Limitless Path

"Alright, aprons first," Elana said then, moving to a rack to the side with heavy aprons hung on it. "Until you can withstand the sparks and metal bits with your stats alone, an apron is always a good idea. Plus, if you have decent clothes on, it's better to wear one to preserve them. Though, you shouldn't really be forging in nice clothes."

Beth put on a heavy leather apron made of some kind of dark hide that had multiple large pockets on the front. She looped it over her head and tied it around her torso, able to accomplish the task with ease without being able to see what she was doing thanks to her new high DEX stat. Elana had copied her and tossed on an apron before signaling her to move over to a smelter next to their chosen work area.

"What can you tell me about this?" Elana asked her, gesturing at the eight or so foot tall object.

"It's a cylindrical smelting tower. It uses a magic flame fueled by magic crystals or arrays to melt ore into a liquid. There're also more traditional smelters that use solid fuel, as well as more advanced ones that break down ore using more advanced technologies," Beth replied. "This one could melt pretty much anything we'd be working with."

"Right. It's important to note that you can augment the smelter or even directly fuel it with your mana," Elana followed on. "And I mean the royal 'you' there. I could do it with most ores because I have an ocean of mana and fine enough control to slowly push around individual molecules. You have a small cup and can only throw all the water out all over something."

"Right, mana exhaustion and worse if I tried to power one of these right now," Beth said in response. "So, what's the plan now?"

"Now, you are going to smelt ore, and I am going to correct all the mistakes you make," Elana replied, gesturing at a nearby set of bins containing chunks of ore.

Beth first moved to the area where the aprons were kept and retrieved a pair of heavy leather gloves. She knew the 'testing' had already begun as Elana gave her a small nod and a smirk when she did this first step correctly. She then moved to the smelter to check it closely, including making sure there was nothing inside, before moving over and selecting a large piece of mana copper ore. She didn't put the ore into the smelter, but instead took it to the bench, where she grabbed a hammer and proceeded to bash the ore apart.

Once she'd fractured the ore into smaller pieces, she withdrew the crucible from the smelter and filled it with the ore pieces. She replaced the vessel within the smelter and shut the door before starting the smelter. It also used activation runes, ones that were helpfully labeled in Universal Standard, and once she had started the smelting sequence, she stood back and looked over at Elana. The dwarven smith looked at her and nodded, indicating that she was at least on the right track so far.

They had to wait a little while for the ore to undergo the initial process, which was heating the ore up to a few hundred degrees to remove unwanted carbon. This step was called roasting and was used for a number of common kinds of metal. The step that would be more familiar to anyone who had seen anything about smithing would be the next, and longer, step of taking the oxide compound produced from the roasting and melting it together with a flux to remove many of the heavier impurities as, like most ores, copper ore had a large amount of other materials mixed in with it. The second step was commonly referred to as simply smelting and was used to separate out much of the remaining iron within the ore and many of the remaining impurities. The end of the second step will see the copper 'matte' that remains in the furnace eventually drawn out, a substance that is between thirty-five and sixty-five percent copper.

The third step of the process was fairly simple in principle, though just a bit tedious to do with the current forge, which was mainly designed for heating stock to an appropriate temperature for smiths to work. This step, known as converting, involved mixing the matte, siliceous flux, and copper scraps together in the furnace and blowing oxygen rich air across them. Slag would constantly be skimmed, the remaining iron sulfides converted to iron oxide and sulfur dioxide. Eventually, this step would produce copper blister, which was between ninety-eight and ninety-nine percent pure copper.

The fourth and final step used in refining (at least, this type of refining, as Elana explained there were two different methods for copper smelting), was known as refining and was where the workable copper would come from. Copper blister couldn't exactly be used as-is, and was heated again with air blown through it to oxidize the copper and the remaining impurities. The last few bits of impurities would be skimmed off and the copper oxide would be subjected to a reducing atmosphere to leech off the oxide part of the compound, leaving pure copper.

The whole process of four steps took much of the day for the two of them to go through, and Beth would have been rather lost by the end without Elana's guidance. They managed to turn the ore that Beth had originally crushed into a tiny amount of "finished" copper of greater than ninety-nine percent purity, and Beth now understood why the materials talked about refining being done in massive batches. If that much starting ore turned into less than a penny's worth of copper, it wouldn't be practical to try to refine even much higher concentration ore at a small setup. Elana mentioned that large smelteries ran massive furnaces for several of the steps they had done almost year round, constantly moving tons of ore through all four steps from crushed rock to finished, ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent pure copper.

During the process, Elana took the time to point out the use of specific flux while smelting an ore. The common flux used in the copper process was a siliceous flux, but other kinds would be used when dealing with other types of metals. There was also the fact that they were trying to smelt a single metal from ore to bar versus trying to make an alloy, which was its own entire process with its own materials.

The process was, of course, a little different when done in a small batch. Elana also explained while they waited that it was fairly rare to do it this way, as most people in the galaxy would use a major smeltery to process any ore they found. Often people would either sell the ore to the smeltery and buy what they needed in bar stock, or they would trade at some ratio of so much ore to so much refined metal. She was having Beth go through the process to ensure Beth had a solid foundation, as a smith that didn't understand where the product they worked came from couldn't excel.

Elana helped guide Beth through the whole process before they were ready to move on, but first she instructed her in the cleanup steps necessary for the type of smelters they had in the forging room, taking the opportunity to give a quick explanation on a number of the different parts of the piece of equipment, mainly detailing a few things about the inscriptions. Beth paid close attention as Elana covered the basics of carving and powering runes, using the flame runes that melted the metal as the basis.

The basics of inscription was another fascinating topic that Beth could see herself getting lost in. She was taking mental notes as Elana pointed out how the runes were all specific patterns carved in groups, interlinked with certain interconnecting patterns. The flame ruin had a large number of what looked like jagged triangles inscribed together, these being the foundational rune of producing flame. With the smelters not needing to do much more than produce a clean, hot flame of a certain temperature, the runes didn't have to be overly complicated. They were linked together with connector runes, looking almost like small chain drawings, and those were interlinked to a handful of other runes.

One set of chains moved up to the controls, allowing the inscribed buttons to interact with the enchantment. Another set of chains went to a series of circular enchantments spread around the interior of the smelter that contained wavy lines. These, as Elana explained, were temperature sensing enchantments used by the overall enchantment to control the amount of flames and the area they were concentrated in. Elana also took some time to point out a few runes that looked totally random to Beth but were described as safety measures.

If someone opened the smelter door during a run, the enchantment would immediately turn off, as well as snap a very mild air barrier in place. Elana powered the air barrier rune, which looked like a bunch of swirl symbols in a box, with a direct infusion of her mana. She then had Beth try to reach into the smelter and, much to Beth's surprise, it took her utilizing all of her fairly high STR stat to be able to shove her arm in.

"A barrier like that wouldn't stop somebody at my STR that didn't know any better from shoving their arm in," Elana explained. "But somebody at my STR likely wouldn't be seriously injured from the huge amount of heat in there. As for somebody exactly like me, I have too much training and knowledge to even try shoving an arm in a smelter at all and if, for some reason, I tried, I would recognize the safety barrier immediately."

"Well, I don't know what your STR is at, but that barrier is more than enough for me," Beth replied. "Of course, after having run the process just once with your help, I would never stick my arm in there. That's what the crucible tongs are for."

Beth was, of course, referring to a long set of heavy tongs that they had used to lift the crucible out of the forge. The more she did in the forge that afternoon with Elana, the more she found that she needed to learn. She hadn't known what crucible tongs looked like or how they worked, as the basics book she had read didn't have pictures, and it had only mentioned certain things in passing.

"Now, we're going to move on to what you actually want," said Elana with a wicked smile dancing at the corners of her mouth.

"Uh, I don't like how you're smiling right now," Beth said a little nervously.

"What do you mean, how I'm smiling?" Elana replied, the smile growing wide. "We're doing exactly what you want, hitting some metal. And the first metal we're going to hit is mana copper, and the first thing we're going to do with it when we hit it is making nails."

"Make…nails?" Beth asked, squinting her eyes at the instructor as she frowned slightly.

"Good, your ears actually work," Elana said. "We, or more specifically, you, are going to make copper nails. I'll demonstrate the technique, and then you'll make nails." She emphasized when she said 'you' with a glint in her eye, moving over to the forge and anvil as she spoke. She pressed an area on the forge to turn it on, and the equipment immediately started producing a constant, bright yellow flame.

She pulled out some round stock from a pile of mana copper materials and set it in the forge. She set one end of the length of copper in the flame so that about a quarter of the metal rod was in the flame, the rest sticking out to the side of the central part of the forge. She then grabbed a hammer off the rack and set it on the anvil in front of the forge.

"This is two elant round stock," she explained. "Or I should say, this is eight-millimeter round stock. Stock, as you should know, is a term used in smithing to refer to ingots, bars, dowels, tubes, and so on that are fully finished from a smelter and ready to be worked.

"What I'm going to do is heat this up until it has a yellow-white color. I'm then going to move it to the anvil, and I'm just going to hold it with my hand at the back where it's out of the fire, but you should pay attention to the size of the piece and the heat applied. You're going to burn yourself learning this trade, and if you don't pay attention, it's going to happen a lot."

Elana took one of the three bars of stock she had put in the fire and picked it up by the far end. She grabbed the hammer off the anvil and set the heated end of the bar against the anvil. She lifted the hammer up to about shoulder height and let it drop on the bar, using her wrist to create a strong, precise blow. She spun the stock after the hit, twisting the rod about a quarter turn before striking it again.

She continued to hammer the bar, creating a fairly fine point as she struck and spun, struck and spun. She explained what she was doing as she hammered, "I'm striking the end here while rotating the stock. I'm also very slightly striking away from me while I hit the piece," she pulled the stock back from the far side of the anvil to the near side. "I want the material to stretch to a point, and I'm not getting that by hitting it dead-on. Once I have the material drawn, I move it back to me to continue shaping. I can also draw it a little more as I shape it near me, and then I can check it."

She put the bar back in the fire for a moment and grabbed a device off the rack that was just a handle with a piece of metal at the end. The metal had a squarish hole, and Elana grabbed the end of the stock outside the fire with her left hand and pushed the heated end through the hole, checking to make sure she had grabbed one of the proper diameter before returning the stock to the fire.

"This is something that, remarkably, is called a nail header. It's a good project for you to do once you've started to get some of the basics down, making your own one of these," Elana explained, putting the rod of stock back in the flame.

She then pointed at the anvil, to a section on the back. "Know what this is?"

"Uh, I think that's called a hard blade…or wait, it's called a hardy?" Beth replied.

"Yes, it's a piece of metal that's in a wedge shape, though usually it's not super sharp. The wedge shape is the more important part, as it's used for shaping a piece or, more often, cutting through a piece. Now watch," Elana commanded.

She removed the stock from the fire and worked it for a moment more on the anvil. She then moved the stock over the hardy and set the piece on it, placing the stock so it was against the edge of the hardy about a quarter inch above where she had been hammering. She then hammered the piece of stock before flipping it over and hammering it again. She repeated this, rolling the stock and hammering until it was almost sheared through. She then bent the greatly narrowed section by holding the bar against the anvil at an angle and tapping the nail portion once. She returned the bar to the fire with the bent 'nail' section pointing tip up, waiting for it to heat again.