The Venture Company's goblins were no fools. They would not make a losing deal twice, and the steep price of ninety gold coins had undoubtedly signed the death warrant for any future coal trade with them.
Of course, wherever there was profit to be made, there would be no shortage of buyers.
The Venture Company's refusal to buy coal from Rowan's mine did not mean the Steamwheedle Cartel, the Bilgewater Cartel, and the various neutral goblin trading organizations had no interest in working with him.
But all that was for later. Rowan's first priority was to get the ships that had sat idle in the shipyard for so long moving again.
Ninety gold coins were enough to keep the mine running for several months. Rowan told Kande to raise the miners' wages by 50% so they could concentrate on mining.
Coal was the main fuel for steam engines. Once the ships in the shipyard were fitted with them, the mine's weekly coal output would fall far short of what they needed to sail.
Rowan had two reasons for asking the old butler to raise the miners' wages. The first was to motivate the workers; the second was to change the townspeople's entrenched views of mining.
In Morris Town, besides diligently farming the land, mining was another good job that could give a family a comfortable life.
The old butler watched Young Master Rowan and his paladin recede into the distance. Clutching the heavy gold coins in his hand, he said with feeling, "We have money now, money! The good days are finally coming to Morris Town."
Byron had spent the past few days preparing to build a smithy. Ever since Young Master Rowan arrived in Morris Town, he had been dealing with these blacksmiths.
For some reason, Morris Town's blacksmiths were rarely in their smithies, so Byron had to go looking for them in the fields every day.
Eventually, Byron could no longer stand chasing down the blacksmiths every day. He took out the gold Rowan had given him and paid each blacksmith one gold coin as a deposit.
Previously, Byron had kept invoking Young Master Rowan's name to intimidate the blacksmiths, but they would only visit the town's council hall at noon before sneaking away in the afternoon.
Now that each had received a gold coin, the blacksmiths obediently followed Kobi and his son in preparing to build the smithy.
They discussed it all afternoon and finally settled on the cost of construction.
Seventeen gold coins in total-and that was after Byron had haggled the price down several times.
Damn it, getting kickbacks out of the Norwington Family was no easy task. Byron felt miserable. He had spent so many days running around and had not pocketed a single day's kickback.
The blacksmiths were professionals. With the gold Byron provided, they began gathering materials to build the smithy.
Once preparations for the smithy were underway, Rowan reported the results of the planning to Rowan. Rowan provisionally chose a small hill south of the shipyard as the site. It was right beside the shipyard and also served as the stockpiling area for coal brought to the harbor. The smithy would also be close to the town's residential area, making the blacksmiths' commute convenient.
Before Leonard returned to Morris Town with the iron ore, Rowan checked the smithy's construction progress every day, then wandered around the shipyard for a few circuits. When he finally ran out of things to do, he went back to the council hall to sleep.
Other people get endless quests and mobs to fight after being transported to another world. I get to sit around at home every day with nothing to do. Fuck, how am I supposed to live without a phone or a computer?
Reality was far crueler than he had imagined. Life after being transported to another world really was that plain, uneventful, and tedious.
Only when Leonard returned to Morris Town with the wagon convoy did Rowan become busy again.
The old butler and Leonard took the iron ore to Whitewater Forest to be smelted.
Rowan needed close to half a ton of iron ingots. Based on the blacksmiths' experience, the smelter in Whitewater Forest would need three days to produce half a ton of iron in lumps.
The smelter's blast furnace could not refine the ore, so Rowan still had to transport the smelted iron ingots to the smithy for further processing.
Only after the blacksmiths melted and hammered the iron ingots to remove the impurities from the pig iron could they make iron plates suitable for Rowan's use.
Rowan visited the Whitewater Forest smelter on its second day of operation.
With practiced ease, the blacksmiths fed ore into the furnace opening, while their young children worked the bellows to keep pumping air inside.
Although the blast furnace used to smelt the iron ore was a crude, earthen one, the blacksmiths' smelting techniques were by no means backward.
The coal layer went at the very bottom of the blast furnace, with crushed iron ore and powdered carbon placed above it. This produced ingots that were more uniform, stronger, and less prone to fracturing.
At Ashvane Munitions in Kul Tiras, the blast furnaces used to smelt iron and steel generally relied on high-temperature inscriptions composed of fire elementals as their heat source to melt the ore. This omitted the chemical reaction between the iron ore and the carbon monoxide produced by coal, forcing Ashvane Munitions to use more processing steps to obtain higher-quality pig iron.
Of course, compared with Ashvane Munitions' comprehensive smelting process, Morris Town's crude blast furnace was still underdeveloped. Although the blacksmiths had devised a fairly mature smelting process using coal, Rowan remained doubtful about the quality of the cast iron it produced.
To save raw materials, Rowan decided to build a small steam engine first to test the waters.
If Morris Town's craftsmanship really could not meet his requirements, Rowan would have to find another way. After all, he still had twenty thousand gold coins on hand.
That evening, Rowan drew a simple schematic of a steam engine on paper.
Just as Rowan was considering how to produce uniformly shaped rings of iron plate to build a round cylinder, a glimmer of magical light appeared out of nowhere in his room.
Blue-violet magical energy wove a shining magic circle that hovered in midair, with intricate magical symbols drifting around its edges. As time passed, the faint purple circle grew clearer. Then a distinct sound of impact rang out, a dazzling white light flashed, and a beautiful young woman stepped out of the circle.
"Jaina? What brings you here? Was that teleportation magic just now?" Rowan asked in surprise, looking curiously at the magical glow still floating around Jaina and clicking his tongue.
Seeing how much thinner Rowan had become, Jaina's gaze softened considerably.
"Yes. This was my first time using a long-distance teleportation spell. Fortunately, it worked."
"Could you teach me that spell?" Rowan considered teleportation spells the most practical magic in Azeroth. They were the perfect way to catch a ride without buying a ticket.
Jaina rolled her eyes at Rowan. "With long-distance teleportation like this, even my mentor Antonidas might not be able to control the arrival point. It involves magic matrices, mental-link locking, positioning..."
"All right, I don't understand any of that. You can stop." Faced with so many complicated terms, Rowan shook his head and interrupted Jaina.
Jaina returned to the matter at hand. Her expression darkened, and she said coldly, "You've been in Morris Town for twenty days, and all you've done is build a smithy?"
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