Supreme Magus novel Chapter 593

Lith already had a copy of the booklet inside Soluspedia, so he had no need to review the procedure again. Zekell had put a dirty silver ore inside the crucible to check the temperature of the furnace.

"Is it a problem if I use magic to speed things up?" Lith asked.

"Be my guest, but remember that metals can evaporate. Finding the right temperature could require even more time since I know nothing about magic and you know nothing about metals." Zekell shrugged without taking his eyes off the booklet.

Lith sighed.

’Even Fire Vision could be useless without proper knowledge. I need to start practicing now, or I’ll need months to create even a single item. Here goes nothing.’ He thought after checking that no one was looking.

Lith’s throat became covered in black scales as he breathed Origin Flams inside the furnace. The blue magic flames overpowered the normal yellow ones, spreading an eerie light.

"What the heck have you done?" Zekell jumped off his chair, trying to save the situation.

The crucible, the coal, the silver ore, everything but the stones was engulfed in blue flames. Zekell took out the crucible using metal tongs, but even those caught fire. He kept his cool and took the crucible out of the furnace before splashing the tongs in a bucket of water.

"Is this normal?" Lith asked pointing at the flaming crucible.

"No, it’s not. You should’ve... Oh, gods!" Zekell couldn’t believe his own eyes.

His old, trustworthy tongs seemed now to be made of two different parts. One was blackened with dirt, time, and use, whereas the extremity that had been eaten by the flames was slightly smaller than he remembered it.

He touched it with his fingers, he even hit the anvil with them to make sure of his findings.

"This doesn’t make sense. I get that your flames destroyed the dirt, but this? The metal seems to have been purified several times."

"What about this?" Lith used spirit magic to have the crucible float in front of Zekell.

The crucible was shiny as if someone had spent hours polishing it and the silver ore was reduced to a small clump of metal.

"By the great hammer! I’ve never seen such pure silver. This is bad." Zekell said.

"Why bad? Isn’t the purer the better?" Lith asked.

"If you want to make an ornament, yes. If you need it for something that has a practical use, impurities aren’t all bad. Pure metals are a myth. Sometimes, you have to add impurities to obtain the right balance between hardness and softness.

"Too much of the former and the final result will be brittle, too much of the latter and it bends just by watching at it."

Lith had his doubts, but he couldn’t experiment with Origin Flames in the presence of witnesses. He spent the rest of the morning with Zekell, learning how to smelt the Orichalcum and how to turn it from as ductile as silver to harder than Damascus steel.

The procedure was relatively simple. First, they picked a crucible big enough to contain quite some ore, but not so heavy that Lith couldn’t easily lift it even when full.

Zekell covered the bottom of the crucible with a special sand to prevent the ore from sticking, then he prepared a mixture of ore, wheat flour, lard, and ashes. The flour would provide the carbon for the oxidation of impurities and heat the metal from the inside.