“The new houses are going up fast, and our new settlers are enthusiastic about having a real roof over their heads,” Alex told Jason as they watched the Doughboys train. In private, Tyler had yet to forgive Jason for naming their squad something so ridiculous, but in front of his men, he had used it as a motivational opportunity. “You’re all so flabby and out of shape, you got us this idiotic name! I know just what to do about it…” he had yelled before an extended round of physical training.

“They’re improving,” Jason observed. “They were wheezing and dropping like flies from this run a couple of weeks ago. Their sparring has gotten better as well.”

“Seems like it, sir.”

Jason turned and walked through the town’s streets, heading towards the sawmill. He arrived to see a worker loading the last board onto a cart drawn by a lone ox. “Wasn’t there a large pile of lumber here just yesterday?”

“Yes, my lord,” the man replied. “But the new houses are using it up as fast as we can cut ‘em.”

“Thank you,” Jason replied, and with a quick bow of the man’s head and a click of his tongue, he and the ox were off towards the new construction.

“What else do we need to do today, Alex?”

“Well, my lord, the blacksmith requested your presence at your earliest convenience. He said something about that new type of iron you wanted him to work on.”

Jason immediately turned his steps towards the lot where the mobile forge was parked in what was slowly becoming his industrial district by the river. A small building was being framed next to the forge cart, and even before a roof was on, the blacksmith had started to build workbenches and expand into the new space.

As Jason drew near, clanging sounds saturated the area. He saw several piles of broken iron rods laid out on the workbench. Jason looked to the man holding a hammer with a maniacal gleam in his eye. He was burly to the extreme, wearing a loose cotton shirt and trousers, covered in a well-worn leather apron. The hammer came down on the iron rod with a clang as it shattered into multiple pieces. Curses flowed freely until he looked up and saw Jason standing there.

“Sorry. Another failure. Are you sure this is possible?”

Nope. Not really. But I’m not going to tell you that, Jason thought. “Why don’t you walk me through what you’ve tried so far,” he replied instead.

The man grunted.

“Otto Smith, show a little respect to your lord!” Alex frowned.

“It’s fine,” Jason waved him off. “The respect I’d like to see is Otto’s persistence with what he probably sees as an experiment that’s unlikely to succeed when he could be working on the thousand other things we need. Is that right, Otto?”

A sheepish grin and a shrug of the big man’s shoulders was the response Jason got.

“Well, thank you for your patience. If we don’t succeed in producing ductile iron the next week or so, I might delay this project and work on things of more immediate benefit. But I’m sure you remember why I want this?”

“Yeah, you said you wanted pipes for moving around water, and this would work better.”

“Yes, but that’s only the start of it. Are you married, Otto? Any kids?”

A more coherent response followed a grunt. “I am. The missus and I have two sons and a daughter. That’s my oldest son over there,” he said with a nod, “working on that pipe mold you drew for us.”

“Who fetches the water for cooking and washing?”

“She does, most days, or sends one of the boys if they’re not helping me. Our daughter is too young to carry the bucket that far.”

“What do you think would happen if she was able to turn a lever and get clean water delivered instantly to her home?”

“Well…” the thought for a bit, “It would certainly save her time. And she’d probably be less tired at the end of the day.”

Jason nodded. “At the minimum, it would do those things. It would also make things like bathing and washing dishes and clothes easier, meaning they’ll probably happen more often. Those all prevent disease and sickness.”

“The morale of the village would increase significantly too,” Alex chimed in. “This is a luxury wealthy merchants and nobles only experience through servants hauling water constantly. If I understand your intentions correctly, you wish to make this something a commoner can afford?”

“Absolutely. I haven’t decided exactly what we’ll need to charge for connections to individual houses, or if we’ll be able to cover this under normal taxes, but the system will make life better for everyone. We’re also going to lay pipes for waste removal at the same time, though we may not have the equipment to hook up to it for months yet. But at some point, you’ll not need to leave your house to draw water or expel waste. After living here for a while, you’ll never want to move anywhere else. ”

Jason turned to Alex. “That reminds me - I don’t think I ever learned the name of this town.”

“That’s likely because it doesn’t have an official name, sire. Most just call it ‘the town’ or ‘the settlement.’ You’re certainly able to give it a formal name if you wish.”

“Hmmm… I’ll have to think about that. Anyway, we were talking about how important your ductile iron project is, Otto.

“I want us to be able to cast gears that deform before they crack if they’re not quite perfect. I want to be able to bury these pipes and not have frost heave break them as the ground moves. I want to be able to upgrade our water wheel to a water turbine and generate electricity. Actually,” the lord turned inventor paused, “that last one needs more of the pipe production operation we’re starting over there than the ductile iron, specifically. But it would be really nice to have my cake and eat it too.”

“Are you hungry, sire?”

“No, just a saying where I’m from…” he trailed off. I’ve been so immersed in this world that I haven’t recently stopped to think about the outside world. I hesitate to call that one the real world, even, because this one is so real to me. The digital world, then.

The burly smith cleared his throat and brought the conversation back to his work. “I don’t know what some of those things mean. But I’ve been working on the process you talked about. I’ve added this - what you called epsom salts - to the iron.”

“In what percentages?” Jason inquired.

“I started at ten parts per thousand and went down from there, as you directed. Measuring that precisely takes a long time on my scales.” He shot a disgruntled look at Jason. “The problem I’m running into is that the iron is coming out, well, crumbly. At least when it’s red-hot, and I’m getting ready to work it. It’s getting better as I move down to lower quantities, but it seems like it won’t go away until I stop adding this, which would defeat the purpose.”

Hmm. Jason started thinking about the problem. Alex and Otto watched as he paced back and forth, alternating between biting his lip and sticking his tongue out in concentration.

“The reason we’re using epsom salts is that it was the most readily available source of magnesium I could think of - it’s composed of magnesium and sulfur. My best guess is that the sulfur is contaminating the iron. We can try to burn it out at a high temperature, but we’ll be reducing the carbon content as well. We’ll have to add that back in with more charcoal or coal, but not too much.

“That should leave us with a small amount of magnesium alloyed with the iron. If we do this right, instead of flakes of graphite in the iron, we’ll have spherical nodules. That will allow the iron to bend instead of break, and our pipes will need to use much less cast iron. They’ll be both stronger and lighter, too.”

“I can certainly see the advantage of not using as much iron ore,” Alex piped up. “We had plenty for what I thought we would need, or at least sources to buy more. But I see now that your plans will require vast quantities. I’ll look into options for sourcing more ore or iron bars, but we might need to see what local deposits we could find. I’m told some trace iron was discovered locally, but no one has investigated further.”

“How do people find iron here, anyway?” Jason inquired.

“I’m not sure, my lord,” Alex responded. “Perhaps they just melt rocks down?”

Otto spoke up: “I’m not sure about around here, but I saw a miner use a shallow bowl of water, a lodestone, and a needle. He brushed the lodestone across the needle in one direction a couple of times, then gently placed it so that it was floating on the surface of the water. If a rock had much iron ore in it when he put the rock nearby, the needle would move.”

“Huh. I guess that would work. Remind me to make a magnetic compass sometime and equip our military scouts and civilian surveyors with them. And then make some decent maps. But we can talk about that later. And Alex - buy as many of these lodestones as you for a reasonable price. They’ll be very useful to us later.”

“Yes, sire.”

“Now, let’s talk about what it will take to make steel for guns.”