Chapter 227: Bold Gamble

Ideally, extracting gold and silver should take over a week to process both ores. Even with gravity manipulation, Rino found himself at a dead end. He read the tutorial several times but found out that he did not have the materials required to extract gold properly.

Gold was more problematic than silver that could be extracted easily by crushing, heating, and cupelling over grounded bone ash.

Rino worked on the silver and within fourteen hours, the first silver baby bar was ready. Naturally, Rino wasn't inhumane enough to require the bone ash of his subordinates or hunt animals for them. He simply plucked his ribs and ground them into the necessary material. Thankfully, nobody saw him break his own bones for the sake of smelting silver. The subordinates he worked more closely with would have offered their bones instead.

The bone ash successfully removed all the impurities from the silver ore harvested. Instead of receiving slag, Rino found out that the impurities fell into the bone ash pile and formed a new waste material. All that was left buried in the exhausted waste was a very pure silver metal. It wasn't wholly silver, but it was close. Rino could tell because it sparkled.

Sadly, the same could not be said with gold. The tutorial wasn't very helpful in explaining the extraction process. Rino also did not have most of the materials required for easy extraction. He did not have the right environment either.

Things like mercury and cyanide were things that Rino knew posed huge dangers to the living. They are both poisonous and toxic substances that also do great harm to the environment. Rino saw how no plant life could ever grow on that land ever again for any mining site that used mercury. Cyanide in the soil meant that the plants that grew there became poisonous, and animals that ate them quickly perished, toppling the delicate ecosystem.

The other method he could extract gold from its ore was by cupelling, similar to the silver extraction and refinement method. However, when Rino tried, he found that there was a problem. The gold he extracted was mixed with silver, so the colour was closer to silver than gold, even if there were gold flecks inside.

The new alloy formed naturally by the mixture of silver and gold could be stronger than pure silver or gold. The metal was stronger than bronze and steel in some ways, but more importantly, Rino knew they could act as lightning mediums. He tested both metals in his previous life and decided that while they were good lightning mediums, they melted after one strike.

Maybe this new alloy could be the material he needed to make that breakthrough. Rino decided to name it electrum for now but left the alloy aside. He still had to find a way to obtain pure gold for that baby bar because the electrum extracted after cupelling did not count.

As he retreated to his gloomy corner to reflect on what went wrong and how he could rectify it, Rino left the magical furnace's operation to Kamiya to take over in his control room. The killer rabbit monsters learned the art of smelting very quickly and coordinated the new batch of gold ores to be smelted. As it was, they might be better panning for gold at the river and smelting the nuggets into a bar instead. That might be quicker.

Exploring his other options, Rino eyed the GF credits in his virtual wallet. There was no shortage in GF credits because his subordinates dutifully fulfilled the offering quota, even exceeding it.

Not watching where he was going, Rino bumped into a miner scurrying to one of the newer shafts. The little killer rabbit dropped the bag, and Rino apologised absent-mindedly, helping them to pick up the things he scattered.

Rino picked up a locating talisman that he made for the miners to locate specific ores among the scattered objects. It was a simple deviation spell that Noir taught him and the item made Rino's mind work on overdrive even after the little miner went along on his way after gathering the items.

Even if the talisman could locate ores, it was still full of flaws that Rino had not tweaked. If only there was a way for Rino to create something similar to the talisman that worked in the magic furnace to locate specific metals to be extracted from the conglomerate mess.

That's it! Deciding on this direction, Rino decided that if he could not figure out a way to replicate his alchemic success using dark magic from what he learned in the previous world over the next five hours, he would buy a time extension from the reward shop.

With haste, Rino returned to his study and got crafting.

The concept that he created was that every metal was unique with something like a special composition code that would reject other metals, like how unrelated blood would repel each other.

Rino could not prove that his idea was right for the longest time because metals, when molten, could mix with one another to form a new metal with different properties. He could not test the difference between them during the huge coin forgery case where lead and copper coins circulated in the capital to replace actual silver and bronze coins.

Many people used fire to test the authenticity of coins, even biting on them to determine if they were pure silver and gold. If there were teeth marks on the coins, they were pure silver and gold. Unfortunately, it was a little harder to test bronze and copper. Ideally, copper was mixed with tin to form bronze. However, other cheap metals like lead were sometimes added to copper, and the copper amount might be reduced to save cost for fake coins circulating in the market.

Now that Rino learned how versatile the divination spell was, he had ideas to modify it to do a lot more than simply searching.

Normally, it wasn't possible for divination spells birthed from holy magic to work alongside shadow magic born from the opposite nature. However, Noir was able to successfully create a version of divination magic without adding any elements. The theory was simple, and even as Rino copied the talismans for his subordinates a few hundred times, he could not understand Noir's trick to locating and understanding so much depth about the located ore pockets.

The black cat was able to determine the size and location accurately with just one spell. Rino was still trying to figure out how that happened. Divination without elemental help was like an area search using mana particles in the environment as a radar to reflect its location based on search perimeters.

Rino already added a concentration or searchable element within a certain size specifics to help his miners locate the desired ores for mining. Apart from size, was it possible for Rino to add a follow-up spell trigger on such talismans?

Deciding that this might be worth a shot, Rino attempted to add a sorting spell. If the talisman could detect, it could also attempt to contain or move certain objects to the focal point before the spell expired.

The first attempt ended miserably as Rino's shadow tendrils failed to grab the overly tiny grounded dust full of metals that he wanted. Hence, the second attempt to modify the grabbing action occurred.

Using gravitational manipulation, Rino hoped that moving the right dust particles over in the right direction was easier. However, the spell proved disappointing when nothing much changed from the first experiment. Rino was back to square one as he looked at the dust particles. He couldn't draw all of them over to the baby iron bar either because crushed hematite ore contained other fused elements with the iron. Maybe he had to melt them first?

Thinking back to his discovery about density, Rino wondered if this would work on metals as well. Anything was worth a shot at this point. Rino wondered if he needed to extract the ores from the other things like sand before he tried fractional distillation of molten metals according to their density.

The talisman would be useful in identifying the metal Rino wanted, but how should he convert the molten metal into a solid without issues?

Molten metals became solids when cooled. Instead of risking oxidation and even accidental alloy mixtures, Rino could implement heat magic manipulation to instantly cool the chosen area of identified molten metals. Then, using dark magic to teleport it into temporary storage, the metal can be retrieved safely.

The idea sounded decent to Rino, who liked it better than using harmful substances to remove the gold. For the other metals, he could continue using charcoal, sand and crushed marble. Silver and gold were a little more tedious to process, and Rino did not want anyone to volunteer for ribcage extracting duties.

With this, the lich modified the divination spell and made a trip back to the mines to get his test ores. That prototype magic furnace should still be functioning, so he went to the storage to retrieve it as well.

It might be a bold gamble, but with high stakes, the returns should be sweeter.

From up above, Ace was impressed by what Rino managed to think about just from his sloppy divination spell. Rino wasn't wrong about him using only mana particle manipulation to identify the ores. Divination was originally called a holy spell because of its guidance from a blessing whenever it was used. The prayer chants gave them their element, but no magical elements were required for those who knew how to cast it. All the caster needed was good mana sensitivity and control.

Eager to see how Rino's new spell turned out, Ace skipped his prayer listening duties for a while to observe. They never know when this crazy genius' ideas could be the next breakthrough for alchemy and mana smithing. Many other gods have tried, and only a few succeeded. If Rino succeeded, Ark had to treat Rino better for giving their department the leverage they needed to gain their former glorious positions in this god realm.