Chapter 446: The Dawn of Glass Manufacturing

At the Earl's birthday banquet, what surprised Liszt the most was the resumption of a distant relationship between him and Ronasa Golden Ear.

Perhaps this is the noble instinct; after the passion fades, they return to their respective life trajectories.

Without interfering with one another.

Apart from some reflection, he didn't have many other thoughts. After a brief rest in the afternoon, he returned to Flower Town. The territorial affairs were numerous, and without his presence as the central figure, it always felt unsettling. However, upon returning to the territory, he found that there was nothing urgent to handle.

So he went directly to the burial grounds of Black Horse Island to extract the Fire Dragon's magic power.

While infusing magic power into Fire Dragon bones could be assisted by his knights, extracting the Fire Dragon's magic power alone and filling it into jars of Fire Dragon magic power could only be done by himself, as only he possessed the mana secret technique. Once he became skilled, the speed of canning the Fire Dragon's magic power increased.

He could extract about four tons of volcanic glass a day, filling nearly eight jars of Fire Dragon magic power.

The volcanic glass, after extracting the Fire Dragon's magic power, was immediately sent to the newly built crystal workshop in the port town, handed over to the crystal craftsman Brad for carving utensils.

Volcanic glass is not as hard as crystal but much harder than regular glass, and it has excellent transparency, making it suitable for making glassware. Cups, wine glasses, tea cups, teapots, wine bottles, glassware, test tubes, and small medicine bottles for storing magic potions—all these utensils are not sold to the public.

The reason is simple: volcanic glass has an insulating effect on the Fire Dragon's magic power, leading him to speculate that this material could also block the magic power of other dragons.

Thus, its value is beyond estimation.

In his spare time, Liszt also went to the blacksmith's shop to find a forge, bellows, and charcoal for high-temperature testing—he remembered that glass could be repeatedly melted and shaped.

So he wanted to melt the scraps produced when Brad carved volcanic glass, to reuse them by shaping them into other forms.

The charcoal burned in the forge, and the servants continuously stepped on the bellows, making the charcoal in the furnace burn fiercely. The volcanic glass was placed in the furnace in an iron pot and heated—he wasn't sure of the melting point or softening point of the glass, and if it was higher than that of iron, the experiment would surely fail.

Fortunately, when the iron pot just began to glow red, the volcanic glass started to melt.

Soon it melted into a bright, soft mass.

Liszt ordered the attendant servant to pour out this mass of volcanic glass onto another piece of red-hot iron sheet. Then he had a squire knight insert an iron tube into the soft glass and blow hard. The knight's lung capacity was large, and with a gentle blow, the soft glass began to expand.

When it expanded into a spherical shape, Liszt had him stop and pull out the iron tube.

After slightly treating the bottle mouth, a crude glass bottle was freshly made. Then a master from the Fire Dragon brick factory came to help complete the annealing procedure—annealing was discovered by the workers of the Fire Dragon brick factory. After firing bricks, to cool them faster, they once used the water splashing method.

However, bricks splashed with water were prone to break.

Thus, under the incentive of rewards from the Lord, the workers, after a long period of exploration, found a reasonable annealing procedure, greatly reducing the breakage rate of the fired items. Ten workers were rewarded with ten silver coins each and became the first batch of masters in the Fire Dragon brick factory.

From ordinary workers, they were upgraded to qualified craftsmen.

Since volcanic glass was a new product, the master didn't know what temperature was suitable for annealing and could only explore slowly. However, after the volcanic glass cooled, he volunteered information to Liszt: "Lord, there is something I wonder if you would like to know."

"Speak," Liszt always encouraged his people to discover new things.

The master was not old, about twenty years old, named Atest, a serf from the Kingdom of the Eagle: "You know the Fire Dragon brick factory often seeks new materials for firing. Once, serfs from the Thorn Caravan brought a kind of yellowish-white rock, which appeared slightly translucent when held up to the light."

Seeing Liszt listening attentively.

Atest, both nervous and expectant, continued: "I threw this rock into the kiln to fire,

but it was strange, it rapidly melted into a pool, and when I took it out, it soon transformed again... just like, just like the volcanic glass you asked me to anneal, only very turbid." "Hmm?"

Liszt raised his eyebrows: "Like volcanic glass?"

"Yes, it was also a soft mass, quickly solidified, and somewhat transparent. I showed it to the masters of the brick factory, and none of us could determine its purpose, and it soon broke. We concluded it was not suitable for firing and discarded this rock," Atest said.

His words greatly moved Liszt.

If he was not mistaken, the substance that Gort had produced was the long-awaited glass—primitive glass made from quartz.

The stones brought by the Thorn Caravan serfs must be the raw material for glass—quartz.

Liszt had once searched for quartz, trying to smelt all the stones and soil from his territory in the Fire Dragon brick factory, but he had never succeeded in producing glass.

He had a vague memory that beach sand could be turned into glass, but the results were disappointing; the beach sand did not yield glass.

The sand on this beach seemed to be the remnants of ancient coral reefs weathered into grains.

Surprisingly, the rocks brought from elsewhere might actually be quartz ore. Liszt wasted no time and tasked Gort with handling the matter: "Consultant Gort, what you need to do is purchase a batch of the type of rock that Gort described, and then assist in the glass-making experiments. Remember to keep it confidential."

"My lord, can this stone really be turned into glass, like the cups you crafted from volcanic glass?" Gort was very puzzled.

"We'll find out after the experiments."

...

The potential discovery of quartz filled Liszt with great joy. He could already picture how glass, as a Black Horse Island specialty, would bring in wealth.

In a time when crystal was pricey, minor nobles would surely fall for the charm of glass products.

Of course.

Without confirming that the rock was indeed quartz ore, Liszt did not get carried away. He continued his experiments with volcanic glass—to determine whether the re-smelted volcanic glass still had the effect of blocking Fire Dragon's magic.

The Fire Dragon needle absorbed a bit of Fire Dragon's magic.

Injected into the new "Fire Dragon bottle," he soon observed that the Fire Dragon's magic still remained in its magical form, quietly flowing within the bottle without any leakage. This showed that volcanic glass's power to block dragon magic stayed the same even after melting and reshaping.

"So, the volcanic glass of Black Horse Island indeed possesses high strategic value and may very well help me subdue dragons, thereby achieving the great feat of dragon riding."

He thought with a grin.