The new worker and soldiers molted with breakfast, the silver worker did not, and since she was probably going to have boosted stats I suggested to Victoria to start thinking up some names now instead of later. She had just agreed and was settling down to think when her antenna jerked hard and she looked around confused for a second.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I detected something, I'm not sure what it was since the only experience I had with this was when I was in that trance and digging the entry tunnel, but if I had to guess one of the worker teams is near it." She closed her eyes and wiggled her antenna some more to sense it out, "I feel that the group digging in the forward tunnel are nearing whatever it is, let's go see, maybe getting closer will give me more information."

I had nothing particularly pressing to do, and another odd unlisted queen power was always interesting to see in action, so I grabbed my helper celestial and attached her to my upper arm, but didn't wake her up, before we headed out to see what the forward team was up to. Quick explanation, since we don't know which way is north we decided that tunnel direction is relative to the mountain, forward means going towards the mountain with the other directions based off of that. Anyway, we headed down the tunnel, passing four sleeping chambers, two to a side, on the way there. Right now they are for the workers, but once this level was considered large enough the workers would go down another layer and move there with the current rooms being taken over by other castes.

We reached the end of the line where the workers were carving away at the wall and had them stop work as Victoria started tapping at the walls with her antenna. After a little of that she stopped on the left side and gave it a few extra taps before having the workers dig there. She still didn't know exactly what she was detecting but she knew it was just a little ways in the direction she pointed. It took about a half hour to get through it and when a chunk of rock first broke away to expose the material I was incredibly excited. It was a shiny silvery looking material, at first I thought it actually was silver but after a couple taps from Victoria's antenna she knew it was tin. Still useful to have a blob of tin to work with but I am not sure what it would be useful for besides making bronze once we also have copper.

I knew the tin to copper ratio was very small but I was sure I had just enough copper coins that I could make a bronze ring, I could also use pure tin to practice my blacksmithing with and see if a pure tin ring was better or worse than the other kinds. To that end I had the workers cut out a chunk from the deposit roughly the size of my head, before having them secure a proper entryway to it and then ignoring it, we didn't have the ability to process that much tin and even if we did I wasn't sure what it could be used for by itself. So for now it was marked but was otherwise just an interesting feature of the tunnels. The workers went back to digging the forward tunnel and I asked Victoria if she had a better handle on this ability now that she felt it out a bit.

It was both yes and no, she was confident she would be able to tell if anyone got near more tin but felt that if anyone got near something else it would be an unknown feeling. Feeling it out she believed the power of it was based on the total hive size and number of daughters, like a sort of passive enchantment aura. The tunnels of the hive acting as the enchantment lines and the kids being power boosters embedded in it. So the tunnel ends where groups of workers were at were the most sensitive but once the place became big enough she may be able to sense random things in places that work groups don't visit, for example there could be copper in the wall right behind our chamber but she can't sense it right now, eventually she would be able to.

After that she settled down to think of names and work on carving a big wooden something, while I went upstairs with my tin chunk to see what I could do with it. First, though, I plugged in my little helper and woke her up, and then handed her the copper ring. It was much too big to be used as a normal ring and too small to act as a bracelet so she just made it a hat. As a level four celestial she had eight int, activating the ring brought her to ten, so between two and two point nine, looking at the activation amount of it had the inner ring at what I tentatively decided was full power and a second loop was slightly activated. Pure intuition made me believe she got the even two added to her stats instead of any weird number.

I waited a minute to let her get used to the surge of extra mana then slowly pulled my mana away, she felt woozy for a second as her mana flow filled in the gap but she stayed awake. Ten Int was enough for a celestial to stay awake, getting them there required them to be level four and have good enough enchantment to get a bonus of two or help her grind to level eight which would give her ten base Int. I couldn't let her keep the copper ring though, she had to keep a hand occupied with holding it on, she should have a small bracelet made instead. When asking about fitting she showed me that her lower hands can have the thumb dislocate resulting in the hand being thinner then the wrist and then popped back into place to make them wide again.

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With that I made a dirt bracelet that fit just right and could be slipped on and off while her thumb was dislocated but was secured when in proper position. I then took the cast and covered it in clay to make a mold then had the dirt inside flow out, resulting in a perfectly formed clay mold of a celestial sized bracelet. Because I would need to resue this a lot i made a micro seam through it so I could pull it in half instead of needing to shatter it to get the item out. Finally it was time to work the tin, I first needed to purify it since according to my book, a silvery ore of tin was cassiterite, which was tin oxide. Luckily the oxide is relatively loose and mixing carbon into it will cause the oxygen to bond to that and produce plain old carbon dioxide. 

Unlike normal ancient methods I could create mild vacuums at will so after filling a crucible with more than enough tin and powdered charcoal I added a plug and then had it pull up so it was level with the top, meaning that inside the crucible was tin and carbon with very little free oxygen in the air so the powder had no choice but to react to the oxide in the tin. After all that the actual heating process was completely normal, and once I was sure it was melted I grabbed the crucible with dirt hands and shook it vigorously to make sure it was thoroughly mixed before I let it sit for an hour and separate out into metal and gas. The book also said that slag can form on the top so I couldn't pour it directly into a mold and instead had to open it and remove the slag and cast the tin to check for impurities.

I made a small number of ingot molds from clay, one was the size of a copper coin, one was just enough for a ring, one was sized for the celestial's bracelet, and had three more that would result in hand sized plates if filled. I removed the top from the furnace then applied hardened sand to the edge of where the new clay lid met the old crucible and spun it at high speed letting it saw through the lid. Once mostly through I just levered it open, there was a faint pop as the pressure suddenly equalized but because it regained a lot of pressure from the carbon dioxide gas forming it wasn't explosive. Looking inside I could indeed see a thin layer of what I assume is slag had formed on the top and used a stone scraper to remove it.

There didn't seem to be any other issues so I poured the tin into my molds, I filled all the small specialized ones but only two and a half sheet molds, the liberation of solid material into gas made it shrink more than I thought it would. Regardless I now had plenty of tin to work with and it looked fairly pure to me, once they were cool enough to touch I tapped the half formed sheet, it wobbled slightly as I felt my new casting skill kick in and then nothing happened, it was a messed up sheet, no big deal. Touching the next two sheets got the same reaction but the skill gained a level, the designed amounts seemed to make it consider a bit harder if I should succeed but in the end decided what I made was kosher.

First up was the pure tin ring, making it was really simple since tin melts easier than copper. Like the copper ring though I added the enchantments while it was still hot, not to trick the system but because it is easier to add them in while it is hot. The enchantment was also completely identical to the one I did before, three lines of Int boost. I didn't bother with the whole slow cooling this time though, and instead got the tin for the bracelet added to the crucible while it cooled on the ground. Once cooled andI popped the mold open and grabbed it, a completely different sensation happened, unlike before where they fought, this time enchantment and casting were working together to keep the ring intact.

In the end it wobbled slightly but overall was considered good, and casting gained another level for a job well done. Putting it on and seeing what it did, there were some interesting differences. It still gave me the Int boost to fourteen but when I looked at it with magic sense I saw that two of the lines were at full power and the third line was nearly full lit up as well. Giving the same bonus while clearly working harder meant that tin was a weaker material when it came to enchanting than copper, but since it still gave me a two point something boost it was good enough to make equipment for celestials. Making the bracelet went nearly identically, but when I touched it after cooling I could feel my skills needed to use a little more force to make sure it kept it's shape.

After a quick check by me using it like an oversized ring to make sure it wouldn't break during heavy lifting I helped the celestial put it on. Once I was sure it was secured to her wrist properly I told her she was free to go, she could now walk around on her own and help how she saw fit.  I also gave her a message that a worker should bring up a new unoccupied celestial for me to start training up to level four. She was very nervous taking the first few steps away from me, worried that if she got too far from me her bracelet would stop working, but with every step she took her confidence grew and eventually she was running down the tunnel excitedly. I felt happy that she was happy with something as simple as being able to walk under her own power, before I went back to work at the forge, time to see what a bronze ring did.