Kael examined the shriveled cocoons under his portable lens. Then he opened his journal, where he had been cross-referencing soil samples, fungal spores, and rainfall data.
“It’s not a blight,” he said quietly. “It’s a genetic bottleneck. Your silkworms have been brother-to-sister for too many generations. They have no resistance. You could have the perfect mulberry leaves and the cleanest sheds, and they’d still die. The only cure is crossbreeding with wild silk strains from the eastern valleys.”
For years, this worked. Uram prospered. But prosperity curdled into stagnation. silk unblocked
She spread Kael’s drawings across the council table. Charts of genetic diversity. Maps of wild silk regions. A simple diagram showing how to introduce new strains without losing the fineness of Uram thread.
She went to the one place forbidden: the home of Kael, a traveling botanist who had been studying the blight. He had been camped on the edge of the village for three weeks, tolerated only because the silkworms were dying faster than the Guild could hide it. Kael examined the shriveled cocoons under his portable lens
“If she doesn’t find out,” Lina replied, “we won’t have any silk left to weave.”
Kael looked up from his microscope. “If your grandmother finds out, she’ll have you weaving burial shrouds.” “It’s a genetic bottleneck
“I need to show you something,” Lina said.