Watching Schiller build up the furnace, Strange could not help saying, "This game is really losing out by letting you play for free."
About half an hour earlier, Schiller had unpacked all the crates and sorted the materials into categories. Then, working with Wanda, he had dismantled the original fireplace.
The fireplace's structure was simple: flames below, with a long flue above. The smoke from burning firewood could be vented outside through the flue.
As everyone knew, the most primitive method of refining minerals was to burn them with fire. But there was a particular art to burning. Without modern machine tools, the most efficient method was a primitive blast furnace.
A primitive blast furnace was, in fact, just a very tall chimney built from scratch. There was no need to explain the precise principles; in any case, it looked much like a fireplace, and this one could be used with a few modifications.
Because the ward was rather old, it used an old-fashioned brick fireplace. It was actually very easy to dismantle—once a few bricks had been knocked loose, the rest posed no problem.
The two of them broke apart the outside of the fireplace together, while Schiller used the materials they had bought to turn it into a somewhat crude primitive blast furnace.
But its appearance did not really matter. The most important factor in blast-furnace ironmaking was temperature. As long as the temperature was high enough and the ore placed inside was sufficiently pure, metal could be smelted.
In truth, Schiller suspected that the flames alone were hot enough to smelt metal directly, even without making a blast furnace. The real reason he had gone to so much trouble was to warn the monster behind the fireplace wall: the First Industrial Revolution was about to begin in