Monarch of Solitude: Daily Quest System

Chapter 228 - Early Alchemy

When science met magic, alchemy was born. Rino never once gave up on making alchemy advancements. However, he wasn't expecting an alchemic development to occur at the beginning of a complex civilisation.

Extracting gold from the ores and refining them was a difficult process, enough to make Rino turn to magic and away from the tutorial for help. His first few attempts could only be classified as pathetic. 

Not understanding the reasons for metal merging or the uses of dark magic, Rino fumbled for a long time. The time extension was purchased but the promise was long forgotten.

By the time Rino succeeded, he had spent a huge amount of GF credits with only a fraction of what he had in his wallet. Yet, the amount of satisfaction he felt from understanding the concept of material reactivity, a new concept, told Rino that he regretted none of his decisions. Everything he did for the last fifteen days led up to this point as he stared at the beautiful mess of molten liquids with various colour differences.

The idea of using fractional distillation on metals was something Rino wasn't sure would work. However, seeing as he was already working on inventing a new type of talisman to help with ore extraction, he might as well do something similar. The extraction process for various metals took Rino several good hours, and he made huge batches of them for several tests. 

The process of grinding up stone and charcoal was further simplified when Rino put his automated hammer and grindstones in the stone cottage to use. The waterwheels needed a little more force to keep up with the workload, but Rino's subordinates learned quickly how to adjust the dam's flow.

With wagon after wagon of pulverised ores were transported back to the mines and handed over to the smeltery workers, Rino watched Kamiya take over operations smoothly, extracting metals from the ores as he designed new variations of the spell.

If there was one other thing RIno learned about dark magic, it would be the ability to command unsummoned subordinates hiding in his shadow to do things for him from the shadow realm. That did not cost mana, but it did take up mental stamina to listen to their communication and sustain the new space in his shadow sack for them to move inside and do what he needed.

Mutt offered to help Rino slather seed oil in the shadow realm on teleported metal that would be forcefully cooled using temperature manipulation magic according to Rino's theory. The concern about metals reacting with air immediately after being exposed to air and rusting or oxidising was so quickly resolved that Rino felt ashamed for agonising over it for so long.

Hence, the order to produce seed oil was passed down to the cookhouse. The ladies in the kitchen did not disappoint when they delivered a barrel of that stuff in two days.

Once preparations were ready, RIno started testing the concept of fractional distillation. He had no idea how dense the different metals were or why they reacted with each other. Hence, Rino could only experiment with the metals he knew would react with each other to understand the temperature differences. The easiest metals to test that out with were copper and tin due to their great difference in melting points.

The first experiment ended in failure when the tin completely dissolved into the molten copper. Rino had to put that bronze away and try with a new batch of different quantities when he realised that the copper no longer merged with the tin after a certain amount of tin.

This discovery made Rino come up with a new theory. Perhaps metals were like salt and water. After a certain amount of salt was stirred into a cup of water, no more salt would dissolve as the water could no longer hold any more salt. Metals might be the same.

However, a new discovery threw Rino off track quickly. He wanted to test the density of molten metals and chucked a handful of extracted metals into the forge to wait for them to melt, not caring if they merged with each other. However, the strangest thing happened inside, and Rino realised that not all metals merged with each other. In fact, some metals preferred merging with some metals in particular. Other metals like gold, silver and copper were not as reactive. They only changed under the intense heat after melting to mingle with other metals. Otherwise, even in their molten state, they remained undisturbed.

It also explained why Rino found it very difficult to break the silver and gold bonds. Even after heating the metals to an unimaginable degree, causing the silver to evaporate and turn back into a liquid form upon touching the cool sides of the glass, Rino could not break apart electrum, which was both a good and bad thing.

Needless to say, Rino modified the mana glass spatial chamber to tilt it in a manner that metals could drip into the casting outlet for pure metals. Almost all metals had a unique melting point that Rino learned to identify with brief estimations. For metals with very close melting points, Rino would use gravitational magic to alter their conditions to create more buffer in between.

As for the alloys that formed thanks to Rino's crazy pot of molten ores, He learned that seawater and air were great ways to help certain metals break apart into more natural forms. Using air burned with charcoal and pushed through the spatial chamber was also an excellent way of separating stubborn alloys.

Yet, none of what he did helped Rino fully isolate the gold he needed for smelting a baby bar. The divination spell was also tweaked many times for the distillation furnace's use. This experiment was the first true alchemic experience ever since his awakening in the world. Rino designed more familiar lab tools to understand alloys and spent most of his time identifying the behaviours of metals.

In Rino's darkest moment, he left the study and furnace room to brood temporarily in the place he often sought solace in. The stone plate library was full of undiscovered and untranscribed secrets. By some sort of fate, the stone plate that Rino had yet to transcribe cracked while he was brooding in the library. Investigating the loud disturbance, Rino discovered that there were records of how the dwarves processed their gold bars even without the aid of magic.

Wasting no time at all, the first thing Rino did was look for Quasimodo and instructed him to collect animal pee in barrels. If there was one thing the undead could not do compared to the dwarves, it was producing biological waste that was somehow used in important processes such as tanning leather and now, gold extraction.

The concept was simple, and everything else could be found in this rocky mountain terrain. Rino knew that salt was good for many things apart from cooking. However, he had no idea it was the secret ingredient used to separate gold from silver. Another major key player was burnt clay. Rino read that again to make sure they did not mean dried or fired clay. They literally meant burnt clay for some reason, and not one to doubt the professionals, Rino relayed his orders to the kiln in Noir Province.

Once the materials were gathered, the true gold separation chore began. According to Rino's understanding, the three least reactive metals in his mix of ores were copper, gold and silver. Unsurprisingly, they are the three metals with the highest melting points. Copper was easily removed, but the bronze alloy that remained proved a pain in Rino's neck when the copper and tin mixture refused to be separated like the electrum. The best he could do was drain them for now and scour the stone plate library for more information about undoing alloy mixtures and reverting them back to their base metals.

With a sealed boiling chamber, Rino ensured that nothing could escape. Adding the electrum mixture and bringing that to a molten state, Rino carefully added his crushed burnt clay, heaps of salt and barrel of animal pee. Then, he manipulated the gravitational field inside the sealed spatial chamber and watched alchemy magic happen.

The dwarves were right about the process, and Rino could barely restrain his excitement when two very distinct layers of molten liquid separated. The top layer was definitely silver, even if the colour was duller, but the bottom layer was exactly what Rino wanted. After nearly two weeks, he finally succeeded at smelting gold!

Once that mixture cooled enough, Rino let the gases escape and carefully tapped the metal, chiselling the gold from the silver portion and washing it. The gold's purity was close to perfect, and Rino left the resmelting of extracted gold to his subordinates while he did the last step required for silver.

Unlike the other undead, Rino could regenerate indefinitely using mana under sunlight. He waited for day to arrive before tossing the block of silver chloride under the deadly rays and watched as the colour changed to a shiny sheen.

Quickly, Rino wasted no time after the silver stopped reacting under the sunlight and grabbed it using shadow tendrils, storing it safely in his shadow sack.. All that was left to do was wait for the baby bar of gold to be smelted, and his daily quest would be completed.