A temporary office on the second floor of the factory.
After the commotion of the test run had died down, Ayla nervously flung a bundle of bills onto the desk and rubbed her face dry with both hands.
“To hell with test runs or whatever else. We’re truly out of time now, Elpanso.”
Beneath her eyes hung dark circles born of exhaustion and stress.
“It’s already been ten days since that bastard Valerius raised the gate toll twentyfold. The cotton cloth piled up in the warehouse is on the verge of growing mold, and the wholesalers are swarming to the factory gates every day, grabbing people by the collar and screaming for refunds.”
“Can’t we just use the deposits we received to refund them for now and send them back? We’ve gathered enough capital, haven’t we?”
At my words, Ayla let out a hollow laugh.
“What good is having money when all of it is tied up!”
She thrust a ledger streaked with red lines right in front of my eyes.
“The massive advances we received from the Southern Union merchant companies are bound by Veritas Divine Contracts. If we fail to deliver the promised volume of cotton cloth to their territories by the appointed date, we have to cough up triple the amount as a penalty for breach of contract! The moment we pay those damages, our merchant company’s cash flow dries up and we go bankrupt on the spot!”
Ayla’s finger pointed at the calendar.
“We have exactly one month left. If we don’t float that hideous cargo boat within a month, sail upriver and out to sea, then haul the goods all the way to the Southern Union’s free trade port… Valerius will have us by the throat, and we’ll die right there.”
One month.
It was an insanely tight deadline to cast a new massive boiler, install it in the ship, and send it off on its maiden voyage.
“Don’t worry, partner.”
I gave the trembling Ayla a deep smile unique to merchants.
“I’ve built the perfect formula based on our failure. One month? A week is enough. While that Valerius bastard waits around eating dust, we’ll be out on the sea belching black smoke and bringing cotton back from the south.”
At my voice, brimming with certainty, Ayla nodded while still half in doubt, biting hard on her lower lip.
“…Fine. You’re a man who came back perfectly intact from the middle of an exploding hunk of metal, so I suppose it’s not impossible. Go give orders to the dwarves outside immediately. I don’t care how much money it costs. Boil out the heart of that damned ship right now!”
*
“Now, everyone, pay attention!”
I spread out the blueprints and notes and shouted in a rough voice.
“Throw away all the pig iron you were boiling in the old open-hearth furnace! Plates made from that kind of impurity-ridden iron can’t withstand the pressure of mana steam. From now on, we’re going to boil out a new metal that has never existed in this world before—‘ultra-high-strength alloy’!”
At my declaration, the soot-covered dwarves began to murmur.
“A new metal? We’ll still be melting iron ore and pouring molten iron, won’t we?”
“If impurities are the problem, can’t we just hammer and temper it ten times, twenty times over? Trust us dwarves and leave it to us!”
One dwarf went on, thumping the trained muscles of the arm that gripped his hammer.
“Or have you brought some legendary mithril ore, perhaps? If so, it might be possible!”
“You can’t eliminate the microscopic cracks inside with that kind of brute-force hammering.”
I waved my hand firmly and pointed to the sacks of ore the dwarf foreman had procured in advance.
“First, pour a large amount of limestone into the molten iron in the blast furnace to create basic slag. We have to float all the sulfur and phosphorus inside the molten iron to the top and skim it off!”
At my order, the dwarf foreman scratched his beard hard and tilted his head.
“Sulfur? Phosphorus? What in the blazes are you talking about, Chief? I’ve handled iron for hundreds of years, but I’ve never heard the names of those minerals before.”
“Ah.”
I let out a short sigh.
There was no way Earth’s chemical terminology would work as-is on the craftsmen of this fantasy world.
Recalling the characteristics of the elements from Kang Woojin’s memories, I changed my explanation into something more intuitive that they would understand.
“You know, the yellow stone powder that gives off a disgusting rotten-egg smell when you boil molten iron, and the mineral component like bone powder that glows bluish like will-o’-the-wisps in the dark.”
Only then did the dwarf foreman go, “Aha!” and slap his forehead.
“Ah! You mean demon’s tears and goblin stone! But why in the world would we skim those out of the molten iron?”
At the foreman’s cry, the surrounding blacksmiths all began to protest at once, leaping as if they couldn’t understand.
“Chief! You may be the best when it comes to carving machines, but we’re the experts in handling molten iron! You need ‘demon’s tears’ in it so the molten iron becomes thin and smooth and flows neatly into every corner of the mold!”
“That’s right! And how can ‘goblin stone’ be an impurity? When that melts into the iron, the metal becomes hard as stone once it cools! You’re telling us to remove two things that are both common sense to blacksmiths and blessings of the earth? The iron will turn soft and useless for anything!”
It was absurd.
It was the fatal ignorance and painful prejudice of medieval technicians who had only passed down ironworking by word of mouth for long ages.
With a hollow laugh, I smashed their outdated common sense head-on.
“It’s precisely because of that shallow common sense that the boiler just now tore apart like that, you stubborn fools!”
“Wh-what?!”
“Demon’s tears? They make molten iron flow well? Sure, when it’s melted, it’ll be easy to cast. But if that junk is mixed into iron, when it’s exposed to high-temperature mana steam, ‘red-shortness’ occurs, tearing the metal’s bonding structure apart like sorghum stalks!
Goblin stone? It makes iron hard at room temperature?
It’s not becoming hard—it’s becoming easy to shatter like a windowpane in winter because of ‘cold-shortness’!”
At my thunderous scolding and logical barrage of facts, the once-triumphant dwarves became as silent as if they had swallowed honey.
They had lived their entire lives amid iron and flames, yet today, for the first time, they learned that the blessings they had carefully added were in truth time bombs that made iron explode and break.
“That’s why I’m telling you to throw in limestone. To float those damn impurity bastards you mistook for blessings to the top of the molten iron and skim every last one of them away!”
It was the foundation of modern steelmaking: thorough impurity control.
“Next, we add manganese to perfectly neutralize the sulfur… no, those demon’s tears that we couldn’t quite remove. Control the carbon content to ultra-low-carbon steel below 0.15 percent. We need to maximize toughness so the steel plates don’t crack and instead hold out tenaciously.”
“Th-then, just as you say, Chief, the iron may become tougher, but if we reduce the carbon that much, won’t it be too soft to withstand pressure?”
When the foreman, his momentum dampened, asked carefully, I took two small ore samples from my bag and held them up high.
“That’s why we add these fellows!”
“Chromite, a hard silver ore said to come only from deep within the Armand Mountains. And molybdenite, a gray-black pyroxene!”
Known on Earth as chromium and molybdenum, the alpha and omega of modern specialty steels.
In the fantasy world, they were merely surplus minerals used as pigments to color ceramics, or discarded by blacksmiths because they did not melt easily in fire and were difficult to process.
“Mix these two ores into the molten iron at exactly one percent and 0.5 percent! I will not tolerate even a 0.1 percent error!”
The dwarf foreman accepted the mixing ratios on my blueprint with trembling hands.
“You want to mix chromite and molybdenite into molten iron? And precious materials used only in tiny amounts when forging legendary swords, at that—you’re going to pour them into casting a boiler drum the size of a house… You are out of your mind, Chief!”
“You have to be out of your mind to turn the world upside down. Create the skin of a true monster, firm as Mount Tai and incapable of tearing even before heat of several hundred degrees Celsius!”
“Ooooooh—!!”
At my roar, a fanatical flame ignited in the eyes of the dwarves and craftsmen.
They, too, were artisans who had handled lumps of iron all their lives.
Beyond simple hammering lay chemical impurity control and the mixing ratios of a perfect alloy they had never seen before.
Before that wondrous truth, the blood boiling in their veins began to surge uncontrollably.
Fwoooooosh—!!
Above the skies of Pellua Harbor, the flames of the blast furnace soared up gigantically.
“Do as the Chief says and pour in the limestone! Skim off every bit of the dross!”
As limestone was added, the foul impurities turned into slag and were removed.
Manganese soothed the molten iron, and at last, when chromium and molybdenum were added, the color of the molten metal transformed into an enchanting, bluish silver hue.
“Maintain the temperature! Don’t quench it rapidly! Let it cool slowly at room temperature to prevent structural defects!”
The miraculous molten steel with a yield strength of 480 MPa, proven at Earth’s Taesan Specialty Steel Research Institute, poured like a waterfall into the molds of the fantasy world.
Hissssss—!!
Bellows and quenching continued day and night without pause.
Three days later.
The new boiler that emerged into the world after the mold was broken was no longer the coarse, crude lump of cast iron from before.
Emitting a subtle luster, it boasted the majesty of a true “special alloy steel,” the crystallization of modern engineering that allowed not a single flaw.
At every joint of the fully assembled boiler, I shoved in gaskets made by layering and compressing graphite powder and copper plates, then tightened the bolts like a madman.
“With this, the seal is perfect. Not a single wisp of steam will leak out.”
Wiping my sweat-soaked brow, I looked up with satisfaction at the new boiler settled in the heart of the old sailing ship whose sails had been torn away.
The massive cast-iron paddlewheels mounted on both sides of the ship displayed a bluish majesty, as if they would tear the current apart at any moment.
“Chief! The ship assembly is complete! We’ve loaded it full of coal, too!”
The dwarf foreman reported with a broad grin on his soot-covered face.
At last, the time had come.
I raised my hand high toward Ayla, who was pacing nervously at the dock, and toward the wholesalers waiting to board with the fate of our factory on the line.
“All hands aboard! Stuff the cotton cloth into the hold without leaving a single gap!”
A massive pile of cotton cloth amounting to hundreds of freight wagons was sucked into the ship’s cargo hold.
The ship sank heavily, and the churning waters of the Rene River struck its hull.
“Now, then.”
I gripped the engine key in the pilothouse tightly.
“Shall we go grab Valerius by the collar?”
The maiden voyage of a true steel beast was about to begin.