What Sui Xiong wanted to do, of course, was not invent machinery that could operate steadily underwater.
With his somewhat meager engineering knowledge, making machinery work steadily underwater meant waterproofing it. Waterproofing was generally done with waterproof coatings, but for machinery meant to grind bedrock, no matter how much waterproof material was applied, the grinding parts would surely wear out quickly.
After all, bedrock was incredibly hard, no less so than steel. Sui Xiong truly could not think of anything that could grind it without having to worry about wear and tear itself.
Oh, there actually was such a thing: orichalcum.
Making a grinding machine out of orichalcum... It was not as though Sui Xiong had no way to find that much orichalcum, but he felt that if he really built such a grinder, the dwarves would not be happy when they saw it. They would be angry instead.
They would definitely call it "squandering Heaven's gifts," or something like that.
No, perhaps they would simply suffer cerebral hemorrhages or heart attacks. After all, the shock might be just a little too intense for them.
Orichalcum was more or less the hardest substance in the world. In most cases, only powerful gods like Sui Xiong could gather it, using it to forge mighty divine artifacts. Weaker gods could only obtain it through trade and similar means, and never in great quantities. Thus, many low- and mid-grade divine artifacts, even inferior divine artifacts, often contained no orichalcum at all. Even when they did, there was only a tiny amount, used in the most crucial places.
Mortals sometimes obtained small amounts of orichalcum through sheer luck, but they had no ability to process it and generally could only admire it as a gemstone. Long ago, a lucky powerhouse had once acquired a