With the food reserve precariously balanced at fifty-two days for the five-hundred inhabitants, Kael immediately dismissed the notion of solving the caloric deficit through conventional agricultural expansion. The chemically repaired soil was finite, and the time required for a new crop cycle was far longer than the remaining safety margin. The survival of the entire population hinged on generating a high-volume, continuous protein source that was independent of the existing land and required minimal labor input. Kael's solution was a radical industrial application of biology: an Aquaculture Project, leveraging the barony's most reliable, engineered resources—the purified water from the aqueduct and the continuous waste heat from the new Kiln.
Kael gathered his core operational team—Sergeant Rylen, Hektor the forgemaster, and Torvin, the field foreman, now burdened with the entire agricultural destiny of the settlement—and presented the complex schematics for the new system. The objective was to create a series of high-density cultivation vats for a fast-reproducing, small aquatic protein source. This required utilizing the one resource the barony now possessed in predictable abundance: controlled, temperature-stable, and clean water.
The project began with immediate infrastructure adaptation. Kael ordered the massive, newly expanded Contingent labor pool—now including the desperate refugees—to immediately cease Ash Reclamation and redirect their efforts to construction near the Kiln site. They were tasked with building a series of large, shallow, stone-lined pits directly adjacent to the Kiln's outer wall. These pits were designed to function as the aquaculture vats. Kael utilized the same dense refractory bricks produced for the Kiln lining to minimize thermal loss and maintain structural integrity. The placement was strategic: the outer refractory walls of the operational Kiln radiated a significant amount of waste heat. Kael planned to use this residual thermal energy to maintain a constant, optimal water temperature in the vats, thereby accelerating the metabolic rate and reproductive cycle of the aquatic organisms—a profound increase in biological efficiency driven by industrial waste heat. .
Hektor's role was critical and highly technical. Kael ordered the immediate production of specialized, corrosion-resistant iron piping and sluice gates at the Iron Works. The piping was designed to draw a continuous, low-volume flow of purified water directly from the main aqueduct channel, run it through a series of shallow reservoirs adjacent to the Kiln wall (where it would warm slightly by passive contact), and then feed the water into the aquaculture vats. The sluice gates were essential for maintaining precise water levels and, more importantly, for allowing controlled draining for eventual harvest and daily sanitation without stopping the continuous, essential water flow to the rest of the barony. Hektor utilized the remaining high-grade coastal iron for this, recognizing the investment in durability was necessary to prevent rust and metallic contamination of the protein source.
Torvin was tasked with sourcing the initial biological inputs, a logistical nightmare requiring external negotiation. The local River Ash was far too cold and lacked the necessary density of breeding organisms to support the project. Kael ordered Torvin to utilize the newly created intelligence network (established in Chapter 32) via Elara's caravan agents. The task was not to buy food, but to purchase and transport live, breeding stock—specifically, high-reproducing, hardy freshwater minnows and small, native crustaceans from warmer coastal river systems. Torvin's team had to manage the complex, high-risk logistics of transporting live, fragile cargo over a long distance through bandit territory, a challenge requiring constant monitoring, temperature control, and physical aeration, transforming their role from simple field managers to biological resource transporters.
The greatest difficulty, and the core of the logistical challenge, was managing the feed input. Kael could not divert valuable, rationed grain to feed the fish; doing so would merely transfer the caloric deficit. His solution was to close the loop on the barony's waste system with rigorous scientific management. He ordered the creation of a dedicated Nutrient Processing Pit where vegetable trimmings, safe organic waste, and pulverized insect biomass (harvested by the Dependent group from the surrounding plains) were rigorously composted, fermented, and processed into a dense, nutrient-rich slurry. This slurry, carefully monitored by Healer Mara's former assistants for purity and pathogenic risk, would be used as the primary, high-volume feed input for the aquaculture vats, ensuring the entire protein source was generated entirely from internal waste products, incurring zero net caloric cost to the existing food supply.
The assimilation of the 200 refugees proved essential for the speed of the project. The Contingent labor pool, now swelled by desperate manpower, could sustain the simultaneous, grueling labor of constructing the numerous vats, excavating the connecting channels, and managing the initial waste collection for the feed pit. Kael enforced absolute discipline, utilizing the numerate supervisors to log water levels and construction progress every hour, recognizing that the margin for error was now nonexistent. The refugees, desperate for a sustained ration, worked with a furious intensity that shocked the original, less-pressured Contingent workers.
The Aquaculture Project represented Kael's boldest, most immediate defense against the looming famine. It was a calculated gamble: if successful, it would provide a continuous, high-volume protein source that would quickly replace the rapidly depleting grain buffer, allowing Kael to restore the full, proper ration to all 500 inhabitants. More importantly, it would establish a secondary, non-land-based food infrastructure, adding critical redundancy to the barony's survival matrix. The success of the political siege and the survival of the population now depended entirely on the efficiency of the Kiln's waste heat and the reproductive cycles of freshwater minnows, a systematic race against the fifty-two-day clock.