After completing the iron and steel baby bars, RIno checked his daily quest quickly to see if the system accepted such bar sizes.

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Daily Quest #29

Objective: Smelt some Ores

Time Limit: 5 Days

0/1 Bronze Bar

1/1 Iron Bar

1/1 Steel Bar

0/1 Silver Bar

0/1 Gold Bar

Tutorial here.

Reward: Smithing Skill

Penalty: Deduct 24 hours of sleep upon failure and [Curse of Overtime] until quest is forcefully completed.

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Yes! Pumping his arms out in joy in the control room, Rino ordered the next materials to be shovelled into the magical furnace.

This time, he was reminded of an old tale about a bronze axe, a silver axe and a golden axe.

Back in his previous world, there were many folk tales that nobody knew were true or false. Most times, nobody cared. After all, folk tales were told to teach children certain things, and it was a convenient way for adults to reason what they did without understanding why they practised such a culture.

Superstition was strong in the village folks and less common within the cities or capital when there was more diversity and people from all sorts of places sharing what they believed to be right. 

The story of the bronze, silver and golden axe was the same. Rino heard it from one of the villages he stopped by for a night on his way back from a tiring mission. It was the village of truth, and the story spoke about a nymph from the forest and a poor woodcutter.

Basically, the woodcutter lost his bronze axe in the forest in a river, and a nymph who was watching him for a long while had a crush on him. To test if this man was worthy of becoming her husband, the nymph fished out an axe made of silver and placed it in the woodcutter's path when he was not looking. 

The humble man saw the silver axe but left it alone instead of claiming it as his property and continued searching for his bronze axe. Unconvinced that the man was truly righteous, the nymph once again placed another axe in his way secretly to observe his reactions. This time, it was an axe made of pure gold.

If the man took the golden axe, he would be a rich man who could afford many acres of land and marry five wives without a problem for the rest of his life. However, the poor woodcutter saw the golden axe and left it there. He continued to search for his dull bronze axe, and that was when the nymph gave him her heart entirely. She presented him with the bronze axe he was looking for and asked why he did not take the first two axes as a replacement.

The woodcutter simply replied that he would not take what did not belong to him. His earnest attitude won him the nymph, and they spent the rest of his human life peacefully at the edge of the forest in the humble log cabin.

Of course, the second part of this story said that the woodcutter did exactly what he did, not because he had no greed but because he knew about the nymph and staged the show for her. Nobody knew if it was true or false, but most parents only told their children the first part when they were young to encourage honesty and integrity. Only after the children reached adulthood did they learn from the older adults about the second part of that story just before they left the village to visit bigger towns. The second part of the story was to teach them cautiousness against evil which could be lurking behind good acts.

To cast bronze, Rino took a look at the tutorial. There were two metals that he had to extract and refine before bronze could be made. The two metals were namely tin and copper. The weightage of these metals required was nine parts copper and one part tin. Rino tried to imagine the amount of ores he would use to cast a bronze baby bar and decided it might be easier to make a load of excess instead. He did not feel like adding too many raw materials into the huge spatial chamber as it would take too long. Left with less than a hundred hours to finish the last three bars, Rino decided it would be wiser to keep to the same amounts he used earlier. Even after making the baby iron and steel bar, there was still enough molten steel to pour into a tool mould. Rino told the trolls working in the collection chamber to decide what was suitable.

Keeping to that volume of five shovelfuls or raw ore for copper, Rino noted that one shovelful of tin would be more than enough to form that bronze bar. The only thing he wasn't sure about was how he could control the weightage of metals to melt together into a bronze bar. Perhaps he had to refine both copper and tin separately and transform them into baby bars first before he could determine how much tin and copper he should remelt into bronze.

Thinking about it gave Rino a headache. Unlike his advanced alchemy lab in the previous world, Rino did not have sufficient measuring instruments to help him determine the right proportions of spices, metals and even liquids in this world. It was rather tricky.

Agonising over this for a while, Rino decided that he would have to make more copper and tin baby bars than he initially wanted to. It was probably too late to ask Ubel to start making new moulds or measuring the volume of tin collectable in other types of moulds. If he could not decrease the quantity, Rino could only increase it to find out.

Thankfully, he made the baby bar moulds. If they did not exist, Rino would have to make nine full bars of copper and one full bar of tin. In baby bar measurements, that would be forty-five baby bars of copper and five baby bars of tin. In Rino's dictionary, that was too much work, and he didn't want to do that. Luckily, making nine baby bars of copper meant he wasn't even casting two regular bars of copper. Honestly, if this did not help him save time, Rino would give up and purchase a time extension. They might not be able to make it for casting gold and silver if this failed.

Working against the clock, Rino yelled orders from the control room to start pouring in more shovelfuls of copper. They needed more copper than tin and at this stage, more was probably better than less.

Roasting the crushed copper for a while, Rino read that extracting tin in a blast furnace was slightly different from extracting iron. Instead of adding crushed charcoal and limestone, extracting copper used charcoal but also sand instead. Rino did not know much about where to get his sand, but he supposed if sand were crushed rocks, he could just reuse the plenty of slag bricks he had. They might not all be sand, but there was plenty of that to make things happen.

After the initial extraction was down and a new kind of slag drained, Rino looked at his copper matte liquid and wondered what he should do to purify it.

As he read the tutorial, the magic slowly happened, and Rino looked up to see a rather lovely orangey molten metal in the chamber. All it took was a little more air and time to bring the matte copper to a boil. Rino quickly told the trolls in the collection chamber to pour the copper liquid out. They might make slightly more than what he wanted, but more was better than less.

With such a surplus of copper, Rino wondered what he could do after the quest was completed. There were not many uses of copper in his previous world. Copper was not used for many things because iron was more favoured, although the empire made all their arrowheads from copper. It was possibly the cheapest metal to acquire and process, so not many people mined it. Copper wasn't profitable,, and Rino remembered that the only big consumer of copper was the magicians' tower. He used a lot of copper for his alchemy simply because they did not rust easily and had a high heat conductivity. Many of Rino's flasks were made out of copper because glass was simply too expensive and fragile.

As the refined copper was turned into baby bars, Rino checked his time. He could make it as long as bronze was a success. Extracting gold and silver was slightly simpler. They did not require mixing like bronze either. Gold and silver might dull over when in the air,, but they certainly did not rust like iron. Rino could deal with that.

Tin was easier to extract and refine because Rino did not add as many materials inside the spatial chamber. Done in less than half the time it took copper, tin melted rather easily. According to the tutorial, he only needed to use charcoal to extract it from the ore.

When tin was extracted, Rino realised a new problem. Unlike copper that took a long time and extremely high heat to melt, tin melted quickly. Rino did not even need to use the gravitational manipulation magic in the spatial chamber when tin turned into a silvery-white liquid that floated mostly at the top of all the other solids stuck at the bottom.

Faced with a new issue, Rino told the trolls to ready the moulds for pouring out the molten tin. It might be a good thing Rino built his magical furnace by parts. This trick would have been impossible to pull off if the glass chamber could not be detached from the main funnel.

Using shadow tendrils, Rino carefully poured the molten liquid into the baby bar moulds and considered the toughest part of this mission a success. All that was left to do was get the right amount of tin and copper remelted into this huge glass forge and turn that into bronze. He could still make it before the deadline.