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Shan Liang's POV
The knowledge did not descend like a thunderclap. It arrived as a warm, steady tide—familiar yet impossibly vast—spreading through my mind in clean, lucid layers.
[Reward Unlocked: "Metallurgy Basics."]
[Scope: Ore identification, charcoal production, bloomery furnace construction, smelting workflows, slag control, hammering/forging fundamentals, quenching/tempering for early alloys, mold casting (clay/sand), safety protocols, workshop organization.]
[Advisory: The leap from stone to metal will alter social structures, labor division, warfare, and trade. Proceed deliberately. Couple every new technique with training and governance.]
I closed my eyes and let it unfurl. Images formed—iron ore veins streaking through rust-red cliffs, charcoal pits breathing with low, muffled heat, a bloomery furnace glowing like a second sun, slag shearing away in viscous ribbons, the dull bloom hammered alive on the anvil until it sang. My hands twitched as if mimicking tongs; my forearms remembered a hammer I had never held.
When I opened my eyes, the Academy's open-air circle lay before me—students scratching numerals into clay, a pair of apprentices arguing about seed spacing in the spring field plan, a teacher reciting lunar cycles to a gaggle of wide-eyed children. Ordinary life. And yet, everything felt on the cusp of becoming something else.
I sent a thought to the System. Show me the first steps.
[Phase Plan Recommended:
(1) Material Survey: local ore sources, suitable clays, sturdy stone.
(2) Fuel Chain: charcoal-making from hardwood, airflow control.
(3) Bloomery Build: small trial furnace near the river's leeward bank.
(4) Tooling: stone hammers → wooden mallets with stone caps → bone/antler tongs → early iron tools once available.
(5) Safety & Ritual: heat boundaries, child exclusion, guard rotation.]
I exhaled, then grinned despite myself. "All right. Let's birth a forge."
We began with wood and earth.
Under a stand of old oaks, we dug shallow pits and stacked hardwood in careful cones, covering them with damp clay and turf, leaving only small vents. It felt like coaxing a secret from the trees. For two days, the ground pulsed with low heat while thin blue smoke braided upward. Children pressed their palms to the warm turf, giggling until the Protectors shooed them back.
Meanwhile, scouting teams combed the hills. The settlement with iron ore—suspicious and hard-eyed—had given us a first haul through our fragile truce, but we could not let our future rest on another's whim. Ruan, a clever woman with an instinct for stones, found our first local seam: a ragged scar of hematite peeking through weathered shale. She brought back pebbles that stained her fingers red.
When we unloaded the first charcoal and piled the first sacks of ore near the river, a hush seemed to fall. People came by at odd hours, quietly, as if visiting a shrine. They knew, even if they couldn't name it: we were about to try something that might unmake the age they were born into—and remake it.
We sited the furnace on a gravel terrace by the water, where prevailing winds could be tamed. A waist-high cylinder, clay over a lattice of woven sticks, lined with compacted fire-brick we shaped from riverbank clay and sand. A small arched opening at the base for tapping slag. Two clay tuyeres—air inlets—angled downward to breathe the furnace without tearing its heart out.
The first time we lit it—charcoal at the bottom, then a layer of crushed ore, then more charcoal—we gathered around like people at the first dawn. The rush of heat slapped my cheeks. Soot traced my nose and temples. We took turns feeding the furnace in measured charges, stoking it with a rhythm that felt like prayer.
The System pulsed, precise and calm.
[Temperature Window: 1200–1250°C.
Maintain charge cadence: charcoal → ore (pea gravel size) → charcoal.
Observe slag at tap: viscosity should flow like thick honey.
Signs of trouble: acrid yellow smoke (sulfur), choking soot (airflow low), whistling roar (tuyere pressure high).]
Xie E set a guard ring and posted a water team in case of brushfire. The Protectors paced without complaint, eyes reflecting furnace-light like night animals. The Academy apprentices recorded everything: how the smoke changed, how the furnace sounded, how each charge settled.
Hours passed. The furnace roared like a living thing. At the tap arch, slag began to drool, shimmering green-black. When I finally gave the signal, we cracked the belly and reached in with hooked poles.
A half-solid mass dropped with a meaty thump: our first bloom.
Cheers burst like a storm. Someone whooped. Someone else started crying and couldn't stop.
We dragged the glowing lump to the anvil stone we'd bedded in sand. The first hammer strikes were clumsy, rocking the bloom more than shaping it. But as blows piled on blows and sparks scattered like fireflies, the thing inside the bloom began to show itself—fibers knitting, voids closing, slag squeezed out like black tears.
By dusk, we had a small billet: not pretty, not pure, but iron.
A child, eyes huge, whispered, "It sang."
I touched her hair and laughed. "It sang."
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