Chapter 221: Blast It All

Successfully completing his daily quest a few hours before the deadline, Rino claimed his reward without checking the skill. There was still some work to be done.

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Daily Quest #28 (complete)

Objective: Create Blacksmith Workshop

Time Limit: 7 Days

1/1 Stone Forge

1/1 Stone Quenching Basin

1/1 Stone Hammer

1/1 Stone Anvil

1/1 Wooden Tongs

1/1 Ceramic Metal Bar Cast

Tutorial here.

Reward: Alloy Smelting Recipe

Claim your reward here.

Penalty: Deduct 24 hours of sleep upon failure and [Curse of Overtime] until quest is forcefully completed.

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"Put this over there," Rino told the trolls who fitted the detachable hammerhead from the waterwheel's axle. 

Rino tested the runes and the activation commands to ensure everything in this small workshop worked as intended. The wooden tongs he crafted did not work as well as he intended for them to work because the adjustable bend material he chose the first time was too fragile.

Rino thought that using sinews would work. His bows were crafted from sinews, and those things could pull back a lot. When they twined together, they were very strong. However, under the weight of ceramic moulds and molten metal, the sinew gave way. Rino had no idea why but Deezer thought it might be due to the heat. Eventually, Rino was forced to come up with a new design with the help of pygmy dwarves.

The new wooden tongs design was simpler but no less efficient. Rino found it heavy on the wrist when lifting the mould from the foundry up using tongs. It did not matter what kind of design they used. They were things that could be easily scooped from the oven like a pizza. Rino still found the use of shadow tendrils most effective, but for the sake of those who could not use magic, the earth gnomes were working on a design that would push the ceramic racks out of the foundry when a lever was pulled so that the moulds could be removed more easily.

While the trolls worked on the finishing touches to the extended foundry for the blacksmith and the waterwheel powered hammer, Rino enchanted a hastily crafted wooden cabinet with spatial magic, tying the spell to the mana web array. They needed to resolve the space shortage, and Rino intended to have the trolls build more huts along the river to double as storage and living quarters. They could even use the space underground once the rabbit monster tribe completed their section of storage constructions near the windmill.

The workshop was almost completed, and Rino finalised the testing when he heard the familiar system notification.

Ping!

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Daily Quest #29

Objective: Smelt some Ores

Time Limit: 5 Days

0/1 Bronze Bar

0/1 Iron Bar

0/1 Steel Bar

0/1 Silver Bar

0/1 Gold Bar

Tutorial here.

Reward: Smithing Skill

Penalty: Deduct 24 hours of sleep upon failure and [Curse of Overtime] until quest is forcefully completed.

===

Rolling his non-existent eyes, Rino skimmed through the tutorial.

Knowing nothing about smithing, the lich could only assume it was difficult. He might have some smithing skills from the previous quest rewards but knowing how to smelt and actually getting to smelting was very different.

Skills were only a type of blessing received from the gods to increase the chances of success. Rino still had to do the correct things according to the tutorial for the skill to increase his success rate. It wasn't an automated work process.

Reading the tutorial was a huge headache. After fifty good minutes, Rino flopped onto the bed and called it a night. Whatever a blast furnace was, Rino wasn't interested in building yet another damned furnace to get what he needed. He already had a lovely blacksmithing workshop design and a whole dwarven mine full of equipment to use. Building something new for a one-time use was the last thing Rino wanted.

Sometimes he really could not understand the concept of this new world. Why must a potato grow from a potato? Why can metal only be smelted effectively using metal?

Hovering on the sleep wallet withdrawal button, Rino wondered if he should sleep it off for now. He still did not understand a lot because the explanation was so detailed, it seemed complicated.

Every ore had a different smelting process, but the concept was rather similar. Basically, there were two very special things that Rino needed to make that smelting happen. Thankfully, he already knew how to find those materials and mass-produce them.

Charcoal and marble were the magical items that could turn raw ores full of impurities such as sand and dirt into pure metal. The real problem was the time it took for the impure ores to smelt into bars. The one-use blast furnace design made from clay irritated Rino a lot when he found out that iron created from the blast furnace only amounted to less than one percent of everything that went into it. They came in small pellets if the charcoal was hot enough and the ores mixed with crushed marble powder well enough.

According to the tutorial, raw ore, charcoal and marble stone must be crushed and mixed thoroughly. Then, the blast furnace column must be built, and the charcoal was to be constantly burned at the pit of the blast furnace column while constant air was supplied to it. The bigger the fire, the better.

Eventually, after six hours, when the layers and layers of mixed iron ore, charcoal and crushed marble stone were thoroughly burned into a melty mess, the bottom part that hardened into a lump was where the real iron resided.

There were two ways to tell if the iron obtained after a blast session was good or bad. Crumbling after it was pounded when it got removed from the broken open blast furnace was a sign that most of the iron was impure and could not be used. The second was by colour. If iron wasn't shiny and grey, it was impure. Signs of red would indicate that the iron was weak from exposure to air, and it should be sent back into a new blast furnace for recycling, hoping that it would birth a purer iron from the new batch.

Rino read all of this using iron ore as an example and noticed that of the metals he was required to smelt, iron was probably the biggest pain to handle because of how insanely difficult it was to obtain in its unrusted form. Initially, he thought bronze would be harder to create because it was formed using 90% copper and 10% tin mixed together.

Blast it all! His plans for a semi-automated smeltery were going into smoke the more he read the tutorial.

Terms like quicklime, slag and pig iron made him more confused. Rino had no idea what a reducing agent was. Why couldn't they call charcoal for what it was? That darn thing came with so many different names that Rino had to translate into simpler terms for his personal referencing.

The process did not seem difficult, and the blast furnace had a very simple structure. The only thing his current stone forge was missing might be that layered build-up to burn all three materials to extract the pure metal under the influence of heat.

Despite reading the tutorial multiple times, Rino still had no idea how the molten iron and slag substance would separate even if they managed to settle to the bottom of the charcoal fire without killing the flame.

In Rino's notes, slag and quicklime were synonymous with rubbish by-products made from the fire after burning the raw ore with charcoal and marble stone. If done correctly, there should not be any charcoal or marble stone powder left by the time everything in the blast furnace was melted. There should only be two kinds of liquid and only one that Rino wanted.

Density wasn't a concept that many people understood, even in his old world. Most people think that wood floats on water because it is lighter. However, nobody truly understood the meaning of lighter. When a rock of the same weight as the wood was placed in the water, it sank. People often claimed the rock was heavy, but Rino had his doubts. After testing both materials, Rino invented the concept of density that was defined as the mass of an object in the same space.

Slag and molten metal were similar. Rino did not know if the rule of density could apply to liquids that were hot but according to the tutorial, nothing was different from how oil and water would naturally separate.

However, all these things buzzing around at the back of his mind made little sense now as Rino hit the confirm button. It did not take long for his reward to pull him into the land of dreams where slag, quicklime and coke did not exist.

Yet, the mind of a genius worked overtime even as Rino's body rested. There, he found the simplest way to smelt the bars he needed.