Chapter 657: A Secret Shared by Two Girls

Roland poured a cup of tea and glanced toward the couch. “Would you like some?”

“Yes, thank you.”

Nightingale was reading one of May’s new plays — holding the book with one hand, a strip of dried fish with the other, feet propped on the tea table and her robe shifted to one side so her legs could breathe. The black knit stockings Soraya had painted onto her skin showed clearly in the autumn light. She didn’t move them when he looked, only when someone else entered the office.

Since returning from wherever she’d gone for two days after her conversation with Anna, she had seemed different — lighter, as though something that had been held carefully in place had been allowed to settle where it wanted. She’d started smiling at him often, and sometimes he caught her watching him with a particular quality of attention — frank, unhurried, quietly alive.

I knew I shouldn’t have asked Soraya to paint those stockings.

He carried a cup to her. “Here.”

She put the book down and took it with both hands, breathing in the fragrance first. “Lovely. Could you add a lump of sugar?”

She liked everything — salty and sweet both, in any amount. During his illness she had lost weight visibly. Since his recovery, she had climbed back to exactly where she’d been before, and stopped there. Her body seemed to have found its equilibrium and held it as a fixed point. He’d teased her about overindulging, back when he’d thought it mattered; he now acknowledged it didn’t.

He added sugar, returned to his desk, and tried to resume the blueprint. Several strokes of the quill later, he gave up the pretense of focus.

“Nightingale.”

“Mm?”

“What exactly did Anna tell you?”

In an instant she was off the couch and had materialized on the corner of his desk, sitting cross-legged, near enough that he could smell the tea-warmth on her. “It’s a secret.”

“Even from me?”

A pause — weighing. “I made a promise to Anna. If it were only my secret, I’d tell you anything you wanted to know. But it isn’t only mine. She asked me to keep it for now.”

“All right.” He took a sip and set the cup down. He could ask Anna directly, but there were degrees of emotional intelligence even he recognized, and one of them was knowing when not to pursue a thing. Whatever Anna had said, Nightingale had come back from it whole.

He picked up his quill again.

“Thank you,” Nightingale said.

“For what?”

She was looking at him when he glanced up — full attention, unhurried. The autumn light came through the window behind her and caught the ends of her fair hair, made her skin luminous.

“For telling her what I feel.”

Time had the quality of something briefly paused.

Good news arrived from the Ministry of Construction in the afternoon: Neverwinter’s first converter steel mill was complete at the North Slope Mountain.

It looked nothing like a mill. It was an iron shed — simple, angular, functional — housing one large piece of equipment Roland had designed himself. The converter’s body was steel throughout, angular in cross-section, resting on a grate and coated with heat-resistant material. Its surface was dark grey and dull in the daylight, the mass of it suggesting weight and purpose rather than any aesthetic intention. Beside the blast furnace and the existing smelter works, it held its own.

He arrived at the Furnace Area to find the equipment already surrounded by experienced workers and City Hall officials, peering at it from various angles with the slightly baffled concentration of craftsmen confronting something unfamiliar.

“Your Majesty.” Lesya of the Ministry of Construction met him at the steps. “I followed the design exactly. But — can this thing actually make steel? There’s no hearth.”

Roland smiled. “In nature, fire isn’t the only thing that produces heat. Get the workers ready. We’re running the first test.”

He had weighed the three standard options against Neverwinter’s specific constraints. The electric furnace was out immediately — the necessary infrastructure didn’t exist. The open hearth furnace had elegant simplicity and familiar operation, but its energy consumption was punishing. Neverwinter’s coal reserves sat far upriver at the Redwater source, and its coking plant had only just come online — barely enough to feed the existing blast furnace. An open hearth furnace would drain what little surplus they had. It also required a regenerator to be efficient and consumed half a day per heat, which made it impractical as a production facility.

The converter required almost no fuel. It worked by oxidizing the impurities already present in liquid pig iron — silicon, manganese, carbon — generating its own heat through the reactions themselves. A blast of oxygen-rich air through a pipe was sufficient. The setup was compact, needing no regenerator, and the orbit doubled as the liquid steel’s transfer line. A heat took less than an hour; with mature technique, it could be done in fifteen minutes.

The first step: iron ingots into the pear-shaped furnace, delivered by the steam crane.

“Anna — make it liquid.”

She climbed the stairs to the converter’s mouth without ceremony, summoned her Blackfire, and reduced the ingots to flowing iron in minutes. The heat painted her face in red-orange light. She stepped back, looked down at Roland, and he gave the next instruction.

“Insert the blowing pipe.”

The foreman directed his crew with the ease of men long familiar with cranes and heavy equipment. The steam engine boomed. The steel pipe descended into the converter mouth from above, connected at its other end to a flexible coated line leading to the air pump.

Oxygen-rich air entered the furnace.

For a moment, nothing.

Then the mouth erupted. Orange sparks scattered in arcs. Brilliant white flame shot upward, enveloping the pipe and the grate and the top third of the converter itself. The sound of expanding gas overwhelmed the steam engine’s noise entirely.

Every official took a step backward.

Roland stayed where he was, hands behind his back, face into the hot wind. The roar of it resonated in his chest. The warmth on his face, the surging glow at the furnace mouth — it felt like something about to begin.

He saw these flames as an emblem: humankind stepping into a new era.

Chapter 657: A Secret Shared by Two Girls

Translator: TransN Editor: TransN

…

Roland poured himself a cup of tea and looked at Nightingale. “Would you like some?”

“Yes, thank you.”

Lying on the couch, she was reading a newly written play by May with great interest. She was holding the book with one hand and a piece of dried fish with another hand.

Since Anna had talked to her, she had disappeared for two days. When she returned, she looked relieved, free and easy, as she had been before. Since her return, Roland felt that she kept smiling at him and sometimes peeped at him with eyes full of vitality.

Took what she was doing now as an example.

She put her feet on the tea table and moved her robe to one side, revealing her long slim legs in black tight stockings. She did not avoid him at all and would only conceal herself when someone else came into the office. This attractive posture made it hard for the prince to focus. He could hardly stop his eyes from involuntarily moving to the side sometimes. As a result, he had not finished even a single blueprint in the first half of the morning.

He complained in his heart, “I knew I shouldn’t have asked Soraya to paint these stocking-like leg warmers.”

He took a cup of delicately fragranced tea to her and said, “here’s your tea.”

She put down the book and took the tea with both hands. She sniffed at it and said, “ah… nice tea. Could you please add a lump of sugar for me?”

He found that she enjoyed both salty and sweet food, and no matter how much she ate, she would never get fat. When he had been in his lethargy, she had lost lots of weight and looked much thinner than before, but after he had woken up, she had quickly gotten back her normal weight. Her weight seemed to have an upper limit. When she reached it, she would stop gaining any more weight.

He had nagged her to stop eating too much or she would get fat, but now he realized that was not a problem for her at all.

He added a lump of sugar to her teacup and returned to his desk. After painting several strokes on the paper, he still could not stop himself from being curious and said, “Nightingale…”

“Uhm?’

“What indeed… did Anna tell you?”

“Well…” She nimbly slipped out of the couch and instantly appeared on his desk. “It’s a secret.”

“Can’t you even tell me?”

After a little hesitation, she shook her head and said, “no, I’ve promised Anna. If it’s just about me, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, but this is not… She asked me to keep it up my sleeve for now.”

“Well, I see.” Roland took a sip of his tea and stopped asking. He could go to ask Anna directly, but as a person of normal EQ, he knew he must stop mentioning this thing repeatedly.

At least, from Nightingale’s reaction he could tell that Anna was not angry.

When he picked up his quill again, Nightingale suddenly said, “thank you.”

“What?” Rowland was stunned and looked up, his gaze met hers.

In the warm autumn sunshine, her long blonde hair shone, her skin glowed and her face looked exceptionally beautiful. Time seemed to stop at this moment.

“Thank you for telling her what I feel.”

…

In the afternoon, good news came from the Ministry of Construction. Neverwinter’s first converter steel mill, a steelmaking facility recently designed by Roland, was completed at the North Slope Mountain.

Despite that it was called a steel mill, it looked more like a simple iron shed with a large new equipment in it. Different from all the previous furnaces, this equipment was made of pure steel, supported by an angular grate and covered with heat resistance coating. Its surface was dark gray and dull, making the machine look towering and thick in the sunshine.

When Roland arrived at this new Furnace Area with his City Hall officials, this new furnace had been surrounded by a large number of curious experienced workers.

“Your Majesty, can this stove make steel? It doesn’t even have a fire place.” Lesya of the Ministry of Construction had asked the same question, but he had still built it up in strict accordance with Roland’s design. This converter’s components were all processed by Anna. With Hummingbird’s help, their heavy weight had not caused any trouble during the construction which was finished in just a week.

Roland smiled and said, “in the nature, fire isn’t the only thing that produces heat. Let the workers get ready for the equipment’s first test run.”

Roland had compared three most frequently used steelmaking facilities, open hearth furnace, converter, and electric furnace. He had firstly ruled out electric furnace because of the lack of necessary conditions and decided on a converter after a long and thoughtful consideration.

With the simplest structure among the three choices, an open hearth furnace was similar to a traditional smelter in terms of operation, but it also had a significant drawback in energy consumption. It required a huge amount of fuel in steel making, which would definitely pose a threat to Neverwinter’s limited supply of energy resources. Given that its coal mines were located far away at the source of the Redwater River and that its coking plant was just put into use and could barely meet the demand of the blast furnace iron smelting, adapting open hearth steelmaking would soon lead to an acute shortage of fuel.

Choosing a converter would avoid such a problem, as it hardly cost any fuel. It kept the liquid iron at a high temperature to continue the smelting process, using the heat generated by the oxidation of impurities contained in pig iron, such as manganese, silicon and carbon.

The other shortcomings of an open hearth furnace included occupying a too large area and a long smelting time. To make the best use of fuel, a regenerator should be built for an open hearth furnace to heat the air in advance, and making each batch of liquid steel would took this facility over half a day. By comparison, a converter took up less room, as it needed no additional device and its orbit could double as a transmission line for the liquid steel. It also worked more efficiently. Each of its smelting process only took dozens of minutes and this smelting time could be further shortened to 15 minutes when the technology was mature.

In view of these two points, Roland decided to choose converters as the main facilities for Neverwinter’s steel production.

The workers used an steam engine to put a batch of crude iron ingots into the furnace shaped like a pear.

“Anna, make a fire.”

She nodded and walked up the stairs to the top of the converter. She summoned her Blackfire to melt the Iron Ingots into liquid iron in a short time, and the hot red liquid soon lit up her face.

He planned to use the liquid iron produced by the blast furnace for this steel mill in mass production. That was the reason why he built it here in the Furnace Area.

He said to the leader of the steelmaking team, “now, follow my instructions. Insert the blowing pipe into the furnace mouth.”

This was the first time for them to use a converter, but for these experienced workers who had operated similar equipment, controlling this pipe was as easy as controlling a trailer. In the booming noise of the steam engine, a steel pipe slowly fell into the furnace from the top.

The other end of the pipe was connected to a coated flexible tube which led to an air pump driven by an steam engine. When the oxygen-rich air was inhaled into the converter, raging flames sparked to life at the furnace mouth. Orange sparkles splattered from the furnace, looking like fireworks. Glaring white flames made it hard for people around to open their eyes.

All the officials marveled at this spectacular sight.

Roland got a sense of fulfillment, feeling the hot air blowing on his face.

He saw these flames as an emblem of human beings’ entering a new era.