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Chapter 3-Let's make Steel!

“Haaaaa, this is gonna be tough, isn't it?” Kylia grimace, It seems her understanding of trust between Valor family members was heavily biased towards “friendship.

At this point, Kylia had to face the cruel reality of the problem. "How long will we last?"

"We have five tonnes in storage…so about seven months." Roshi replied, "The data from last year’s census is as follows-

Total Population-9,000

Kylian Land Area-1,000,000 Km^2

Kylian GDP-1,620,000 Rupees

Kylian Revenue-81,000 Rupees

Total Kylian Debt--1,193,130 Rupees

People in the Armed Forces-50

Percentage of population who are in the Armed Forces-0.5%

Kylian Steel Production-2 tonnes per year

“While the numbers may sound good on paper, last year we consumed nine tonnes of steel, 78% of all that steel was purchased from Hyrule with the food that we produce.” Roshi stated.

“If we do not find a new source of steel soon,” Fermer replied with a sour look on his face. ”Both farming equipment and weapons will fall into disrepair, greatly weakening the national strength of the State.”

“We would need to increase the steel production of course, with more steel we could save more food and get rid of the reliance on Hylian steel, killing two birds at once.” Kylia pondered this and decided this may be the time to try out some new technologies she saw in her visions.

“We have a limited number of blacksmiths available in Kylia, not to mention feeding them, if too much of the population is not focused on agricultural activities it could spell famine and revolt among the populace.” Roshi shook her head with remorse.

With a gleeful smile on her face, Kylia refuted. “Who said that increasing production capacity requires more people? I tell you what, give me until tonight to draw something up that could rapidly increase our steel production. If our blacksmiths and masonries could make it, of course.”

“You…really think you can do this?” Fermer questioned.

Kylia straightened her back and replied confidently.”100% sure!”

Both subordinates shrugged their shoulders, not seeing any other options in such a crisis and exited the room.

Kylia soon left along with them, entering her office. Soon, she found some quills and parchment. Writing and drawing with neat strokes she quickly began designing what appears to be the Bessemer converter. She also made sure to design the blast furnace, just in case there's not enough pig iron to throw into the converter.

As the sky slowly darkened, Roshi arrived at Kylia’s desk. Kylia picked up a thick stack of all of her designs and handed them to Roshi.

“Go to both the Smithy, Masonry, and Workshop yourself, find those artisans, and let them build these drawings! Tell them I will personally give them a reward if they complete as fast as possible! Set a time limit for 15 days! Don’t let me down!”

Roshi, nodding her head with fury, quickly picked up all the designs, and rushed out the door without saying a word.

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Letting her leave, Kylia sighed, and quickly went to bed. No need to eat dinner, she had a big lunch anyway.

“This will be interesting.” she thought to herself before her weary eyes closed shut.

To her surprise it only took 14 days to construct both the blast furnace and the converter.

Kylia had taken the time to test her new abilities she had gained after the incident with the Autunite.

Punch through logs? Easy! Jump super high? Easy! Lift tons of weight? Easy! More resistant to attacks? Easy! Flying at Mach1? not easy but now doable.

If before Kylia was at human level strength then now her strength had rapidly increased to hulk like power, on par with her older brother Viskov.

She never really had the chance to test her powers out because of three reasons. The first being that she never had time to in the last couple of days because of the amount of work flying her way, especially with helping the artisans that would get stuck trying to read her modern designs.

The second reason why is a lot more complicated.

Valors are not magical beings. They do perform many feats that look magical but ultimately these could be explained down to the atomic, molecular and microscopic level, where everything can be broken down to make sense.

The weakness of Valors is that because they are not magical, they can’t create their own energy, just like all other species. Even plants don’t really create their own energy, they just use solar energy to drive molecular functions that eventually make ATP using acquired resources.

Same thing with Valors. They gain energy from the sun(sort of like superman but more scientific), from chemical energy in food, and sometimes older individuals even accidentally ingest radioactive substances to gain energy.

Because of this, the stamina of a Valor at top performance is restricted by the amount of energy he or she carries. When out of energy, a Valor will not die, and compared to humans, it is still a god-like existence, however, it will be severely weakened, taking several days to absorb enough energy before the body recovers back to near peak levels of fitness.

The third is the most embarrassing of them all.

As vast amounts of energy travel through both the blood circulatory system plus lymphatic system, it gets released through the skin and wings, enabling Valors to move at speeds much faster than the limit that flesh bodies could exert force. However releasing that much energy generates a lot of heat outside the body, and at traveling supersonic speeds, let alone cloth, I'm afraid even metal will melt under those extreme conditions. This is why Valors rarely use their maximum strength, because it really is too shameless to travel around without any clothes.

Under the joint collaboration between Masonries, Carpenters, and Blacksmiths, they had constructed the steel making plant right off the Roscof river, as the flow of the Roscof river is much stronger compared to that of the Rosa river.

Because the craftsmen were in a hurry to get the plant up and running, no building was constructed for the equipment, leaving the area open to the elements.

When Kylia came by to check out the new steel converter, Roshi and Fermer followed along.

“After we completed the construction of designs you had requested, we quickly ran out of both iron and steel metal,”Roshi warned. “If this doesn't work then we would have to salvage and strip down what we had painstakingly built for the last 14 days!”

“You should see the look on your face as you see tonnes of steel gold pouring down.” Kylia refuted.

“Dump the iron!”

Turning around, Kylia and her subordinates watched the start of an industrial behemoth roar to life.

As various artisans were still lifting up walls around the area, newly promoted steelworkers started performing various processes to start the Bessemer converter.

The workers dumped scrap iron from above, filling the converter. Then molten metal was poured into the converter through the top. Hot air was pumped through the bottom with a water wheel powered air pump.

Soon a blue flame rose out of the top of the converter, showing that impurities inside the steel were being burned away. After a bit of waiting, steel workers then tilted the brick converter 45 degrees, using iron hoes to scrape away floating slag. Finally the converter is fully tipped, pouring molten steel into a clay mold.

On the opposite side of the converter a blast furnace was being filled with coke and iron ore, after completing its first batch of pig iron, which it gave to the converter.

"This is a miracle!" Roshi looked at the machines cooling down, looked at the ingot of steel cooling down, and exclaimed: "It's definitely a miracle."

“Indeed, with this machine, who cares about the thoughts of those poor City States, soon we will be able to conquer the entire Rosa basin!” An old blacksmith exclaimed.

“While this machine is definitely a game changer for us Kylians, it is entirely reliant on our pig iron production,” Stalevi, an young Lavovy blacksmith, was the leader elected by all of the artisans to lead the project, glanced down at the tonne sized steel ingot. “At this rate we can only produce nine more of these tonne steel ingots this year with our current pig iron production, even with the new blast furnace.”

“This will be enough steel for the time being, we may even have a slight surplus of steel this year if nothing goes wrong.” Kylia chided him, “In fact we may have more pressing matters to deal with now.”

“Once news comes out ,we will be swarmed by enemies on all sides!” Kylia continued. ”We do have a non aggression pact with the other Valorian states. However the City States around us will take no hesitation to rip us to pieces.

“Without sufficient population, only by increasing the means of productivity of our people can we feed, arm and recruit more soldiers to fight for our state. I call this new term “Industrialization”.” Kylia made quote marks with her hands.

“But how?” Roshi questioned.

“In the next couple of months I will visit and give designs to each of the different Industries in the state. At most we could keep this a secret for five years.” Kylia stood up heroically. “In five years we must double the standing armed forces to 100. Only with sufficient strength can we protect our people!”

"Of course, my Valord, we wish to serve!" All answered in unison.