The river junction near the hidden iron ore deposit became the Arren fief's new industrial frontier. Alex, constantly bundled against the cold, stood on the muddy bank, supervising a crew that mostly consisted of bewildered tenant farmers and the grumpy blacksmith, Garth. They were building something no one in the four kingdoms had seen: a simple, functional blast furnace.
The design was an insulting simplification of Earth technology, stripped down to what they could source locally: a tall, tapered stone shaft lined with clay, built right next to the small waterfall.
"You said this monster needed constant air, My Lord," Garth shouted over the noise of hammering and cursing. "But the water wheel is a joke! It creaks and barely turns the shaft!"
Alex grimaced. The problem wasn't the power of the water; it was the inefficiency of the transfer. Their carpentry was crude. The wooden gears connecting the waterwheel to the massive, leather-sealed bellows were mismatched, grinding loudly and losing half the force.
"Focus on the bellows, Garth!" Alex yelled back. "Make sure the ox-hide is tight, and the timber lids are heavy. If we don't get sufficient compression, the temperature will stall at a thousand degrees, and we'll get slag, not steel!"
For two weeks, Alex pushed them with the cold logic of the deadline. He introduced a concept he called "Quality Control" by simply shouting when a stone was placed crooked or a seam in the clay lining wasn't sealed perfectly.
Meanwhile, Master Hemlock, confined to linen inventory, kept sending nervous, oily couriers upriver. They reported back that the Viscount was wasting all his newly earned money on "a cursed stone tower" and "a water machine that insults the nature spirits."
"Let them talk," Alex muttered to Silas, who was now expertly mixing limestone flux into the crushed ore. "As long as they think I'm mad, they aren't worried about my ledger."
***
The day of the first firing arrived under a sky as gray and heavy as the local clay. They had piled their concentrated charcoal fuel, the limestone, and the crushed ore into the mouth of the tall furnace.
Alex stood next to the colossal, straining bellows, which groaned and wheezed as the waterwheel turned. Garth, sweating heavily, nervously checked the iron grate at the base, where the white-hot air was being forced into the charcoals.
"Ready, My Lord," Garth whispered. His hands trembled, half in fear of the unknown, half in excitement.
"Initiate fire protocol," Alex ordered, using the most technical term he could invent for "light the damn thing."
They dropped torches into the top. The fire caught quickly, fueled by the draft from the height of the chimney, but it was the forced air from the bellows that defined the experiment. As the waterwheel found its rhythm, the furnace began to roar—a deep, hungry sound unlike anything the locals had ever heard.
The temperature climbed rapidly. The stone exterior began to feel hot, then scorching. Hours passed. The crew waited in silence, watching the shimmering heat rising from the top.
"My Lord, it's hot enough to melt stone!" Silas exclaimed, wiping sweat from his brow.
"Not hot enough for steel, Silas," Alex corrected, his eyes fixed on the base. "We need the heat high enough to separate the oxygen and the carbon efficiently. We need 1500°C—or at least its medieval equivalent."
Suddenly, the roaring changed pitch. It became a shrill, intense whistle. The forced air was doing its job. Inside the shaft, the temperature passed the threshold. The iron ore softened, then began to liquefy, dropping through the burning charcoal.
***
Finally, Alex gave the command. Garth, using a specialized pole, knocked open the clay plug at the base of the furnace.
What emerged was not the spongy, porous bloom they were used to. It was a thick, dazzling stream of molten, pure liquid iron—bright orange, flowing like thick syrup into the prepared sand trenches, which formed crude ingots. It pooled, hissed, and cooled into solid black lumps.
Garth fell back, staring. The liquid iron was exactly what the Dwarves were rumored to produce.
"It... it is metal from the heart of the earth," Garth stammered, pulling off his leather apron. "It flows like water! We have made the impossible, My Lord!"
Alex, however, wasn't celebrating the flow; he was calculating the yield rate. He had put in a known quantity of ore and charcoal. He now had a known quantity of pig iron.
"We have a yield rate of 65%, give or take," Alex announced, ignoring the mysticism. "It's acceptable for a prototype, Garth. Now, that is not the final product. That is pig iron—it's high in carbon, too brittle for a plow. We need to refine it. We need a secondary furnace for decarburization."
He looked at the lumps of heavy, black metal. They were crude, but they were the foundation of his empire. The weight of just one lump was more metal than Hemlock's entire inventory.
"Garth," Alex said, clapping the stunned blacksmith on the shoulder. "The Arren Steelworks is now officially open. Your next project is the refining furnace. After that, we mass-produce the moldboard plows. We are moving from surviving debt to dominating the market."
He looked toward the river, where the massive blast furnace stood, silent now but still radiating heat. The immediate debt crisis was solved by peas. The long-term problem of the Fief's sustainability was being solved by fire and physics.
Next priority: Production ramp-up. We need better logistics to move this raw material. Time to fix this world's roads.