“So, if you look at early human history, you’ll find a rather, well, I wouldn’t call it ‘paradoxical’, but at least ‘puzzling’, timeline of events, namely, why did the Bronze Age predate the Iron Age?

To even understand the relevance of the question, it is worth mentioning that there is a huge discrepancy in the natural accessibility of the respective metals. To make bronze, one needs to have access to both copper (Cu) and tin (Sn), in an 88 to 12 parts ratio, smelting the metals together to form an alloy. Iron (Fe), on the other hand, does not require any additional metals, and so in that sense, input simplicity already favors the latter. But if we delve deeper into the hard numbers regarding resource abundance, the prior question posed becomes even more intriguing.

Copper, despite its rather cheap price in modern society, and its ubiquity in technology such as electrical wiring, is not, in fact, an especially common material in the Earth’s crust. You might find it surprising to learn that other metals like Titanium (Ti) are actually a hundred fold more abundant. And Iron (Fe)? A thousand fold more abundant. And this is only looking at copper, the more common of the two elements of which bronze is composed. If we look at tin, we see that it is around twenty-five times rarer than copper even, or approximately 25,000 times rarer than iron. All of this, of course, is also reflected in the O-Point costs of the respective materials, which as I recall, appears as such, with silver given as a reference:

Element

Symbol

O-Points Per Gram

Iron

Fe

10

Copper

Cu

9,465

Tin

Sn

246,919

Silver

Ag

7,572,091

So, with an understanding now of the rarity of both copper and tin relative to iron, I turn you back to my original question. Do you not find it strange that the former are the first metals that humanity would work, in spite of their rarities? Is it not puzzling that the Bronze Age should precede the Iron Age, in every prehistoric society, on every continent? Well, the reason, as it turns out....

… is temperature. Copper and tin both melt at much lower temperatures than iron, making them easier metals to be worked, specifically to be cast, by ancient societies. And it was only with the advent of better smithing technologies, like the blast furnace and forge, that iron became widely adopted as a replacement for bronze around 1200 BC. As I recall, the melting points of the metals looked something like this:

Element

Melting Point (°F)

Melting Point (°C)

Iron

2800

1538

Copper

1984

1085

Tin

449

232

Bronze

1742

950

Note the more than 60% increase in temperature between bronze and iron. That, as far as historians have concluded, is the reason for the early adoption of bronze nearly two millennia before iron. Kind of interesting, right?”

“Slime. Slime.”

Franklin glances down, at the green gelatinous ball sitting in his lap, and he raises a hand, offering the creature a pat. “Indeed, Cy, indeed,” he mumbles. In response, the monster wiggles around, its sole googly eye wandering to and fro, apparently in joy. Franklin looks on in mild bemusement, happy to find that there is apparently no hard feelings between them, what with him offering the slime just the day prior as a sacrifice on the altar of science and all. And as to how he is confident that this present Swamp Slime is his old cyclops companion, well, what is the probability of summoning two different, but equally defective, slimes in a row? That, and the fact that it consumed the emerald gem he had picked up, what he now suspects to be Cy’s monster core, leads him to conclude that the present creature and ol’ Cy are one and the same.

Regarding Franklin’s feelings as to Cy’s return, well, he’s objectively pleased of course. The substitution of the monster core for the monster token while using Summon meant he did not have to go collect essence again, nor apparently will he have to in the future every time an adventurer slays one of his minions. Of course, the associated AP cost still remains- in the case of Cy, it was 500 AP- so there is still an incentive not to let his summons die constantly, but at least the grindiest part- essence collection- is alleviated. And on some deep- really, really deep- subconscious level, perhaps he even feels a modicum of joy at the creature’s revival, having found it a tiny bit endearing, not that such feelings will ever be uttered from his lips directly.

The event of Cy’s demise and subsequent respawn has also brought a different matter to Franklin’s attention. After summoning Cy, he had begun to notice discrepancies in the amount of AP he had, wherein the displayed value did not correspond with the amount he consumed by commands or walking. And at first, he had thought this might have been a mistake in his calculations somewhere. But with Cy’s disappearance, those discrepancies too disappeared. This has led him to suspect that there might be some kind of passive cost associated with Cy’s summoning, and that is, in fact, the reason he is currently sitting still, not using any AP at all, chatting away about human antiquity while periodically checking his Stats.

Level

2

Current Exp

0 / 500

AP

2000 / 2000

Thus far, it has not changed, but as he check again, several minutes later, he notices a difference, the screen now reading:

Level

2

Current Exp

0 / 500

AP

1990 / 2000

“Ah ha! So you were the culprit, Cy!” Franklin exclaims.

“Slim~e. Slim~e,” the monster replies, jiggling about.

Franklin taps his chin in thought, wondering aloud to himself, “So, I think approximately an hour has passed. Does that mean Cy consumes 10 AP per hour? Where does this number come from? His level? Well, at the very least, I know the consumption is discrete and not continuous, but I’ll have to do further testing. Let’s see, ten more hours of observation should do. No, let’s make it a hundred hours, just to be sure...”

“Slime? Slime?”

“... What do you mean, what about the iron processing? Nothing’s changed. I’m still going to work on the system. I just have to do this first-”

“Slime? Slime?”

“No, I am not stalling for time, Cy. Why would I be-?”

“Slime… Slime…”

“...”

“Slime.”

“Okay, fine, you’re right. I’ll admit it. I’m stuck. I’ve hit a roadblock in the iron ore processing system. You happy now?”

“Slim~e. Slime, slime, slime?”

“Look, just because I have photographic memory doesn’t mean I know everything. That’s not how it works. It’s more like always having a reference book in hand. I can turn to any page in my mind and tell you what the paragraph says, but that doesn’t mean the information is incorporated enough that I can draw a conclusion from the totality of the material. I’ve memorized it, but that doesn’t mean I understand it. Plus, there’s only so many things a human mind can hold at a time, a limited amount of RAM so to say, even if the hard drive itself is in the terabytes in size. Not to mention that most of the information I have about ore processing lies in modern technologies, which are clearly not relevant to the present situation…”

“Slime… slime…”

“I’m not giving excuses, I’m just…okay, you know what? If you’re so smart, you can figure this one out. See, the problem right now is that, as I mentioned before, iron has an extremely high melting point. This means that you need a very strong heat source in order to process it. Now, obviously, the campfire won’t do, but that’s why I made the bloomery and the tuyeres. Just blowing into the tubes manually, however, wasn’t sufficient. The ore still didn’t get hot enough...”

“Slime?”

“Obviously, Cy, if I could make a hotter fire, then I wouldn’t be having so much trouble to begin with. But that’d require increased air flow, from something like a bellows or the like, which in turn will require leather as a starting material, which I don’t have, nor do I have anything that can replicate leather’s soft and stretchy properties either, while also forming an airtight seal around the…” Suddenly, Franklin’s eyes open wide, as a thought occurs to him. He glances down at his minion, which looks back at him with a single, googly eye.

“Slime,” it says.

“... Shut up.”