Chapter 550: Eda Mathews’ Ironworks

"Damn it, Kade! I told you to stop bringing outsiders around here!" A gruff female voice suddenly called out, drawing Lucas’ attention.

Looking over, he saw a short middle-aged woman with burly arms and short messy grey hair glaring grouchily at him.

Farah had a rather muscular build, but compared to this woman, Redwood Town’s best butcher looked positively petite.

"Master Eda!" Lucas’ tour guide, Supervisor Kade, hurriedly bowed before trying to explain, "These 4 aren’t outsiders, this is..."

"Bah!" The woman named Eda literally spat on the ground before waving her thick arm widely, "I don’t care who it is! No one enters the heart of Torren Ridge without my permission!"

"Oh? Even me?" Allina, who had so far been hidden from view of the older woman, stepped out and smiled.

"Little Allie!" Eda’s scowl instantly turned into a bright, happy smile as she rushed over and gave Allina a big hug, "It’s been too long! How’s the hammer I forged for you holding up?"

"Hahaha, still the same as always, Aunt Eda," Allina let out a rare burst of cheerful laughter as she returned the hug, "As for my hammer, it still smashes things up, so it’s all good."

"Heh, you really should have become a smith," Eda grinned, pulling back but still patting the much taller Allina on her shoulders.

Turning next to the two young men, who she quickly identified as blacksmiths, and the young boy who should have seemed out of place yet oddly didn’t, Eda asked, "So, who are the brats?"

Knowing the personality of this old woman, the one who had helped her out so much when she first joined the Raging River Legion, Allina simply smiled, "This is Adam, Marco, and Lucas."

"As in Braxton’s students and the Marquess’ Disciple?" Eda tilted her head slightly.

"Yup," Allina nodded.

Pursing her lips, Eda seemed to think about something for a moment, before nodding, "Fine, they can stay."

Shaking her head wryly, Allina figured she should try to move the conversation along, so she explained, "We’re here to check out the ironworks and see if there is anything we can help improve upon to boost production."

"Hmph, give me a big enough budget and I’ll improve things!" Eda, the chief blacksmith in Torren Ridge and one of 3 Spirit Blacksmiths under the Balfour Family’s employ snorted.

"That might just be possible," Lucas spoke up, smiling widely as he figured he had found another eccentric craftsman to work with.

"Oh, really? You can do that, kid?" Eda asked somewhat skeptically.

"If anyone can get money and resources for you, it’s Lucas," Allina chimed in from the side, while both Marco and Adam nodded along.

Seeing this uniform reaction, even from Marquess Balfour’s most trusted adjutant, Eda Mathews couldn’t help raising her brow slightly, "And how much, exactly, do you want to boost production?"

"10 times," Lucas blurted out without hesitation, before quickly adding, "to start with."

Unlike Head Treasurer Oxley, Master Eda didn’t show any kind of dramatic reaction, she simply thought about it for a moment then nodded, "You want us to start producing iron the same way those big nations do it, I suppose?"

This time, it was Lucas’ turn to be surprised as he promptly asked, "The Large-Size Nations are capable of mass-producing iron?"

"Mass-producing..." mulling over the term she was hearing for the first time, Eda nodded in approval, "an apt description. And yes, I worked at an ironworks in the Kore Sovereignty for a couple years and saw them churn out over a dozen times as much iron as we do by using much, much larger furnaces and equipment."

"Fascinating, I’d love to see that," Lucas mused, a thought soon coming to him, "Is that where Master Eda got the idea to set up this ironworks?"

"You’re a smart one, aren’t you, Lucas?" Eda grinned proudly, "That’s right. Naturally those stingy smiths from the Sovereignty didn’t share any of their core secrets with me, but I was still able to glean enough knowledge from my time there to figure out how things operated."

Suddenly, however, a frown appeared on the female blacksmith’s face, "That being said, as far as I could tell, the reason that refinery was able to churn out so much iron so quickly was also because they were using various Spirit Tools and had several secret ingredients that they added to the molten metal."

Letting out a wistful sigh, Eda shook her head, "Even if we wanted to replicate that process, we wouldn’t be able to."

"We won’t know until we try," Lucas argued, "Even if we can’t precisely replicate what those big nations do, we can take inspiration from their example and develop our own unique process."

Taking another hard look at the young boy before her, Eda couldn’t help liking him more and more as a cheerful, confident expression soon returned to her face, "You’re right! I haven’t spent the last 80 years researching better refining methods to be stopped now!"

"In fact, I recently made an interested discovery!" Eda continued, turning on her boot-heels as she beckoned to Lucas’ group, "Follow me and I’ll demonstrate."

"Ahem, since Master Eda is willing to show you around personally, I shall take my leave," Supervisor Kade bowed politely before swiftly retreating, relieved he no longer had to play tour-guide to people who could immediately have him fired for any mistake he made.

.....

As the group of 5 walked through the giant iron refinery, Lucas couldn’t help asking a few questions about what was going on.

His inherited memories contained bits and pieces of knowledge about the process, as well as terms like ’blast-furnace’, ’Bessemer process", and "electric-arc-furnace refining’ just to name a few, but all of this seemed to be anecdotal information without any real technical details.

It was similar to how Lucas’ benefactor seemed to know about steam engines, but very little related to how they actually worked or were built.

In this regard, a Master Smith like Eda Mathews, with decades of experience, was definitely better informed than he was. What’s more, she seemed eager to share her knowledge with anyone willing to listen.

Over the next few minutes, Lucas learned how each of the furnaces in this refinery was doing something Eda referred to as ’smoking’ the iron.

Raw ore and charcoal were added to these furnaces, then they were lit on fire using more charcoal or coal.

Bellows pumped fresh air into the furnaces to heat the ore, though it never got hot enough to melt, and ’smoke out’ some of the unwanted impurities and concentrate the desired iron.

The process lasted roughly 8 hours, and once it was completed, a chunk of raw iron and some solid impurities were extracted from the bottom of the furnace.

This chuck was generally quite small, about 100 kg per furnace, hence why there were so many of them in this ironworks.

Even after this initially processing, the chunk of raw iron needed to be heated and hammered repeatedly to remove the remaining unwanted waste before you wound up with a relatively pure iron.