Lith already had a copy of the booklet inside Soluspedia, so he had no need to review the procedure again. Zekell had put a dirty silver ore inside the crucible to check the temperature of the furnace.
"Is it a problem if I use magic to speed things up?" Lith asked.
"Be my guest, but rember that tals can evaporate. Finding the right temperature could require even more ti since I know nothing about magic and you know nothing about tals." Zekell shrugged without taking his eyes off the booklet.
Lith sighed.
’Even Fire Vision could be useless without proper knowledge. I need to start practicing now, or I’ll need months to create even a single item. Here goes nothing.’ He thought after checking that no one was looking.
Lith’s throat beca covered in black scales as he breathed Origin Flams inside the furnace. The blue magic flas overpowered the normal yellow ones, spreading an eerie light.
"What the heck have you done?" Zekell jumped off his chair, trying to save the situation.
The crucible, the coal, the silver ore, everything but the stones was engulfed in blue flas. Zekell took out the crucible using tal tongs, but even those caught fire. He kept his cool and took the crucible out of the furnace before splashing the tongs in a bucket of water.
"Is this normal?" Lith asked pointing at the flaming crucible.
"No, it’s not. You should’ve... Oh, gods!" Zekell couldn’t believe his own eyes.
His old, trustworthy tongs seed now to be made of two different parts. One was blackened with dirt, ti, and use, whereas the extremity that had been eaten by the flas was slightly smaller than he rembered it.
He touched it with his fingers, he even hit the anvil with them to make sure of his findings.
"This doesn’t make sense. I get that your flas destroyed the dirt, but this? The tal seems to have been purified several tis."
"What about this?" Lith used spirit magic to have the crucible float in front of Zekell.
The crucible was shiny as if soone had spent hours polishing it and the silver ore was reduced to a small clump of tal.
"By the great hamr! I’ve never seen such pure silver. This is bad." Zekell said.
"Why bad? Isn’t the purer the better?" Lith asked.
"If you want to make an ornant, yes. If you need it for sothing that has a practical use, impurities aren’t all bad. Pure tals are a myth. Sotis, you have to add impurities to obtain the right balance between hardness and softness.
"Too much of the forr and the final result will be brittle, too much of the latter and it bends just by watching at it."
Lith had his doubts, but he couldn’t experint with Origin Flas in the presence of witnesses. He spent the rest of the morning with Zekell, learning how to slt the Orichalcum and how to turn it from as ductile as silver to harder than Damascus steel.
The procedure was relatively simple. First, they picked a crucible big enough to contain quite so ore, but not so heavy that Lith couldn’t easily lift it even when full.
Zekell covered the bottom of the crucible with a special sand to prevent the ore from sticking, then he prepared a mixture of ore, wheat flour, lard, and ashes. The flour would provide the carbon for the oxidation of impurities and heat the tal from the inside.
The ashes served for both the oxidation and to make the impurities clump together. Much to Lith’s surprise, the lard was used to help the ore form an ore bar and to help build up the heat.
Once the crucible was filled with the mixture, Zekell covered its surface with more ash, sand, and sytium. The sand would prevent the tals from volatilizing, whereas the sytium was a substance necessary to keep the silver and the Adamant in the ore together.
They put the crucible inside the furnace and Lith used magic and Fire Vision under Zekell’s supervision to spread the heat evenly until the ore looked like honey with no lumps of unmolten material.
After pouring the liquid into a dry mortar, the ore quickly solidified into an upper part made of slag that looked like colored glass and a lower part made of tal. They separated the tal from the slag and repeated the process until it was pure.
Only then did they add the last ingredient, Darkestkhan. It would make the Adamant saturate the silver, giving to the tal ingot the properties of both tals.
After they had treated a few batches of ore, Lith noticed that it was almost lunchti.
"Can we stop here? I need you to make a few things for ." Lith asked.
"Isn’t it a bit late for that? You should have told way earlier. Without a mold, there’s not much I can do and you didn’t give enough notice to prepare anything."
"Do you still have the mold for the silver hamrs you made so ti ago?"
"Sure. Do you need a hamr?" Zekell was surprised by his request. It couldn’t be a weapon since Lith only used swords, nor sothing rely decorative. It would’ve been a waste of Orichalcum and Lith was as thrifty as he was.
"More than one. I need to enchant them and failure is likely. I also need a chain mail and chain pants of Orichalcum. The shape doesn’t matter. I’m going to make a better Skinwalker Armor." Lith said.
Zekell had enough ti to prepare him a couple of hamrs, everything else had to wait. Zekell would first finish to purify the rest of the Orichalcum and then work on the items Lith had requested.
’Orichalcum is definitely different from other tals.’ Solus thought.
’Indeed. It’s much lighter and durable of all the hamrs we used to far.’ Lith had struck Zekell’s anvil with it several tis, yet the tal didn’t bend nor did it get scratched.
’Not that. I an that it has a very thin mana flow of its own.’ Solus’s words shocked Lith.
He activated Life Vision, noticing that Solus was actually wrong.
’It’s not really a mana flow. Orichalcum seems to be able to draw the world energy and channel it. There’s no life force nor mana core.’ Lith used Invigoration to put his hypothesis to test.
He discovered that he could now see inside the tal like it was a living being and even spot the residual impurities within.
’I wonder why we didn’t notice that with Zolgrish’s forge. Orichalcum is just silver and Adamant, whereas the forge he gave us is made of pure Adamant. It makes no sense that Orichalcum has better properties than Adamant.’ Lith thought.
’Probably because we were both blinded by all the magic stuff stored inside his lab. The place was about to blow up, we didn’t have the ti to use Invigoration on the forge. Plus, after we escaped, we never took it out from our pocket dinsion.
’Right after leaving Jambel we ca to Zantia. We simply had no chance to give it a second look.’ Solus replied.
’It seems we have so much work to do and only 20 frigging days at our disposal.’ Lith thought.
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