milling possible at later stage

  by adding millstone housing above existing wheel mechanism.

  ―――――――――――――――――――――――――――

  Junho closed the panel and stood up.

  The problem had just gotten smaller. Not small — smaller. There was a difference.

  He turned to Pell, who had been waiting with the patience of a man who had nothing else to wait for.

  'Do we have a carpenter?' Junho asked. 'Anyone in the barony who works wood professionally?'

  Pell thought about it. 'Hendry Voss's son does woodwork. Calder, his name is. He learned some of his trade from a joiner in Westmark before he came back. He's not a master, but he's better than the man they hired for the original mill.'

  'Which is a low bar,' Junho said.

  '...Yes, my lord.'

  'Is he reliable?'

  Pell made the face of a man carefully choosing between honesty and diplomacy, and settling on a middle path. 'He's capable. He can be distracted. He has a tendency to go hunting when the work gets difficult.'

  Ah. That type.

  Junho had known that type. Every construction site had one — the man who was genuinely talented but required active management to stay pointed in the right direction. You didn't discard those people; you just structured their work so that leaving was harder than finishing.

  'We'll manage,' Junho said. 'All right. Let's go meet everyone.'

  * * *

  The tenant families gathered in the yard of the largest farmhouse — the Dunwick place — and Junho counted them as they came.

  Seventy-one people. He'd expected the number, but seeing it was different. Men with the particular build of people who worked outside all their lives, thick in the shoulders, worn in the face. Women who looked at him with the frank assessment of people who had learned to evaluate newcomers quickly and accurately. Children clustered near the backs of their families, some curious, some hidden behind adult legs.

  They were not a prosperous-looking group. Their clothing was functional and repaired. Their expressions ranged from cautious to openly skeptical. Quite a few of them had the specific look of people who had been disappointed by someone standing where he was standing before.

  In front, slightly apart from the others, stood a woman of about fifty. Square-built, grey-streaked hair pulled back severely, arms folded. She had the eyes of someone who had been running things by necessity for a long time and didn't particularly enjoy it but was very good at it.

  Mara Dunwick. Pell wasn't wrong about the sergeant impression.

  Junho stood in front of all of them and did not waste time.

  'My name is Lloyd Ashmore,' he said. 'I'm your new lord. I've been away, which means I'm coming into this without enough information, and I'm going to be honest with you about that because I need your help to get up to speed quickly.'

  Silence. A child coughed somewhere in the back.

  Mara Dunwick's eyes narrowed fractionally. She had not been expecting that opening.

  'The barony has a debt problem,' Junho continued. 'I'm not going to pretend otherwise. The Galden Group has a foreclosure notice. We have ninety days. If I can't show meaningful progress on the barony's revenue in that time, we will lose this land, and I do not think any of us want to find out what the Galden Group does with territory they acquire.'

  A murmur ran through the group. Not panic — recognition. These people had known. Of course they had known; people always knew more than their lords assumed, because lords never thought to tell them anything and they had to piece it together from scraps.

  Mara Dunwick unfolded her arms. 'And what exactly is your plan, my lord?'

  There was only the faintest emphasis on the title. Enough to indicate she was using it by convention, not conviction.

  'Three things,' Junho said. 'First, we're going to rebuild the mill on the Ash Run. Not a grain mill — a sawmill. Second, we're going to begin a controlled timber harvest from the north forest, starting this week. Third, we're going to fix the drainage on the east field so it can actually grow something by next planting season.'

  'The east field's been draining wrong for thirty years,' said a man near the back — older, with a greyish beard. 'My father tried to fix it.'

  'Your father didn't have the right approach,' Junho said, and then immediately softened it. 'Or rather — the solution isn't obvious without knowing what to look for. The grading is wrong. We need to cut drainage channels in a herringbone pattern leading to the creek, and regrade the surface to direct water out instead of pooling it in. It's labor-intensive but not complicated.'

  The bearded man looked at him.

  'Where'd you learn that?'

  ...Good question.

  'I studied it,' Junho said, which was technically true. 'I was in the capital for four years.'

  This was Lloyd's actual history and Junho used it without guilt. Apparently Lloyd had been posted to a capital lord's household as a junior aide, which would have given him access to libraries, educated people, possibly engineers or architects. It was a plausible explanation for knowledge that would otherwise be difficult to account for.

  Mara Dunwick was still watching him. 'The mill,' she said. 'Who builds it?'

  'Calder Voss takes the lead on carpentry. I'll direct the construction. Everyone else helps as needed — foundation clearing, timber hauling, material prep.'

  'In between our regular work?'

  'I know it's more labor,' Junho said. 'I'm not going to pretend it isn't. But the mill is the thing that makes everything else viable. Once it's running, we can process the timber at higher value. That's what buys us the negotiating position with the Galden Group. Without the mill, we're just hoping the harvest is good enough, and it won't be.'

  He let that sit.

  Mara looked at the other families. Something passed between them — not words, just the particular communication of people who had been neighbors long enough to have an entire language of glances.

  She looked back at Junho.

  'The last lord had plans too,' she said. 'The mill was his plan. Before that it was a new irrigation scheme that never got past the first ditch. Before that—'

  'I know,' Junho said.

  'Do you.'

  'I read Pell's letter. I walked the east field last night and the mill site this morning. The original mill failed because the joinery was wrong on the wheel frame. I know what the correct design is, and it's different from what was attempted.' He paused. 'I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm asking you to give me thirty days and watch what happens. If I haven't made visible, measurable progress by then, you'll know I'm the same as the last three lords and you can adjust your expectations accordingly.'

  Another silence.

  Mara Dunwick looked at him for a long time. Junho met her gaze and didn't fidget, because he'd learned in years of client presentations that the moment you looked uncertain, they started looking for exits.

  'Calder,' Mara said, not looking away from Junho.

  Somewhere in the crowd, a younger man said, 'Aye?'

  'Go with the lord after this. He wants to talk mill work.'

  A beat. Then: 'All right.'

  Mara turned her gaze back to Junho. The expression on her face was not warm, not welcoming, not yet. But it was something. The specific look of a person who has decided to wait and see, which was more than he'd had a minute ago.

  'Thirty days,' she said.

  'Thirty days,' Junho confirmed.

  * * *

  Calder Voss was twenty-six, lean, with the kind of restless hands that were always reaching for something to fidget with. He'd found a piece of wood somewhere — just a scrap, palm-sized — and was turning it over and over in his fingers as they walked back toward the mill site.

  He'd barely said a word during the walk. He just followed and looked at things.

  Junho had learned that this was actually a good sign in tradespeople. The talkers were often the ones who needed to fill space with words because they weren't filling it with observation.

  When they reached the mill foundation, Calder stopped.

  He looked at the collapsed timbers. He walked around the perimeter of the foundation. He crouched at the wheel housing and looked at the channel opening. He stood up and looked at the creek.

  'They put the wheel frame in wrong,' he said finally.

  'Yes.'

  'The load wasn't distributed. They had the whole weight of the frame bearing down on two points instead of—' He frowned. 'I would have done it differently.'

  'How would you have done it?'

  Calder looked at him with mild surprise, as if he hadn't expected to be asked. Then he crouched again and began sketching with a finger in the soft dirt at the foundation edge, drawing out a rough frame diagram. He wasn't precise — this wasn't a technical drawing — but the logic of it was sound. He understood how loads worked, even if he'd never been taught the formal vocabulary.

  ...He's actually good.

  Junho crouched beside him and studied the sketch. Then he drew his own addition, modifying the joint configuration at the base of the frame.

  Calder looked at it. 'What's that?'

  'It's how you cut the mortise so the joint locks under load instead of shearing. The angle of the tenon shoulder—' He traced it. 'If the load presses down here, the joint tightens. With a standard square shoulder, the lateral force pushes the pieces apart. With this cut, it can't.'

  Calder stared at the diagram in the dirt for a long moment.

  '...Nobody showed me that.'

  'It's not widely known,' Junho said, which was true in this world and a massive understatement in his own. 'Can you cut that joint?'

  'I can cut anything you draw,' Calder said, with the quiet confidence of someone stating a fact rather than boasting.

  'Good. Because we're not building a grain mill. We're building a sawmill first. Different mechanism.' Junho began to sketch again — the crank shaft, the pitman arm, the reciprocating saw frame. Rough, fast sketches, the kind he used to do in project meetings. 'The water wheel drives a crank. The crank drives this arm. The arm converts rotation into vertical reciprocating motion. The saw blade attaches here, moves up and down through the log. The log advances on a sliding bed.'

  Calder watched each element appear in the dirt. His head tilted slightly to one side — the posture of someone whose brain was quietly assembling something.

  'How long does the blade last?'

  Good question. He's already thinking about maintenance.

  'It dulls over time. Needs regular sharpening. But a iron saw blade, if it's decent quality, will last months before it needs replacement. Do we have a blacksmith in the barony?'

  'Old Ferris. He's mostly a farrier now. His forge works.'

  'Can he make a saw blade?'

  Calder considered. 'A simple one. Maybe. You'd need to tell him exactly what you want.'

  'I can do that.'

  Calder looked at the dirt-sketched diagrams. He was quiet for a moment in the way people were quiet when they were genuinely thinking rather than just pausing before speaking.

  'This works,' he said. 'I can see it working.'

  'It does work,' Junho said. 'I've seen it.' He had, in fact, seen historical watermill reconstructions in documentaries, which was not precisely the same thing, but the engineering was solid and that was what mattered.

  Calder nodded slowly. Then he looked up. 'You said thirty days to Mara. For the mill.'

  'Twenty-five for structure. Five for calibration and testing.'

  'That's fast.'

  'It's fast,' Junho agreed. 'That's why we start today.'

  Calder blinked. 'Today?'

  'Right now I want an inventory. Every piece of fallen timber — you assess each one, I'll record it. We sort into: keep as-is, recut and keep, discard. By end of today I want to know exactly what we have and what we need to source. Tomorrow we start clearing the foundation and cleaning up the wheel housing.'

  There was a brief pause while Calder processed the speed of this.

  'You're not like the last lord,' he said.

  'No,' Junho agreed.

  'The last lord used to sit in the hall for a week before he made any decision about anything.'

  'I know. That's why we're in the situation we're in.' Junho stood and brushed dirt off his knees. 'Come on. Let's count timber.'

  * * *

  They spent the rest of the morning on the foundation.

  It was not exciting work. It was methodical, slightly tedious work — lifting each piece of fallen timber, examining it, making a decision, marking it with charcoal on the end. Keep. Recut. Discard. Pell had found a second piece of parchment and followed behind them writing down Junho's dictated notes.

  By midday, they had a clear inventory.

  Ping—!

  ―――――――――――――――――――――――――――

  [ QUEST PROGRESS UPDATE ]

  「 The Inheritance 」 — Phase 1: Restore the Ashmore Mill

  ? Assess foundation condition

  ? Conduct timber salvage inventory

  □ Acquire remaining construction materials

  □ Complete mill structure (functional standard)

  Materials still required:

  → 4x oak studs (3m) — from forest harvest

  → 7x pine purlins (4m) — from forest harvest

  → Iron saw blade (1, approx. 80cm) — blacksmith commission

  → Crank shaft fittings (iron) — blacksmith commission

  → Roofing material (thatch or shingle) — local source

  Current funds: 14 silver, 3 copper

  Estimated iron commission cost: 8–11 silver

  ? Funds critically low. Prioritize revenue or credit.

  ―――――――――――――――――――――――――――

  Junho stared at the funds line.

  Eight to eleven silver for the blacksmith work. That left him three to six silver for everything else, including the possibility of needing to eat.

  I have to find credit somewhere. Or sell something.

  He looked around the mill site. At the sorted timber. At the creek running past. At Calder sitting on the foundation edge eating a heel of bread he'd produced from somewhere.

  There was one option he hadn't fully explored yet.

  'Pell,' he said.

  'My lord.'

  'The forest timber. The overdue harvest. Who knows about it? Locally, I mean. Any merchants, any buyers?'

  Pell thought. 'There's a timber merchant in Crestfall — that's the nearest town, about half a day's ride south. His name is Dorin Brek. He used to come up every few years when the harvest was due.' A pause. 'He stopped coming when the late baron started talking about the lumber consortium deal. I imagine he's... moved his business to other suppliers.'

  'But he'd know the timber is here. He'd know it's overdue.'

  'Almost certainly.'

  Then he might be willing to advance on a committed sale. If I can show him the standing timber and give him a realistic processing timeline...

  It was not a comfortable position to negotiate from. Walking into a buyer's office with no leverage and a desperate timeline was the kind of situation that got you terrible terms. He knew that. He'd watched it happen to subcontractors in his previous life — the ones who needed payment faster than the invoice cycle would allow, who went to buyers hat in hand and came away with margins shaved to the bone.

  But terrible terms are better than no terms.

  He made a decision.

  'I'm riding to Crestfall tomorrow morning,' Junho said. 'Pell, stay here and supervise Calder — I want the foundation completely cleared by the time I'm back. Calder, start prepping the salvageable beams. Clean the mortise holes, assess what needs re-cutting.'

  Calder, still chewing his bread, raised a hand in acknowledgment.

  'What should I tell Mara Dunwick?' Pell asked. 'She'll want to know the plan.'

  'Tell her the mill work has started. Tell her I've gone to secure materials.' Junho paused. 'And tell her we'll need four able bodies to help with clearing and hauling starting tomorrow. Offer whatever the going rate is for extra labor. Which I know we can barely afford, but we can't afford not to have the labor either.'

  Pell wrote it down. He had stopped looking surprised by what came out of Junho's mouth and had transitioned into the steady, slightly dazed competence of a man trying to keep up.

  Good, Junho thought. That was the right mode.

  He looked at the mill foundation one more time before they left. The creek ran past it unchanged, indifferent, carrying water it had always carried to a sea it had always found.

  Day one.

  Twenty-nine to go before Mara decides whether she believes me.

  Eighty-nine before the Galden Group comes to collect.

  He turned and walked back toward the farmstead.

  There was a lot left to do before dark.

  —

  [ End of Chapter 2 ]

  ~ To be continued ~