Chapter 52 — A World Where Magic Exists
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 3
All three runes were carved into slabs of a pitch-black stone, and all three slabs had clearly been carefully polished and their positions meticulously adjusted before being set into the furnace body, so that the spacing between them was perfectly even and their edges parallel. The lowest slab bore a triangular symbol with a wavy line inside it—the initial character for the fire element in magic books. The middle slab showed a square enclosing a diamond: the initial character for earth. The upper slab held a swirling, vortex-like symbol, which had to do with the wind element—though it was not an initial character.
Beyond these three slabs, fine glittering dust could also be seen in the material of which the furnace body was built. Gao Yu asked what it was: quartz sand—the quartz sand of "this world."
Quartz sand is a material with magic-conducting properties. Though its effect is exceedingly weak, it is cheap enough for common folk to use, and so it is widely employed.
Gao Yang raised his head and glanced at the old blacksmith. "You built this furnace?"
"Yes—yes, my lord..." Hearing the lord address him, the old blacksmith immediately clutched his cap in his nervousness and answered with a hasty bow of his head. "Oh, half of it I built, and half I directed the apprentices in building..."
Gao Yan nodded, but asked nothing more.
Magic is a transcendent power, a domain beyond the reach of the "lowly"—yet in this world saturated everywhere with magical force, even commoners who could not cast spells had the shadow of magic in their lives.
Some basic uses of magical force required no knowledge or ability in spellcasting. Every person had magic within them, and one need only use a particular material, carve a simple symbol into a material of a particular shape, and anyone could faintly stir those wondrous forces that were everywhere present.
This was not spellcasting at all; in the eyes of the true "transcendents," its effects were so feeble as to be nearly laughable. Such borrowed power was like picking up a stick from the ground to use as a walking cane, like snatching up a stone to crack walnuts—devoid of any technical sophistication. Even an illiterate commoner could memorize how to draw a few symbols of faint efficacy. And yet it was precisely this tiny, meager power that made this world a place utterly different from the homeland Gao Yang knew.
Like the one degree Celsius that separates water from boiling.
By virtue of those three runes, this "traditional furnace" needed only firewood for fuel—with no bellows and no optimized combustion chamber—to smelt molten iron.
If the fire-element rune were carved into a slab of mithril, the furnace could burn even straw as fuel!
Yet it was precisely because of the existence of these ancient runes that the humans of this world had to this day never considered improving furnace efficiency by improving the combustion efficiency of the fuel. All they kept improving was the material used to carve the runes, and the forms of the runes themselves.
And so Gao Yang had not built any earthen blast furnaces, but had come first to observe this primitive, backward traditional furnace.
The old blacksmith Hammel watched this great noble before him with mounting nervousness. He did not know what the man meant by suddenly asking a question and then studying the furnace, nor whether he himself had done something wrong. He knew only that nobles were powerful and their moods unpredictable. Though Lady Rebecca, the lord, and the lords before her had all been kind and generous, this man before him was the legendary pioneering hero, a thoroughgoing man of arms, and a Duke besides. What sort of temperament would such a great noble have?
And just as the old blacksmith stood there in trepidation, Gao Yang at last straightened up and put his second question to him: "With a furnace like this, assuming a steady supply of ore, how much iron can you smelt in a day?"