Chapter 552: Water Hammers

About 10 minutes later, under Eda’s lead, Lucas and his group arrived at a separate building that was located about a kilometre downstream of the first, but long before they arrived, even through the thick forest, the racket was already quite shocking.

Upon entering the building, Lucas quickly understood why it was so loud; 3 giant hammers connected to very large waterwheels by a complex system of levers and fears were hard at work, lifting slowly before smashing down onto the raw iron ingots below.

Each time one of the hammers dropped, Lucas could feel it in his bones, despite being quite far away still. It was an impressive display of power, to say the least.

As for why this facility was located so far from the ironworks supply it, Lucas suspected it had something to do with the river’s shape and flowrate.

Waterwheels were essential to almost every step in this iron-making process as they allowed manual labour to be replaced by water-power, but there were only so many waterwheels one could built at a single spot on a river for numerous reasons.

And so, workers would load up the raw ingots from the ironworks and then ship them down-river to his hammering facility, where they were then unloaded and brought inside.

These ingots, which had naturally had to be cooled quite a bit before they could be safely transported, next had to be thrown into a massive central furnace to heat up again until they reached a high-enough temperature that they could be worked with.

Skilled workers then used long metal tongs to extract the heated ingots and bring them over to the water-hammers.

Blacksmiths controlled these hammers using something akin to a simple gearbox while directing the workers to manipulate the raw ingot being pounded using a set of hand-signals, as verbal communication in this place was basically impossible.

At the same time, lower-level labourers used brooms and buckets to clear away the impurities which were being beaten out of the ingots.

Once the ingot got too cold from being out in the open, it was put back in the furnace to re-heat.

The process was repeated until something Lucas’ otherworldly benefactor would call wrought iron or ’pure’ iron was produced.

Wrought iron had basically all of the carbon pounded out of it and was thus much softer and ductile. It also had a lower melting point and was far easier to shape than pig iron.

The whole process, from start to finish, was quite impressive, but unfortunately, the same properties that made wrought iron easy to work with, along with its lower overall strength and susceptibility to rusting, made it a poor choice for most applications.

All that time and effort for just a single ingot that didn’t have many uses might seem like a waste, but it was actually an essential step in primitive steel-making.

"What do you think?" Eda’s voice entered Lucas’ ears, obviously a result of her using her Soul Sense to communicate directly with him.

"It’s cool," Lucas replied, using the same method, though his message was much shorter as even after months of practicing he was still having some trouble properly expressing himself purely using Soul Qi.

Even so, Eda seemed surprised she had gotten such a clear response from the boy, causing her evaluation of him to rise even further.

Allina, of course, responded much more fluently, "A lot has changed here since my last visit; for the better, of course."

As for Adam and Marco, the former hadn’t even reached the Sea Establishment Realm, while the latter had achieved that much, but unlike Lucas, didn’t have much control over his Soul Qi. The two young men were thus forced to just give a thumbs-up sign.

Unfortunately for them, this was a gesture Lucas had taught them, so Eda didn’t understand what they meant, causing her to look funnily at them.

Allina and Lucas both laughed at this sight before the former proceeded to explain.

After trying it out for herself, Eda seemed quite taken with this gesture and grinned, giving Lucas a thumbs-up as well before leading the group out of the iron-processing plant and leading them towards a building she described as the steel-refinery, which was again further downstream.

.....

Stepping out onto the dock and boarding one of the small boats, Lucas thought of something and couldn’t help asking, "What do you do with all the waste and byproducts from these refineries?"

"Hm?" Eda tilted her head in confusion before replying, "We just dump it. It’s waste, after all. Why? Do you have some kind of other use for it."

"Uh..." Lucas paused, not quite sure how to answer.

From his inherited memories, he knew that there were other uses for this iron slag, but like many things, his mysterious benefactor didn’t have detailed knowledge about the subject.

This left the young boy in the awkward position of knowing something was valuable, but not knowing why.

Still, he figured it wouldn’t hurt to run a few experiments. You know, when he had... free time...

Well, I can just dump it onto someone else to look into, Lucas thought to himself rather irresponsibly as he replied, "Not yet, but I was hoping to take some with me and see if I can find something better to do with it than just throwing it out."

"Suit yourself," Eda shrugged, not really caring as, as far as she was concerned, the iron slag was just garbage to be disposed of.

If Lucas could come up with some way to use it, thus taking it off her hands or, better yet, paying her for it, Eda was more than happy to indulge his curiosity.

.....

The steel-refinery was a quite a bit further downstream, so even by boat, it took them over 15 minutes to arrive, and when they did, it was clear that this was a much more specialized facility.

While it couldn’t exactly be described as ’small’, it certainly wasn’t comparable in scale to the two previous refineries.

Hopping out of the boat, Lucas, Marco, Adam, and even Allina grabbed a few wrought iron ingots before heading inside.

Eda told them it wasn’t necessary for them to do such menial labour, but none of these 4 had any problems with helping out a little bit when it cost them nothing to do so.

Of course, most of the ingots were still unloaded by the usual work crews as Lucas’ group wasn’t so generous that they would make several round trips to haul out all the wrought iron blocks.

Allina technically could have carried the whole boat inside all by herself... but no one was expecting anything remotely like that from her.