Seraphine pushed through her punishing training regimen for a while longer, taking brief pauses to catch her breath whenever she felt her heart rate spiking to dangerous levels.
Faced with a complete lack of modern gym equipment, the tall - yet still painfully thin - young futa was forced to rely on traditional calisthenics. Her routine was heavily adapted from the combat fitness standards of the engineering corps in her previous life, though drastically scaled down to match the pathetic limits her fragile body and weakened heart could currently endure.
Her thin linen shirt was instantly drenched in sweat, clinging tightly to her pale skin and turning practically transparent. With every ragged, heavy breath, the contours of her firm, youthful breasts rose and fell violently, while trickles of moisture traced glistening paths down her stomach, pooling along the curve of her hips.
Gritting her teeth as she forced herself through another set of squats, she felt the muscles in her slender thighs burn, the tight fabric of her trousers stretching snugly over her new futa anatomy.
Fighting through the dizzying waves of exhaustion, Seraphine swore to herself that the moment she secured a shred of financial freedom, she would draft blueprints for free weights, kettlebells, and a crude bench press. She’d commission the town’s blacksmiths to forge them - a perfect test run to gauge their manufacturing capabilities. After all, the baseline technology here was unimaginably primitive compared to what she considered standard.
Meanwhile, peering down from a narrow slit in one of the castle's watchtowers that loomed over the courtyard, Cordelia Karsfeld watched her sister’s grueling efforts.
A dark, twisted grimace marred the younger girl's striking features, her icy blue eyes flashing with pure malice. This sudden, inexplicable drive for self-improvement on her elder sister’s part threw a massive wrench into her meticulously crafted plans. Utter disbelief warred with an escalating, seething fury in her chest.
Seraphine was supposed to be rotting in the family crypt right now.
The poison Cordelia had procured for an extortionate sum was potent enough to drop a fully armored warhorse. Yet here this cursed twig was, sprinting around the courtyard looking healthier and more vibrant than she ever had in her life.
Her entire assassination plot had gone up in smoke.
The crushing debts she had accrued to poison the firstborn heir were still hanging by a thread over her head. If she failed to secure the right of succession, she would have absolutely no means of paying them off - a failure that would spell absolute ruin for her.
Attempting another poisoning so soon, however, would immediately draw devastating suspicion upon her, and that was a risk she had to avoid at all costs.
If Cordelia was going to usurp the seat of the house and satisfy her burning ambitions, she needed to orchestrate a completely new, vastly more sophisticated method of execution.
***
An hour later, Seraphine was utterly spent. She couldn't force her trembling legs to take a single step more.
Her immediate priority was washing off the thick layer of sweat and grime she had accumulated during the grueling workout.
The castle maids were thoroughly bewildered as to why the young heir was demanding a second bath in a single day, yet they obediently filled the wooden tub with scalding water. The buxom servant girls bustled around the bathhouse, their heavy linen skirts swaying invitingly over their plump hips every time they bent over to haul a bucket. The sight certainly didn't escape Seraphine’s keen, predatory gaze, though for now, cleansing her battered muscles took precedence over everything else.
Once she was thoroughly scrubbed and dried, Seraphine retreated to her bedchamber. She settled into the heavy oak desk, rolled out a thick sheet of parchment, unstoppered the inkwell, and took up her quill. Without wasting a moment, she began drafting the technical blueprints for the first wave of industrial innovations she intended to unleash upon the local economy.
While her direct authority within Adelgarde’s domain was severely limited, she banked on her ability to persuade her Sire to authorize these revolutionary designs.
If her mother pressed her on where such radical concepts came from, she could easily write them off as knowledge purchased from Far Eastern merchants - after all, similar iron-smelting techniques had likely already taken root in those distant regions during this era.
The sooner the Barony of Karsfeld began mass-producing high-grade steel, the faster they would secure an unassailable strategic advantage.
The Karsfeld Barony was nestled deep within the Duchy of Ardenia, encircled by impenetrable, jagged mountain ranges, its fertile valleys fed by a wide, sweeping tributary of the Danube. It was precisely this imposing geographic fortification that had allowed the Karsfeld dynasty to maintain an iron grip over such a resource-rich territory. If not for that natural mountainous barrier, the vastly more powerful noble houses of the Alarian Empire would have undoubtedly swept in to seize the rich ore veins for themselves long ago.
After a feverish stint of drafting, Seraphine completed the schematics for one of the most pivotal inventions in the history of metallurgy - the very catalyst without which the industrial revolution in her former world would have never ignited.
It was the Bessemer converter and the pig iron refining process. Utilizing this technology, it was possible to forge three to five tons of exceptional, high-grade steel in an astonishingly short window of time.
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The process relied on blasting compressed air directly through the molten pig iron, oxidizing the impurities and burning them away. By lining the converter with basic materials like dolomite or limestone, the process also yielded a phosphorus-rich slag - an incredibly cheap and violently effective agricultural fertilizer.
This single innovation would simultaneously revolutionize both the barony’s steel production and its crop yields.
Every single mechanical component required could easily be fabricated by competent late-medieval artisans, and the heavy blowers could be driven by a standard water wheel or a horse-drawn gin. In the future, she could upgrade the system to steam power, but for now, she just needed a functional, rudimentary prototype. Quality steel was an exorbitantly priced luxury good in this era, and its applications - ranging from superior tools to cutting-edge weaponry - were virtually limitless.
To guarantee complete success, Seraphine also needed a fully functional blast furnace to effectively smelt the raw ore into pig iron. While blast furnaces should theoretically exist in this era, and a mining hub like Karsfeld likely possessed at least primitive bloomery forges or early shaft furnaces, she wasn't taking any chances. She drafted a second set of meticulous blueprints detailing an advanced blast furnace design, ensuring she could break ground on construction immediately if their current infrastructure proved inadequate.
Once the ink was dry, she rolled up the parchments and set off for Adelgarde’s study.
The sun was slowly bleeding behind the jagged mountain peaks, casting deep, violet shadows across the stone corridors by the time she knocked on the heavy oak door.
A moment later, a deep, frosty voice echoed from within:
“Enter.”
Seraphine took a steadying breath and crossed the threshold.
Inside the sprawling study, seated behind a massive desk buried under ledgers and administrative missives, was Baroness Adelgarde Karsfeld. The surrounding walls were lined with towering bookshelves packed with heavy tomes on domain management and military strategy.
A small oil lamp cast a warm glow over the harsh, aristocratic features of the mature futa, who didn't even bother to glance up at her entering daughter, her quill scratching fiercely across a document.
The collar of Adelgarde’s tunic was left unfastened, revealing the strong, sun-kissed swell of her cleavage and the thick, powerful structure of her collarbones - the undeniable physique of a veteran accustomed to bearing the crushing weight of full plate armor.
“This had better be important…” she grumbled gruffly, her hand never pausing its writing.
Seraphine cleared her throat and extended the rolled parchments she had slaved over all afternoon.
“I need you to look at these. This is a matter of critical importance for the future of our barony's steel production.”
Adelgarde froze at the statement and slowly set her quill down.
She leveled a piercing, intensely calculating gaze at Seraphine, her icy blue eyes boring into her daughter as if weighing whether this was a colossal waste of her precious time. Ultimately, however, she reached out, snatched the parchments, flipped through them once, then a second time, before exhaling a sharp hiss of breath.
“What exactly am I looking at?”
The Baroness was a brilliant administrator and a terrifyingly competent warlord, but complex technical drafts and geometric cross-sections were complete and utter gibberish to her.
Seraphine swallowed hard, projecting absolute, unshakable confidence as she broke down the essence of the invention:
“With the aid of this device, Sire, we will be capable of producing tons of exceptional, high-carbon steel in a mere twenty minutes, rather than suffering through days of grueling, manual forging. Furthermore, the byproduct of this entire process is a heavy slag, which, once pulverized, serves as an incredibly potent fertilizer - one that will radically multiply the crop yields across all our farmlands.”
Genuine, unadulterated shock rippled across Adelgarde's hardened features. While the engineering intricacies remained completely over her head, the sheer economic and military implications her firstborn was laying out were simply too staggering to dismiss. Still, she narrowed her eyes suspiciously, pinning her daughter with a severe glare.
“Where did you acquire these?”
Seraphine had been waiting for that exact question. With a perfectly stoic face, she spun the fabricated tale of a wandering female merchant from the distant east, claiming she had purchased the exotic blueprints for a handful of silver coins during her brief stay in the lower town.
Adelgarde received the revelation with a heavy dose of skepticism, yet she had heard countless rumors of the terrifyingly advanced technologies wielded by the far eastern empires. She decided to give her daughter the benefit of the doubt.
“Very well. Tomorrow, I will summon the finest master artisan in the region, Sabine Keller. If she confirms that these scribbles actually make sense and can be physically constructed, we will break ground on this project without delay.”
Seraphine offered a sharp smile and bowed with deep reverence. That went far smoother than she had anticipated.
“Thank you for hearing my request, Sire.”
Adelgarde picked up her quill and immediately returned her terrifying focus to the ledgers.
“If that is all, you are dismissed.”
Seraphine bowed once more and slipped out of the study, a wide, predatory grin spreading across her face. The Bessemer converter and the blast furnace were merely the opening gambit in her grand modernization scheme.
The next phase would be the aggressive implementation of four-field crop rotation, alongside foundational land reclamation and irrigation projects. Unfortunately, she couldn't exactly blame those innovations on traveling foreign merchants.
She was going to have to personally ride out into the fields, speak with the peasant women, and take a direct pulse on the agricultural state of the villages.
But those plans were for another day.
Right now, her muscles were burning like liquid fire from the morning’s punishment, and her exhausted frame was practically screaming for rest.
On her way back to her chambers, she took a detour through the castle kitchens, snatching a handful of cured jerky and roasted nuts. As she chewed, her eyes casually roamed over the flushed, rosy-cheeked cooks bustling around the massive hearths, appreciating the heavy, rhythmic sway of their plump asses beneath their coarse linen aprons.
Upon returning to her quarters, she collapsed onto the heavy mattress.
Before she could even string together her next grand strategy, she plunged into a deep, restorative sleep - one where the fading memories of Dr. Evelyn Weiss twisted and merged seamlessly with the harsh, new reality of Seraphine Karsfeld.