Er Mu - Release that Witch

“Remember as you search through the tools, never to touch them directly with your hands,” the Prince reminded Carter. “There are gloves in the closet.”

Since Soraya’s ability had evolved, he had also sent a dozen pairs of thin and anticorrosive gloves to the laboratory, but looking at the alchemist’s horrible injuries, it was evident that he had been working on the test object without wearing them. In case he had worn the gloves, even if the explosion had blown his fingers away, at least his fingers would still be within the gloves.

When Roland looked through the closet above the test stand, something unusual attracted his attention. After he had taken the unusually formed bottle down and taken a closer look, he was convinced that it was actually the liquor he sold at the convenience market — and the amount left inside showed that a lot of it had already been drunk, leaving only half a bottle behind.

Kyle actually brought white liquor into the laboratory? It is hard to imagine that an experienced alchemist would be drinking during an experiment!

“Your Royal Highness, Miss Nana has arrived,” a guard reported.

“Good, continue to guard the door, don’t let any of the apprentices enter,” leaving Carter behind, who continued to rummage through the chaos to find the fingers, Roland immediately went back to the main room.

“Is it him?” For Nana, treating this sort of level of injury was already nothing out of the ordinary. The little girl who had previously been so scared of seeing blood and fainted whenever she encountered terrible wounds, had already grown up a lot — whether it was in regards to ability, or courage.

“First start with curing the corrosion wounds on his face,” Roland nodded. “Carter is currently looking for his missing fingers, when he finds them, you can connect them again later.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Nana responded proudly, “By now I’m already able to heal such small wounds.”

The startled Roland could only look on as she laid her hands on top of the Alchemist’s chest, closed her eyes, and Kyle’s injuries immediately began healing — his face was soon completely restored, and his disabled fingers unexpectedly began extending, healing at a slower rate. First, the bones regrew, followed by the flesh, and finally nails and hairs. About a quarter of an hour later, his fingers had been completely restored.

At this point, Carter also came back out of the side room, “Your Royal Highness, I was only able to find three of them, the last one might have already been destroyed during the explosion — eh?”

“Since when have you been able to do this?” Roland asked Nana in surprise when she opened her eyes again.

“Roughly a week ago, when the current chicken for my training lost a limb, I discovered that as long as I pour enough magic into it, I can slowly let it regrow.” She stuck out her tongue, “Probably because I recalled what you had said— that every part of the body is composed out of the same cells, which meant that the cutoff area was also only a loss of cells. Since my magic can make up for the damaged parts, why shouldn’t it also be able to make up for the lost parts? And then I tried to do it.”

“Are you able regrow every part?”

“The regrow takes a lot of effort,” Nana said, shaking her head. “Even though this method is very easy, and as long as it is only fingers, it is okay. But if it’s an arm or a leg, I cannot help it. After all, the amount of magic I can hold is far less than that of Sister Anna.”

That’s because you’re a still a minor, Roland thought.Moreover, was this new capacity because of the evolution of her magic, or is it just the result of her training, leading to an increase of her magic capacity, allowing her to achieve an effect which had previously been impossible? Currently, Nightingale is not here to determine whether Nana’s magic source had given birth to changes or not. If this change is only because of an increase of her magic, the little girl’s performance after she reaches adulthood is something he looked forward too.

“Your Royal Highness, he woke up,” Carter interrupted.

“I was… what’s wrong?” Kyle frowned, first looked at his intact hands, then touched his face, “Shouldn’t I—”

“Should you have been killed during a chemical accident? Usually yes, but this witch saved your life. This person besides me had undertaken the task of rescuing and giving medical treatment to your people, Miss Nana Pine.” Roland decided to directly reveal Nana’s identity to the chief alchemist. A man who had rushed to Border Town because of an equation for a chemical reaction, shouldn’t be an incorrigibly or stubborn person, even if he thought of witches as disgusting in his heart, it would be unlikely that he would abandon his work and run over to the Church to report. And now since they had Lucia in town, it was only a matter of time until the alchemists and witches had to work together.

“For goodness sake! Do you mean that this witch can cure alchemy — no, the trauma caused by chemical experiments?” Roland hasn’t foreseen that Kyle’s reaction was totally contrary to what he had expected, “Hahaha, this is excellent, Your Royal Highness, this means that I can go through with experiments, without worrying about the dangers!”

“In the end, what happened?” Roland sighed in relieve. “Why did you bring the liquor into the laboratory?”

“No, Your Royal Highness, it is merely a test item,” the alchemist became entirely excited, “The thing I needed to produce for you, I did it!”

“Are you speaking of… Mercuric Acid?”

“That’s right, Your Highness! It turned out that the missing reactant was alcohol!” He said in one breath, “Previously I had already tested dozens of raw materials, but I was unable to make any progress. Annoyed I went to the market and bought some liquor, but then I suddenly remembered that the “Elementary Chemistry” mentioned that alcohol is an organic solvent, which is necessary for some raw materials to react. I then distilled and purified the liquor and used it for a new reagent test, and finally, the sixth try was a success… Within several tubes, the gray crystal’s precipitation occurred, so I recorded all of their heating time and temperatures. Afterward, I extracted some of the crystal and tested them. The features they showed were the same as what you spoke of — the ash gray needle-shaped crystal powder is extremely sensitive and irritable. Just when I wanted to filter out the rest of crystals in the tubes, the test tube suddenly exploded.”

So, it is done like this, at this moment, Roland also suddenly remembered it, to get mercury fulminate it was necessary to add ethanol to the mercury to excess the nitric acid, or, perhaps it can be produced from the direct reaction of mercury nitrate and ethanol.

“Well done,” Roland said and patted Kyle’s Sichi’s shoulder. “This feat is enough for you to receive Border Town’s highest honor and rewards.”

Thus, with the cartridge problem fixed his centerfire ammunition finally took shape.

After returning to his office, Roland immediately began to draw the blueprints for the new machines.

During the days, the First Army and witches had all gone to King’s City, instead of doing nothing, Roland felt that he was busier than ever. Even without Nightingale around, Anna’s and his time spent alone with one another was also very rare. Besides finding a place for the refugees to live that were coming with each ship, he also asked Anna and Lucia to test the composition of smelting products together, as well as constructing a new smelting furnace.

Before, no matter if it was smelting iron or making steel, it had purely been done by experience and feeling, never knowing what the result would be after the refining. But now with Lucia’s help, Roland finally had a precise method for determining the composition of the ingots. With the aid from the material decomposition ability, he could finally obtain the necessary detailed data for smelting metal after repeated comparisons between results. For example, the post-melting stirring time, the exact amount of charcoal added, and whether to add limestone or other additives to remove sulfur and phosphorus, or which other metals and raw materials had to be added to get alloy and so forth…

Based on these data, Roland could summarize a standard process for the smelting industry, which would guarantee the continuous production of iron ingots and steel that had the same quality each time. This would also disperse the dense fog hovering over the material science and engineering field.

The new smelting furnace had also been built for this reason.

It was a square furnace with a length and width of four meters, and a height of two meters, with the bottom tilted towards one end. It’s thick outer shell was made of pig iron, while the internal layer consisted of clay bricks as well as Soraya’s “earth” coating, which all guaranteed excellent heat resistance. The lower end was provided with a movable gate, which was driven by a steam engine. Considering that those high-end heating methods, such as oxygen, electric arc and so on haven’t reached the implementation stage yet, the furnace simply didn’t have any combustion systems installed — And depended entirely on Anna’s black fire for smelting molten steel. After adding the right amount of raw materials and to smelt the metal in accordance with the finished test, the molten steel was directly discharged from the tailgate.

The furnace could produce 50 ton of steel at once, and with it, Anna would only need a short half hour to complete the smelting. Together with the feeding and tapping time, it would take around one hour to complete, its output could then meet the current need for firearms and artillery production. Nowadays the town’ smelting plan was that the group of blast furnaces and shaft furnace were responsible for producing a great amount of pig iron, which was not only be used in the manufacturing of the daily use ironware and steam engines but could also be used as the raw material for further smelting, for example wrought iron or steel.

…

The blueprints Roland was currently drawing, was the set of production equipment used for bullet stamping — with a stable and reliable source of steel, processing and assembling a stamping machine would no longer be hindered by material problems. So, when the trial production of the mercury fulminate succeeded, they could immediately start with mass production of the new bullets. Even though cutting with Anna’s black fire was efficient and accurate, but even in the case where a person could complete the whole process, they would still need to spend a long time doing so. However, in the event that a line of stamping machines was put into production, after learning how to operate them, more than 30 ordinary people could at least produce ten thousand bullets per day. Furthermore, the soldiers would also no longer need to manually reload their ammunition.

Even after dinner, he was still busy drawing, only when the sound of the midnight bell came through the window could his set of sketches be considered complete. Of course, this was merely the most initial plan of his concept, he still didn’t know if some of the details was feasible, and because of this it needed to be tested before he could finalize his plan.

If it were like usual, Roland would have already yawned again and again, but today he was in high spirits, not feeling even a little sleepy at all.

After putting the more than ten recently drawn draft papers away, Roland took the attached parchment to the 5th Princess letter out of the drawer, spread it over the table, and finally came to the long awaited task — the selection of the visiting witches.

The list held more than 60 auxiliary witches and their abilities, but from Maggie’s mouth, Roland had heard that Sleeping Island sheltered between two hundred to three hundred people, which made it obviously that Tilly had not put all of the auxiliary witches on the list at his table. This was also in line with the way a leader should behave — taking the initiative to reach out her hand in friendship, rather than holding on to family bonds. In this way, the opposite party had already expressed enough of their sincerity in wishing to form an alliance. Then Roland put up a new candle and concentrate on going over the witch abilities on the appendix.

He soon had to acknowledge, that this was a tough decision to make, but after a going through the list many times and comparing them from all sides, he finally chose the name of his five visitors.