Chapter 26: Winter Cabins

Jack carefully rolled the parchment up. He tied a thin piece of leather cord around the center of the scroll to keep it closed.

He leaned back in his high-backed wooden chair. The room was warm and silent.

But as Jack stared at the rolled-up blueprint on his desk, his mind began to drift away from architecture and engineering. He looked at his own thin, pale hands.

A sudden, deeply unsettling thought crossed his mind.

Just a few days ago, he had stood on his balcony and ordered his skeletons to kill. He had watched Bones crush the chest of a young Fire Mage. He had ordered Rusty to snap the neck of an older Wind Mage. He had thrown screaming bandits off the high stone walls to fall to their deaths in the snow.

In his old life, Jack was a corporate logistics manager. The most violent thing he had ever done was yell at a careless forklift driver. If he had seen a man die in his previous world, he would have been traumatized for months. He would have had nightmares.

Here? He felt absolutely nothing.

He felt no guilt. He felt no remorse. The only emotion he had experienced when the bandits died was a profound sense of relief. They were a threat to his supply chain, and the threat was removed.

“Why?” Jack whispered to the empty room, his brow furrowing in deep concentration.

It was highly suspicious. A normal man from a peaceful modern world simply did not adapt to brutal, medieval slaughter in the span of a few weeks without breaking down mentally.

Was his mind merging with the original John Frost-Grip? The young noble had grown up in a harsh world where peasants and bandits were often viewed as mere numbers. Was that aristocratic detachment bleeding into his modern consciousness?

Or was it something else? Jack placed a hand over his chest, right where his Grey Core was located. The death mana was a cold, swirling energy. Did the constant channeling of death magic numb the human soul? Did the Grey Arts strip away the natural human aversion to taking life?

And the biggest question of all: why was he even here?

Transmigration did not seem like a random accident. The timing was entirely too perfect. The exact moment the original John Frost-Grip succumbed to his mana-burn, Jack’s modern soul was inserted into the body. It felt deliberate. It felt like a calculated move on a massive, invisible chessboard.

As these impossible questions multiplied in his mind, a strange sensation washed over him.

It was not the physical exhaustion of using his magic. It was a sudden, overwhelming wave of darkness that seemed to press directly against his consciousness. The edges of his vision began to blur. The warm orange light of the fire in the hearth seemed to stretch and distort.

The room began to spin slowly.

Jack tried to lift his hand to rub his eyes, but he couldn’t move his arms. He could not move his fingers.

A deep, unnatural darkness rushed in, swallowing the light of the room entirely. His thoughts instantly disconnected, and he fell forward, his head resting on his crossed arms on the wooden desk. He was engulfed in a deep sleep.

Knock. Knock.

“Lord Jack?”

Jack blinked. The darkness shattered instantly. He jerked his head up from the desk, gasping slightly as if he had just been pulled from deep underwater.

The room was bright. The morning sun was shining through the gaps in the window shutters. The fire in the hearth was nothing but ash.

“Lord Jack?” The voice was outside his door again. It was Karen. “Are you awake? I brought your morning meal.”

Jack rubbed his face vigorously with both hands. His mind was incredibly foggy.

“I am awake, Karen,” Jack called out. “Come in.”

The door opened. Karen stepped inside, carrying a wooden tray with a steaming bowl of porridge. She set the tray down on his desk, her eyes glancing at the charcoal stains on his hands and the rolled-up parchment.

“You worked through the night again, My Lord,” Karen scolded gently, though a fond smile was on her lips. “You must eat while it is hot. Giles is already down in the courtyard organizing the men for the day.”

Jack looked at the bowl of porridge. His stomach gave a loud rumble.

“Thank you, Karen,” Jack said, taking the spoon. “Tell Giles, Barnaby, and Old Miller to wait for me in the courtyard. We have a new project.”

An hour later, the winter air was sharp and clear in the castle courtyard.

Giles, Barnaby, and Old Miller were gathered around a large, empty wooden barrel. They were wearing thick coats, their breath pluming in the cold morning air.

Jack walked toward them, leaning on his brass-headed cane. He held the rolled-up parchment in his hand.

“Good morning,” Jack said, stopping at the barrel.

“Morning, Lord Jack,” Giles replied, taking off his cap. “The men are ready for work. What are we building today? More defenses for the walls?”

“No,” Jack said, his expression completely serious. “We have a much more dangerous enemy inside the walls right now. Old Martha confirmed it yesterday. The Stone-Sickness is spreading in the Great Hall.”

The three men froze. The color drained from Old Miller’s face.

“The sickness?” Barnaby muttered, his hands clenching into fists. “It killed over a hundred of us over past years. The Great Hall is too crowded. The air is foul.”

“Exactly,” Jack nodded. “We cannot keep all those people crammed into one stone room. We must spread the families out. We are moving them back down to the village.”

Giles shook his head violently. “We can’t, My Lord! You know the condition of the village huts. The walls are single planks. The wind cuts right through them. If we send the families back down there, they will freeze to death in their sleep.”

“They will not freeze,” Jack said. He unrolled the parchment and spread it flat across the top of the barrel, placing two small stones on the corners to keep the wind from blowing it away. “Because we are going to rebuild their homes. We are going to build Winter Cabins.”

The three men leaned over the barrel, looking at the charcoal sketches.

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“What am I looking at, Lord Jack?” Barnaby asked, his finger tracing the lines.

“A shelter designed specifically to fight the cold,” Jack explained, tapping the drawing of the walls. “Look here. The walls are not single planks. They are double-timber walls. A house built inside a house, with a six-inch gap between the inner and outer planks.”

Giles immediately frowned, his practical carpenter instincts kicking in.

“Lord Jack, double walls mean using twice the timber!” Giles argued. “We don’t have the wood for that. And even if we did, that six-inch gap between the walls will just become a freezing wind-tunnel. The cold air will get trapped in there and freeze the inner planks anyway.”

“It would be a wind-tunnel if we left it empty,” Jack countered smoothly. “But we are not going to leave it empty. We are going to pack that gap completely full of dry sawdust, ash from the forge, and dry pine needles.”

Giles blinked, looking at Jack in confusion.

“Insulation,” Jack explained, using his modern knowledge. “The cold cannot pass through dense material quickly. By packing the walls with dry ash and sawdust, we trap the dead air. The heat from the inside cannot escape, and the winter chill from the outside cannot get in. It forms a perfect barrier.”

Barnaby let out a low whistle, his eyes widening as the logic settled in. “Like packing sand around a hot iron casting to cool it slowly,” the blacksmith muttered. “It traps the temperature.”

“Exactly,” Jack said. He moved his finger to the center of the drawing. “And this is the heart of the cabin. A central stone hearth, just like the one in the greenhouse. But instead of heating dirt, the hot exhaust will be channeled through shallow stone paths directly under the wooden floorboards. The floor will also become warm. It will require only a tiny fraction of our coal to keep the entire cabin sweltering hot.”

Old Miller stared at the blueprint, his hands trembling slightly. “A house with a warm floor? And walls that keep the wind out completely?”