In the afternoon, an Aves messenger flew into town. "They've done it! The core is destroyed!"

The army was returning in victory, in battered ranks. The campaign against Kolm's Fell was over. The Woven had gone in as originally planned, but not against a heavily fortified and fully powered dungeon of nightmares, only a wheezing and drained one. The fact that so many of the Woven were still alive was proof of that.

There was a lot of noise and confusion as the soldiers began packing up. Even the placid Woven seemed caught up in the rush. Vonn figured there'd be a village-wide party tonight, half in celebration of getting rid of the outsiders.

He hadn't expected a squad of six Woven to show up at the Company's door.

One of the artificial troops looked badly damaged, its bones cracked and its vines seemingly threaded together with a type of enchanted thread he didn't understand. "Where is the Aves who flies with a God?"

Vonn stood there with his mouth open. Birb answered for him, "Selen, with the picture box? She's gone back to Grandbridge."

"Good. We will see her again. Thank you and your group for your role in this war. We saw you fight alongside us, and we didn't know some of these devices were possible."

Vonn bowed. "I hope only that you're allowed to grow and reach your full potential."

"Perhaps we will be allowed to, after all."

Tazo said, "You know, you should probably speak with our printer team. They could get to share your words with other people, and let you be better known outside Grandbridge."

The Woven conferred. The print-shop kids had been mostly rebuffed earlier when trying to speak with them, since the soldiers were on duty. Even now, Vonn wasn't sure if they were on an allowed break or sneaking away. One of the Woven eventually said, "I think that would be allowed. And helpful."

There was indeed a party that night. Life began to return to normal in Shieldpoint, its border now scarred by a dead dungeon maze that would provide neither endless ore nor monsters. As the Reeve put it, having just the Rising World Company around was disruption enough for one barony.

Vonn told his friends, "All right! Let's relax tomorrow. And then, let's finally get that waterwheel running."

#

Spring came with heavy rain and fog. Vonn woke up late and was disciplined enough to scarf down breakfast before going to the temple. He'd been a little busy lately, and his whole family knew he'd be coming back home with a new level.

This time he felt obligated to upgrade Learning. He would sacrifice skill in Clockwork, Elemental Magic, and Healing Magic to get it. At this point he wanted to increase his raw stats again, looking ahead to more flight, but he needed to keep advancing his Clockwork skill and not let it stay capped. At least, that was the way the System encouraged him to play things. There was always next season for raising Mana and so on.

The obligation came from what exactly he was trying to do, now. He sat in the temple, dressed in his fashionable tie-dye shirt, and focused. Incense smoke wafted through the open room before the altar of the Triad gods. This part wasn't a simple trade of skills for stats, but a judgment on what he'd accomplished.

Last summer, seemingly ages ago, he'd built the first airplane. His actual achievement for the System's purposes had been the frostfire engine itself! In the fall he'd taken his third Mage level. Then in winter he'd done Engineer again using a whole matched set of engines, proof of early mass production. Ironic that he'd never gained a level specifically from the plane. When he tried concentrating on that like a retroactive offering, he felt a sense of resistance, as though the System didn't quite buy it when he'd done it seasons ago and moved on.

No matter. Instead, he'd brought a sheaf of papers. No clanking machinery this time, but a draft of a true engineering textbook. He'd consulted with his friends to produce it. The book began with the principles of motion and force, then the simple machines such as the lever and pulley. Then discussion of concepts like torque and pressure. He covered practical ideas of clockwork like gears and belts, laid out the basic notion of engines including his own and the "Firefern type" that burned fuel. He mentioned the buoyancy principle "dramatically shown by Selen Moonlit's balloons".

He'd asked her for advice on what to put in the book. And so, he had a section that set forth workplace safety, fair pay, and pollution mitigation as moral principles. He'd also asked Polestar. And so the book talked about not losing sight of the goal of making people's lives better, and about not thinking that the whole world was a machine for a clever person to control.

Finally he laid out the big picture of "working our way upwards from the simplest lever to machines that can touch the stars". As he said, "The field of Engineering may be easiest for those who use the gods' explicit class and skills, but the way is open to anyone."

The book was about a hundred pages long, and he hadn't yet finalized it for printing. His discussion with his friends and the apprentices had helped him make an introductory text that would still be relevant in a century. This was a world that didn't already have widely available books of any kind, let alone mass-produced textbooks. He'd earned a Charm-based skill called Teaching by writing this thing.

Though he felt that this book was worthy of a level, he still sensed that annoying resistance when he mentally offered it up. Was it unworthy? Or too incomplete? Surely he wouldn't need to add a hundred pages of dull practice problems so he could rip off future students with high textbook prices. He was trying to break through to sixth level when a fifth was roughly where people plateaued. Maybe he needed something bigger, something special. Because the System didn't think this work was good enough.