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 remember that metals can evaporate. Finding the right temperature could require even more time since I know nothing about magic and you know nothing about metals." 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 became covered in black scales as he breathed Origin Flams inside the furnace. The blue magic flames 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 flames. Zekell took out the crucible using metal tongs, but even those caught fire. He kept his cool and took the crucible out of the furnace before splas.h.i.+ng 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, G.o.ds!" Zekell couldn"t believe his own eyes.
His old, trustworthy tongs seemed now to be made of two different parts. One was blackened with dirt, time, and use, whereas the extremity that had been eaten by the flames was slightly smaller than he remembered 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 flames destroyed the dirt, but this? The metal seems to have been purified several times."
"What about this?" Lith used spirit magic to have the crucible float in front of Zekell.
The crucible was s.h.i.+ny as if someone had spent hours polis.h.i.+ng it and the silver ore was reduced to a small clump of metal.
"By the great hammer! 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 ornament, yes. If you need it for something that has a practical use, impurities aren"t all bad. Pure metals are a myth. Sometimes, you have to add impurities to obtain the right balance between hardness and softness.
"Too much of the former 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 experiment with Origin Flames in the presence of witnesses. He spent the rest of the morning with Zekell, learning how to smelt the Orichalc.u.m 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 some 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 metal 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 metals 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 gla.s.s and a lower part made of metal. They separated the metal 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 metal ingot the properties of both metals.
After they had treated a few batches of ore, Lith noticed that it was almost lunchtime.
"Can we stop here? I need you to make me a few things for me." Lith asked.
"Isn"t it a bit late for that? You should have told me way earlier. Without a mold, there"s not much I can do and you didn"t give me enough notice to prepare anything."
"Do you still have the mold for the silver hammers you made me some time ago?"
"Sure. Do you need a hammer?" Zekell was surprised by his request. It couldn"t be a weapon since Lith only used swords, nor something merely decorative. It would"ve been a waste of Orichalc.u.m 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 Orichalc.u.m. The shape doesn"t matter. I"m going to make a better Skinwalker Armor." Lith said.
Zekell had enough time to prepare him a couple of hammers, everything else had to wait. Zekell would first finish to purify the rest of the Orichalc.u.m and then work on the items Lith had requested.
"Orichalc.u.m is definitely different from other metals." Solus thought.
"Indeed. It"s much lighter and durable of all the hammers we used to far." Lith had struck Zekell"s anvil with it several times, yet the metal didn"t bend nor did it get scratched.
"Not that. I mean 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. Orichalc.u.m 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 metal 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. Orichalc.u.m is just silver and Adamant, whereas the forge he gave us is made of pure Adamant. It makes no sense that Orichalc.u.m 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 time to use Invigoration on the forge. Plus, after we escaped, we never took it out from our pocket dimension.
"Right after leaving Jambel we came 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.