NEC Chapter 132: Reduction Workshop and the Earthbound Undead's Steel Production Journal

Aurelio's father had once been the leader of a famous knightly family in the northern lands. With excellent family conditions, Aurelio received proper literary and martial education from childhood, growing up amid the ink fragrance of parchment scrolls and the clear ringing of swords cutting through wind.

His future had been as brilliant as the morning sun.

However, with the arrival of the beast tide, everything changed.

His grandfather died in battle, his eldest and second uncles died in battle, his father died in battle, his elder brother died in battle...

The Lee family's reputation for loyalty and courage was sung throughout the White Deer Kingdom.

Well, Aurelio's full name was Aurelio Zellin Lee.

For his own convenience, Chen Mo decided to call him Lee Zellin, anyway the earthbound undead didn't seem to care about this.

Lee Zellin went to war with his family when he was nine years old, fighting for a full twelve years.

With his exceptional talent, he grew in the blood, fire, and gunpowder smoke of battlefields to become a seventh-tier Void Breaking Sword Saint. At the same time, the family population sharply decreased from over three hundred to less than sixty.

The old were old, the young were young, the injured were injured, the disabled were disabled.

Although hope was dim, we were still resisting. This was the only driving force for the northern human warriors to persist.

Then, the White Deer crown fell to the ground. The king and his courtiers, those fat and greedy great nobles, abandoned their lands and people, fleeing without a trace.

The backbone of the resistance army was completely broken by this naked betrayal.

That year was called the Year of Blood Dusk.

Unable to escape in time and feeling the betrayal, large numbers of city lords and small and medium nobles gave up on themselves and became hysterical. They knelt at the feet of their former deadly enemies, the orcs, turned their blades around, and frantically slaughtered their former comrades and companions.

With the help of these guides who were familiar with the environment and resistance strategies, the entire White Deer Plains completely became a pasture for orcs to roam freely.

In just one year, the northern population lost half, with over three million wronged souls perishing on the White Deer Plains.

As organized resistance forces completely disappeared, these surrendering minor nobles discovered that they had lost value to the orcs. The orcs began to wantonly abuse these surrenderers, beating them when they wanted to beat, killing them when they wanted to kill.

It seemed the orcs better understood the principle of eliminating helpers after achieving goals.

What could be done? They had chosen their own path, so they had to bear the consequences.

In this bloody scene, only Aurelio, that is Lee Zellin, always persisted in holding the flag of resistance, relying on his powerful personal strength to conduct guerrilla warfare everywhere.

The northern orcs had a total of over three hundred tribes of all sizes, among which over two hundred and sixty tribes had bloody bounties on this guy.

However, trying to eliminate a clear-headed, resolute seventh-tier Void Breaking in places full of valleys, dense forests, and swamps was simply too difficult.

At this time, it was again time for the surrender faction among the human race to play their role.

They created a bloody decree called "Death to All Who See Lee."

Along the routes Lee Zellin passed, any person who saw this resistance leader but didn't immediately report to the orcs, or provided food supplies to the resistance army, would face the massacre of their entire family, entire village, or even entire city.

As a leader dedicated to resisting orcs, he couldn't draw his sword against ordinary civilians like the orcs he hated. Soon, Lee Zellin found himself cut off from water and food, with no way out.

Even so, this Sword Saint never thought of surrendering. He dismissed all his subordinates and, alone with one sword, ate wild beasts raw in the mountains and forests, drank mud in swamps, and killed every orc he could see one by one, whether warriors or civilians, shamans or laborers.

Until one day, while being pursued by high-level orc warriors, he accidentally encountered a human civilian who was gathering wild vegetables with a child.

Realizing that if he fled now, this human family would inevitably face slaughter, Lee Zellin fought desperately despite being severely wounded to take down his pursuing opponent.

But when he dragged his blood-soaked body around, he saw a scene that plunged him into the abyss.

That civilian man had not only gouged out his own eyes but had also dug out the child's eyeballs. Warm blood and murky fluid splashed on his fear-filled face.

The man held the child, who was rolling on the ground in pain, with one hand, kneeling on the ground and continuously kowtowing to the air, pleading mournfully:

"We saw nothing, saw nothing!"

At that moment, Lee Zellin felt all hope was lost.

The human "wise ones" had used the most despicable method to precisely strike Lee Zellin's weak point. When even civilians began to fear and be afraid of this leader, Lee Zellin seemed to lose the meaning of continuing resistance.

The last Void Breaking swordsman, the banner of northern resistance, dejectedly disappeared into the twilight of the White Deer Plains.

Only one thing remained in his remaining life: kill orcs, find every opportunity to kill orcs!

For this, he refused the recruitment offers of high-ranking officials and generous salaries from several countries, and also slapped away envoys sent by the former White Deer king.

When the founding Grand Duke of Emerald promised to build a fortress standing at the forefront of human-orc warfare, he resolutely accepted the city lord seal of this "Razor Fortress."

Fate mocked him once again. Razor Fortress, this fortress that carried his last faith, was once again sold out by the betrayal of the continental human upper echelons.

Defending the isolated city to the death, the entire army was annihilated.

After the orcs leveled the entire Razor Fortress, they hung the corpse of this resistance leader they hated to the bone at the gate of the city lord's mansion, and carved stone tablets beside him boasting of martial prowess and intimidating future challengers.

The destroyed magical guardian formation triggered chaotic spiritual energy turbulence that swept through the fortress. Aurelio Zellin Lee, with his overwhelming obsessions that could not dissipate, thus became an earthbound undead.

Even in death, turned to ashes, the orcs should never think of stepping into this towering fortress.

Therefore, the old bull who was seen would inevitably receive that sword strike.

Also therefore, with hundreds of orc corpses piled like mountains, when Chen Mo righteously declared, "I killed them!" the earthbound undead chose to trust this seemingly weak lord and accepted the soul contract chain.

Having obtained an extremely powerful contracted undead creature, Chen Mo almost felt he could walk sideways, but he soon understood that things weren't that simple.

As an earthbound undead, Lee Zellin could not leave this area that bound him, which was the relic core.

When the relic core was excavated and moved, the earthbound undead would fall into a dormant state within the range of the relic core until the relic core was repositioned and activated, then the earthbound undead would awaken and continue wandering in the area around the relic core.

The bad news was, commanding the earthbound undead to go out and fight was out of the question!

Even if you brought the relic core out to seek revenge, simultaneously satisfying the necessary conditions of finding an elemental concentration zone that could activate the core, having no interruption during core activation, enemies entering your relic core's radiation range, and so on, was simply too exaggerated.

The good news was that by activating the relic core in a suitable area within Vast Sea Territory's range, Chen Mo would essentially have a safe zone with extremely strong defensive capabilities. When encountering troubles, he could hide in the nest, and enemies would have to attack this troublesome iron-blood barrier like conquering a large relic.

So, this relic core's greatest use was still to create a nest. By absorbing spiritual energy from the elemental core zone to supplement the core, the core would spawn nest creatures, and killing nest creatures would yield mana crystals, forming a benevolent cycle of crystal production and supply chain.

On the Starry Continent where spiritual energy flourished vigorously, finding an elemental concentration zone wasn't difficult. During Chen Mo's absence, two experts sent by the Magic Academy had already marked several optional locations for Vast Sea Territory.

However, during communication with Lee Zellin, Chen Mo discovered a possible bug.

This relic core's characteristic was precisely the iron-blood manifestation of Blood Fortress.

During the manifestation process, when nest creatures spawned depending on the "iron" element, spiritual energy would strip away other elements unrelated to iron.

For example, when the camera in the nest was manifested back then, the non-metallic components inside the camera were corroded and squeezed out.

Chen Mo's mind immediately opened up with possibilities. If iron ore was put in for manifestation, could the impurities inside also be removed?

In East Xia's original planned development steps for the territory's steel industry, at least two months of major transport capacity would be needed to construct steel factory reduction equipment.

Most annoyingly, due to lack of stable coal supply, they had to use electricity instead of fire, and the Industrial Concentration Zone's power supply would be further strained.

Besides supplementing more solar power generation panels, they would need to add ultra-high power, high overload capacity special rectifier transformers for the reduction equipment's special requirements, core power modules and control units for dynamic reactive power compensation and harmonic treatment devices, various key circuit breaker contacts, insulation materials, large-capacity solid-state battery energy storage units, and so on and so forth.

This would consume another large chunk of transport capacity.

As for installation and maintenance, that was an even bigger headache for Lord Chen.

Now, if they could skip the reduction step, the remaining transport capacity could be directly allocated to the backend casting system, saving a large amount of precious territory development time.

Chen Mo decisively placed the relic core at an elemental concentration zone closest to the Industrial Concentration Zone.

The experimental results came out quickly.

The effect was indeed there. During the relic's manifestation process, it could indeed eliminate many impurities unrelated to metal.

However, this purification wasn't pure enough. What came out couldn't even be considered pig iron. Wanting to obtain refined iron or even steel in one step was wishful thinking.

But regardless, this still saved Vast Sea Territory a major step. Soon, under the lord's careful design, a brand new steel industry development and mana crystal acquisition process was freshly produced.

It would just be a bit hard on Comrade Lee Zellin.

Iron ore fragments that had been preliminarily crushed and magnetically separated from the processing plant would be loaded by workers into crude earthenware jars, with each jar weighing about three kilograms after deducting the container weight.

Workers from the processing plant arranged these ceramic jars neatly and pushed them into the newly constructed [Molten Iron Nest] with flatbed carts.

This was what the Magic Academy called it. Actually, the sign hanging at the entrance read: [Vast Sea Territory First Steel Factory Reduction Workshop].

Low-key and practical.

After entering the workshop, which was the nest, there was a huge pit directly ahead, clearly marked: First Reduction Pit.

Wooden ramp boards were set up beside the pit. The flatbed carts were pushed directly to the bottom of the large pit, and skilled porters quickly removed the earthenware jars and arranged them neatly along the pit bottom.

When the entire pit was filled, there were two hundred earthenware jars total, approximately six hundred kilograms of iron ore.

The porters and flatbed carts left, the ramp boards were withdrawn, and all personnel evacuated in sequence.

A few minutes later, receiving the signal, Lee Zellin activated the nest core. A thick black fog swept through the nest, and the iron ore at the pit bottom, after being immersed for about thirty minutes, completed elemental manifestation and grew into nest guardians.

The reason for piling three kilograms of iron ore per jar was because this amount could guarantee spawning mid-tier nest guardians.

The produced mana crystals were of higher quality.

These newly born nest guardians wandered around bewilderedly at the pit bottom.

The pit walls had been compressed and compacted, even fired with flames, and the height had been repeatedly tested. This group of mid-tier nest guardians couldn't climb out even by forming human pyramids.

Guard team members entering the scene directly threw torches, igniting the prepared kindling materials in the reduction pit. In just ten-plus minutes, basically all of this batch of mid-tier nest guardians were eliminated.

The ramp boards were lowered, the guard team went down to finish off stragglers, and specialized mage apprentice groups carefully collected the spell crystals remaining in the field.

After triple-confirming safety with no omissions, the transport group again descended into the reduction pit to begin recovering the ore.

During the elemental manifestation process, the original iron ore would, due to the black fog's tempering, retain the mainly iron-quality parts unchanged, while other impurities like silicon, aluminum, sulfur, phosphorus would be squeezed to the outer layer, forming an impurity shell.

Workers wearing work gloves and carrying thick wooden sticks knocked and broke the outer shells. What was obtained at this point was equivalent to pig iron still containing small amounts of slag.

These pig iron lumps were thrown into baskets beside the pit. When filled to capacity, workers above operated pulleys to hoist the baskets up.

They cleaned up the crushed earthenware jars at the pit bottom, tidied the scene, and waited for the next batch of earthenware jars to arrive.

Earthbound undead Lee Zellin, with vacant eyes, once again activated the nest core.

The spiritual energy consumed in large quantities during the process would be replenished through excitation-type spiritual energy formations, and the power source for the spiritual energy formations was precisely the energy crystals just harvested.

The entire process flowed like clouds and water. Besides being quite labor-intensive, the biggest consumption was those crudely made earthenware jars.

Of course, whether it was the elemental concentration of the elemental concentration zone or the spawning black fog of the nest core, both needed time to generate. Therefore, the [Vast Sea Territory First Steel Factory Reduction Workshop] strictly followed an eight-hour work system.

Working two hours every four hours, with a total cumulative working time of eight hours per day.

Because impurities had already been removed once during processing, the reduction workshop's refining efficiency was around fifty percent, producing approximately twelve hundred catties of pig iron per day and eight hundred mana crystals.

However, to drive this large-scale spiritual energy formation operating at full capacity, three hundred and twenty mana crystals still needed to be consumed.

Of course, this was the ideal maximum efficiency. When encountering situations like insufficient iron ore supply, insufficient earthenware jar supply, or the poor earthbound undead having mood problems and wanting vacation, considerable output would be lost.

No matter, this production line had been completed, and Vast Sea finally had its own real industrial output.

Of course, iron ore, as a core strategic element and basic resource for future territory construction, definitely could not be sold externally.

The setting sun stretched the workshop's tall silhouette very long, casting long shadows on the ground. This was no longer the blood fortress shrouded in black fog of the past, but an orderly production workshop.

To stabilize his contracted undead's emotions, Lord Chen Mo had to come in every so often to have heart-to-heart talks with Lee Zellin.

Talking about ideals, talking about the future, talking about the significance of steel development for the territory, and the importance for future counterattacks against orcs and recovery of the White Deer Plains.

Who knows if the undead believed it or not...

In any case, this former Void Breaking Sword Saint thus became the production manager of the reduction workshop.

Somewhat helpless yet somewhat expectant, he stood as a milestone in the development history of Vast Sea Territory's steel industry.

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