Vol. 6 - Captivity - Chapter 5 (Patreon)

Thomas examined the ore as best he could but the ore was so fragmented inside of the rocks that he couldn't find a piece big enough to send his mana through using Metallurgy. With a shrug of his shoulders, he went around and dug out the biggest crucible he could find in the workshop. After setting it on the swingarm above the forge he tossed in five chunks to fill it. The ingot he was originally working on was still left, forgotten, on the anvil. Once the chunks of raw ore were inside of the crucible, Thomas placed his foot on the blower and poured mana into it. The flames inside of the forge roared to life and bathed the crucible in their crimson glory.

Maybe he was just feeling poetic, but that's how it felt to him. He stayed still and closely watched the ore inside of the crucible. The process of turning raw ore into a useable ingot was actually really simple. It was just an application of heat. Melt everything down and it will all separate. The heavier stuff will sink to the bottom and the lighter stuff will float to the top with a delicious metal center. There were other factors but that was the super simplified version. The question was, what temperature did he need to get the ore to, to melt it?

Different materials melted at different temperatures. Lead, for instance, had a relatively low melting point of just over 300°C. Iron melted at just over 1,500°C. The highest temperature he could recall off the top of his head was tungsten which required a massive 3,000°C to melt. With fantasy metals, there was no real way to tell what the melting point will be. For all he knew the ore in the crucible would require a temperature of 10,000°C to melt. Likely not though.

The flames roared loudly and after a short while, the crucible itself began to glow. He stepped away from the blower to check the ore inside of the crucible. They were glowing but not melting yet so he returned to pumping mana into the blower to keep the temperature up and increase it a bit more. The more mana he channeled into the blower the more air it pumped into the coals and the hotter they got. Every few minutes he checked the progress within the crucible. After nearly half an hour the metal finally started to melt and pool.

Once the ore melted enough he grabbed a ladle and started to scoop out the impurities that were floating on top of the molten metal. After a few scoops, a large portion of the excess rock and impurities were removed and he tossed in a few more chunks of raw ore. The metal extracted from the ore wasn't copious amounts. The majority of what filled the crucible had been rock and impurities. The actual ore contained in the rocks was rather small, making up less than half of the total size of what was deposited into the crucible.

He repeated the process of removing the impurities and adding in more ore until the crucible was half-filled with molten metal. He was annoyed at the amount of time it took him to do so. He'd do something about it later. For now, he dug around until he found an appropriate mold to pour the molten metal into to make an ingot. He pulled the crucible off of the swingarm and slowly poured the metal into the mold. He paid close attention to the pour since he didn't want to pour in the impurities that had likely pooled at the bottom of the crucible.

Once the ingot mold was filled he pushed the crucible back into the flames and left it alone. Now he just needed to wait for the metal to cool. In the meantime... He turned to look at the cold iron ingot on the anvil and tried to decide what he wanted to do with it while tossing it back into the forge. It didn't take very long for the ingot to come up to a workable temperature. Whatever he had melted in the crucible, it was not iron. As he heated the iron ingot he decided that he would make a bearded axe out of it. Something good for chopping.

The first thing he needed to do though was to infuse the ingot with metal mana. He hadn't forgotten and was still curious about what would happen if he infused metal mana into the ingot and made a magical weapon out of it. He went through the process of channeling mana through the tongs and hammer to flood it into the ingot. His eyes flashed blue and once again stars of grey light floated in his vision. The stars of light were particularly concentrated around the ingot that his mana was flooding. Without wasting another moment he started to slam the hammer into the ingot. Each blow stagnated some of the mana. He rotated and hammered the ingot over and over stagnating more and more mana inside of it.

He continued to hammer his mana into the ingot as it cooled until a bright flash of gray light. He let out a sigh and wiped the sweat from his brow. Yet again his mana was nearly bottomed out from working on the ingot. He was really starting to get annoyed at the continued draining of his mana pool. Even with his Magic sitting at 129 points it just wasn't enough anymore for the work he wanted to do. Serenity was helpful, but goddamn having to use it a bunch of times each day would get old really fast.

As annoying as it was he still couldn't do anything about it so he just sighed and left the mashed up ingot on the anvil to check on his freshly poured ingot. It had cooled enough at this point to be handled without the risk of being burnt. He turned the mold over and tapped it a few times to drop the ingot out of it. He picked up the matte gray ingot and looked it over with a smile. It would look better polished but for now, it looked complete. He examined it closely and saw that it had a light blue, nearly impossible to see, tint to the metal. Still, it was completed!

System Notice: You have created a Normal rarity Icebound Platinum ingot. Quality: Above Average. You have gained 200 Magitech Engineering experience.

Seeing the notice, his eyes grew wide. Slowly a smile curled his lips. He'd just discovered a cheap workaround to discovering what an ore was! He ran his fingers over the ingot with a loving look on his face. Maybe from now on he should just buy raw ore to make sure he could identify it? Then again, unless he was busing something random and unknow he could easily be told what he was buying by the seller. Icebound Platinum. He set the ingot down and pulled out his favorite Blacksmithing book.

He flipped through the book until the found the passage covering Icebound Platinum. It was a relatively rare version of Platinum that only existed in areas filled with water mana. Considering he was inside of a cave connected to the ocean, water mana wouldn't be that much of an issue. He scanned over the entry for it.

Icebound Platinum
A rare mana imbued platinum only found in areas with large amounts of water mana. Icebound Platinum is a hard but brittle metal that works best when applied as a coating to other metals or as a filigree. To properly bring out the abilities of Icebound Platinum it should be cooled using ice magic and brought down to freezing temperatures after being applied. Icebound Platinum works best when combined with other ice element enhancements or enchantments.

After reading the entry again, Thomas closed and returned the book to his inventory. The Icebound Platinum was definitely a nice material to work with but it had no bearing on what he was doing right now. He placed the ingot to the side and returned to the iron ingot infused with his metal mana. Once it was back inside of the forge, he sat down and sent some mana into the blower. It would run for a short time on a burst of mana and during that time he would try to recover the mana he spent creating the 'embryo' from the ingot.

By the time the lump of iron was back up to temperature, he'd managed to recover about twenty percent of his mana thanks to short sessions of Serenity. He brought it over to the anvil and started hammering it out into a more uniform shape. As he worked on his project the guards brought a rickety wooden bed, mattress, sheets, pillow, and blankets into the workshop for him. The sun had already started to set and the workshop was starting to get dark. The darkness didn't bother Thomas as he used his 'All Seeing Eyes' for night vision. The guards had to light lamps for themselves to see by. As there were no proper prison bars or anything to keep Thomas locked up they would have to keep an eye on him twenty-four seven in rotating shifts. Their problem, not his.

Thomas worked the metal mana infused ingot into a flat somewhat axe-shaped piece of metal. Once the base work was done he left it to dig through the pile of supplies to find a solid piece of wood that could be used at the handle. Unlike the handle of the cutlass this piece needed to be able to handle a lot of stress. He tried out several pieces of wood by gripping them tightly as well as bending them in his hands. He needed a piece that was sufficiently strong to withstand the forces but also somewhat flexible. If it was too stiff it would likely break from a strong impact. After digging around he found a piece of wood with a dark brown color that was both tough and slightly bent when he flexed it.

He cut off a section of the wood that was about a meter long and then cheated by using his Transmutation ability to form it into a thick dowel and cut off the excess material. This was mostly an experiment for himself. If the pirates wanted to use it that was their business. He wasn't going to put in a ton of effort until he got the materials he needed to make Uncommon rarity items. Anything else was just wasting time away until then.

With the handle almost instantly completed, he got back to work on the axe head. He wanted to get the eye of the axe head formed so he got it heated up and used a punch to force a hole into it to become the eye that the handle would fit into. He used thicker and thicker punches to widen the eye until the handle would just barely fit into it. With the thickest punch left inside, he hammered the axe head some more to continue to shape it. He made the beard of the axe a bit long, almost like a long knife or short sword handing down and increasing the length of the cutting edge. He always liked the way axes with long beards looked. This one might be a bit too long and prone to breaking but he didn't care. It looked awesome and that was good enough.

By the time he finished shaping the axe with his hammer as much as he could, it was already past sunset. He set his tools down and did a bit of cleanup of his work area, including banking the coals for the night. Tomorrow he would continue to do his work and see what happened when he made a metal weapon infused with metal mana. Once everything was cleaned up he waved goodnight to his bored-looking guards and climbed into his bed. Tomorrow he planned to finish the axe and then log out for a while. He'd promised himself that he would log out every eight days and he was pretty certain that tomorrow would be the eighth day since he last logged out.

Thomas got into the bed that had been prepared for him and immediately had a few complaints he wanted to lodge with Yorik. The frame was so rickety that he felt like it would fall apart at any moment. The mattress was so thin and worn out that it barely qualified as cushioning of any kind. The pillow was filled with hay. The blankets and sheets were thin and worn out. Frankly, the accommodations were just plain atrocious. It just barely qualified as 'better' than sleeping on the plain wood of the ship's hull! He couldn't stand it and ended up pulling out his sleeping bag and cushion for camping to add extra padding to the bed. He tossed the provided blankets and used the nice thicker one from his camping kit as well. The pillow ended up thrown away as well. Hay? Really? Fuck that. He used his personal pillow as well. Aside from the frame and matress he discarded everything else and used his own stuff.

Thomas didn't consider himself a prima donna or anything similar. He hadn't even complained about a lack of proper sleeping arrangements on the ship. If they were going to give him a bed, though, they should have at least given him a decent one! In his opinion, it might have been better if they'd just given him nothing. At least then he wouldn't have had any expectations and could have slept on the ground beneath the stars showing through the hole in the ceiling. He looked at the hole and just smiled to himself. The guards and Yorik had no idea that he could simply fly out of that hole at any moment. But as long as they had Snowlily hidden away from him he wouldn't take the very obvious and very easy escape route through there. He was pretty certain that flight was not a common ability held by people yet. In the worst case, he would make use of that surprise and instantly escape from here. Until then... He tolled over onto his side and used Serenity to lull himself to sleep on the uncomfortable bed.