New Year's Eve, 1906.
The chandeliers of the Berlin palace blazed with a thousand candles and electric bulbs, glittering off crystal and uniforms, drowning everything in warm golden light.
Oskar stood at the edge of the ballroom with a glass of mineral water he didn't really want, and felt… poor.
Not objectively, of course. On paper, the Oskar Industrial Group was one of the most powerful conglomerates in Europe. But after the land‑buying promises and emergency investments, his personal accounts — and Karl's — were once again scraped down almost to nothing.
Supposedly, they were among the richest men in Germany.
In reality, somewhere out there a newspaper boy probably had more freely spendable coins in his pocket than they did.
He'd even had to arrive empty‑handed. No elaborate jewellery for his mother. No extravagant gift for Louis, who was happily ignoring that fact and choosing instead to loudly demand a kiss from him.
"Absolutely not," Oskar had said, smiling blandly and pretending not to hear her, while gently redirecting Louis toward the little Archducal boy from Austria.
"Go dance with young Maximilian. Show him how it's done."
Maximilian — four years old, dark‑eyed, the future Archduke of Austria‑Este — trotted obediently after Louis to the dance floor. Oskar watched him go with the strange double‑vision that plagued him whenever history and reality overlapped.
There goes the son of the man whose murder starts World War I, he thought grimly.
And here I am making sure he learns to waltz properly.
Because this year, as if the evening were not already weighted with politics and expectation, Vienna had sent family.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand had arrived in Berlin for the New Year festivities with his wife and their small son—officially to reinforce dynastic goodwill, unofficially to speak with Oskar about money, factories, and the quiet spread of German industry into Austria-Hungary.
But beneath both explanations lay something more personal.
Franz Ferdinand understood Oskar in a way few men in the ballroom did.
He, too, lived with a relationship the court pretended not to see. A wife his uncle disapproved of. A marriage tolerated rather than embraced. A family that existed in the shadows of protocol, accepted only because it could not be undone.
Two women. No marriage. Children born outside the neat lines of dynastic expectation.
Vienna whispered about it. Berlin whispered too.
Franz Ferdinand did not whisper.
Where others saw scandal in Oskar's household, the Archduke saw a man who had chosen loyalty over convenience—and paid the price for it in silence. That alone had been enough to make the journey north worth his time.
And so he had come.
Not merely as an Archduke.
But as a man who recognized another man already living outside the rules, and still standing.
Wherever he moved in the hall, Oskar could feel the Archduke's presence like a weight. They'd already spoken once that evening: formal congratulations, polite concern about his wounds, thinly veiled eagerness about the expansion of Oskar's businesses in Austria‑Hungary.
PumpWorld gyms. AngelWorks shops. Pump Stations. Welfare Lottery outlets. Little German‑speaking islands scattered across a polyglot empire that otherwise struggled to even understand itself.
That was the real problem there, Oskar knew.
Eleven officially recognized nationalities. Dozens of languages. Hungarian schools and churches teaching one tongue, Austrian ones another. Local elites tugging the state apart while insisting they were saving it. Arguments over whether Vienna or Budapest truly ruled, while Croats, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Romanians, Poles, Serbs and others all wanted their own recognition.
The Balkans simmered. Serbia seethed. The Habsburg machinery rattled on, rattled but not yet broken.
In the last half‑century, the Austrian half of the Habsburg empire had been battered repeatedly. Defeat by France and Piedmont in 1859 had helped open the road to Italian unification. In 1866, Prussia had smashed Austria at Königgrätz, forcing Vienna to compromise instead of cling to old absolutism.
The result had been the 1867 Ausgleich: Austria‑Hungary. One monarch but two states, each with its own parliament and government, sharing only foreign affairs, defence and a joint finance framework. Even those shared matters weren't debated in a single common assembly, but in two separate delegations of sixty men each, meeting alternately in Vienna and Budapest — an arrangement that guaranteed friction as much as it preserved prestige.
Every decade, revenue agreements and customs unions had to be renegotiated. Every decade, Hungarian nationalists pushed for more autonomy; Austrian conservatives grumbled that Budapest wanted rights without equal burdens. Neither side really won. Everyone collected grudges.
By 1906 the whole structure held together less by enthusiasm than by habit — and by the quiet, stubborn presence of Emperor Franz Joseph. The old man had lived through more dynastic tragedies than most families could bear: Rudolf dead at Mayerling, Empress Elisabeth stabbed on a lakeshore, brother Maximilian shot in Mexico, a web of cousins and archduchesses burned, drowned, or broken in half‑forgotten accidents.
Yet the monarchy still put on a composed, ceremonial face. Terrible, but not hopeless, as people sometimes joked about Franz Joseph's carefully neutral tone at public events.
And into that brittle, strained world, Oskar's companies were creeping like ivy.
The Archduke saw them as tools: workplaces with one language, one set of rules, one religious expectation, cutting across ethnic lines. If everyone who wanted a good job had to speak German and be Catholic or Protestant, maybe — just maybe — the Empire could weld itself into something coherent.
Maybe.
Oskar wanted to help. But at this precise moment, he had a practical problem:
He was broke again.
Not truly bankrupt, but illiquid. Every spare mark had gone into land, factories, sanitation, education, aircraft, and God knew how many other projects. Austria‑Hungary would have to wait a little longer for its next AngelWorks branch.
Franz Ferdinand did not yet know that, and Oskar had no desire to discuss balance sheets at a New Year's ball with half the European aristocracy listening in.
So he smiled, and maneuvered carefully, and tried not to get cornered.
Which would have been easier if Bertha Krupp weren't tracking him like a homing pigeon.
She was never far — always somehow within arm's reach of his chair, his children, his line of sight. Tonight she joined his table openly, as if she'd always belonged there, taking turns fussing over his toddlers and cradling one of the newborns with a look that was far too soft for someone who was supposed to be only a business partner.
Three months pregnant now.
With his child.
A fact known only to a very small circle of people — and absolutely not visible in the way she radiated contentment, pride, and a frightening lack of shame.
Her husband, Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, kept his distance, talking shop with industrialists and officers. Whether he truly did not notice or had simply accepted his role, Oskar could not tell and did not want to think about too closely.
Normally he would push through an evening like this with Karl at his side as a shield, a distraction, or at least a reliable source of sarcastic commentary.
Tonight, Karl was absent.
Heddy Bergmann was eight months pregnant, and Karl had chosen — for once — to stay home, hovering anxiously around their villa like a small, stubborn satellite. Oskar could hardly complain. If anything, he envied him.
And yet, of all the things pressing on him tonight — the Austrians, Bertha, money, obligations — what weighed on him most was someone who was not there.
Wilhelm.
Not dead. Not healthy. Somewhere in the vague, frightening in‑between.
The official reports used phrases like severe traumatic brain injury and intracranial bleeding. In practice it meant: the Crown Prince could stand, walk, speak — but something fundamental inside him had shifted sideways.
The worst parts of him had become magnified.
The manic arrogance. The brutality. The obsession with war and demons that had once been mere theatrics now sounded, according to the guards, like the fixed religion of a mind unmoored.
Every night, they said, Babelsberg Palace echoed with him.
Laughter that didn't sound entirely human. Shouted monologues about becoming a beast to match the Devil of Wrath, Asmodeus. Sudden crashing noises as he punched walls, threw furniture, or lifted weights until something snapped.
Sometimes, when the mood took him, he played the piano. Hauntingly well, by one report. It did not comfort anyone.
Babelsberg had effectively become his gilded asylum.
Windows barred. Exits watched. Guards drilled not just to protect the Crown Prince, but to protect everyone from him. His room now had a reinforced door. The line between "royal suite" and "luxury cell" had blurred almost completely.
The Kaiser and Empress prayed for him daily. The doctors talked about swelling, clots, pressure, and time. Officially, no one had given up hope that he might improve.
Unofficially, no one trusted him near a crowd—or his own child.
Cecilie was here tonight, though.
She sat at the same long table as Oskar and his family, pale but composed, little Prince Wilhelm on her lap. The boy clung to her shoulder, dark‑haired and solemn, watching Oskar's toddlers like they were some strange, bright animals.
Every so often, Cecilie's gaze would flicker to Oskar with a complicated mix of fear, gratitude, and pleading.
She knew, or suspected, what her husband had plotted before his fall. She knew how close the Kaiser had come to disinheriting him outright. She knew that if the full truth — about letters, money, in‑laws — ever spilled into public view, it wouldn't just be her husband who paid the price.
It would be her. Her children. Her Mecklenburg‑Schwerin relatives.
Exile at best. Scandal and ruin at worst.
And so she smiled when expected, laughed in the right places, and held her son a little too tightly as fireworks began to crackle somewhere outside the palace walls.
As for her father‑in‑law — Grand Duke Friedrich Franz III — he was being watched closely but discreetly. The Kaiser had no doubt of his involvement in funding the assassination attempt. Yet to drag him into public court, to publish the full chain of guilt, would be to admit that a German Crown Prince had conspired with a foreign grand duke to murder his own brother.
That was a stain Wilhelm II could not yet allow on the Hohenzollern name.
So the investigation remained quiet. The Duke remained technically free, practically contained. The Crown Prince remained in his haunted palace. And Oskar remained at this table, between Bertha's warmth and Cecilie's tension and the Archduke's expectations, watching the year die.
Out on the palace terrace, just beyond the tall windows, fireworks burst into white and gold.
Inside, the orchestra reached the climax of a waltz.
Glasses were raised. Voices began the countdown.
"Zehn… neun… acht…"
Oskar exhaled slowly, fingers resting on the backs of the children's chairs, heart beating under a chest crisscrossed with fresh scars and old worries.
This is my life now, he thought.
Not just factories, laws, and speeches.
But broken brothers in iron cages.
Austrian cousins clinging to a dying empire.
Women whose futures were tied to his decisions whether he liked it or not.
Six small children who had no idea how much blood and compromise stood behind their warm clothes and clean hands.
"Drei… zwei… eins—!"
The room erupted.
"FROHES NEUES JAHR!"
1907 arrived in a storm of noise and colour.
Oskar smiled, because he was supposed to.
And somewhere behind that practiced expression, the Chinese man inside the German prince looked up at the painted ceiling and thought:
We survived 1906.
Now comes the hard part.
After New Year's, time resumed its usual march—cold, fast, and full of quiet turning gears.
Berlin returned to work. Potsdam returned to routine. The court returned to its endless dance of etiquette and paranoia. And beneath all of it, Germany kept changing—sometimes loudly, sometimes in the small ways that only became obvious once they were already everywhere.
In early January 1907 under grey skies and filtered coal smoke, and in shop windows across Berlin a new boardgame appeared almost unnoticed at first.
A flat box.
A bold title in black letters:
SCHLACHTSCHIFF – Ein Spiel moderner Seeschlachten
Battleship.
On the lid, Japanese and Russian warships clashed in a stylised echo of Tsushima: funnels, gun flashes, flags, and dramatic waves. Inside, there was nothing mystical at all — only two folding grids, small pegs, and simple printed rules.
Six Marks a set.
Cheap enough for the growing middle class, expensive enough to feel respectable.
Within weeks, it was everywhere.
In respectable Berlin parlours, fathers solemnly "trained" their sons on modern naval tactics while quietly cheating behind the cardboard screen. In smoky cafés near barracks, officers argued over optimal formations as if they were planning real manoeuvres. In working‑class tenements, children crowded around shared boards, shouting gleefully whenever they "sank" a battleship that cost more than they would ever see in a lifetime.
Newspapers called it a clever educational tool.
Priests grumbled that war should not be a game.
Krupp quietly ordered a few dozen sets for visitors' children.
And once again, people shook their heads and said the same thing:
"Trust that Prince Oskar to turn a recent war into both profit and play."
Six days into the new year, profit and play took second place to something else entirely.
On 6 January 1907, the Feast of the Three Kings, Karl's wife Heddy went into labour.
Oskar was there, of course, pacing the corridor, occasionally bursting into the room to offer utterly useless encouragement before being shoved back out by exasperated midwives. Then, at last, a newborn cry cut through the air — small, furious, very much alive.
Karl, pale and trembling, was handed his son.
"So," Oskar said, leaning over with that particular grin that always meant trouble, "shall we name him Durin?"
Heddy blinked. "Durin?"
"Yes," Oskar said solemnly. "Durin the First of his name. May his beard grow mighty, and his legend last two thousand years and beyond."
Karl pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Absolutely not," he started. "We are not naming my son after whatever nonsense you—"
Heddy, exhausted and giddy and strangely charmed, laughed.
"Durin," she repeated, tasting the word. "It sounds strong. Old. I like it."
Karl stared at her as if betrayed by the universe itself.
And that was that.
The midwife wrote it down, the priest repeated it, and the child — a sturdy dwarf boy with light eyes and dark‑blond hair — became Durin Bergmann, first of his name, future terror of account books and staircases.
Oskar left the baptism with a deep, private satisfaction.
Karl left with a son and a dawning horror that Oskar had just cursed his family with some obscure joke from a future fantasy novel.
Time did not slow to admire any of it.
Later that same January, the first of the new German giants slid into the water.
Down in Wilhelmshaven, the Nassau‑class battleship built at German Works thundered down the slipway under a forest of flags and salutes. To the public it was simply "our answer to the British Dreadnought." To those who had seen the internal drawings, it was something more — denser armour, better internal subdivision, and gunnery layouts shaped by lessons no one was supposed to know yet.
Brutus — still known in official documents as "Direktor Bruchart" — stood with Oskar and Karl on a reviewing platform as the hull struck the water and the crowd roared.
"For Durin," Oskar murmured under his breath as the bow bit into the grey sea.
"For the overtime bill," Karl muttered, watching bonuses evaporate in rivets and steel.
Behind the celebrations, British agents watched through opera glasses, took notes, and learned… almost nothing.
They tried everything over the winter and spring:
bogus job applicants with forged baptismal certificates,
dockside informants with too‑perfect German,
grainy photographs taken from rented fishing boats.
It did not help.
The German Works yard had rules as uncompromising as its gates:
Only German citizens.
Only native‑level German speakers.
Only Protestants or Catholics.
No criminal record.
In a Germany that was now overwhelmingly ethnically German, with returning emigrants re‑filling the cities, anyone who did not quite fit stood out like a coal stain on snow. Foremen were loyal, guards were better paid than in most armies, and half the workforce owed their comfortable flats directly to Oskar's housing schemes.
Loyalty might not be bought cheaply — but it could be rented very effectively.
By early spring, Whitehall grudgingly admitted the truth: they knew the class names, the tonnage estimates, and the public launch dates. They did not know the armour layouts, fire control systems, or internal compartment schemes.
In April 1907, another piece of Oskar's invisible war slid into place, far from any slipway.
On the outskirts of Hamburg, screened by warehouses and ordinary chimneys, the first synthetic plant of the Oskar Industrial Group came online. Officially, it was a "chemical research complex." Unofficially, it was a quiet revolution: early synthetic rubber for tyres, experimental fuels for engines, and secret tests that, if successful, would one day make oil shortages less terrifying.
Production volumes were still small.
Most of what they produced went straight into:
Muscle Motors — tyres that bit the cobbles better than anything natural rubber could offer,
and into select Pump Stations — modern fuel outposts where drivers could feed both their engines and their stomachs under one bright, branded roof.
For now, no one outside his closest circle knew exactly what was being brewed in those vats. Oskar intended to keep it that way.
May brought another birth — this one far more public, and far more dangerous.
In Essen, Bertha Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach gave birth to a healthy baby boy: Alfried.
The doctors smiled. The nurses congratulated the house. Krupp workers cheered; a future heir meant stability, continuity, steel orders for decades.
Only when people looked closely did the murmurs begin.
The child's hair was very light.
His eyes were a cold, clear blue.
He did not resemble Bertha.
He did not resemble Gustav.
He resembled—
well.
He resembled someone else.
Someone who had spent many late nights in Essen "discussing artillery and industrial hygiene," and who happened to possess that exact shade of hair and eye.
Gossip moved faster than trains.
It did not reach the newspapers.
It did reach the Kaiser.
One afternoon, Oskar found himself once more in his father's office, standing before the desk like a schoolboy.
Wilhelm II did not shout at first.
He glared.
Then the dam broke.
Words like irresponsible, immature, dynasty, and keep your trousers closed flew across the room with more force than most artillery shells. The Kaiser did not name Bertha, did not accuse him in formal terms — that would have made the scandal real.
But the message was clear.
Whatever you have done, boy, do not do it again.
Oskar stood, hands behind his back, and took it.
He did not apologise. He did not confess.
Inside, though, he felt something he would never have admitted to anyone but Karl:
Relief.
The boy was healthy. Bright‑eyed. No sign of the hereditary weaknesses that had haunted the Krupp line. Whatever else he had done, Oskar believed he had at least tilted fate in favour of a sane heir for Germany's greatest steelworks.
Let them whisper, he thought. Let Gustav look away and accept his strange blessing. Let Father be furious.
The guns will not care whose blood flows in Alfried's veins.
Only that the man running the factory knows what he is doing.
And so time rolled on.
Ships were launched.
Others — the second‑generation "Wichelsbach‑class" dreadnoughts — began on slipways in five different yards, steel skeletons rising beside the water like the frames of future temples. In June, the long‑awaited Blücher‑class battlecruisers finally kissed the river, their long hulls promising speed and heavy guns in a single, sleek package.
The German Navy's tonnage grew month by month.
So did British anxiety.
When spies could not see inside the hulls, the Admiralty did the next best thing: it counted chimneys, cranes, and the number of new workers' houses being thrown up around Wilhelmshaven and Kiel.
At the same time, the political net around Germany tightened.
British diplomats, following a very old script, busied themselves with guarantees and understandings:
Denmark and Belgium received renewed assurances that their independence was a British interest.
The Netherlands and Luxembourg were soothed and reminded of how useful British friendship could be for small states living beside large neighbours.
In Asia, quiet signals went to Tokyo; in the Balkans, Russians were encouraged to think of themselves as guardians of Slavs against "Teutonic pressure."
Then, on 31 August 1907, in Saint Petersburg, the last piece clicked.
Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Izvolsky and British ambassador Sir Arthur Nicolson signed an agreement carving Central Asia into spheres of influence: Persia divided, Afghanistan acknowledged as under British protection, Tibet recognised as a Chinese concern with British interests safeguarded.
To the public, it was the end of the "Great Game" between Britain and Russia.
To every general staff in Europe, it meant something simpler:
Britain and Russia had stopped seeing each other as enemies.
They were now free to see the same enemy.
Together with France, that understanding hardened into something new and heavy:
The Triple Entente.
On paper, it was not yet a formal military alliance.
In practice, everyone understood what it meant.
If Germany moved carelessly, it would face not one rival, but three.
And far from all those map rooms and polished tables, in a warm nursery in Potsdam, Oskar's children slept.
Germany's ships were growing.
Her enemies were learning to stand shoulder to shoulder.
And the man who had set so many of these changes in motion was still, in the quiet hours, just a former Chinese nerd with too many schemes, trying to keep promises he'd made to strangers in a square.