Chương 48: Chapter 49: The Crimson Stratum

The monochrome server tickers updated without graphical interpolation across the lower left quadrant of Ethan's field of vision. He sat flat against the un-rendered limestone shelf of the hidden fault fissure, his thumb rhythmically tracing the dull, cold lip of his oxidised bronze trowel to scrape away the dry crust of regular gray clay silt.

The subterranean space was nothing but flat, charcoal-tinted lines wedged beneath the territorial boundary separating the Hazor forage tracks from the high-density Megiddo transit lanes. Ethan had spent the last three hours forcing his golems units through these unmapped corridors, migrating his entire asset footprint away from the Hazor coordinates. Up on the regional message boards, the notifications were flashing red.

Pixel Rex had put a bounty on his unknown supplier profile over the sulfur cake buyout, while Merlion Holdings' enforcers were actively raiding F2P camp coordinates to secure what was left of the copper veins. Topside, the high-tier bronze crisis had hit a breaking point; casual players were walking into the market with shattered tools they couldn't afford to repair. He needed a new resource to exploit, and he needed it outside their control zones.

Three metres below the wireframe ledge, the three automated Golems executed their routines looking for new ore veins. The letters of Emet (אֱמֶת) etched into their foreheads glowed as Ethan oversaw them work. Suddenly, a strange sound came from where Emmett-01_Oved was digging. Instead of the dry, brittle snap of ancient limestone debris, there was a squelch of wet, heavy, un-lubricated soil. Ethan leaned over the lip of the wireframe trench.

A dense, dark-crimson vein of iron-saturated, viscous clay was bleeding upward through the fractured bedrock, bubbling continuously against the Golem's lower joints like stale hydraulic fluid. [System Alert: Passive Resource Detected] Material Identification Code: Dmei-Adamah דְּמֵי־אֲדָמָה (Blood-Soil Structure) Ownership Status: Public Refuse / Free Salvage. Market Analysis: Red soil contains unknown quantity of blood within the medium. Be warned. Quality Grade: Impure Clay. Ethan didn't move.

He slid down the wireframe ledge, his boots hitting the damp gravel with a dull thud. He didn't read the warning text. Instead, he reached out, digging his fingers directly into the dark red mass, pulling up a thick clump and squeezing it tightly within his fist. The clay didn't crumble; it maintained its shape perfectly, leaving a dark, heavy metallic residue across his skin that smelled sharply of rusted iron. He took his trowel, dragging the flat edge through the core of the sample.

The slice was perfectly smooth, showing an unnaturally dense structural binding index. He wiped his hands on his soot-stained tunic and tapped his visor interface to scan the exact material composition. [System Prompt: Passive Resource Detection] Target Material Identified: Dmei-Adamah (Impure Clay). Viscosity Index: +45% Deviation. Smelting Feasibility: Null — Iron Contamination Exceeds Standard Refining Tolerances. Value: 0. 00 Shekels. This red dirt was trash for anything but pottery.

The high iron contamination would cause catastrophic structural fractures during any standard refining process. However, Ethan's analytical focus didn't track the commercial smelting failure; his mind immediately cross-referenced the raw silicate metrics with the industrial material safety sheets he had memorised from his father's engineering books. High iron oxides, when sintered under a tight reduction kiln cycle, acted as a powerful fluxing agent for basic silica. Love what you're reading?

Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. He jumped down into the trench, his boots hitting the damp gravel with a dull thud. His gaze scanned the floor of the fissure, tracking a small, pale drift of raw, crushed river silica that had filtered down through an un-rendered bedrock crack from an old ancient water channel above. He scooped up a handful of the cheap, coarse white sand and threw it directly into the red mud.

He dragged the flat edge of his trowel through the core of the sample to test the consistency.

"Emmett-01_Oved, start the extraction process," Ethan commanded, his voice dropping into a cold, flat register.

"Emmett-02_Choresh, construct a low-capacity test kiln using the local limestone debris." The golem shifted its weight, its heavy clay hands methodically stacking the un-rendered stone blocks into a tight, narrow chamber, sealing the gaps with wet alluvial mud to maximise pressure. Within four minutes, a crude, un-vented pit forge was complete. Ethan kneaded the first prototype by hand, using a 90% blood-clay to 10% sand ratio. He shoved the raw red lump into the kiln, forcing the reduction fire to max heat.

Thirty seconds later, the system pinged. The sample came out a porous, crumbly brick-red slag that dissolved into dust under his boot. [Vitrification Failure: Silica Deficit Detected. Structure Unstable.] He didn't blink. He grabbed a larger scoop of the river silica, adjusting the formula to a 50-50 split. The second batch vitrified slightly, but the excessive sand left un-melted quartz grains locked inside the frame, causing the sample to cleanly snap in half when he tapped it with his trowel.

Ethan kept trying various combinations. He recalibrated, balancing the iron oxide impurities trying to find the magic ratio where the iron flux would completely digest the sand grains under the suffocating, oxygen-starved reduction cycle. On his 49th try, the heat bloomed. The high iron contamination in the blood-soil reached its melting point, completely liquefying the sand into a glowing, syrupy red liquid.

Ethan quickly ladled the molten mixture over a carved mud mold, smoothing out the red hot surface with flat basalt stones as it rapidly cooled into a deep mahogany, nearly black. Once the core cooled, he scraped out the internal mud backing, leaving a heavy glass shell. The sample didn't look like clay anymore. It was a dense, lustrous, dark-red volcanic mass—synthetic mahogany obsidian, capable of holding a sharp edge.

[Material Formulation Successful] Material Manufactured: Iron-Slag Glass (Synthetic Mahogany Obsidian). Physical Properties: Maximum Hardness / Extreme Sharpness / Low Elasticity Depth A sharp, cynical smile cut through the grey soot on Ethan's face as his visual feed confirmed the properties. While it lacked the lateral elasticity of high-tier copper alloys—meaning it would snap if twisted sideways—it could cleanly substitute broken components on existing frames. He didn't need to forge whole weapons.

He could mass-produce modular obsidian blade inserts designed to slide straight into the curved slots of the players' broken weapons, transforming a ruined bronze khopesh into a functional, razor-sharp composite hybrid.

"Emmett-03_Yotzer," Ethan called out, shifting his focus to his final golem.

"Form Khopesh Slag-Blades based on 7: 3 clay to sand ratio. Emmett-02_Choresh, maintain the heat and assist with the dipping and ladling." The three Golems reset their postures with a synchronised, dull scrape, starting his newly formed industrial loop. Ethan pulled his linen wrap tight over his face, obscuring his character's profile beneath a thick, soot-stained mask before pulling up his local map overlay. He zoomed out, tracking the treacherous mountain passes of the Jordan Valley wilderness.

He started formulating a plan to test sales on the wilderness periphery to migrating players left frozen by the bronze crisis.