Sharath no longer viewed himself as a child bound by playtime or privilege. Within him still echoed the heartbeat of a world far behind him—a world of blueprints, assembly lines, and system diagrams. Over breakfast with Lord Darshan, he set his cup of spiced milk aside and unrolled a scroll.
"These are the bottlenecks," he said plainly, pointing to inked diagrams. "Wagon axles arrive late from Riverforge. Copper chains are inconsistent from Lendrah. If we want to scale, we decentralize."
Lord Darshan raised an eyebrow. "Scale?"
"Growth. More cycles, more pickups. We don't build everything here—we teach others to build parts, components, standards."
The idea was simple in Sharath's mind: distributed manufacturing. But in Navaleon, where craft was revered and closely guarded, the concept was radical. Still, Darshan had learned never to underestimate his son.
"And who leads this decentralization?" Darshan asked.
Sharath smiled faintly. "We do. House Darsha becomes the mind, not the hand. We let others become the hands."
It wasn't about control. It was about flow. Systems. Optimization. Legacy.