The hatchling is practically vibrating with excitement as she watches all the action and I can already sense the thought of running off to explore further forming in her mind. This little thing! She needs to chill out, yeesh! Rather than toss her to Invidia for time out, I head off her burgeoning escape attempt by offering to take her deeper into the nest so we can watch the process bear out further, an offer she readily agrees to.
It takes a little while to follow the looping tunnels, but eventually we make our way down to the area just beneath the bottom of the ore drop off point. I'm not sure what I expected to see, but the work room here is just as vast and oversized as the area above it. A blast of hot air smacks us in the face as we reach the end of the tunnel and find ourselves in the massive furnace room. Carvers are everywhere in here, running around, operating the many enormous blast furnaces and processing the slag and metal that comes out. It's bedlam filled with the roar of flame, the grind of metal and the crack of stone.
Trying not to let her get distracted, I herd the hatchling toward the bottom of the cone so we can watch the process from start to finish. I have to admit that I'm super curious to see it for myself, not just to show it to the new champion in the Colony. What my siblings have achieved just blows me away and I feel great pride at the incredible things my family has accomplished. It's not just killing monsters and growing more hatchlings, we build and create, design and develop! It's exciting and interesting just what we've become capable of and I'm eager to see more.
To my shock, I find that the ants have invented something else I never expected to see in this world without me knowing anything about or having any input. The opening of the cone is still several metres across and from it pours a constant flow of raw ore. This rock drops a short distance onto a rounded slope that kills the momentum and gathers the ore together before its deposited onto, of all things, a conveyor belt.
Have they invented rubber? Nope, that'd be way too out of their league, we haven't gone quite far enough as oil processing. Come to think of it, would oil even exist? Biomass gets absorbed by the Dungeon if it's left lying about for too long… and this world isn't exactly solid all the way to the middle, far from it… Forget it!
No, the belt they have made is actually stone. How does that work, you might ask? Magic. As in, literally, earth magic. A team of dozens of carvers work above and below the belt, using their earth magic to constantly keep the thin layer of stone moving until it reaches the end of the line, where the individual blocks drop down and rotate back the other way. Close inspection reveals that guide rails for the blocks have been carved on the other side, glowing brightly with powerful rune magic. Of course something like this wouldn't be possible without extensive enchanting. The belt itself is formed of very thin but highly condensed blocks of stone that slot together seamlessly, each one only thirty centimetres or so wide but several metres in length. The other shocking thing is the length of the belt itself, perhaps as much as a hundred metres long it extends out, carrying the ore in a straight line past numerous stations, each manned by dozens of ants.
In fact, the entire thing is positively bristling with carvers, quite a few of them on the belt itself, picking through the rock and using their nimble front claws to pick and shift bits and pieces as they continuously run forward to avoid being pulled back as if they were on a treadmill.
Close to the belt I can hear a constant rumble that ripples through the air and sends shivers through my antennae. It's pretty darn intense and gets the heart pounding. I nudge the hatchling and we shift over to the stations further down the belt, curious to see what they are about. At each one I can smell the carvers talking to one another as they work.
"There, there! Get it!"
"That's granite, no, no, that one! Send it back, we want iron ore!"
"Is that infused tin? Let it roll down the line, we just process the regular stuff. Read the mana signature already!"
Quite a few of them turn to speak to me as I stroll over and I'm forced to wave off the usual accusations of slacking and loafing as we watch them work. It appears each station is part of a furiously paced sorting process as the ants use their mana sense, eyes and highly developed stone magic to pick out the minerals and ores they want at their station, dragging the rocks in magically and depositing them into huge iron 'bins' that rest beneath them. I don't know nearly enough about geology to know which rocks are which, but the carvers appear to have no trouble discerning what they want, sweeping the ore they d.e.s.i.r.e off the belt with minimal trouble, leaving behind that which they don't need. If by chance they do end up snagging the wrong thing, there are carvers running the lip of the bin itself, inspecting every single stone that falls in to ensure the contents remain pure.
As we watch, the iron ore bin, definitely one of the more busy stations, in fact I think there are two of them, fills up and we get to see the next stage. After a final check, something is done to release the bin and a team of carvers use magic to direct it along a predetermined path. Further down the line, it enters an all new processing line, where huge numbers of carvers operate all sorts of gear. I decide to take the hatchling down the iron line to ask a few questions and run into one carver who's happy enough to answer them.
"We learned most of this process from the humans on the surface," she happily admits, waving one of her claws at the vast setup, "but we've taken many steps to refine it further, obviously."
She points to the bin that just arrived.
"The new ore is a mix of rock containing iron at various purities and we need to do a ton of work in order to get something usable out of it. Crush it, wash it, filter it, heat it and after that -"
"You get iron?" I ask.
She laughs.
"No! Then you have ore that's ready to smelt!"
Holy smokes.
"Sounds like a lot of effort!"
"It is!"
As I watch, teams of carvers work to tip the bin, which only now do I realise sits on hinges attached to a base so it can rotate without being tipped all the way over. The ore is dumped out into a basin whereupon the carvers operate huge steel 'hammers' that drop from overhead before being winched back up as other carvers 'stir' the jumbled rocks using their stone magic.
"After crushing them here, we'll wash them down to remove sand, then bake them to eliminate impurities, only then will they go into the blast furnace over there along with limestone to turn into pig iron. After that it gets refined further into steel. After that we imbue it to churn out charged steel."
"Charged steel?" I ask, confused. I don't think I've heard of anything like that.
The carver nods, excited.
"It's the latest process we've been working on. Normally to produce the truly good stuff, you need to find ore that contains magic already, right? We call that imbued ore and it's really rare! The carvers and mages got to thinking though, what if we could produce steel, regular, plain old steel, and then imbue it with magic!"
"Isn't that just enchanting?"
"No! This is putting mana and bonding it directly to the steel itself! When you take imbued steel and enchant it, you get double the effect of enchanting normal metal!"
Wow!
"That's crazy! So how's the process working?"
"Not… perfectly. We're still in the test and development phase. But we're getting closer to refining our methods! So far, our best has only been about a third of the mana level found in naturally occurring ore, but it's a heck of a lot better than normal steel."
