Age of Gods - A VRMMO Story

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 there was 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 attribute 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 recently 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!