2: Chapter 2 The Deadline of Blackrock Village

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Twenty days.

This was the figure Lin Mo arrived at after spending the entire morning walking through Blackstone Village. Twenty-seven households, eighty-nine people; at the current rate of consumption, the grain would last for twenty days. Fewer than fifty were capable of normal labor.

He went over it three times in his head to make sure he hadn't miscounted.

Wang Defu followed behind with his hands behind his back, his expression shifting from "this outsider is quite a novelty" to the confusion of "what on earth is this kid doing?"

"What are you looking for?"

"Seeing how long we can hold out."

"Hold out?"

Lin Mo brushed the old grain dust off his hands. "Twenty days. If the next batch of grain isn't harvested, Blackstone Village will run out of food."

Wang Defu opened his mouth but said nothing. He knew that number, of course. He just hadn't expected an outsider who arrived only yesterday to uncover his entire bottom line in a single morning.

Twenty days. This was his first deadline.

---

At noon, he saw a notice at the village entrance. The paper was yellowed and brittle, its corners curling in the wind, but the golden Imperial double-headed eagle emblem was still barely recognizable. The content was short: Conscription. Taxation. Requisition. Violators would be treated as traitors.

Below the notice, someone had scrawled a line in charcoal: "The tax official who came last time took half a year's worth of our grain."

The handwriting was embedded in the wood grain, written at least several months ago. That resentment had been building up for a long time within the silence of Blackstone Village.

---

Afternoon, Old Tom's blacksmith shop.

Old Tom was a hunchbacked old man with completely white hair and beard. His knuckles were thick and deformed, and the backs of his hands were covered in calluses and scars from sparks. He was hammering iron plates in front of a crooked forge; he didn't even look up when Lin Mo entered.

"From out of town?"

"Arrived yesterday."

"Know how to smith?"

"No. But I know of a weapon—one that uses fire and smoke to kill enemies without you needing to get close."

Old Tom stopped his hammer.

Lin Mo pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and spread it out on the soot-covered workbench. Drawn on the paper was the firing mechanism of a flintlock.

Old Tom glanced at it once, then again. Then he set down his hammer, picked it up, and scrutinized it closely.

"...A musket?"

"Yes. But there's a problem with this diagram—the spring's lever arm is drawn too long; there won't be enough force to strike the flint when it fires."

Old Tom looked up at him. The look in his eyes changed: from "this kid is wasting my time" to "this kid at least speaks sense."

"You, a man who doesn't know how to smith, are talking to me about spring lever arms?"

"I... studied some before," Lin Mo thought about how to explain. "Studied some principles."

Old Tom didn't press further. He folded the paper and handed it back.

---

In the evening, Lin Mo found what he was looking for on the ridge north of the village.

The exposed rock surface was covered in a layer of pale yellow powder—sulfur. In the cracks of the nearby shale, white crystals were seeping out—nitrates.

He crouched down, scraped a small piece of sulfur into his palm, rubbed it, and took a sniff.

Sulfur, saltpeter, charcoal. Mixed in a ratio of 1 to 2 to 1.8—black powder.

This information wasn't something he had learned. It was one of the countless fragments the golden figure had stuffed into his head, as if someone had built a library in a corner of his brain for him to access whenever needed.

He suddenly froze for a moment.

In that library, there weren't just weapon parameters and tactical data.

When he "retrieved" the gunpowder recipe just now, half a line of poetry surfaced in his mind—not a memory from Earth, but something stuffed in by that golden figure. Only half of the line surfaced, like a book blown open and then shut by the wind:

*[The nation broken...]*

Before he could see the following words clearly, they were submerged by the massive amount of data for the gunpowder recipe.

He shook his head, stood up, and looked back toward Blackstone Village. Cooking smoke was rising from the low wooden roofs, stretching into a thin line against the gray-purple sky.

Eighty-nine people. Twenty days of grain. Twelve spears and crude bows.

And a pile of sulfur and saltpeter.

It's enough.

---

That night, Wang Defu set a table with coarse grain cakes and wild vegetable soup in his courtyard. Lin Mo, Rock, Old Tom, and Old Zhou sat together. Their light came from a dim oil lamp in the center of the table.

"What did you find on the northern ridge today?" Wang Defu asked.

"Something that will let us defend the village."

"What is it?"

Lin Mo didn't answer directly. He picked up a clay jar from beside his feet—a sample he had prepared that afternoon using the first batch of ground ingredients. He stood up, walked to the center of the courtyard, placed the jar on the ground, and inserted a grease-soaked hemp rope as a fuse.

"Take a step back."

He lit the fuse and quickly retreated ten paces.

The moment the fuse burned out—nothing happened.

No explosion. No loud bang. The clay jar sat quietly at the bottom of the pit, with only a thin wisp of gray smoke curling from its mouth.

Rock took a step forward. "A dud?"

"It's not a dud," Lin Mo walked forward and crouched to check. "It's damp. The ground ingredients need to be completely dry before being jarred."

He placed the clumped gunpowder on the table.

Old Tom, however, crouched by the pit, pinched some powder from the edge with his fingers, smelled it, and even licked it. Then he looked up at Lin Mo: "If we increase the dose of this stuff, how big of a blast can it make?"

"Depends on the dose. One kilogram could blow down a wall."

Old Tom was silent for a moment, then stood up and brushed the dirt off his knees. "I'll take some men to gather saltpeter tomorrow. You calculate the proportions."

Wang Defu sat at the table, his bowl still in hand. "...I'll listen to you. But where will the miners come from? That means fewer people farming. What about the grain?"

"Reduce non-essential labor," Lin Mo said. "All children under thirteen will strip bark for fuses. The elderly over sixty will be responsible for drying the gunpowder. Twenty days isn't enough for us to grow new crops—but it's enough for us to drive back the orcs. Only after the orcs are driven back can we focus on planting next year's grain."

Wang Defu was silent for a long time. He finished the last gulp of ale in his bowl.

"...Fine."

---

It was late by the time he returned to his quarters.

Lin Mo lay in bed, his mind still racing: labor allocation plans, fortification renovation projects, gunpowder purification processes.

Then, that golden stream of light at the edge of his vision flickered again. It was very faint, like a firefly's tail sweeping across the night sky.

—Underground energy fluctuation. Depth unknown. Source unknown.

He rolled over, staring at the window covered in oiled paper.

Underground. Energy. What was hidden beneath Blackstone Village?

He had no answer to that question. But the information the golden figure had stuffed into his brain mentioned the word "Blackstone" more than once. Not the village name—but something much older. Something buried underground, something related to the "mirror of the emperor."

He closed his eyes.

Between sleep and wakefulness, that silver-haired silhouette appeared again. This time it was a bit clearer than before—he saw the profile of her face and her instinctively clenched fist.

She seemed to be calling his name.

But he couldn't hear it clearly.

---

Hundreds of light-years away, on the bridge of the "Eternal Dawn."

Alice Vian stood before the observation window, her long silver-white hair swaying gently in the breeze from the ship's air conditioning. On her wrist, the surface temperature of the psychic inhibitor ring was a fraction of a degree higher than usual.

"Psionic Officer Vian?" The adjutant called her twice before she snapped out of it.

"...Present. What is it?"

"The captain is asking if we should stop at Hope Star for the next leg."

Hope Star.

Her pupils contracted.

"No," she said. "Continue on the original flight path."

After the adjutant left, she stood alone at the observation window, looking at the silent stars in deep space.

Hope Star was in that direction. She knew. Her psychic perception told her—that faint, spider-silk-like signal was coming from that direction.

Since yesterday, that signal had grown a bit stronger. Only a tiny bit, but enough for her to confirm: it wasn't an illusion.

She returned to her cabin, locked the door, and pulled an old notebook with a nearly falling-off cover from under her pillow. It wasn't standard Imperial issue; she had bought it herself.

She flipped to a page in the middle.

On that page was a line of text, written lightly as if in fear of something:

*Eastern Star Sector, Hope Star. Signal strength: Weak. Nature: Unknown.*

*Not Chaos. But it reminds me of some things... things I shouldn't remember.*

She stared at that line for a long time.

Then she flipped to the next page and began writing something new. The tip of her pen hovered over the paper for a long time before she finally set it down:

*The signal is strengthening.*

*I feel... a resonance. Not a psychic resonance. More like—*

She stopped writing.

More like wh—

She tore the page out.

She crumpled it into a ball and threw it into the waste disposal.

There were some things she wasn't ready to face. She wasn't even ready to admit they existed.

---

Lin Mo had a dream.

There were no images in the dream, only sound. A woman's voice, far away, speaking softly. He couldn't make out the content, but the temperature of the voice—if a voice could have a temperature—was warm.

He rolled over and wrapped the blanket a bit tighter.

Under the gray-purple sky of Blackstone Village, this was his second night since transmigrating.

Tomorrow's task list was long: improve the gunpowder drying process, help Old Tom renovate the forge, teach the Village Guard new formations.

But at this moment, in the final seconds before falling asleep, only one clear thing remained in his mind:

That half-surfaced line of poetry.

*The nation broken...*

*The nation broken, what?*

He couldn't remember.

And hundreds of light-years away, a silver-haired woman had also just fallen asleep.

There were no images in her dream either. Only a sensation—as if a star, far away, had just begun to shine.

Toward that direction, in a dreamless slumber, she reached out a hand.

---

*[The nation is broken, but the mountains and rivers remain; the city turns to spring, and the grass and trees grow thick.]*

*—Memory fragment two of the mirror of the emperor. Lin Mo does not yet know the second half of this poem.*

*What he knows even less is that hundreds of light-years away, the person who reached out to him in her dream—*

*Is also currently staring blankly at the same poem.*