If there was something Rino learned during his alchemy research in his previous life, it would be how density was affected by atmospheric pressure. It was yet another accidental discovery when Rino tried to make coffee on the mountains during one of his trips to investigate an odd incident of disappearing villagers. The coffee took less time to come to a furious boil high up in the mountains when the altitude was high and the oxygen low. After returning from his investigations, Rino formulated certain theories about it but could not prove them because he could not replicate them in his alchemy lab.

Now, things were different. Dark magic came with several unique properties on top of the gory stuff like sacrificial hexes and soul slavery. It was rather useful because it bridged the gap between magic and science in Rino’s eyes.

Things like spatial control, time influence and even object manipulation were extremely useful for creating an effective system. Dark magicians were not often credited for their abilities, and Rino supposed it was due to the stigma around them worshipping evil. Many dark magician guilds bring calamity with their disaster campaign. However, Rino knew that there were more dark magicians who refused to join their faction. Instead, these dark magicians live in isolation and practise medicine, becoming witch doctors instead. Villagers who did not know better referred to them as witches, although really, they were just dark magicians who put their abilities to better uses..

With this inspiration after his nap, Rino decided to start working on a magical furnace that would improve the smelting process by a hundred times. He did not have the knowledge and skill of dwarves, but he had something better – an innovative spirit that rivalled them.

The tutorial wasn’t wrong. However, Rino disliked the idea of having to burn something for over six hours just to get one percent of loot that was usable with a significantly high failure rate of not getting anything good. The effort of building a blast furnace that could be destroyed after a few rounds of burning did not sit well with him. When Rino invested in something, he was in it for the long haul. Nobody, not even his dead teachers, could convince him otherwise. Even if he spent his entire fortune on an experiment, Rino would still insist on getting quality materials for the sake of his research. His butler could bitch about it, but that wasn’t Rino’s concern. He was alright not having any servants in the huge mansion, and if he really had to, Rino would auction the house away and eat only one meal a day if that meant he could get enough funding to complete his research.

Thankfully, things never came to such a drastic extent in his previous world. There were always nobles looking for entertainment and investors with ulterior motives who would offer obscene loans to Rino if he asked for it. Granted, the king was usually his guarantor for such loans, and the royal treasury was often the collateral, but that was beside the point.

Without the best equipment, it was impossible to make astounding breakthroughs. Rino failed more than he succeeded, but with the best of tools, it brought him one step closer to understanding how to touch that line of success on the road full of unknowns. It was one of the joys that came with research. Ah, such bittersweet chemistry!

Combining what Rino knew about blast furnaces from the tutorial and his understanding of various metal melting points, Rino decided that there should be an easier method to extract pure metal if there was a controlled environment for the change to occur.

The risk of failing to obtain pure metals primarily came from the lack of consistency in heat and airflow in a blast furnace. Additional obstacles included unwanted particles coming into the molten liquid mixture without a proper collection method.

Rino gave it some thought. It was possible to eliminate the external obstacles getting in the way and keep the conditions constant for the chemical reaction to occur. Although he could not control how the three materials would interact, Rino could reduce the unpredictability factors that caused failing to a minimum and increase the interactivity rate using spatial magic.

At the same time, Rino thought about including gravitation manipulation to change the movement speed of the three materials in his close spatial magic chamber holding them. External fire magic could be used to heat the air pumped through and constantly removed from the spatial chamber as the three materials reacted, as Rino used gravitational magic to bring the ground materials together and apart. It was rather similar to the butter churn concept, where the mixture was turned continuously to get the best of everything inside. That was the best Rino could do.

As for the collection of the different materials, metals and slag had different melting points and densities. He could easily pick out the slag as they melted into liquid at the bottom and drain them away using the same teleportation magic he used to drain the quenching basin. Slag wasn’t very useful for much, so Rino could compress them into cheap bricks as they formed. Eventually, all that should be left in the magical furnace’s spatial chamber should be pure molten metal. 

The bright side of using a magical furnace meant that Rino could control where the molten metal went. Instead of designing a crucible and tongs to pour it out that could end up getting messy, Rino could set it to drain into a precise tap that falls directly onto whatever mould placed beneath it. He could also control the flow of molten liquid with some mechanical levers to trigger the runes. That part, he would let the experts handle.

For now, the most important thing was to test if this design would work and how long it would take for Rino to get his first bit of pure metal.

The hardest metal to smelt was iron, and steel was its cousin, with more fused carbon inside to make it stronger. Rino had no idea what would happen during the testing stage, but it was best to experiment with it away from where everything was built. Town Zera wasn’t accident-proof. His alchemy lab had to be remodelled. The magician’s tower was fixed several times before the magicians had faith that their safety would not be compromised in the vicinity of Rino’s lair.

Rino remembered the luxury of having an entire tower dedicated to him. There were several towers on the island known as the Magician’s Tower. To be precise, there were five. One of them was dedicated to criminals, one was dedicated to students and learning. The grand library was there, including the forbidden library that fewer people knew about. Then, there was the tower of storage and accommodations that were very small. Nobody minded the prison-sized rooms because hardly anyone needed the space for anything apart from a shower and a bed. The rest of the time was spent studying, reading books or practising new spells. The last tower was simply not a tower at all. It looked like one, but it was empty inside and had many strong protection spells to ward curious trespassers away. The other magicians did not know what was in it, and there were rumours that the tower kept a dragon or something similar.

In reality, it wasn’t anything as cool. When Rino became the director of the magician’s tower, he came to understand why there was a need for secrecy there. It was forbidden for anyone else to find out, and only a few within the magician council knew about it. The tower guarded the island’s most important secret, which was a huge disappointment for anyone who truly knew what it was.

Simply put, the last tower was a tomb. Every magician to be part of the island was laid to rest here in a unique way. Their mana registration tablet that all official magicians of the tower must submit upon their acceptance and graduation were kept in this tower. It was a vault of mana signatures for dead magicians to ever be recognised, and Rino could understand why it must be protected so securely. Dark magicians with the mana signature of a dead magician could summon their soul back from the land of the dead as a slave even if the magician’s body was burned to ashes and lost in the wind. Nobody, dead or alive, wanted to become a servant of evil. Hence, the tower took on the duty of a protector for those who swore to serve it with their lives.

Getting out of his comfortable bed, at last, Rino grabbed his sketchpad to write down the ideas he had after a quality sleep. The gods wanted him to smelt metal, but they never limited his methods. 

Sure, the tutorial was helpful. However, Rino was too lazy to follow it step by step. If there were no shortcuts, he would help them create one. After all, a magician would never do things normally. Magic was the way of life and the lazy.