The preparatory unit wakes to bowls where water is easier to find than grain. Food, cloth, treatment supplies, water, shields, wagons, and young knights all have to be stretched without breaking. Dante, Yuan, Tilia, and the others fail, learn, and slowly become useful hands in a system designed to return people alive. Central expeditions and village work test whether the unit's ideas can survive outside the training ground. The Pot Fire shows how a knightly order is built not only by swords, but by meals, records, discipline, and the people who keep the fire from going out.