Chapter 52 — A World Where Magic Exists
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
The smithy was already under construction, though it was still far from complete—and in Gao Song's plans, this plank house was not really a "smithy" in the sense that people of this world understood at all. He had simply called the place a smithy for the time being, to make things easier for everyone to grasp.
By his own reckoning, he had been intending to name the place "Cecil Ironworks"...
As the only blacksmith in the territory at present, old man Hammel was rather puzzled by this "smithy" the Duke had ordered built. To his mind, the structure occupied an utterly unnecessary expanse: apart from a plank house of preposterous size, it also included an open yard a full hundred meters on each side and a timber shed under which only a few support posts had so far been raised. To call a facility of such scale a "smithy" seemed thoroughly incongruous—yet he dared not say that the famed founding Duke was a know-nothing outsider meddling in matters he did not understand. Though that was indeed what he thought, he absolutely dared not voice it.
After all, he was merely a commoner, and the other was a great noble who stood on equal footing with His Majesty the King.
And because of this "smithy's" astonishing footprint, it could only be placed at the eastern edge of the camp, its "great courtyard" stretching out onto the wasteland beyond, as comical as a lump jutting out from an otherwise neat wooden fence. The tools and gear brought from Tanzan Town looked pitifully sparse inside this gigantic smithy: at best they occupied one corner of the plank house, while the sole iron-smelting furnace had been set out in the open ground, sheltered by a crude timber shed against wind and rain.
As for Gao Yang, the reason he had reserved such a large plot for the smithy, and placed it hard against the territory's edge, was simply that he had taken future production capacity into account, along with the ease of later expansion. The traditional smithies of this age—one master with a few apprentices, one little hut with one furnace, the clang and clatter of hammered iron—were not at all what he needed.
But there was simply no way he could explain all of this to that old blacksmith and his dim-witted apprentices right now.
And beyond considerations of capacity and future expansion, Gao Yang had no intention of doing what the transmigrator seniors in the novels he had once read did—planting a row of earthen blast furnaces in this yard. Though he had genuinely considered it, a few days earlier he had watched Hedy use the power of magic to bring the rafts ashore and to reinforce the camp's foundations, and after that he had shelved the idea for the time being, instead having Hammel, the territory's only blacksmith, build a traditional furnace in the yard.
He arrived at the smithy. Rebecca was already waiting there, along with the old blacksmith Hammel—hair and beard both grizzled white—and several of his apprentices. A few other settlers in short tunics stood about the yard, and in the large baskets at their feet lay the first batch of ore to be delivered.
Gao Yang walked straight over to the traditional furnace.
It was a rather crude-looking stove, roughly a meter tall, clearly divided into an upper and a lower part. Below was a bulging hemispherical structure; above, it swiftly narrowed into a cylinder. On the lower hemisphere two openings were visible: one set low, plainly where fuel was added, and the other near where the cylinder began, where the ore was presumably poured in.
None of this was anything remarkable—merely an ordinary furnace. What made it special was the side.
There three runes were arrayed.