The Mighty Dragons Are Dead

At the Earl's birthday party, the most unexpected thing for Li Si Te was the restoration of a tepid relationship with Rona Sally Golden Wheat.

Perhaps this is the instinctive way of behaving for nobles, passions having faded, returning to their respective life tracks.

Without interference with each other.

Apart from some reflections, he didn't have many other thoughts, and took a short rest in the afternoon before returning to Fresh Flower Town. With myriad duties on his land, the absence of its backbone always instilled unease. However, upon returning to his territory, he found no urgent matters awaiting him.

So he went straight to the Burial Ground on Black Horse Island to extract Fire Dragon Magic Power.

Filling Fire Dragon Bones with magic power could be helped by his knights, but extracting Fire Dragon Magic Power and infusing it into Fire Dragon Jars had to be done by him alone, as only he possessed the Dou Qi Secret Technique"The Eye of Magic". Once he became skilled at the craft, the speed at which he could fill jars with Fire Dragon Magic Power increased.

He could extract about four tons of Volcanic Glass a day, filling nearly eight Fire Dragon Jars.

After extracting the Fire Dragon Magic Power, the Volcanic Glass was immediately sent to the newly built Crystal Workshop in the port town, where the crystal craftsman Brad carved vessels.

Volcanic Glass is not as hard as crystal, but it is much harder than glass, and its translucency is not bad, making it suitable for making glass vessels. Water glasses, wine glasses, tea cups, teapots, wine bottles, glassware, test tubes, and small bottles for storing Magic Potions—all these vessels were not for sale.

The reason is simple: Volcanic Glass has a blocking effect on Fire Dragon Magic Power, which led him to guess that this material might also block other dragons' magic power.

Then its value would be incalculable.

In his spare time, Li Si Te also went to the Smithy to fetch a blacksmith's furnace, bellows, and charcoal for high-temperature experiments—as he remembered, glass could be melted and blown repeatedly.

So he wanted to melt down the remnants produced when Brad carved the Volcanic Glass to reuse them by shaping into other forms.

Charcoal burned in the blacksmith's furnace, with servants continuously pumping the bellows to stoke the coals into a roaring flame. The Volcanic Glass was placed inside the furnace in an iron container and heated—he was not sure about the melting point or softening point of glass, but if it was higher than that of iron, the experiment would certainly fail.

Fortunately, the Volcanic Glass began to melt as soon as the iron container started to glow red.

It quickly melted into a bright, soft substance.

Li Si Te instructed the servant operating the furnace to pour this mass of Volcanic Glass onto another red-hot iron plate. He then had one of the Retainer Knights insert an iron tube into the soft glass and blow hard. The knight had strong lungs, and with a gentle blow, the soft glass began to expand.

Once it expanded into a sphere shape, Li Si Te asked him to stop and pull out the iron tube.

After slightly processing the bottle's mouth, an ugly glass bottle was freshly made. Then a master from the Fire Dragon Brick Factory came to help complete the annealing process—annealing was a technique discovered by the workers of Fire Dragon Brick Factory, who had used water spraying after brick firing for faster cooling in the past.

However, bricks splashed with water tended to shatter.

Encouraged by the rewards from Lord Landlord, the workers, after much trial and error, found the proper annealing procedure, greatly reducing the fragility of the fired products. Ten workers were awarded ten silver coins each for this discovery and became the first masters of the Fire Dragon Brick Factory.

They were upgraded from mere workers to qualified craftsmen.

Since Volcanic Glass was a new product, the master did not know the appropriate temperature for annealing and had to explore slowly. After the cooling of the Volcanic Glass, he took the initiative to report to Li Si Te, "Lord Landlord, there is something I wonder if you'd like to know."

"Speak," Li Si Te always encouraged his people to discover new things.

The Master Craftsman was not old, around twenty years of age, and his name was Atest, a serf from the Eagle Kingdom: "You know that the Fire Dragon Brick Factory is always looking for new materials to calcine. Once, a serf from the Thorn Caravan brought a kind of yellowish-white rock that felt a bit transparent when held up to the light."

Seeing that Liszt was listening earnestly.

Atest said, both nervous and hopeful, "So I threw this type of rock into the kiln to calcine, but it was very strange, it melted into a puddle very quickly, and when I took it out, it had changed into something else... just like, just like the volcanic glass you asked me to anneal, only much cloudier."

"Hmm?"

Liszt's eyebrows raised: "Like volcanic glass?"

"Yes, it was also soft and soon solidified, and it was somewhat transparent. I showed it to the master craftsmen at the brick factory, and nobody could figure out what use it had, and it broke apart quite soon after, so we assessed it was not suitable for calcination and abandoned this type of rock," Atest explained.

His words greatly stirred Liszt.

If he was not mistaken, the substance that Atest had calcined was the glass he had long anticipated—primitive glass made from quartz.

The stone brought by the serf from the Thorn Caravan was definitely the raw material for glass—quartz.

Liszt had once searched for quartz and had tried calcining all sorts of stones and soil from his territory in the kilns of the Fire Dragon Brick Factory, but never succeeded in making glass.

He vaguely remembered that seaside sand could be used to make glass, but the results had been disappointing; glass did not emerge from the sand after calcination.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

The beach's sand here seemed to be the remains of ancient coral reefs weathered over time.

Unexpectedly, the rock brought from foreign lands could potentially be quartz ore, and Liszt immediately issued an order for Goltai to take charge: "Consultant Goltai, what you need to do is to purchase a batch of the type of rock mentioned by Atest, then cooperate with the forging glass experiment. Remember confidentiality."

"Lord, can this kind of stone really be calcined into glass, just like the cups you made from volcanic glass?" Goltai was very skeptical.

"Whether it is or isn't, we will decide after the experiment." Explore hidden tales at empire

...

The potential discovery of quartz filled Liszt with great joy; he could already imagine how glass, as the specialty of Black Horse Island, would amass fortune in the future.

In an era where crystals were expensive, minor nobles would definitely find it hard to resist the allure of glassware.

Of course.

Before confirming that the rock was indeed quartz, Liszt did not get carried away. He continued his volcanic glass experiment—he needed to verify that the volcanic glass, once recalcined, still had the effect of blocking the magic power of the Fire Dragon.

The Dragonfire Syringe drew a little bit of Fire Dragon Magic Power.

Injected into the new "Fire Dragon Bottle," he quickly found that the Fire Dragon Magic Power still assumed a Magic Form, flowing quietly within the Fire Dragon Bottle without any leak. This proved that the volcanic glass's ability to block the magic power of dragons did not change with the melting and reshaping process.

"So it seems the volcanic glass from Black Horse Island indeed has significant strategic value and is very likely to help me subdue dragons, thereby achieving the great endeavor of Dragon Riding," he thought to himself, pleased.