She sat down and spent 20 minutes trying to decipher the language.
She held the paper up to the light, turned it sideways, tilted it at every possible angle.
Nothing.
The symbols remained stubbornly unreadable, a wall of alien marks that made her temples throb with frustration.
She spoke every single language in all of the 44 countries in Elräänga.
She knew the formal court dialects and the back-alley slang.
She could read the merchant shorthand that changed every generation and the poetic script used by the old noble houses.
She had studied the dead languages of 3 countries that no longer existed, absorbed into larger kingdoms centuries ago, their alphabets preserved only in crumbling archives she had personally raided.
She had translated treaties written in scripts so ancient that even the scholars who guarded them had forgotten what half the characters meant.
This was none of those.
Maybe it was from one of the other continents.
Nörthenheim had its own runic system.
Yevy used a flowing cursive that looked like water on paper.
Ulaniolola.
She had studied all of them at various points, enough to recognize them on sight.
This looked like nothing she had ever seen.
FUCKING HELL WAS HE FROM SPARVA?
The thought made her stomach drop.
Sparva was an entire continent of savages who had never developed a written language.
They carved pictures into stone and called it history.
If this was some Sparvan dialect, she would never figure it out.
Nobody would.
She refused to be underestimated.
She refused to be embarrassed by a primitive human who probably learned to read from a rock.
She pulled out every deciphering technique she knew.
Frequency analysis.
Pattern matching.
Contextual guessing based on the diagrams.
She tried to map the symbols to sounds, to concepts, to anything that made sense.
The symbols kept their secrets.
She was mid-attempt on a particularly stubborn cluster of marks when she heard the sound of paws hitting dirt.
Baegun’s heavy footsteps, moving fast, heading straight for the clearing.
Gen was on his way back.
Vyxia dropped the paper like it had burned her.
She scrambled to her feet, and walked over to the logs near the fireplace with the careful casualness of someone who had definitely not been snooping. New chapters come out on novelping dot com first.
She sat down, crossed her legs, and arranged her face into an expression of bored disinterest.
A couple seconds later Gen burst through the treeline.
His hair, that newly acquired long mess of dark curls, had somehow acquired a lustrous quality in the short time he had been gone.
Water still dripped from the ends, catching the light in a way that made it look almost polished.
The lake had done something to it, smoothed out the tangles and added a healthy sheen that Vyxia absolutely refused to comment on.
She kept her eyes fixed on the distance, pretending she had not noticed.
Gen slid off Baegun’s back and walked over to his clay formation.
He circled the kiln once, then twice, running his hand along the surface, checking for cracks and imperfections.
There were none.
The structure stood perfect and smooth, every line exactly where the blueprint had placed it.
He let out a satisfied grunt and wiped his hands on his pants.
Vyxia watched him from the corner of her eye.
She had always considered pottery and building to be beneath her.
Manual labor was for peasants and servants and the kind of people who had to work for a living instead of passion.
She had never once felt the urge to shape clay or cut wood or do anything that might dirty her hands.
But watching Gen work, watching the focused way he checked every inch of that kiln, something stirred in her chest.
He was not playing at this.
He was not doing it for show.
‘
He actually cared about the quality of what he built, about getting it right.
(Civil Engineer rizz?)
She hated how much that interested her.
She stood up, walked over to where he stood, and planted herself in front of him with her arms crossed.
Her face had gone the shade of pink she got when she was trying to seem unflusterd and failing miserably.
She spoke with all the bratty authority she could muster, which was a lot.
“Explain the mechanisms. Of whatever contraption you have constructed. Now.”
Gen raised an eyebrow.
He looked at her, then at the kiln, then back at her.
A slow grin spread across his face.
“Nobody’s ever asked me about my buildings before. Most of the people living here barely speak.” He gestured vaguely toward the woods.
“Groova only just learned to say photosynthesis. The aspen dryad knows like 5 words. Nyobin and Ozin are too busy being terrified of me to care about engineering. And Nøx only ever wants to talk about my waistline.”
He clapped his hands together and turned to face her fully, his eyes lighting up with the kind of enthusiasm that usually belonged to children and mad scientists.
“Okay, so. This is a kiln. Basic concept. You need intense heat to smelt ore. You can’t just throw rocks into a campfire and expect anything useful to come out. A regular fire doesn’t get hot enough, and even if it did, you can’t control the temperature or the airflow.” This story is hosted at novelping.com.
He walked to the side of the kiln and pointed at the base.
“The clay traps heat better than anything else I have access to. The walls are thick enough to hold temperature, but not so thick that they crack under the strain. You see the opening at the bottom? That’s for the fire. You feed it from underneath, keep the flames steady. The chimney at the top draws air through the whole structure, which makes the fire burn hotter and cleaner.”
He crouched down and traced a finger along the bottom edge.
“The real trick is the oxygen flow. Smelting ore requires reducing conditions. You need to strip the oxygen out of the metal oxide, leave pure metal behind. If you have too much oxygen in the kiln, you get slag and impurities. So you have to control the air supply. That channel I dug at the bottom, it lets me adjust how much air gets in. Too much and the metal oxidizes. Too little and the fire goes out. You need it just right.”
He stood up and dusted off his hands.
“Once I have this fired properly, I can start smelting iron ore. I found a deposit near the marble mountain range. It’s not high-grade stuff, but it’s enough for what I need. I’ll crush the ore, mix it with charcoal, and load it into the kiln. The heat will melt the metal out of the rock, and it’ll pool at the bottom. Then I can pour it into molds, get ingots.”
He paused and scratched the back of his head.
“And from ingots, I can make nails.
That’s the real goal here.
I have been building everything with joinery and tree sap and hope.
It works, but it is not ideal.
Wood joints loosen over time.
Sap dries out and cracks.
I need metal fasteners if I want to build anything that will last more than a few years.
Nails are the first step.
Then hinges, brackets, tools.
Eventually I want to build a real forge, but that is a project for later.”
He kept talking, his words flowing faster as he got into the rhythm of explaining.
He talked about the specific temperature needed to smelt iron, about the charcoal production he would need to set up, about the bellows he still had to build to get enough air into the fire.
He talked about the different types of ore he had found and which ones were worth processing.
He talked about the shape of the kiln and why he had chosen those exact dimensions, about the angle of the chimney and the depth of the firebox and the thickness of the clay walls.
Vyxia listened to all of it.
She did not understand most of it.
The concepts flew past her brain like birds she could not catch.
Temperature curves and oxygen ratios and reduction conditions blurred together into a wall of jargon that should have bored her to tears.
But she actually liked it when Gen explained things.
There was something about the way he talked, the way his hands moved as he described the process, the way his eyes lit up when he got to a part he was particularly proud of.
He was not trying to impress her.
He was not showing off.
He just genuinely loved what he was building, and he wanted to share that with someone who might actually listen.
When he finally stopped, his chest heaving slightly from the effort of the monologue, she realized she had been staring at him the whole time.
Her face went hot.
She turned away sharply, arms still crossed, and let out a haughty huff.
“Your explanation was subpar at best,” she said, her voice clipped and dismissive.
“Saxønilly would have explained it in half the time and with twice the detail. You are lucky I bothered to listen at all.”