Book 5: Chapter 22
The elves’ goldmine was situated outside of the village. You could see it if you went upstream. I think that’s why Luna said she could often find gold in the lake.
Normally, collecting gold in a goldmine isn’t complicated. The gold you mine is just rough bits of gold. You need to purify and refine it before it becomes usable gold. The complex part is the smelting process.
I trust that you know how gold is purified and refined if you passed chemistry in high school.
Though I’m not one-hundred percent sure, I think that the purification and refinement methods for gold are the same for both this isekai and my original world. At least the element should be the same. They probably don’t have the modern-day methods for weaving things out of gold by hand. They’re probably using out-dated methods, so they require water.
Water is used to operate the machine which then crushes the ore. I don’t know if the elves have it or not, but since there’s a lake nearby, I imagine they do have it. It’s not that elves don’t use machinery at all, but that they usually replace machines with their magic.
The reason gold can be found in the lake is that gold leaks out during the filtering process, thereby letting bits of gold slip out.
“Brother, are we going to the goldmine now?”
“Uhm… if you want to go, then you can come for a look, but I don’t think we’ll find anything. Unless you want to go underneath the mine.”
“We have to go before tonight regardless of what the case is because the celebration is tonight.” Luna looked at us and continued, “Everybody needs to be present when the celebration starts. We will be suspected if we are still roaming around outside when it starts, so we need to be quick.”