Chapter 52 — A World Where Magic Exists

"That's little?" Hammel could not help blurting out, then hurriedly tried to make amends in a panic. "I don't mean to question your judgment, my lord, but..."

"It's all right. No need to be nervous talking to me," Gao Yang said, reassuring the old master. "I'm the lord who protects you, not a bandit come to rob and kill you."

"Yes... yes, my lord," Hammel said, mopping at his sweat nervously, and then explained, "But this really is the limit. The furnace looks big from the outside, but the space inside is actually limited, and after every batch is smelted it has to rest for an hour to let the runes on the outside cool down. That means the whole furnace has to cool off too, and then the fire has to be lit all over again... back and forth like that, fifty catties of iron a day really is the limit!"

"Let the runes cool down?" Gao Qi frowned.

"Yes," Hammel explained. "This is just a little trick we common folk carve on black stones—nothing compared to the true magic runes of the mages. It breaks easily, especially the fire rune; keep it in contact with the fire element too long and it simply cracks apart. Even swapping in tougher materials doesn't help. Once the rune cracks, the whole furnace is ruined, so when smelting iron you absolutely cannot burn continuously..."

"What if the furnace were made bigger?" Gao Yang asked.

"That wouldn't help either," Hammel said worriedly, thinking to himself that the Duke's lordship asked nothing but hard questions. "The runes can only supply so much heat. Make the furnace bigger, and the heat isn't enough, the ore won't smelt into molten iron, and the earth rune will fail along with it. The refined iron ingots that come out will have more impurities in them—and then they're completely useless..."

Gao Yang rubbed his chin. "So what limits the output is entirely these runes?"

The old blacksmith blinked, not really grasping what "limits the output" meant, but he nodded hastily all the same. "Yes, yes—it's the runes."

Gao Yang looked at Rebecca. "What do you think—if the runes were replaced with... er, maybe I should just call Hedy over..."

Rebecca's face flushed crimson at once. "Ancestor, I understand magical theory too! I just can't construct a spell model..."

"So your theoretical knowledge is decent?" Gao Yang's eyebrow arched. "Then how do you think we should solve this problem?"

Rebecca thought hard for a moment. "Since you just said runes are our weak point, why not replace them?"

"Replace them with what?"

Rebecca kept racking her brains. "Actually, the functions of these runes are all very simple—nothing more than raising the temperature, controlling airflow, controlling impurities, and the like, and only the weakest kind of effects at that. If we replaced them with real magic arrays, the efficiency would improve by who knows how many times over, and magic arrays can channel their own energy, so they won't self-destruct even under continuous operation..."

Gao Yang raised an eyebrow. "Carve a magic array onto every iron smelting furnace?"

"But in practice, that won't work," Rebecca said, sticking out her tongue. "Aunt Hedy and I could help carve a few magic arrays, sure, but... the blacksmiths and their apprentices wouldn't be able to use them!"