The train to Paris rattled across the French countryside, iron wheels hammering a rhythm that echoed Elias's thoughts.
The car smelled of wood polish, coal smoke, and the faint perfume of a baroness across the aisle.
He sat quietly, coat draped neatly, a foreign gentleman in appearance—but in truth, every clatter of the wheels only reminded him of his system's newest gift.
Rail.
The veins of empire at the start of the next century.
The promise of speed unmatched by any army of this century.
Late spring sunlight poured across the fields outside, painting villages gold as the train drew closer to the capital.
For most travelers, Paris was the crown jewel of Europe, the cultural heart that had outshone empires.
For Elias, it was something more: a crucible.
By the time the locomotive hissed into the Gare de l'Est, Elias's mind was already alight with calculation.
Paris was not Vienna.
Vienna lived in music and order, the quiet strength of bureaucracy.
Paris was chaos veiled in brilliance—crowded streets, artists and radicals in every café, soldiers patrolling boulevards widened by Haussmann to crush the very revolts the city seemed to breed.
He stepped from the station into the swirl of voices and carriages.
France was recovering still from the Crimean adventure, its pride bruised but not broken.
Napoleon III strutted on the world stage, dreaming of glory, but Elias could see the cracks.
The empire was not as secure as its marble façades suggested.
His pace carried him through streets that would, in another generation, blaze with electricity.
For now, gaslight reigned, and the city of lights was but a city of flame.
He allowed himself to enjoy it—cafés spilling onto the pavements, bookshops stacked with pamphlets railing against kings, and the smell of roasting chestnuts drifting beneath the looming shadow of Notre Dame.
But always, beneath the surface of admiration, the hum of the system lingered.
His miners had already begun their transformation.
The investment had been a simple one, yet profound: upgrading their picks, carts, and smelting tools from iron to steel.
A small leap in technology, but it multiplied their efficiency.
From a meager 123 credits, his income had surged to 220 per day.
It was not yet the roaring river he desired, but the growth was tangible.
Every calculation pointed to the same outcome: by the time Montenegro rose against the coming Ottomans, his summoned army—two thousand strong—would be fully upgraded.
Each man armed not with outdated muskets, but with bolt-action rifles of the 1870s, their training sharpened to match.
Fresh recruits would swell their number further, creating a force decades ahead of its time, easily capable of repulsing and humiliating the Ottoman Sultan forcing the sessation of lands into the Principalities hands.
Elias had peace of mind at last.
Even if the system pushed him to expand, even if Rank III loomed like an impossible summit, he had secured the most important thing: time.
Paris became his classroom.
He studied its politics, drifting like a ghost between salons and assemblies.
He listened to republicans whisper of liberty, to Bonapartists extolling empire, to socialists predicting a revolution yet to come.
None knew what he knew—that all their squabbles would one day be drowned beneath industrial thunder, that the wars of the future would not be decided by speeches or barricades but by steel rails and mechanized slaughter.
Still, he did not dismiss them.
Ideas were weapons.
A bullet killed a man, but an ideology swayed nations.
Elias was already sketching the outlines of his own creation: Neo-Traditionalism, a blend of discipline, progress, and merit that would promise stability while advancing society.
Neither republican freedom nor autocratic tyranny, but something new, at least publically, meanwhile internally the military would be purely Autocratic answerable only to the Supreme Commander.
Paris gave him proof of its necessity.
The city's streets teemed with dreamers, but also with beggars.
The glittering salons masked the poverty of the outskirts.
Elias saw it and filed it away.
He knew the language of power was not spoken only in armies, but in how one fed, clothed, and directed the restless masses.
The system's ledger ticked steadily upward each dawn.
220 credits.
221.
223.
Small increments, but every day added fuel to his ambition.
He began the slow work of upgrading his soldiers.
Each transition cost dearly, yet he knew the worth of it.
A single company of bolt-action riflemen could stand easily against three times their number armed with muskets.
A battalion of lever-action skirmishers could shred cavalry before they ever closed.
In the evenings, he would walk the Seine, watching the lights shimmer on the water.
Tourists and citizens alike saw only the romance of the scene.
Elias saw supply lines, crossings, choke points.
Paris was beautiful, yes, but more importantly, it was vulnerable.
Every city was to modern warfare.
He allowed himself moments of simple humanity.
A glass of Bordeaux, a night at the opera, a stroll through the Louvre to stand before canvases that in his own time had long since been preserved behind glass and wire.
These were the moments that grounded him, reminding him that he was still a man, not merely the avatar of some alien machine.
Yet always, the thought returned: expansion.
Fifty million credits loomed over him like a storm on the horizon.
His current progress was laughable against that figure.
But he would not be cowed.
The Ottomans were the first stone to topple.
The Balkans would be his forge.
And once the system's web of bases spread, once the rails tied the mountains to the plains, his income would grow not by hundreds, but by thousands.
Paris, for all its charm, was a pause.
A place to breathe, to learn, to refine.
Elias knew that soon he would move again—perhaps south toward the Mediterranean, perhaps north toward Britain.
Every capital offered lessons.
Every empire was a case study in strength and weakness.
One evening, sitting beneath the awning of a café on the Boulevard des Italiens, Elias scribbled a single line in his notebook:
When the storm comes, it will not be Paris that burns first—but Paris will burn brightest.
He closed the book, tucked it away, and finished his wine.
For now, Paris shone as the city of lights. But Elias carried with him the fire of the future—and when he chose to unleash it, the world would never be the same.