As the last few lessons approached, Shane suddenly grew busy. Fortunately, it was not because various factions had begun testing him or trying to recruit him after his advancement to master rank. Even the prince had remained silent. What kept him busy was the arrival of all the metals he had ordered from Northrend.
Several tons of metal ingots lay on the floor, occupying less than a cubic meter. Titansteel, cobalt, and Saronite ingots were arranged separately, gray, blue, and green, each little bar as charming as a piano key. Yet he frowned. There was far too little material for the sheer amount of experimentation ahead.
His initial experiments had to begin with testing magical conductivity. Endurance and structural rigidity would come later.
The Titansteel ingots lived up to their name, boasting magical conductivity unlike anything he had seen before. After inscribing a rune that altered the rules of gravity, Shane lightly tapped one with a finger and fed it a little arcane energy. It floated up with a faint hum. He had Kel'Thuzad to thank for sparing him so many detours.
Its endurance was excellent as well. He carried it with him for dozens of hours, continuously feeding it mana, without any decline in magical conductivity or signs of overheating. Its structural rigidity, however, shared the usual weakness of magical metals: it was soft enough to leave tooth marks in.
That was where the other two metals came in, providing structural support. He needed to smelt them into an alloy that balanced magical compatibility with structural rigidity, allowing it to support an enormous floating building.
He used the materials sparingly. By the time he finished his series of experiments, all his lessons had ended, and he had produced only a ring thirty centimeters in diameter. He named it the