Chapter 227: Bold Gamble (1/2)

Ideally, extracting gold and silver should take over a week to process both ores. Even with gravity manipulation, Rino found himself at a dead end. He read the tutorial several times but found out that he did not have the materials required to extract gold properly.

Gold was more problematic than silver that could be extracted easily by crushing, heating, and cupelling over grounded bone ash.

Rino worked on the silver and within fourteen hours, the first silver baby bar was ready. Naturally, Rino wasn't inhumane enough to require the bone ash of his subordinates or hunt animals for them. He simply plucked his ribs and ground them into the necessary material. Thankfully, nobody saw him break his own bones for the sake of smelting silver. The subordinates he worked more closely with would have offered their bones instead.

The bone ash successfully removed all the impurities from the silver ore harvested. Instead of receiving slag, Rino found out that the impurities fell into the bone ash pile and formed a new waste material. All that was left buried in the exhausted waste was a very pure silver metal. It wasn't wholly silver, but it was close. Rino could tell because it sparkled.

Sadly, the same could not be said with gold. The tutorial wasn't very helpful in explaining the extraction process. Rino also did not have most of the materials required for easy extraction. He did not have the right environment either.

Things like mercury and cyanide were things that Rino knew posed huge dangers to the living. They are both poisonous and toxic substances that also do great harm to the environment. Rino saw how no plant life could ever grow on that land ever again for any mining site that used mercury. Cyanide in the soil meant that the plants that grew there became poisonous, and animals that ate them quickly perished, toppling the delicate ecosystem.

The other method he could extract gold from its ore was by cupelling, similar to the silver extraction and refinement method. However, when Rino tried, he found that there was a problem. The gold he extracted was mixed with silver, so the colour was closer to silver than gold, even if there were gold flecks inside.

The new alloy formed naturally by the mixture of silver and gold could be stronger than pure silver or gold. The metal was stronger than bronze and steel in some ways, but more importantly, Rino knew they could act as lightning mediums. He tested both metals in his previous life and decided that while they were good lightning mediums, they melted after one strike.

Maybe this new alloy could be the material he needed to make that breakthrough. Rino decided to name it electrum for now but left the alloy aside. He still had to find a way to obtain pure gold for that baby bar because the electrum extracted after cupelling did not count.

As he retreated to his gloomy corner to reflect on what went wrong and how he could rectify it, Rino left the magical furnace's operation to Kamiya to take over in his control room. The killer rabbit monsters learned the art of smelting very quickly and coordinated the new batch of gold ores to be smelted. As it was, they might be better panning for gold at the river and smelting the nuggets into a bar instead. That might be quicker.

Exploring his other options, Rino eyed the GF credits in his virtual wallet. There was no shortage in GF credits because his subordinates dutifully fulfilled the offering quota, even exceeding it.

Not watching where he was going, Rino bumped into a miner scurrying to one of the newer shafts. The little killer rabbit dropped the bag, and Rino apologised absent-mindedly, helping them to pick up the things he scattered.

Rino picked up a locating talisman that he made for the miners to locate specific ores among the scattered objects. It was a simple deviation spell that Noir taught him and the item made Rino's mind work on overdrive even after the little miner went along on his way after gathering the items.

Even if the talisman could locate ores, it was still full of flaws that Rino had not tweaked. If only there was a way for Rino to create something similar to the talisman that worked in the magic furnace to locate specific metals to be extracted from the conglomerate mess.

That's it! Deciding on this direction, Rino decided that if he could not figure out a way to replicate his alchemic success using dark magic from what he learned in the previous world over the next five hours, he would buy a time extension from the reward shop.

With haste, Rino returned to his study and got crafting.

The concept that he created was that every metal was unique with something like a special composition code that would reject other metals, like how unrelated blood would repel each other.