The thought that he might be able to fix the cold floors was all well and good.
The problem came afterward.
Daemon was three years old.
Though he understood the principle in his head, he could not move stone, summon masons, or authorize payments himself. And if he tore out a wall as a test and failed, he had even less chance of restoring it by his own strength.
Above all, he did not even know how much money the household had to spend.
The same was true of people.
He knew there were many servants. There were people in the stables and the kitchens, people who carried firewood each morning and others who tended the lamps in the evening. But he had no idea which of them could do what, whom he had to go through to summon craftsmen from outside, or whether this household could even afford such work.
In engineering, an idea was only the beginning.
Without materials, nothing could be made. Without people, nothing could be made. Without a budget, it all ended as a drawing on paper.
For Daemon, who had seen laboratories lose their research funding more than once in his former life, it was a familiar problem.
‘If I mean to do anything, I need to know what I have first.’
So Daemon went to find his mother.
Valena was seated in one corner of the receiving room, several ledgers and letters spread before her. When Daemon stood in the doorway for some time, she was the first to look up.
"Why are you standing there?"
"Mother."
"Yes?"
Daemon looked at the ledgers for a moment.
"How much money does our house have?"
Valena’s hand stopped.
After a few moments, she slowly looked at her son.
"Yesterday you said you would heat the floors, and today you want to start counting money?"
"Making things costs money."
Valena laughed as if she could not believe him.
"So you mean to inspect your mother’s wealth first?"
"I need to know what our house has before I know what I can do."
This time, her laughter came a little later.
It was a strange thing for a three-year-old child to say.
Valena had experienced such things many times already. At first she had been startled, then worried. Now she was learning how to compromise somewhere between those two feelings.
She held out her hand and beckoned Daemon closer.
"Not all of it."
"Why?"
"Because there are things you do not need to know yet."
Daemon considered that for a moment, then nodded.
He already knew that his mother was hiding something.
"Then only the money used for the household."
"That should be all right."
Valena pulled one ledger from the stack.
"Ask if there is anything you do not understand while reading it. And do not alter the figures as you please."
Daemon’s expression stiffened slightly.
"Why would I alter them?"
"Who was it that did calculations in the margins of a book last time?"
"...That was because paper is wasteful."
"Do not do it."
"All right."
The negotiation was over.
Daemon hugged the ledger in both arms.
It was quite heavy for a three-year-old.
Watching him, Valena eventually took the book from him again.
"I will carry it for you."
"I can carry it too."
"I know."
She rose from her seat.
"But Mother can carry it faster, can’t she?"
There was no reason to argue.
＊ ＊ ＊
When he first opened the ledger, Daemon learned that this household was a far more complicated little organization than he had expected.
Six people had followed Valena from Tyrosh, and sixteen more had been hired after they settled in White Harbor.
Twenty-two in all.
There was more than the visible work of cooking, washing, and cleaning. Some prepared firewood and water, managed the storehouses, cared for horses, ran errands, and stood guard. There were people who could sew and make simple repairs, people who bought goods at the market, and others who kept the accounts and wrote letters on their behalf.
It was not enough merely to pay wages.
They had to be fed.
They had to be housed.
They needed winter clothes and firewood to keep warm. When they fell ill, the household also bore some of the cost of physicians and medicine.
At first, Daemon tried to convert it into modern labor costs.
He wondered whether he ought to calculate the silver content of a gold coin, then soon gave up.
The value of labor was different, as were grain prices. Even the significance of providing board and lodging could not be compared to his former life.
Instead, he considered it another way.
The tiny one-room flat Daemon had lived in during his former life contained far more functions than one might think.
When he opened a tap, water came out without anyone having to fetch it. The boiler heated the room and water without a person tending a fire through the night. A washing machine did the laundry, and a refrigerator stored food. The gas stove and microwave helped with cooking, and when he ordered delivery, food someone else had made came right to his door.
Modern people had packed all those functions into one small room.
Here, people filled the places machines did not exist.
Mara alone was proof enough.
If Daemon asked for water, she brought it. If he said his room was cold, she tended the fireplace. If he was hungry, she fetched food from the kitchen. When his clothes got wet, she prepared a change. Whenever there was a problem in his room, she either dealt with it herself or summoned someone who could.
One person handled with her body the work that, in his former life, would have been done by separate appliances and services.
Daemon watched her tidying his room for a while.
‘It is like a studio apartment walking around in human form.’
It was a very strange comparison, but it made perfect sense to him.
Then another thought followed.
‘And better than AI.’
The artificial intelligence of his former life understood words. It was astonishingly good at calculating, finding information, and organizing writing.
But when he said he was thirsty, an arm did not emerge from the screen and bring him a cup of water.
The people before him were different.
They did not stop at understanding instructions.
They actually moved.
They carried water and firewood, moved heavy chests, and fed horses.
‘They have actual physical capability.’
Having reached that thought, Daemon remembered the innocent servants being punished by Raymund a few days earlier because of one curse he had uttered.
His expression cooled slightly.
AI was a tool.
These were people.
They were merely selling their time for money.
To put it precisely, what this household purchased was not the bodies of twenty-two servants, but portions of their days.
Someone kept the fire through the night while Daemon slept. Someone else kneaded dough before dawn, while another fed the horses. Because they spent that time in his place, Daemon could read books or pore over ledgers during it.
Daemon looked down at the names written in the ledger once more.
‘Our household has more money than I thought.’
And not only people.
There was a two-story stone manor with a courtyard, stables, storehouses, and an annex where the servants stayed. They kept several horses, and though it was modest in scale, they even had a private library.
At first, that library had seemed shabby.
It had fewer books than he had owned in his former life.
But in this age, a book was not a cheap mass-produced product.
Paper or parchment had to be procured, a scribe had to copy every letter by hand, and a binder had to stitch it together and cover it. If it contained illustrations, those too were made by human hands.
The very fact that they owned a private library was considerable luxury.
Moreover, a fair amount of the gold and jewels Valena had brought from Tyrosh remained.
Daemon turned a few more pages and found something strange.
They had lived for three years, yet their wealth had not diminished as quickly as he expected.
The reason soon became clear.
There was income.
Raymund was the first example.
Under House Manderly, which ruled White Harbor, the old knight managed forests and hunting grounds, horses and hounds. It was not merely a post that paid him a few coins in wages.
Having spent a long life among noble houses and armies, Raymund knew how to control people, was accustomed to handling horses, and could read the woods. He knew where a lord’s hunting grounds ended, which beasts could be hunted in which season, and how hounds and horses were to be cared for.
To Daemon, he was always an old man who did nothing but nag, but outside the house he was apparently rather useful.
‘So he is capable of functioning in society too.’
It was an unexpected discovery.
Valena had made a place for herself differently.
She had no fixed title for what she did.
Instead, she met people.
She drank tea, shared meals, sent and received invitations. She exchanged small gifts and wrote letters. She naturally remembered which household’s daughter was nearing marriageable age, which port a merchant’s ship was bound for, and which people did not get along.
At first, Daemon thought it was merely socializing.
After about three years, he could see the results.
Some shops allowed purchases on credit, while certain merchants sent word first when fine goods arrived. There were people she could ask for a recommendation when the household needed a physician, and one such connection had helped Raymund obtain his position.
Daemon watched for a while, then admitted it.
‘She is better at that than I am.’
When he met someone unfamiliar at an academic conference in his former life, he first looked at their name tag.
Affiliation.
Field.
Research subject.
He needed at least one of those to begin a conversation.
Valena required no such support.
So the two of them had not merely been hiding for three years.
Raymund had built trust outside the household, while Valena had built relationships.
While Daemon was learning to speak properly and simply seeing the world, they had laid the foundations for surviving in this land.
Daemon returned to the matter of wealth.
It was impossible to determine exactly how much it was worth in the money of his former life.
Still, he could compare their standard of living.
They had a house and land.
They maintained several horses.
They had employed twenty-two servants for years.
They bought books.
They burned firewood throughout the winter.
They could summon a physician if necessary.
And after sustaining that life, they still had gold and jewels left over.
If he had to translate the feeling into terms of modern Korea, this was not the level of an ordinary middle-class household.
After thinking for some time, Daemon wrote a number on his slate.
Three billion won.
He tilted his head.
A moment later, he erased it.
Five billion won.
He looked at it again.
‘Somewhere between those, perhaps.’
An economist would have wanted to strike him over the head with the slate for such a conversion.
He was reducing a world where the relative prices of manors, land, labor, precious metals, and everything else differed into one number.
Daemon knew that too.
It was only a number to give him a sense of it.
In any event, the conclusion did not change.
They were rich.
Quite rich, at that.
He recalled the possessions from his former life.
A rental deposit.
A bank account.
A laptop.
Clothes.
Books.
And a few stocks.
Thinking of their returns, he wanted to remove the last from the list of his assets.
Daemon looked back and forth between the ledger and his own hands with an odd expression.
His three-year-old self was far wealthier than he had been after living more than thirty years in his former life.
It was a little sad.
Yet at that very point, he saw another problem.
This money was not money Daemon had made.
It was what Valena had brought from Tyrosh, wealth that she and Raymund had preserved for three years.
In other words, it was an inheritance.
Once lost, Daemon had no way to create the same thing again.
That troubled him.
The more he understood this world, the more it troubled him.
The Seven Kingdoms had a king, but the king did not directly control everything. Beneath the great lords were lesser lords, and those lords had lands and soldiers of their own. In some places, even the right to collect taxes and hold court lay in a lord’s hands.
Daemon knew well enough not to judge the medieval age by the standards of a modern nation-state.
Still, he was uneasy.
When he thought of the worst way to lose one’s property in the modern world, words such as bankruptcy and seizure came to mind first.
Here, soldiers might come first.
They would break down the door.
Burn the house.
Kill people.
This was a society where ruin was not necessarily a metaphor.
Daemon did not close the ledger.
Instead, he tapped its cover with one finger.
‘I cannot live relying only on this.’
An old saying came to mind.
A cunning rabbit digs three burrows.
The house already had several burrows.
The wealth Valena had brought.
The local trust Raymund had earned.
The connections Valena had built.
But none of them were things Daemon had made.
He needed at least one thing he could build again through his own power if he were left empty-handed.
If Daemon possessed such a thing, it was knowledge in the end.
In his former life, he had studied mechanical engineering.
He had spent a long time studying heat and fluids, and was familiar with combustion, heat transfer, and energy systems. He had dismantled experimental devices and assembled them again, calibrated sensors, and when results were strange, found the cause and changed the conditions.
He could not use all that knowledge at once.
Knowing the operating principle of a steam engine did not mean he could build one immediately.
He would need the technology to machine cylinders and pistons precisely enough to fit together, along with valves, sealing methods, metal of consistent quality, and lubrication.
Anything that used pressure was even more dangerous.
If he built a boiler without a trustworthy pressure gauge or confidence that he could make a proper safety valve, he might end his second life at the age of three.
A waterwheel or pump was much more realistic, but it involved water rights and rights to land.
If it competed with someone else’s mill, talk of lords and customary law would soon follow.
It was no good for a first step.
The heating he had considered the day before was different.
He could use an existing hearth.
There was stone, clay, and brick.
It required no complicated metalworking.
It could be tested on a small scale.
Above all, the North was cold.
The odds of it becoming a technology without customers were very low.
The notion of using fire to heat a building itself had a long history even on Earth.
In the ancient Mediterranean, traces of heating systems that sent heat beneath floors existed even before Rome, and the Romans developed them into a system fit for large bathhouses and wealthy villas.
It would later be called the hypocaust.
Hot air and combustion gases were produced in a furnace, small brick pillars were set close together to raise the floor, and the heat was sent through the empty space below. In larger buildings, it did not stop at the floor. Hollow bricks or passages inside the walls allowed hot air to rise and warm the walls as it escaped.
It was effective, but costly.
The entire floor had to be raised, and vast quantities of fuel were needed to keep a large space warm. It suited bathhouses and great manors, not something easily installed in every house.
Korean ondol had developed in another direction.
In its older forms, it heated only part of a floor rather than an entire room, and ruins from the Goguryeo era bore traces of L-shaped ondol channels bending along the walls. As time passed, the flues ran beneath broader sections of the floor, eventually becoming an ondol system that warmed the whole room.
When a fire was lit in the hearth, hot smoke and gases passed through channels beneath the floor before leaving through the chimney. The stone slabs above absorbed and stored the heat, while the thick floor continued to release warmth slowly into the room after the fire had weakened.
The Roman and Korean systems were not the same thing.
Their structures differed, as did how they were used.
But they resembled one another in that they did not immediately throw heat away outside, but first transferred it into a building’s stone and floor.
Of course, Daemon did not remember that history in such detail.
Only that there had been something under Roman bathhouse floors that circulated hot air.
That it had probably been called a hypocaust.
And that traditional Korean ondol diverted smoke from a hearth beneath the floor to warm stone slabs.
His memories were that scattered.
He did not know the exact shape of Goguryeo ondol, nor how many inches the Romans raised their floors.
But he knew why it worked.
The heat carried by combustion gas was not sent straight up the chimney.
By increasing surface area and contact time, heat was transferred into stone and brick.
Heat stored in a structure with high heat capacity cooled more slowly than the flames in a hearth.
And the height of the chimney and the buoyancy of hot gas kept the smoke flowing in one direction.
Those principles lay within the realm of heat transfer and fluid mechanics he had learned at university.
Daemon did not want to recreate either a hypocaust or traditional ondol exactly.
He had no intention of tearing up the entire floor of the house for his first experiment.
Like ondol, he would lengthen the route the combustion gas took a little and pile enough stone and brick around it to store heat. But he would preserve the hearths and chimneys already used in the North as much as possible.
It would be a kind of heat-storage stove.
‘This much might be possible.’
Now all he needed were money and people he could actually use.
And thanks to the ledger, he had a rough grasp of both.
This time, Daemon prepared first.
On a slate, he roughly drew a hearth, flue, and chimney.
It was miserable by the standards of a technical drawing from his former life. The straight lines bent slightly, and the writing scratched out by the hand of a three-year-old varied in size.
Still, it was clear enough to see what went where.
Valena studied the drawing for some time.
"This is what you spoke of yesterday."
"Yes."
"And that is why you went through our household money."
"I did not go through it. You gave it to me."
"Indeed."
Valena did not bother disputing that point.
Instead, she turned the drawing toward herself.
Daemon had considered the operating principles.
Valena saw different matters.
How much it would cost.
Who would make it.
What might burn if it were made wrongly.
And how widely it was safe to let others know that a three-year-old had conceived such a thing.
They discussed several points.
Daemon said he would not touch the main house, but would test it first in a small storehouse where no one slept. It was a place where damage could be limited if smoke leaked or fire spread.
After calculating for a while, Valena asked,
"So how much firewood can it save?"
"I do not know."
She looked at her son’s face.
Daemon did not hesitate in the least.
"I have to build it before I know."
The corner of Valena’s mouth moved very slightly.
For a merchant’s daughter, that answer was not a bad one.
It was better to admit what one did not know than invent figures that did not exist.
"Then we should not spend a large sum from the beginning."
"Yes."
"What if it fails?"
"We take it apart and make it again."
"And if it fails again?"
Daemon fell silent for a moment.
"I get a little angry, then do it again."
Valena laughed.
"That, I can believe."
With that, permission was nearly settled.
Valena agreed to provide the necessary money, but attached conditions. At first, they would use only a few household people and trustworthy craftsmen. They would not touch the main house. And Daemon would not go near the fire by himself when it was lit.
Daemon had no reason to refuse.
One thing remained.
Someone to actually direct the craftsmen and laborers.
Daemon knew who it would be.
His expression darkened slightly.
Seeing it, Valena said,
"You will have to speak to Raymund."
"Can’t you do it, Mother?"
"Even if I do, he must be at the worksite in the end."
Daemon made his peace with reality for a moment.
"...All right."
Valena smiled at his expression, but did not tease him further.
Raymund studied the slate for a long time.
Daemon explained only once.
Instead of hot smoke escaping straight up the chimney, it would travel between stones, leaving its heat behind in brick and stone.
When the explanation ended, the old man set down the slate.
"What if smoke leaks?"
"That is why we are doing it first in a storehouse where no one sleeps."
"If it catches fire?"
"We clear away anything that can burn nearby."
Raymund thought for a moment.
Daemon waited.
In the past, that silence would have frustrated him.
These days, he understood.
Raymund thought longer when looking for danger than when agreeing.
"I will find the masons."
That was the conclusion.
Daemon’s face brightened slightly.
"I can do it?"
"If your mother means to spend the money, what am I supposed to stop?"
Wait.
"However."
Of course there was a condition.
Daemon narrowed his eyes.
"What is it?"
"When giving orders to craftsmen, say you do not know what you do not know."
It was not what Daemon had expected.
He looked at the old man.
Raymund tapped the slate with a finger.
"If a three-year-old insists he knows everything, craftsmen will not trust what you say. Speak only of what you know."
Daemon thought for a moment, then nodded.
"That is true."
"And listen to me around fire."
"I know that too."
"And do not curse."
"...Why are you adding that now?"
"Because it is necessary."
He really was an old man Daemon could not stand.
While putting the design into writing, he learned another fact of life.
At first, Daemon thought he could simply summon any servant and ask them to neatly copy the contents of his slate.
He could not.
Some could read their own names and distinguish simple numbers, while others could not read at all.
There was a reason everyone regarded it as so remarkable that Daemon could read books at three.
In the end, they summoned the scribe responsible for accounts and letters.
Daemon spoke, and the scribe organized it.
The problem.
The principle.
The necessary materials.
The place to test it.
At first, he thought of making it long, like a research-funding proposal from his former life, then stopped.
Here, writing at length itself cost money.
Paper did.
Ink did.
The scribe’s time did.
In the end, he had only the necessary details written over several pages.
Looking at the finished papers, Daemon felt a peculiar satisfaction.
‘It is not a PowerPoint presentation, but still.’
There was no projector.
There was no need for a presentation.
The only people who needed to read it were Valena, Raymund, and the few craftsmen they brought in.
There was no reason to advertise Daemon’s cleverness to all twenty-two people in the household.
Valena did not want that, and neither did Raymund.
Their reasons differed slightly, but their conclusion was the same.
This was not a household that benefited from drawing attention.
A storehouse some distance from the main house was selected for the test.
Only two masons, a laborer skilled with bricks, and a few people Raymund judged trustworthy were assigned to it.
When Daemon first met the craftsmen, he did not begin by explaining heat transfer or pressure differences.
There was no need to say such things.
A craftsman did not need equations. He needed to know what was to be placed where.
The hearth here.
The smoke this way.
Between the stones, then finally to the chimney.
What Daemon gave them was the purpose.
The masons knew better how to interlock the stones and seal gaps with clay.
Engineering knowledge did not mean manual skill followed with it.
Daemon had many chances to learn humility on that account in his former life as well.
The person who designed something did not necessarily possess the same abilities as the person who actually welded it.
The prototype did not succeed at once.
That was only natural.
In the first design, the flue was too long and narrow, so smoke could not escape properly. The flames weakened, and some smoke was forced back toward the entrance. When they shortened the route and widened the passage, the combustion gases escaped too quickly up the chimney, leaving too little heat in the thermal mass.
Sometimes only the area nearest the hearth became too hot, while smoke leaked through small gaps that appeared as the clay dried.
There was no need to cling to every stage of the process as though each were a separate scene.
Daemon recorded it, the craftsmen dismantled it, and Raymund brought in the people and materials needed again.
They shortened the flue somewhat and increased its cross-section.
They eliminated needless sharp turns.
Where heat gathered too intensely, they changed the thickness of the stone. Where smoke leaked, they sealed the joints with fresh clay.
Several days later, at least one thing became clear.
Even after the fire was extinguished, the stones remained warm for a time.
The first time Raymund confirmed it, he kept his palm on the stone in silence for a while.
"Well?"
Daemon asked.
Raymund removed his hand.
"It is warm."
"Is that all?"
"What else is needed?"
"Something like, ‘Well done.’"
The old man looked at Daemon.
"It is not finished yet, is it?"
Daemon narrowed his eyes.
That tone.
He had heard it so often in his former life.
The words a supervising professor said after results had come out.
‘So what is the next experiment?’
It was the sort of remark that foretold additional work rather than praise.
Daemon cursed inwardly.
He did not say it aloud.
That was growth.
The truly unexpected problem arose not from the technology, but from measurement.
One of the masons said of the flue’s width,
"Three feet here should do."
Daemon looked down at his drawing and asked,
"Three feet?"
"Yes."
The carpenter beside him spoke.
"Do you mean harbor feet?"
The mason looked at him.
"No. The measure used here."
Daemon’s gaze moved between the two men.
"They are different?"
Both men looked at Daemon at once.
They wore the expressions of men wondering why he was asking something so obvious.
When they brought out their measuring rods and placed them together, they truly were subtly different.
The difference was not even one or two finger joints.
For making an ordinary piece of furniture, it might not have been a serious problem.
But in a structure where the same dimensions were repeated many times, and changes in the width and height of passages affected flow, it was another matter.
He discovered it was not only a problem of length.
Units of weight bearing the same name could have different standards depending on the market and the goods, while grain was measured in containers of volume. Old trading customs and the standards of different towns were all mixed together.
Earth’s past had not been much different.
Before the metric system appeared, Europe had countless feet, ells, and pounds. Units with the same names differed a little by city and era, and standards for weighing precious metals and ordinary goods could also differ.
To a modern person, meters and kilograms felt like laws of nature, but in truth they too were standards people had chosen, unified, and maintained.
Daemon had read that in a history book once.
It had meant little to him while reading.
It was different when a mason and carpenter stood before his eyes holding different lengths of ‘one foot.’
‘So this is why standards are important.’
Only then did he truly feel it.
Daemon looked from the mason’s rule to the carpenter’s, then chose one.
"We will use this one."
The mason asked,
"Which one do you mean?"
Daemon lifted one wooden measuring rod.
"Use only this for this work."
"It is a little different from the measure used at the harbor."
"It does not matter. What matters is that we mean the same length among ourselves."
Raymund, listening beside them, asked,
"Do you intend to measure everything with one rod?"
"We can make more identical ones."
Daemon handed the rod to the carpenter.
"Can you make four more exactly like this?"
The carpenter judged its length with his eye once, then nodded.
"That is not difficult."
"Exactly the same."
"It can be done."
"Do not use one. Keep it stored away."
The carpenter looked somewhat puzzled.
"Why?"
"If the others wear down or break, we must match them again."
This time, Raymund looked at Daemon.
He did not ask any questions.
Daemon called it a master standard.
It was no great invention.
He had no intention of changing units across the whole world.
He had no ability to do that yet, either.
He had merely made it so that the people involved in this one construction project meant the same length when they used the same words.
But once he had noticed it, weights and measures continued to bother him.
The amount of firewood.
The size of bricks.
The weight of iron goods.
The vessels used to hold grain.
He began to wonder why the standards of one market and another differed slightly.
When he began looking into it, the problem proved far older than the stove.
In White Harbor’s library, there was a record written by some maester long ago comparing the rods and weights of the North with those of various southern regions.
Daemon found it by chance, then became engrossed.
Timber merchants in one region used one sort of measure, while the harbor used another. Each market had old customs, and records showed that weights guaranteed by a lord and those used by merchant guilds were not always exactly the same.
At first, Daemon was dumbfounded.
Then he reconsidered.
The author must have suffered far more than he had.
To travel between regions in this age and compare actual rods and weights, one had no choice but to inspect the objects personally, search market ledgers, and ask merchants and craftsmen one by one.
At the end of the book, there was even a brief consideration.
It argued that the Seven Kingdoms would gain great benefits in construction, taxation, and commerce if they used the same measures and weights.
Daemon nodded.
"Exactly."
Then he read the very next passage.
Its conclusion was that such unification would not be easily achieved because of each region’s old customs, the rights of lords, and market privileges.
Daemon stared down at the book for a while.
He checked the author’s name again.
Maester Osric.
"...Master."
He felt a strange kinship.
The conclusion reached by some man, perhaps decades or centuries ago, after walking about with rods and weights.
Unification would be good.
But politics would prevent it.
Daemon felt he could sincerely understand that hardship.
"You must have had a hard time too."
This time, he did not add a curse.
That was a little growth as well.
Originally, he had intended to look at only one conversion table before sleeping.
But after reading a little more, he came across records from other regions.
Seeing those, he wanted to compare them with the values he had read earlier.
While comparing them, one calculation seemed wrong.
He checked it again.
Then something else made him curious.
Dinner arrived.
He did eat.
Later, he could not remember what the meal had been.
One candle grew short.
He lit a new one.
That one shortened too.
Only when the light beyond the window began to turn pale did Daemon lift his head from the book.
"..."
It was morning.
The door opened.
Raymund entered.
The old man looked in turn at the candle wax on the desk, the open book, and the slate densely covered in numbers.
Last, he looked at Daemon.
"Did you not sleep?"
Daemon gave an ambiguous answer.
"A little."
"How much?"
"I closed my eyes."
Raymund did not ask further.
That was more ominous, if anything.
Daemon asked first.
"We are going to see the stove today, right?"
"We are."
"Then perhaps I can wake up a little later?"
"Why?"
"I studied all night."
"That was your doing."
Daemon’s face hardened.
Raymund continued without the slightest concern.
"You are riding this morning."
"I have to work on the stove too."
"This afternoon."
"I am tired."
"You should have gone to bed early."
Perfect.
There had been people like this in his former life too.
People who would not cancel the morning meeting just because someone had spent the night conducting experiments.
People who would not excuse a class because a paper deadline was near.
People who, when someone did something well, did not think there was less work to do, but that there was one more thing they could make that person do.
Daemon looked at Raymund.
‘A professor.’
He was certain.
A degree was not necessary.
It was not an occupation.
The moment someone looked at another person and thought, ‘I can make him do a little more,’ he was already a professor in spirit.
As Raymund went out the door, he said,
"Get dressed and come out."
Daemon remained seated in his chair without moving.
The old man’s footsteps receded.
A moment later, his voice came again.
"Daemon."
"I know!"
At last, Daemon climbed down from the chair.
His legs wobbled slightly.
That was the price of staying awake all night.
The fire still lived in the fireplace, and snow was falling beyond the window.
The stove was not complete.
Weights and measures were far more of a mess than he had thought.
He had made one measuring rod, and the things he needed to learn had multiplied severalfold.
Yet strangely, he was no longer as bored as before.
At least that, he liked.
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