April 1525, The Swabian Circle, Holy Roman Empire.

Konrad opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling.

For a long moment, he just lay there in the bed, trying to process the flood of memories rushing into his brain.

His soul had somehow crossed through the boundaries of time and space, landing in the frail body of an eighteen-year-old nobleman.

He was now Konrad von Frundsberg, a minor lord holding a small county within the Swabian Circle of the Holy Roman Empire.

Konrad let out a long sigh. Of all the times and places to be reborn, this had to be one of the most terrifying!

The Holy Roman Empire in 1525 was a fractured, deeply chaotic patchwork of over three hundred independent duchies, electorates, free imperial cities, and prince-bishoprics.

Emperor Charles V nominally ruled over it all, but his true power was limited by the whims of the powerful prince-electors and the endless bureaucracy of the Imperial Diet.

The memories of the previous Konrad told him exactly why he was lying in bed recovering from a near-fatal fever.

His father, Lord Wilhelm, had recently been killed in action. Seeking glory and much-needed ransom money for their struggling estate, his father had ridden south into Italy to fight for the Habsburgs in the Italian Wars.

Word had just arrived that Lord Wilhelm had perished at the Battle of Pavia, struck down by a French musket ball just before the imperial forces captured King Francis I of France.

The shock of the news had broken the original Konrad’s frail constitution, leading to the severe fever that allowed the modern soul to take over.

Now, as the sole heir, Konrad had inherited the lands, the titles, and all the crushing problems that came with them.

The biggest immediate threat was the German Peasants’ War. It was the spring of 1525, and the countryside was in total upheaval. Furious commoners, driven to the brink by heavy taxes and inspired by the recent religious reformations, were forming massive armed mobs. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

They were roaming the Swabian countryside, burning castles, looting monasteries, and demanding new rights.

Gunpowder was currently a primitive, dangerous mess. It was mixed as a fine powder, often called "serpentine." It absorbed moisture instantly, burned with terrible inconsistency, and fouled the barrels of the clunky matchlock arquebuses after only a few shots.

Then there was the steel. In 1525, blacksmiths were still using small bloomery furnaces. They had to beat the impurities out of spongy iron by hand over hours of grueling, backbreaking labor.

It made high-quality steel incredibly rare and wildly expensive, restricted mostly to the plate armor of elite knights and wealthy Landsknecht mercenaries.

An elderly man stepped into the bedchamber, carefully balancing a tray holding a clay bowl of thin oat broth.

This was Hans, the estate’s lifelong caretaker. Hans was a stout, balding man with deep wrinkles etched into his face from decades of hard work and stress. He had served the von Frundsberg family for forty years.

He had watched Konrad’s father grow up, and he loved Konrad as fiercely as if the boy were his own grandson.

Right now, Hans looked devastated. His eyes were red and swollen from crying over the old lord’s death.

When Hans looked up and saw Konrad sitting upright, his eyes widened.

"My Lord!" Hans gasped, rushing forward and nearly spilling the hot broth.

"You are awake! Praise be to God!"

Konrad offered the old man a warm smile. Seeing the genuine love and relief in Hans’s tired eyes touched something deep within his heart.

"I am awake, Hans," Konrad said, "And I am not going to die. The fever has broken."

Hans set the tray down on a small table beside the bed and wiped a stray tear from his wrinkled cheek.

"Thanks be to the Almighty. But... oh, Lord Konrad, the situation is so grim. With your father gone, the treasury is completely empty. He spent our last silver coins equipping his retainers for the Emperor’s war in Italy. We have no money to pay the guards, and the Swabian League is demanding their regional war taxes."

Hans lowered his voice, "And the peasants, my Lord. The rebellion grows closer every day. They say an army of five thousand angry farmers wielding pitchforks and stolen pikes burned down the neighboring barony just three days ago. If they march on our lands, we have no army to stop them."

Konrad listened patiently, he reached out and placed a hand on the old caretaker’s shoulder.

"Breathe, Hans," Konrad said. "My father was a brave knight, but he played the old game of charging into foreign wars for glory. We will focus on defending our borders, reinforcing our walls, and looking inward. We have resources beneath our feet that no one else realizes the value of yet."

"Resources, my Lord?" Hans asked, completely baffled. "We have nothing but rocks, some timber, and a few patches of poor farmland. How can we possibly defend ourselves without gold to hire mercenaries?"

"We don’t need expensive mercenaries..." Konrad chuckled lightly, "We just need a little ingenuity, a lot of hard work, and secrecy. Tomorrow, I want you to gather the local blacksmith and our best carpenters. I have some new designs for our defensive pikes, and a rather interesting idea for mixing our powder stores!"

Konrad decided to stand up, eager to get to a desk and begin sketching out the schematics for a basic water-powered triphammer and the chemical ratios for corned gunpowder.

He threw off the wool blankets and swung his bare legs over the edge of the tall bed.

"My Lord, wait! You are still too weak!" Hans pleaded, reaching out.

"Nonsense, Hans, I feel perfectly—"

The moment Konrad’s feet touched the stone floor and he put his weight on his legs, the room spun around him.

A wave of extreme dizziness crashed into his brain, his vision blurred into a sea of dark spots, and a sudden coughing fit tore through his chest.

"Lord Konrad!" Hans screamed.

Konrad lay on the floor, gasping for breath. He tried to speak, to tell Hans it was just a dizzy spell from standing up too fast, but all that came out was another cough.

"Hold on, my Lord! Please, don’t die!" Hans wailed. "Help! Guards! Someone fetch the physician quickly! The young master is dying!"

As the panicked caretaker ran off down the hallway screaming for help, Konrad closed his eyes and let out a sigh.