Although Max really wanted to explore Winter Town, half a day of high stress and cold wind — less than 5°C in medieval clothing felt nothing like it did in 21st-century attire — and his reluctance to waste his scarce funds on unnecessary things pushed him toward home.
This time, however, he didn’t take the wretched eastern road. He followed the Kingsroad.
Because of the hilly terrain to the east, the southern Kingsroad effectively split into three separate branches.
The first led straight to the South Gate.
The second went east toward Winter Town, after which it passed through the East Gate and then exited through the North Gate.
The third — the one Max was walking — curved around Winterfell’s western side, near the western Hunter’s Gate, and continued farther, up to the Well.
The reason why Max Northson could chop wood for twelve hours a day, yet now Max felt chilled by a breeze, lay in what stretched along the western side of the Kingsroad and Winterfell.
For kilometers before and after Winterfell, the western side of the road was riddled with small paths disappearing deep into the Wolfswood forest.
They led to well-developed logging camps, hunting lodges, and sometimes even small forest villages, all littered with windbreaks — some artificial, but almost always natural.
“Hills, mountains, ravines, wind… in hindsight, all of this makes perfect sense. Winterfell lies in a basin between two massive mountain ranges, and probably on the flattest plateau nearby. Which means the mountains channel cold air from the Wall, over the snowy ranges, straight toward Winterfell. This leads to wind that stays bitter and humid no matter what the weather is.” Max recalled information that had once seemed like insignificant trivia.
“The number of well-kept houses along the Kingsroad and the forest roads makes sense too. Why haul logs and pelts uphill to Winter Town when you can process and sell them here, closer to the source?”
The rest of the way home, Max’s eyes kept jumping between the tidy houses and forest roads on his left. The smooth, well-made road beneath his feet, with its smooth central elevation in the middle and drainage ditches on either side. And, because of lowland, towering over him were the outer walls of Winterfell on his right.
Back in his hut, Max spent half an hour figuring out the wooden lock, scolding himself for forgetting to visit the bathhouse — though at least that had spared him the risk of losing all his money.
In some ways, the lock worked similarly to his previous world’s safe lock, except instead of a rotating dial it used two nested wooden tubes with rotating wooden tongues. By inserting them into a large, thick wooden keyhole and tilting the tongues to angles known only to the owner, the tongues slightly pushed two independent planks with latches.
'To make picking harder by touch, the channel is padded with soft leather,' Max muttered.
'Even so, with a basic key replica, this would be laughably easy to break. However, the very existence of a mechanical lock means twelve thousand years of progress weren’t completely wasted,' Max concluded half-jokingly.
Suddenly, as his stomach started rumbling, he remembered the existence of food.
He got some grain from the cellar, lit the stove, and boiled water from the basin beneath a rain-catch wooden plank.
Soon he had a thick barley porridge with turnip and, according to Max Northson’s memories, an absurdly generous amount of salt.
After finishing, predominantly because of hunger and novelty, surprisingly tasty porridge Max was hit by crushing fatigue. He crawled into bed and fell asleep almost instantly.
He was woken sometime later by a knock at the door.
When he asked who it was and learned that it was one of the orphans who worked with Max Northson, he opened the door and, doing his best to mimic Northson’s mannerisms, said he had caught a cold and would be skipping a few workdays.
Once the door closed, Max tried to decide what to do next. But soon night fell with shocking speed, cutting off nearly every possibility.
Of course, he had a few candles, but each one provided no more than three hours of light and cost more than a day’s worth of food.
The only other option was to open the stove’s draft, but a brief test showed that this quickly filled the hut with acrid smoke from the damp firewood.
'How did people entertain themselves before books and TV?' he irritably wondered in the darkness. 'Singing? Knitting? Just talking?'
'No, a more important question: what should I do tomorrow if I don’t get a new charge?
Keep sitting at home waiting for a miracle? That’s stupid.
Go back to logging? Even though I have some of Max Northson’s muscle memory, I’m not him. I cannot spend twelve hours a day repeating the same motions, broken only by short, quiet rests by the fire. Eventually the other orphans will realize something is off.
Look for a job somewhere else? Employers will start asking around. Then they will ask those who know me. Rumors will spread, and I’ll be exposed again. Not that people will think I’m a super assassin, of course, but I will still be a strange and suspicious anomaly — which, in medieval times, is rather bad.
Start my own business, like carving wooden trinkets? I have an endless number of ideas, but I have neither the tools nor the skills.'
Annoyed, Max kicked the stove he had been sitting by, while occasionally feeding it firewood, and did what he thought was the best possible choice right now: he focused on his breathing and entered meditation.
'If you want to do something, first observe. Look for patterns. Analyze them. Only then act.
If you don’t know what to do — do nothing. Even when you’re idle, your brain is still subconsciously reorganizing and consolidating information. Sooner or later, it will produce an idea about what needs to be done.'
He was reciting a fragment of knowledge whose original source had been robbed from him along with other parts of his personal memory.
At some point, when the night grew deep, Max carefully listened for a few minutes — not for hypothetical thieves, but for wolves and sudden raven's 'Gothic-Rock' — and cracked the door open.
At first, he just wanted to look at the beautiful night sky. And it really was beautiful: a black-blue tapestry studded with countless tiny diamonds over a watercolor-like mix of distant nebulae.
Yet despite the sky’s hypnotic beauty, his gaze caught on something very strange — a light mist enveloping Winterfell.
'Um…' Max muttered.
He shut the door, lay down on the bed, and began to carefully think through what he had just seen.
'Were my memories of the GoT fanfics I read altered too? If not, then why don’t I remember a single fic that went like this:
“Hey, Ned! Winterfell’s so huge! How do you heat it?
What? There are hot springs under Winterfell? Seriously? How many? Where exactly?
Why does it matter? Because with a few copper pipes and hot water you can build something like a water wheel! A lot of them!“
'From the authors’ perspective, probably due to a lack of the necessary knowledge, and because of the need to avoid overly boring explanations for the sake of a few feeble and unnecessary prototypes.
From an in-universe point of view…' Max began to slowly recall various related reasons. There turned out to be quite a lot of them.
‘The staggering cost of even the simplest aeolipile, far exceeding many years of a peasant’s wages — peasants who, unlike steam engines, are self-maintaining.
The high acidity of hot-spring water, which would require even more complex and expensive two-loop designs. And those would need a stable water supply, which Winterfell only has in the form of wells — very fragile and picky fuckers, with a constant risk of aquifers shifting or draining away due to slightly increased pumping than usual.
Fast-wearing shafts and bushings, lacking the key advantages of watermills: low rotation speeds and a huge contact area between greased wood and iron bushings.
The absence of mathematical and physical understanding — which is ‘ok‘ for a few experimental prototypes, but fatal for anything scalable.
But the biggest and nastiest problem is something else,‘ Max decided.
‘On Earth, heat engines were economically unprofitable because of the high price of the fuel they required…
…until someone had the brilliant idea: ‘Hey, why not use coal to power the machines that mine coal?’ And that single insight changed everything.
Yet since Westeros is roughly equivalent to 14th–15th century Europe, that kind of coal extraction would require decades of financial investment and mining-related innovations.
Because transmigrators are usually dropped into the original GoT timeline with just a few years left before the Others, they simply don’t have time for coal. And even if there is time, why pour it into mines and machinery when you could invest it into much more efficient uplift ideas, politics, and, obviously, magic during the epoch of its epic comeback?
And without the “coal–machinery–coal cycle“ any of Winterfell’s unscalable experiments aren’t the beginning of something new, but just glorified tourist attractions.
Why would any transmigrator want to spend so many resources on something like this?
In other words, both the industrialization of Winterfell through hot springs and the North and Westeros through coal are just inefficient investments of scarce resources...
But not for me, isn’t it? With my charges. “Direct damage to non-human magical factions results in a charge-reduction“ penalty. And two unknown Modifiers. Right?’ he added.
’If I really can gain new charges, and don’t find any better workaround,’ he corrected himself.
’By now it’s too late to deny the obvious. It’s well past midnight and I still have one point.
Hoping it will just appear on other days is unreasonable. If the sex theory is correct, then in one to three months a large portion of the named female characters around me will no longer be available. And because of the butterfly effect, perhaps not even alive.
And one or two months after that? Shit hits the fan, the realm collapses into chaos, and it will take orders of magnitude more effort to stabilize it than it would right now.
Therefore… I have no choice. I must spend the charge on something, and soon leverage it into some plan.
And since I have nothing and no idea what I’ll need most in the near future, I have to spend my charge on something as multipurpose as possible. Something useful against as many risks and for as many goals as possible.’
Then Max began carefully thinking about exactly which risks and goals his new superpower would have to cover.
He lit one of his rare candles, spread his only spare sheet across the table, and began drawing improvised symbols and medieval emojis on it with charcoal.
From the top, with the most urgent risks, to the bottom, with the most distant and low-priority ones.
’First: If the theory about gaining points through sex is true, then the superpower must help with natural attraction or with bribing women. Specifically, it has to let me have sex with Osha or the kennelmaster’s daughter — the local women with the lowest social status that I remember.
Second: The superpower must give me at least some defensive and offensive capability. At minimum, the ability to frighten or disorient an enemy. Or perhaps some form of healing.
Third: superpower should help me earn money and gain political influence and power through some kind of goods or services, or at least demonstrate my enormous potential.
Fourth: superpower must be useful for studying magic, acquiring magic, buffing mages — anything related or adjacent to magic. Not just because the Age of Magic is beginning, or because many superpowers in the catalog, especially mental ones, should have strong synergy with magic, but because magic will be MY — therefore more reliable — source of power.
Fifth: superpower must be useful for very rapid, almost instantaneous industrialization — at least of Winterfell with its hot springs, and preferably of all Westeros.
Personal magic is overall, of course, much better, but my offensive magic capabilities are being weakened by ‘no direct damage‘ modifier. Also, weak magic is rather unsuitable for long-term and/or widespread defense.
Sixth: superpower must help prove the existence of the Others and the ‘return of magic.’ Without that, the only real way to mobilize Westeros before the Others attack is for me, or a faction sponsored by me, to seize power. And given how many factions want the Iron Throne, that would be nightmarishly difficult.
I once read a fanfic where ten — ten, Carl — different factions were plausibly fighting for it. Under no circumstances will I allow something like that to happen.
Seventh, superpower must be useful against the Others, solving at least one of the following problems:
Debuffs from natural and magical cold.
The low travel speed of armies.
Food shortages related to armies. I’m not sure what the show’s hundred thousand Dothraki and Unsullied ate, but my intuition tells me that such food supplies are unlikely to exist in my world.
Poor military logistics. Right now there is only one good road to the Wall and one port close to the Well.
The lack of effective personal weapons against wights. If I remember right, dragonglass is no better against them than any other piercing weapon, and therefore ineffective. The most effective - blunt damage, slowest and most tiring — one.
The lack of some superweapon against the Others. The modifier only mentions a ‘charge-reduction penalty.’ If the only downside of that penalty is the accumulation of negative debt, then, just in case, I should have something that can swiftly swing a critical situation in favor of the living.
Superpower should be useful against adjacent or completely different magical cataclysms. Real crisis of this world isn’t the Others, but the return of magic itself. Hence, I have to be ready for subsequent crises. The creators of the Black Stone structures are no longer just fun references, it’s my reality.’
Once Max had laid out his priorities, he spent half an hour meditating to clear his mind and began combing through the superpower catalog, waiting for a “this is it” moment.
After many long night hours, with the first pale light leaking through the wall stoppers, that moment finally came.