The Search for the Blacksmith
Alex knew that moving from legume-based survival to industrial-scale profitability required a leap in technology. The current plows were brittle, wood-heavy jokes that wasted precious time and labor. They needed steel. And steel required three things: iron ore, high-temperature heat, and someone capable of hitting things with a hammer.
He started by calling the manor's only functioning craftsman, the one-eyed, perpetually irritated blacksmith, Garth.
Garth arrived, smelling strongly of charcoal and sweat, and eyed the Viscount with suspicion. "My Lord. I hear tell of miracle crops. I see no need for my hammer in a field of peas."
"You will," Alex promised. He pushed aside the last of the financial ledgers and slid a hastily drawn schematic across the table. It was a simplified cross-section of a moldboard plow, complete with an adjustable cutting share and a curved surface designed to turn the soil efficiently.
Garth squinted at the drawing. "What in the seven hells is this curved thing? It's all wrong. Where's the prayer notch?"
"This isn't for praying, Garth. It's for physics," Alex explained. "The curve minimizes friction, allowing one ox to do the work of two. But for this to work, the cutting edge must be harder than anything you currently forge. Your iron is brittle."
Garth snorted. "My iron is the finest the Royal Guild permits, Lord Arren. We beat the impurities out of the bloom until the metal cries. That's how iron is made."
"No, that's how you make soft iron," Alex countered. "To make steel, you need to introduce carbon. To do that efficiently, you need extreme, continuous heat that your current forge cannot reach. We need a way to burn hotter, cleaner, and use air pressure to force the reaction."
Garth stared at Alex, not with suspicion this time, but confusion, as if the Viscount were speaking a mix of Elvish and Goblin. "My Lord, the forge is built of stone! Only the Dwarves can make fires that hot, and they guard their secrets with axes!"
"Then we will invent our own Dwarven secret," Alex declared, his internal project manager taking over. "Forget the smithy, Garth. We are going to build a blast furnace."
The Site and the Material Constraint
Alex already knew the key resource location from his hours of novel immersion: a rich, untouched seam of iron ore was located near the river junction, a long-forgotten detail mentioned in a footnote about the geography.
He immediately dispatched a handful of the manor's now-incentivized staff to scout the location. They came back excited—the black, heavy rocks were exactly where they should be.
The problem wasn't the iron; it was the fuel.
"We need massive amounts of charcoal to run this furnace," Alex told Garth. "Your tiny kiln won't do. We need clean, concentrated fuel, and the woodsmen are complaining about the cost."
"Wood is wood, My Lord," Garth said. "It burns."
"Inefficiently," Alex sighed. "We can't just throw raw wood in; it lowers the temperature and introduces too many impurities." He thought back to the energy crisis of the later Victorian era in the novel's background lore. "We need to build a series of large, carefully sealed kilns for mass charcoal production. And we need a steady source of limestone to act as a flux."
Alex was effectively attempting to jump the world from the early Iron Age directly into the late Middle Ages of industrial capability—and he was doing it with three servants and a grumpy blacksmith.
The Problem of Air and The Great Bellows
The most crucial, non-negotiable requirement for the blast furnace was not the materials, but the air.
"Garth, a conventional forge relies on your lung power and two bellows operated by hand," Alex explained, drawing a sketch of a massive, cylindrical chimney structure. "The blast furnace is essentially a contained inferno. To reach the melting point of iron, we need a constant, ferocious volume of air pumped into the base."
Garth looked horrified. "A hundred men couldn't work bellows long enough to feed that beast!"
Alex smiled. "Correct. That's why we don't use men. We use the river."
He grabbed a new piece of parchment and sketched a simplified diagram of a water-powered bellows system—a crank shaft connected to a simple water wheel, which would alternately compress two large, heavy bellows built from ox hides and timber.
"We build the furnace next to the waterfall near the ore deposits. The river does the work, creating a continuous, high-pressure air blast. This allows the heat to climb high enough to melt the iron and turn it into true, pure pig iron, which we can then refine into steel."
Garth's one eye glazed over. He slowly picked up Alex's schematic, turning it over in his rough hands. "This... this is a war engine, My Lord. Not a tool. If this works, no one in the four kingdoms will have metal like ours."
"Exactly," Alex agreed, his systems-analyst heart pounding with the thrill of a complex project kicking off. "We're not just forging plows, Garth. We're forging a monopoly. Now, gather every carpenter, every ox hide, and every strong back we own. We have a waterfall to harness."