Cycle fever birthed strange children. One afternoon a youth pedaled into Riverbend's yard astride a contraption with two gears linked not by chain but by a taut leather belt. It squeaked horribly, slipped on steep grades—yet climbed without the clatter of metal. The inventor, a miller's apprentice named Silas, had cannibalized grain-belts and wagon spokes to build it.
Sharath examined the device, mind racing. Belt-drive promised quieter motion, immune to rust. But the leather stretched. "What if the belt were woven of flax?" he mused. "Or silk soaked in resin?"
Within a fortnight, the workshop loomed with experimental belts: braided hemp, waxed linen, spider-silk strands harvested from cavernous nests. Failures piled high; successes sang softly. Silas earned an apprenticeship and a 2% royalty on any belt-drive product that made it to market. Innovation had become open market, not closed shrine.
Elsewhere, cycle couriers modified frames with rear cargo boxes, inventing the "ped-cart." Midwives commissioned drop-frame cycles to ride in skirts. Students layered parchment between cedar sheets, forming lighter composite rims. Each novelty fed back into Riverbend's design office, where Mira maintained an ever-thickening "Book of Improvements."
Sharath instituted the Improvement Bounty: any citizen could submit a tested modification. If adopted, they earned coin and printed credit in the *Darsha Gazette*. Submissions flooded in—so many that a committee of apprentices met each week to test, measure, and, occasionally, laugh until tears at doomed but earnest contrivances.
The cycle was no longer Sharath's invention. It was a canvas onto which a kingdom painted ingenuity. And Sharath—once sole artist—now curated a gallery expanding faster than any one mind could contain.
* * *