The delivery of the chemical fertilizers was the first time the farmers of Redania touched the future. Under Arthur's direction, the concentrated nitrates and phosphates were tilled into the blackened earth. Almost immediately, the soil's "bitterness" vanished, replaced by the rich, loamy scent of a living foundation. The ground was ready, but it remained thirsty.
Arthur knew that the reforestation he had ordered would take decades to mature naturally—time his nascent empire did not have. He turned to the elven sages, the keepers of the ancient "Song of the Earth."
"You have the ability to accelerate the pulse of the wild," Arthur said, standing before the elven elders. "I want you to perform your rituals. Speed the growth of the saplings we have planted. I want a forest where there are currently only stumps."
The sages looked at him, their brows furrowed in confusion. "Prince Arthur," one sage whispered, "if it is the water you seek, we can simply perform a ritual for the rain. We can call the clouds directly from the Great Sea. Why waste the Power on the slow crawl of bark and leaf?"
Arthur looked at the sage with a gaze that saw past the magic to the educational psychology of the masses.
"If you bring the rain with a song, the peasants will call it a miracle. They will go back to their prayers, wait for the next drought, and blame you again when the sky goes dry," Arthur replied, his voice firm. "I do not want them to rely on the rain; I want them to understand the mechanism of the rain. I want them to see with their own eyes that it is the trees that clean the air and breathe moisture into the heavens. If the forest brings the rain, the forest becomes sacred to their logic, not just their superstition."
The sages bowed, struck by the cold brilliance of his strategy. They began the ritual. For days, the hills of Tretogor hummed with a low, melodic vibration. Saplings that should have taken years to grow surged upward in weeks, their roots anchoring the soil and their leaves unfurling into a dense, emerald canopy.
The results were undeniable. As the hills turned green, the climate returned to normal. The air, once thick with dust and the stench of decay, became crisp and clear. The atmospheric pressure shifted, and the rain began to fall—not as a sudden, violent magical storm, but as a steady, nourishing cycle that happened more and more often.
The peasants watched the clouds gather over the new woods and felt a fear shift into a profound, shaky respect. Arthur had proven his claims. He had mastered the weather not with a wand, but by fixing the broken machine of the world.
As the rains returned and the first series of bountiful harvests swept across the Redanian plains, the story of the "Peasant's Folly" took on a life of its own. What began as a local dispute in the outskirts of Tretogor soon became the talk of every tavern from the Pontar to the Braa.
The rumors were devastatingly clear: the humans had nearly starved themselves through their own greed and ignorance. They had cut down the "Lungs of the World" and bled the soil white, only to point their fingers at the Aen Seidhe bystanders. The revelation of their own stupidity acted as a cooling agent on the racial tensions of the region—not out of sudden love, but out of a desperate, stinging embarrassment.
The human lords and wealthy landowners, usually the first to incite a pogrom to distract from a bad season, suddenly found themselves silent. To press the "non-human threat" now was to invite a lecture from Prince Arthur on the nitrogen cycle or the physics of transpiration. To save face, the humans decided to let the matter drop, retreating into a quiet, humbled productivity.
The non-humans, however, did not let it fade so easily. For the first time in centuries, the elves, dwarves, and halflings walked the streets of Redanian towns with a subtle, mocking glint in their eyes. They didn't need to draw swords; they simply watched the humans toil in the newly reforested fields, occasionally whispering to one another about the "fragility of human logic."
The "blunder of human recklessness" became a staple of elven dark humor. They found a profound irony in the fact that it took a five-year-old human prince to teach his own race how to breathe and eat properly.
Arthur watched the social shift from the high windows of the palace. He saw the humans working harder to avoid further humiliation and the non-humans finding a sense of superiority in their shared knowledge with him. By exposing the "Old Ways" as mere incompetence, he had inadvertently created a fragile, ego-driven peace.
"Pride is a powerful catalyst," Arthur mused, dipping his quill into fresh ink. "They won't kill each other today because they are too busy pretending they weren't idiots yesterday."
With the agricultural crisis solved and the peasants effectively silenced by their own shame, Arthur turned his attention to the next stage of his Industrial Revolution. The fertilizers had provided the nitrates; now, he needed the steel to house his ambitions.
In the solar of the royal palace, King Vizimir II sat alone, his head resting heavily in his palms. The reports from the countryside were absolute. The drought was gone, the soil was singing with life, and the "elven curses" had vanished—not through an exorcism, but through the planting of trees and the spreading of salts.
Vizimir let out a long, weary sigh, his hand sliding down his face in a literal facepalm of realization. For years, he had navigated the treacherous waters of racial politics, often unable to defend his non-human subjects because the tide of superstition was too strong. To learn that his own human peasants had effectively strangled the land with their own axes and greed was a bitter pill to swallow. By exposing the mechanical cause of the calamity, Arthur had indirectly dismantled the superstitions of non-humans causing misfortune. You could not blame an elf for a drought when the Prince had proven the peasants were the ones who cut down the rain-bringers.
"I have failed them," Vizimir murmured, looking out at the greening hills. He felt the weight of every non-human civilian he had allowed to be persecuted for "calamities" that were actually just human incompetence.
His attention then shifted to a small wooden bowl on his desk containing a fine, vibrant green powder: the Leaf Antitoxin. He ran a finger through the dust, feeling the grit of the ground herbs and the crystallized venom. To Vizimir, this substance was a total paradox. In his world, poison was the tool of the assassin—it took life. Yet, Arthur had taken the venom of a common adder and refined it into a substance that detoxified other poisons. It was a cure born of death.
If he weren't aware that Arthur had produced it using only glass tubes and natural chemistry, he would have suspected it as a magical creation born of forbidden Chaos. But Arthur had used no runes. He had whispered no incantations.
"How?" Vizimir whispered to the empty room. "How does a child of five years grasp the hidden strings of the world? He performs miracles without magic, and he heals with the very things that should kill."
The King realized then that his son was not just a genius; he was a force of nature. He wondered where this "New Way" would lead Redania—and if the world was truly ready for a Prince who treated life like an equation to be solved.