The threat wasn't a bandit. It was worse: a competitor trying to reverse-engineer his Intellectual Property. Elias was furious. His precise, standardized manifest tablets—the very invention he was so proud of in Chapter 9—were now a vulnerability. If Duke Vesper's spies could read his Optimal Route Navigator or understand the composition of his Structural Cement, the Barony's competitive advantage would vanish.
"Kaelen, we have a breach! The standardized system is being compromised by unauthorized data extraction!" Elias raged, pacing his room. He threw the last remaining bag of cement mix down the abandoned mine shaft to keep it from prying eyes.
Sir Kaelen stood by the door, still subtly rotating the ventilation crank. (Internal Monologue: "He is now fighting invisible thieves who want his mud formula. Truly, the Baron's life is never dull, only endlessly humiliating.")
"My Lord, I can stand guard over the remaining blueprints," Kaelen offered, touching his sword. "No thief can defeat me."
"A thief is a variable, Kaelen! A spy is an uncontrolled data input!" Elias screamed. "We can't just stop them from seeing the information; we must make the information useless if they do see it. We are going to invent Encryption!"
Elias cleared his desk and began scribbling furiously. He decided on a simple Substitution Cipher, focusing on replacing vowels to keep the code complex enough to baffle medieval minds but simple enough for his illiterate drivers to potentially learn.
"Behold, Kaelen! We are creating a Controlled Communication Distortion Matrix!" Elias proudly displayed his chart:
A — Y
E — Y
I — Y
O — U
U — Z
"This is flawless, Kaelen! If we want to say 'Attack at Dawn,' we simply write 'Yttyck yt Dynn!' If Vesper's spies capture the message, they will assume it's a nonsensical prayer!"
Kaelen stared at the scrambled words, his face pale. "My Lord, that is gibberish. I barely understand the original language, let alone this… this linguistic sabotage."
Elias's plan hit an immediate snag: the drivers and local officials already struggled with basic reading. Trying to teach them a coded language based on vowel substitution proved a disaster that swallowed three days of crucial production time.
Elias spent hours with Bor, the lead driver, trying to explain the principle.
"Bor, when you write 'Ore Secured,' you must replace the O with a U and the E with a Y. So, it becomes 'Zry Syczryd!'"
Bor, sweating profusely, tried to write it on a practice tablet, resulting in a series of chicken scratches. "Baron, why can't we just use a different kind of flag? A green flag means 'secured,' a red flag means 'danger'?"
"Because a flag is a visually accessible asset, Bor! And the meaning is instantly comprehensible! That's a fatal security flaw! Now, write 'We need more cement!' Encrypt it!"
Bor spent five minutes concentrating, then proudly displayed his tablet: 'Wy nyd myry czymynt!'
Elias put his head on the desk. "You used 'y' for the Es, Bor. That's correct. But you missed the 'O' in 'more' and the 'E' in 'cement'! You have created a message that is only 80% encrypted! The spies will see 'more' and instantly crack the code! It is administratively compromised!"
Elias finally gave up on the drivers writing the code. He turned to the one educated man he could trust with this humiliating task: Kaelen.
"Kaelen, you will ride with the next small shipment. You will be the Chief Cryptographer. Your sword is irrelevant! You will personally encrypt the manifests, you will verbally relay the code to the contact, and you will ensure the decryption is flawless! Your honor now depends on your ability to consistently substitute the letter Y for the letter A!"
Kaelen nodded solemnly. (Internal Monologue: "I trained for years under the finest swordsman. My true purpose is to guard against the letter 'A'.")
Elias gave Kaelen his first coded test message to relay to the next small delivery point—a trusted merchant thirty miles away. The message was simple, designed to test the system:
Original:The shipment is carrying three ingots.
Encrypted (Kaelen's perfectly transcribed message):Thy shypmynt ys cyrryyng thryyynguts.
Kaelen rode out, delivered the message flawlessly, and returned twenty-four hours later, looking proud but exhausted.
"My Lord, the encryption was successful. The merchant received the message and decoded it," Kaelen reported.
"Excellent! And what was the merchant's response to the information?" Elias beamed, grabbing a celebratory cup of water.
Kaelen frowned, recounting the merchant's reply. "He said he understood the weight of the order, but he was concerned. He sent back a message asking why the Baron was now sending him three barrels of oil."
Elias spat out his water. "Oil?! Why would he think that?"
Kaelen pulled out his coded message. "He received Ynguts—the encrypted version of 'ingots.' He translated the 'Y's back to 'I's and the 'U' to an 'O.' But in the local dialect, 'Ingot' and 'Oyl' sound identical to the untrained ear."
Elias slapped his forehead with a thunderous CRACK. "No! The code worked, but the Acoustic Phonetics of the local dialect created an uncontrolled translation error! We didn't account for the merchant's low-fidelity auditory processing unit!"
Elias slammed his fist on the desk. He had successfully created the first encrypted message in the barony, only for it to be defeated not by a spy, but by a regional pronunciation error.
"Kaelen! Stop turning the crank! We need to recall the last shipment immediately! If Vesper thinks we're transporting oil—a far more valuable, volatile asset—he will send an army, not a clerk! We have accidentally created a massive security risk by over-encrypting a simple message!"