Iron leaned back against the rigid spine of his chair, exhaling tiredly as his palms smoothed out a massive, heavy sheet of parchment. Drawn in dark charcoal was a meticulous blueprint of the ground tier and the titanic foundation of the permanent tower.
"Take this," Iron said, handing the tightly rolled scroll to Darwin. "This is the bedrock. The very core upon which our entire defense grid will stand. Without a monolithic foundation, the ultrasonic vibrations of the active core will literally rip the earth beneath our feet apart."
Darwin accepted the scroll with a reverence reserved for holy relics. Turning on his heel, the apprentice strode out of the workshop and headed straight for the construction site, where Marek was busy checking the alignment of a freshly raised log frame. Spying Darwin with the massive scroll, the head builder immediately dropped his tools and hurried over.
When they unfurled the parchment, weighing down its corners with heavy chunks of jagged granite right over a raw timber beam, Marek let out a low, impressed whistle. The sheer scale of the required earthwork and masonry was staggering.
"Alright, hold the wall cladding!" Marek bellowed, his voice booming across the entire clearing. "All hands, assembly! Right now!"
Within minutes, every able-bodied resident of the settlement had gathered before the blueprint. It was a grueling task, and there was absolutely no time to waste. Without mincing words, the builder strictly drafted twenty men for the excavation crew. The remaining sixteen were left behind to handle camp maintenance, perimeter security, and woodcutting.
"Listen up!" Marek pointed his spade toward a rocky ridge on the edge of the square, where the first wooden stakes had already been driven into the soil. "Iron gave the green light. We need to dig down to solid, unbroken bedrock and clear out the site for the foundation pour. To work, boys! For Dornheim!"
A moment later, the quiet of Dornheim was shattered by the heavy, metallic ring of pickaxes striking the stubborn ground.
The door clicked shut behind Darwin, burying the workshop in a heavy, stifling silence.
I was rolling the single, still-warm ingot of the newly minted alloy in my hands. The rich, matte midnight-blue of Ocean, shot through with the internal, iridescent sparks of Prism. It was perfect. But when I looked down at the workbench, where a shapeless, smoking heap of slag lay—all that remained of my single-use emitter—a cold dread settled deep in my chest.
The bar resting in my palm weighed barely half a kilogram. To cast the load-bearing pylons, the reinforcing rings, and the armor plating required for a permanent tower, I didn't need half a kilo. I needed tons.
My sleep-deprived, feverish brain instantly threw out a seemingly obvious thought: “Iron, if this alloy survived that wild heat without melting, why not just use it? Forge the components for a new machine out of it, build an everlasting smelting chamber or emitter nodes, and keep refining the ore without a care in the world!”
I smirked bitterly, gripping the cold metal until my knuckles turned white. A beautiful fairy tale. But a mechanical impossibility.
The Ocean-Prism composite is a perfect shield. It is incredibly dense, heavy, and entirely inert. Its purpose is to absorb kinetic and thermal impacts and disperse them safely; it is fundamentally incapable of generating energy, conducting it, or focusing a concentrated thermal stream.
What I needed was an active catalyst. A stable, reusable thermal core capable of containing extreme artificial heat and directing it outward, while surviving the cycle intact.
And on a purely physical level, I couldn't even cast a retaining ring for a new cannon from this pathetic little scrap of metal. As for jerry-rigging another single-use device out of old junk—that option was dead. The rare transistors, high-purity copper windings, and focusing crystals from my personal stash were utterly depleted.
Furious red spots danced across my vision from sheer exhaustion, and Lumon remained frustratingly silent, offering no ready-made engineering solutions.
In a fit of helpless rage, I slammed the ingot onto the workbench, buried my face in my hands, and took a ragged, heavy breath. A heartbeat later, fueled by pure frustration, I backhanded the table, sweeping aside a pile of rock samples Noah had hauled up from the mines.
Several heavy stones went clattering across the floorboards. One of them—a non-descript, coal-black chunk of tailing rock—cracked cleanly in two as it slammed against the iron base of my wheelchair.
I looked down irritably, intending to kick the fragment away, but froze mid-motion.
Where the rock had freshly sheared open, it looked entirely different. The interior possessed none of the usual matte dullness. The sunlight streaming through the window caught the inner structure of the split, exposing a strange, mirror-glossy texture securely hidden beneath a coarse, black rind.
Leaning down, I scooped up half of the broken stone and laid it on my palm. It felt remarkably, unnaturally cold—far colder than the ambient air of the workshop.
Lumon instantly initiated a deep, automated express analysis of the molecular matrix without waiting for a command.
[Warning! Natural high-carbon damper detected.]
Properties: Under radial compression, the crystalline matrix of this material is capable of absorbing, retaining, and directing immense thermal streams without degrading its own structural integrity.
Recommendation: Material is ideally suited for the fabrication of replaceable thermal cores for high-temperature emitters.
Wear Projection: A single compressed core can withstand 5 to 10 full smelting cycles of composite alloys before hitting critical structural failure.
Synthesis Specification: 100 units of raw black rock are required to manufacture one stable thermal core.
I read the text over and over again. Five to ten smelting cycles!
"Lumon," I commanded mentally. "Query our inventory logs. What are the current stockpiles of the associated black rock that Noah’s crews are pulling up alongside the anomalous ore?"
The heads-up display updated in a fraction of a second:
[Inventory Query: Dornheim Stockpile — Associated Black Rock]
Current Balance: 512 units.
Status: Classified as "industrial waste"; discarded to the far storage platforms.
Five hundred and twelve units... One hundred per compressed thermal core. We had the exact resources to press five fully functional, replaceable cores. And if each one held out for at least eight melts, I could fire up the refinery forty times in total!
Given the dimensions of the full-scale industrial converter I had designed, forty smelting cycles provided a massive surplus—more than enough to cast every single load-bearing pylon out of Ocean and every thermal insulation plate out of Prism for our tower.
The crushing fatigue that had anchored itself inside me for the past week evaporated in a heartbeat.
I whipped the wheels of my chair around, snapping back toward the table buried in schematics.
"I severely underestimated you from the start, didn't I, black rock?" I muttered aloud, reaching for a fresh sheet of blank parchment. With rapid, confident strokes, I began mapping out the blueprints for a brand-new, reusable industrial furnace.
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