“It was very dark; but in the murky sky there were masses of cloud which shone with a lurid light, like monstrous heaps of copper that had been heated in a furnace, and were growing cold.”

- Charles Dickens

==Caden==

Before now, I had only done a little smithing.

I had been using wood, which only produced a relatively small amount of heat. It was more than enough heat for mundane purposes, but not for melting metal. I had softened copper before using that, but it wasn’t enough to melt it.

The process of creating greater and greater fires, or really, the heat, was a reflection of the evolution of society. Metallurgy advanced in lockstep with science and knowledge. Unfortunately, I lacked most of that knowledge. However, I could replace some of that with sheer power.

I had a rune that was directly capable of producing heat. Properly controlled, and with enough power, I should be able to melt just about any metal. Honestly, I could probably melt a lot of other things too.

I started with a single emblem, as a test.

First was the heat rune, that was simple enough. I set the subtext to turn as much mana into heat as possible. Then I added a trigger, an on/off switch, and a mana accumulator.

I activated it and waited.

The rune started to produce heat, but it didn’t get incredibly hot with the relatively low ambient mana.

So I remade the emblem and attached a mana crystal to it. It was a relatively low capacity mana crystal; it only held about a hundred mana.

Which proved to be way too much.

The rune heated and heated, and then the heat rune started to shimmer.

I turned it off before it could melt and explode.

The mana crystal had tiny cracks in it. The cracks no longer had any mana in them. I dissolved a small bit of the cracked crystal. The intricate structure that was required to store the mana had been broken apart. It appeared that the emblem just pulled the mana out through the structure, destroying it in the process.

That was a minor problem, and something that I was actively working on making a solution for with metallurgy.

The other problem needed to be addressed now.

The heat rune output the heat directly around the rune itself. This was just fine for a very mild heat, like using it to keep yourself warm. It wasn’t so great when I was trying to melt metal, since it was going to melt the rune first.

I could just use my environmental controls to make the area cold, but that defeated the whole point of heating an area up. Plus, I would need to do it inside my dungeon, instead of just my aura.

Fortunately, I had a way to work around that now.

The teleportation tube showed me how to make a three dimensional emblem and use that to designate the space inside as the target. In combination with what I had learned about using circles with additional commands from Tam’s work, I should be able to place the heat away from the rune structure.

I started by clearing out a small sphere of stone inside a section of unused aura. From there I created two metal circles of folerth, each perpendicular to the other and set into the inside of my makeshift forge. Each band of folerth was thin, only there to designate where the heat should go.

I took my previous work and made a copy. I attached it to the folerth, adding subtext and superscript. The new commands told the emblem to produce heat in the center where both circles overlapped. That way the heat would show up in midair at the center of the forge.

I turned it on.

I could see the heat as it accumulated in the center of the forge, making shimmering waves of air.

.

The movement of the air made me think of something else, and I set a different shard to work on that problem.

I used a hand of stone to lift a piece of copper up into that central point. Now the heat should be directly targeting the piece of copper. The copper grew hotter, but the stone that was holding it began to melt before the copper did.

Right… not what I was expecting.

Let’s switch that out with something else then. Granite had a high melting point right? I thought so anyway. I had watched something about how the granite of Yosemite had formed.

I switched out the stone surrounding the forge with granite. The air inside the forge was trapped and had started to get much hotter. I should probably fix that while I was thinking about it. Unfortunately… that meant I needed to move the forge into a part of the dungeon. So I did, putting it deep in a section of wall.

None of the people in the dungeon right now would be able to sense it some sixty feet deep, so that would have to be good enough for now.

Once I had moved the forge, I altered the environmental controls for it. The outside few inches of air and stone would automatically go back to a normal temperature. This would prevent the folerth rings and the surrounding stone from getting too hot while I was manipulating things in the forge. I didn’t want my smithing to fail because the surrounding stone melted and let the emblem shift.

I would be able to fix everything after the ensuing explosion, but I would prefer to avoid needing to deal with it in the first place.

This time I constructed tendrils out of granite and held a piece of copper in the center of the forge. The copper started to glow, and so did the granite, but the copper started to melt before the granite did. I shaped the granite into a crucible, allowing the copper to pool into it.

After the copper was fully liquid, I absorbed it, adding it to my list of things that I could create.

I didn’t actually need copper since I could already make it, but liquid copper would be useful if I wanted to try manually alloying it with another material.

I did the same thing for silver and gold. The silver melted at a lower temperature than the copper, I could tell because the granite wasn’t glowing as hot, so my calculation ability pitched in to help. It was already starting to make guesses about specific heats, thermal gradients, and far more as I worked. Fortunately it was easy to tune it into the background when I didn’t want to deal with it right away. The gold melted at around the same point as copper, though it took less time to heat it.

The patterns of each were stored away.

I was surprised when the bronze actually melted at a much lower temperature than pure copper. I guess I had thought its toughness would translate to a higher melting temperature. I am not sure why I thought that.

I ran into problems again after that when I tried to melt iron. The granite started to melt around the same time as it did. So, I needed a different material.

I figured I would use diamond. Diamonds formed at immense pressure and heat deep in the earth. And I knew it was often found in formerly volcanic areas, like here, because they came out with the molten lava or were deposited by magma that cooled before it reached the surface. So, diamond had to be able to deal with heat reasonably well.

So I picked up a piece of iron with a tendril of diamond, forming a crucible of diamond under the iron. I let the iron start to heat and then the diamond started to vaporize. It was vaporizing at a relatively low temperature, too, before I would even be able to melt bronze.

There was no fire, as there was no hydrogen in the diamond to react with. The only thing in it was carbon. I had a suspicion. I doubted the carbon was vaporizing on its own. I knew that graphite and diamond had high melting temperatures. And the diamond hadn’t bothered melting, instead it was sublimating. I was fairly sure it was reacting with something.

Fortunately, the forge was a closed space.

I couldn’t fill it with a neutral gas like argon or neon, because I didn’t have samples for them, but I could do the next best thing.

I put the diamond directly into the middle of the forge, letting it heat up. As parts of it vaporized I replaced them with more. Eventually the diamond stopped vaporizing. I let it go a few moments longer, but then I was satisfied.

Whatever it was reacting with, there wasn’t any left in the chamber anymore. I was fairly sure it wasn’t reacting with nitrogen, because there would have been far more diamond needed to react with all of it. I was pretty sure it had reacted with Oxygen. Probably into CO or CO2.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Regardless, now I could melt materials in peace.

I picked up iron again, forming the crucible. It melted properly and the diamond was still very stable.

I put the folerth into the center of the forge, letting it melt in the crucible. Its melting point was similar to silver, though it took a little more time to heat up. Mana reacted strangely as it became molten, forming currents when I tipped the crucible from side to side, rippling away from the waves in the molten metal. For now, I absorbed it.

Next came the mana crystal.

I placed it into the crucible and waited. And waited. It slowly started to glow, the clear crystal becoming foggily translucent and then white with heat. The light it produced, unlike many of the metals, was a bright clear white. Then it slumped down and became a puddle in the crucible. I carefully stirred it with a spatula of diamond, making sure it was completely melted. Then I absorbed it.

Now it was time to experiment.

First I did the simplest thing. I put an equal volume of molten folerth and molten mana crystal together inside the crucible and tried to stir them. The mana crystal froze around the comparatively cold folerth, forming a clumpy mess. I put it into the heat and let the mana crystal start to heat up again. As the mana crystal started to get hot again I stirred the two together. They combined from two brightly shining liquids into a single one.

I separated the batch into three parts. I absorbed one, put one into storage and then plunged it into water to quench it, the last one I put into an environmentally modified chamber, on a diamond pedestal, that would cool it down very slowly.

The quenched sample shattered into countless pieces. Each of the pieces looked similar to pure folerth, but they had a tiny bit of depth to them. I absorbed one of the pieces. The structure felt crystalline, but I felt nothing like the spirals that had been in the mana crystal before.

I tried to push mana into it, but the mana just flowed through it and then back out. Not so useful. That was okay, I was expecting my first try to be a failure. I still had one sample cooling slowly, and I needed to try other ratios as well.

I prepared eight new samples, from 90% folerth and 10% crystal, to vice versa, skipping the fifty percent mixture I had already tried. I melted each one down, combining them and then repeating what I had done with my first try.

When I had substantially more folerth in the blend, quenching no longer caused it to shatter, it cracked. Once I got to 80% folerth, it no longer did that anymore, either, simply setting into a deeply reflective silvery metal. It was still useless for storing mana, however.

All the other blends were the same. I ended up with different arrangements of crystalline lattices. I could sense the lattice that was at the core of each of them. There were no helices, intersecting or not.

I checked on the samples I had slowly cooling. The first few were no longer red hot, so I took a tiny sample from them. The crystalline structures were different from when they were simply quenched, but again there were no spirals. And pushing mana into them didn’t do anything.

I felt like I was missing something… How did I make it crystallize the way I wanted? Trying to forcibly create the blends with the pattern of mana crystal had done nothing.

I had done something like that before right? In chemistry class, we had dissolved sugar and then used a string to make it all precipitate on the string. Hmm… that just left a place for it to crystallize, it didn’t force it into a particular arrangement.

Wait… I knew this.

I liked watching cooking shows, and had looked up quite a bit about them. When someone made chocolate, one of the ways to get it to crystallize properly while tempering was to add a piece of chocolate that was already tempered. It acted as a seed crystal, and told the rest of the material how it should form.

I reformed each of my sample batches and placed them inside a chamber with a normal atmosphere. They should cool relatively slowly that way, though if any of them seemed like they might be successful I could try again with those and go slower.

After each sample batch had a chance to start cooling, I used a rod of mana crystal and inserted it into the still liquid material. The batches had cooled enough that the inserted rods didn’t start to melt, though several did start to glow gently. I left the batches alone, trying other ratios just in case.

After the batches had all cooled enough to become completely solid, I took samples. The ones with more folerth didn’t form spirals at all. The fifty percent blend had disconnected spirals. The samples of the forty percent folerth and lower all crystallized into interlinking helices, and they all could store mana again.

The forty percent blend could barely store any mana, it was worse than regular mana crystal. The thirty percent was about the same as normal mana crystal, though it didn’t shine at all when filled with mana. The other two remaining blends both worked better than a normal mana crystal, though the twenty percent folerth worked the best. The ten percent batch shone at about half the intensity of normal mana crystal when mana was stored into it. The twenty percent batch barely shone at all, even with large amounts of mana.

I messed around more, seeing what I could do to refine the process.

Eventually I settled on a batch that was slightly less than twenty-three percent folerth. It produced a crystal that was translucent grey, the interior forming natural mirrors after only a slight depth. Despite the somewhat clear nature of the material, it didn’t light up at all when mana was poured into it. It stored vast amounts of mana, easily a hundred times more than normal mana crystal could. When I absorbed it, I saw the familiar interwoven helices, but folerth had filled all the gaps in the middle.

And after I finally created it, I received a message.

You have acquired a new skill!

You have acquired: Metallurgy II (Metal, Earth, Fire)

You gain insights into working with metal. You know what to do to make the metal work for you.

The other shard had been busy working on meteorology while I worked on this project.

I created a hollow cylinder filled with air, about a hundred feet long, inside of my dungeon. I would need to refill the area with stone later. I altered the environmental conditions at the very top and bottom. At the top I placed the freezing temperatures from outside, and at the bottom I placed the heated temperatures of the forge.

As I watched, I could see the cold air spread downward and run into the hot air as it attempted to rise. Things stayed in equilibrium for a time, but soon the heat pushed upward, making a small amount of room to the side where the cold air descended. The two streams of air moved past each other rapidly, but they didn’t form a tornado like I was hoping.

My environmental controls did have choices for strong natural up and down drafts now though.

Maybe it would work if I helped out a little?

I set up two fans, one a the top and one at the bottom. Each fan would make the air above and below spin in the same direction. I didn’t turn them on just yet.

I set up the same setup as before, letting the warm and cold air gather. Then, before the two could get out of balance on their own, I activated the two fans.

Both pools of air began to move, the air spinning. The two spinning masses of air met each other, each trying to push past the other. The hot air slipped upward, spiraling into the middle of the cold air then decreasing its rotation, making way for the cold air to push down around the edges. The air began to spiral down as the hot air pushed straight up, each cycle reinforcing the other.

The air in the tube was completely clean, no dust or debris, so the tornado was completely transparent, until it wasn’t. The water vapor in the warm air began to condense as it rose and cooled rapidly, turning fog like. It reached the bubble of cold at the top of the tornado, growing in intensity before it was pulled out by the descent of the now cooled air. Soon enough the entire tornado was the misty white that I was familiar with.

I checked my environmental options; I didn’t get an option for a tornado yet. However, I did get options for a stable vortex and a minor vacuum. I wasn’t sure if I was just getting the component parts of a tornado, or it just wasn’t big enough to qualify.

Well… I did have one place that I could experiment with this inside the dungeon. Actually, I had a few places in my super large environments where I could do this. However, I had one location that was almost perfect for this, the others would need far more work. It even had fans at the top already, though I would need to add fans on the bottom.

I had a completely vertical tunnel in the defenses for my core room, and it was more than a mile tall.

I quickly checked my dungeon; everyone was asleep now. I was in no danger.

I turned off the traps in the vertical tunnel, added fans to the bottom, and altered the fans at the top, making them tilted to the side in different directions to spin the air. The top thirty feet of the tunnel were changed to produce cold air, and the bottom was changed in the same way for hot air.

I didn’t think the fans would be enough to move a preexisting mass of cold and hot air, so I started them up from the beginning. I let the everything run, and I watched.

Both columns of air moved toward the middle of the shaft, but they had slowed down substantially by the time they reached, having lost most of their rotational energy. After a few moments, the two columns of air pushed past each other, but neither started a vortex. As each column of air reached the end of the shaft, they reacted with the swirling air, pushing it out of the way. This formed two small vortexes at each end of the shaft, but they didn’t grow and connect.

I turned everything off, and used the environmental controls to reset the internal air temperature to the standard, comfortable level.

After that, I added more fans. This time they were in the wall. They took in air from the tunnel and moved it through the fan and then blew back out. These sideways fans would push the air to keep it rotating.

I turned everything on. Like before the masses of air spun and moved towards each other. This time their spin was considerably higher, the fans on the wall pushing until each was pushing against the other, but moving in the same direction.

The hot air slipped into the middle and the cold air began to push down the outside of the shaft. The cold part started to pick up rotational speed, while the hot air began to rise directly up the shaft, rising and cooling until it hit the super-cooled environment at the top. The whirling of the cold air intensified, a whirlwind beginning to form as the two forces worked together.

The air in the tornado turned white and the forces began to grow, the wind howling with power as it formed an even more powerful funnel. Additional pockets of air formed as the warm air rose through the middle, bowing outward under the force of the air moving around them. The shape transmitted out to the edges of the tornado, pushing unstable bulges up and down, as though it were attempting to swallow something too large for it.

The air at the edges was moving faster than my fans could propel the air, so I sealed the fan tunnels back up with stone.

The tornado was self-sustaining at this point. It continued, the air roaring through the tunnel, powered by the cold and heat that was stayed constant at each end. I had my suspicions that I had used a heavily simplified version of the mechanics that normally produced a tornado, but I didn’t mind cheating if it was effective.

I looked at my options. Medium tornado was in there now, along with bulging-vortex, extreme wind, and medium vacuum. I suspected that I could create a much stronger vacuum without too much difficulty. As for the strength of the tornado, I bet I could make a stronger one, but I would need a much larger room for that. Powerful tornadoes were generally very wide and tall. A truly powerful tornado could be a mile or more wide. It was a project I could work on later when I had the room.

For now, I went about crafting variations. First, I slowly added water to the base of the room. The water started to get sucked upward into the vortex, rising up into the tornado, and gradually spreading through out the entire structure. The structure of the tornado faltered for a moment before stabilizing again into a waterspout, the water rushing through the air at breakneck speeds.

I grinned, this was something truly dangerous.

I absorbed the water, and replaced it with sand. Tiny particles of sand were thrown outward and brushed against the edges of the tunnel, scraping against the stone. Sections were scored by the sand, only for the tunnel to repair itself a moment later. I added the water back in and the intensity of the scoring became even more intense. Every moment the terrific force of the water dragged the sand hard against the walls, scoring deeper lines than before.

I added other materials in various combinations. Sulfuric acid, glass (powdered and in shards), gravel, small pieces of steel, wood, and others. The explosion from a tornado completely filled with sawdust was awe inspiring. It also required I fix some very cracked walls. Each of these options ended up being something that I could recreate later with my environmental settings.

I added the more effective variations to the traps in the shaft. It would now be a permanent tornado, filled with different nasty substances.

If an acid waterspout filled with glass, followed by an explosive tornado wasn’t enough to stop someone from getting to me, then I don’t think anything I could do would matter to them.

I was inspired by the tornado to make a whirlpool.

A basic whirlpool was easier to make. I just poured two streams into an area, each one moving in the opposite direction of the other. Fortunately water was much easier to get moving quickly by just using gravity.

The two met in a central circular area that was moderately deep. One entered from the top of the circle and pushed the water the to the left, while the other entered from the bottom and pushed the water to the right. Excess water flooded over the sides of the cylinder, and as the two streams flowed in the middle began to rotate faster, until it pushed downward into a whirlpool. I added an exit for the water at the bottom center of the cylinder, then the whirlpool really started to get stronger.

In the end I ended up with a medium strength whirlpool in my options, along with everything below it. I figured I would could make a much stronger one later when I made the bigger tornado.

I was also inspired to make a type of trap. It used sand over smooth angled plates of stone. The plates were arranged downward in a circle, so when the bottom was removed the sand would spiral downwards like a whirlpool.

I ended up with a sand-whirlpool in my options. Not something I was expecting, but I would take it. I proceeded to make a mud version and gained the option for that too. I hadn’t expected those traps to give me environmental options, but I would take them.