Yeah, I did tons of research on the first scenario.

The lantern sputtered, casting flickering shadows across the stone vaults of the ancient library beneath the Citadel of Acre. Dust hung thick in the air, disturbed only by the soft shuffle of parchment and the occasional creak of leather bindings. Brother Mathieu sat cross-legged on a cold marble slab, his mantle laid aside, robes dusted with sand and ink. Around him lay scrolls, codices, and pages bound in the skin of goats and men.

But one manuscript alone consumed him.

It had been smuggled from a scholar’s house in Toledo, where Arabic texts whispered secrets in a tongue most Latins dismissed as heathen. The Templars knew better. They had paid dearly in blood and coin to retrieve this particular volume, for it was said to contain the work of a man who saw the world in a way that could move empires.

The name was written in fluid kufic: Al-Khwarizmi.

Mathieu’s brow furrowed as he studied the strange glyphs beside their Latin gloss: 1, 2, 3, 4… Simple lines, circles, and curves, each a symbol not just for counting, but for meaning. No Roman muddle of Xs and Is and Vs. These were elegant, abstract, precise.

He traced the zero with his finger.

A nothing that meant something.

He turned to a section labeled “Hisab al-jabr wal-muqabala”—the art of reduction and balancing. The examples unfolded like divine revelation: debt and credit, loss and gain, debits recorded not by tally marks but by a flowing logic. A shopkeeper in Cairo could track a hundred trades with these symbols. A banker could calculate interest over years. A man, a monk—a Templar—could build an entire system of trust and power on it.

He reached for his wax tablet and began to experiment.

Ten barrels of oil, sold at five dinars each. Expenses, fees, a tithe to the Church, a cut for the caravan master. In Roman script, the calculation would have taken a dozen lines of arithmetic. Here, it danced across the tablet like a chant.

And at the end—balance.

The sum reconciled not just goods, but truth.

Mathieu sat back, heart pounding.

This was more than bookkeeping.

It was language. Faith. The bones of order beneath the chaos of commerce and war.

He whispered a prayer not to Christ, but to understanding itself.

“This… this is the key,” he murmured. “Not just to accounting. To justice. To knowledge itself.”

Outside, the bells of the Templar citadel began to toll.

Mathieu rose, the manuscript pressed to his chest. The road ahead no longer led only to a murderer’s lair, but into the very soul of civilization.

Numbers, he realized, were not tools of heathen sorcery.

They were the architecture of God.