The Sleepless Siege had softened the Imperial blockade, but Kael knew that exhaustion alone wouldn't win a war of attrition. He needed to convert the enemy's desperation into his own expansion. The Imperial soldiers outside were professional, disciplined, and technically literate—the exact demographic he needed to scale the Protectorate beyond its current limit of 595. He initiated the Voice of the Stone, a psychological broadcast that transformed the acoustic pipes from a source of pain into a medium of seduction.
The technical refinement involved the Acoustic Diaphragm. Kael moved away from pure resonance and toward voice-frequency transmission. He constructed a massive iron "megaphone" in the deep vaults, capped with a thin, highly tensioned plate of beaten copper. By speaking into the small end of the cone, the sound was amplified and channeled directly into the buried iron network.
"The smog prevents them from seeing our wealth," Kael told the gathered Telegraphers. "So we must make them hear our warmth. We will broadcast at the frequency of a human heartbeat—steady, inviting, and undeniable. We offer them a choice: die in the frost for a Crown that won't send you bread, or enter the stone and become an architect of the new world."
The grit of the broadcast was the delivery. Kael didn't use a military herald; he used the voices of the former mercenaries—the Tier 0 laborers like Drax. These were men the Imperial soldiers would recognize as peers. The message was simple: There is heat beneath the mountain. There is grain in the stone. The Baron pays in iron and life, not promises. Find the white stone in the marsh. Tap thrice. The earth will open.
The physical reality on the surface was eerie. To the Imperial soldiers, the earth itself seemed to be speaking. The low-frequency vibration of the pipes made the message feel as if it were resonating inside their own skulls. In the pitch-black, freezing nights of the frontier, the promise of subterranean warmth was a powerful cognitive solvent.
Socially, this move was controversial. The original citizens of Ashfall, who had survived the siege and worked the mines, were wary of "inviting the wolves into the den." Kael managed this by establishing the Intake Protocol. Any deserter who entered the "Intake Gate"—a hidden, pressurized airlock near the Sinking Trestle—would be stripped of their weapons and placed in a thirty-day "Observation Tier." They wouldn't be citizens yet; they would be "Potential Assets."
The first technical failure occurred at the Intake Gate's mechanical seal. A group of three Imperial scouts, attempting to feign desertion to scout the entrance, tried to jam the airlock with an iron crowbar. The seal wouldn't close, and the vault's internal pressure began to drop, triggering a scream of high-pressure air escaping to the surface.
Drax didn't hesitate. He utilized the Airlock Purge. By reversing the ventilation fans, he created a sudden surge of outgoing air that physically threw the scouts out of the tunnel. He then slammed the secondary iron shutter manually, his hands bruising against the cold metal. "They aren't all coming for the bread, Baron," Drax warned, his breath ragged.
"The math accounts for outliers, Drax," Kael replied, monitoring the Seismic Mirror.
The breakthrough came on the fifth night. The Mirror-Reader signaled a "Soft Signature" near the white stone marker. No weapons, no synchronized march. Just two individuals, moving with the heavy, sluggish gait of the starving. They tapped the stone. The signal traveled through the earth to the guardroom.
The Intake Gate cycled. Two Imperial ordnance smiths, their fingers blue with frostbite and their eyes hollow with fatigue, stepped into the warmth of the mountain. They were the first of the External Aspirants.
Kael observed the two newcomers from the observation gallery. They were being fed a warm broth from the aquaculture vats, their faces lit by the soft glow of the bioluminescent ceiling. They looked around at the iron pipes and the stone arches with a mixture of terror and awe.
"The count is 597, Elms," Kael said, his voice quiet. "The blockade is no longer a wall; it's a filter. We are pulling the best of the Empire through the stone. Over the next month, I want that number to reach 700. We need to start the construction of Tier 4 Residential. The mountain is getting crowded."