Me, My Spirit, And I [Book 1 Complete]

The establishment of Shada's steel production factory and the scribe supply shop had allowed him to get a much better idea of the general state of crafting and material science on Sierrallas, at least in the area of Westlin, which was considered a backwater city on the very edge of civilization. General trade knowledge and basic techniques were surprisingly easy to obtain. Shada had expected more secrecy around crafting, but it appeared there had been very little innovation in the past thousand years and all the real secrets had leaked long ago.

This is how Shada found himself talking to a Professed Smith named Pavla through his business manager Kariss. She was one of the few people in his business enterprise that knew that the main ideas and techniques were coming from a spirit.

"So Smith Pavla I hired you for your knowledge of alloys and their uses. To the best of my knowledge, until the introduction of Shadow Steel, most things were made from copper alloys right?" Shada asked Pavla using Kariss as a medium.

"Indeed, iron was considered a poor man's metal. Cheap as dirt and easy to get, but not as useful or as easy to work as quality bronze. Bronze has always been easier to produce than iron let alone this new Shadow Steel, whichI have been working with for a few days now. It takes some getting used to and a bit of finesse in the working, but a Shadow Steel sword beats a bronze sword every time," Pavla explained while showing a bent and chipped bronze sword next to sharp steel sword. "As you can see it keeps an edge better, is harder, and everyone knows the iron that goes into it is more abundant than the copper and tin in bronze."

"Do you think people will be able to make steel on their own now that they know it is made from iron and charcoal?" Kariss asked for Shada.

"Not likely, at least not until someone figures out how them magic boxes work. I know flour and eggs go in a cake, but I sure as hell couldn't bake one myself. You need a recipe and that is all hidden in the magic boxes right now," Pavla said with a sigh.

"Tell me more about your normal smithing practice, eh?" Kariss asked/ordered. "Our benefactor has a rather unique perspective and invented the magic boxes as you call them. He has asked me to look into what materials are commonly available and how they are worked."

"Well I am a smith so I work with all kinds of metals, but bronze and brass alloys be my bread and butter. Those are combinations of copper and tin or copper and zinc. I have also worked with a bit o' electrum, which is made of gold and silver," Pavla said as he went on to explain the common techniques for processing the ore and extracting the raw metals for alloying.

Much to Shada's surprise a significant flaw in local thinking became obvious while listening to Pavla. Back on Earth smiths often discovered alloys by accident when refining ore would occasionally produce natural alloys due to impurities, but the prevalence of Skills and spells meant that the locals almost exclusively worked with highly pure metals. There was little room for the kind of happy little mistakes that lead to greater discoveries on Earth. In addition they used methods and techniques that were passed down unchanged for hundreds of years.

Shada knew that most ores contained multiple elements and that Sierrallas likely had some exotic materials due to the high Essence content of the world, but he suspected that there was a fortune in unknown metals being left behind in the slag piles of the metal refiners. One of the programming jobs John had been involved in was an inventory system for a metal manufacturer so he had a general idea of the composition of various ores. How many metals did the locals think existed, he wondered? He had Kariss ask Pavla.

"Well there is copper, tin, zinc, gold, silver, platinum, lead, mercury, and antimony. These are the nine known metallic materials found in nature. There are odder things found in Dungeons of course, but those are just variations of the others," Pavla responded.

Shada was somewhat stunned. He didn't know the exact number of metals nor could he remember the full periodic table, but he knew there were more than nine metals. He was also grateful for the automatic insight he got from Polyglotism, otherwise he would have no clue what materials Pavla was referring to in the local languages.

This conversation led Shada down a rabbit hole of thought about how to rediscover other important metals. He would need a lot of ore samples and some way to separate one element from another, but Material Mastery was uniquely suited to helping him with that. When he was working on steel he had learned that pure elements like pure iron or pure carbon had a distinct resonance compared to mixed materials like iron ore. He could use that to separate the raw iron from the ore and had even incorporated it in the ritual inside his black box, but he hadn't considered extending the procedure. It was time for him to return to the Mound for experimentation.

—

Shada once more enlisted the help of his grandfather in his next set of experients. While his eventual goal was to gain access to more metals he figured he could start with something a bit more fundamental.

"Walk me through what you want to do here Shada," Alexzandrous said.

"This is a rather simple experiment back on Earth, but magic is going to let us cheat quite a bit," Shada said as he drew a simple diagram of a water molecule on a chalkboard they used for planning. "Everything in nature can be broken down into smaller parts. These parts are called atoms on Earth. From what I understand this isn't unknown on Sierrallas, but has never been experimentally proven. Water is one of the simplest molecules and one of the most common. It is made from two gases, oxygen and hydrogen," Shada said as he labeled his molecule drawing. "The problem is that these two elements are tightly bonded and you have to break that bond to separate them. You also have to be careful when doing so as the mixture is explosive."

"Master Shada, are you saying that you can make explosive water?" Raelis asked.

"Not exactly; well actually there are ways to make water explode, but that involves heat and pressure and is a whole other process. For this experiment we are going to use an old trick to break water down into its individual components. Once I get a feel for them with Material Mastery and Essence Perception, I should be able to isolate the individual elemental resonance for oxygen and hydrogen," Shada said to the confused demon.

"As you say, master Shada." Was Raelis' only response.

"Focus Shada, how do you plan to break water?" Alexzandrous asked.

"Simple, I will have you create a current of electricity, or lightning as you know it, and pass it through the water. The electricity should break the bond between the hydrogen and oxygen in the water molecule and allow me to pick them out," Shada explained while coaxing Alexzandrous through the process. This was hardly the best setup for this experiment, but it was the best he could do with what was available.

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At first the experiment just resulted in hot water and steam. It took several attempts with different lightning spell variants before they found one that created the necessary reaction and caused the water to break down into its component elements. Shada used his Essence Perception and Material Mastery Skills to observe the process. Once he finally got a feel for the process and the two elements he was able to isolate a sample of oxygen and hydrogen with his Skill. Two invisible spheres of gas slowly formed above the bowl of water as Shada gathered hydrogen on one side and oxygen on the other. He didn't have any way to really store them, but he could hold them in place with magic.

"On the right is hydrogen gas and on the left is oxygen. Of course they are invisible gases, but hmmm, I can do this," Shada said as he Conjured light to highlight the two spheres. "If we mix these two gases." He moved the spheres until they mixed into one large sphere. "Then add a spark…" There was a whooshing sound as the hydrogen and oxygen ignited. Shada gathered the resulting moisture from the air and then recondensed it into water. "We get an explosion and pure water. In fact this water is likely the purest you are ever going to see."

"Seems like a lot of work to get pure water," Alexzandrous said in an offhand manner.

"That wasn't the goal. Water, oxygen, and hydrogen are everywhere. Now that I can recognize their Etheric signatures I can do this," Shada said as he used his Material Mastery to split the water into its component parts once more by Banishing one part of the molecule. "Most ores are oxides, so now that I know what oxygen is I can do other things like this…" A piece of rusty iron floated into the air before seeming to dissolve into iron dust as Shada Banished the oxygen into the Etheric Plane. Next he did the same with oxidized copper. "As you can see, by isolating and removing the oxygen I can refine quite a few materials, which should let me isolate more elements. There are a lot of useful metals out there that your Smiths don't know exist. Aluminum and titanium for example can make incredibly lightweight materials, but I am really curious what happens to aluminum with a hardening and strengthening enchantment. The real problem is that I don't know the ores that hold those elements so it will take a lot of experimentation to isolate them, but again I can create an oxygen Banishing Spell to allow others to break oxides down."

Both Raelis and Alexzandrou were shocked when Shada converted quartz sand into metallic silicon. From their perspective Shada had turned sand into a metal. The process of Banishing the oxygen from materials resulted in flashes of heat and light as the chemical bonds were broken. Shada tried to use Material Mastery to recombine the pure silicon back into silicon dioxide, but unlike steel, which was an alloy or mixture, Shada's skill couldn't do what he asked of it. He chose a different approach.

He took some sand then purified it by Banishing everything that wasn't silicon dioxide. With pure silica, or quartz, Shada proceeded to Shape the sand until through trial and error he created a smooth sheet of quartz glass.

"As you can see, once you know what things are truly made of it becomes much easier to use them in a variety of ways. Admittedly, my Skills are letting me cheat and avoid the complex heating and chemistry needed for these processes to happen without magic, but since I can do it with my Skills I should be able to translate the whole process into the Lingua Arcana to create new spells and rituals for manufacturing," Shada told the surprised duo.

"Shada, do you know how rare and expensive glass is? Glassmakers are rather rare as the whole process is rather finicky and you are saying you can create a spell to just churn it out like you did with steel?" Alexzandrous asked incredulously.

"Eventually, yes. I see no reason why I can't. Glassmakers likely have Skills that help with the manual glass making process, but with this I can skip that entire physical process. It will take a bit to refine and get everything right, but like iron ore, sand is pretty common. Glass, steel, and concrete made up most of the structures on Earth. With enough steel you can build towers of incredible height surrounded in shells of glass windows, but that is a far off dream," Shada said wistfully as he imagined owning his own skyscraper/wizard tower.

"Master Shada, what is concrete?" Raelis asked.

"Oh, I don't really know how to make that and I don't see it as being really necessary with Stone Shapers around. It is a mixture of cement, which has something to do with lime, and things like sand and gravel. You add water to make a slurry, which then hardens into stone. It is really useful, but again, Shapers can just mold regular stone into whatever form they like so there is little use for concrete and it is rather polluting to produce manually as is steel," Shada explained.

—

"What was it you were wanting to show me Pavla?" Kariss asked after receiving a message from the Smith.

"So I was going over those notes from our benefactor you gave me to work with you know and well one of the ideas has panned out better than I expected. See this bit of shiny metal? It's steel, but coated in a layer of zinc," Pavla said while holding up a shiny metal ingot. "Now what makes this special is that it doesn't rust like normal steel. The zinc coating protects it and that makes it extra useful if you catch my meaning."

After getting more details from Pavla, Kariss let Shada know during their regular meetings. "So Pavla managed to make corrosion resistant steel? Without the anti-rust enchantment? That will be useful. I will have to see if it is worth creating a new box for," Shada said as he used his senses on the coated steel. Analyze plucked a name from Shada's memories of Earth and called it galvanized steel.

—

Shada himself worked to add new products to the Shadow Scribe Shop, where he sold his ballpoint pens and specialized fast drying ink. The ink was too complex to recreate with a black box, but it was relatively easy for alchemists to produce once they knew how. However, the ink recipe was held under lock and key so it couldn't be reproduced easily.

"What are these metal bits called again, master Shada?" Raelis asked as Shada tinkered in the Mound.

"A paperclip, staple, and a stapler. They are office, or scribe, supplies used to hold sheets of paper together," Shada said to the curious demon.

"What of this wooden board, master Shada?"

"Oh that will be a clipboard. Another thing for holding paper in place while also providing a solid surface to write on."

"Why create these things, master Shada?"

"Well I am producing a lot of cheap metal and while most of it is being sold to Smiths for weapons and armor I don't want that to be the only thing my company is known for. There is a saying on Earth: the pen is mightier than the sword. Organization requires organizational supplies and that's what these are. Things that will help with the gathering and organizing information. I suspect in time they will become so common that scribes will wonder how they ever lived without them," Shada explained as he shaped bits of steel into new forms.

"What else do you have planned, master Shada?"

"Mainly convenience items and tools for now. Galvanized steel needles, scissors, nail clippers, pins, and other items are all on my list. They will be easily copied, but steel tools will eventually dominate the market and right now I am the only one with a steady supply of steel."

"So you are essentially trying to increase demand for your new metal and products made from it, master Shada?"

"Yes, someone will eventually figure out how to make steel manually or even magically, but for now I have a monopoly and plan to exploit it for as long as I can. Kariss is already talking about building Shadow Manufacturing facilities in other cities, but creating the enchanted blackboxes is slow and has to be done on site. I can only travel so far from Luca even with my new tricks before it strains us both." As he talked with Raelis, Shada bent and shaped metal into new forms.

—

At the Shadow Manufacturing companies headquarters in the Shelves, deep in the most secure part of the structure, behind the best wards Vanestra could construct, was Shada's perfect duplication ritual. Here he could recreate his inventions and have them sent to regular Duplicators working above for mass production using his steel as the raw material. Only those under restrictive Contracts could reach this area and some of the key components couldn't even be accessed by anyone that couldn't float through walls.

—