The Conduit

The walls are stronger than ever. The thing that wants to tear them down has a Royal Writ.

Edric Thorne built Ironhold from ruins. A smith, a Settlement Core, and twenty settlers who turned a Frontier outpost into a community. But beneath the walls he forged, tunnels connect to something older and more dangerous than any Tide.

A base-building LitRPG where the forge is the weapon and the walls fight back.

When Edric discovers a network of deep iron conduits linking Settlement Cores across the Frontier, he finds a hostile second Founder who is destroying the network from within, and a Crown officer with thirty soldiers and a thirty-day deadline to deactivate his Core. The walls need the Core to survive. The Writ says shut it down. The Tide doesn't care about either.

With a new alloy, a forge that answers grief with discovery, and a conduit that connects two settlements through infrastructure older than the Interior itself, Edric must forge the one piece that changes everything: a bracket that links two Cores and proves that the network the Interior destroyed was designed to make the Frontier self-sufficient.

The Interior destroyed it once. They'll try again.