Chapter 69 — The Failed Project
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
The little old man pressed a hand to his chest and performed a rather unorthodox bow: "Piyun Lauren, at your service. You may simply call me Piyun."
"Very good, Piyun. You can rest for now—I'll arrange for someone to take you to your quarters shortly. You've seen this place for yourself; everything is still in its early stages, and the living conditions may not be ideal. But as long as you work as hard as my people do, this will soon be a prosperous and comfortable new home."
Piyun Lauren's face broke into a radiant smile: "For those shiny little darlings, I shall give it my all."
This jack-of-all-trades druid left the tent with the guide Gao Yang had arranged, leaving Amber and Gao Yang staring at each other. After a brief read of the surrounding atmosphere, the half-elf lady gave an awkward laugh and prepared to slip away—only to be caught fast by Gao Yang: "Where do you think you're going?"
"I'm going to help patrol around the camp!" Amber hopped on her feet and hollered, "Hey, let go of me!"
"First explain what 'dug up a seven-hundred-year-old antique' was about. I haven't forgotten that line."
"Eek—"
Everything in the camp was getting on track, but not everything would go smoothly.
In a courtyard west of the workshop district, Rebecca was staring blankly at the thing before her.
In front of her stood a kiln of peculiar design, built from fireproof bricks and mortar mixed with quartz sand. It resembled a giant bowl overturned on the ground, its sides painted with simple runes for raising temperature and controlling the flame, and at its base a kiln door that had just been opened, previously sealed with clay. It looked somewhat like a brick kiln, but what was fired inside it was not brick.
What was being fired was stone—or rather, a mixture of limestone powder and clay fired together. The Xuanmai Sect said that once this calcined product was mixed with the slag brought over from the smithy and ground into powder, it could become a new kind of building material.
But nothing about it looked like a success.
In the baskets before the kiln lay the finished products: a grayish-black caked substance, dirty and ugly to look at, its fragments of every size shot through with many hard, brittle clumps. Rebecca had already tried grinding some of the fragments together with the slag into powder, then mixing it with water as the ancestors had instructed. Now the first batch of test mixtures had dried, and they had turned into something that crumbled at a touch, like rotted wood.
There was no way this could build a house.
Rebecca propped her chin on her fingertip and sank into thought, her face so blackened and filthy she couldn't be bothered to wash it.
These past two days she had either been at the smithy—now renamed the Cecil Steelworks—supervising the installation of Magic Net No. 1 and the new furnace, or running over here to fire stones. A fine viscount's daughter, and she spent more than half of every day looking like this, filthy from head to toe. Yet the knights and soldiers of the domain thought nothing of it—after all, the viscount's daughter had always been like this. Singeing her face black while practicing fireball spells was a common occurrence, and sometimes she would run off into the woods to wrestle with wolves and come back covered in mud. Everyone was used to it...