Chapter 507 (1/2)

The orange haired woman stood to thank her benefactor, shock in her eyes. She was a good 4 inches taller than him. The two flirted for quite some time, so much so that Randidly gave up on learning more about the creature, and walked back to the factory early, shaking his head. Besides, he had no interest in being pointlessly tangled up in more nonsense than he had to be.

He spent another week working, Extracting, Refining, and then mixing monster bones into the metals. It was relaxing, in a way, and his Skills slowly ticked upwards as he continued to work. However, his most recent batch had a slight problem: he had used a different type of monster bone, so the metal was slightly different.

This metal was more rigid, harder, and cracked rather than bent. Almost helpless, Randidly could only take it to Foreman Davey to be tested.

“Formula go awry?” The man asked curiously, regarding the metal. Randidly could do nothing but shrug.

Finally, after snapping two ingots, Foreman Davey seemed satisfied. “I can still give you the $2.50 for this. It’s more rigid, but it has good strength. I’ll take it all.”

So Randidly sold all 300 ingots that he had made, netting himself $750. Including the money he had from his previous sales, he had just below $1000. It was still quite a bit short of the amount required to buy preliminary citizenship, but it would close that distance fast if he dedicated himself to it.

Increasing the quantity would be easy. Randidly had no doubt that he could do almost 1000 ingots a day. But that might draw too much attention. Best to keep the quantity constant, while pushing the quality enough to make more money.

Four hours later, Randidly looked down at a metal ingot with chagrin. It was a dull red, but there were thin lines of emerald running through it, which seemed to pulse with a strange light. Randidly shook his head dourly. He had spent the last hour trying to do ANYTHING to it, but even with his prodigious strength, he wasn’t able to bend or warp it.

Acri could cut it, but barely. His blade got stuck into it after about a centimeter, and it would pull itself out and complain to Randidly. He shrugged helplessly. It was gratifying that the mixture of a Level 65 spine and a bit of his own blood would result in such a powerful metal, but it was… too powerful. Randidly stored it away and began to think about how he could pull back somewhat on the formula strength.

Instead of the potion brewing portion of the process, Randidly decided to focus his efforts on increasing the efficacy of the Extract and Refine portions. If he could strengthen the base materials, he wouldn’t need to work more ingredients into the formula yet.

Plus, the past two weeks of working with the metal further deepened his understanding of it. The more he saw examples of pure iron and steel, the stronger his image would be. So Randidly took two days to just extract and refine, working on forcing more out of his raw materials.

When his progress was frustratingly slow with just the iron ore, Randidly also began refining the bones he had Acri slice up. This avenue bore fruit. Not only did he gain quite a few Skill Levels in Refine for it, but it also seemed to condense the strengths of the prior two metals into one.

He was quite pleased when, after only 8 days, he returned to Foreman Davey with 100 ingots of the improved metal.

“You aren’t a lad that takes many breaks, are ya? Still, this is good. Better than good. I’d like to buy this for myself. $5 an ingot.” Foreman Davey said with a warm smile on his face. “Make sure you come to me with any more experiments, eh?”

Foreman Davey walked off, whistling in the smoggy and hot steel smelting factory. Randidly shook his head, filled with wonder.

He sensed the other approaching but felt no real need to do anything about it. It was only when a hand gripped his arm that he looked up, finding himself face to face with a shaggy looking man with deep bags under his eyes.

Even his smile felt tired and overused. “Congratulations brother. It seems like you’ve been doing a lot of business lately. It gives men who are down on their luck like myself some hope for the future. Say, since you’ve come into such a windfall, how about a night on the town? A friend of mine is throwing a party tomorrow, and I’m sure I could get you an invite. What do you say?”

Randidly’s immediate response was to open his mouth to say no, but he thought better of it. Although it would likely be a waste of time, low profile is key. From the way this situation was developing, he might be muscled more directly into cooperating with these seedy elements if he didn’t seem willing to play ball.