“Whoa!” The word leaked out. Given what I was looking at, my reaction was understandable. The storehouse was spacious and filled to the brim with sparking and bright thundercite.
The rows of the electric stones, each of them separated by a foot or two, was a sight to behold. They were all on the floor. Was this because Graste didn’t want them touching anything else? While it was a beautiful sight, if the sparks hit anything flammable there would be an immediate fire. It was a dangerous setup, to say the least.
Dad gripped his head and Marie gripped my arm. They stared openmouthed at the thundercite. Mom looked unsettled and Graste gave a twinge of an anxious smile.
Yeah, what the heck could I do about this?
I mean, I knew it would be nuts, but it was a different matter to see it for myself. This is nuts. Totally nuts! This was so nuts that the only word that came to my mouth was “nuts,” which is nuts.
“They’re a total nuisance,” Graste said. “I wouldn’t mind so much if they just glowed all night, but they make a lotta noise too. The owner said I gotta do something about the sound in the next three days or I’m outta here. There’s nowhere else to go.”
“So, we have three days?” I asked.
“Yup. Well, if we can’t come up with nothin’, I’ll just have to return the thundercite to the mines. That’ll mean I must pay the mine fees again, then this will all have been for nothing. I’ll be even deeper in the red. I haven’t been opening my shop much ’cuz I’ve been spendin’ all my time on this.”
I didn’t mind the strict deadline. That just meant I wouldn’t have to waste too much time on this. Even with that bit of silver lining, this was still a rough situation.
Hearing Graste had a hundred pieces and seeing those hundred pieces were totally different things. That was a lot. At least, the largest pieces were still small enough for me to pick up, I guess.
I looked around the warehouse. You never knew where a solution could come from. I needed to be as observant as possible. Eventually, a question popped up.
“Why did you separate the thundercite pieces from each other?” I asked Graste.
“Well, y’see, somethin’ kinda special happens when you put ’em too close together.”
He retrieved a towel that hung on the wall. I could see that he had sewn pieces of mica into the cloth. He had made a clever improvement. He took the mica towel in his hand and used it to push a piece of thundercite closer to the one next to it. As he did so, a huge burst of electricity released. The stones reacted to one another and shared their electric current between the two pieces. It was like an electric rope had tied them together.
“This much electricity is pretty dangerous, innit? So, I’ve spread them out like this.” Graste said.
It was an electrical reaction. Thundercite didn’t just produce electricity in isolation, but electricity that would interact with other pieces of ore. The pieces let off electrical discharges intermittently, but when they were near another thundercite ore, the electricity flow stabilized. It looked like an arc discharge. I assumed that the voltage wasn’t particularly high, but it would be enough to leave a burn if you touched it.
“Did you try smithing with the thundercite?” I asked.
“Yeah, I did,” Graste said. “I tried to forge a piece. It melts at a low heat, or at least the kiln in my shop was enough. There was a little bit of a problem. I’ll show you back at my shop, c’mon.”
There was some more information for me to learn. At Graste’s shop, which seemed to be temporarily closed, we entered the dimly lit store and went into the back room. I saw a furnace installed with a large smelting kiln, various and well-used tools and hammers hanging on the wall, then a large stack of bricks in the corner.
Graste grabbed a metal piece from the table and handed it to me. It had a faint blue color and was lighter than expected. It didn’t feel like metal at all.
“This is what happens when you smelt thundercite and forget it.”
It seemed mundane for having come from thundercite. It was a blueish metal, that’s it. With its smooth surface, it seemed like pure thundercite. Graste had done a great job forging it. However, it had lost all its special properties. It didn’t have a trace of electricity sparking from it.
“Does this have an electrical reaction?” I asked. “Or do multiple pieces together react like the thundercite?”
“Try for yourself.” Graste handed me a second piece.
Judging from his reaction, he must’ve already tried it. I touched the two pieces together, but nothing happened.
“Can I ask how you forged this?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure,” Graste said. “First, I broke the thundercite apart with a hammer and then put it in the smelting furnace. I added a few special materials, made a wood fire, then removed the impurities from the melted mixture. I poured it into a mold before it hardened. It still wasn’t smooth at this point, so I cleaned it up with more forging and a hammer. It got stronger, but it’s still inferior to other metals.”
“At what point did it stop conducting electricity?”
“When I first broke it up. The pieces only had a little bit of spark left. It probably stopped sparking altogether after I melted it down. I did everything all in one go, so it’s hard to say. Maybe it was the melting, or removing the impurities. It could have also been the stuff I added in.”
The process sounded like how pig iron was made. If we wanted to exhaust all the possibilities, we could probably try different forging methods. Given the bricks, he must’ve had a bloomery iron smelt. I doubted that a one-man smithing operation had anything like a blast furnace.
If there was still some electrical response when the thundercite was broken apart, that meant its electricity was lost at some point afterward. It made sense that the electrical properties wouldn’t survive the heating and smelting process. At the same time, I didn’t know what other forging process there could be in this world other than melting the ore down. Regardless, I could safely assume it had to do with the heating.
Heat…fire? That suggested Flare. Flare was fire magic produced by the electrical spark of a flint. Besides a bright blue flame, it was like normal fire.
But what was “normal fire,” anyway? Flare’s fire was magical: it was bright blue and fueled by mana. I wasn’t adding the mana to an already-burning fire. No, I was literally using the mana to light a flame that would burn until it consumed the mana and floated away.
The faintest lightbulb flickered in my mind. All right, it’s worth a try.
“Hey, Dad.” I took out my portable flint and gestured at him.
He watched me for a second, then nodded. “All right, sure.”
I was pleased he caught on so fast. It saved me the trouble of explaining my thought process.
“I want to try something out,” I said, turning back to Graste. “Can you set up the forge?”
“Sure, but what for?”
“You’ll have to wait and see.”
Graste gave me a puzzled glance and got to work. Once he filled the furnace with charcoal, he came back over to me.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“I’ll light the fire. Once I do, start smelting.”
“That’s it?”
“Yep. I have no clue whether it will work or not.”
This was a simple experiment of trial and error. I gathered mana in my right hand and struck the flint. I shot the fireball into the furnace, engulfing the burning wood in a blue flame.
“Holy cow!” Graste gasped. “Wh-what was that?”
“Graste, please start your work.”
“Just hang on second! Am I supposed to pretend that didn’t just happen? What did I just see? Fire shot out of your hand!”
“It’s called magic,” I said.
“M-magic?”
Dad nodded and explained it. He didn’t want other people to know about magic, but I guess he didn’t mind telling a good friend like Graste. Graste looked shaken after Dad finished talking.
“Th-that’s unbelievable! Gawain and Shion, you have both known about this all along?”
“More or less,” Dad said. Then they exchanged a look. I missed the meaning behind it, but after a moment, Graste let out a tense sigh and grimaced.
“Well, I guess I have to believe my own eyes and have to believe you. Magic, eh? So, you’re wondering if things are gonna be different when you try and forge using the magic fire?”
“I really don’t know,” I said.
“Huh? You don’t?”
“No. I’m still researching and haven’t properly developed magic yet. This is just a test. If this doesn’t work, then I’ll have no choice but to use the unforged thundercite. From my current understanding, that seems very difficult.”
I didn’t see any way to make a practical tool out of a small piece of thundercite, particularly because the electrical discharge grew weaker the smaller the ore. It needed to be at least as large as my hand to carry a suitable amount of electricity. I was basically thinking that if you could produce a more pure, refined thundercite metal, then you could have more electricity in a smaller size. That would make it a lot more practical for use.