I held a meeting with the elders of the human tribes back in the city. The next solstice was around the corner. The crops and domesticated monsters could feed the humans many times over. People were living longer. Less children were dying young. I had already started taking the first steps towards producing steel and making an electric infrastructure for the city. The population was increasingly rapidly, as was the standard of living.

And yet. There was a feeling. A feeling in the back of my mind that made me anxious. Anxious about the future, the present, and the past that I had lost. I advised the elders to send out frequent scouting parties to the east, and for the human Jora tribe to permanently move into the city, leaving behind their ancestral homeland.

They asked me what was wrong.

I told them it was nothing. Just a feeling. A feeling and some information that I had learned from the demons beyond the mountains.

“No, it’s more than that,” I said. “I will have to confront the Singing Horde. I do not know when, nor how, but I need to go to their lands and find what remains of the other elves.”

The elders let the silence hang in the air, interrupted only by the wind and the crackling fire. Kelser was sitting on the ground. He scratched the back of his head, his eyes looking somewhere else. I knew who he was looking at. He must have sent a message to that person with magic. I ignored him.

“Can we help you confront the horde?” asked Elder Kezler Roja.

“I would appreciate it,” I said, “but do not feel compelled to do so. The last time I faced the being that stands behind the beastmen, I was completely helpless in front of him. In fact, I still have no idea how he did what he did to me that day. All we did was talk. A simple, uneventful conversation. And yet, it was one of the most devastating things I have ever experienced.”

The elders eventually decided to support me despite my warnings. I asked them to prepare. To prepare their magic, their hunters, and their weapons. There was no need to hurry, I didn’t want to proceed until I had more information about the Singing Horde. And since the Izlandi Kingdom couldn’t give me that information, I figured I might have to trade for it from the Lux Republic. Before going the republic, however, I was going to visit Kol. I was planning to ask the Izlandi Kingdom to make similar preparations, in exchange for some more magical knowledge and material knowledge.

“Oh, great teacher, I almost forgot. Have you had a chance to meet the metalworkers?” asked Elder Konri Oko.

“No, sorry, I haven’t had the chance. Why, did something happen?” I said.

“They said they had made some progress that they wanted to show you,” said Elder Konri.

“Progress?” I said.

“Something about purifying metals by heating them up. They said they had been exploring it on your orders,” she said.

I slowly nodded. “I remember now. That is exciting. I’ll give them a visit in the morning.”

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“And by using two teams of alternating wind magic users, we can blow in enough air into the furnace to heat up this iron until a lot of the impurities can be removed and we are left with this strangely brittle form of iron,” said the lead metalworker as she took me around the rudimentary blast furnace that they had developed while I was away. A host of other experimental furnaces dotted the area, many of which were clearly being used for glass. The metalworker herself seemed to have gathered a handful of people who were interested in her work, most of whom were teenagers or young adults. The population of the human tribes had been skewing younger and younger thanks to improved nutrition and medicine.

“I see, you’re right. This is much more brittle than the iron we’ve been using. I suspect you are interested if this will make sharper edges than the other kinds of iron we are using,” I said as I grabbed some of the iron they’d purified yesterday. Judging by its appearance, it was pretty close to the kind of pig-iron that would be used for industrial applications back on my Earth. Seeing the blast furnace being operated by the metal and glassworkers, who were working together to improve furnaces, I had an idea. “I think you’re on to something with the idea to increase the heat in your furnaces. But does this new iron that you’ve produced need as much heat to melt?”

“No, it gets into a molten state more easily than the iron ore we feed the furnaces,” she said.

“Then I think we’re ready for the next step!” I said, gathering some of the pig-iron. I walked over to another empty furnace that was roughly in the shape I wanted it to be. The lead metalworker followed. After adding in the pig-iron and heating up the furnace, I was slowly able to re-melt the iron to create what was called a ‘bloom’ back on my Earth. I then took this bloom and used an iron hammer made from cast iron to slowly work out the molten slag from the bloom. It took a while, and I wasted quite a bit of pig-iron and charcoal, but with a lot of magic, I was finally able to make a decent bit of wrought iron.

“This is fascinating,” said the metalworker. “This iron is much stronger than what we had before.

“It’s all thanks to the experiments that you were doing here,” I said as I wiped the sweat from my forehead. “I think you’re doing amazing work down here, all of you. I do foresee one problem, though,” I said.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s fine right now, because you’re only making a little bit, but if you start making a lot of iron, you’re going to end up cutting a lot of trees to make charcoal, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Yes, I suppose so. We try to cut them far away from the city, but there’s only so far we are willing to go since we have to lug back all that timber here,” she said.

“Then maybe we need to find better sources of fuel,” I said.

“Do you know of any?” she asked.

“I couldn’t find any around here, but, while I was in the Izlandi Kingdom, I came across some of the methods they were using to make iron for their own people. Some of their metalworkers were using a black rock that looked like charcoal to heat up their furnaces. I will tell the next trade delegation to send some back for your use. The only problem with the substance they were using, which we can call coal, was that it added a lot of impurities to the iron in certain processes or didn’t go hot enough if it was too impure,” I said.

“So we’ll have to think of a way to make the coal more pure,” she said.

“And I think I have an idea of how you could do that. I’ll ask the demons to run the experiment first, but I am fairly confident it will work to produce a more useful form of coal, something which we can call coke,” I said.

After discussing the possibilities of hotter furnaces and iron with less or more impurities, I also asked her to look into the possibility of reworking good iron ore directly into other forms. Specifically, I asked her to try making a furnace that could melt iron inside a tightly shut clay crucible. Crucible steel, if she could figure out a way to make it in this world, would be amazingly useful. Having access to steel would improve the humans and demons’ chances against the beastmen, in case we ended up in a conflict of some sort.

I walked away with a hopeful smile, envisioning the day when this world would have steel. And how fitting would it be if the first type of steel that was made in this fantasy world was the kind that featured all the time in fantasy and magical stories back on my Earth: wootz or Damascus steel!